Panpsychism as a Contemporary Alternative

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness, or some primitive proto-experiential property, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality, present in some form at the most basic level of matter, rather than an emergent property that arises only within complex biological systems such as brains. Although panpsychist ideas have ancient roots — traceable to certain readings of the Presocratic Thales's claim that "all things are full of gods," to Leibniz's monadology (1714), on which reality is composed of simple, mind-like substances called monads, and to elements of Spinoza's dual-aspect substance monism in the Ethics (1677) — the position experienced a marked contemporary revival beginning in the 1990s and 2000s, driven substantially by dissatisfaction with the perceived failure of both reductive physicalism and substance or property dualism to close the explanatory gap surrounding consciousness discussed by Joseph Levine and popularized by David Chalmers's hard problem.