Consciousness Is Common
How the Universe could be made of consciousness if panpsychism is true
Consciousness is not the ultimate level of reality. Its the minimal level of thought necessary for you to get out of bed, do the dishes, wash your clothes and get on with living. There is a tendency for some to think that awareness in general is cause enough for intelligence.
But this could not be further from reality. If you consider consciousness a prerequisite for existence as, panpsychism considers it to be, then consciousness is nothing special.
Panpsychism seems to be a decent theory about the nature of consciousness, and the implications it has for the meaning of reality. First, when we think of what makes a good scientific theory, either complexity or simplicity, what wins in the end?
Most of the time, a simple answer capable of explaining complex phenomenon is preferable to a complex answer that does the same thing.
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Albert Einstein
Einstein’s principle underpins how a good theory of reality should be conceived — in the simplest way possible.
Now, let’s ask ourselves what makes more sense given what we know about the universe already. Would it make more sense for consciousness to be rare: a special form of cognition that made humanity its only chosen recipient?
Or, would awareness most likely be a feature of the reality we occupy — a ubiquitous occurrence that is not uncommon?
Why science can’t explain reality
The first lens we use to ponder consciousness leads to a few problems. For one, we get into the strange issue of dualism. Dualism holds that consciousness is external to the brain. It contends that something interacts with the neurons of the brain to create a conscious experience.
Talk about extra complexity! This theory perplexes researchers to this day. No one seems to have a good answer.
Another framework for understanding consciousness is called materialism. And it has its own issues.
A materialist view of reality overlooks subjective experience. What’s the problem with this? Reality is made of material — matter, the stuff that makes up other stuff. Well, an approach that focuses purely on matter tends to favor quantitive experiences over qualitative ones.
Modern science is designed to focus on quantitative events, and ignores the qualitative experiences that result from the behavior of matter. Science does an outstanding job of predicting and measuring the movement of particles, where they will be in the future, and what is likely to happen millions of years down the road.
However, it cannot tell us about the value, or nature, of these events. It skips over qualitative experience almost entirely, choosing instead to describe existence in a one-sided quantitative formula.
“For the materialist, the inner subjective world of experience is to be explained in terms of the chemistry of the brain, in something like the way the wetness of water is explained in terms its molecular structure.”
— Philip Goff’s Galileo’s Error Foundations For a New Science of Consciousness
Explain this — You can’t!
I’m drinking coffee right now. What’s the formula for that? How do you describe mathematically the smell of the room, the feel of the cup in my hand, or the taste of the perfect combination of cream, sugar and coffee? Oh, also include in your formula how it makes me feel.
Can this be done? Not yet. Physics attempts to garner information that is applicable across the plane of existence, but it cannot describe an individual’s sensation of a soy mocha latte, or the atmosphere of the coffee shop. The subjective is not considered.
Blind people will never know what it’s like to see colors. Yes, they can describe them by name, but the experience of color, what they are, and the feelings they evoke entirely escape them. This is because they do not have the sensory input necessary to fathom this layer of reality.
In other words, awareness is contingent upon perception, meaning awareness is a subjective occurrence.
Back to materialism. It denies the existence of consciousness. Because of its emphasis on the material, and desire to describe only quantitative realities, materialism ends up rejecting the notion of awareness altogether.
This view contends that matter is unconscious. If this is so, then how did humanity manage to gain consciousness from physical matter that is not sentient at all? This question is known as the hard problem of consciousness, and it remains unanswered by science and philosophy.
The idea that an immaterial soul is interacting with the brain would have been observed a long time ago. There has been tons of research conducted about the nature of awareness up to this point. Someone would have noticed if there were some interplay between the brain and some external source of energy by now.
Panpsychism is the answer?
Before we go into why panpsychism is mostly the best way forward for researching awareness, It’s necessary to describe its limitations.
The most convincing argument against panpsychism is the combination problem, or how smaller forms of awareness become larger forms of consciousness.
It could be that awareness is the foundation to reality, a reality in which all matter is aware. I’m not saying that a rock is watching you walk past it, or that the trees are listening to your conversations. We can conceive of different levels of awareness within the larger realm of consciousness.
What I am saying is that consciousness is not emergent. It is NOT derived from existing elements of reality that have somehow merged to form another. It IS foundational, a precondition for everything we know to exist.
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The strongest argument for panpsychism
We just discussed the combination problem of consciousness, or the issue of how smaller amounts of consciousness end up forming larger entities such as human awareness. One proposed answer was found in the brains of patients with severe cases of epilepsy.
To cure these extreme cases, surgeons performed what is known as a Corpus callosotomy, or a severing of the corpus callosum, the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This drastically reduced the amount and severity of seizures the patient experienced, but there were some remarkable side effects.
Under normal conditions, the right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. It is now known that the area of the brain used to regulate speech is located in the left hemisphere, and the ability to recognize faces is in the right.
Experiments performed on patients after the procedure demonstrated that the two hemispheres of the brain no longer communicated with one another. If a patient were shown an image of a face on the left side of their field of vision, they would not be able to communicate to the right side what it was, and articulate what they had seen.
This astounding finding suggests that consciousness can be divided!
It is hypothesized that awareness can be further subdivided if different regions of the brain were to be separated from one another. This is just a theory. But the experiments do indicate that if awareness can be divided, it also can be constructed, built up. As Philip Goff puts it:
“But we might imagine the unity of each hemisphere further disintegrating, collapsing into smaller and smaller pockets of separate experience. Assuming the truth of panpsychism, we will eventually, if this process continues, get down to the consciousness of the particles making up the brain.”
— Philip Goff’s Galileo’s Error Foundations For a New Science of Consciousness
Implications — what does this mean for you?
Panpsychism would represent a dramatic shift in the scientific paradigm. If we are to pursue this path to further explore awareness, we should do so with caution. Because of the subjective nature of consciousness, it is necessary to control for a wide range of factors, some of which I am not convinced we can account for at the moment.
However, as machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to make progress, this just might become possible. For now, it might be best to think of panpsychism as a good next step that still has some wrinkles that need to be ironed out.
It is worth it to keep this perspective in our consideration. If we are to really understand what this existence is, we need any theory or framework that could provide us with different perspectives. It’s hard to imagine never getting a full explanation of what conscious awareness is and why it exists.
After all, consciousness is what we are. Without it, you would not be reading this, and I would not be typing these words. It is essential that we find an answer. What a shame it wold be if something as dogmatic as past theories and prior methods block our progress.
But most importantly, it would settle the question of if we really exist. I contend that to answer the question of consciousness is to validate our human reality. Because if we are able to explain how we bring objects and experiences into our awareness, how could that awareness be anything but valid?
