Radical Panpsychism

Radical Panpsychism (RP) offers a rigorous mathematical, physical, and philosophical foundation for panpsychism, addressing its central challenge ‐ the combination problem ‐ by reframing the hard problem in deflationary-structural terms: experience is identified with the dynamics by which entities model and respond to their environments and to their own organization. Each entity is modelled as a fuzzy subset of an appropriate space, equipped with internal degrees of freedom (dof) that evolve in response to environmental dof to which they are sensitive.1 This internal response, or direct model, expresses the entity’s mentality across a continuum ‐ from minimal experience in simple systems to consciousness in complex organisms. Based on a deflationary understanding of the so-called hard problem, RP shows that the label panpsychism can extend to theories that ground mentality in structural responsiveness rather than in irreducible phenomenological substance, thereby broadening the conceptual field of panpsychism itself. In this broadened sense, deflationary theories may in fact make wider claims about the ubiquity of “psychism” in nature than traditional, inflationary models, since they locate experience wherever dynamical selfmodeling occurs.