Panpsychism or Panexperientialism?
Q. Is this Panpsychism?
A. Close, but not exactly. Panpsychism can imply that a rock has human-like experiences. My hypothesis can be categorized as panexperientialism because I do think that all forces and fields are figurative externalizations of processes which literally occur within and through ‘matter’. Matter is in turn diffracted pieces of the primordial singularity. It’s confusing for us because we assume that motion and time are exterior conditions, by if my view is accurate, then all time and energy is literally interior to the observer as an experience. What I think is that matter and experience are two symmetrical but anomalous ontologies – two sides of the same coin, so that our qualia and content of experience is descended from accumulated sense experience of our constituent organism, not manufactured by their bodies, cells, molecules, interactions. The two are both opposite expressions (a what & how of matter and space and a who & why of experience or energy and time) of the underlying sense that binds them to the singularity (where & when).
But then where does ‘agency’ fit into this picture? Is the entity that experiences or ‘thinks’ not also have ‘ability’ to act? This is what I find very attractive about the ‘agential realism’ of Karen Barad. One can experience until the cows come home and not be an agent for change.
My view is that all experience is irreducibly participatory, its just that human experience allows access to a very robust form of participation that incorporates intellectual deliberation on top of instinct giving human will teleological properties. I suspect that it is this elaboration of nested sense and sense-making modalities that presents as a separate entity, but ultimately I go with parsimony and see the appearance of a ‘dreamer’ as just another part of the eternal co-dreaming. It may be the case empirically that there happens to be a separate entity, but rationally I don’t see a context for such an entity to make use of itself in on the absolute scale. Without a boundary that separates the entity from something else, it seems like there’s nothing to ‘be an entity about’.