LIFE at the moment seems full of questions where everyone has an opinion, but few can supply a convincing answer. By way of diversion, let us instead consider a question that invites few coherent opinions, but screams what seems to be a correct answer.
Ask “is the universe conscious?”, as we do on this week’s cover, and the brain-jerk answer is “no”. Consciousness is a case of the haves and have nots. Humans clearly have it; a rock, a star or other agglomeration of physical matter, such as the wider cosmos, doesn’t. The venerable philosophical idea of universal sentience, or “panpsychism”, says otherwise when it comes to inanimate things, but it seems to have no more place in modern science than a belief in fairies at the end of the garden.
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However, an enquiring mind does well to leave its intuitions at the door. How certain arrangements of matter such as the neuronal circuits in our brains give rise to felt experience, while others don’t, is a “hard problem”. It is difficult to set boundaries on consciousness when we don’t really know what it is. Does an octopus have it? A tree? A bacterium? A sentient robot?
“Mathematics has an extraordinary way of leading us to enlightenment by subverting our intuitions”
Propose that all matter has consciousness in some form, differing only in degree, and you go some way to setting aside such basic problems. That still isn’t an argument. But the realisation that our mathematically most mature theory of consciousness, integrated information theory, gives succour to panpsychism, could well be.
Mathematics has, in physicist Eugene Wigner’s phrase, shown an “unreasonable effectiveness” in tackling hard problems of science, and has been an extraordinary way of leading us to enlightenment by subverting intuitions. Just ask any student of quantum theory or relativity where those theories lie in relation to the grain of our brains.
Of course, there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamed of even in mathematical philosophy. It may be that, as a tool developed by consciousness, mathematics reaches a limit in describing the phenomenon itself. Who knows – but what a delightful distraction it is to consider such esoteric questions at a time like this.
