Yesterday I listened to Michael Shermer interview Philip Goff about his new book on panpsychism.
Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property.
I think about it this way.
If you start with the idea that matter only has the kinds of properties a physicist could measure, then consciousness becomes a very hard thing to explain. Protons have no consciousness. Rocks have no consciousness. A blade of grass has no consciousness. These things are just mechanical systems. So why, when a physical thing gets to a certain level of complexity — e.g., a dog, or a human — does it suddenly take on this additional property? It’s not clear there’s a point to having a subjective experience of the color red, and … actually, that’s beside the point in any event. What is the mechanism, in a purely physical world, for there even to be such a thing as a subjective experience?
It seems that if you start with “purely material” stuff and try to work your way up, consciousness is a difficult thing. That’s the so-called “hard problem of consciousness.”
But what if you go in the other direction? Rather than trying to build a conscious thing from unconscious parts, why not start with consciousness as a given? That’s the reality, after all. I know that I am conscious more surely than I know anything else in the world — more surely, certainly, than I know that a proton is not conscious, or even that a proton exists. (The idea that a proton has something like consciousness is certainly very weird.)
So as long as you can escape solipsism, it’s easy to move from there to the recognition that other humans are also conscious, and then you start to realize that apes have a sense of self, and even some birds (including crows, by the way!). Dogs have a more limited consciousness, etc., and as you work your way down, towards less complexity, you can see that fish have some level of consciousness, and so on. Maybe there’s some sense in which a jellyfish, or a tree, has some weird type of consciousness. And maybe, when a protozoa reacts to stimuli, it’s experiencing something remotely analogous to fear.
We’re raised on the idea that things like protozoa are just biological machines. But that assumption leads to the hard problem of consciousness. If we reject that assumption — if we say that something like consciousness is a fundamental property — does that eliminate the “hard problem”?
And what would it be like to live with that assumption? In the western world, we live with the assumption that things are mechanical. What would it be like to think that the universe, and everything in it, has something like consciousness?
It’s a very weird idea, but it’s possible there’s something to it. I think it needs a lot more work — e.g., if consciousness is a fundamental property, is a planet conscious, or only things that have certain types of complexity? And why would that be so?