Generally this will come from the analytic tradition. Panpsychism is absurd, mad and a surrender to the forces of unreason. ‘Our way of life is under threat’. Well not quite but the fact that it’s, as it were, trending as a philosophy is troubling. The reductio that is offered and viewed as a knockout punch is the characterisation of an electron or even a quark having a mind. Then if all these little minds add up to one big mind as in the human being or the chimp isn’t there a problem about how they might combine and present a unified front. Won’t they squabble? They are of one mind (sorry) with Ralph Cudworth in his ‘The True Intellectual System of the Universe’ (1678):
“And to say that these innumerable particles of matter do all confederate together—that is to make every man and animal, to be a multitude or commonwealth of percipients and persons, as it were, clubbing together—is a thing so absurd and ridiculous, that one would wonder, the Hylozoists should not choose to recant that their fundamental error of the life of matter, than seek shelter and sanctuary for the same, under such a Proteus.”
I think the fundamental problem here with the anti-panpsychist view is that it is based on an implicit dualism. Mind and matter are are irreducible. Yet at the same time mind sort of happened when matter became complex enough. Is that more intelligible than the monistic view expressed by the ‘satkaryavada’ theory of Vedanta (non-difference of cause and effect) or the ‘ex nihil nihilo fit’ about which the Chandogya Upanishad affects to be ambivilent.
Interesting speculations to be hewn from the obdurate metaphysic. Anon.
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