Is mind everywhere?

Aristotle reports that Thales, first name on every list of philosophers, said all things are full of gods. He probably meant that a magnet, which moves iron without touching it, has something like a soul. For most of history that did not sound insane. The Stoics ran a living breath through everything. Spinoza said mind and matter were two faces of one substance. Leibniz built the universe out of monads, each a tiny point of experience. It is only in the last few centuries that mind in matter became something a serious person could not say out loud.

Then in 2006 a serious person said it out loud.

The problem physics made for itself

The modern revival starts with a hole that science dug on purpose. Galileo, in the 1620s, decided science would describe the world in terms of what can be measured, shape, size, motion, number, and would set aside what cannot: color as you see it, taste, pain, what things feel like. Brilliant call. It built everything. It also meant that when science finally got around to the brain, it had already defined out of existence the one thing a brain most obviously does, which is experience.

David Chalmers named the result the hard problem of consciousness in 1995. We can explain, in principle, every function the brain performs: processing light, storing memories, producing speech. What we cannot explain is why any of it comes with an inside. Why is there something it is like to see red? A complete physical description of your brain leaves that question not just unanswered but unasked.

The panpsychist move

Galen Strawson's 2006 paper argued that if you are a hardcore physicalist, someone who thinks everything is physical, you have to be a panpsychist, because experience is obviously real and you cannot build it out of ingredients that have none. Mix things with zero experience and you get more things with zero experience, however cleverly you stack them. So experience, in some faint and simple form, has to be in the ingredients already. An electron does not think. But there may be something, however dim, that it is like to be one.

Philip Goff's version is gentler. Physics tells us what matter does, how it pushes and pulls. It says nothing about what matter is, in itself. Panpsychism fills that silence with the one intrinsic nature we actually know from the inside, which is experience. Rocks are not thinking. The stuff rocks are made of has an inside as well as an outside, and a brain is what happens when enough of those insides get organized into one.

Integrated Information Theory, from the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, puts a number on it: consciousness is integrated information, and anything that integrates information has some. The theory is fought over, but it is being tested, which is more than Thales managed.

Why it is on this shelf

The oldest claim in this library is that the cosmos is alive. Plato said it in the Timaeus and the Stoics built a physics on it. The claim fell out of polite company when Galileo drew his line, and it is now, in a humbler and more technical form, being argued in peer reviewed journals. A universe where experience goes all the way down is a universe with an inside, and a universe with an inside gives a new answer to whether we are part of the order. We are not spectators of a dead machine. We are the places where the machine is awake enough to ask.

What is still open

The combination problem, first stated by William James in 1890, is unsolved. If every particle has a flicker of experience, how do billions of flickers add up to one you? Experiences do not obviously combine the way masses do. Critics say that is fatal. Panpsychists say it is a research program. The fight is live, the people in it are respectable, and the idea that mind is woven into the physical order rather than painted on top of it is, for the first time in three hundred years, something you can say at a university without lowering your voice.

The Stoics would not be surprised. They would want to know what took us so long.