Pantheism and Panpsychism

Pantheism, if you've just joined us, is the doctrine that everything in existence--all of reality--forms a unified, divine Being. God is nature, God is existence, God is reality.

Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is an inherent characteristic of reality. Animism, pantheism, panentheism, and transcendentalism are all systems that may include panpsychism.

Panpsychism can be a sort of "top-down" theory in which the universe unfolds from a "world soul." For instance, Spinoza's panpsychism is a sort of dualistic monism in which Mind and Matter are two sides of the same coin--two aspects of the same infinite, universal Being, and therefore both parts of how the universe came to exist. Spinoza was a sort of materialist panpsychist.

Panpsychism can also be an emergent process in which the basic particles from which reality is built have some sort of conscious awareness. Gottfried Liebniz described a world formed, not by one Substance, but by an infinite number of substances, which he called "monads." Each monad could be described as a "point of view," rather than a mode or attribute; thus the world was a collection of ideas, rather than bare physical matter. Each monad had "holographic" properties: each bit contained not only its own point of view, but all the information in the entirety of reality. An individual human soul was a monad: although we contain all the universe, we're only conscious of our little piece of it.

P.A. Zizzi's "Emergent Consciousness" (or "Big Wow"--I like that one!) combines these top-down/bottom-up theories. The early universe, she says, achieved consciousness in a brief time between inflationary periods, when the "laws of nature" became set--possibly as a result of this "conscious event." Because of this early consciousness, the very nature of the universe had the necessity of consciousness embedded in it (a variation of the anthropic principle). So the emergence of biological consciousness become possible (or even inevitable) because of this early "conscious event."

Many of the names associated with panpsychism, like Spinoza or Whitehead, were also associated with pantheism or panentheism. The two systems agree very easily. In Spinozan pantheism especially, Mind is an intrinsic aspect of Reality, of God. Mind and Matter are indistinguishable except for viewpoint: God is reality; God has an aspect of infinite Mind; Matter can be seen as the ideas of Mind; Mind can be seen as the orderliness of Matter.

Pantheism doesn't necessarily entail panpsychism, or vice versa. But they're very friendly neighbors.