Is the Universe Thinking Through Us?

On panpsychism and animism: two persistent suspicions about the inner life of matter, and what separates them

Start with a sensation you have probably had and probably dismissed: the feeling when looking at a forest or a river or a night sky, that the thing in front of you is not merely a thing. Not that it is alive in the way you are alive, not that it has thoughts or intentions or feelings you could name, but that there is something it is like to be it, some interiority that your gaze is meeting even if it cannot understand what it meets. Most people learn to dismiss this feeling early. Science, common sense, and a reasonable suspicion of pathetic fallacy all recommend against it. The forest is not looking back. The river is not listening.

But some of the most serious thinkers in the history of philosophy have argued that the dismissal is too quick, and that what gets dismissed, along with the sentimental feeling, is something philosophically important. The question of whether mind, or experience, or something like interiority, is more widespread in nature than we usually suppose is not a question for mystics alone. It sits at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science, and it has returned to serious academic attention in the last two decades in a form rigorous enough to demand engagement rather than dismissal.

The two positions most often discussed in this context are panpsychism and animism. They are frequently conflated, occasionally confused with each other, and rarely distinguished with the care the distinction deserves. This essay is an attempt to map the distinction clearly, to explain what is genuinely compelling about each position, and to say something about where they part ways and why it matters.

Does the river speak to you?

WHAT PANPSYCHISM ACTUALLY CLAIMS

Panpsychism is the view that mind, or something like mind, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Not that rocks are conscious in the way that humans are conscious, not that electrons have opinions or electrons deliberate, but that the basic constituents of the physical world possess some form of experiential character, however primitive, and that the richer forms of consciousness exhibited by animals and humans are built from these more primitive experiential properties rather than arising from nothing in particular when matter reaches sufficient complexity.

The philosophical motivation for panpsychism is almost entirely a response to the hard problem of consciousness. If we accept that consciousness is genuinely puzzling, that no amount of description of neural firing patterns will explain why there is something it is like to be a brain, then we face a choice. We can conclude that consciousness is something over and above the physical, a separate kind of substance or property that emerges from the physical without being reducible to it. Or we can conclude that the physical was always already experiential, that the reason consciousness does not seem to be explicable in terms of the physical is that our picture of the physical has been too impoverished, that we have been describing matter as if it were wholly inert and then wondering how experience could arise from inertness.

Panpsychism is the second horn of this dilemma. Philosophers like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson have argued for it in careful detail, and their arguments deserve to be taken seriously. Strawson's version holds that if you take materialism seriously, if you really believe that everything that exists is physical and that consciousness exists, then you are committed to holding that consciousness is physical, which means that the physical must be experiential through and through. What appears to us as inert matter is our macroscopic, third-person description of something that is, from the inside, experiential.

The question is not whether experience exists. It obviously does. The question is whether its existence is better explained by adding it to matter or by discovering it was never absent from matter.

WHAT ANIMISM ACTUALLY CLAIMS

Animism is an older and harder-to-define position, partly because it encompasses a wide range of indigenous and traditional worldviews that do not map neatly onto Western philosophical categories, and partly because its contemporary philosophical rehabilitation has taken several different forms. At its most general, animism is the view that the world is populated by persons, where persons need not be human, need not be biological, and need not be the kind of thing that Western philosophy has typically taken as the paradigm case of a minded being.

The anthropologist Graham Harvey, whose work has been important in bringing animism into serious philosophical discussion, describes contemporary animism as the recognition that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others. What matters here is not the attribution of a hidden mental substance to trees and rivers but the recognition of relational personhood: the idea that what it means to be a person is constituted by relations with others, and that those others include entities that Western modernity has classified as mere objects.

Philosophical animism, as distinct from ethnographic or religious animism, draws on this relational emphasis to make a claim about ontology. The fundamental structure of reality is not a collection of objects with properties but a network of relations between subjects, and the error of the modern Western worldview is to have taken the object as primary and the relation as secondary, the thing as fundamental and the between-space as derivative. On an animist ontology, the forest is not an object that has or lacks mental properties. It is a node in a web of relations, and what it means to be in relation with the forest is something that cannot be fully captured by treating the forest as inert material to be described from outside.

PANPSYCHISM

Locus: Properties of fundamental physical constituents

Method: Analytic philosophy of mind, responding to the hard problem

Key move: Experience is intrinsic to matter at every scale

Challenge: The combination problem: how do micro-experiences combine into unified consciousness?

Temper: Individualist; experience belongs to entities

ANIMISM

Locus: Relations between entities across scales

Method: Phenomenology, relational ontology, indigenous philosophy

Key move: Personhood is relational, not intrinsic to any single thing

Challenge: How to specify relations rigorously without dissolving into mysticism

Temper: Relational; experience arises between, not within

WHERE THEY AGREE AND WHERE THEY PART

Panpsychism and animism share a rejection of the view that mind is a late and local arrival in an otherwise mindless universe, a product of sufficient neural complexity that appears nowhere else in nature. Both hold that this picture is both philosophically untenable and phenomenologically impoverished, that it fails to account for consciousness and also fails to account for the character of our actual experience of the natural world. Both regard the hard problem as evidence that something has gone wrong in the standard materialist picture, rather than as a merely technical puzzle to be solved within that picture.

The difference lies in where they locate mind and in the ontological framework they employ to do so. Panpsychism locates experiential properties in individual physical constituents. Electrons, quarks, or whatever turns out to be fundamental have experiential properties, and composite objects have whatever experiential properties can be assembled from the experiential properties of their parts. The framework is individualist and additive: minds are built from micro-minds.

Animism rejects this framework at the level of ontology rather than merely adjusting it. The relational animist does not say that electrons have experiences and that the forest's experience is built from theirs. It says that the question is being posed in the wrong frame, that what matters about the forest is not the sum of the intrinsic properties of its constituent particles but the web of relations in which it participates and which partly constitute what it is. Mind, on this view, is not a property of things but a character of relations, and looking for it in the intrinsic properties of fundamental constituents is like looking for a conversation in the properties of the individual words.

Panpsychism puts mind inside things. Animism puts mind between them. The difference is not merely verbal: it changes what a solution to the hard problem would look like.

THE COMBINATION PROBLEM AND WHY IT MATTERS

The most serious difficulty for panpsychism is the combination problem, and it is worth dwelling on because it is precisely where the animist alternative becomes most attractive. If consciousness is a fundamental property of basic physical constituents, then complex consciousness, the kind you have right now reading these words, must somehow be built up from the micro-level experiential properties of the neurons in your brain, which are themselves built from the experiential properties of their atomic constituents.

But it is deeply unclear how micro-experiences combine to produce a unified experience. Your experience of reading this sentence is a single, unified event. There is one perspective from which the words are appearing, not a collection of thousands of sub-perspectives corresponding to the individual neurons involved in processing them. How does one get from the many to the one? Panpsychism needs an account of experiential combination that has no obvious analogue in the physical world. Properties like mass add up; it is not clear that experiences do.

Philip Goff and others have worked hard on this problem, and the discussion is genuinely interesting. But what strikes me is that the problem only arises if you accept the panpsychist starting point: that experience is an intrinsic property of individual entities that then needs to be combined. If you start instead with the animist premise that experience is relational, that it arises in the between-space of relation rather than in the interior of isolated entities, then there is no combination problem in the same form. The unity of experience reflects the unity of the relational field, not the mysterious summation of many private interiors into one.

THE UNIVERSE THINKING THROUGH US

Return to the question in the title. Is the universe thinking through us? Panpsychism gives one answer: in some sense, yes, because the experiential properties that constitute our consciousness are continuous with the experiential properties that are fundamental to all matter. We are dense aggregations of a property that is spread throughout reality, and our thinking is what that property looks like when it reaches sufficient complexity and organisation.

Animism gives a different answer, and I find it more interesting. The universe is not thinking through us in the sense that we are channels for a distributed cosmic mentality. It is thinking, if that is the right word, in the relations that constitute us and that we participate in constituting. Our consciousness is not a concentrated form of something spread thin throughout matter. It is a node in a relational network whose other nodes are not conscious in the way we are but whose relations with us are not simply those of a subject with an inert object.

What this means practically is something that philosophy borrows, with appropriate caution, from traditions that have never accepted the subject-object dichotomy as fundamental. The river you stand beside is not looking back at you in the way that another person looks back at you. But the relation between you and the river is not the relation between a subject and a mere object either. It is a relation between two nodes in a web of which both are parts, and the character of that relation, including whatever character your experience of it has, is not fully determined by the properties of either node taken alone.

This is not mysticism. It is a claim in relational ontology with substantive philosophical consequences: for how we understand consciousness, for how we understand the hard problem, and for how we understand our relation to the natural world. Whether it is true is a further question. But it is a question worth asking with more rigour than it usually receives, in both directions: with enough rigour to take the animist tradition seriously rather than dismissing it, and with enough rigour to subject it to the kind of philosophical pressure that will reveal whether it is more than an appealing metaphor.

WHAT THE COMPARISON REVEALS

Comparing panpsychism and animism is useful not because the comparison settles anything but because it maps the space of positions available to anyone who takes seriously the hard problem and also takes seriously the possibility that the standard materialist framework has gone wrong at the level of ontology rather than merely at the level of detail.

Panpsychism stays within the framework of intrinsic properties and tries to populate it with experience from the ground up. Animism challenges the framework itself and proposes to replace intrinsic properties with constitutive relations as the basic ontological unit. Both positions are coherent. Both have serious philosophical defenders. Both have significant unresolved difficulties. And both are preferable, in my view, to the combination of hard-nosed materialism and paralysis in the face of the hard problem that constitutes the default position in much of philosophy of mind.

The question of whether the universe is thinking through us is not one that either position answers in the way the question initially suggests. What they offer instead is a reorientation: a set of frameworks within which the question can be posed more precisely, examined more carefully, and connected to the philosophical problems it genuinely bears on. That reorientation is itself an achievement, and in philosophy, it is often the most one can ask for.

The author is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford and a researcher in philosophy of mind, working on consciousness as a relational phenomenon. Published at magicinharmony.com.