Why Some Scientists Believe the Universe Is Conscious

Why Some Scientists Believe the Universe Is Conscious

by "News" apparently. 

That stuff, you may say, is a lot like Pareago’s odd stars in the Milky Way—pretty far out. But consider this: Some prominent neuroscientists, whom you might expect to be stark materialists, are also on board, including Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi.

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Koch and Tononi write cautiously but in an open-access research paper they acknowledge that their work “vindicates some panpsychist intuitions – consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental property, is graded, is common among biological organisms, and even some very simple systems have some” (2014).

In Tononi’s view, consciousness requires a special kind of space called qualia space: “A conscious experience is a maximally reduced conceptual structure in a space called ‘qualia space.’ Think of it as a shape. But not an ordinary shape — a shape seen from the inside.” These do not sound like materialist intuitions.

Respected philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the term hard problem of consciousness in 1995 because there were no good theories out there (and still aren’t), is sympathetic to panpsychism.

The main thing to see is that these prominent thinkers are driven to panpsychism because materialism about the mind doesn’t really work. So if panpsychism ends up seeming absurd, dualism—there really is an immaterial world—is also worth considering.

Of course Koch & Tononi aren't the only neuroscientists who question/reject materialism - a few immediately come to mind:

-Michael Egnor

-Raymond Tallis

-Sam Harris

[Laird]

Some interesting thoughts in especially that Michael Egnor post, Sci, re the distinction between that of our thought which is conscious and that which is unconscious. Thanks for sharing these.