Is Consciousness Everywhere?

"Is consciousness everywhere? In every rock and atom? That is what panpsychists like the philosopher Philip Goff believe. They urge us to revolutionize or abandon physics itself to accommodate consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality. This view will sound absurd to most readers, yet it has gained surprising attention over the past decade. The attention puzzles me until I remind myself that we have seen this pattern before."

"When progress in Darwinian biology threatened cherished beliefs about human uniqueness and about our special place in nature, creationists urged us to reject Darwin rather than accept that we are continuous with nature. The fact that science slowly unearths more details about our evolutionary origins, rather than revealing them in one simple stroke, as if our history could be told on a single page, was taken as a reason to reject evolutionary biology wholesale."

"We know that scientific evidence is frequently discounted when it conflicts with cherished beliefs. Panpsychism, unfortunately, follows the same logic as earlier creationism. Consciousness is treated as something magical, to be admired rather than explained, lest scientific reduction rob it of the spiritual significance that draws people to popular books on consciousness, meditation retreats, and even psychedelic drugs. The observation that consciousness is still an ongoing scientific issue, rather than a completely resolved one, is taken to imply that science cannot explain consciousness at all..."

Panpsychism proposes that consciousness exists throughout the physical world, including rocks and atoms, and urges changes to physics to treat consciousness as fundamental. The position has gained attention despite seeming absurd to many, echoing past resistance to Darwinian biology when scientific findings challenged beliefs about human uniqueness. Some individuals discount scientific evidence that conflicts with cherished beliefs and prefer treating consciousness as mystical to preserve spiritual significance linked to meditation, books, and psychedelics. Ongoing scientific uncertainty about consciousness is sometimes interpreted as evidence that science cannot explain it, even as researchers continue to learn more about consciousness and its mechanisms.

Read at Psychology Today