Ever thought about what consciousness actually is, where it comes from, why it makes us aware of being conscious?

Maybe you haven’t thought about stuff – it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. But have you ever thought about what has consciousness, and what doesn’t? Given that we have consciousness, it seems fairly logical that our closest animal relatives like chimpanzees and bonobos share this experience.

What about dogs? Does your pet dog have consciousness? It kind of seems so. Keep going down the line and the answer gets more and more blurry. Does a mouse have consciousness? An ant? A Venus fly trap? A tree? A fire? Where can we draw the line?

While it would be fun to explore the myriad of different theories and formulations that have attempted to unravel the mystery of consciousness, it would be a huge undertaking, and likely one that ends in the conclusion of ‘nobody knows’. Instead, I’ll explore one theory that I find particularly thought-provoking – panpsychism.

Panpsychism (translates to ‘mind is everywhere’) is basically a philosophical position that argues that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe, existing , to some degree, in all entities. This would mean not just humans, living animals, or the other things we assume to have consciousness, but everything – from a brick to a speck of dust to a distant star.

This seems weird – and a bit Star Wars ‘the force’-y. How can a brick have consciousness? However, an important distinction should be made. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness as an entity is fundamental and ubiquitous, however, the sophisticated thoughts that we attribute to being conscious are not.

If we accept that a dog has consciousness, for example, it’s reasonable to assume that its consciousness is less complex than ours. The subtlety and complexity of their emotional experiences, their capacity for introspection, and their conscious awareness of their environment, likely pale in comparison to ours (complexity-wise). Following this logic, as organisms become simpler, it may be that ‘consciousness’ never disappears entirely, but merely fades in complexity, extending to small animals, insects, plants, bacteria, even quarks and electrons.

It could be the case that there is a threshold where organisms of a certain complexity have consciousness and the rest do not. However, given our limited understanding of what this threshold may be and if it even exists, the panpsychist argument for a continuum of consciousness is plausible, albeit strange.

Two panpsychist arguments may convince you. First, despite all the miraculous advancements of neuroscience and neuroimaging techniques we remain clueless as to how the sensation of consciousness arises from neural activity. While this lack of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence for panpsychism, as David Chalmers famously argued, it highlights ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ – that physical mechanisms seem ill-suited to explain our subjective experiences. This doesn’t mean that panpsychism is incompatible with scientific understanding, just that our understanding of consciousness may require more fundamental, theoretical postulations. Think about how the notion of fundamental, universal electromagnetic forces were theorised to explain electromagnetic phenomena.

A second argument for panpsychism is that physics and its mathematical, causal explanations of the universe, may not be sufficient to grasp consciousness. It lacks the ability to explain abstract, qualitative concepts such as colours, tastes and other such phenomenological experiences. The causal structuralist view of the universe is that there is nothing more to the nature of any physical entity other than the way it behaves. There are a number of arguments against causal structuralist views of matter, but the majority come down to one thing – it tells us what matter does, but not what it is. It is in this theoretical gap where panpsychists seek to position themselves. For the panpsychist, consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter.

Our current ignorance regarding consciousness means the door is open to theoretical postulation. The current lack of evidence doesn’t mean that panpsychism is necessarily true. However, given the theoretical fog that shrouds our current understanding of consciousness, the panpsychist view may be a guiding light.