Everything from animals to plants to atoms has consciousness, a scientific theory that is gaining momentum
Eric Ralls
ByEric Ralls
Earth.com staff writer
Consciousness is usually treated as a human problem, tied to brains and behavior. Yet for centuries some thinkers have quietly asked whether experience might reach far beyond our skulls, right down to the building blocks of matter.
That radical possibility – panpsychism – holds that every bit of the universe possesses a flicker of experience, however faint.
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Interest in the idea has surged again as researchers wrestle with the “hard problem of consciousness,” the stubborn mystery of how physical stuff gives rise to subjective feeling.
If neurons alone cannot fully explain awareness, might awareness already be lurking everywhere, waiting to be arranged into minds like ours?
Panpsychism through the ages
The question is older than science itself. Thales of Miletus, puzzling over magnets in the 6th century B.C., claimed they must carry a soul because they move iron.
A generation later, Anaxagoras said that “everything contains a portion of mind,” foreshadowing today’s talk of micro-experiences combining into richer ones.
Greek Stoics spoke of the universe as a living creature animated by “logos,” the rational breath binding all things. This principle was thought to permeate all matter, giving rise to the interconnectedness of all things.
Plotinus kept the thread alive in late antiquity, arguing that the cosmos emanates from a single living “One.”
His influence resurfaced in the Renaissance when Giordano Bruno pictured an infinite universe teeming with worlds, each ensouled.
Such views clashed with the mechanistic models that soon powered modern science, but they never disappeared.
From magnets to monads
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes sliced mind from matter, pushing consciousness into an immaterial corner.
Even so, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz answered with “monads,” indivisible units that mirror the entire universe through their own tiny perception.
By the late 19th century, William James, Gustav Fechner, and Alfred North Whitehead were again arguing that feeling might be woven into nature’s fabric instead of perched on top of it.
Their intuition found fresh urgency once Charles Darwin showed that life, and by extension minds, evolve. If consciousness blooms gradually, perhaps it never strictly begins; perhaps it intensifies as matter organizes itself.
Science meets philosophy today
Modern neuroscience attacks the mystery head-on. Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin put forward Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in 2004, claiming that a system’s consciousness equals the amount of integrated information it generates, a value symbolized by “Φ.”
High Φ signals a richer, more unified experience; low Φ signals a dim one.
Crucially, IIT treats consciousness as “intrinsic and independent of external observers,” meaning it could arise in any structure – animal brains, artificial networks, or, in principle, a block of silicon – if the informational web is tight enough.
Researchers are now testing IIT’s predictions with brain-stimulation experiments and computer models.
Some early results suggest that loss of consciousness, as in deep anesthesia, coincides with a sharp drop in measurable integration. The data are tentative, but they push the theory beyond armchair speculation.
Inside information integration
IIT also tries to map the quality of experience: different shapes of integrated information should correspond to different qualia, the raw feelings of color, taste, or pain.
That ambition draws praise for its clarity and criticism for its boldness. Skeptics note the difficulty of calculating Φ in real systems and ask whether the math truly captures subjective life.
Yet the framework has already inspired machine-consciousness tests, raising practical as well as philosophical stakes.
If IIT holds up, panpsychism gains a scientific foothold, because the theory does not limit consciousness to biology. Wherever the right informational architecture appears, experience could spark.
Quantum puzzles and panpsychism
A more controversial route links mind to quantum mechanics.
Physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff propose the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, which places quantum computations inside neuronal microtubules.
When enough microtubules entangle, they say, an “objective reduction” occurs, collapsing superposed states and producing a moment of awareness shaped by “quantum gravity.”
Many biophysicists argue that brains are too warm and noisy for prolonged quantum coherence and that microtubules are unlikely qubit hosts.
Supporters counter with new work on room-temperature quantum effects in photosynthesis, suggesting nature might pull off similar tricks elsewhere.
So far, definitive evidence for Orch-OR is missing, but the debate keeps the link between physics and consciousness on the table.
Why does any of this matter?
Panpsychism alarms some thinkers who worry that ascribing feeling to atoms cheapens the concept of consciousness.
The main technical hurdle is the “combination problem”: even if electrons feel a whisper, how do countless whispers merge into the loud voice of human thought? No consensus mechanism exists.
Still, the position refuses to die because it offers a clean way around dualism. If experience is not tacked onto matter but rides with it from the start, the gap between mind and world may shrink.
Philosophers compare the shift to realizing that heat is molecular motion rather than an extra substance called caloric. Whether the analogy holds is an open question, yet it shows why the stakes are high.
What’s next for panpsychism?
Future progress will rely on sharper experiments and clearer concepts. Neuroscientists are refining Φ-based metrics, while physicists hunt quantum signatures in biology.
Philosophers, for their part, are re-examining ancient ideas with modern logic, asking whether panpsychism is a genuine explanation or a verbal sleight of hand.
Wherever the search leads, it forces us to face an unsettling possibility: consciousness might be less a rare jewel than a basic note in the cosmic score.
If so, the challenge is not to grant minds to stones but to understand how nature composes simple tones into the symphony we call waking life.
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