What is Consciousness? By Brian Simpson
Philosophers, cognitive psychologists and even theologians, have wrestled with the problem of the nature of consciousness for at least two thousand years. How is it that something like desires, beliefs, and intentionality - the mental domain - exist in a material world? There have been various answers to this, with most philosophers today going the way of materialism, that the mind and its contents is just the brain, a purely physical thing.
But this view has been under challenge, since the reductionist position seems to throw the mental baby out with the physical bath water, if I have got the metaphor correct. Some bold thinkers have felt that the only real solution to the mind-body problem is to accept that mind is a fundamental part of nature, and thus, that not only animals, but even things like the sun, and perhaps subatomic particles, have some sort of proto-consciousness! This issue has gained public attention with speculation by neuroscientist Christof Koch, who argued in Scientific American that if matter can form into human bodies and become conscious, then there no good reason why elementary particles don't have consciousness as well.
The problem here, as with most speculative philosophy, is that the hypothesis, known as panpsychism, does not solve the mind-body problem. What it does is replicate the problem now for everything, and that is not a solution. What exactly is the consciousness of a particle like a quark (the supposed building blocks of matter)? No-one knows. And as well, panpsychism makes the problem of other minds, justifying why particulars are conscious, and how exactly do we know this, totally unsolvable, since now one needs to apply it to the universe itself.
Philosophy is certainly a bit crazy, and too much of it can make one unhinged, even leading to losing one's "mind"!
"A bong rip of a theory suggests that all matter possesses some form of mind or consciousness, not just animals — including, as one biologist suggests, the Sun itself.
In a fascinating dive into the hypothesis, which adherents call "panpsychism," Popular Mechanics reports that this out-there concept has existed for thousands of years, and in its more crystallized form has been bubbling around for the last few hundred years.
Though inklings of similar thought had existed since ancient Greece, the term "panpsychism" was, as the report explains, coined in the 16th century by Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi. Though it enjoyed 19th century credibility when the psychology superstar Williams James publicly ascribed to it, the theory was veritably killed in the 1920s by the Vienna Circle when its "logical positivism" — the idea that philosophical questions must have logical answers — took hold of the philosophical world.
Fast forward to the year 2004, when another Italian, the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, proposed what he called the "integrated information theory of consciousness," which suggests that consciousness is, essentially, almost everywhere. By and by, a sort of panpsychist renaissance began to take place, and in 2014 — nearly 100 years after the Vienna Circle killed the feel-good theory — the respected neuroscientist Christof Koch argued in Scientific American that if lumps of matter can form into human bodies and become conscious, there's no reason that groups of elementary particles couldn't either.
Sun Salutation
While AI pioneer and fashion-forward hat-wearer Ben Goertzel has been an adherent since at least '04, perhaps one of the most compelling instances of panpsychist thought came in 2021, when biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake published a paper questioning whether the Sun itself might be conscious.
"Consciousness does not need to be confined to brains," Sheldrake told Popular Mechanics in its new story. "The link between minds and physical systems seems to be through rhythmic electromagnetic fields, which of course are present in our brains. They are also present in and around the Sun, and these could be the interface between the solar mind and the body of the Sun."
To be fair, there isn't a lick of evidence of support this theory. And Sheldrake is a peculiar character; he does hold a PhD in biochemistry, and he did research at Cambridge University in the 1970s. But since then he's been drawn to a variety of extremely out-there topics ranging from crystals to telepathy, and been largely dismissed in the mainstream.
Still, it's a fun idea in a sci-fi type of way. The Sun is a complex system; maybe it harbors mysteries we haven't yet comprehended.
And say the whole thing is somehow true — if so, what would the Sun think about?
"It may be able to choose in which direction to send out solar flares or coronal mass ejections," Sheldrake mused to PopMech, "which can have an enormous effect on life on Earth, and to which our technologies are very vulnerable."
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