This is an updated version of an essay originally published in 2010
Yes, Dan Dennett is a panpsychist, but he wouldn’t admit it in public. He might not even realize it. And he surely wouldn’t agree with my diagnosis.
Yet Dan Dennett, one of the foremost materialists in the early part of the 21st Century advocates views regarding consciousness, biology and philosophy that unavoidably lead to that most ridiculous of philosophical views: that all things have some degree of consciousness, otherwise known as panpsychism.
For those who don’t know, Dan Dennett is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He’s written numerous books, including Breaking the Spell, an anti-religion screed that places him firmly among the “new atheists” school of thought. The new atheists, which include Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others, take as their primary target the traditional view of God as a creator and patriarch who resides somewhere up in the sky observing his creation. This traditional view is quite hard to defend for anyone who has scientific or philosophical training. But Dennett and the rest of the new atheists go too far, in my view, in rejecting any notion of divinity as part and parcel of their rejection of traditional religion.
I had the good fortune of meeting Dennett in 2010, and again a couple of years later, and found that he is in fact a very pleasant man, courteous, and with a great sense of humor. (I’ve learned that people who become very influential almost invariably are both very smart and have a good sense of humor). I couldn’t call Dennett humble, but for someone with such a wealth of ideas and the ability to express them so well couldn’t be expected to be humble.
Dennett has also written books on Darwinian evolution (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and consciousness (Consciousness Explained, Brainstorms, From Bach to Bacteria and Back, among others). He is, with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist, probably the best-known proponent of what I call “strong materialism.” Strong materialism is the hard-core — some would say dogmatic — version of materialism. It is the view, in essence, that the universe is all just matter and space, there is no God, and that all things can in principle be explained fully through human inquiry and theorizing. Strong materialists believe, to speak very generally, that mind (consciousness) is “merely” what brains do. Once we explain the various functions that brains do we have then explained all that there is to explain. Explain the brain and we have thus explained the mind.
Dennett has acknowledged, however, that “subjective experience” is real. The phrase subjective experience refers simply to the first-person perspective, as opposed to a third-person perspective. It is the feeling of something here, right here, behind my eyes and between my ears. When philosophers talk about the mind/body problem or about explaining consciousness, this is what they are trying to explain.
Dennett has also argued forcefully against the idea of conscious experience being something fundamentally different than what is simply matter. Dennett seems to be most opposed to dualism. Descartes, the 17th Century French philosopher and mathematician, was the best-known dualist and he argued that there is physical stuff, mental stuff and some organ in the body, most likely the pineal gland at the base of the brain, which allows these two different stuffs to interact. For Descartes, only humans were conscious, so all other animals were considered mere automatons devoid of any kind of consciousness or spirit. Dualism is not a common position today among philosophers or scientists, but it’s still fairly common in religious views of the world, which refer to “spirit” or “soul” as something separate from mindless matter.
Dennett often mentions the history of “vitalism” in biology, as an argument by analogy to show why dualism is wrong. Vitalists argued that there is something special, some élan vital, which imbues certain kinds of matter with properties that make it “alive.” Vitalism was a fairly common view until the early 20th Century. This argument has long since been (rightly) discredited because we have found that there is nothing else to explain about “life” once we explain the functions of living organisms. In other words, “life” isn’t a quality or a thing, it’s just a label we give to certain types of matter that exhibit more complex behavior than what we generally think of as being not alive. But there’s not a clear dividing line between life and non-life.
Now here’s my main point — admittedly a fairly subtle point. If Dennett is a materialist and he admits that subjective experience is real, and he is an anti-vitalist, then he must also be a panpsychist. This is the case because if subjective experience is real, and materialism is true, then matter must include experience at some level, however nascent. And if anti-vitalism is true, then life does not suddenly appear where it was not present before — it must also be a continuum from the most simple forms of matter up through the chain of being all the way to us, human beings.
And if anti-vitalism is true, then Dennett can’t argue consistently that consciousness magically appeared at some arbitrary point in the history of the universe. Ergo: life and consciousness are present in some tiny amount from the most simple type of matter up through the most complex forms we know of today. In other words, all things are alive to some degree, and all things are conscious to some degree. This is panpsychism.
A difference between what we consider to be “life” and what we consider to be “consciousness” is that explaining the functions of consciousness does not explain consciousness, subjective experience. We can explain the various functions of human consciousness, such as sight, dreaming, judgment, etc. But these functions all pre-suppose a first-person point of view, what we call subjective experience. We must somehow explain this first-person point of view, and why it is different than a third-person point of view, if we’re seeking insight into the nature of the universe — or “merely” in explaining consciousness.
I have in recent years come to the position that panpsychism is the best explanation we have of mind, matter and spirituality, after pondering these issues for almost thirty years now. The best-known panpsychists in western history include Spinoza, Schopenhauer, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, J.B.S. Haldane, David Bohm, Galen Strawson, and many others. Unfortunately, panpsychism is still not taken seriously by many scientists or philosophers. But it should be. And it is certainly catching on. [Since I wrote the first version of this piece in 2010, panpsychism has apparently increased in credibility and popularity quite remarkably, due in large part, it seems to me, to the efforts of Galen Strawson (in particular, his article and 17 responses in a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies available as Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, David Skrbina (his book, Panpsychism in the West, is an excellent survey of this strand of thought through the ages, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi in developing the panpsychist-by-implication Integrated Information Theory of consciousness.]
So why does all of this matter (pardon the pun)? It matters because it shows that strong materialism, a still-common worldview in the western world, holds inherent contradictions. Self-contradiction is the surest sign that a theory or paradigm is problematic. And it shows that consciousness is not a property particular to complex forms of matter like human beings, as materialists usually argue.
Consciousness is in fact probably a property of all matter, from the simplest to the most complex forms. As matter has complexified, through the process of evolution, consciousness has complexified. This can form the basis for not only a satisfying and consistent philosophical and scientific worldview, it also forms the basis for linking science and spirituality in a rational framework that incorporates areas more traditionally left to faith — the topic of my two books, Eco, Ego, Eros (2014) and Mind, World, God (2017), and a third book coming out in 2020, Commerce of Mind (yes, I have a thing apparently for three-word book titles).
