Saving Panpsychism From Itself

A Response to Ish, A Defence of the Intuition, and an Apology to the Rock

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“The map is not the territory. But sometimes the map is pointing at a real mountain even if it was drawn upside down.” — Me, just now.

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My friend Ishmael Hodges recently fired a well-aimed broadside at panpsychism. I encourage you to read it. Ish’s a genuinely good thinker who happens to write like he’s arguing at a pub and somehow makes that work. And his critique is largely correct.

Yes. You read that right.

The version of panpsychism Ish is shooting at — everything has a little blob of consciousness inside it or rocks have “fee fees” as he delightfully put it — that version deserves to be shot at. It is confused. It is an uncomfortable compromise position caught between two larger confused positions. And it does trade one hard problem for another.

I want to do something slightly unusual for a response piece. I’m not here to save panpsychism by defending it. Instead I want to show what survives the critique.

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Ish Is Right (Let Him Have This, He’ll Be Insufferable Otherwise)

Let me steelman Ish’s strongest points before I start causing trouble.

On the definitional problem: He’s completely right that “consciousness” does too much work in panpsychist discourse. When the word stretches from “what it’s like to be Thomas Nagel’s bat” all the way to “the way a quark responds to a field,” you have a word that has stopped meaning anything coherent. It’s trying to still carry all the emotional and intuitive weight of the original meaning but applies it to a rock falling down a hill.

That’s a problem.

On the rock: Ish is right that telling someone a rock is conscious in the way they understand the word conscious is either false or meaningless. If what you mean is that the rock has something like your subjective experience scaled down to rock-level, that’s a bad claim. It imports a rich, integrated, first-person experience into a system with no integration whatsoever. The rock doesn’t have experiences the way you have experiences. Anyone who tells you otherwise with a straight face is either using a different definition of “experience” than you are, or they should dial down the amount of pot they’re smoking.

On the combination problem as a dodge: The parsimony argument — consciousness is fundamental, therefore no emergence required, therefore hard problem dissolves — is only parsimonious if it actually solves something. And as Ish correctly notes, you can’t claim credit for solving the hard problem through a definitional move and then face the combination problem as if it were a separate difficulty you hadn’t anticipated. You’ve just rescheduled your crisis, rather than solve it.

All of this is correct and fair.

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But Ish — And I Say This With Enormous Affection — You Underestimated What You Were Shooting At

Here is where I need to push back.

The intuition behind panpsychism is this: the inside view cannot be an emergent accident.

That’s it. That’s the load-bearing insight. Everything else is a (sometimes confused, sometimes brilliant) attempt to cash it out.

When a physicalist says consciousness emerges from sufficiently complex matter, the panpsychist asks: from where, exactly? “at what complexity threshold”. If matter is fundamentally inert, if there is nothing it is like to be an electron, nothing it is like to be an atom, nothing it is like to be a molecule — at what point in the causal chain does the inside view show up, and what is it made of if not the stuff underneath it?

This is not a confused question. Aand the standard physicalist answer — “it just emerges at sufficient complexity, stop worrying” — is not an answer. Illusionism works by flirting with eliminativism. But eliminating phenomenality and pretending there’s no difference between a purely physical zombie and a System capable to smell farts is uncharitable to say the least.

Ish, when you say you can imagine extending consciousness to plants and possibly to single-celled organisms, but not past the “life line” — you’re already conceding the intuition. You’ve accepted that the inside view extends further than human exceptionalism suggests. You’ve just drawn a line at a different place. But where, precisely, does “something it is like to be” a bacterium stop and “nothing it is like to be” a molecule begin? What physically changes at that boundary? What ingredient gets added or removed?

The panpsychist isn’t crazy for not accepting the promissory note. Both a plant and especially a single celled bacterium are essentially a clump of molecules working together in a synchronized way.

We see them operate intelligibly in their respective environments and thus can imagine the requirement for some kind of awareness for that navigation. The reason we struggle to extend this intuition to a molecule is because we can’t even beginn to imagine its environment. The navigation is real nonetheless.

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The Actual Problem:

Panpsychism Tried to Fix Physicalism With the Wrong Tool

This is where it gets fun.

Physicalism starts with matter as fundamental and has to explain consciousness. It fails because you can’t get an inside view from an entirely outside-view description.

I use inside and outside in a way that might need clarification:
Think of any kind of interaction between two things.

you can either be a third thing looking at them from the outside.

or be one of the two things relating to the other from the inside of that relation.

It has nothing to do with an entire mind dimension living “inside” a physical atom.

Idealism starts with consciousness as fundamental and has to explain matter. It mostly succeeds but at the cost of a slightly embarrassing dependence on a cosmic mind holding everything together.

traditional Panpsychism looks at this situation and says: what if both are fundamental? Problem solved!

Except: it isn’t. Because by making both fundamental — physical stuff and experiential stuff somehow bundled together at every level — you now need to explain how they relate, how they combine, and how they affected the playing out of things. If you dont want your panpsychism to collapse into dualism you often have the consequence of making the conciousness you tried to preserve epiphenomenal and useless.

This is the sense in which panpsychism is a compromise between two confused positions. It inherited the bad assumption from both parents: that mind and matter are genuinely things that exist. Substance as essence with properties is a model that simply doesnt work.

The middle way I want to propose doesn’t start there.

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Enter the Yoneda Lemma (I Promise This Is Relevant)

Bear with me for exactly one paragraph of mathematics.

In category theory, the Yoneda lemma is one of the most fundamental results in all of mathematics. It says something deceptively simple:

An object is completely determined by all its relations to other objects.

Cut away all intrinsic properties, remove any substance it is made of. Entirely and only by its relational profile — the complete pattern of how it maps to and from everything else.

Two objects with identical relational profiles are, by this lemma, identical. There is no remainder. No hidden essence sitting behind the relations. No “what it really is” beyond its place in the web.

more on category theory and its implications will come in a future essay 🌱❤️

Now bring this back to philosophy of mind.

The question “what is the electron really like from the inside?” assumes that the electron has some intrinsic nature beyond its relational profile. Some hidden phenomenal substance that either is or isn’t there. This is the assumption both physicalism and idealism share — one says the hidden substance is physical, one says it is mind — and it is the assumption the Yoneda lemma tells us to give up.

What if the electron simply is its relational profile? What if there is no hidden essence separate from the web of interactions it participates in? And what if — here’s the key move — every relation has two equally valid descriptions: the outside description (how it looks from a third-person perspective) and the inside description (what it is like to stand in that relation)?

Two descriptions of one thing. One results in the physicalist intuition, the other one in an idealist intuition.

Taken together we achieve something like Panpsychism but without the confusion of inheriting a wrong assumption from its parents.

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Panperspectivalism: The Version That Doesn’t Embarrass Itself

This is what I’ve been calling Agentic Panperspectivalism, and it’s my attempt at the middle way.

Not: everything has consciousness (the rock has fee fees version).

Not: consciousness is everything (the idealist version that needs a cosmic mind holding everything together).

But: every relation has an inside face, and that inside face scales continuously with the complexity and integration of the relational structure.

The electron doesn’t have rich subjective experience. It has something far more minimal: a relational orientation. A way of being responsive to its environment. The inside face of participating in a quantum interaction is not nothing — but it is also not a tiny human experience scaled down.

It’s a complete but simple perspective: a system’s relations, seen from inside rather than outside.

A difference that makes a difference to something. The to-ness of information is ineliminable. And that to-ness is the perspectival inside of the relation — not a floating phenomenal substance, but the interior description of what it is to stand in that specific relational configuration.

The rock, then, doesn’t have consciousness in Ish’s sense. It has a perspectival profile — a complete description of all its relational interactions, “experienced” from the POV of that rock. This is nearly nothing, experientially speaking. The inside face of a rock’s relational profile is so minimal, so undifferentiated, so lacking in integration, that calling it “experience” in any rich sense would be genuinely misleading.

But it is not nothing. And crucially — the thing that makes your experience real and rich is not a different kind of thing. It is the same type of thing, massively more integrated, more differentiated, more structurally complex.

Information doesn’t change its character throughout all of this. There is no need for (strong) emergence of some kind of illusion, no confused superiority of representations over direct presentation.

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On the Combination Problem (And Why It Evaporates Here)

Ish correctly identifies the combination problem as the price panpsychism pays for dodging the hard problem. How do micro-experiences combine into macro-experiences? How does the experience of a trillion neurons become one unified experience of tasting coffee?

Traditional panpsychism has no clean answer. Because it models consciousness as a substance that needs to be combined — like mixing paints, or adding numbers, or merging streams. And substances don’t obviously combine into unified experience. They just pile up.

The perspectival account dissolves this. We’re not combining substances. We’re asking when a collection of relational profiles synchronizes into a unified relational profile. When the membranes of meaning align such that information from across the system is integrated into a single perspective rather than remaining a collection of local ones.

The answer: when there is sufficient integration of information, sufficient coherence across sub-systems, sufficient synchronization of local perspectives into a shared one. The boundary between “collection of micro-perspectives” and “unified macro-perspective” becomes a question on similarity between them. If two perspectives are close in all regards, operate on the same information. Why would there be a need to treat them as different?

All this is exactly what neuroscience is already measuring. What physics describes as decoherence, Quantum Darwinism describes as copying information across quantum perspectives.

The combination problem was hard because it assumed you were combining substances. It becomes manageable once you realize you are integrating relational structures.

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The Strongest Part of Ish’s Piece

Ish’s most interesting move is the “conscious vs. is consciousness” distinction. Is reality conscious, or is reality consciousness?

He’s right that this matters enormously. And he’s right that many panpsychists aren’t clear about which they mean.

My answer: neither, exactly.

Reality is perspectival. Perspectives are neither things that have consciousness nor substances made of consciousness. They are relational nodes — empty of intrinsic nature, defined entirely by their relational profiles, possessed of an inside face that scales with integration. The word “consciousness” has been doing too much work because it’s trying to name something for which we don’t have the right vocabulary yet.

Information is the closest we have so far. It conveys both their causal influence if observed from the outside and the notion of being informed by it on the insight.

Information are not intrinsically phenomenal they only hold as much meaning as is ascribed by the structure that it interacts with. In this sense they co-form each other.

Whenever you receive a signal it is as much influenced by your interpretation as it influences you by its structure.

Once you recognize that experience is what it means to be informed in the first person, the question changes from “how does this create Qualia?” to “why did we ever think there is something more to this than the information?”

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Ish, You Glorious Potato

I think you fired at the right target and mostly hit.

BUT

“Where does the inside/first person view emerge from?” is a silly question to ask. That physicalism only describes the third person is also known.

To combine the two and realize that neither is more fundamental than the other, is I think the entire mystery behind the debate. Everything else. the entire functional circus of biological cognition is the so called “easy problem” of consciousness. Its explainable by evolution and describable by neuroscience.

To expect the first person to emerge out of the third person is as confused as wringing a citrus fruit for its lemon qualia.

So maybe we shouldnt throw out the baby with the bathwater and save a version of panpsychism that preserves our intuitions without adding anything unprovable.

The map traditional panpsychism drew was upside down and invented several countries. But it was pointing at a real mountain.

The mountain of perspectives not talked about.

The rock needs no fee fees to be a genuine point of view in this world xD✨

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