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HALDANE -If consciousness were not present in matter, this would imply a theory of strong emergence that
is fundamentally anti-scientific. Such emergence is “radically opposed to the spirit of science,
which has always attempted to explain the complex in terms of the simple. . . . If the scientific
point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them [signs of consciousness in inert matter], at
least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”
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Skrbina walks the reader through more than three hundred years of
contemplations by scientists—from Johannes Kepler to Roger Penrose—
who take a scientific approach to panpsychism, many of whom arrive at the
conclusion that the simplest explanation of consciousness is in fact a
panpsychic one.
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| Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing the monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward." |
| - C. S. LEWIS A SWDOD When stars get very old, eventually they run out of free protons and their cores start filling up with an ash of fused protons—in other words, helium nuclei. Fusing helium nuclei requires much higher temperatures than fusing single protons, so eventually, the furnaces at their core stop working. When that happens, gravity takes over, and the stars collapse under their own mass. But that’s not yet the end of the story. After a star collapses, it heats up again as gravity piles on the pressure. Far from the core, the star’s outer layers expand and cool to keep everything in balance. To us, these cooler outer layers look red, which is why we call stars at this stage red giants. When our sun reaches this stage, it will expand to about two hundred times its present size and vaporize the inner planets, including Earth. A C Additionally, when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property—that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts—they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena—like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves—are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside.6 What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does. If some matter has experience and some doesn’t (and some emergent phenomena entail experience and some don’t), the concept of emergence as it is traditionally used in science simply doesn’t explain consciousness A |
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