Panpsychism

‘Ex nihilo nihil fit’
-Parmenides of Elea

My topic for this month is panpsychism. This is the concept that the mind or some corresponding entity is a universal aspect of reality, not just of humans and certain animals. This was the topic of my dissertation for my BA course in philosophy and something that still occupies a lot of my thought.
The first reaction of many people is that the idea seems far fetched: rocks and raindrops don’t ‘think’. The mistake here, I think, is confusing a fully conscious human Mind with some basic component of mind or consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, I will only refer to this property of the world as ‘mind’ without trying to fully define it. If I am talking about the more familiar concept of a conscious human mind I will use an upper case M, ‘Mind’.
It seems obvious that a rock cannot think as we do. For that matter even a human being who is asleep or drugged doesn’t seem to think. Similarly a rock doesn’t seem to have any magnetic or electric properties but it does have mass. That mass comes from the basic particles that make up the rock, and the weight of a person comes from the roughly 40 octillion protons and neutrons in their body. In other words, in the case of mass, the mass of the macroscopic object comes from the mass of its components. As far as electrical charge, the protons and electrons that make up the rock have electrical charge, but they are randomly arranged and cancel each other out. In a battery some of the electrically charged particles are organized in a way that we observe an electrical potential. The electrical properties of a battery do not magically arise from nothing. They are a manifestation of the electrical charges of many of the electrons in the battery. This is an illustration of the concept of ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’, nothing comes from nothing. This is an idea whose first known expression comes from Parmenides of Elea, a Greek philosopher from the 5th – 6th century BCE.
If this concept applies to mind, as some people including myself believe, then mind exists everywhere in nature as a property of the most basic building blocks. Of course the mind that exists in a proton or even a bacteria would be totally insignificant compared to a human Mind, or that of a dog, or dolphin. Similarly without sensitive lab equipment we cannot detect the mass of a molecule. The establishment of a mind that we can appreciate doesn’t seem to depend solely on the amount of material that an object consists of. If it did then boulders and mountains would have ‘bigger’ Minds than humans. While we don’t know for certain that this is not the case, it seems unlikely. This is the type of example that makes people shy away from panpsychism.
I think that the situation is more like magnetism. A granite boulder doesn’t demonstrate ferromagnetism. A dinner knife will not stick to it. A dinner knife will stick to a piece of magnetite however. The magnetic properties of magnetite do not arise by magic. They come from the same magnetic properties of the fundamental particles as those found in a piece of granite. They are just arranged differently.
What I believe is that the mind that is present in our basic makeup is somehow ‘arranged’ in us, presumably in our brains, so that they produce a Mind. Just as our heart has evolved using basic laws of physics to be able to pump blood and our eyes have evolved to focus light and send electrical signals to our brain, our brain has evolved to think using the mind that is present in the particles from which we are made. Our brain has evolved to think, to feel, to be aware. These are functions that arise from the properties of ‘small m’ mind.
Ironically, our own Minds are the things in the world that we can be most certain of, but other Minds are something that we can only detect by implication. Unless we somehow learn to detect and measure mind and Minds, we may never have a definite answer to these questions.

Wayne
August 2025