© NASAIs everything conscious?
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.
"Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?" says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. "Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn't necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality."
David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the "
hard problem of consciousness" in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.
The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It's unclear, though, exactly how this could work. "It's very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness," says Chalmers.
"Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there's a gap: Consciousness." Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter - but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an "unimaginably simple" form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans' subjective experiences. This isn't meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that t
here's some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.Panpsychism doesn't necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. "Panpsychists usually don't take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole," writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. "Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness."
But, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that "any system is conscious," says Chalmers. "Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness."
Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers' "hard problem" paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a
feature of serious study. There have been
several credible academic
books on the
subject in recent years, and
popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.
One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi's
Integrated Information Theory, further lends
credence to panpsychism.
Tononi argues that something will have a form of "consciousness" if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently "integrated," or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures-not just the human brain - Integrated Information Theory shares
the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.
Goff, who has written
an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the "hard problem" and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.
"Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume," says Goff. "Eddington" - the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 20th century - "argued there's a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter
does but not what it
is. We can put consciousness into this gap."
In Eddington's view, Goff writes in an email, it's ""silly" to suppose that that underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where consciousness comes from." Stephen Hawking has
previously asked: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Goff adds: "The Russell-Eddington proposal is that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations."
The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the "combination problem": Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn't answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.
Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems - from inanimate objects to plants to ants - count as conscious.
An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement - the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they're separated by such immense distances there can't be a causal signal between them -
suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness. "The more I think about [any theory], the less plausible it becomes," says Chalmers. "One starts as a materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist," he adds, echoing
his paper on the subject. Idealism holds that physical matter does not exist at all and conscious experience is the only thing there is. From that perspective, panpsychism is quite moderate.
Chalmers quotes his colleague, the philosopher John Perry, who says: "If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration."
Olivia Goldhill is weekend writer for Quartz, with a focus on philosophy and psychology.
Reader Comments
Given all of the high-tech research that has been conducted, it should be quite obvious by now that the Universe is a hologram projected from the all pervading aether.
Even without the benefit of sophisticated instrumentation like the Large Hadron Collider, Rev. John G. Mac Vicar's enigmatic observation that, "The place of the material world in the universe is that of an exquisitely beautiful precipitate of varied cloud-work in the universal aether, determined by a geometrical necessity", is remarkable.
All is the projection from the Creator....aka, the eminently illusive all-pervading luminiferous aether or fundamental substrate without which nothing exists.
To answer this you could look at the physiological aspects of our bodies. How atoms form to create molecules, then molecules join to create organs, organs to systems etc etc. I would think the same would apply to the formation of consciousness. The basic fundamental aspects of each individual conscious formulates a larger more experienced form and so on until we reach awareness. However, we continue to experience and add to our already formed consciousness: so, are we in fact continuing the trend? Maybe, to answer the question, there needs to be a more in depth look on how we expand our consciousness without the likes of Danial Dennet leading the investigation.
God's consciousness is so vast and his speed is so fast, that as soon as he goes somewhere, he is right back where he was before.
There.
Did you digest that? Did you take a really really big bite?
Because when you do, I've got another point to make.
ned,
OUT
It is not a "particle" but a conscious force of infinite magnitude and potentialities that operates in accordance with immutable laws of cause and effect. An all pervading cosmic sine wave of infinite potential eternally alternating between positive and negative polarities....Yinging and Yanging without beginning or end.
Mystery solved.
The physicists finally discovered the existence of God, as science and philosophy merge.
All That Is, Is. That is simply not possible to think about.
You can only think about something else - that you made up as an image, symbol or definition of Is.
When 'thinking' is associated with your sense of Is (existence).
Your thoughts are your definition of having an Experience of Is.
You cannot experience All That Is - but it Is the being of you.
Communication in Universal terms is resonance - not signs pointing to something else. Feel for your inherence in that which resonates in you and open the channel of a communication.
In a world of imaged and signed symbol, communication seems to break down and conflict.
The development of the subjective mind is need-driven under scarcity or lack as a result of experiencing breakdown and conflict as a blocked channel of communication. Such breakdown and conflict is the 'chaos' upon which a sense of exclusive order is asserted in absence or lack of true direction, support and guidance, as the attempt of manual control as the replacement for what comes naturally - because in experiencing UN kindness, trust flips from life to fear and guilt of what life has now become as a result of 'unnatural' thought and experience. And so the mind is limited, denied and redefined as a frail and tiny trickle - yet seeking its true limitlessness in substitute fantasy associations, enacted upon the body, of self, other and world.
To make our self stranger unto our Self, is an incredible learning feat, that opens to experience of drama set against pain and loss that magnify to permeate the world that was adventured and contested. Because it is simply beyond credibility to be who you are not and so credibility has to be transferred to the impossible and unbelievable focus in exclusion of awareness of wholeness.
And so in time, separated in space, fragments identify in what protects them from their truth, so as to think they think alone.
The you who thinks, is not the awareness of thought, recognised, accepted and loved. Yet that which is resonant to your signature vibration Is you - at a point of which dissonance covers or hides from awareness - while you look there under the spell of drama.
When the call to war is instead recognized as the call to wake, and the call to hate, recognized as the call to heal, following the recognition will bring you back to conscious alignment with All That Is as it Is - instead of invoking UN consciousness of Existence by virtue of attention to the defining, mapping and controlling intent.
So the 'violater' accuses the world of its own condition and even unto the least, does unto Me - yet knows NOT what it does.
Unless you release your 'other' from your own 'sins' seen there, you suffer them however they are assigned under narrative control. No one can release themselve alone, because no one Is alone. Is - Is Universal. But to be alone is to be special.
Couldn't that be the point of existence? For one to fully be the 'Is', would then one consider themselves: omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent? If this were the case then one could consider themselves to be a higher spirit. So, if there is a higher power, what better way to hide their presences and our ability to be the 'Is', then to condition the 'Is' to reveal itself as a symbol or image. Thus, disallowing the prospect to ever be true reality.
I eagerly await your first edition of: 'The Utensil Diaries'; with an introduction by Galen Strawson.