Panpsychism

(FYI, quotes taken from http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/panpsych.htm)

I used to think about an idea I would call "global consciousness" and then found that there's a term called "panpsychism" which is similar in a number of ways.

First: What is panpsychism?
"panpsychism may be defined as the view that all things possess mind, or some mind-like quality"

It stands in opposition to the belief that only a certain restricted class of beings can possess mind. Also, "Either mind was present in things from the very beginning or it appeared (emerged) at some point in the history of evolution." Believing the former means you're a panpsychist, believing the latter makes you an emergentist. Defending emergentism is generally more problematic because one would have to argue for a line at which you could rigourously define the mind.

If you believe in Darwinian evolution, you would probably agree with me that arguing for such a line is not very useful and that it is clearly a better idea to just think of things in terms of always having possessed some simpler mind-like quality.

Second: What is mind?
"it is clearly debatable what one means by “mind.” Panpsychists have employed a variety of descriptive terms to articulate the mental quality that all things share: sentience, experience, feeling, inner life, subjectivity, qualia, will, perception"

To address the question of mind, I will appeal to structuralism. Having a mind is equivalent to having a specific set of atoms organized in a specific structure. This explains the continuum of varying complexity of minds that human experience seems to encounter (including cats, dogs, cnidaria worms, toddlers, infants, etc.) Different structures mean different experiences.

Third: Why is it important?
"Panpsychism, with its long list of advocates and sympathizers, is a robust and respectable approach to mind. It offers a naturalistic escape from Cartesian dualism and Christian theology"

"Panpsychism thus offers a kind of resolution to the problem of emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question. At issue is the specific form it might take, and what its implications are. Panpsychism suggests a radically different worldview, one that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant mechanistic conception of the universe. Arguably, it is precisely this mechanistic view—which sees the universe and everything in it as a kind of giant machine—that lies at the root of many of our philosophical, sociological, and environmental problems. Panpsychism, by challenging this worldview at its root, potentially offers new solutions to some very old problems."