Living Consciousness

Living Consciousness

Panpsychism is the doctrine that elements of mind exist in all physical things, down to atoms and their constituents. And yet we don’t see inanimate things tending towards mentality, despite their alleged quota of it. The mind is confined to animate things. Why should this be? A hypothesis suggests itself: elementary consciousness does not exist in all things, but it does exist in all organic things. There are traces of it in all living tissue, but none in anything else. The mind is pan-biological but not pan-physical. Organic tissue is prone to developing mentality, but the same is not true of inorganic objects. Being organic is a precondition of consciousness; it disposes things to having minds in the full sense. We don’t know how or why, but that seems to be the natural trend. Organic tissue is mysterious in this way. In the brain organic tissue reaches its mental apotheosis, while rocks remain sub-mental. There is proto-mentality in your feet, a faint throb of what can become a full-fledged mind. It is the organic animal body that provides the cradle of mentality.

We already know that not everything contains mentality in some form, even for the staunchest panpsychist. Not numbers or empty space or universals or the Good or geometric forms; mentality can’t live just anywhere. Can the panpsychist explain why? Not that we have heard. So, the pan-biologist is not being arbitrarily selective while the pan-physicalist is free of that vice: both are selective in their way. In fact, there is room for all sorts of restrictions on the general form of the doctrine of mental ubiquity: you might say atoms have mentality but not the elementary particles that compose them, or only physical things of a certain size and mass, or only organic tissue of certain sorts (not bone, say), or only tissue that has blood flowing through it. It is an empirical question. The evidence is that mentality is associated only with the organic—the correlation is unmistakable. It is a matter of detail precisely where it finds a home. The picture is that matter undergoes a kind of revolution in forming animal bodies, the result of which is the upsurge of consciousness of varying types and degrees. There is nothing simple or all-or-nothing about this.

Could some types of biological tissue be closer to overt consciousness than other types of tissue–more packed with the stuff? Is it the amount of blood being pumped through it? Is consciousness blood-consciousness? Blood does seem remarkable in its powers and curious in its composition. There is no consciousness at all in hair and fingernails but plenty in the heart and lungs, according to this view. Is some neural tissue more charged with consciousness than other neural tissue, given that some is conscious and some is not? Is the heart more conscious than any other organ of the body except the brain? Fanciful, no doubt, but are such speculations beyond all reason? What would we discover if we had a consciousness microscope? Given the general shape of panpsychist doctrines, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. I rather fancy the idea of a consciousness hierarchy existing in the body, with the liver at the bottom and the brain at the top—with hair and fingernails not even in the running. Perhaps there is a correlation between organic complexity and degree of consciousness (or proto-consciousness)—whatever we might mean by complexity. It’s all terribly mysterious, no doubt, but is it beyond the possibilities of nature? Nature has surprised us many times and continues to do so. So, I suggest exploring the varieties of panpsychism and entertaining the idea of a panpsychism confined to the organic world. Doesn’t it feel right to limit mentality to the organic? We have underestimated the discontinuity between the animate and inanimate.[1]

[1] I freely admit I am venturing out on many limbs here, with analytic philosophy left far behind. So be it.