Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives

Recent debates in philosophy of mind seemingly have resulted in an impasse. Reductive physicalism could not account for the phenomenal mind, and non-reductive physicalism could not safeguard a causal role for the mental as mental. Dualism was considered the only alternative, but it exacerbates the problem of mental causation and seems to be a position that is hard to square with a naturalist evolutionary framework. In 1979, Thomas Nagel argued that if reductionism and dualism fail, and a non-reductionist form of strong emergence cannot be made intelligible, then panpsychism may be viable. It was not until David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind in 1996 that debates on panpsychism entered the philosophical mainstream. Since then the topic has been growing rapidly, and some leading philosophers of mind as well as some scientists have argued for panpsychism.