river said:
1. In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal feature of all things
Yes. I think that a lot of the recent eruption of panpsychism (CC knows more about this than me, since unlike me she's attracted to it and finds it credible) derives from the primary/secondary quality distinction. Physical objects are thought to be composed of atoms. Atoms, at least on the classical view that inspired this 17'th century distinction, were believed to have qualities like position, velocity and mass. These were primary qualities, qualities that actually inhere in objects themselves. (Interestingly, these were the qualities that lent themselves to 17th century's attempts to mathematize physics.) Secondary qualities on the other hand are things like the experienced quality of redness. Secondary qualities were widely thought to be dependent on minds. Atoms presumably have no color in this sense. This motivated all kinds of representative theories of perception, in which what we directly perceive (whatever that means) isn't the physical object we think we perceive, but rather some kind of mental image of it, like watching an inner TV monitor displaying a mind-generated image of the surrounding world. The British empiricists assumed this, as did Kant and his followers. It's still a widely held assumption in cognitive and neuro-science. The early quantum physicists (whose limited exposure to philosophy tended to be Kantian) assumed it and it's part of what motivated the Copenhagen interpretation.
Representative theories of perception obviously have all kinds of skeptical implications. If we don't actually perceive an objective physical world, then how do we know that it bears any resemblance to what we see, or that it even exists? That's the path that some of the 19th century German idealists took. More recently, a few philosophers have tried to overcome these arguments and preserve realism regarding the perceived world by arguing that physical objects, including the atoms that make them up, possess secondary qualities as well as primary qualities. The atoms that compose a red object really are red. But since secondary qualities like redness are thought to be subjective and mental, everything to which secondary qualities can apply must have some minimal subjectivity of its own, so this argument seems to go.
and the primordial feature from which all others are derived.
I'm less sure of that. Most of the recent panpsychists seem to favor something like a double-aspect account of qualities. In these theories every object in the world supposedly has both objective/physical and subjective/mental qualities. (How outside observers supposedly observe another object's subjective/mental qualities, so that an object is red to us and not just to the object itself, remains mysterious.)
Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of minds.
That depends on what kind of panpsychism they embrace, I guess. I guess that all panpsychists would agree that everything has mental characteristics.
