What is Panpsychism? | Rupert Sheldrake, Donald Hoffman, Phillip Goff, James Ladyman

I am interested to know what others think of these arguments. For me, a model for consciousness must address the mind-matter expression of intended order we find in Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC).

I have admired Sheldrake for some time now. Craig Weiler wrote an informative book titled Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet describing how Sheldrake was attacked by science traditionalists over his views about morphic fields. I think I previously mentioned I was blocked for life from editing his page in Wikipedia because I proposed pseudoscience should be given more open-minded treatment.

Morphic fields, properly known as the Hypothesis of Formative Causation, is the proposal that cell differentiation is organized by fields representing Nature's habit of that organism. The unavoidable implication is that the morphic fields are nonphysical. If his model is right, and there is some indication it is, panpsychism would be irreparably flawed and dualism would remain the most viable model.

I am always uncomfortable with people who argue that physical science is wrong because ... but the fact remains that any theory explaining consciousness must address such questions as ITC and cell differentiation. 

In my view, reality consists of life and expressions of life. it is not the other way around.

The unavoidable implication is that the morphic fields are nonphysical. If his model is right, and there is some indication it is, panpsychism would be irreparably flawed and dualism would remain the most viable model.

Could you run through the reasoning here, I mean Sheldrake is advocating Top-Down Panpsychism in the video...

I am uncomfortable saying what Sheldrake thinks, so this is Shelkdrake according to Tom.

Panpsychism is the assumption that consciousness emerges from substance as a universal characteristic of matter. I think Sheldrake is arguing that, as visualized, it is an incomplete theory. He has always held that the arrow of creation is top-down.

His Morphic Resonance theory is based on the idea that a species has a shared set of instructions for formation; for instance how and when a cell differentiates as a bone or hair cell. That is not to say that cells do not have consciousness. It is to say that they are in some way guided by a shared thoughtform he calls Nature's Habit.

Of course, Morphic Resonance is in conflict with Darwinism because of the propagation of acquired traits problem. Genes do the heavy lifting for formation for both theories, but the organism's body image is maintained as a nonphysical field shared by every instance of a species in Morphic Resonance Theory.

The problem with Lamarckism (competed with Darwin back then) was that there was no known way for acquired traits to alter genes to be passed to the next generation. In Morphic Resonance, a creative solution to an environmental challenge is modeled as being able to modify the shared morphic field. That is one of Shaldrake's predictions for which there is some evidence emerging. That requires a characteristic of reality that nonphysical with a degree of intelligence.

There is also emerging evidence for the existence of a nonphysical aspect of reality, for instance, the Psi Field Hypothesis.

Sheldrake appears to be a monist, and in that video, described reality as an intelligent singularity (my words) in a similar way that the physical universe is theorized to have evolved from a singularity. If that is true, he is not saying panpsychism is wrong, only incomplete.