Human Consciousness Is an Illusion, Scientists Say

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The entire universe may have an internal mind—or the whole idea of consciousness could be a sham. Here’s why scientists still can’t agree.

BY STAV DIMITROPOULOS

HOW WOULD YOU REACT TO THE THOUGHT that the very chair you’re sitting in is made up of tiny particles that harness some type of rudimentary experience? Actually, how would you feel if we told you that the potted flower next to your chair, as well as your brain and the four walls surrounding you, possess an internal mind? What if the world around you was not an inanimate stage, upon which you, the owner of a soul, played the lead role, but was instead fully awake—just like you? This is called “panpsychism,” or the theory that everything has a mind or a mind-like quality.

The concept of panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years. Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi coined the term in the late 16th century. He combined the Greek words παν (pronounced “pan,” and meaning everything) and ψυχή (psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind”) to describe a distinctive soulfulness inherent to each and every order of creation. The idea dates back even further, though, to ancient Greece, when astronomer, mathematician, and pre-Socratic philosopher Thales said “that everything is full of gods,” and one of the world’s best-studied philosophers, Plato, said that the world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence.

In the 19th century, panpsychism took off in the West, championed by the likes of the great philosopher of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the father of modern psychology, William James. Then came the philosophical movement that emerged in Vienna, Italy, in the 1920s, called logical positivism: the idea that scientific knowledge—empirically proven knowledge—was the only kind of acceptable knowledge, the rest being metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. It was game over for panpsychism.

Until recently.

The inability of empirical sciences to figure out why and how matter gives rise to the experiences of consciousness has recently rekindled an interest in panpsychism. So have developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics.

In 2004, Italian neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, Ph.D., proposed the integrated information theory of consciousness, which says that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems. In his article in Scientific American, leading American neuroscientist Christof Koch, Ph.D., bashed materialism and its view of emerging consciousness 10 years later. The notion of subjective feelings springing from physical stuff is at odds with a commonly applied axiom in philosophy and modern science: the “ex nihilo nihil fit,” or that “out of nothing, nothing comes,” Koch wrote. He argued that elementary particles either have some charge, or they have none; similarly, where there are organized lumps of matter, consciousness follows.

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“Consciousness doesn’t exist, and we only think it does because we are under a sort of illusion about our own minds.”

Not everyone agrees though. Keith Frankish, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, believes today’s panpsychism is in a “metaphysical limbo,” a direct result of what he calls the “depsychologization of consciousness.” This means that we try to grasp consciousness through what our senses perceive or through our immediate experiences, and that we refuse to acknowledge it as a psychological function. “The thought is that, if consciousness is not essentially connected to brain processes, then there’s no reason to think it must be restricted to brains. Maybe everything has a little inner glow to it, ” Frankish says. But it is exactly this view that tends to undermine the significance of consciousness. “If my consciousness makes no difference to how I react, why should I or anyone else care about it?” he asks. Frankish proposes a mirror image of panpsychism.

“Whereas panpsychists think that consciousness is everywhere, I think that consciousness—of the non-functional, inner glow kind—is nowhere,” he explains. “Consciousness doesn’t exist, and we only think it does because we are under a sort of illusion about our own minds, a view I call illusionism,” he continues. In other words, we humans have vastly extended the power of our biological brains and, through powerful tricks like self-manipulation or solid problem-solving skills, we have convinced ourselves we have a unified, conscious mind, a self, a soul—but it’s all an illusion, according to Frankish.

But illusionism is a view antithetical to what well-known biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., believes. For Sheldrake, it’s an irrefutable fact that not only do we humans have consciousness, but the whole galaxy has consciousness, too. Sheldrake is best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, a process through which self-organizing systems (picture termite colonies or insulin molecules) inherit a memory from previous, similar systems. Similar organisms share mysterious telepathic interconnections, and species share collective memories: this is how your dog foretells when you’re coming home and why you feel awkward when someone is staring at you, according to Sheldrake. In a paper he published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2021, Sheldrake asked “Is the sun conscious?” For him, it most certainly is…

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https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61208306/is-consciousness-real/

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