In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It has taken on a wide variety of forms. Contemporary academic proponents hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distancing these qualities from complex human mental attributes; they ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe it to most aggregates, such as rocks or buildings.
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The panpsychist doctrine has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel’s 1979 article “Panpsychism” and further spurred by Galen Strawson’s 2006 article “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Its prominent proponents in the United States include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin, and David Skrbina. In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson, Gregg Rosenberg, Timothy Sprigge, and Philip Goff. The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is “not unlike panpsychism” in that he rejects a line in nature between “events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness.” The Canadian philosopher William Seager has also defended panpsychism.
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The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems. However, it does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others. Koch has referred to IIT as a “scientifically refined version” of panpsychism.