The view that consciousness is not produced by brains but is a fundamental feature of matter itself, present in some vanishing degree in everything, electrons to elephants.
Documented
From hylozoism to the journals
Documented pedigree: Thales and the hylozoists, Spinoza's one substance with two faces, Leibniz's monads each dimly perceiving, James and Whitehead giving it metaphysical form, and the modern revival, Strawson's Realistic Monism (2006) arguing it is the default materialism, Goff's Galileo's Error (2019) making the public case. The motive is the hard problem: if experience cannot emerge from the non-experiential, perhaps it was always there.
Assessment: Documented as a live position in analytic philosophy, no longer a fringe shelf. Its own wound is documented too: the combination problem, how trillions of micro-minds sum into one unified you, has no accepted answer.
Stories
The ensouled world, perennial edition
The folk tier is older than writing: animism, the kami in the river, the genius of the hearth, the tree that listens. Nearly every culture's first philosophy assigned inner life outward; panpsychism is the rare academic position that tells the ancestors they were onto the shape of something.
Assessment: Documented as humanity's default metaphysic before mechanism. The resemblance is real but the modern version is austere: micro-experience, not spirits, no messages from the toaster. The folk reading must not be allowed to smuggle the kami back in.
Interesting claims
The universe noticing itself
The interesting claim escalates: cosmopsychism flips the combination problem, the universe is the one big mind and we are its dissociated fragments; some physicists toy with proto-conscious fields as the missing interior of the quantum world. It connects, by temperament if not by evidence, to our simulation and holographic files: reality with an inside.
Assessment: Speculative metaphysics in good standing, which is the ceiling. It explains consciousness by spreading it so thin it explains nothing measurable. Believable? Perhaps. Checkable? Not yet, and the not yet is now several thousand years old.