Everyday Systems: Podcast : Episode 98

Practical Panpsychism

“Panpsychism” – Have you ever heard of it?

It’s a philosophical idea that everything in the universe has consciousness, or psyche, that it’s just a matter of degree to what extent. Complex things have more, but even the simplest things have some. So even rocks have some small degree of consciousness. Even atoms. Even AI. Even pong, for that matter.

I have no idea if this is metaphysically true. And it seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers, like, if my rock has consciousness what happens if I break it into two rocks? But I find it an interesting idea to ponder. And also a potentially useful inspirational metaphor.

The title of my episode today is practical panpsychism. On the surface, panpsychism may sound like the least practical idea ever conceived. I mean, it barely makes sense. It’s completely unprovable. What on earth are you going to do with it? Bear with me.

One of the difficulties in implementing good habit systems (as we’re all struggling to do, I assume, dear listeners) is that going into it you think you know what you are dealing with – your appetite, a dirty kitchen, getting to work on time – and you come up with or adopt some rules you found on the internet and then you try to put them into practice and then you realize that you actually had no idea what you up against. Your appetite, the kitchen, the clock, is a different beast entirely than you’d thought.

As Helmut von Moltke, the great Prussian general said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

Or in Mike Tyson’s brilliant reformulation, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Panpsychism to the rescue.

What you do to prepare for and respond to this surprising nature of reality is you view your system, your plan, not as the be all and end all, but as the start of a relationship with whatever problem you are addressing. It’s a conversation starter, rather than a precise, unalterable specification you have to either conform to in every particular or slink away in failure.

I find this attitude particularly helpful and easy to explain around habits of tidiness. Let’s say your fridge is disgusting and you want to keep it less disgusting. Instead of figuring out the perfect way to clean it 100% from top to bottom up front and then committing to doing that on some unrealistic schedule that you’re never going to be able to follow through on because it takes too much time, you say, “Fridge, you and I are going to have a weekly 1:1 meeting. It might be short, the agenda might change from week to week and sometimes I’m going to show up without an agenda at all, and most of the time I’m going to be doing more scrubbing than talking, but we’re going to get together every week and take it from there. We’re going to get to know each other. We’re going to have a relationship.”

So basically you anthropomorphize the fridge. You treat it like a relationship partner. You treat it, panpsychically, as if it were imbued with consciousness and soul.

And then you learn. What are the parts that get most disgusting soonest? How much time do you find you can really devote to cleaning it every week? What is the biggest bang for your buck you can get every week during that time? What makes sense to do on those rare occasions when you can carve out a bigger block of time? How should you rotate your focus from week to week so no corner gets too neglected? What are the lazy excuses you make to wriggle out of this task? How does it fit in with your other relation ships, ordinary and panpsychic? As in a real, human relationship, you’re learning as much about yourself as you are about your partner, about your limitations and preferences when confronted with this particular slice of reality.

I really, literally do this. I have a weekly 1:1 with my Fridge. On Fridays, because they start with F, and they fit into my silly daily task phrase for Fridays so I can’t forget when I’m making my daily personal punch card todo list: “Furry finger fridgebit & fam Fridays.” I also have a recurring event on my outlook calendar to make double sure I follow through. Good redundancy.

And behold, though I’ve been punched in the face many a time now, surprised again and again by how hopeless a task it is to keep my fridge really, truly clean, I’m still standing, I’m still in the ring, and my fridge is significantly less disgusting than it was before. And I feel better about the whole situation. I feel like I’ve done what I reasonably can on this front and accepted what I can’t.

I have a similar relationship with my microwave, my oven, my toilets, my vacuum cleaner. I’ve got 1:1 meetings with them too, in my calendar. They’re mentioned in my cutesy daily task phrases and checked off on my personal punch cards.

Practical panpsychism is useful even beyond the world of physical objects. Just as you can have relationships with these physical things you can also have relationships with problems, with appetites, with parts of your own soul. Remember that rock we split in two? Well, I have no idea how the metaphysics of that would work, philosophically, but in practical panpsychism it means we can treat aspects of ourselves as distinct entities that we can have a relationship with and learn to know. Like, my dieting self, my exercising self. I have rules about these things, about diet and exercise, but then bam, a punch in the face from reality. The way to recover from that is to say, “ok appetitive self. You’re quite a character. We’re going to get to know each other. I’m going to keep checking in with you and we’re going to find a way to live together that at least kinda sorta works for both of us.” And then when new things go wrong that you hadn’t anticipated, you’re not floored, you don’t view it as a zero sum game that you either have to win at or fail, you treat it like you would a complex other person that you are invested in. You might even start to enjoy the relationship, this process, find the surprises interesting, and the new things you are learning about yourself and this other aspect of yourself.

I don’t have regular, scheduled checkins with my diet self or my exercise self, though that might not be a terrible idea. I do keep this metaphor in mind though, of having a relationship with a problem, with a problematic aspect of myself, when I reflect about them. And I find it very helpful in staying the course, long term. It makes me more committed, more flexible, less angry when I run into trouble. It helps me expect and even kind of welcome trouble. It helps me have a sense of humor about it. It makes me curious.

If you are curious about pansychism as an actual philosophical idea, lookup David Chalmers on youtube. He’s a charming guy and has some very accessible interviews. As I’ve already mentioned, you don’t need to actually, metaphysically believe any of this stuff to implement the practical panpsychism I described in this episode, but it’s a good mind stretch to contemplate it.

Well, that’s all for today, thanks for listening. Next time, back to one of those original systems book chapter episodes. Maybe shovelglove.

By Reinhard Engels

Discuss