The contemplative universe

NBC Mach

As you stumble your way across the room, do you ever stub your toe on a chair that you suspect moved into place just to cause you pain?  As though it were conscious?  Maybe it is, say some scientists, maybe it is.

Well, not exactly.  Your furniture doesn't have eyes and mouths; it doesn't sing along with you as in a Looney Tune.  But scientists and philosophers who subscribe to some form of panpsychism argue that the one constant in the universe is consciousness, and that consciousness is manifested in various ways -- depending on the panpsychic's particular theory.

I'd never heard the word "panpsychism" until a Facebook friend shared an article with me, from this week's NBC Mach, entitled "Is the Universe Conscious?" accompanied by an astronomer's photograph of a sprawling nebula.  Pretty interesting -- scary? -- but the title describes only one of the more extreme possible consequences of panpsychism -- that any complex system exhibits consciousness, and the universe is pretty complex.

In a lengthy article, Wikipedia describes panpsycism in less dramatic terms:

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism. The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.

The Mach article starts off with the mind-boggling idea of galactic consciousness, but quickly turns to the more complex issues presented by quantum theory.  The writer describes the discussion in 2006 by a German physicist, Bernard Haisch, who proposed that quantum fields, producing and transmitting consciousness, pervade all of empty space, and that the transmitted consciousness then flows into and is manifested by complex systems in the presence of energy.  The more complex the system, the more obvious and intense the consciousness.  The human brain is pretty complex.  That chair in your living room?  Less so.

The universe is also complex, but even most panpsychics seem to doubt that galaxies do much independent thinking.  Our sun, one notes, is far less complex a system than a single E. Coli bacterium, and we know how deeply bacteria contemplate.

Most scientist, subscribers to panpsychism or not, seem to agree that consciousness is somehow related to complexity.  For me, at least, the problem is the inability to define consciousness in objective terms, other than as something related to complexity.  We believe ourselves to be conscious, and dogs seem to mimic us in some ways.  Therefore, we assume dogs share to some degree our own consciousness.  But we can't prove that they aren't just parasitic little automatons that have evolved the ability to survive by imitating their human hosts.  In fact, we can't really begin to argue whether dogs are really conscious like us, because we don't understand what consciousness means even in ourselves. 

"I think, therefore I am," said Descartes.  Maybe the best we can say, or will ever be able to say, is, "I worry about whether I'm conscious, therefore I am conscious." Maybe your chair worries, too? No way to prove it doesn't.