The panpsychist claim that reality's fundamental constituents are conscious is increasingly popular, but it faces an unanswerable question: how can conscious fragments fuse to make up complex minds? Philosopher S. Siddharth argues that the solution requires venturing where those sympathetic to panpsychism, from William James to David Chalmers, have feared to tread: the weird metaphysics of German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Reviving Leibniz’s “monads,” Siddharth envisages a reality composed of indivisible centers of experience, which neither fuse nor split, but are rigorously singular, sidestepping the question that plagues popular versions of panpsychism.

Consciousness is at once what we are most familiar with, and a persistent mystery. The endurance of the mind-body problem across time and cultures, and the wide variety of contemporary philosophical theories of consciousness, are a testament to this. Some say consciousness is an illusion, others say it is merely brain processes. Still others think of it as abstract functions implemented by the brain; as something that emerges from the complexity of brain processes; as a global workspace; as integrated information; as a substance distinct from the body; and so on. Amidst these, a view of ancient vintage has regained prominence in recent decades within analytic philosophy of mind—panpsychism, the view that consciousness is both fundamental and ubiquitous.

A major motivation for contemporary panpsychism has been dissatisfaction with both physicalism and dualism. Equally important have been the insights of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell and other philosophers of science who showed that the sciences are successful precisely because they limit themselves to delivering a certain kind of knowledge of the physical world—its structural properties—without concerning themselves with the stuff that implements this structure—its intrinsic properties. Now, if our knowledge of the physical world known through the sciences is limited to its structure, and if consciousness cannot be reduced to mere structures of fundamentally non-conscious-physical stuff, couldn’t it be that consciousness (or something like it) is the non-structural, intrinsic aspect of physical stuff? Panpsychists think that this likely is the case.

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Subjects, as the American philosopher William James famously noted, seem to be the “most absolute breaches in nature,” not the sort of thing that can combine.

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The resulting view, while elegant in integrating the advantages of both physicalism and dualism, is weird to say the least. It entails that consciousness is everywhere: if fundamental physical entities are all intrinsically conscious, every physical entity is constituted of conscious entities. This is not the same as saying that every physical thing, including rocks and spoons, is conscious—no contemporary panpsychist seriously thinks that it feels some way to be a spoon—but only that the fundamental entities that constitute all physical entities, including rocks, spoons and human beings, are each conscious subjects-having-experiences.

This makes the job of accommodating consciousness in a physical world easier, but only just. Critics of panpsychism contend that while panpsychism tells us that fundamental physical entities—quarks, strings, electrons, whatever our best physical theories tell us are fundamental—are conscious, it does not tell us how these micro-conscious entities combine to form the consciousness of macro-entities such as human beings. Indeed, it seems impossible that micro-subjects-having-experience can combine at all. Subjects, as the American philosopher William James famously noted, seem to be the “most absolute breaches in nature,” not the sort of thing that can combine. Given this, panpsychism is no better than physicalism in explaining the kind of consciousness that needs to be explained—the complex, human experiences of the sort we are intimately familiar with.