Panpsychism

At the outer frontier of modern science, a very provocative question is being asked: Are human beings special with regards to consciousness? Or is consciousness the default state of being for everything that exists? Scientists increasingly believe the universe itself in its entirety may be conscious.

The theory of panpsychism posits that mind is a fundamental property of the physical universe and is imbued into all states of matter. The cosmos has a mind... a cosmic mind.

Minds are conscious. Minds are conscious even when they appear to an external observer to be unconscious. You look at someone. He is asleep and snoring. Where has his mind gone? His mind hasn't gone anywhere. The man has still got a mind. His mind is just conscious in a different kind of way when he's asleep than it is when he's awake.

The physicist Gregory Matloff thinks that it is possible to design experimental tests which could validate or falsify the idea that there is a ubiquitous proto-consciousness field in the universe. Matloff also suggests that stars may be volitional. There is evidence that they control their own paths of movement through space.

Absurd as the theory of panpsychism sounds to many, it has several prominent adherents. The British theoretical physicist Roger Penrose introduced the idea three decades ago. Penrose thought that consciousness arises from the properties of quantum entanglement. He and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff came up with the Orchestrated Objective Reduction hypothesis, suggesting, among other things, that consciousness results from quantum vibrations inside microtubules.

In 2006, the German astrophysicist Bernard Haisch took the idea further. He proposed that consciousness arises within a quantum vacuum any time there is a significantly advanced system through which energy flows.

The neuroscientist Christof Koch is another proponent of panpsychism. He approaches it from a different angle, using integrated information theory to argue that consciousness is not unique to biological organisms. Koch is approaching the experimental phase of the theory by using brain-impaired patients. He wants to know if these people's information responses match underlying neurochemical foundations of consciousness. Koch plans to test this by wiring the brains of mice together to see if their minds merge into a larger information system.

“The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity; with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate,” Koch says. “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”

Matloff and others are now moving the argument into a new phase: experimentation. Matloff is planning to study the behavior of stars. In particular, he wants to analyze an anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. Matloff wants to know why certain cooler stars appear to emit jets of energy pointed exclusively in one direction. This is a phenomenon which seems oddly and inexplicably ubiquitous in the galaxy. He plans to use results from the Gaia star-mapping space telescope to show that the apparent anomaly may in fact be a deliberate (wilful) stellar action.

Along with Gregory Matloff, Roger Penrose and an increasing number of other associated free-thinkers continue to venture outside the margins of accepted science in their efforts to reconcile the intractable contradictions and anomalies increasingly being exposed by quantum theory.

Adapted from an article by Jake Anderson at theantimedia.com on June 28, 2017