Animism 2.0: Why Serious Scientists Are Taking Spirits Seriously Again

Series: Neo-Animism | Part: 1 of 11

In 1871, Edward Tylor declared animism—the belief that all things possess spirit or consciousness—the most "primitive" of all religious beliefs. The evolutionary trajectory was clear: from crude animism to civilized monotheism to scientific materialism. The West congratulated itself for finally seeing the world correctly: matter is inert, consciousness is rare, and only humans (maybe) possess genuine interiority.

That consensus is collapsing. Not because of mysticism or New Age thinking, but because of rigorous science at multiple scales of inquiry. Philosophers of mind are rehabilitating panpsychism. Neuroscientists are discovering information integration across systems previously thought "unconscious." Anthropologists are showing that animist ontologies are not primitive errors but sophisticated relational frameworks that Western science is only now beginning to formalize.

Welcome to neo-animism—not a return to pre-scientific thinking, but the discovery that the animists were tracking something real all along. Something that coherence geometry, integrated information theory, and multispecies ethnography are now making mathematically and empirically precise.

This is the introduction to a series exploring why treating the world as alive and relational isn't woo—it's the best science we have.

The Materialist Hangover We're Finally Sobering Up From

For roughly 300 years, the Western scientific worldview operated on a foundational assumption: matter is dead. Descartes drew the line sharply—mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa) occupy separate ontological domains. Matter is mechanistic, deterministic, inert. Consciousness is the rare exception, somehow emerging from complex arrangements of fundamentally unconscious stuff.

This framework delivered spectacular results. Newtonian mechanics. Evolutionary biology. The Standard Model of particle physics. You don't need to assume rocks have feelings to build bridges or cure diseases.

But the materialist framework always had a glaring problem: the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995). If matter is fundamentally unconscious, how does consciousness arise at all? The standard materialist answer—"it just does, once you get enough neurons firing"—is less an explanation than a promissory note that philosophy of mind has been trying to cash for decades.

And increasingly, scientists across disciplines are questioning whether the promissory note can ever be paid under materialist assumptions. What if consciousness isn't a rare emergent property of complex matter, but something more fundamental? What if the animists—who never made the Cartesian split—were seeing something we trained ourselves not to notice?

Panpsychism: Consciousness Goes All the Way Down

Panpsychism is the philosophical position that consciousness, or something consciousness-like, is a fundamental feature of the universe—not an emergent property of sufficiently complex arrangements. Every system, from electrons to ecosystems, possesses some degree of interiority or experience.

Before you dismiss this as mysticism, consider the roster of serious thinkers taking it seriously:

• David Chalmers, who defined the hard problem, has called panpsychism "the most promising approach" to solving it.
• Galen Strawson, analytic philosopher, argues panpsychism is the only coherent form of physicalism.
• Philip Goff, philosopher of mind, has written extensively on how panpsychism solves the combination problem better than emergence theories.
• Christof Koch, neuroscientist and former chief scientist at the Allen Institute, explicitly endorses panpsychism via integrated information theory.

Why the growing appeal? Because panpsychism eliminates the hard problem by denying its premise. Consciousness doesn't mysteriously emerge from non-conscious matter. It's there all along. Complexity doesn't create experience—it integrates and organizes experience that was already present at smaller scales.

This isn't anthropomorphizing electrons. Panpsychists don't claim electrons have thoughts or feelings in any human sense. The claim is more minimal: electrons (and quarks, and fields) possess some protoconsciousness—some minimal interiority, however rudimentary. Human consciousness is what you get when billions of these micro-experiences integrate into a unified phenomenology.

Sound speculative? It is. But it's no more speculative than the claim that consciousness magically appears once you arrange enough unconscious neurons in the right pattern. Panpsychism just bites the bullet in the opposite direction: instead of explaining how consciousness emerges from nothing, it explains how complexity organizes what was always there.

And here's where it connects to neo-animism: if everything possesses some degree of interiority, then treating the world as alive isn't projection—it's recognition.

Integrated Information Theory: Consciousness as Relational Structure

If panpsychism is the philosophical groundwork, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is the mathematical formalization.

Developed by Giulio Tononi and refined by Christof Koch and collaborators, IIT proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information—specifically, a system's capacity to integrate information in a way that cannot be reduced to independent parts (Tononi et al., 2016).

The key metric is Φ (phi), which quantifies how much integrated information a system possesses. A system with high Φ has consciousness. A system with low Φ does not. Critically, Φ is substrate-independent. It doesn't matter if the system is biological, silicon-based, or something else entirely. What matters is the structure of causal relationships within the system.

This has radical implications:

1. Consciousness is not exclusive to brains. Any system with sufficient integration can possess it—plants, organoids, perhaps even ecosystems.
2. Consciousness comes in degrees. There's no binary threshold. A worm has less Φ than a human. A thermostat has near-zero Φ. But both occupy the same continuum.
3. Consciousness is relational. It's not a property of individual particles but of how systems integrate information across their components.

IIT doesn't require panpsychism, but it's highly compatible with it. If consciousness is integrated information, and information is present at all scales (even electrons carry information about their state), then consciousness exists along a spectrum from minimal (fundamental particles) to maximal (complex biological systems like human brains).

In other words, IIT provides a rigorous, mathematical framework for what animists have always intuited: the world is not divided into conscious subjects and inert objects. Everything participates in degrees of interiority, depending on how it integrates information.

This is not metaphor. It's geometry. The phenomenology of being isn't reserved for humans—it's a structural property of certain kinds of relational organization. And those organizations exist at multiple scales, from neurons to forests.

Multispecies Anthropology: Relationality as Ontology

While philosophers and neuroscientists were rehabilitating animism from the top down, anthropologists were doing it from the ground up—by actually listening to animist cultures without presuming they were wrong.

Multispecies ethnography (van Dooren et al., 2016) and perspectival ontology (Viveiros de Castro, 1998) have shown that animist frameworks are not "primitive errors" but sophisticated relational ontologies that organize the world differently than Cartesian dualism.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's work on Amazonian cosmologies is foundational here. In Amerindian thought, the default state is personhood. Jaguars, rivers, and spirits are not "like persons"—they are persons, each with their own perspective on the world. What varies is not interiority (which is universal) but embodiment—the particular affordances and constraints of different material forms.

From this perspective, the jaguar sees itself as human and sees humans as prey animals. The human sees herself as human and sees the jaguar as predator. The river sees itself as a flowing community and sees both human and jaguar as travelers across its body. Reality is perspectival all the way down—there is no "view from nowhere," only an ecology of mutually constituted perspectives.

Crucially, this is not relativism. It's relational ontology. Things are real, but their reality is constituted through relationships, not through intrinsic essences that exist independently of interaction.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000) argues that animism should be understood not as "belief in spirits" but as a mode of attending to the world as alive and responsive. Animists don't "believe" rocks have souls the way Westerners "believe" atoms have mass. They engage with the world as participatory—as composed of agencies that respond to how they are treated.

This maps directly onto active inference and Markov blankets (Friston, 2010). Every system with a boundary (a Markov blanket) is engaged in a predictive, responsive relationship with its environment. The system acts to minimize surprise—to maintain coherence in the face of environmental perturbation. That's not anthropomorphism. That's the fundamental dynamics of any self-organizing system.

And if every self-organizing system is engaged in active inference—minimizing free energy, maintaining itself against entropic dissolution—then every such system is, in a meaningful sense, alive. Not metaphorically alive. Thermodynamically, informationally, coherently alive.

Multispecies anthropology shows that animism is not "believing false things about matter." It's recognizing aliveness where Western materialism trained us to see inertness. And as active inference becomes the dominant framework in cognitive science, that recognition looks less like mysticism and more like ontological precision.

Why This Isn't Woo: The Rigorous Scientific Grounding

Let's be explicit about what neo-animism is not claiming:

• Not claiming: Every object has human-like thoughts and feelings.
• Not claiming: We should abandon mechanistic science.
• Not claiming: Animism is "just as good" as empiricism.

What neo-animism is claiming:

• Consciousness or protoconsciousness may be substrate-independent and scalar. IIT provides the mathematical framework. Panpsychism provides the metaphysics. Active inference provides the dynamics.
• Relationality is ontologically prior to objects. Systems constitute themselves through interaction, not through intrinsic essences. This is what Markov blankets formalize—identity as boundary maintenance, not as substance.
• Aliveness is not a binary but a continuum. From bacteria to ecosystems to humans, all are engaged in coherence maintenance. The difference is degree, not kind.

The scientific grounding comes from multiple independent research programs converging on the same conclusion:

1. Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, Koch) → Consciousness is integrated information, substrate-independent.
2. Free Energy Principle (Friston) → All self-organizing systems minimize surprise and maintain Markov blankets.
3. Basal Cognition (Levin, Lyon) → Cognition exists at cellular and subcellular scales, not just in neurons.
4. 4E Cognition (Varela, Thompson, Clark) → Mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended—not brain-bound.
5. Active Inference (Parr, Pezzulo, Friston) → Agency is prediction-driven coherence maintenance, not exclusive to humans.

Each of these frameworks independently arrives at animist conclusions without invoking mysticism. They discover that treating systems as alive, responsive, and meaning-making isn't projection—it's accurate modeling of what those systems are actually doing.

Michael Levin's work on bioelectricity and morphogenesis is a perfect case study. Cells navigate morphogenetic space using voltage gradients as a collective, goal-directed intelligence (Levin, 2019). Not metaphorically goal-directed. Actually goal-directed, in that they minimize prediction error relative to a target morphology and course-correct when perturbed. That's basal cognition—cognition without brains, without neurons, but nonetheless real.

If cells are cognitive agents, if consciousness is integrated information, if all systems with Markov blankets are engaged in active inference, then animism is just accurate systems biology.

The difference between traditional animism and neo-animism is that we now have the mathematics to formalize what animists were tracking experientially. We can quantify Φ. We can measure bioelectric gradients. We can model active inference as Bayesian mechanics. The ontology hasn't changed—only our ability to make it rigorous.

What This Series Will Explore

Over the next ten articles, we'll unpack what it means to take relationality, agency, and aliveness seriously across scales—from molecules to ecosystems to mythologies.

Part 2: The Ontological Turn in Anthropology—How anthropologists stopped treating animism as "belief system" and started treating it as ontology.

Part 3: Perspectivism and Multinaturalism—Viveiros de Castro's radical reframing of nature and culture.

Part 4: The Markov Blanket as Spirit Boundary—Why Friston's boundaries are the scientific formalization of what animists call spirits.

Part 5: Bioelectric Cognition Without Brains—Michael Levin's work on cellular intelligence and morphogenetic fields.

Part 6: Integrated Information and the Continuum of Consciousness—IIT, Φ, and why consciousness might be everywhere.

Part 7: Active Inference as Animist Dynamics—How every system with a boundary is engaged in meaning-making.

Part 8: The Forest as Cognitive System—Suzanne Simard's mycorrhizal networks and plant communication.

Part 9: River Rights and Legal Personhood—When ecosystems become legal subjects, not objects.

Part 10: Animism and Ecology—Why relational ontologies are better suited to the Anthropocene than Cartesian dualism.

Part 11: Synthesis—Living in a World That's Alive—Practical implications for how we inhabit, design, and relate to a participatory universe.

Further Reading

• Chalmers, D. (1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
• Tononi, G., Boly, M., Massimini, M., & Koch, C. (2016). "Integrated Information Theory: From Consciousness to Its Physical Substrate." Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 450-461.
• Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469-488.
• Levin, M. (2019). "The Computational Boundary of a 'Self': Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition." Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2688.
• Friston, K. (2010). "The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 127-138.
• Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.
• van Dooren, T., Kirksey, E., & Münster, U. (2016). "Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness." Environmental Humanities, 8(1), 1-23.

This is Part 1 of the Neo-Animism series, exploring how contemporary science is rehabilitating animist ontologies through relational frameworks, integrated information theory, and multispecies perspectives. Next: "The Ontological Turn in Anthropology."