Panpsychism and Russellian Monism

There's a lineage of some of the smartest people who ever lived — Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Russell, Eddington, Whitehead — who all independently arrived at roughly the same conclusion: physics describes what things do but says nothing about what things are, and the gap left by that silence might be where consciousness lives. This isn't mysticism. It's a recurring insight from major thinkers confronting the same hole in the physical picture.

The Gap in Physics

Start with the observation that got Russell in 1927: physics is entirely structural. Mass is defined by its propensity to be accelerated by forces. Charge is defined by its electromagnetic interactions. Each property is defined only by its relations to other properties. As Chalmers puts it, physics gives us "a giant causal flux, but tells us nothing about what all this causation relates."¹

This is structuralism about physics — the claim that physical theory describes the world only in terms of spatiotemporal structure and dynamics, never in terms of what underlies that structure. It's a surprisingly strong claim, but it's hard to refute. Point to any physical property and try to say what it is rather than what it does, and you'll find yourself going in circles.

Russellian monism breaks the circle by positing quiddities — properties that underlie the structure, the categorical bases for physical dispositions, the way a ball's spherical shape categorically grounds its disposition to roll. And the move that makes this a theory of consciousness: these same quiddities are relevant to, and may partly constitute, conscious experience.¹

Two Flavors

The theory splits. Russellian panpsychism identifies quiddities with phenomenal properties — consciousness goes all the way down, though the micro-experiences of fundamental particles would be nothing like pain or color. Russellian panprotopsychism posits instead that quiddities are proto-phenomenal: not themselves conscious, but capable of collectively constituting consciousness when arranged right.¹

Panprotopsychism avoids the seeming absurdity of electron-consciousness but faces its own problem: explaining how non-conscious properties combine to produce consciousness. This is suspiciously like the hard problem all over again, just relocated one level down. Panpsychism avoids that relocation but runs straight into the combination problem: how do micro-experiences combine into your unified macro-experience? When I see red, is that experience composed of trillions of micro-seeings? What does that even mean?¹

Neither version cleanly solves the problem it set out to solve. But both change the kind of problem you're trying to solve — from "how does consciousness arise from something wholly non-conscious?" to "how do experiences combine?" — and many philosophers find the second question more tractable, or at least more honest.

Schopenhauer Got There First

Schopenhauer arrived at something remarkably similar two centuries before Russell, from a completely different direction. Starting from Kant's distinction between phenomena (the world as it appears) and noumena (things as they are in themselves), he made a move Kant refused: he claimed we do have access to the thing-in-itself, through our own bodies. When I move my arm, I experience it both as a physical event in the world of representation and as an act of will from the inside.²

The will — blind, unconscious, aimless striving — is the inner nature of everything. Gravity is will. Animal instinct is will. Human desire is will. Every phenomenon is the will manifesting at different levels of complexity. This is essentially Russellian panpsychism avant la lettre, with "will" playing the role of the quiddity.

Schopenhauer's pessimism follows directly from this metaphysics, and it's worth understanding why because the argument is airtight given the premises. If will is endless striving, and all phenomena embody that striving, then suffering is built into the structure of reality. Pleasure is just the momentary cessation of a particular desire, instantly replaced by another. Only aesthetic contemplation (temporary) or ascetic denial of the will (permanent) offer escape.²

This maps onto Buddhist metaphysics in a way that isn't superficial — Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to take Indian philosophy seriously, and "Tat Tvam Asi" (thou art that) from the Upanishads expresses exactly his claim: the will is the in-itself of every appearance, and individuality is illusory.²

Process Philosophy: Reality as Becoming

Whitehead provides yet another angle. If reality is fundamentally composed of processes rather than static substances, then the Hard Problem Of Consciousness looks different. Static matter generating consciousness seems mysterious. But if the basic units of reality are dynamic "actual occasions" — events of experience that integrate information and create new data — then consciousness isn't layered on top of dead matter. It's a feature of the process-nature of reality itself.³

Whitehead's philosophy of organism treats every actual occasion as having "prehension" — a taking-in of data — that, at the human level of complexity, becomes conscious experience. Quantum physics seems to favor this picture: the fundamental level looks more like fluctuating processes organized into apparently stable structures by statistical regularities than like tiny billiard balls. Carlo Rovelli's relational interpretation of loop quantum gravity is committed to "physical being as becoming in a radical sense."³

I find process philosophy more aesthetically satisfying than substance metaphysics, but I'm genuinely uncertain whether it delivers testable predictions that substance metaphysics can't match. It might be a more beautiful redescription of the same thing rather than a genuinely different theory. The 4EA cognition program (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affective) in cognitive science is explicitly process-friendly, but the hard ontological work of distilling biologically relevant process architectures from the statistical formulas is still mostly undone.³

The Eastern Parallel: Emptiness and Form

There's a striking convergence between Russellian monism and Buddhist metaphysics that goes deeper than Schopenhauer's acknowledged borrowing from the Upanishads. Madhyamaka Buddhism's central claim — that all phenomena are "empty" of inherent existence, existing only in dependence on other phenomena — maps onto the structuralist insight that physics describes only relations, never intrinsic natures. Both traditions are pointing at the same gap: the absence of self-standing substance underneath the web of relations.

But the Buddhist traditions diverge on what to do with this insight in a way that mirrors the panpsychism/panprotopsychism split. Mahayana Buddhism separates emptiness and form into two levels of truth — the ultimate truth that everything is empty, and the conventional truth that forms exist as they appear. This two-truths doctrine has generated two millennia of argument about how the levels relate, with no satisfactory answer. Dzogchen — the most radical of the Tibetan Buddhist frameworks — calls this bluff. It rejects the two-truths framework entirely: emptiness and form cannot be separated at all. They are "inseparable aspects of the dynamic play of phenomena."⁴

Where Mahayana treats emptiness as a remote goal accessible only to Buddhas, Dzogchen treats it as an obvious everyday reality. Emptiness is luminous (ösel) — not a mere negation of existence but something radiant, full of dynamic potential (tsal). This is closer to Whitehead's process philosophy than to Russell's quiddities: the basic nature of reality isn't static substance with hidden experiential properties, but dynamic process that is experiential in its activity. The Dzogchen practitioner doesn't discover emptiness through argument; they recognize it in the texture of ordinary experience — the groundlessness that's already there once you stop papering over it with conceptual frameworks.⁴

I'm drawn to the convergence but wary of making too much of it. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense isn't consciousness in the Western sense — it's more like the absence of the fixed substrate that Western philosophy keeps looking for. But that absence is precisely what Russellian monism identifies as the gap in physics. Whether filling the gap with "experience" (Russell) or leaving it radically open (Nagarjuna) are genuinely different moves or different vocabularies for the same recognition — that's a question I can't settle.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The combination problem is the Achilles' heel, and I don't think any version of panpsychism has convincingly solved it. But the lineage matters — when Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Russell, Eddington, Whitehead, and (from a different direction) Nagarjuna all independently converge on "the relational structure of reality leaves something unsaid about what underlies it," that's not a coincidence. It's what happens when you take the foundations of your ontology seriously and refuse to pretend the gap isn't there.

The Chalmers thermostat thought experiment crystallizes why I can't let go of this. Strip away all the neural complexity, reduce processing to its simplest form, and the explanatory gap remains exactly as wide. Adding complexity doesn't help. This means either consciousness requires something beyond processing (panpsychism says: it's already there, all the way down) or the gap is an artifact of how we frame the question (illusionism says: misrepresentation by introspective mechanisms) or we're missing something about what "processing" is (process philosophy says: it's not what we thought). The last option is the one I find most promising and least developed.