Panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness or mindlike properties are fundamental and widespread in nature. Its versions differ over which entities are conscious and how their experiences relate to human minds.

Consciousness: Consciousness is the presence of subjective experience: there is something it is like to be a conscious subject. Panpsychism proposes that consciousness extends beyond the familiar cases of human and animal experience.
Combination problem: The combination problem asks how many simple experiences could combine into one complex subject's experience. It is the main challenge for versions that build human minds from many smaller minds.
Thales of Miletus: Thales of Miletus was an early Greek philosopher who proposed natural explanations of the world and associated soul with motion. Ancient reports of his views are often cited as an early precedent for mindlike properties throughout nature.
Physicalism: Physicalism is the view that everything is physical or depends entirely on the physical. It contrasts with panpsychism when physical reality is taken not to include fundamental experience.
Hard problem of consciousness: The hard problem of consciousness asks why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. Panpsychism addresses it by denying that experience first appears only at complex levels.
Phenomenal consciousness: Phenomenal consciousness is the subjective, felt character of experience. Many panpsychists treat phenomenal feeling, rather than thought or self-awareness, as fundamental.
Subject-summing problem: The subject-summing problem asks how distinct subjects of experience could become one subject. It isolates the difficulty of explaining a unified self from supposedly conscious constituents.
Baruch Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza was a seventeenth-century philosopher who held that thought and extension are attributes of one substance. His monism offers a historically influential framework for relating mind and nature.
Dualism: Dualism is the view that reality includes fundamentally distinct mental and physical kinds or substances. Unlike panpsychism, traditional dualism often restricts mentality to a separate domain or class of beings.
Mind-body problem: The mind-body problem concerns how mental phenomena relate to bodies and physical processes. Panpsychism is one proposed metaphysical account of the relation between mind and matter.

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