Panpsychist

I label Rod, a bicyclist at the Lulu Island café, a spiritual "eclectic," this morning on the 22nd of August of 2022. He is a slim older white man. He talks to me, whilst I munch on salted vinegar potato chips with iced black tea, beside a favourite Spanish-language sci-fi book, Crónicas de Majipur, by Robert Silverberg. Rod believes that there is "one God," but I say that God could be either singular or plural, as number is a limitation on God. I wonder if he is a "pantheist" or "panpsychist," who believes that there is, at some level, the divine or the mind, respectively, in everybody and everything, even a "pillow." The terminology excites him. He shows me a video describing the complex Aztec calendar on his smartphone. The presentation is full of Aztec, aka Nahuatl, words, which he mistakes for "Mayan." I tell him that in ancient Mexico, the Aztecs were more like the Japanese, whilst the Maya were more like the Chinese. I utter some words presented in Nahuatl. He does not look too surprised that I know how to pronounce. We both have visited Mexico before.

1984, Timothy Sprigge, Santayana and Panpsychism, in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 2: Fall 1984, page 1, Santayana was certainly not a panpsychist. However, I believe that there are panpsychist tendencies in his work.

Meditational practices are quite consistent with, and even conducive to, a panpsychist outlook, but the aim of panpsychism is not to attain enlightenment.

However, seeds have been planted for a panpsychist reading in the suggestion that in order to truly move beyond the consciousness-object distinction Merleau-Ponty's ontology would need to be more panpsychist than those of Leibniz and Scheler, not less.

As the philosopher Philip Goff, one of the most prominent contemporary panpsychists, has pointed out, our belief that science will solve the mystery of consciousness, given that it triumphed in so many other areas, ignores that its success was predicated in the first place on the exclusion of the mind.