## 2. Varieties of Contemporary Panpsychism### 2.1 The Definition of PanpsychismThe word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind. However, in contemporary debates it is generally understood as the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Thus, in conjunction with the widely held assumption (which will be reconsidered below) that fundamental things exist only at the micro-level, panpsychism entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, and that instances of those kinds are found in all things throughout the material universe. So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have _parts_ with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do).We can distinguish various forms of panpsychism in terms of _which_ aspect of mentality is taken to be fundamental and ubiquitous. Two important characteristics of human minds are _thought_ and _consciousness_. In terms of these characteristics we can distinguish the following two possible forms of panpsychism: * _Panexperientialism_ —the view that _conscious experience_ is fundamental and ubiquitous * _Pancognitivism_ —the view that _thought_ is fundamental and ubiquitous.According to the definition of consciousness that is dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy, something is conscious just in case there is something that it’s like to be it; that is to say, if it has some kind of experience, no matter how basic.[[7](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/notes.html#note-7)] Humans have incredibly rich and complex experience, horses less so, mice less so again. Standardly the panexperientialist holds that this diminishing of the complexity of experience continues down through plants, and through to the basic constituents of reality, perhaps electrons and quarks. If the notion of “having experience” is flexible enough, then the view that an electron has experience—of some extremely basic kind—would seem to be coherent (of course we must distinguish the question of whether it is coherent from the question of whether it is _plausible_ ; the latter will depend on the strength of the arguments discussed below).Thought, in contrast, is a much more sophisticated phenomenon, and many doubt that it is correct to ascribe it to non-human animals, never-mind fundamental particles. The traditional view in analytic philosophy is that thoughts are mental states that can be modelled as _psychological attitudes towards specific propositions_ : _believing_ that Budapest is the capital of Hungary, _hoping_ that war is over, _fearing_ that there will be another Global Financial Crisis. Panpsychism is often caricatured as the view that electrons have hopes and dreams, or that quarks suffer from existential angst. However, whilst there have been some defenders of pancognitivism in history, it is panexperientialist forms of panpsychism that are taken seriously in contemporary analytic philosophy.[[8](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/notes.html#note-8)] From now on I will equate panpsychism with panexperientialism.### 2.2 Constitutive Versus Emergentist Panpsychism