Micropsychism

Proponents position panpsychism as a solution to the vexing problems of both materialism and dualism: replacing materialism's apparent impotence to account for consciousness and avoiding dualism's sharply bifurcated reality (Goff et al., 2022). The challenge, according to Chalmers, is how microphysical properties, characterized by a completed physics, relate to phenomenal (or experiential) properties, the most familiar of which is simply the property of phenomenal consciousness (Chalmers, 2013).

If panpsychism is correct, Chalmers says, there is microexperience and there are microphenomenal properties, which are obviously very different from human experience. Though a proper panpsychist theory of consciousness is currently lacking, some progress can be made.

Chalmers posits “constitutive panpsychism” as the thesis that macroexperience is (wholly or partially) grounded in microexperience. It is the thesis that microexperiences somehow add up to yield macroexperience. “Nonconstitutive panpsychism” holds that microexperience does not ground the macroexperience; rather, macroexperience is strongly emergent from microexperience and/or from microphysics (Chalmers, 2013).

In either case, traditional panpsychism is micropsychism, the position that all facts of panpsychism are formed at the micro-level. Two forms are distinguished, based on which aspect of mentality is privileged to be fundamental and ubiquitous: thought (pancognitivism) and consciousness (panexperientialism).

Panpsychism's thorniest problem, long recognized, is the “combination problem”: How could micro-level entities with their own very basic forms of conscious experience somehow come together in brains to constitute human and animal conscious experience? The problem is severe: How could minuscule conscious subjects of rudimentary experience somehow coalesce to form macroscopic conscious subjects with complex experiences? (Goff et al., 2022).