Jerry Coyne really doesn't like panpsychism.

Oy! LiveScience touts panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness

Panpsychism makes a sneaky return

Another panpsychist flogs a dead theory

A BBC show on panpsychism once again shows that there’s no “there” there

...And so on. More can be found on his blog. But to sum up with passages from the last link:

If you’re sick of panpsychism by now, you can skip this post and the podcast below. But it’s not going away soon, I think, given the vociferous nature and arrant careerism of its proponents...I’ll soon stop posting about this, but I wanted readers to see how deeply wrong an idea can be (maybe “woo-ish and untestable” is a better characterization than “wrong”) and still be popular. I am still baffled by its popularity, though nobody I respect has adhered to this idea...[proponents don't] say what it actually means for an electron to have “experience”. Sure, they have spin and move around, but in what sense is that “experience” if they don’t “experience” it? What he’s saying is more or less what he told Sean Carroll on the podcast I posted yesterday: all matter has “properties,” like mass and spin and velocity, and if you call those properties “consciousness,” then yes, everything is conscious. But then he’s made no advance beyond pure physics. And this doesn’t solve the second problem: how do the rudimentary consciousnesses of the molecular bits of our brain somehow come together to produce full consciousness in the whole organ: consciousness in which we have qualia—feelings, perceptions, and sensations? This remains a mystery that neither Goff nor Morch appear to solve....the Hard Problem of Panpsychism [is]: How do the semisconscious bits of brain stuff combine to make a brain conscious, but the semiconscious bits of tables and rocks don’t? These philosophers don’t tell us, and so there’s a gaping hole in their “theory”—if you want to call an untestable and largely semantic issue a “theory”.

Coyne is amusing in that the very ad hominem he uses - careerism, untestability of the theory being put forth - applies to some of his allies in the New Atheist crowd.

Is he this cranky about MWI?

I really don’t see the problem with panpsychism. Consciousness is so ill-defined and nebulous that it’s hard to get worked up when someone postulates an (equally nebulous) proposition that “it’s everywhere”. Why spoil their fun?

I really don’t see the problem with panpsychism. Consciousness is so ill-defined and nebulous that it’s hard to get worked up when someone postulates an (equally nebulous) proposition that “it’s everywhere”. Why spoil their fun?

Coyne is one of those odd people who is a determinist but also gets mad when people end up with beliefs he disagrees with.

Go figure.

Coyne is one of those odd people who is a determinist but also gets mad when people end up with beliefs he disagrees with.

Go figure.

Probably best to assume he is simply messed up product of the sum of all his previous experiences...

I really don’t see the problem with panpsychism. Consciousness is so ill-defined and nebulous that it’s hard to get worked up when someone postulates an (equally nebulous) proposition that “it’s everywhere”. Why spoil their fun?

In one of his posts, Coyne mentions that the idea that electrons might have consciousness "freaks [him] out." I assume that was somewhat facetious, but I do get the impression that his objections are, in part, more out of a fear of letting "woo" get taken seriously than any rational objection, a la Maddox and the Big Bang.