On The Personal Implications Of Panpsychism
A branch of science that seems to be telling my story. To me.
Years ago, I read an article that made a startling observation: If humans have free will, they get it from the matter of which they are composed. That article described work published by physicists and mathematicians, that suggested that all matter is conscious. I have been considering that possibility for years now. I have long wondered if the world I live in is filled with things that are conscious, and I have acted as if it were.
Consider all the ways in which we anthropomorphize things. We give inanimate objects human qualities. A familiar example is the Der Wienerschnitzel commercial starring a hot dog running for his life in a hot dog bun. Another example is the way the ancient Greeks and Romans gave human qualities to patterns in the stars. And finally, there is that lamp that appears at the beginning of every Pixar movie, pounding the letter I into oblivion. They are all examples of how we give human attributes to things.
Then I wondered if we have an understanding on some level, that everything is conscious. That is the question posed by a field of science called, panpsychism. Panpsychism is defined as follows by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Panpsychism is the view that…
