Planetary excess is one thing, although one wonders where the stem-cell Earths have been hiding all these years -- and then suddenly, when we need such reminders of our insignificance most: Wham! We gotta worry about CRISPRS; and renegade Chinese doctors cloning humans and enhancing their brains -- no doubt, starting a brain race to augment the arms race; we got working AI prozzies and preggers AI mothers and the whole AI Problem. And climate change, nuke threats, and the end of democracy (h/t Chomsky). It's a carnivalesque atmosphere. We're a drunken carnie clown plopped on down in the dunk tank. Who's laughing now? The universes seem to cry out to us in unison.
Well, we took God up the poopchute and He's all curled up, fetal-like, in an isolation cell for His own protection. Like something out of The Glass House, starring Vic Morrow. No point in calling on Him for help. This ain't no Shawshank Redemption, motherf*cker. The TV movie of the week from the idealistic 70s, based on a Truman Capote story, seems to say to us. Idealism's dead inside.
And then, to top it all off, we gotta worry about consciousness.
Or, at least, Annaka Harris worries about it, and I worry with her, as she works through her thesis in Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (HarperCollins 2019). Harris is the author of the children's book I Wonder and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser Greenland's Mindful Games Activity Cards, each of which is designed to help people think laterally and to open themselves up to curiosity they naturally possess. Conscious is an exercise in philosophical thinking; it has seven chapters with topics that include Intuitions and Illusions; Is Consciousness Free?; Is Consciousness Everywhere?; and, Consciousness and Time. A fair assessment of the book's value is deftly summed up by Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017), who blurbs, "In this gem of a book, Annaka Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor and clarity, in a style that's accessible and captivating." I agree.
Though Harris's book is now four years old, its themes are timeless and its cultural relevance is more fascinating than ever. Essentially, Harris is a panpsychist who argues that consciousness is not limited to humans but exists even in inanimate objects; in fact, she sees consciousness in everything. She writes, "Consciousness is experience itself." A simple sentence, but packed with meaning. She adds that deniers of such thinking are not all there, and, getting feisty, wheels in British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson to castigate those who hold that consciousness is an illusion (or epiphenomenon). Strawson woofs:
How could anybody have been led to something so silly as to deny the existence of conscious experience, the only general thing we know for certain exists?
I light up with awareness, therefore I am. As Harris points out, "Modern thinking about panpsychism is informed by the sciences and is fully aligned with physicalism and scientific reasoning."
It might seem at first that this is a new view, but panpsychism has actually been with us for millenia. According to Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy at Durham University in the UK, and a leading champion for the panpsychist view, it is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In Timaeus, for instance, Plato asserts, "This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related." So, panpsychism is not new, but re-emerging, after a hiatus, more insistent than ever, and, when you think about it, in perfect harmony with questions surrounding the potential consciousness of AI and whether we should "allow' such an emergence.
Of course, many counter-culture drop-outs who turned on in the 60s and went psychedelic like Dibs in search of a self (or less) and wanted to groove on the rubble of fundamental fractals governing the kaleidoscope everywhere, hit the bong often and heavily. White Rabbits down Black Holes feeding their heads, as the Airplane says we must on Surrealistic Pillow. F*ck 'em, if they can't take a cosmic joke, the song's vibe seems to say. But Harris is more mature than that. It ain't just Hippie's Revenge at play here. Panpsychism is the real deal, she says. And I agree. It makes sense to me.
Harris doesn't just wander willy-nilly across some mindfield of improved expressive devices (IED), wow-ing with words that blow the mind apart like cluster bombs of love shredding your last presumptions and illusions before the freedom of mental annihilation kicks in. No, she's bigger than that. But at the same time, she's not taking any sh*t from reified science (Fauci, rolls eyes); she's like classic Grace Slick that way. When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go, tell them where to go. Tell them to get rooked.
One of the things I like about Conscious is how Harris brings in others to bolster her claims; the choice is always appropriate and results in a clarifying note, citation or consideration. The book is short at 90 pages, so needs to be compact, and Harris does a nifty job keeping her thesis in focus and her plan executed in a nice progressive order. For instance, she makes good use of Thomas Nagle's famous thought essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Coronavirus Bat?," which brings into full relief her disdain for an anthropocentric universe. She explains Nagle's argument this way:
Is it like something to be a grain of sand, a bacterium, an oak tree, a worm, an ant, a mouse, a dog? At some point along the spectrum the answer is yes, and the great mystery lies in why the "lights turn on" for some collections of matter in the universe.
After all, an infant is composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun. The particles that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe's past. They traveled for billions of years to land here...in this particular configuration that is you...and are now reading this book. Imagine following the life of these particles from their first appearance in space-time to the very moment they became arranged in such a way as to start experiencing something.
This will eventually lead to Harris asking the reader to consider the possibility that the panpsychism (and consciousness) flows back to particles, and may be discovered eventually to be an as yet undiscovered elemental force. Here she provides an extended quote from a 2017 essay titled "Minding Matter," by Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester:
It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. . . . Rather than trying to sweep away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter, we must grapple with the intertwined nature of the two. . . . Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. [my emphasis]
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