Consciousness - fundamental and universal - Lent 2022: Day 31

Science is split. There are scientists who believe that consciousness is an emergent property of matter (life emerged from complex molecules; natural selection favoured life-forms that had evolved some form of consciousness in their brains). And there are those who believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter (along with mass and charge, and that along with size and complexity, consciousness grows in sophistication).

Neither proposition is one that can be falsified; arguments for consciousness as a fundamental property tend to be philosophical in nature. And consciousness as emergent property of evolution is also a hypothesis, albeit one that most scientists feel more comfortable with.

So - either consciousness sits at the apex of All That There Is - a property of the most complex thing we know of in the entire universe (the human brain) - or it is the base substrate of All That There Is, consciousness everywhere, filling the void between electron and nucleus, filling the void between molecules, filling the void between galaxies.

For me, it boils down to a belief thing - at the Planck scale (where things cannot get any smaller), do discrete, granular units of consciousness coexist with matter, making it aware of its own existence? Or is consciousness even more basic than that - a background filling all of spacetime? Observing, as it were, reality into existence? Panpsychism. As matter coalesces into ever-more complex atoms and molecules, so consciousness grows in scale. At the higher end - us; feeling, subjectively experiencing consciousness - what it is to be alive, to learn, to grow, to be mortal.

The debate within the scientific community with regard the nature of consciousness is polarised. It is difficult to stay neutral. A Venn diagram would clearly show a correlation between atheism and materialism and emergent property vs some form of belief in the metaphysical and fundamental property. The materialists' main argument against the panpsychists is lack of scientific rigour in presenting the evidence; the panpsychists' main argument against the materialists is merely emotional.

Consciousness, something that randomly evolved within the brains of higher-order animals on our planet in response to environmental stimuli? Or a phenomenon that pervades the entire universe? Something confined to our skulls - or present everywhere?

The acknowledged (by the US military) presence of unknown craft within our atmosphere that seem to demonstrate engineering beyond our current understanding of physics really shakes things up. A new paradigm shift may yet be unravelling. This may have the most profound implications for our study of consciousness, our understanding of the Cosmos and our place within it.

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