Thank you for sharing this, Gregg.  I just hosted a debate on The Integral Stage re: emergentism vs panpsychism (on the place of consciousness in the cosmos).  I posted my own reflections on the debate this morning, which I'm sharing here for anyone interested:

I've been wanting to do a response to David and Matt's recent dialogue/debate.  Overall I enjoyed it quite a lot, but also was a little frustrated, since I felt that on a number of points, there was a paradigm disjunction and not enough traction was made.  So it ended up feeling incomplete to me (and I do hope there is eventually a Round 2).

Rather than go over the debate point by point, however, I'd like to offer my own thoughts on panpsychism, which is my current paradigm of choice.  I really would prefer a different word than panpsychism, but it is hard to find good (and as easily recognizable) alternatives.  In any event, this is not a formal, researched statement, which I may do at some point later.  This is my off-the-cuff riffing on my general thought on this topic.  

Whether consciousness emerges at some point in evolution, or is pervasive throughout all matter/energy, would not make a significant difference to my spirituality.  The fact that consciousness emerged at the level of bacteria, or higher organisms, would not impact what I mostly value and get out of spiritual practice.

I make this point first, to dispense with the argument that any defense of panpsychism must be primarily theological (rather than philosophical or scientific).  

From a postmetaphysical perspective, and from a perspective of epistemic humility, I think at this point in our understanding we need to entertain metaphysical and theoretical pluralism -- allowing for multiple possible interpretations, though of course not a mere relativism.  Some options will be stronger than others.  But we have to grapple with the uncomfortable fact (for some!) that identical empirical observations can be accommodated by multiple interpretations, without easy resolution.

And from a postmetaphysical perspective, while we recognize that some grounding in metaphysics is unavoidable, we want to generally prefer metaphysical assumptions which are parsimonious, logically consistent, powerfully explanatory, and/or open to some degree of empirical justification.  We have to be a bit careful about the latter, however.  Metaphysical 'givens' typically are those factors which are necessary for observables to be possible, and thus are not on the level of 'observables' themselves.  They are 'necessary conditions of possibility,' necessary starting points (for the general empirical worldspace we inhabit).

Regarding the place of consciousness in the universe, there are basically two possible positions:  it has a discrete beginning, or it is elemental or primordial.  However, since consciousness is not something we can objectively observe, both emergentism and panpsychism have similar problems pointing to it in a definitive way.  We can point objectively to behaviors that we usually correlate with consciousness of at least a particular level of sophistication or development, but there are cases where consciousness (here, qualitative experiencing or interiority) may be present even though we can't observe any of those correlated behaviors, such as when a person is in a coma or apparently brain-dead; and places where there is conscious-like behavior, even though there may good reason to doubt there is any coherent system-level consciousness or experiencing present (as in the self-navigating activity of a Roomba).

Now, consciousness itself is perhaps the only thing we can know directly, and therefore we must take it as real -- as an element or aspect of reality.  I find the claim that consciousness is an illusion incoherent, since 'illusion'  itself presupposes consciousness -- a kind of error in experiencing, (ap)prehending, or knowing.  So, taking consciousness as real (at least as minimally described, as a potential for qualitative experience or what-it's-like-ness, and for the registration of difference), we must ask how/where it is situated.  Idealism is one of the possibilities, but I'm not going to deal with it here.  I'll stick to the main themes of David and Matt's video: panpsychism and emergentism.

The main argument that panpsychists usually make against emergentism is that emergentism doesn't solve the mystery of how consciousness emerges from supposedly wholly non-qualitative and interiorless matter; it only seeks to locate it along a timeline.  There are of course understandable reasons for choosing to locate it at some particular points along the evolutionary timeline than others.  If we're looking for (admittedly biocentric) behavioral correlates of consciousness, we find those correlates much more readily in amoebas or lizards than in stars.  But we shouldn't mistake the reasonableness of this assertion for an actual demonstration of the mechanisms of the emergence of consciousness, the particular 'how' of the arising of qualitative experience out of wholly insentient matter or chemistry.  No one, yet, has been able to offer any plausible mechanisms or explanations for that.  But if we don't yet know the mechanics of the generation of the qualitative out of the purely quantitative, but we assume that it must nevertheless have started somewhere, then there are definitely some more reasonable places to locate that mystery than others.

But there are good reasons to remain dissatisfied with this promissory account.  The emergence of the qualitative and experiential, out of wholly insentient stuff, is a different order of emergence than is usually meant by the term (which is applied to the emergence of new patterns of material or energetic organization and behavior).  We don't know how it could be done, and it is without scientific precedent.  This is not just the claim of wishful thinkers; this is a growing claim among philosophers of mind, who have continually run into dead ends with the emergence paradigm.

When, under certain paradigmatic assumptions, we continue to be frustrated in our efforts to explain certain phenomena, sometimes it is justified to fundamentally shift those assumptions.  We did this not long back with the shift from a classical object-oriented worldview to a process-relational open systems view.  Current paradigmatic assumptions (at the time) didn't appear to be able to account for evolution, so we experimented with a fundamental frame-shift and discovered this allowed for expanded and renewed explanatory power.

Some philosophers of mind are entertaining a similar frame shift motivated by the ongoing explanatory failures of the current emergentist paradigm.  We have been starting from the view that quantitative matter is primary and qualitative consciousness/experience is derivative; what if we start, instead, from the assumption that quantity and quality are equiprimordial?  This is not an irrational move, any more than the shift from an object-oriented to a process-oriented view was irrational.  It can be rationally justified and defended, and then tested for explanatory power.  

If we consistently fail to be able to show how "this" gives rise to "that," in other words, then entertaining the idea that the "that" may not be, after all, an effect of the "this" ... is not at all an irrational (or psychologically weak or needy) move.  It's perfectly reasonable.

Nor is it a "God in the gaps" move.  Consciousness is not a postulated mythological figure that we are trying to force-fit into a world that no longer has a place for it, but a directly accessible feature of reality -- a justifiable given, as I argued above --, and we have two basic approaches available to us to account for its place: it is derivative or elemental.  If one option has continued to run into dead ends, it makes sense to try out the other and see what happens.

Since consciousness itself is not objectively observable -- the scientific method doesn't let us "see" it either in the brain or out in the world -- some people complain that a panpsychic world would be practically indistinguishable from a non-panpsychic or emergentist world.  There is nothing immediately, at the level of scientifically observable, empirical reality, that would set a panpsychist world behaviorally apart from an emergentist one.  Instead, we have to look at the aporias, if any, generated by our starting assumptions -- as we did with object-oriented metaphysics vs. process metaphysics -- and decide which provides more explanatory power or avoids certain problematic consequences.

Here's my view in a nutshell, which might be called a kind of panpsychic emergentism.

My view is that the world we inhabit is indeed the physical-energetic world that we deal with in science, but that matter-energy has been underdescribed; every basic matter-energy event has a qualitative or interior aspect to it.  At the level of elemental particle-events, the interior or qualitative aspect is very basic and almost negligible, especially as compared to higher organismic awareness.  Whitehead referred to this elemental qualitative interiority as prehension -- the barest of 'registration' events.

Autopoietically self-organizing systems then increase not only in physical complexity as they evolve, but in qualitative depth as well.  And I would distinguish between autopoietic and allopoietic entities in this regard: the former are organized, via internal relatedness, in such a way as to be able to amplify interiority across the whole system, or at least across some systems within systems; whereas in the latter, where order is imposed from without, there is not enough internal coherence or internal-relatedness of constituent elements to be able lead to the amplification of interiority across the whole or parts of the system.  This is generally in line with the autopoietic systems-science view that autopoietic process *is* cognitive process.  In my view, cognition, in part, is the processual interlinking of elements and systems which are, at once, both energetic and qualitative.

(As a side note, I don't think there is an absolute line between autopoietic and allopoietic; I expect we will gradually be able to mimic autopoiesis more and more, through our technology, leading eventually to the emergence of human-like or greater sentient machines ["artificial organisms"]).

Of course, one of the problems that face this proto- or micro-panpsychist account is the combination problem.  How are minimally 'conscious' (prehensive) micro-events combined in a way to provide more holistic forms of consciousness (across systems, organisms, etc)?  I think there are some early contenders for mechanisms, such as the quantum coherence states generated by microtubules that seem to be associated with waking consciousness (in patients pre-anaesthesia).  But we don't know for sure yet.

But in my view, the combination problem is less of a logical or ontological problem than the one posed by the emergentist paradigm (which posits the emergence of a radically new domain, a qualitative domain out of strictly non-qualitative elements).  We already are tracking the emergence of higher-order physical systems, with higher-level behavioral properties.  We can then consider whether the higher-level behaviors that we associate with conscious organisms involve 1) the irruption of a wholly new ontological domain, subjective interiority out of objective interiority; or 2) the amplification and higher-order expression of already qualitative-quantitative elements.  In my view, the latter option is more parsimonious and involves less of a theoretical problem or ontological leap.

There are of course multiple different panpsychic models, just as there are several versions of emergentism.  Personally, I think physical emergence is well established and it must be taken into account in any model of reality. But as I just said, I think the most parsimonious and least theoretically challenging option is to suggest that there are levels of interiority running through all levels of physical emergence, rather than positing its radical irruption somewhere along the line.  

One unfortunately never-fully-developed 'panpsychic' model which attracts me is David Bohm's soma-significance.  In his view, reality is a field with a holistic superposition of soma (form) and significance at every point -- rather like a magnet, where north and south poles appear at distinct and apparently separate 'points' but which are really just two aspects of a holistic process.  (Break a magnet, and continue breaking it, and you have new north and south poles for each piece).  At the quantum level, in his account, every particle 'reads' the somatic form of its environment via a pilot wave, and this influences its behavior.  Higher-level organisms simply involve higher and more complex forms of this soma-significant/signa-somatic interplay.

But as I said at the beginning, while I think there are some cosmological models which are stronger and more compelling than others -- and I've just given my view for why a basic panpsychic one is better than an emergentist one --, we also are still in 'early days' in our accounting for this aspect of reality and epistemic humility would require us to be willing to entertain a plurality of options.  In my case, this means, first, a willingness to explore several different forms of panpsychism, to test for the greatest explanatory yield, consistency, etc; but also an openness to at least seriously considering other fundamental theoretical and metaphysical choices.