Yes, you have read all of this before if you are at all familiar with my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. Now there's a word for it: panpsychism. Pan--Greek for "everything"; psyche--Greek for "mind/soul/consciousness"; ism: a field of study. You can read Olivia Goldhill's article on the state of panpsychism below.
The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility
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.
“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a
gap: Consciousness.” 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 there’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.”
“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a
universe for them to describe?”
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 conscious experience
is the only thing that truly exists. 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.”
You can find the above article at Quartz: https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/
Meanwhile, here's one of my popular videos on the topic, called "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe." Easy to understand. Really.
Onward and upward!
You can find the above article at Quartz: https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/
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Of course, I'm only on the doorstep of respectability. No attributions for Cyd Ropp, Ph.D., independent philosopher; No invites to conferences with the in- crowd. No endorsements from puzzled former advisors and fellow academics. No mention in the wikipedia article on panpsychism. Ah well, maybe someday.Meanwhile, here's one of my popular videos on the topic, called "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe." Easy to understand. Really.
Onward and upward!
