Panpsychism is the view that consciousness, or some simple precursor of it, is a fundamental and widespread feature of the natural world rather than something that switches on only inside complex brains. It does not claim that rocks or chairs think or have feelings. It claims that the basic stuff of reality has an experiential side, and that the rich inner life of humans and animals is built from, or carved out of, that more basic mentality.
It matters because science still has no agreed explanation of why brain activity is accompanied by experience at all. Neuroscience can map which areas respond when a person sees red, but not why seeing red feels like anything. Panpsychism tries to answer that question head-on, and in thirty years it has moved from the fringe of philosophy to a respected minority view. It also touches the question running through the holographic universe topic hub: is mind something the universe produces, or something it is made of?
What is panpsychism, exactly?
Panpsychism is a family of positions, not one theory, united by the claim (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's wording) that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Three versions come up most often.
Micropsychism holds that the basic physical entities, such as particles or fields, have extremely simple experiential properties, and that human consciousness is somehow built up from them. Cosmopsychism turns this around: the universe as a whole is the basic conscious subject, and individual minds are aspects or fragments of it. Russellian monism starts from an observation Bertrand Russell made in The Analysis of Matter (1927). Physics describes what matter does, its structure, relations and dispositions, but says nothing about what matter intrinsically is. Russellian monists suggest that this intrinsic nature may be experiential, which would put consciousness inside physics rather than outside it.
The roots are old. Some Presocratic Greek thinkers saw the world as animated throughout. Spinoza treated mind and matter as two aspects of one substance, Leibniz built reality from mind-like units he called monads, and William James and Alfred North Whitehead both developed versions of the idea.
It helps to separate panpsychism from two neighbours. Dualism says mind and matter are two different kinds of substance. Idealism says only mind exists and matter is a form of appearance within it. Panpsychism usually keeps the physical world fully real and argues that experience is part of its basic nature.
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
The hard problem is the question of why any physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. The philosopher David Chalmers named it in "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (volume 2, number 3) in 1995.
Chalmers separated it from the "easy problems": explaining functions such as how the brain discriminates stimuli, directs attention and produces verbal reports. Those can be solved, in principle, by describing the mechanisms that perform them. The hard problem remains even after every function is explained: why is all that processing accompanied by an inner point of view at all?
He built on Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in The Philosophical Review (1974), which argued that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and that this subjective character resists the objective descriptions of physics.
Chalmers treats panpsychism as one serious option among several for answering the hard problem. He has not committed to it.
Why are philosophers taking panpsychism seriously again?
The revival rests on a surprisingly conservative argument: if both experience and physics are taken seriously, panpsychism may be the least strange option left. Galen Strawson made the case in "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism," the lead article of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (volume 13, numbers 10-11, 2006).
Strawson argued that if experience is real and physicalism is true, experience must be physical. Could it emerge from wholly non-experiential matter? Genuine emergence, he argued, has to be intelligible; in his phrase, "emergence can't be brute." Since nothing about non-experiential matter explains why experience appears, he concluded that the matter making up brains must already have an experiential aspect.
Philip Goff took a historical route in his book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). Goff argues that Galileo, in founding mathematical physics, deliberately set aside sensory qualities such as colours, smells and tastes, placing them in the mind of the observer so that physics could deal only with quantities. That move made modern science possible, Goff says, but it means physics was designed to leave consciousness out. His proposal is to bring it back as the intrinsic nature of matter.
What is the combination problem?
The combination problem asks how many tiny experiences could combine into one unified mind like yours, and it is the most serious objection to panpsychism. If every particle in your brain has a flicker of experience, why is there a single "you" rather than billions of separate micro-subjects?
William James pressed the point in The Principles of Psychology (1890), in his discussion of "mind-stuff." He argued that a hundred feelings shuffled together would still be a hundred feelings, not a new, larger feeling that contained them. The label "combination problem" is usually credited to the philosopher William Seager, who used it in 1995. Cosmopsychism is partly a response: if the universe is the basic subject, the task becomes explaining how individual minds are divided out of one whole rather than assembled from parts.
Panpsychism also has strong rivals. Illusionists such as Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish argue that the hard problem rests on a misleading picture of experience. Analytic idealists such as Bernardo Kastrup argue that mind is all there is. Dualists keep mind and matter as separate kinds.
What is integrated information theory (IIT)?
Integrated information theory is a scientific theory that identifies consciousness with integrated information, a quantity its authors call phi (Φ). It was proposed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in "An information integration theory of consciousness" in BMC Neuroscience (2004), and revised as IIT 3.0 in 2014 and IIT 4.0 in 2023. The neuroscientist Christof Koch is its best-known supporter.
IIT starts from features it takes to be true of every experience, such as being unified and specific, and asks what physical system could have them. Its answer is a system whose parts constrain one another in a way that cannot be reduced to independent pieces; the more integrated that causal structure, the higher the Φ.
Because any system with non-zero Φ would have some degree of experience, IIT is often described as panpsychist-leaning. Its authors draw the line more carefully: consciousness requires a specific kind of integrated causal structure, so on their account most things, including many computers, are not conscious.
Critics find that line hard to hold. In 2014 the computer scientist Scott Aaronson argued that simple, highly regular networks of logic gates could be built to score a higher Φ than a human brain while doing nothing anyone would call thinking. Critics treat this as a reductio of the theory.
How did the 2023 IIT controversy unfold?
It began with the first large experiment designed to test IIT against a rival and turned into a public argument over whether IIT counts as science.
The Cogitate consortium ran an adversarial collaboration in which proponents of IIT and of global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) agreed in advance on predictions that could count against their theories. First results were presented in June 2023 at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in New York. Neither theory came out cleanly. At the same meeting, Koch conceded a bet he had made with Chalmers in 1998 that a clear neural signature of consciousness would be found within 25 years, and settled it with fine wine. The two then made a new double-or-nothing bet running to 2048.
On 15 September 2023, 124 researchers posted an open letter on the preprint server PsyArXiv. The signatories called IIT pseudoscience, arguing that its core claims cannot be tested empirically and objecting to its portrayal as a leading, empirically supported theory. Many researchers, including some IIT critics, objected to the label; the neuroscientist Anil Seth called it inflammatory. Koch replied that IIT "is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong." Liad Mudrik, a co-lead of the adversarial study, noted that the team had tested IIT and managed to falsify one of its predictions. The signatories later published a revised version of their argument as "What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?" in Nature Neuroscience (volume 28, April 2025).
The full peer-reviewed results appeared in Nature on 30 April 2025. The study recorded 256 participants using fMRI, MEG and intracranial EEG across several laboratories. IIT's prediction of sustained synchronization within the posterior cortex was not supported. GNWT's prediction of "ignition" in the prefrontal cortex when a stimulus disappears was not confirmed either. Both theories were challenged; neither was proven or disproven.
Is consciousness fundamental? Where the science stands
There is no scientific consensus on what consciousness is or whether it is fundamental. Most neuroscientists work within physicalist frameworks, and the leading theories, IIT included, remain under test. Panpsychism is a respected minority view in philosophy of mind, but it is a philosophical position, not an experimental finding.
That cuts both ways: no experiment has shown that consciousness is fundamental, and none has shown that it is not. Claims that quantum physics proves consciousness creates reality go beyond the evidence; the double-slit experiment, the case most often cited, shows the effect of recording which-path information, which a machine can do with nobody watching.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson's documented position is that consciousness is fundamental. A 4biddenknowledge profile of his views on common consciousness and the universal mind describes his belief that consciousness pervades the universe as an essential component of it, with one Universal Mind present everywhere, including within each person. A companion post quotes him directly: "All that exists is the Universal Mind and nothing more than that one mind."
That view sits inside his larger framework, the fractal holographic universe, and alongside the first of the Hermetic principles, "The All is Mind," which he draws on through The Kybalion and the seven Hermetic principles. In his interview with Natalie Namaste on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast, he discusses his book on the fractal holographic universe and the idea that consciousness plays an active role in shaping experienced reality.
As analysis rather than a label he uses: a single Universal Mind of which individual minds are expressions is closer to cosmopsychism, or to idealism, than to the micro-level panpsychism of Strawson or Goff. A view that starts from one mind does not face the combination problem in its usual form; its challenge is the reverse, explaining how one mind divides into many apparently separate ones. Carson approaches that question through Hermetic and ancient sources, where philosophers like Goff approach it through the limits of physics.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy's talk "What Is Consciousness? Ancient Magic, Quantum Physics and The Emerald Tablets Explained," embedded with this article, raises the questions at the centre of this debate: is mind the ground of reality, and do ancient texts and modern physics point the same way? Hear his conversation with Natalie Namaste on the Fractal Universe, consciousness and the law of attraction on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast. For the physics side, read Is the Universe a Hologram?, and for earlier coverage of neuroscience on the site, see the post on brain scans challenging a major theory of consciousness. The holographic universe topic hub collects every related article and video.
Frequently asked questions
Does panpsychism mean rocks and chairs are conscious?
No. Most panpsychists hold that the basic constituents of matter have extremely simple experiential properties, not that every object is a thinking subject. A rock is an aggregate of particles without the organisation that would make it a single mind.
Has integrated information theory been proven or disproven?
Neither. The adversarial study published in Nature in April 2025 found that a key IIT prediction, sustained synchronization in the posterior cortex, was not supported, and that a key prediction of its rival GNWT was not confirmed either. IIT's supporters continue to develop it, and its critics continue to dispute it.
Who called IIT pseudoscience, and why?
A group of 124 researchers did, in an open letter posted on PsyArXiv on 15 September 2023 and later revised in Nature Neuroscience in 2025. The signatories argued that IIT's core claims are untestable. Many other researchers, including some critics of IIT, rejected the label as unfair to a theory that has made testable predictions.
What is the difference between panpsychism and idealism?
Panpsychism usually keeps the physical world fully real and says experience is part of its basic nature. Idealism says only mind exists, and matter is how mental activity appears. Cosmopsychism, which treats the universe as one conscious subject, sits close to the boundary between the two.
Sources and further reading
- Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974)
- David J. Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995)
- Galen Strawson, "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism," Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 10-11 (2006)
- Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon / Rider, 2019)
- "Panpsychism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2022)
- Giulio Tononi, "An information integration theory of consciousness," BMC Neuroscience 5 (2004); L. Albantakis et al., "Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0," PLOS Computational Biology (2023)
- Cogitate Consortium, "Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness," Nature 642 (2025)
- IIT-Concerned et al., "What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?," Nature Neuroscience 28 (2025)
