Where does consciousness come from? What even is it? This is one of the most perplexing questions in both philosophy and science, and where both meet, in the field of Philosophy of Mind. I’ll always remember my first Philosophy of Mind class, where we were bluntly told: “There’s no agreed philosophy of mind”.
Indeed, some researchers, such as Daniel Dennett, openly deny that there’s such a thing as consciousness at all. This is clearly at odds with the lived experience of the rest of us. I know I have a consciousness and no doubt you do, too. Unless you’re a hardcore solipsist, you’ll also believe that other people have it, too. The damnable thing, though, is that our consciousness is available only to each of us alone: the ‘Cartesian theatre’ in our heads.
For the longest time, it was assumed that human consciousness was unique. Indeed, Rene Descartes, the first serious philosopher of mind, assumed that animals were mere ‘automata’. Today, it’s generally acknowledged that, while human consciousness is still unique in degree, it’s not so much in kind. Other animals have more or less conscious states similar too, if not at the same level as humans.
This might point to part of the solution for where does consciousness come from? It seems that it has evolved to greater and lesser degrees in all animals, if not all living things. But that leaves us with the problem: how did consciousness emerge in living things at all? In seeking an answer to that, some philosophers and scientists are reviving an ancient idea: panpsychism.
Panpsychism might well be the oldest human spiritual idea. Animism, which attributed spiritual being to everything from rocks and rivers to animals, even wind and weather, seems to be the most ancient human belief. It persists today in many indigenous cultures, while in the Japanese Shinto religion, kami or spirits, can be found in mountains, rivers, trees, rocks and other natural elements, as well as personifications of such abstract concepts as fertility.
Today, panpsychism is seriously considered as an answer to the problem of the origin of consciousness. ‘Mind’, it is believed, may be as fundamental to nature as electrons, quarks and the Higgs boson.
For the panpsychist, consciousness goes all the way down. And, as it rises up, it becomes more multifaceted – from atoms and rocks, to trees, animals, and humans.
Thales of Miletus, 2500 years ago, argued that “the world is not divided into animate and inanimate as easily as we might think”.
Associating psyche, or soul, with movement, Thales maintained that even inanimate things have a type of “psyche.” For Thales, the world is alive because “soul is mingled in the whole universe.”
Five hundred years later, the Apostle Paul similarly described the physical creation in overtly cognitive and personalistic terms as he spoke of it having “its own will”, “waiting with eager longing”, “hoping”, “groaning in labor pains” and “being set free from slavery to decay.” (Romans 8:19–22)
In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea likewise reflected on the panpsychic responsiveness of reality as a reflection of nature’s capacity to obey the Creator’s laws […] Basil’s view of creation as teeming with consciousness and with the capacity for lawful obedience continued for over a thousand years in both the Eastern and Western Christian traditions, reaching its peak in the mystical reflections of St Francis of Assisi.
The Scientific Revolution banished the spirits from the demon-haunted world. Galileo re-imagined God’s laws as disembodied mathematical descriptions – a mechanistic view of the natural world that still largely persists. Descartes sought to pare the mind away from the body, even though that left him with the problem of how the former could therefore possibly influence the latter (as it plainly seems to do).
But, with the dawn of the quantum era a century ago, the mechanistic universe was in trouble. Quantum mechanics enshrines the special role of the observer in the outcomes of quantum probabilities.
As [Max Planck, founder of quantum physics] explains: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Given that the universe and its quantum processes clearly predated conscious human observers by tens of billions of years, that begs the question of what ‘mind’ was in operation back then? An obvious, if startling, conclusion is that ‘mind’, however rudimentary, was part of the universe from the beginning.
The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed a widespread return of the panpsychist perspective among both scientists and philosophers of mind. Among philosophers, Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, William Seager, Philip Goff, Yujin Nagasawa and Andrei Buckareff have all offered cogent defenses of panpsychism. Scientists who have opened up avenues of discussion and research that seriously consider panpsychism include Stuart Kauffman, Simon Conway Morris, Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi, Terrence Deacon, and Robert Ulanowicz.
These philosophers and scientists are asking questions such as: How deep does intelligence extend, and might it manifest itself in unexpected ways? Is mind preexistent to matter? Is evolution simply the process to discover mind? Yet, even in the midst of the current renaissance of panpsychism, many questions from skeptics remain. Is panpsychism scientific? Can it be tested? Is it compatible with traditional theism? And could we ever coherently speak of what is it like to be a plant, or a rock?
Thomas Nagel pondered the impossibility of really knowing What Is It Like to Be a Bat? As he concluded, one would have to be a bat to really know what it is like. But the conclusion remains that to know what it is like to be a bat is to know something. If bats can have minds of a sort, why not worms, even cells. If cells, then why not rocks or atoms or even more fundamental particles?
Does the family of particles that make up the Standard Model need a new member added: mind?
