Wallace’s Panpsychism Inside Physics

To philosopher of physics David Wallace, one way to motivate panpsychism is as a kind of synthesis of materialism (consciousness is just reducible to the physical) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the physical). Each, he says, has major advantages and major disadvantages. “Materialism seems like it can't adequately explain consciousness. Dualism can't give an adequate causal role to consciousness.” Wallace envisions panpsychism “as a way of getting the best features of both materialism and dualism without their disadvantages,” which is why he envisions “panpsychism potentially as the synthesis of materialism and dualism” (Wallace, 2016a).

Panpsychism as a Synthesis

Wallace starts with dualism, where “consciousness is real and fundamental, existing at the bottom-most level of nature”—but dualism, he stresses, has a serious problem: “How can dualism play a causal role in physics, because physics looks to be closed and autonomous?” This is where Wallace has panpsychism playing the critical causal role by looking to the intrinsic nature of physics. “Physics tells us how fields and particles relate to each other, but it doesn't tell us about what they really are in themselves. According to panpsychism, consciousness is right there inside the physical world, as its intrinsic nature, and thus when one field or particle affects another, it's really consciousness which is doing the causing. So, you get a causal role for consciousness in physics and you get consciousness as real and fundamental.” That's a set of advantages, Wallace argues, “that no other theory has—and it motivates panpsychism” (Wallace, 2016a).

Consciousness Inside Physics

Wallace explains that when physics gives a mathematical theory of how all fundamental physical entities relate to one another quantitatively, it doesn't tell us what these entities actually are. This gives room, he says, for panpsychism to offer a hypothesis about what these entities actually are. However, Wallace stresses that the intrinsic relationship among all these entities, non-conscious and conscious, must be as described by the laws of physics. There is no need to postulate a fifth kind of force or feature as the carrier of panpsychic consciousness, he says; rather, the need is, as Stephen Hawking put it, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations?” That would be the fundamental nature of the reality that physics is describing (Wallace, 2016a, 2016b). Regarding consciousness itself, Wallace would have it not so much as requiring an extra force or feature in the physical world (as panpsychists sometimes imply), but rather as the underlying nature of the processes that physics is describing mathematically.