The belief that consciousness or awareness is
fundamental to reality is an ancient philosophical idea. It can be found in the writings of
many eastern and contemplative traditions, such as buddhism and hinduism as well as in
western traditions such as in the philosophy of ancient greece in platonic idealism. A
fundamentality of consciousness in reality is a metaphysical position that has been defended
throughout history by scholars and sages alike. And in various interesting cases, driven
not by ideological or religious convictions but by philosophical deduction, introspection, and
ontological parsimony. Before we continue we need to define consciousness. When we think of our own
consciousness many things may come to mind: Our senses of sight and taste, smell and touch, our
rich palate of emotions, or our ability to think about concepts and ideas. To philosophers however,
the word consciousness can be simply defined as experience. It is commonly said that something is
conscious if there is something it is like to be that thing, no matter how simple or sophisticated
that experience might be. It is in this way that we will be using the word consciousness today.
In recent decades the idea that consciousness is a fundamental element of reality has made an
unexpected return to Western academic thought, enjoying a new credibility among respected
scientists and philosophers. It has been the subject of both popular and academic books,
philosophical papers, and scientific monographs. So why has this ancient and esoteric idea
returned to our modern thinking? Is it true and what might it mean for us? This is the story
of how consciousness in Western academic thought went from an insignificant illusion to a leading
candidate for the ultimate ground of existence. To understand the recent resurgence of fundamental
views of consciousness we need to first go back to the turn of the 20th century when a similar
flowering of such views was occurring in western philosophy. Our story begins with one
of the leading academic figures of that time, Bertrand Russell. A British polymath,
Russell's interests spanned philosophy, science, mathematics, and literature. And
yet it was Russell's philosophical work on the ancient mind-body problem, now
rediscovered by academics decades later, that has now sparked a renaissance in considering
a deep place for consciousness in reality. In his 1927 book, "The Analysis of Matter" Russell
focused on the enduring question of how mind relates to matter. He adopted a stance on
matter similar to that taken by earlier philosophers including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Immanuel Kant and later by Arthur Schopenhauer. These thinkers had argued that, in spite of
the richly detailed description of the world provided by physics, the physical account actually
offers no explanation of the nature of matter. The core of the position is that physics tells
us not what matter is but only what it does. Consider a particle. Physics tells us that
particles have the properties of mass, charge, and spin. Yet these properties tell us
only about how a particle will relate to its environment and nothing about the intrinsic nature
of the particle. --What it is in itself. This, it turns out, is true of everything that
physical science tells us about the world. In the popular understanding physical science
reveals the essential contents of reality, however in actuality, science reveals only behaviors and
relationships, what we might call "the causal structure of nature." And while it has proved
highly valuable in countless practical ways, the intrinsic nature of reality --what our physical
equations are actually describing, remains an unsolved mystery. As Russell writes, "We know
nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events." But does physics actually require
an intrinsic ground in order to be complete? Perhaps structure and relationship are simply
all there is to reality. This view however falls apart on closer inspection. As the philosopher
Hedda Hassel Mørch points out, "For there to be a relation there must be two things being related.
Otherwise the relation is empty --a show that goes on without performers or a castle constructed out
of thin air." She continues. "Physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or
substance that is itself not purely structural, otherwise there would be no clear difference
between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere
abstraction." This fact was not overlooked by the late, great physicist Stephen Hawking who
famously pointed out that we have no idea what it is that quote "breathes fire" into the equations
of physics and gives reality to the universe. It would seem that there must be some essential
ground to which our physical equations actually point. And without it, as Russell argued, our
account of reality will never be truly complete. After presenting this view on
matter Russell went on to observe that the elusive intrinsic nature of the
world is in a conspicuous way analogous to the mysterious reality of consciousness. --We know
that it's there and yet it stubbornly resists all attempts to capture it through objective or
behavioral processes. Russell argued that our epistemological blind spot in physics: To get
at the nature of what things are in themselves, is precisely the same reason that physical
approaches to consciousness seem doomed to fail. --Intrinsic natures simply cannot be captured
through a purely physical approach. Russell did not suggest that consciousness was the intrinsic
nature of reality but instead argued for a position that has become known as "neutral monism"
in which reality has a single underlying nature that is neither mental or physical but capable
of being expressed in these two different ways. Much like interiors and exteriors, in Russell's
account the mental and the physical imply and necessitate each other as reflections of
a single (hence monistic) underlying nature. In the 1920s Russell's arguments sparked interest
among several leading academics of the time, most notably in Arthur Eddington. Like Russell,
Eddington was another titan of early 20th century science. As a physicist and mathematician,
he was famous for demonstrating the validity of Einstein's theory of general relativity, by
setting up an ingenious experiment that involved the observation of stars as their light is
curved by the mass of the sun. Eddington was once heralded as one of only three people in the world
to truly understand Einstein's general relativity, and Einstein complemented his presentations on
the subject as the clearest in any language. But aside from his scientific
contributions, Eddington was also a celebrated philosopher of science
with a deep interest in the mind-body problem. In 1927, at the same time that Russell was
developing his neutral monism, Eddington was invited to give a series of lectures at Edinburgh
University in Scotland for the prestigious Gifford lectures -- a long-running annual event
considered by many to be among the highest honors in a philosopher's professional career. It was
in these lectures and then in his later writings that Eddington outlined a compelling solution
to the mind-body problem. It was a new synthesis of an ancient philosophical position known as
panpsychism -- a name given to views throughout history which place mind or consciousness
as a deep and ubiquitous feature of reality. In these lectures Eddington argued that
there is only one plausible candidate for the intrinsic nature of the physical world,
consciousness. Like Russell and others before him, Eddington recognized that science gives
no description of the intrinsic nature of the physical world. His primary contribution
however was to argue, convincingly to many, that consciousness is precisely the required
candidate to fill this awkward gap in our knowledge. Eddington put forward an argument for
panpsychism which is known today as "The Intrinsic Nature Argument." This argument, now recently
rediscovered, has seen panpsychism return as a respectable theory and a view that now enjoys
growing support from scientists and philosophers alike. To explain the intrinsic nature argument
we first begin with an account of consciousness. It is sometimes said that the existence
of consciousness is the one thing we know for sure about reality. Perhaps the most famous
philosophical dictum of all time is that of René Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." Whatever
we believe we may know about the outer universe, there is only one feature of reality that is
utterly invulnerable to any and all doubt, our consciousness. The world might be very different
to what our senses describe. Maybe we are a brain in a vat, or living in some kind of simulation,
maybe we're just dreaming. And yet for all of the ways we could be mistaken about reality,
we can be sure only that consciousness exists. But other than its existence what else do
we know about consciousness?Eddington argued that we know at least one thing concretely about
consciousness, --that it is an intrinsic nature. In our unmediated access to it, consciousness is
a reality that we apprehend directly and without inference. Consciousness exists uniquely to and
for itself. We might even go so far as to say that consciousness is the only part of reality
that we truly understand, because only in our consciousness do we have access to the intrinsic
nature of at least one small part of the universe. But why then believe consciousness could be the
intrinsic nature of all reality? As it turns out consciousness is both the only intrinsic nature
we know, or can conceive of. Only consciousness exists to and for itself and it would seem that
this same property is required to ground the physical world in reality. Previously Russell
had described our need for an account of the intrinsic qualities of physical events. And yet it
would seem that qualities are the exclusive domain of consciousness. Many philosophers, past
and present, have argued that a true account of consciousness requires an expansion of our
physical picture of nature, and according to the intrinsic nature argument, physics calls for
precisely this expansion in order to be complete. For these reasons Eddington regarded nature's
grounding interiority as a perfect candidate for the otherwise mysterious interiority of our minds.
Through this approach, mind and matter could be unified, the interaction problems of dualism could
be averted, and the elegant economic ontology of monism could be restored. As Eddington concluded,
(quote) "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be
the stuff of our consciousness." (end quote) ~An Idea Lost to History~ It is arguably due
to the turbulent events of the 20th century that this earlier flowering of panpsychism
came to an end. In the wake of the first world war a dramatic shift took place in analytic
philosophy. With the rise of Logical Positivism academics argued that philosophy must now
dispense with metaphysical musings about the nature of reality and earn its keep by
providing actionable contributions to science. A consequence was that introspective and intuitive
knowledge was sidelined and not surprisingly, the question of consciousness once again faded into
the background. During this time another similar development was also underway in psychology
with the rise of Behaviorism. With hopes of finally achieving the status of the hard sciences
B.F Skinner and other influential psychologists directed the powerful objectivity of empiricism
to human behavior. With great ambition psychologists now predicted that every datum
of the mind could be entirely understood by reduction to environmental inputs and behavioral
outputs. For decades in the field of psychology, even mentioning consciousness raised eyebrows. As
the field advanced however, it became increasingly clear that denying mental states left out the
true essence of psychology; sensations, emotions, feelings, and desires -- these were what made us
who we are as living beings with conscious minds. While in some relative obscurity consciousness
continued to be discussed by philosophers, it wasn't until the 1980s that consciousness
re-entered the broader academic discussion. In the late 1950s the biologist Francis Crick
shot to fame for his role in discovering the structure of DNA. With his place in the
pages of history secured, by the 1980s Crick hoped to surpass even this discovery
by solving that other great mystery of life, consciousness. Now, together with his colleague
neuroscientist Christof Koch, the two scientists announced the beginning of a new scientific
program dedicated to finally demonstrating how brains become conscious. Through their study
and the research it inspired a great many new discoveries about cognition and neuroanatomy were
made. And yet in spite of their achievements, how any quantitative description of the objective
processes of the brain could somehow lead to a qualitative description of subjective experiences
remained a mystery. It gradually dawned on them that any physical theory of consciousness is
forced to take no less than a leap of pure faith from the objectively physical to the subjectively
mental -- what the philosopher Joseph Levine had called "The Explanatory Gap." A century of
studying the brain had provided an impressive and extremely useful science of correlations.
We learnt the specific brain states associated with recognizing faces, solving problems,
feeling pleasure, pain, and excitement. Yet the central question remained: Exactly how
do physical brain states produce mental ones? In an important sense a century of neuroscience
had brought us no closer to understanding this mystery. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
reflected in an article for scientific american, (quote) "One question towers above all others in
the life sciences: How does the set of processes we call "mind" emerge from the activity
of the organ we call "brain." (end quote) The effort to understand the nature
of consciousness seemed once again to have encountered an impasse. And yet while
Crick and others collided with the ancient mind-body problem, several philosophers were now
rediscovering strands of Russell and Eddington's previous work. Among these philosophers were
Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, and William Seager. It seemed that between them,
Russell and Eddington had discovered an attractive middle path for solving what was now being called,
"The Hard Problem of Consciousness." While their approach had been convincing and influential
to several leading academics of the early 20th century, as neither a form of materialism or
dualism, the nuance of the Russell Eddington approach had been overlooked by much of the
mind-body debate of the time. Eventually it had been obscured by a turbulent century of great
wars and revolutions in psychology and philosophy which were hostile to the issue of consciousness
as a legitimate subject of inquiry. Now however, in the latter part of the 20th century, hostility
towards metaphysics had largely subsided, the limits of behaviorism had become obvious,
and the imposed restrictions on philosophy were challenged by a new generation of philosophers.
It was now finally becoming clear that purely behavioral or physical approaches could never
explain consciousness. A growing minority of first philosophers and later neuroscientists began
to argue that consciousness could never emerge from exclusively physical processes. That
consciousness, in some unrefined or proto-form, must exist inherently within the natural
world -- a fundamental aspect of reality. Space, time, mass, and charge are all
considered to be fundamental features of the world -- so called because they
cannot be defined by anything more basic. Historically the advancement of science
has always led to the introduction of new fundamentals and with them the expansion
of our scientific picture of the world. Now, for a small but growing cadre of thinkers, we are
now at another such critical moment in history, when a new fundamental must be recognized.
This time it is consciousness. Instead of being a field-specific problem in neuroscience,
the mind-body problem looks increasingly to be an issue that extends to our entire
understanding of the physical world. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, (quote)
"The mind-body problem is not just a local problem having to do with the relation between
mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms -- it invades our understanding of
the entire cosmos and its history." (end quote) While panpsychism has now returned as a
respectable theory it is not without its critics panpsychism, for many, is just too
weird to be true. And yet the weirdness of a theory is not evidence against it. Indeed
a similar association once cast a shadow over quantum physics, a field derided by Einstein
for its (quote) "Spooky actions at a distance." Today, quantum physics is widely regarded as
the most powerful physical theory ever conceived and its so-called spooky actions have been
widely demonstrated. Indeed Einstein's own theory of special relativity tells us that
time slows down for objects as they accelerate. --A scientifically demonstrable
fact that is at the same time profoundly counterintuitive, with no basis
in our ordinary experience of reality. The panpsychist view, that the interior quality of
our minds is continuous with the intrinsic inner nature of the world, might sound very strange
and yet history teaches us to keep an open mind to counter-intuitive theories and judge them
not by how they seem to us but by their elegance and explanatory power. To the panpsychist it is
materialism that is the unintelligible position. Through the Russell-Eddington approach we
can see that physics less reveals the nature of reality than it is silent on the question.
Taking its physical description as the totality of what exists begins to look like a classic
case of confusing the map with the territory, and the resulting materialism less an account of
the nature of reality than the absence of one. Now, to a growing number of
thinkers, only panpsychism unifies the mental and physical facts of existence
and places them in necessity of each other. Alongside concerns about the strangeness of this
view, there are common misconceptions about what panpsychism actually entails. If consciousness
is somehow fundamental, must we now believe that rocks, tables, and chairs have conscious minds? In
fact, no serious thinker has defended such claims. A complex mind requires a complex organization
with the specific capacity of aggregating a fundamental aspect of consciousness. There
are now several scientific theories which begin with a fundamental view of consciousness.
One such theory that has been widely discussed is Integrated Information Theory or "IIT."
Developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, IIT is considered by many to be the leading scientific
theory of consciousness today. It is also, conspicuously, a form of panpsychism. The theory
asserts that information, by its very nature, has both a physical and mental pole, and that when
information becomes integrated inside a system, an integrated consciousness emerges. In this
respect IIT is reminiscent of Russell's neutral monism where the physical and mental are unified
aspects of a more primary reality of information. Tononi and his colleagues have developed methods
for gauging the integrated information present in the brains of patients in their laboratory.
They appear to show that the presence of greater amounts of integrated information does indeed
correlate with the presence of consciousness. IIT also successfully predicts which centers
of the brain are associated with consciousness. For example, why the cortex is so
central to consciousness in humans even though it has far fewer neurons than the
cerebellum -- which can actually be removed with only minor disruption to consciousness.
The reason, according to iit, is that the neurons of this area are significantly
less integrated than those of the cortex. And this is precisely what examining the
neural structure of the cerebellum reveals, many more neurons than the cortex yet much less
integration between them. But Tononi's theory does not confine consciousness to brains. IIT
predicts that integrated information and therefore some amount of consciousness exists all around us
in all sorts of things. According to the theory, every living cell, every electronic circuit,
even a proton consisting of just three elementary particles, possesses something albeit but a
glimmer of consciousness. As Tononi has put it, (quote) "Consciousness is a fundamental
property like mass or charge. Wherever there is an entity with multiple states there is some
consciousness. You need a special structure to get a lot of it but consciousness is everywhere,
--it is a fundamental property." (end quote) Tononi's theory does have its critics,
including among supporters of panpsychism. For example, his theory takes no account of the
interconnected reality of the quantum world and some increasingly argue that quantum effects,
such as entanglement between brain processes, may yet be discovered to play an important role
in the unified nature of conscious minds. But whether or not IIT is correct, it successfully
demonstrated to the scientific community that testable forms of panpsychism can
be developed. It also revealed that such a theory could have extremely important
medical applications, such as determining if consciousness exists in unresponsive coma
patients, or the full effectivity of anesthetics. Philosophers at the Qualia Research Institute have
also thought deeply about the broader implications of Tononi's theory. According to the philosopher
Michael Johnson, IIT predicts that consciousness could exist far beyond the scale of humans
and animals and might in fact be present in massive cosmological phenomena. Black
holes, for example, the surfaces of which are predicted to contain massive amounts of integrated
information, could also have an enormous amount of consciousness. Johnson also tentatively
speculated that for the same reason, the Big Bang could itself have been a massive experience -- a
climax of cosmic symmetry echoing into infinity. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, who
began his career as a materialist working alongside Francis Crick, now takes
panpsychism very seriously. Describing his radical shift in perspective he writes, (quote)
"The entire cosmos is suffused with sentience. We are surrounded and immersed in consciousness.
It is in the air we breathe, the soil we tread on, the bacteria that colonize our intestines, and
the brain that enables us to think." (end quote) ~Panpsychism and the Combination Problem~ Perhaps the most credible challenge to panpsychism
is what is known as "the combination problem." This challenge to panpsychism was first raised
over a century ago by one of the founders of modern psychology, William James. While James
himself was actually an advocate of panpsychism, he pointed out that any panpsychist theory needs
to explain how more elemental conscious entities combine to create more sophisticated minds
like ours. But how could a conscious entity combine with another? As the philosopher Sam
Coleman has pointed out, it is the essence of a conscious entity to have a specific viewpoint that
excludes other viewpoints. Under this definition it's very difficult to conceive how multiple
simple conscious entities could combine to become one. For its critics the combination problem
serves as a decisive refutation to panpsychism perhaps equally insurmountable as the hard problem
of consciousness itself. And yet as defenders of panpsychism have pointed out, we already have
highly convincing evidence that mental combination does occur. The best example comes from
neuroscience. Many experiments have shown that under specific circumstances, the two hemispheres
of the brain can become isolated from each other. In such "split brain" cases a fascinating
observation is made, --each of the two separate hemispheres appears to have their
own separate consciousness, capable of very different personalities and desiring very
different things. Reconnect the hemispheres and these two minds apparently merge to create
our normal awareness. Such split brain cases reveal, at least in principle, that conscious
entities can combine to create larger minds. Explaining exactly how this occurs would be a
task for a future science of consciousness, and yet the fact that mental combination takes place
would appear to have already been demonstrated. ~Cosmic Mind~ Historically panpsychists
have attributed consciousness or mentality to nature's fundamental entities. But what if
the most fundamental entity is not a particle but the universe itself? Philip Goff has pointed
out that our historical tendency to view smaller things as more fundamental might be a mere
assumption -- a tendency known as "Smallism." Developing on a view known as "Priority
Monism" goth argues that we might equally take the universe itself as the
primary ontological primitive. After all, it seems quite natural to see the
universe itself as the most fundamental reality. Goff offers a version of panpsychism he calls
"Cosmopsychism" in which the universe itself may be the subject of a singular consciousness that
is refracted into individual minds like our own. After all if panpsychist theories are
to take account of modern physics, they must transcend the atomistic
thinking of previous centuries and now accommodate the holistic fabric of reality
revealed in the quantum. Might the probabilistic field that underpins classical reality now be
thought of as perturbations in consciousness? That they are, as the philosopher Andrés
Gómez Emilsson has put it, "Fields of qualia." In Bertrand Russell's early work he had
been highly critical of a position known as "Ontological idealism," a philosophical view
in which the physical world consists entirely of projections in consciousness.
And yet the species of panpsychism developed from his later work in some ways
has a lot in common with ontological idealism. In very general terms panpsychism argues that
the physical world contains a fundamental aspect of consciousness. Ontological idealism on the
other hand views a fundamental consciousness as containing the physical world. Through this
framing we can see that the two positions are split on the issue of whether consciousness
contains the world, or vice versa. And yet the real difference between these views may come
down to little more than a matter of perspective. -That just like interiors and exteriors, mind
and matter imply and necessitate each other. Indeed, it has often gone unrecognized that the
modern Russell-Eddington pansychism is itself a form of idealism. The apparent
conflict between panpsychism and idealism might be just a matter of from which side
we choose to begin. Ontological idealism has often been criticized for failing to grant
sufficient reality to the physical world, and for failing to account for the deep regularity
between our individual perceptions of nature --why the world is so consistent and predictable.
The emerging panpsychism on the other hand, preserves our highly useful and detailed physical
description of nature yet grounds it in reality. It also finally offers an explanation for why
the physical world requires consciousness, as the essential realizer of physics and
the basis upon which anything at all exists. Past academic revolutions, such as the
discovery that Earth orbits the Sun, or that life evolved from a common ancestor,
re-situated our sense of place in the universe. During these times millions of people paused
in their lives and looked around them, and saw the world for the first time in a new way.
Many thinkers now believe that we are on the verge of another historic shift in our perspective.
Yet this time the proposed shift is different. It is an ontological revolution that could
not be more intimate to the core of our most inner sense of self. For over 300 years in the
West, reasonable minded thinkers have adopted a materialist view, in which a mature acceptance of
the received facts of science dispel all previous notions of human specialness or our centrality on
the cosmic stage. That we live in an arbitrary and unfeeling reality of inert physical laws, in
which we drift in an immeasurable cosmic void separate and isolated from each other and
from true reality. The compromise of this view and the strength it took to accept it were
seen as virtues in our promethean willingness to seek and face reality. Now, once more, it
seems that reality is yet stranger and deeper than previously imagined. But instead of further
decentralizing humanity and the conscious subject, the emerging view offers a break in this
tradition. It recasts the physical world, not as an inert matrix of matter, but as a
tapestry of qualities. And for the first time since the dawn of the Copernican revolution
our significance in reality is promoted. In the emerging view, consciousness -- the context
of all value, meaning, and significance is not an arbitrary illusion of biological evolution
-- it is core to the ground of existence. If consciousness is a fundamental property,
then in our most intimate and essential identity as conscious beings, we are continuous
with the essential nature of reality. More than ever we are at home in the universe,
as part of that tapestry of qualities and the intrinsic experiencing
aspect of the universe itself.
