The mind-matter problem still haunts us to this day. The question of how and why consciousness and the physical world interact and influence one another remains a mystery. In response to this problem, the philosopher Spinoza argued that nature is constituted by something more fundamental than either the mental or the physical: something that contains both. Philosopher Jordi Galiano-Landeira here argues that Spinoza’s philosophy is panpsychist – matter contains mind – and that integrated-information theory can help solve some of the remaining problems with panpsychism.  

In 2023, the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once became a worldwide sensation. Its surreal humour and roller-coaster pace, from slow and mundane at the beginning to frantic chaos, complemented an original sci-fi storyline. The protagonist, Evelyn Quan Wang, transforms from a woman trapped in experiencing a monotonous, bureaucratically suffocating life to one who experiences the vast multiverse of possibilities she could have lived.

I remember watching this film on a sweltering summer night by the Mediterranean coast, feeling both amused and overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of events unfolding “everything, everywhere, all at once.” This overwhelm was neither entirely good nor bad. The protagonist seemed to feel the same: full-blown existential overload. Spoiler alert: by the end of the film, she realizes that, despite her ability to inhabit infinite possibilities (with an infinitude of skills and superpowers), the most meaningful choice was to stay in one and fully experience it.

This brings us to our topic of discussion. Do you recall the scene where Evelyn finds herself in a universe where she is a rock? Did she not still seem to feel something in that state? Well, imagine a world where every single thing, from the tiniest speck of dust to the vast expanse of multiverses, exhibits some degree of consciousness, some form of subjective experience. While this might sound like a fantasy, it is actually a theory: panpsychism.

At first glance, panpsychism may seem like a stretch. Why do we need to posit that a rock is conscious? However, panpsychism tries to solve one of the most perplexing problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind: Why are we conscious, and how does subjective experience arise? This is what David Chalmers famously called the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995. Years later, Chalmers himself suggested that solving it might require a radically unorthodox approach, even pointing towards panpsychism.

If consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, then it has always existed, overcoming the problem of its origin. However, we do not know yet why and how we are conscious. A specific variant of panpsychism, named micropsychism, proposes that complex forms of consciousness, such as those experienced by humans, are constituted by micro-elements of consciousness. The idea is that these micro-elements combine to form more complex structures, leading to macroconsciousness. This would explain how and why different entities, say, humans and rocks, possess different levels of consciousness (though, according to the film, perhaps not).  If this were the case, have we solved the hard problem? Not quite.

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The term “information” refers to a reduction in uncertainty within a system.

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