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"The Buddha never said that life is suffering. He said there is suffering in life. That was his first noble truth. And he identified what that suffering is, but he went on to say that there is a cause for suffering that you can abandon, and there is a path to the end of suffering that you can develop, so that you can reach the end of suffering, all of which can be found in life.
So life isn’t just suffering. It’s important to underline that point, because so many people misunderstand the Buddha’s attitude toward happiness and suffering. Just this last weekend, I heard someone saying that the Buddha’s basic teachings are that all things are inconstant and all things are suffering. That’s not the case, either. As the Buddha once said, if there were no pleasure in the five aggregates, we wouldn’t be attached to them. They do offer pleasure. And we need to understand the different kinds of pleasure they offer, so we can use that pleasure as a means to the highest happiness or the highest pleasure: nibbana."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Connoisseur of Happiness" (Meditations6)
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Panpsychism Interpretation 1: consciousness is just one more irreducible property of matter at a subatomic level, just like mass, charge, spin and momentum are also fundamental properties of subatomic particles. In other words, all matter has consciousness at a fundamental level. Matter, however, remains the broader and more primary matrix of reality
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Panpsychism Interpretation 2: consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter, not just one more of its properties. However, consciousness is still considered fundamentally fragmented in exactly the same way matter is. In other words, distinct bits of matter – that is, subatomic particles – represent distinct bits of consciousness. According to this view, a single isolated electron has its own very simple form of consciousness: there is something it is like to be an isolated electron. More complex arrangements of matter, like a human brain, allegedly aggregate these bits of consciousness together to give rise to richer, integrated inner lives of the kind you and I experience.
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The difference between Interpretations 1 and 2 is subtle. While Interpretation 1 takes consciousness to be just one more irreducible property of matter – the substance of matter still existing outside consciousness – Interpretation 2 takes consciousness to be matter's intrinsic nature. According to interpretation 2, measurable properties like mass and charge are just the extrinsic – external – aspects of this intrinsic nature. That said, Interpretation 2, just like Interpretation 1, also entails that the structure of matter determines the structure of consciousness: the subatomic, fragmented building-blocks of matter still allegedly correspond to fragmented building-blocks of subjectivity
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A key problem with materialism, however, is that it has been unable to explain, even in principle, how arrangements of matter can possibly generate subjective experience. This is known in neuroscience and philosophy of mind as the 'hard problem of consciousness,'
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But here is where panpsychism raises its head as the greatest threat on the horizon: it provides an easy escape route for the materialist. It magically 'solves' the hard problem of consciousness simply by declaring consciousness to be either an irreducible property, or the intrinsic nature, of matter. This way, it maintains our present delusion that matter – either in substance (Interpretation 1) or in structure (Interpretation 2) – is the primary aspect of reality. It threatens to usurp from us the unique opportunity we have today to face and correct our delusional worldview
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WHY PANPSYCHISM ISN'T IDEALISM OR NONDUALISM
The body of my work is a defense of what in the West is called the philosophy of Idealism. In the East, essentially the same view is entailed by the philosophies of Nondualism. According to this view, all reality consists in excitations of consciousness, there being no need to infer a material world fundamentally outside consciousness. As such, reality is akin to vibrations of a 'membrane' of pure consciousness, an idea indirectly corroborated by M-theory. The intricate patterns and regularities of these vibrations are the universe around us. Yet, in the same way that there is nothing to a vibrating membrane but the membrane itself, there is nothing to the universe but consciousness itself. The universe is a behavior of consciousness, not an ontological entity outside and independent of consciousness.A
'Pan - psychism' means literally 'soul everywhere,' which suggests an 'everywhere' outside soul, so soul can be in it. I reject that: 'all-wheres' are in consciousness/soul, in my view. There is a wonderful quote by Henry Corbin that captures this: 'it is the where, the place, that resides in the soul.' (Swedenborg And Esoteric Islam, page 14). I believe the most accurate term for this is 'Idealism,' not 'panpsychism.' If others articulate this ontology under the label 'panpsychism,' very well; what can I do? I would have chosen differently.
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panpsychism does at least represent some recognition of the role of consciousness in the universe. It's possibly a step forwards for materialists who have so far been insisting that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, or even that it doesn't exist at all.
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mystical philosophies, which almost universally set up a mind-matter polarity which is quite similar to some forms of panpsychism, particularly Spinoza's. They of course go further - at least the non-dualist ones - and see both mind and matter as subjective/objective manifestations of an all-inclusive non-mental and non-material principle of Pure Existence/Consciousness.
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