Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.

[Mudhammam]

Whether or not consciousness is a local cosmic accident via the atoms that created the first life forms, that then evolved to produce brains like ours, or something deeply embedded in the fundamental structure of the Universe that guarantees it's arrival at some point in the history of time, seems like a pretty open ended question.

I'm not talking about the probability of life, but rather the probability of consciousness given that there is life. I'm suggesting that evolution doesn't necessarily lead to consciousness (although it does necessarily lead to intelligence), but it happened to in this instance because of extraneous factors.

I'm inclined to agree. What are your thoughts on this statement by Alan Watts (he was an ex-Anglican minister turned Eastern philosopher/popularizer in the West): "For if the behavior of an organism is intelligible only in relation to its environment, intelligent behavior implies an intelligent environment." I think he's equivocating on "intelligence," but more broadly speaking, in his "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" (1966), he to some extent rightly makes an interesting plea for eliminating the distinction between self and world, writing: After all, your neurons are part of my external world, and mine of yours! All our insides are outside, there in the physical world. But, conversely, the outside world has no color, shape, weight, heat, or motion without "inside" brains. It has these qualities only in relation to brains, which are, in turn, members of itself. This leads him down into the line of thought that: "The fact that every organism evokes its own environment must be correct with the polar or opposite fact that the total environment evokes the organism. Furthermore, the total environment (or situation) is both spatial and temporal--both larger and longer than the organisms contained in its field. The organism evokes knowledge of a past before it began, and of a future beyond its death. At the other pole, the universe would not have started, or manifested itself, unless it was at some time going to include organisms--just as current will not begin to flow from the positive end of a wire until the negative terminal is secure. The principle is the same, whether it takes the universe billions of years to polarize itself into the organism, or whether it takes the current one second to traverse a wire 186,000 miles long." I'm not sure if Watts would be considered a panpsychist, but he seems awfully close.