Putting consciousness back into the cosmos
Dr Philip Goff, a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, thinks everything in the physical world has a degree of consciousness. He’s the author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
Panpsychism says that all things have a mind-like quality, thereby pointing to the possibility of the universe being conscious, but how does it explain this? The current resurgence of interest in panpsychism is rooted in important work from the 1920s by the philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington, who was, incidentally, the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The starting point for Russell and Eddington is that physical science tells us what matter does, but it doesn't tell us what it actually is. Physics tells us, for example, that particles have mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of behaviour: things like attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. This is all about what stuff does. Doing physics is like playing chess without knowing what the pieces are made of.
The genius of Russell and Eddington was to see the connection to the problem of consciousness. If physics leaves completely open what an electron is, then physics is left open to the theoretical possibility that an electron is a form of consciousness. Russell and Eddington saw the potential for bringing together what Galileo
Galilei had separated: the quantitative story of physics and the qualitative story of consciousness. According to panpsychism, the former is the story of what matter does, while the latter is the story of what matter is. Matter and consciousness are inseparable: two sides of the same coin.
When people say ’the universe might be conscious’, what do they mean?
It is important not to anthropocentrically focus on human consciousness: nobody is claiming that an electron has the consciousness of a human being. What it’s like to be a human being is a rich and complex affair involving detailed visual and auditory experiences, deep emotions, and subtle thoughts. What it’s like to be a sheep is significantly simpler. What it’s like to be a mouse is simpler still. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. It’s possible that this continues right down to the basic building blocks of matter, with electrons and quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature.
If the universe has experience, on the other hand, it will be incredibly complex, corresponding to the complex physical structure of space and time. However, that doesn’t mean the universe is a kind of self-aware, intelligent agent. You need millions of years of evolution to get these traits. Rather, the experience of the universe is probably just a meaningless mess.
Integrated information theory is compatible with panpsychism. How can it explain consciousness? We can divide the science of consciousness into an experimental bit and a scientific bit. The aim of the experimental bit is to track the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) to work out which kinds of brain activity correspond to which kinds of experience. The aim of the theoretical bit is to explain these correlations. Why is it that certain kinds of physical activity give rise to certain forms of experience? IIT is one answer to the experimental question: according to IIT, consciousness is correlated with maximal integrated information. But it lacks a plausible answer to this theoretical question: why is maximal integrated information correlated with experience?