Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments

Although this paper do not endowses panpsychism directly, the main general concept constructed from the data it provides, and that is expressed in the abstract, points in favor of a more general vision of consciousness, that is a more panpsychist one. Also, a pair of mentions of the term panpsychism in the text gives more strenghtmen to this not so indirect support.

From the abstract:

" It is commonly assumed that a useful theory of consciousness (ToC) will, among other things, explain why consciousness is associated with brains. However, the findings of evolutionary biology, developmental bioelectricity, and synthetic bioengineering are revealing the ancient pre-neural roots of many mechanisms and algorithms occurring in brains – the implication of which is that minds may have preceded brains. Most of the work in the emerging field of diverse intelligence emphasizes externally observable problem-solving competencies in unconventional media, such as cells, tissues, and life-technology chimeras. Here, we inquire about the implications of these developments for theories that make a claim about what is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. Specifically, we analyze popular current ToCs to ask: what features of the theory specifically pick out brains as a privileged substrate of inner perspective, or, do the features emphasized by the theory occur elsewhere. We find that the operations and functional principles described or predicted by most ToCs are remarkably similar, that these similarities are obscured by reference to particular neural substrates, and that the focus on brains is more driven by convention and limitations of imagination than by any specific content of existing ToCs." {Credits 1}

Mentioning panpsychism:

" While many ToCs have already adopted a panpsychist, functionalist, or universalized approach, some still focus exclusively on the brain even though nothing about their secret sauce is actually unique to neurons." {Credits 1}

" The high conservation of mechanisms and behaviors in brains all the way back to precellular material implies that a kind of panpsychism, committed to understanding the scaling and transformation of embodied minds from physical dynamics, is not only viable but should be the baseline assumption." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Rouleau, Nicolas, and Michael Levin. “Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments.” PsyArXiv, 14 Jan. 2025. Web. © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.