CONCEPT
Haeckelian Panpsychism
Haeckel's late-career proposal — developed most fully in Kristallseelen (1917) — that psychic activity exists on a continuum throughout nature, from the rudimentary organization of crystals to the self-reflective awareness of human beings.
In Kristallseelen—Crystal Souls—Haeckel argued that the universal substance consisted not only of matter and motion but of what he called psychom: a psychic energy present in all things, reaching its highest expression in human self-consciousness. The specific claims about crystal souls have not survived scientific scrutiny. But the structural intuition—that consciousness is not a supernatural addition to nature but an expression of nature, produced by specific conditions operating on specific substrates—is the intuition the AI moment demands. Haeckel's panpsychism reframes the AI consciousness debate from metaphysics (does the machine have a soul?) to ecology (where does this system fall on the continuum of psychic organization, and what are the consequences of its specific position for the rest of the system?).
In The You On AI Field Guide
The panpsychist proposal emerged from Haeckel's broader monism. If mind and matter are expressions of one substance, then the boundary between mental and non-mental phenomena cannot be