Consciousness is something that you can find theories on all over the web. Everyone has their own thoughts on it and no one is sure who is right at this point.
Tons of people from across the globe have been speculating over where consciousness comes from and what it is forever and this is not going to end anytime soon. Now, some theories are more recognized than others and depending on the physicist or scientist you are speaking with you might hear something completely unexpected. Some of the more common theories behind consciousness are things like materialism and mind-body dualism. But in this article, we are going to be going over something known as panpsychism.
Panpsychism is basically the belief that everything material no matter how small has some element of its own consciousness. That meaning even the universe itself has its own consciousness. The word itself literally means ‘everything has a mind.’ Lots of scientists seem to really be opening up to this theory and the more you delve into it the more interesting you realize it is.
One supporter of panpsychism happens to be neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science actually wrote for Scientific American his views on panpsychism. He noted that he found “a version of panpsychism modified for the 21st century to be the single most elegant and parsimonious explanation for the universe I find myself in. There are three broad reasons why panpsychism is appealing to the modern mind.” While panpsychism can be a bit confusing once you really break things down it does seem like a good theory in many ways.
Koch wrote as follows for Scientific American:
Taken literally, panpsychism is the belief that everything is “en-minded.” All of it. Whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock or an electron. Everything that is physical also possesses an interior mental aspect. One is objective—accessible to everybody—and the other phenomenal—accessible only to the subject. That is the sense of the quotation by British-born Buddhist scholar Alan Watts with which I began this essay.
I will defend a narrowed, more nuanced view: namely that any complex system, as defined below, has the basic attributes of mind and has a minimal amount of consciousness in the sense that it feels like something to be that system. If the system falls apart, consciousness ceases to be; it doesn’t feel like anything to be a broken system. And the more complex the system, the larger the repertoire of conscious states it can experience.
My subjective experience (and yours, too, presumably), the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” is an undeniable certainty, one strong enough to hold the weight of philosophy. But from whence does this experience come? Materialists invoke something they call emergentism to explain how consciousness can be absent in simple nervous systems and emerge as their complexity increases. Consider the wetness of water, its ability to maintain contact with surfaces. It is a consequence of intermolecular interactions, notably hydrogen bonding among nearby water molecules. One or two molecules of H2O are not wet but put gazillions together at the right temperature and pressure, and wetness emerges. Or see how the laws of heredity emerge from the molecular properties of DNA, RNA and proteins. By the same process, mind is supposed to arise out of sufficiently complex brains.
Yet the mental is too radically different for it to arise gradually from the physical. This emergence of subjective feelings from physical stuff appears inconceivable and is at odds with a basic precept of physical thinking, the Ur-conservation law—ex nihilo nihil fit. So if there is nothing there in the first place, adding a little bit more won’t make something. If a small brain won’t be able to feel pain, why should a large brain be able to feel the god-awfulness of a throbbing toothache? Why should adding some neurons give rise to this ineffable feeling? The phenomenal hails from a kingdom other than the physical and is subject to different laws. I see no way for the divide between unconscious and conscious states to be bridged by bigger brains or more complex neurons.
A more principled solution is to assume that consciousness is a basic feature of certain types of so-called complex systems (defined in some universal, mathematical manner). And that complex systems have sensation, whereas simple systems have none. This reasoning is analogous to the arguments made by savants studying electrical charge in the 18th century. Charge is not an emergent property of living things, as originally thought when electricity was discovered in the twitching muscles of frogs. There are no uncharged particles that in the aggregate produce an electrical charge. Elementary particles either have some charge, or they have none. Thus, an electron has one negative charge, a proton has one positive charge and a photon, the carrier of light, has zero charge. As far as chemistry and biology are concerned, charge is an intrinsic property of these particles. Electrical charge does not emerge from noncharged matter. It is the same, goes the logic, with consciousness. Consciousness comes with organized chunks of matter. It is immanent in the organization of the system. It is a property of complex entities and cannot be further reduced to the action of more elementary properties. We have reached the ground floor of reductionism.
Yet, as traditionally conceived, panpsychism suffers from two major flaws. One is known as the problem of aggregates. Philosopher John Searle of the University of California, Berkeley, expressed it recently: “Consciousness cannot spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins.” Indeed, if consciousness is everywhere, why should it not animate the iPhone, the Internet or the United States of America? Furthermore, panpsychism does not explain why a healthy brain is conscious, whereas the same brain, placed inside a blender and reduced to goo, would not be. That is, it does not explain how aggregates combine to produce specific conscious experience.
This meaning that while he would change some bits of it overall he agrees with the theory. There is a lot more to it than we realize. What do you think about all of this? I for one am a bit blown away.
Image via CBC.CA
