Having explored consciousness as we perceive it, I want to push the boundaries further in terms of what else could be considered conscious. We know we are. Pet owners know their cats and dogs are. Dolphins, octopuses and crows are. We know this from their behaviour. Rodents? Hard to deny. But further down the food chain?
If we acknowledge panpsychism to be a credible philosophical position, the idea that it's consciousness all the way down to the smallest particle must be taken seriously.
"But is a rock conscious?" the sceptic may well ask. "Go on then – ask it." "Are you aware that you are a rock?" No answer.
But consider the quark, deciding whether to spin up or spin down. Has it agency? Is there will at the subatomic level? What's quantum entanglement all about? Is it just random spooky action at a distance? Do atoms have any say in which molecular bonds they end up?
We need to take an imaginary jump and look at the way matter organises itself. A carbon atom may indeed find itself part of a rock. Alternatively, it may find itself part of a living cell, as part of a molecule of protein. Did it have any choice in that?
One boundary for consciousness may be that between life and non-life. You may reasonably posit that if an organism can metabolise, grow, reproduce and respond to stimuli, even it is monocellular, if may be aware. Returning to the rock, it is organised out of atoms and molecules, like a monocellular life form, but without the hallmarks of life.
Now, let's zoom right out.
Rupert Sheldrake has long held that the Sun, for example, is conscious. It's less ridiculous a proposition than might appear at first sight. Famously, J.M.W. Turner's last words were: "The Sun is God". The religions of ancient civilisations deified the Sun. A conscious Sun, says Sheldrake, benignly brings us warmth and light, while steering mass coronal ejections away from our planet that's come to depend on electronics. A conscious Sun that's part of our conscious Milky Way galaxy, within a conscious Universe. God in All, All in God. Possessed of an Ultimate Purpose.
When the sun shines (which at the moment it isn't), my mind is brighter, sharper; thought and consciousness runs deeper, qualia moments are recorded and flash back more frequently and more vividly than when I'm under cloud cover. In sunlight, I'm in an altered state. But should I live in a country where the sun shines all the time, this effect would quickly be muted, becoming commonplace. I live (and have lived) in a country where sunlight is at a premium, and is appreciated.
More controversially, I am noticing a correlation between vivid dreams and cloudless nights. This suggests that it's more than just photons striking my retina and exciting greater neuronal activity; it suggests neutrinos flying through the earth and interacting with my brain. More controversially still, there are the Kordylewski clouds (discovered by Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1966); concentrations of interplanetary dust orbiting the Earth along the same path as the moon, on either side of it (below, courtesy of Wikipedia) at the Lagrangian points L4 and L5, where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun are in equilibrium. [Many people first became aware of Lagrangian points when the James Webb Space Telescope was positioned at the L2 point, beyond the far side of the moon, in early 2022.]
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