Materialism, Idealism, and Panpsychism: Three Answers to Where Reality Belongs When You Trip Over It

What to Take as Fundamental: The Physical World, Consciousness, or Their Deeper Connection

United Wisdom · Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut

W39 · "World and Consciousness" · W‑18 "Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy" · Research Track

"The existence of an idea consists in being perceived."

George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §2. English rendering for this article from the English text on Project Gutenberg.

About this article

Picture an utterly mundane morning. A mug of coffee sits on the desk right in front of you. Within the rigid ledger of the cosmos, you can weigh it on a scale, measure the liquid's temperature with a thermometer, and reduce the ceramic mug to dry chemical formulas. Yet the warmth soaking into your palm, the bracing bitterness on your tongue, and the dreary existential weight of Monday morning operate in an entirely different register: you personally undergo them as living experience.

And right here, the grand philosophical brawl breaks out: how do we stitch these two pictures together at all? Does only a physical universe exist, inside of which a complex neural meat-grinder suddenly sparks subjective awareness? Or is consciousness itself the non-negotiable admission ticket and foundational condition for anything we dare call reality? Or could the simplest sparks of experience be stitched into the fabric of nature from the get-go?

Materialism, idealism, and panpsychism shoulder this crushing explanatory burden each in their own way. Each framework can grant the reassuring sensation of solid ground beneath your feet, only to instantly rip open an enormous sinkhole of awkward questions. We will unpack these questions without shopping for a worldview based on "which one sounds cozier and strokes the ego best." It is vastly more fruitful to figure out what each stance actually claims, what exorbitant price tag it slaps on its tidy narrative, and precisely where a snappy kitchen-table remark quietly sneaks in a massive metaphysical contract.

1. Two Ways to Encounter the Same Mug

The whole ruckus kicks off with the chasm between an objective log of events and subjective experiential acquaintance. The mug from our hypothetical example fits squarely into the public realm: you can hand it to your neighbor, verify its dimensions with a laser rangefinder, or smash it against the floorboards with a satisfying crash. Yet at the exact same moment, it exists as a visual scene before your eyes, a textured surface under your fingertips, and a sharp aroma. Science relentlessly strives for descriptions accessible to any third-party observer. Subjective experience, by contrast, is relentlessly tied to the unique vantage point of the one undergoing it.

Let’s not immediately jump the gun and declare that we are dealing with two separate universes. A city street map and an actual walk through the rain along its avenues are two very different things, but nobody concludes that two distinct cities must exist. Still, this cartographic metaphor runs into a fatal brick wall: a map fails to explain why the walk is experienced in the first place. Why should the scurry of electrons across biological circuits be accompanied by what it feels like from the inside?

Here, it is vital to disentangle two concepts that people routinely toss into the same conceptual blender:

Ontology asks what actually exists and what constitutes the rock-bottom bedrock of being.
Epistemology (theory of knowledge) probes how we come to know anything about it and how far our faculties can be trusted.

The claim "I know the mug through sensations" belongs purely to epistemology. The reckless leap to "therefore, the mug exists solely while it is being perceived" is a massive ontological commitment. And between the two lies an abyss demanding rigorous argument.

In a hypothetical everyday scene, intellectual brakes routinely fail. One person declares: "Everyone sees the world through their own subjective lens; therefore, objective reality does not exist at all." Another scoffs: "The optic nerve delivers signals to the visual cortex; therefore, the mystery of subjective experience is solved." Both secondary leaps demand freight trains of justification that neither speaker possesses.

And keep in mind: materialism, idealism, and panpsychism do not exhaust the entirety of philosophy. Left off the table here are options like substance dualism and neutral monism, not to mention the fact that authors within each camp bicker among themselves with immense enthusiasm. Calling oneself a "materialist" does not mean signing a boilerplate party manifesto; it simply marks the starting point for conceptual clarification. The real question is: what do you take as fundamental? Physical processes? Living experience? Or some deeper reality that ordinary language hacks crudely in two?

2. Materialism: The World Has No Need for Our Presence

The winning hand of the materialist outlook is its stubborn refusal to populate reality with supernatural fairy tales. We do not invent an astral substance every time someone remembers a phone number, gets irritated, or stubs a toe. We search for natural mechanisms that make these occurrences possible within the wider order of things.

At the same time, antique atomism with its flying billiard balls and modern physicalism are far from identical twins. Contemporary physics deals with phenomena vastly stranger than tiny clumps of solid stuff. Roughly speaking, physicalism holds that everything concrete that exists is either physical or fundamentally grounded in the physical.

Pay close attention here: physicalism does not automatically entail reductionism, nor does it boil down to demanding that a Shakespearean sonnet be translated into subatomic particle coordinates (a point Daniel Stoljar unpacks meticulously in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It does not imply an automatic denial of feelings and conscious states! If a friend fails to show up for coffee, an explanation framed around their broken promise, absentmindedness, or hurt feelings can deliver vastly more explanatory power than a raw data dump of molecular velocities in their cerebellum. The physicalist must account for the relationships between these explanatory levels; the stance itself carries no obligation to dismiss human psychology and meaning as sheer illusions.

In this framework, the mug on your desk will not vanish into thin air if you step out of the kitchen to scratch your back. The world insolently marches on without your precious attention, and that persistence is precisely what enables repeatable scientific trials and lets us slam our foreheads against stubborn, unyielding facts. But never confuse an effective empirical method with a completed metaphysical ledger: being able to calculate the trajectory of ceramic shards as the mug hits the floor is by no means a ready-made explanation of what it feels like to experience frustration.

And we must stay honest with the term "physical." If you define "physical" as "whatever ultimately turns out to be real," physicalism risks becoming an empty label rather than an explanatory claim. If you pin it strictly to the contents of current physics textbooks, you are forced to concede their glaring incompleteness. Flippantly tossing out "consciousness is just the brain" accomplishes nothing: the real philosophical heavy lifting lies in demonstrating the actual mechanism of that relation, without papering over the conceptual crater with the magic word "just."

3. Why Describing the Mechanism Leaves the Question Standing

For the human experience under consideration, brain processes play a crucial role. The actual bone of contention is: what kind of explanation are we entitled to expect?

In his seminal paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (§§2–3), David Chalmers famously separated functional ("easy") problems from the "hard problem." From a neurobiological standpoint, those "easy" tasks are wickedly complex: unraveling memory integration, visual processing, and verbal reporting. Chalmers termed them "easy" because of the type of explanation they require: we understand what functional wiring to look for. The hard problem is completely different: why should the execution of all these cognitive functions be accompanied by an inner cinematic experience at all? Why does it feel like anything from the inside? This is a philosophical argument about explanatory sufficiency, not an experimental proof that neuroscience has crashed and burned.

A physicalist can raise a counterargument: the fact that we do not currently grasp the bridge does not mean it is fundamentally unbridgeable, nor does it instantly summon a parallel metaphysical realm. Perhaps we are confronting two distinct cognitive access routes to one and the same underlying reality, or hitting the limits of our current epistemic apparatus. Yet that rebuttal, however plausible, is not a settled victory either.

A thermometer might read 80°C in the mug, but demanding "show me what it feels like to be scalded" is not settled by adding another dial to the gadget. It is foolish to imagine that an instrument's inability to suffer proves the existence of a ghost in the machine. But it is just as naive to insist that a precise gauge reading has dissolved the question of subjective pain itself.

An explanatory gap is a productive diagnosis: it spotlights blind spots. But an explanatory gap does not automatically prove a rival ontology! The triumphalist cheer "science hasn't cracked consciousness yet, so idealism wins!" is a glaring non sequitur. In precisely the same way, pointing out the vulnerabilities of idealism does not render physicalism automatically immaculate.

4. Berkeley: The Perceived and the Perceiver

Idealism becomes vastly more compelling when, instead of relying on internet platitudes about "manifesting your reality," one actually opens Bishop George Berkeley.

In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (§§1–6), Berkeley draws a sharp line between ideas and active spirits. Ideas are the contents delivered through the senses: colors, sounds, heat, solid resistance. An apple is not an invisible material phantom hiding behind sensations, but a bundle of qualities perceived together: round, red, sweet, and crisp. The perceiving spirit, meanwhile, is an active agent, not just another passive picture in the gallery. Berkeley tosses overboard the notion of an unthinking material substance existing entirely apart from any mind, yet he certainly does not declare tables, trees, or apples to be figments of a hallucination!

Berkeley also dismantles the standard distinction between primary qualities (extension, motion, shape) and secondary qualities (color, taste, temperature) (§§9–10). Try to form a mental image of extension or geometric form stripped of all color, tactile resistance, or sensory quality. Berkeley argues that this is impossible. Hence, he concludes, the postulated scaffold of "pure matter" devoid of sensible properties is an empty abstraction.

In §23, he takes aim at the classic objection: what about trees in a park when nobody is around to perceive them? Berkeley notes that the moment you try to conceive of that empty forest, you smuggle your own conceiving act into the picture. You may have written the human observer out of the narrative, but you have not eliminated yourself as the thinker doing the imagining. For Berkeley, this exposes the incoherence of attempting to conceive the sensible world entirely outside of thought and perception.

The critic will instantly push back: "Hold on! The act of thinking occurs in the mind, but why can't the object of that act exist independently outside of it?" Conceiving a room to be vacant and the room actually being vacant without an observer are not self-evidently the same thing. That is a legitimate objection, and Berkeley's defense relies on the foundational architecture of his theory of ideas.

Crucially: Berkeley's universe does not revolve around your personal whims! The mug does not blink out of existence when you close your eyes, nor is it conjured into being by sheer willpower. In §§6 and 45–48, Berkeley invokes an omnipresent Eternal Spirit (God), who sustains the coherence, order, and continuity of the cosmos.

Consequently, pop-spirituality slogans promising "change your mindset and physical reality will bend to your will" have zero backing in Berkeley. Imagining sweet coffee does not make the actual bitterness vanish on the next sip. An idealist ontology is just as obligated to explain why the world resists our desires, why errors occur, and why reality pushes back. When a thunderstorm breaks out, a follower of Berkeley pops open an umbrella just as fast as an ardent materialist: the metaphysics may be worlds apart, but getting soaked is equally unpleasant in both.

5. Idealism Does Not Boil Down to a Single Mind

Idealism is far from a monolithic dogma, and it certainly cannot be collapsed into solipsism. As Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann emphasize in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one must carefully distinguish between metaphysical (ontological) claims and epistemological arguments.

Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism is an analysis of the cognitive conditions and subjective forms (space and time) through which objects are known to us, not a solipsistic rant claiming that nothing exists beyond "my own private headspace." And René Descartes, with his famous division into thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa), is an archetypal dualist, definitely not an idealist!

The distinction is straightforward:

"The world is accessible to us through the filters of our experience."
"The world consists entirely and exclusively of our experience."

The first statement is a modest epistemological reminder of our cognitive boundaries. The second is a heavy-duty ontological claim.

Consider a hypothetical domestic squabble: you receive a terse text message saying, "We need to talk tonight." A pit forms in your stomach: "It's an attack! I'm getting fired!" In reality, the sender simply wanted to pick out pizza toppings. Yes, subjective interpretation colored incoming data in alarming hues. But this divergence between subjective interpretation and the sender's actual intention does not prove that objective reality is an illusion. You can admit your misinterpretation while remaining a committed materialist. And you can be a metaphysical idealist while still insisting on double-checking what the sender actually meant.

Idealism rightly points out that we cannot step out of our own shoes to inspect reality from an unmediated "view from nowhere." Yet idealism still bears the burden of explaining why this world remains coherent across different perceivers, where shared context comes from, and what gives an unread text message its reality before its recipient opens it.

6. Panpsychism: Experience Might Not Originate with Humans

Panpsychism floats a daring hypothesis: elementary experiential (mental) properties belong to the fabric of reality at the ground-floor level. On this view, human consciousness is not a miraculous anomaly erupting out of entirely dead, unfeeling matter, but a posited complex manifestation of a fundamental feature of nature that still requires systematic explanation.

Hold your horses, however: this does not mean that every garden brick is brooding over existential dread or that your office desk harbors secret ambitions. In "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" (§1), David Chalmers explicitly stresses that the posited micro-experience of fundamental entities is not equivalent to human memory, language, propositional thought, or personal selfhood. We cannot even adequately conceive what such primitive experiential states would feel like. Asserting that "the rock feels my pain" is pure poetic fantasy that has nothing to do with rigorous panpsychist philosophy.

Then there is the related branch of panprotopsychism: the view that fundamental entities possess protophenomenal properties. In themselves, these properties are not experiential at all, but according to this hypothesis, when suitably arranged, they can collectively constitute genuine experience (Chalmers, §4). How they pull off this trick, however, remains an enormous open riddle.

The boldest intellectual gymnastics came from Galen Strawson in "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (§1). He argues that subjective experience is an undeniable reality; since everything real is physical, conscious experience must itself be a physical property! Through this startling maneuver, panpsychism is presented as a consequence of his conception of realistic physicalism. This is Strawson's specific, highly idiosyncratic argument, not an orthodoxy accepted across mainstream physicalism. Yet it brilliantly shows why tidy philosophical labels cannot be sealed inside hermetic boxes.

Keep the distinction razor-sharp:

"Experience definitely exists within nature" (an undeniable fact: you are having it right now).
"Experience is embedded in the foundational building blocks of nature" (a speculative philosophical hypothesis).

Panpsychism can hold emotional appeal: it paints a cosmos that feels less cold and alienating. But emotional comfort is not an ontological argument.

7. If the Small Experiences, Who Experiences the Whole?

For composite versions of panpsychism where human experience is built out of micro-experiences, you crash headlong into the combination problem (Chalmers, §6). How do many supposed micro-experiences combine to generate the experience of a brand-new, unified macro-subject? You do not experience your mind as a cloud of dust consisting of billions of disconnected micro-feelings; you experience a unified scene: the mug, the hot coffee, and this article.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario: a concert hall where a hundred people are listening to a symphony. Everyone hears the music, and their emotional reactions may align. Yet the mere presence of a hundred listeners never congeals into a 101st super-subject experiencing the pooled sum of their sensations! This analogy does not decisively refute panpsychism (people and subatomic particles are obviously configured differently), but it throws the conceptual gap into sharp relief: simply aggregating separate experiential units does not explain the emergence of a unified experiencing self.

Waving your hands and claiming "well, they interacted physically" will not fly. The word "interacted" merely hides the very explanatory leap you were asked to demonstrate.

The physicalist struggles to show how feeling emerges from non-feeling matter. The panpsychist bakes primitive feeling into the bedrock, only to hit a wall trying to explain how those micro-feelings assemble into a unified human consciousness. The mystery of consciousness has not vanished; it has merely relocated to a different floor!

And please, spare us the urge to slap the label "quantum" over the problem as a universal bandage! Invoking "quantum entanglement of consciousness" explains absolutely nothing unless you can provide a concrete, testable causal mechanism. Chanting "quantum" does not grant thoughts to an electron, nor does it account for the unity of your personal self.

8. Comparing Explanations, Not Empty Promises

Judging theories by "whichever sounds simplest" is an intellectual trap. All too often, theoretical "simplicity" is bought by sweeping the nastiest paradox under the rug.

Here is a comparative table of the specific versions under discussion, rather than an exhaustive survey of all historical schools (drawing also on the Stanford review by Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson):

Question	Materialism / Physicalism	Idealism	Panpsychism
What is taken as fundamental?	Physical reality	In metaphysical idealism: mental reality; transcendental idealism requires distinct handling	Fundamental mental or experiential properties of nature
Is my attention required for the mug to exist?	No	Under Berkeley, existence is not confined to my personal perception	No: positing basic experience does not make my attention the creator of the mug
What kind of explanation of consciousness is demanded?	Its place within physical nature	The connection between individual experience, other subjects, and the shared world	The relation linking primitive properties to human macro-experience
Where does the hard explanatory transition occur?	From physical descriptions to the qualitative, felt aspect	From primordial consciousness or conditions of knowledge to a stable, shared reality	From elementary micro-experiences to a unified complex subject
What cannot be automatically attributed to the stance?	The denial of feelings and meaning	The absolute mastery of individual thought over all events	Human-level intellect inside every stone
Does a ready-made ethical system follow from it?	No	No	No

A brain scanner can keep philosophical explanations on a leash, but nobody appointed it CEO of ontology: brain data fence in the admissible explanations; they do not hand you a complete worldview along with your hospital shoe covers. Different philosophers may accept the same observations and disagree about what they mean. So “my position is compatible with these facts” does not yet mean “these facts specifically support my position”: a sympathetic nod is compatible with love too, but booking the wedding on that basis is a little ambitious. Want observation to settle the dispute? Show which concrete, mutually incompatible results follow from your positions. Otherwise, the philosophical conversation can continue, but the scanner will not bang a judge's gavel. Someone added that job to its résumé without asking.

Watch the sleight of hand closely:

If someone substitutes an objective sensor reading for an actual qualitative feeling, demand to see the bridge.
If someone swaps out the stubborn, shared world for daydreams about the "law of attraction," ask why gravity refuses to yield to sheer enthusiasm.
If someone equates an elementary proto-spark with full-blown human reasoning, call out the equivocation.

9. What This Means in Practice

No metaphysical system hands you a ready-made checklist for daily living. The following steps represent the authors' practical application of these distinctions, not dogmatic rules handed down by Berkeley or Kant.

Step 1: Separate Observation, Intentional Inference, and Metaphysics

Take an everyday trigger and dissect it with precision:

Observation: "I read a terse email from my boss and felt a tight knot of dread in my chest."
Interpretation of another's intention: "My boss is looking for an excuse to fire me and is deliberately playing mind games."
Causal and metaphysical hypothesis: "My negative energy attracted bad cosmic vibes."

These are three radically different levels of discourse! Having a direct conversation with the boss might clarify the second point, but it will neither prove nor disprove the third.

Step 2: Cut Down Absurd Deductions

"We depend on physical bodies" → Excellent, take care of your health. But that does not mean your emotions are irrelevant white noise.
"The world is given to us through experience" → Wonderful, track your cognitive biases. But that does not imply that an accident victim "manifested" the collision through bad thoughts (ontology is never an excuse for victim-blaming)!
"Experience might be fundamental to nature" → A fascinating philosophical premise. But don't expect the oak tree outside your window to whisper hot stock tips.

Step 3: No Ethical Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Cards

In hypothetical situations, people love using worldviews as an excuse for atrocious behavior:

"We are just biochemical automatons, free will is an illusion, so I'm not accountable for anything!"
"All minds are unified in cosmic consciousness, so why bother asking for your personal consent?"

Stop right there. The metaphysical plumbing of the universe does not excuse bad behavior. No ontology on its own justifies causing harm, voids the necessity of consent, or eliminates the ongoing duty to negotiate personal boundaries and mutual obligations.

It is equally valuable to articulate an opposing view so accurately that its advocate would recognize their own argument. The materialist strives to keep consciousness rooted within the natural world. The idealist questions the primacy of matter or probes the preconditions of knowledge. The panpsychist explores the possibility of fundamental experience. Once that baseline is established, critique becomes razor-sharp: it addresses real philosophical friction rather than a cheap straw man.

Step 4: The Intellectual Honesty Test

Write down the strongest argument for your preferred worldview, and right next to it, honestly note the most excruciating, stubborn problem it currently struggles to answer. Then do the exact same exercise for its sharpest rival. If your side looks like pure genius while the other looks like sheer stupidity, you are arguing with a cartoon.

Grant yourself the luxury of acknowledging what remains unknown. The mug of coffee is still steaming on the table. You can scan it with a spectrometer, warm your fingers on its glaze, and debate foundational metaphysics all day long. Intellectual maturity begins when none of these levels of engagement are erased simply to score a cheap theoretical victory.

Key Citation

"Consciousness is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena."

David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," §2. English rendering for this article from the English text on the author's website.

References

Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710; English electronic text Project Gutenberg, eBook #4723, HTML version published 2009). Text. Used §§1–6, 9–10, 23, 45–48: ideas and spirits, critique of the primary/secondary quality distinction, the conceivability argument, independence of existence from an individual's perception. The specified fragments were read; no claim of having read the entire book is made. Translations of the epigraph and textual expositions were prepared for this article.
Stoljar, Daniel. Physicalism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edition of September 16, 2026. Article. Read: Introduction, §§1.1–1.3, beginning of §3.1, and selected excerpts from §§4.4, 6: concept of the physical, reductionism, and argument boundaries. No claim of having read the entire survey is made.
Chalmers, David J. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 1995, pp. 200–219. English text on author's website. Used §§2–3: functional explanation tasks, the hard problem of experience, distinguishing meanings of consciousness. Read the specified sections; the key citation was rendered for this article.
Guyer, Paul; Horstmann, Rolf-Peter. Idealism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edition of May 5, 2026. Article. Read: Introduction and §1: metaphysical and epistemological arguments, historical boundaries of the term. No claim of having read the entire survey is made.
Chalmers, David J. Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism. Author's PDF version, prepared for the Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 2013; file notes forthcoming publication. Used §§1, 3, 6, and the first paragraph of §4 (p. 15): basic experience, distinction between micro- and macro-experience, panprotopsychism, and the combination problem. Read the specified fragments; this is not a claim of reading any later book edition.
Strawson, Galen. Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism. In: Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008, Chapter 2, pp. 53–74; first published 2006. Author upload of book chapter on ResearchGate. Used §1, pp. 53–54: experience as a physical phenomenon and a non-standard conception of physicalism. The ResearchGate catalog date is not used as the publication date of this edition. Other portions of the chapter do not serve as a basis for this article.
Goff, Philip; Seager, William; Allen-Hermanson, Sean. Panpsychism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edition of May 13, 2022. Article. Read: Introduction, §§2.1, 2.4, 4.2–4.3: definitions and varieties; essential material selected for the article. No claim of having read the entire survey is made.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside her research work, she strives to test these ideas in practice and observe how the principles of unity and mutual understanding operate in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.