Heh, while I was posting about exactly this kind of attitude you were posting this! Maybe its sychronicity?
The philosophy of pansychism has been around for a looong time! You've got to go back to the ancient greeks, and likely earlier than that, for its origins (see section 2 of
this article, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Is pansychism all that popular amongst the people you identify as the biological robot crowd?
I googled Dawkins and panpsychism and found this tweet: "The fact that dogs are conscious doesn't mean atoms are!
http://bit.ly/KmAGkD. Panpsychism is obvious bullshit." I don't know what Bill Dixon (who wrote that article) believes about panpsychism. And while I don't believe everything is conscious, I'm not sure whether we consider it "obvious:" or not is a good argument for or against. Interestingly, in that same Dawkins tweet he refers to a new scientific hypothesis that I've written a lot about recently that doesn't go as far as panpsychism, but is in that direction, hypothesizing that sentience comes from certain arrangements of information and is an inheirant fundamental property. While it is way too early to accept it, even Dawkins writes "IIT just MIGHT not be."
I call IIT panpsychish but its certainly not traditional pansychism, and the originator of it (Tononi) has written so explicitly. Unlike panscychism, IIT would not consider a single electron to be sentient. However, a pair of electronics might, if arranged properly, have some sort of experience - though it would be likely very different from our experiences. IIT hypotheses that it is the integrated system that has experiences. The more integrated information a system contains, the more rich the experience.
This may seem ridiculous to you, and I get the gut feeling to reject it out of hand, but they view this as a testable hypothesis and have been actively doing engaged in such testing. I had a paper awhile back that I have to find again that summarized several of these experiments. I watched a Ted talk the other day talking about IIT which mentioned an IIT experiment that ostensibly accurately picked out who was sleeping/dreaming or in a common/under anesthesia. Haven't tracked down the study yet but I intend to.
The theory has a long way to go before it should be accepted - but early results seem to justify pursuing it. I think their feeling is that even if IIT ends up being wrong, the scientific process they are going through should nevertheless give us some more insight into how consciousness works.
In any event, you might find it interesting and while they don't quite argue that an electron is conscious you might find it somewhat less of a ridiculous concept after looking into it.