Panpsychist Perspectives on Free Will: Compatibilism and Libertarianism, and Constitutive and Non-constitutive Panpsychism

Panpsychism, the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous, has gained renewed interest but its implications for free will remain underexplored. This paper examines whether panpsychist ontologies support compatibilist or libertarian free will. Constitutive micropsychism aligns with compatibilist freedom and determinism, while emergentist (non-constitutive) panpsychism offers a metaphysical basis for legitimizing libertarian free will.

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Abstract

Panpsychism is the unorthodox view that mentality is a fundamental and ubiquitous trait of reality. Although a clear minority position, panpsychist positions have experienced a renewed interest, starting (not only) from Chalmers’ (1995) proposal to take consciousness “as a fundamental feature of our world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time.” Various forms of the panpsychist thesis recently have been elaborated, including constitutive and non-constitutive (i.e., emergentist) types. However, the implications of panpsychist conceptions for related philosophical fields so far have only sparsely been explored. The present paper aims at clarifying the implications of panpsychist theories for the topic of free will: given a panpsychist ontology—should free will in the compatibilist or the libertarian sense be assumed? It turns out that, whereas constitutive (micro-)psychism is perfectly consistent with the compatibilist view of freedom and determinism, emergentist (non-constitutive) panpsychism might be the best metaphysical conception to systematically legitimize a libertarian account of freedom.