[LINK] Is everything conscious?

[Stephen Loosley]

`

What if absolutely everything is conscious?

Scientists spent ages mocking panpsychism.

Now, some are warming to the idea that plants, cells, and even atoms are 
conscious.

by Sigal Samuel July 2024 
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/353430/what-if-absolutely-everything-is-conscious

If you’re feeling brave, sit and look — and I mean really look — at a 
plant on your windowsill as it bends toward the light. It seems simple, 
but stare at it long enough and you may find yourself doubting 
everything you thought you knew about your own mind.

Because sooner or later you’ll ask yourself: Why, exactly, is that plant 
stretching toward the sun?

Sure, you can look it up and find out there’s a thing called 
phototropism, which involves cells in a plant elongating to chase the 
sun. But that’s not really much of an answer. The question was: Why does 
the plant do that? Is its movement just a mechanistic response with no 
feeling behind it? Or does the plant want that delicious, warm light?

To many kids, it’s obvious: The plant wants the light! Yet as adults, at 
least in the West, we’re supposed to be embarrassed by that kind of 
language. Modern science warns us against anthropomorphizing — and not 
just when it comes to plants.

Until a few decades ago, scientists also insisted on viewing animals as 
mechanistic bundles of instinct (even though any pet owner would find 
that absurd). They’ve gradually changed their minds about mammals, 
birds, and certain brainy species like octopuses, while continuing to 
believe that species with simpler nervous systems (or no nervous system 
at all) are not intelligent. They’re not even conscious.

Well, panpsychism begs to differ.

 From the Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul), panpsychism is the 
view, held by many peoples around the world since antiquity, that 
consciousness resides in everything at least to some degree — that it’s 
a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical universe.


Animals have it, plants have it, and even single cells have it. That 
doesn’t mean your chair is conscious — but, according to some 
panpsychists, the atoms inside it might be. How exactly that could work 
is a philosophical puzzle (more on that soon).

As you can imagine, scientists have spent the past century mocking this 
idea. Fair enough — it does sound wacky at first. And yet, this theory 
of consciousness, though still controversial, is now enjoying a 
resurgence as mounting scientific evidence suggests that you don’t need 
a complex brain to feel, remember, learn, or think. In fact, you may not 
need a brain at all.

Once upon a time, tons of people believed in panpsychism. What happened?


If you’re tempted to dismiss panpsychists as weirdos, consider the fact 
that most people probably believed in panpsychism, or something like it, 
for most of human history.

“We’re the weirdos!” Joanna Leidenhag, a professor of philosophy and 
theology at the University of Leeds, told me.

In Western philosophy, panpsychism goes all the way back to the Ancient 
Greeks, where philosophers like Thales, Heraclitus, and Plato espoused 
some version of it. And from Hindus in India to followers of Shintoism 
in Japan to the Indigenous peoples of America, many people believed — 
and still believe — that animals, plants, and other elements of the 
natural world are conscious.

Of course, they wouldn’t have used the word “consciousness,” which was 
only coined in the 17th century. But whether you say that a creature has 
“soul” or “mind” or “consciousness,” you’re expressing the basic idea 
that it’s got a perspective on the world — that there’s something it 
feels like to be that creature.

There’s a lot of conceptual overlap here with animism, anthropologists’ 
(historically derogatory) term for a belief system that says everything 
is alive or imbued with spirit. In fact, if you think that being alive 
and being conscious always go together, then animism and panpsychism are 
basically identical. Many people today don’t believe this, but some do.

In the West, the growing dominance of monotheistic religion put a damper 
on panpsychism for centuries. But it began to spring up again during the 
Renaissance. Accepting the 16th-century astronomer Copernicus’s radical 
new idea that Earth doesn’t occupy a privileged position at the center 
of the universe, philosophers like Giordano Bruno figured humans don’t 
occupy a privileged position, either. If we humans have a soul, he 
reasoned, then “there is nothing that does not possess a soul.”

The Catholic Church hated Bruno’s ideas so much that it burned him at 
the stake. And soon enough, a much churchier view — Cartesian dualism — 
emerged. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes split mind 
from matter, arguing that they are totally distinct: Only humans have 
mind. Animals, plants, and all the rest are just mindless mechanisms — 
blobs of matter that God created for us humans to use.

In the Enlightenment era, panpsychist thinkers like Spinoza, Leibniz, 
and Diderot challenged Descartes’ dualism. It proved hard to dislodge.


Ironically, some of its sticking power may have come from a contemporary 
of Descartes whom the Church abhorred: the astronomer Galileo Galilei. 
He argued that in order to make science objective, we should bracket out 
anything that smacks of mysterious spiritual stuff. That laid the 
foundation for modern science, where matter and mind were walled off 
from each other.

By the 19th century, many scientists fully embraced materialism, also 
known as physicalism. They said they didn’t see any evidence for 
immaterial stuff like a mind or soul, and — taking Galileo’s view to an 
extreme — they argued that the only real thing was the thing they could 
observe objectively: matter.

That, however, produced its own problem.

How panpsychism gets around the “hard problem” of consciousness

The big problem for materialists is what contemporary philosopher David 
Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. In a nutshell, the 
problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of 
non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from 
that?

As the influential philosopher Galen Strawson puts it: “You can make 
chalk from cheese, or water from wine, because if you go down to the 
subatomic level they are both the same stuff, but you can’t make 
experience from something wholly non-experiential.”

Neuroscientists have tried to figure out how inert matter could ever 
give rise to consciousness. Although they’ve identified correlations 
between certain brain states and certain subjective feelings, they still 
don’t have a proper theory about how or why consciousness arises.

And this is where panpsychism really shines. Its central explanatory 
virtue is that it lets you bypass the hard problem of consciousness 
altogether.

That’s because the panpsychist starts out with the right ingredients. If 
you believe that consciousness resides, however minimally, in matter’s 
tiniest building blocks — atoms, electrons, quarks — then it’s much 
easier to explain how sophisticated forms of consciousness can 
eventually arise in, say, humans. It’s basically a story about scaling: 
As matter scales up into more complex creatures, the degree of 
consciousness shoots up, too.

This fits very well with the theory of evolution, which says that 
creatures gradually became more complex as they evolved — not that there 
was some magical “aha!” moment when mind suddenly appeared on the scene. 
After Darwin published The Origin of Species, philosophers increasingly 
accepted the idea that something doesn’t emerge from nothing, and that 
idea is a major reason why super-influential, hard-nosed British 
logicians like Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell eventually 
came to embrace panpsychism. As Whitehead said, there are “no arbitrary 
breaks” in nature.

In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it, 
making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails 
panpsychism. We can break down the argument into six simple steps:

Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.)

Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff exists.)

Therefore, consciousness is physical.

There’s no “radical emergence” in nature. (We don’t get something from 
nothing.)

Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical 
emergence.

Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.

Strawson’s conclusion is as logical as it is surprising: “Any realistic 
— any truly serious — materialist must be a panpsychist.”

Plenty of materialists disagree. For example, neuroscientist Anil Seth 
told me he doesn’t buy the argument because he’s not convinced that 
nature never makes leaps; he thinks it’s entirely plausible that 
consciousness can emerge from unconscious matter if that matter is 
arranged in a complex enough way — in, say, a brain.

“You can still get some property emerging from things that don't have 
that property — in nature, we see this all the time!” Seth told me. He 
gave the mother of all examples: the origin of life itself. “I mean, at 
some point there was nothing alive and now we have living things!”

Yet panpsychists like Strawson say that doesn’t actually prove Seth’s 
point. They’re not claiming there’s no emergence in nature. They’re 
claiming there’s no radical emergence — no cases where a new property 
pops up that can’t be explained with reference to the properties of its 
parts. To say that “at some point there was nothing alive” assumes that 
there’s a sharp break between living and nonliving stuff. But zoom in 
enough, and the biochemistry that makes up life is really just physics. 
Cells, after all, are made of atoms.

Seth acknowledges that he can’t disprove panpsychism. He also 
acknowledges that materialism, in the form of modern neuroscience, 
hasn’t yet figured out how exactly consciousness could emerge from 
cells. But give the field more time and he suspects that it could get 
there, he said: “the hard problem will seem less hard over time, and may 
dissolve and disappear altogether.”

Since neuroscience labs haven’t cracked the puzzle yet, some scientists 
are trying a different approach — and new experimental evidence that may 
support panpsychism is coming to light.

Why is panpsychism becoming more popular now?


Check out these incredible science experiments.


Michael Levin, a professor of biology at Tufts University, is as 
empirical as empiricists come. He does not believe we should just be 
armchair philosophizing about consciousness. “Just having feelings about 
this stuff is ridiculous at this point,” he told me. “You have to do 
experiments.”

And it’s his experiments that have led him to believe in panpsychism.

One thing Levin has studied is slime mold. The gooey single-celled 
organism, which looks like dog vomit, can sometimes be found oozing over 
a forest floor. Even when it grows to be meters across, it’s always just 
a single cell. It’s got no brain or nervous system. And yet Levin has 
found that it can reliably make smart decisions.

Place a slime mold at one end of a maze and a yummy treat, like oat 
flakes, at the other end. You can watch as the slime mold branches off 
to suss out all the different possible routes to the oat flakes. It’ll 
then pull away from the less promising paths, choosing instead to squish 
itself down the shortest path through the maze.

In 2010, researchers from Japan and the UK arranged little heaps of oat 
flakes in a layout that resembles the population centers of Tokyo. Then 
they let a slime mold loose. Lo and behold, the single-celled organism 
cut the most efficient route to each pile of treats, effectively 
recreating the map of the Tokyo subway system.

You may be thinking that the slime mold is just acting off 
pre-programmed reflexes, not choosing or learning anything.


A French researcher, Audrey Dussutour, proved otherwise. She put slime 
mold at one end of a bridge and yummy oatmeal at the other. But she 
lined the bridge with caffeine, which slime mold hates. At first, the 
slime mold refused to cross the bridge for several hours. Hungry, it 
finally braved the caffeine so it could get the oatmeal. Over time, the 
slime mold stopped avoiding the hated substance. Dussutour showed that 
the organism had learned something: caffeine wasn’t so scary, after all.

The obvious question here is: How is any of this happening without a brain?!

Hold on, because it gets even weirder. Consider Levin’s experiments with 
planaria, the humble flatworm. It’s got a teeny-tiny brain, but that’s 
not so important, a fact Levin proved by… decapitating it.

First, Levin trained these worms to get over their fear of light by 
dribbling a delicious liver snack into an illuminated section of their 
petri dishes. The worms, which normally prefer to hang out in the dark, 
learned to venture into the illuminated section of the dishes for these 
treats. Presumably, this learning took place in the brain. But then 
Levin cut off the worms’ heads.

Planaria have an amazing ability to regenerate their body parts, so 
within two weeks, they grew brand-new heads. And when Levin tested their 
willingness to venture into the middle of their dishes, he found them 
surprisingly willing. They somehow remembered the liver treats of yore. 
But how could they remember that if their brains had been cut off?

All these findings suggest that modern science may have made a big 
mistake in assuming that cognition is all about the brain. Brain cells, 
known as neurons, are actually not that special. A key feature of these 
cells — the ability to send and receive electrical signals — is shared 
with other cells in your body. And it’s this sensing and communicating 
via electricity that, Levin suspects, makes basic cognition possible.

We’ve known about bioelectricity for centuries, as you might recall from 
high school biology: send a jolt through a frog and its leg will twitch, 
right? But Levin is demonstrating that it plays a much bigger role than 
anyone realized. He suspects that organisms store all kinds of 
information not just in their cells, but in the patterns of electrical 
currents passing between the cells. The specific pattern would convey 
information to other cells.

And what about plants? After all, we know that plant cells use 
electrical signaling, too. And over the past decade, scientific 
experiments have shown that they do a whole lot more than seeking out 
certain outcomes — like sunlight — and avoiding others. They remember 
and learn from experience, a fact the ecologist Monica Gagliano 
established with the help of Mimosa pudica, a plant known for 
defensively folding in its leaves in response to physical stimuli. 
Gagliano dropped these plants from a height onto a foam base and, as 
expected, the leaves curled up at the shock. But after being dropped 
several times, the plants learned that the drops were pretty harmless, 
so they kept their leaves open during future drops — even a month later.

Plants have many other tricks up their leaves: they keep track of how 
long it’s been since bees last visited, they send out biochemical 
distress signals to other plants, and they appear to lose consciousness 
when sedated with anesthesia.

Levin thinks networks of electrical signals may be making such things 
possible: storing memories, learning, solving problems creatively — in 
short, cognition.

“We know that things that don't have brains have cognitive capacities,” 
Levin said. “Frankly, I don't understand how it took this long for this 
view to really come back.” Given what evolution tells us about the 
gradual development of mind, “there's no getting away from the fact that 
cognition exists widely and long before brains and nerves appear.”

In case you’re wondering why Levin prefers to speak about cognition, not 
consciousness: The former is about functional abilities we can observe 
from our third-person perspective. The latter is about what it feels 
like to be a creature from that creature’s own perspective — so it’s 
hard, if not impossible, to get at experimentally. Nevertheless, Levin 
told me, “If I had to put dollars down right now, I do think that 
consciousness is very ubiquitous and primary, and I think it does go 
along with cognition.”

“All life is sense-making”

Of course, not everyone is ready to bet on panpsychism. For scientists 
and philosophers who believe consciousness resides in more than just 
humans and animals but are not convinced it resides in atoms, there’s a 
kind of in-between position: biopsychism. That’s the view that all 
living organisms — and only living organisms — are conscious.

Some scientists are busily amassing evidence that could support that 
view. Aware that anything with “psychism” in its name will probably be 
branded as woo-woo, they use terms like “minimal intelligence” or “basal 
cognition.” Their goal is to investigate signs of cognition at the base 
of the tree of life — in organisms that have very simple nervous systems 
or lack them altogether because they appeared early in the story of 
evolution.

Some of these researchers note that attributing consciousness to, say, 
plants gels nicely with a theory of consciousness that’s becoming 
increasingly popular in the scientific community: integrated information 
theory, which says that consciousness is basically equivalent to 
integrated information. “Integration” happens when different elements in 
a system communicate with each other, whether that’s neurons 
communicating in a brain, or something else. The more integrated 
information there is in a system, the greater the degree of 
consciousness it’s got. If the cells in a plant are sharing and 
integrating information through bioelectricity, maybe it’s not that big 
of a leap to think the plant has some minimal degree of consciousness.

Evan Thompson, a professor of philosophy at the University of British 
Columbia, argued in his 2007 book Mind in Life that only humans and 
animals with nervous systems make the cut. But he later changed his 
mind. After all, he reasoned, any living thing has to make sense of its 
environment, pursue its goals, and solve problems in order to survive. 
Whether you’re a tiger or a fern, a slime mold or a bacterium, you need 
to find a way to get food, reproduce, and adapt when faced with hostile 
conditions. By its very nature, living seems to be a process of cognition.

“All life is sense-making,” Thompson told me. “The reason I think we can 
assume that it’s basic to alllife is that it’s actually much harder to 
make sense of the idea that a system that produces itself metabolically 
can have directed, oriented behavior without some kind of motivation or 
drive that involves affect.”

In other words, what does it even mean to say that a living being is 
pursuing goals but doesn’t want anything?

The downside for biopsychism, though, is that it’s still stuck with the 
“hard problem” of consciousness, since it reinforces the idea that 
there’s a sharp break between conscious and nonconscious or between 
living and nonliving stuff. And so, philosophers like Strawson and 
scientists like Levin think we need to go further, all the way to 
panpsychism.

I asked Levin what he thinks is going on inside a plant when it bends 
toward the light: Is it just acting mechanically, or does it want the 
light? “All these dichotomies are false dichotomies,” he replied. “What 
most people say is, ‘Oh, that’s just a mechanical system following the 
laws of physics.’ Well, what do you think you are?”

Okay, but how could an atom be conscious?


Debates about theories of consciousness are kind of like a party game. 
The central question is: How low can you go? Are you willing to ascribe 
consciousness to animals? Plants? Cells? Atoms? Subatomic particles?

Even if you believe that all living things have some degree of 
consciousness, you might have trouble with the idea that an atom or an 
electron is conscious. It’s hard to understand what that could possibly 
look like.

Panpsychist thinkers are quick to explain that they’re not suggesting 
these particles have complex forms of consciousness, like 
decision-making or meta-cognition (“I want X, and I know that I want 
X”). They’re envisioning something way more basic. Remember that to have 
consciousness is just to have a perspective on the world, a feeling of 
what it’s like to be you.

“For an electron, there’s no meta-cognition, no decision-making,” 
Leidenhag said. “But when it encounters another electron with another 
negative charge, it repels.” For any particle, she suggests, “there’s 
something that it’s like for it to be attracted or repelled.” This 
attraction or repulsion is a minimal sense of wanting or not wanting.

“Cognition that’s really, really simple looks like physics to us,” Levin 
told me. For example, we typically assume a key feature of cognition is 
intentionality or freedom — being able to choose your own path, as 
opposed to proceeding down a preprogrammed path. Well, physics tells us 
that even elementary particles have that, in the simplest possible form: 
quantum indeterminacy (the idea that the physical facts of the universe 
seem to be indeterminate on the subatomic level).

In fact, if you ask Levin the classic question — How low can you go? Is 
there anything in the world that’s not somewhere on the spectrum of 
cognition? — he’ll tell you: “I don’t believe there is a zero in our world.”

He’s happy to acknowledge that the level of indeterminacy in an 
elementary particle is a “very stupid-low level of freedom,” but it’s 
not nothing. And that’s all the panpsychist needs in order to explain 
consciousness as a simple story of scaling. Once upon a time, there was 
a little particle that was a little bit conscious. It got together with 
more particles, and they formed a cell that was a little bit more 
conscious. It got together with more cells, and they formed an animal 
that was even more conscious…

The biggest challenge to panpsychism: the combination problem


But wait a second. There’s a problem for the panpsychist here. If the 
tiniest particles have conscious experiences, how exactly do they 
combine to produce a more complex thing with its own conscious 
experience? What's more, how do we explain things like tables or chairs? 
Panpsychists generally do not argue that those things are conscious 
subjects — but how do we explain why they aren’t, while the collection 
of atoms known as a human is?

This is known as the “combination problem,” and it’s typically seen as 
the biggest challenge to panpsychism. Any panpsychist owes you an 
explanation of why they think the littlest bits are conscious, and 
humans are conscious, but the table is not.

Our old friend Giordano Bruno anticipated this way back in the 16th 
century. He argued that even though the tiniest “corpuscles” inside a 
table are conscious, they do not produce a unified conscious subject 
when they come together in the form of an inorganic object. “I say, 
then, that the table is not animated as a table, nor are the clothes as 
clothes,” he wrote, but “in all things there is spirit, and there is not 
the least corpuscle that does not contain within itself some portion 
that may animate it.”

Panpsychists like Leidenhag make the same move today. “I think it 
follows our intuitions to say that a table isn't conscious because the 
parts are not interacting together — there's no real unity going on with 
a table,” she told me. “Whereas with a plant, there really is clear unity.”

In other words, a plant is a goal-directed system with unity of purpose. 
Its parts are all working together as a team to perform the essential 
processes that keep the system running. That’s very different from a 
table, where particles are squished together but are not collaborating.


That sounded to me like Leidenhag was saying that the table is not 
conscious because it’s not alive. So I asked her if she thinks that 
aliveness and consciousness are one and the same.

“What I would say is aliveness is one name for the process by which 
conscious parts unify to form new conscious wholes,” she replied. “So I 
could say that a single electron is not alive, but it is conscious. And 
when it is part of a living system, it creates a bigger consciousness.”

Leidenhag acknowledges that she can’t prove an electron is conscious — 
or that panpsychism is right about consciousness. But, she told me, “I 
think it's the most plausible of a bunch of implausible views about 
consciousness.”

Strawson said the same thing. “It's the least worst view,” he laughed.

Here’s the really funny thing: Panpsychists and materialists will both 
concede that they can’t disprove the other camp’s view, because we don’t 
have definitive evidence either way. Yet both believe their own view is 
the simplest and likeliest explanation — the most “parsimonious,” as 
Strawson and Seth each told me.

Panpsychism has the advantage of letting us sidestep the hard problem. 
But materialism has an advantage, too: no combination problem. So, does 
one come out ahead?

The difference between them may be more methodological than anything 
else. Materialism restricts itself to what it can establish empirically, 
testable detail by testable detail, with the hope of groping its way 
toward a broad theoretical framework. Panpsychism has historically let 
itself dream big, starting out with the broad theory and hoping to fill 
in the details later. What’s exciting is that scientists like Levin are 
now combining the methodology of materialism with the theory of 
panpsychism, seeing how they might fit together. These scientists are 
digging right underneath the wall that was erected in the 17th century — 
the one that split matter from mind. Where that will lead is anyone’s guess.

What are the ethical implications? Does panpsychism mean I can’t eat 
anything?


A few years ago, I was chatting about panpsychism with a friend. I 
mentioned that I don’t know if the theory is true, but I hope it is. 
When my friend asked why, I said simply, “So many little buddies 
everywhere!”

To me, panpsychism offered an enchanted view of the world. I suspected 
that if it were the prevailing view, people might be less likely to feel 
lonely or to destroy nature, because they’d see kin everywhere.

But my friend had a totally different reaction. He was horrified by the 
idea of panpsychism. “Think of how much suffering there could be in the 
world!” he said.

His reaction points to the big ethical question looming over 
panpsychism: If it’s right, then how the hell are we supposed to live? 
If everything is conscious, then can we not eat anything?

RELATED:Should animals, plants, and robots have the same rights as you?


For one thing, panpsychism doesn’t argue that everything is equally 
conscious. Different things are conscious to different degrees, so we 
might feel different levels of moral obligation to them.

“It has made me a more committed vegetarian because it’s just made me 
more sensitive to the consciousness of other creatures. It forces you to 
think about your moral reasoning,” Leidenhag told me. But, she added, “I 
don’t think that it makes it impossible for you to go about your life 
consuming things.”

While the consciousness of a given creature may matter a lot, morally 
speaking, lots of other things matter, too. Consider our relationship to 
the creature: Have we made it dependent on us by domesticating it, or 
does it live in the wild? Has it had the chance to live a full life? Is 
it fundamentally hostile to us? Bedbugs may have some degree of 
consciousness, but that doesn’t mean you’re a moral monster if you call 
an exterminator. Your own ability to survive and thrive is also part of 
the moral calculus. It’s probably inevitable that sometimes the 
interests of different conscious beings are going to be in tension with 
each other, or flat-out incompatible; when that happens, we have to make 
choices as best we can.

And what about some advanced artificial intelligence we may invent in 
the future? Could it become as conscious as a biological creature, 
despite being made of silicon? To a panpsychist, who believes there’s 
nothing about mind that requires organic matter — it’s in inorganic 
matter, too — the answer is yes.

“I think it’s nuts that people think that only the magic meanderings of 
evolution can somehow create minds,” Levin said. “In principle, there’s 
no reason why AI couldn’t be conscious.”

In that case, how should we think about our obligations to the vast 
spectrum of conscious beings that exist and might one day exist amongst 
us? Do we need to expand our moral circle — the imaginary boundary we 
draw around those we consider worthy of moral consideration?

“You could say the new Golden Rule is: Be nice to goal-directed 
systems,” Levin said. “It’s actually not that different from ‘treat thy 
neighbor as thyself.’ To the extent that that creature cares about what 
happens to it, you should care about what happens to it. Try to scale 
your compassion appropriately.”

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