Panpsychism gets flak from a lot of directions. But a new one on me was John Horgan’s accusation that panpsychists are guilty of ‘geo-centrism,’ the attempt to drag us back to the pre-Copernican view that reality revolves us human beings:

As far as we know, consciousness is property of only one weird type of matter that evolved relatively recently here on Earth: brains. Neo-geocentrists nonetheless suggest that consciousness pervades the entire cosmos. It might even have been the spark that ignited the big bang.

Let us set aside the suggestion in the last sentence that panpsychism has something to do with theism (in my experience, most panpsychists are atheists just looking for the best scientific account of consciousness). Not only would I resist the charge that panpsychism involves geo-centrism, I would go further and say that panpsychism saves us from geo-centrism. For non-panpsychists, consciousness – the source of all that is of value in existence – is to be found on the planet alone, and only in its very recent history. In the immensity of the cosmos, we are uniquely special and privileged. Panpsychists, in contrast, propose a new Copernican revolution, according to which there’s nothing special about human consciousness; it’s just one highly evolved form of the stuff of the universe. Panpsychist Hedda Hassel Mørch put it well in a tweet to Horgan:

Geocentrism says we are special. Panpsychism says we are not special at all – yes, everything is like us, but therefore we are like everything else.

Moreover, Horgan’s approach in this article doesn’t seem to me a good way to deal with scientific questions. He is starting from an a priori assumption as to what reality ought to look like: it ought not to revolve around human beings. This seems to me just as flawed as the proponent of religion who starts from an a priori assumption that the world ought to have us at the centre. Surely we should just look to the evidence and arguments to tell us what reality is like?

Perhaps, as is hinted at in the first line of the above, Horgan would argue that the fact that we find consciousness only in highly evolved systems counts as evidence against panpsychism. As I discuss in my last post, this would count as evidence against panpsychism only if we would expect to find consciousness in particles if it were there (this reflects a standard Bayesian way of thinking about evidence). But given that consciousness is unobservable, we wouldn’t expect to observe consciousness in particles, whether it was there or not. Nor can we observe consciousness in brains. We know about consciousness not through observation and experiment but through the immediate awareness each of us has of her or his own conscious experience.

Of course, before we take panpsychism seriously, we need to have reason to believe it. Hedda and I, and many others, have argued at length that panpsychism offers the best account of how consciousness fits into a scientific worldview. Of course, those arguments can be challenged in all sorts of ways. But to reject panpsychism simply on the basis that it doesn’t reflect how you think reality ought to be is not good science.