[LINK] Is everything conscious?

[Stephen Loosley]

Tony, may one say, you make excellent points, "Until we can clearly define what we mean by consciousness we can't say whether rocks or trees are conscious."  

Seems to me, we humans are not much closer to truly understanding consciousness than we have ever been. But, must say, Vedanta ancient beliefs explain that electrons understand when they're being observed.

For example, https://www.longdom.org/open-access/proof-of-universal-consciousness-with-the-direction-of-energy-flow-63888.html

The word consciousness is Latin rooted cum means “with” and scio meaning “know”. The Latin sense of consciousness means to share knowledge with someone else or within oneself. Although consciousness doesn’t have a uniform science-accepted definition, we can say consciousness is awareness of internal and external existence.

It also frequently connotes the relationship between mind and a god, or relationships between mind and deeper truths that are thought to be fundamental than the physical world. It is the spectrum there are several conscious states between fully conscious and unconscious. In medicine the degree of consciousness is measured using Glasgow Coma Scale, with scores between 3 to 15 is given and the higher the consciousness higher the score.

Now, universal consciousness is a metaphysical concept suggesting an underlying essence of all being and becoming in the universe. We may say consciousness is an entity which knows or experience. The states of consciousness we may take Conscious, Subconscious and the Unconscious. But slightly different connotations are obtained in Mandukya Upanishad, as quoted by Schrödinger in the epilogue to his masterpiece ‘What is Life’. 

The Upanishad speaks about all three states as Waking state, the Dream state and the Deep Sleep state respectively, but also adds another most important state in which modern terminology we may call as super conscious, Where as an individual becomes one with universal.

Vedanta Philosophy

Vedanta is the most ancient religion of the world; Rig Veda is the oldest book in the world. Vedanta is not antagonistic to anything, though it does not give up truths which it considers fundamental. 

It does not believe in any of modern religious teachings. First it does not believe in a book, it denies the authority of one book over another book. It denies emphatically that any one book can contain all the truths about god, soul, and the ultimate reality. Those whom have read the Upanishads remember that they say again and again “Not by the reading of books can we realise the self.”

More interestingly it does not cling to any one person. Not one man or woman has ever become the object of worship among the Vedantins, it cannot be. No book, No particular man to worship, nothing. A man is no more worthy of worship of any bird or any worm. We are all same but the difference is only in degree. I am exactly same as the lowest worm. There is only little room in Vedanta for any man to stand ahead of us and for us to go and worship him- he dragging us on and we being saved by him.

Vedanta teaches democratic god, you have a government, but the government is impersonal. Nobody seems to understand that the real power, the real life, the real strength is in the unseen, the impersonal the nobody. As a mere person separated from others, you are nothing, but as an impersonal unit of the nation that rules itself, you are tremendous power, but where exactly the power? 

Each Man is the power. There is no king. I see everybody equally the same. I have not to take off my hat and bow down to anyone. Yet there is tremendous power in each man.

Vedanta is just that. Here in Vedanta the kings enter in every one of us.

We, and everything, are all gods notes the Vedanta.

And may seem indeed possible, one imagines?


________________________________________
From: Antony Barry <antonybbarry at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 8 October 2024 4:26 PM
To: Stephen Loosley
Cc: link at mailman.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [LINK] Is everything conscious?

My problem with this is that there is no clear definition of what consciousness is. Certainly, we need to predict the behavior of other animals. How will that tasty rabbit behave when I try to catch it? If the tiger likely to want to eat me. We need an insite into their minds. Perhaps consciousness is a recursive use of predicting behavior applied to yourself. Until we can clearly define what we mean by consciousness we can't say whether rocks or trees are conscious.

Tony

On Mon, Oct 7, 2024 at 10:49 PM Stephen Loosley wrote:

`
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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