This is the title of a recently-published essay in Aeon. It is admirably brief, and clear. But it is also, I believe, mistaken. However I want to show that it is mistaken in a way that its author cannot anticipate.

First of all, 'panpsychism' is the belief that 'everything has mind' in some fundamental sense - electrons , other particles, material objects, and so on, have mind, or are in some sense capable of intentional action. This is proposed to solve, or dissolve, the fundamental dichotomy between 'mind and matter' by saying that mind is 'everywhere' (one meaning of 'pan'). All we're seeing with conscious beings is a highly differentiated form of matter, but matter itself is intrinsically conscious.

The main objection that the author gives is that:

[Panpsychism] is ‘crazy’ and ‘just obviously wrong’. It is thought to be highly counterintuitive to suppose that an electron has some kind of inner life, no matter how basic, and this is taken to be a very strong reason to doubt the truth of panpsychism.

He then points out that many successful theories, such as the Theory of Relativity, are also profoundly counter-intuitive, but we now know they're correct.

Then he says, physics tells us how matter behaves, but it doesn't really tell us what matter is, in its essential nature. And, he says:

In fact, the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the stuff in brains – involves experience.

Now this is where I think the author is mistaken, but not for the reason that he has anticipated.

I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences.

Now, in one sense we can be very clear about our own experiences - we certainly know what an unpleasant or pleasant experience is, and we know that some experiences have specific attributes, across a vast range of experiences. But in all cases, we know those things experientially - we know about those attributes, because they are the constituents of our experience, in a way very different from how we know and predict the behaviour of objects according to physical laws.

We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us.

So, I think the idea of trying to identify what experience, mind, or consciousness is, on the basis of the observed behaviour of objects, or by inferring that it is some property of matter, is profoundly mistaken. It is an attempt to naturalise what is in an epistemic sense prior to any idea of nature.

I think this is similar to Husserl's criticism of naturalism:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.

Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p 144.

So 'panpsychism' has forgotten this fact and then is seeking for what it has forgotten in the inner workings of electrons. 'Look', it's saying, 'there I am!'