The Ubiquity of Consciousness and the Divine Mind

Panpsychism's relationship to pantheism

It’s worth noting from the start that I am not, at least for the moment, a committed panpsychist [Edit: I am now]. I am attracted to the idea, and have been exploring it as a real possibility, but the following is not a defence of panpsychism per se. I wish to explore some of the reasons one may embrace the idea and what inferences we can make from it. In particular, I want to explore the relationship between panpsychism and pantheism. Now, there are obviously ways to hold to panpsychism whilst not embracing pantheism, usually motivated by a desire to retain a strict naturalism, but I think more philosophers should be exploring this relationship. The following is only a cursory look which I may explore in detail in the future.

What is Pansychism?

To paint the metaphysical picture, I am going to quote Dr Philip Goff from his entry on panpsychism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Neuroscience has made great progress in uncovering the mechanisms in the brain that underlie our cognitive and behavioural functioning. But this form of scientific investigation has not produced anything approaching a satisfying explanation of why it is that a person has subjective experience, i.e., of why there is something that it’s like to be a human being. It seems that we can imagine a creature that was empirically indiscernible from a human being in terms of its physical brain processes and the behaviour they give rise to, but which had no experience whatsoever (it screams and runs away when you stick a knife in it, but it doesn’t actually feel pain). And it arguably follows that facts about physical brain processes and behaviour cannot explain, at least not in a transparent and satisfying manner, the reality of conscious experience. This is the problem David Chalmers famously named “the hard problem of consciousness”.”

Why does consciousness exist? How and why does conscious experience emerge out of an unconscious universe? Panpsychism seeks to solve this issue by positing that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. Seeing insurmountable problems with mind-body dualism and naturalism respectively, panpsychism is a monist metaphysics in which fundamental matter is consciousness.

Okay, but why would anyone believe this? Well it seems very difficult to reason to pansychism from empirical premises. The issue with consciousness is that prima facie, it is private and not publicly available. Usually, we only infer the existence of consciousnesses in others because we observe behaviours that correlate with our own conscious experiences. Rather, panpsychism is usually arrived at in an attempt to fix the problem with other theories.

On the one hand, mind-body dualism cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness as described by Goff above. It also fails to explain how or why immaterial consciousness correlates to, and interacts with, the material brain. On the other hand, materialism fails to account for the qualitative nature of conscious experience, nor why there seems to be an immaterial aspect of it. For example, I can’t cut open your brain and find the quality “redness”. Thus, panpsychism seeks to present an elegant solution to these problems.

What is Pantheism?

Pantheism is the view that God and the universe are identical, or so closely intertwined that we cannot draw a real distinction between the two. If one is confused about how this is distinct from classical theism (or panentheism for that matter), in which God is omnipresent, I would distinguish the two by saying that for the pantheist, unlike the classical theist, there is no sense in which God transcends or is ontologically separable from the universe. Pantheism isn’t just that God is in everything, but that God is everything. We’ll come back to this later, but for now, let’s explore panpsychism in more depth.

Are Rocks Conscious?

One of the questions that is regularly used to challenge the panpsychist perspective is; are inanimate objects conscious? Or to be more facetious; are my socks conscious? Are plants conscious? Are rocks conscious? Many philosophers who defend panpsychism usually want to avoid such conclusions, but I would unequivocally answer yes to these questions. This is based on the following metaphysical principles;

• Principle 1: Consciousness clearly exists in less complex forms in non-human animals, and so consciousness scales down in gradations.

• Principle 2: Consciousness exists in all matter and therefore all arrangements of matter must in some sense, be conscious.¹

• Principle 3: Consciousness exists in different forms depending on the material arrangement, and so observing behaviours that imply conscious experience is only helpful when identifying forms of consciousness similar to our own.

Principle 1 isn’t very controversial so I see no need to defend it here. Principle 2 is where most philosophers would pump the breaks. They might say that the rock isn’t conscious, but it’s constituent parts are. However, for those who would deny this premise, I would simply ask them why? Why do some combinations of matter give rise to more complex forms of consciousnesses but some don’t? This seems completely inexplicable. If we want to draw the line, we need to have good reason to do so. My contention would be that folks usually draw the line where they do because of behavioural observations. Rocks don’t behave like they are conscious, and so they aren’t.

Behold, a conscious rock!

Alternatively, as Dr John Vervaeke believes, some will argue there is something unique about the brain that allows for consciousness. Usually they point to the speed at which neurons interact as being a necessary feature of a mind. However, as my friend

Left Brain Mystic

points out in his article ‘God’s Eye’, this relies on the false assumption that there is a required speed for conscious integration. To quote Alex himself:

“Consider a galaxy. At 100,000 light-years across, any form of galactic consciousness would require at least this long to integrate information from its furthest points. From our perspective, such a system would appear impossibly slow—like trying to follow a conversation where each response takes 100,000 years. Yet from the galaxy's own frame of reference, this might be its natural rhythm of thought, as normal to it as our millisecond-scale neural firing is to us.”

This bring us to on to my third and final principle. For something to be conscious this simply means that there is something it is like to be that thing - a subjective experience. This does not imply however, that this subjective experience is anything like the human experience. This is exactly what Dr Thomas Nagel points out in his famous paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’. In that article, he says that:

“…bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.”

He goes on to say that essentially we have no way of knowing what it is for a bat to be a bat. We can only imagine what it would be like for us to be a bat. To me, this implies that there could be forms of consciousness so radically different from our own, we have no empirical way of recognising it as such.

Is the Universe Conscious?

If consciousness scales down, it must also scale up.² Interestingly, some panpsychists believe that the human mind is the top of said scale, but this seems to me totally arbitrary. So, what lies at the highest point of the scale? If the lowest point is fundamental particles, then when do we stop going up? Some people think that theism is the answer to this question, but every other form of consciousness we observe is made of matter. Thus, it seems that the highest point on the scale must be the sum of all material things; the universe itself.

One problem with pansychism in general, and the concept that the universe is conscious in particular, is known as the the combination problem. The question is, how do we combine more simple forms of consciousness, like particles, to create larger and more complex forms of consciousness, like the human mind. This is especially a problem when one starts with the rather scientistic assumption that reality can be best explained by reducing everything down to its smallest components. This might work for physics, but it doesn’t always work for philosophy.

Attempting to solve the combination problem seems impossible from the ground up. However, I think if we start from the assumption that the universe itself is conscious, then we can work from there to give an account of smaller forms of consciousness. In this account of panpsychism (commonly known as cosmopsychism), any particular localisation of consciousness (e.g. a human mind), is simply one aspect of a larger mind experiencing itself. To illustrate this, I turn to an analogy, usually associated with the Buddhist doctrine of anatman (no-self), of that of a whirlpool.

Imagine a whirlpool in a flowing river. The whirlpool seems to be distinct and identifiable from the river itself. It is a consistent pattern that retains a form of identity as it flows through the river. At the same time however, the water in the whirlpool is not entirely separate from, and is indeed made up of, the water of the river. The whirlpool is just a localisation of the river, such that it turns back on itself and sees itself in its own reflection. The whirlpool is a singular mind, and the river is the cosmic-consciousness. To quote Alan Watts; “You are the universe experiencing itself”.

Thus, it seems that for anything to be conscious, and to have any localisations of consciousness, the universe itself must be conscious. As Dr Bernardo Kastrup puts it, any localisation of consciousness is a dissociation from a greater whole. The universe therefore, must be conscious, otherwise there is no way of making sense of panpsychism in the first place.

Is the Universe God?

One thing I think points towards pantheism is the fact that many people seem to have spiritual experiences in nature. It is commonly said that nature is somewhere to go to unwind, find peace, and feel at one with the universe. Having said that, I don’t think we should embrace pantheism for vibes based reasons. I think we should embrace it because the universal consciousness fulfils a basic definition of God. By that I mean it has particular divine attributes.

• Eternal: If the the fundamental elements of reality are not something separate from the universe, but are the constituent parts of the universe itself, the universe must be metaphysically necessary, and therefore eternal.³

• Infinite: If the universe is eternal, it must stretch infinitely into the past and into the future, so is temporally infinite. If time is a 4th dimension, this means that the universe is also spatially infinite.⁴

• One: If the universe is God, and all is embraced within the cosmic-consciousness, then the universe is fundamentally one.

• Omniscient: If all facts exist within the universe, and the universe is conscious and thus has subjective experience, all facts are “known” to the universe through experience.⁵

• Omnipresent: If God is identical to the universe, then the universe is wholly present in itself. To suggest otherwise would be a logical contradiction.

• Omnipotent: If all things that are possible happen within the universe, all possible things will become actual, given an infinite amount of time. Thus, there is nothing the universe cannot do.

• Omnibenevolent: If all good things happen within the universe, and evil is just the privation of good, then the universe is ontologically good.

The only attribute that may be doubtful is the idea that the pantheist God is “personal” in some way. Nevertheless, if the above is true (which I would need a PhD length article to prove), I think that a conscious universe meets a minimum definition of God.

Conclusion

Hopefully, I have begun to show that panpsychism, conceptualised in a particular way, basically entails some form on pantheism. Now I am a bit of a newbie to panpsychism and I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the future, but for now I hope I have managed to communicate where my thinking is at the moment!

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1. I will admit that this leads to a sort of separation problem. How can we separate particular localisations of consciousness? I don’t have an easy answer at the moment but I think it has something to do with pantheism and mereological nihilism. I hope to address this more in the future.

2. In the Christian tradition for example, the planets and stars (the heavenly bodies) are associated with angelic consciousness.

3. If you think the big bang contradicts this, then one can just posit and eternal cycle of big bangs.

4. Whether this entails an actual infinite or merely a potential infinite is going to depend on which theory of time you accept.

5. This may be too controversial as it is only dealing with a particular type of knowledge. Its hard, maybe impossible, to say whether the universe can “know” things in the sense of holding a true fact in one’s mind.