I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism.
Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself.
Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition.
One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher" might give them names, thus:
anthropopsychism -- only humans are conscious
neuropsychism -- any creature with neurons, perhaps in a centrally located bump, is conscious
biopsychism -- all living tissue is conscious.
Panpsychism would then be a natural end to that sequence of expanding answers to "where".
But modern panpsychism isn't about the where. It is about the how, and the where claim is here insofar as it is part and parcel of the how claim. We are conscious because matter as such is conscious.
Roelef also amusingly observes that the view that humans inherit our consciousness from downquarks, which alone among fundamental particles are conscious would count as panpsychic according to a historical definition, but not according to the contemporary understanding of the term.
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