The idea that everything from
spoons to stones is conscious is
gaining academic credibility
Olivia Goldhill January 27, 2018
NASA
Is 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.
“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?”
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.”
