panpsychism

https://www.noemamag.com/the-conscious-universe/ 

Derived from the Greek words pan (“all”) and psyche (“soul” or “mind”), panpsychism is the idea that consciousness — perhaps the most mysterious phenomenon we have yet come across — is not unique to the most complex organisms; it pervades the entire universe and is a fundamental feature of reality. “At a very basic level,” wrote the Canadian philosopher William Seager, “the world is awake.”

Plato and Aristotle had panpsychist beliefs, as did the Stoics. At the turn of the 12th century, the Christian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi was so convinced that everything was conscious that he tried speaking to flowers and preaching to birds. In fact, the history of thought is dotted with very clever people coming to this seemingly irrational conclusion. William James, the father of American psychology, was a panpsychist, as was the celebrated British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck once remarked in an interview, “I regard consciousness as fundamental.” Even the great inventor Thomas Edison had some panpsychist views, telling the poet George Parsons Lathrop: “It seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence.”

Philip Goff is one of a rising tide of thinkers around the world who have found themselves drawn back to this ancient theory. Spurred on by scientific breakthroughs, a lost argument from the 1920s and the encouraging way panpsychism is able to bypass the “hard problem” of consciousness, they are beginning to rebuild and remodel its intellectual foundations, transforming it into a strong candidate for the ultimate theory of reality.

In 1929, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget found that children between two and four years old are inclined to attribute consciousness to everything around them. A child can happily talk to a grasshopper and blame the pavement if they trip up, and it isn’t such an alien thought, at that age, to think a flower might feel the sunlight and perhaps even enjoy it. Fairy tales and children’s media are infused with animate worlds in which trees, animals and objects come to the aid or annoyance of a protagonist.

Eddington’s view, matter is the mystery; consciousness is the thing we understand better than anything else. The only matter we experience directly is the matter in our living brains, and we know that to be conscious. Therefore, we have good reason to believe that all matter is conscious. And while critics of panpsychism are quick to challenge its proponents to prove that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter, the panpsychists are equally poised to respond: prove that it isn’t.

As Eddington wrote in the conclusion to his book: “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” Consciousness didn’t emerge or flicker into existence; it has always been there — the intrinsic nature of us and everything around us. This is what breathes fire into the equations.

“For a panpsychist,” Goff said, “the story of physics is the story of consciousness. All there is is forms of consciousness, and physics tracks what they do.”