Not only does panpsychism have questionable value as a philosophical hypothesis; not only is it flat-out refuted by empirical science; but even the very intuitions that motivate panpsychists turn out to be based on unexamined assumptions mistaken for facts, writes Bernardo Kastrup.

In a world increasingly confronted with the contradictions of physicalism, an alternative metaphysics has become popular in academia: panpsychism. Many different theories go by this term, but most people associate it with what is technically called ‘constitutive micropsychism’: the notion that elementary subatomic particles (henceforth simply ‘particles’), in addition to physical properties such as mass, charge and momentum, also have fundamental experiential properties. In other words, the hypothesis is that there is something it is like to be an electron, or a quark, and that no explanation is required for their consciousness because the latter is irreducible. According to constitutive micropsychism (henceforth simply ‘panpsychism’), the experiential properties of the particles constituting our brain somehow combine to give rise to higher-level human consciousness.