Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

David Skrbina explains that, at first mention, the idea that the inanimate world possesses consciousness seems so anti-scientific that it incites a reflexive and concerted opposition: Upon laying out a panpsychist position, one is immediately faced with the charge that he believes that “rocks are conscious”—a statement taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand. . . . We may see strong analogies with the human mind in certain animals, and so we apply the concept [consciousness] to them with varying degrees of confidence. We may see no such analogies to plants or inanimate objects, and so to attribute consciousness to them seems ridiculous. This is our human bias. To overcome this anthropocentric perspective, the panpsychist asks us to see the “mentality” of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subset of a certain universal quality of physical things, in which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular manifestations.20 Though all the attacks on panpsychism I’ve read lack substantive, detailed arguments, they have been fierce. From the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edwards, 1967) to the New York Review of Books, panpsychism has been accused of being “unintelligible” and “breathtakingly implausible,” with its adherents likened to “religious fanatics.”