Consciousness and Life

Panpsychism is the philosophical doctrine that every physical entity is conscious. By a “physical entity ” I will mean any physical object or naturally occurring process. Note that panpsychism is different from (although consistent with) the pantheistic doctrine that the universe as a whole has a conscious mind. Panpsychism allows that the universe may be conscious, but its primary statement is that each object and each process has a little consciousness of its own. Galaxies, rocks, planets, atoms, electrons, air currents, fires, rivers—each of them has a mind. Panpsychism is related but not equivalent to hylozoism, which says that every object is alive. That curious word comes from the Greek words hyle, matter + zoe, life. To clarify the distinction between the two doctrines, we can divide entities into four distinct categories, listed in the left-hand column of Table 1. And the right-hand column of the table lists some possible candidates for each category