Panpsychic Rivers: An eighteen-month argument over Consciousness

and an illustration from Relativity

The Argument

For years now a good friend of mine and I have argued about Consciousness. In phone calls and conversations, texts and voice memos and countless letters spanning eighteen months we have suggested theories and refutations, have derided each other’s stances even as we took them seriously and offered worthy rebuttals.

It started when I admitted that I’m not really sure that humans are Conscious. That perhaps it was the phrase itself, perhaps the inability to locate its source or define it sufficiently, but that human beings seemed, to me, to be very complicated animal-machines responding to stimuli, circumstances, and learned behavior: we are the measurable firing of synapses, that bias and automaticity suggest mathematically reasonable learned-ness.

My argument has grown, has evolved to the exact opposite side of the coin. I’ll try to trace that progression here, with the caveat that I have a very limited understanding of the literature re: philosophy of the mind, phenomenology, psychological theories, neuroscientific contributions on the matter, zoological theories on the human brain etc etc, and that that’s okay. Very few people have strong grasps on any of these things, and far fewer have the ability to gracefully weigh them against each other. And yet, we are all capable of, allowed to, and perhaps ought to consider them anyways, to the best of our ability¹.

The next few sections track our argument, with far more care spent on my own (leaving room for a rebuttal essay, perhaps?). It ends with my latest assertion, something I stumbled onto recently and have been chewing over, and the real purpose of this essay.

My Beef

My stance started with years of classical studies where time and again I would hear some philosopher describe Consciousness in maddeningly pedantic terms. A few examples:

• Rene Descartes: I think, therefore I am

• Thomas Nagel: You are Conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism

• Sam Harris: To say that Consciousness may only seem to exist from the inside is to admit its existence. For things to seem any way at all is to be Conscious.

These did not come close to my threshold for acceptable scientific theory, and the fact that the smarter the thinker, the more basic their description was, only infuriated me more. How did these rigorous scientists settle on such vague definitions? How did they accept the conclusion as a given, when its implications were so huge? Enter Rawls.

John Rawls coined a thought experiment as the foundation of his political philosophy on distributive justice in a liberal democracy: one ought to imagine themselves in an Original Position, what he called a Veil of Ignorance. Basically, imagine that you are about to be born, and your soul will be placed in a newborn’s body at random. We should then, he posits, create a society where we would be comfortable being placed in any vessel. I have issues with Rawls’ response to utilitarianism (another post), but this conception of souls and Being² spoke to something deep in my beliefs.

Perhaps it’s a Catholic dysfunction in me that assumes that any Being placed in any vessel— with its genetic make-up and pre-natal influences, with the circumstances that meet it outside the womb, with every natural and imposed factor which plays into its upbringing and beyond— will play out the same way as the Being which was placed in that vessel. Simply put, if you were them, you’d do what they do. From the first moments, we act for measurable reasons, incurring measurable affects from Nature and from others which in turn influence our future actions. If this is true, then can we insist on having a soul? If that thing can be placed in a different vessel, and would proceed to match the behavior of the soul which was placed in that vessel, then is it really your soul? Do you have one, then?

(I should say here that the conception of a soul and the existence of Consciousness are one in the same for me. Not that Consciousness must be tied to an orb of glowing white light, but that they are both the belief that there is a particular thing that is us— a non-physical entity provides supplies subjective experience. Call it a soul, call it Consciousness, I’m not sure it exists.)

My friend, in response, thinks this is stupid.

She insists that there is a thing that it is to be. That the experience of Being exists, and that we are not complicated animal-machines but active, decisive individuals, capable of whim and individuality that is not just the reaction to trillions of data points. The letters fly back and forth, between Los Angeles and New York, between Paris and West Virginia, between Connecticut and Westchester, filled with quotes and and rebuttals and allowances as we grow closer and closer to a shared definition before the other says something bold and infuriating and we descend back into the weeds. We have both evolved our stances, but the friction remains the same. It’s like a years-long game of chess between us, where the King is constantly morphing into different pieces.

Around this era of the discussion, in the first half of this year, my thoughts clarified. How could we be so bold to insist we are conscious? What is the precedence for it? What makes humans special that we get this thing, and nothing else does? Is it that we’ve built skyscrapers and assassinated world leaders? We’ve been doing that so briefly, and for eons before, bees were constructing mathematically stupefying combs, rivers were leveling mountain ranges, black holes were eating light! Do our cultures and our snack foods and our intricately woven carpets really match the magnificence of any other given Thing within existence? More recent definitions of Consciousness have included eels and chimps and others, and this only angers me further. I could possibly believe that we are some sort of historic anomaly, that maybe even some god decreed us worthy of the almighty light of Being. Now, I am suppose to believe that a few hundred entities are Conscious, amongst an infinite backdrop of non-Consciousness? Isn’t this statistically infuriating?

Around this point my friend wrote one of the greatest letters I’ve ever received. She asked, in regards to my argument, and amongst other psychological evidence, why it was that I “seemed so determined to negate my existence.” It’s a haunting question, and served as one of those poignant moments which only a true friend can deliver. I looked inward and tried to figure what it was, why, beyond intellectual play, I insisted on my seemingly heartless stance. I realized then that it seemed cruel to me, felt utterly unfair, to invent a concept for only ourselves. To create a term, one associated with Beautiful and Good and True, and to hoard it all for ourselves and, okay, maybe some bees. I realized that my sense of justice extended, perhaps wastefully, beyond humankind, beyond animalkind, into a much deeper ether.

Discovering Panpsychism in a Bathroom

My sparring partner likes to reference Nagel’s famous essay, What Is It Like To Be A Bat, in which he lays out his theory of a “subjective character of experience.” The essay uses the experience of trying to be a bat to illustrate this character. He says that to try and imagine being a bat, one must use one’s tools to project one’s imagination into the bat’s imagination. In doing so, we would only be able to determine what it would be like for us to be a bat, and not for a bat to be a bat. Oversimplifying, and perhaps missing the point, this seems to be the core of Nagel’s argument. To accept this friction is to accept that there is a subjective, singular experience for a Conscious Being to be that conscious Being. Ergo, Consciousness.

The issue is this: it feels inadequate to describe our Being with only our physical components. We insist there is something more going on than a collection of molecules. And yet, no physical location for Being (what we would call a soul but which might actually be a neuron responsible for Consciousness) has been located. And if it was, we wouldn’t accept it. If a scientist pointed to a small particle in our skull and said “that’s the part that makes you you,” we would deny it. We would insist that our subjective experience is inherent to our entirety, that every morsel of our Being is part of the experience of Being. Some bold scientist would probably volunteer to have that particle removed, and intuition says that he would probably still Be, would probably still insist on her own Consciousness.

I respond with a Nagel essay of my own, one which was written five years later titled Panpsychism. It is a beautiful and troubling theory, one which dates back beyond Plato, and in relation to Consciousness goes like this: 1) humans are made up only of matter 2) humans have subjective experiences— thought, feeling, emotion, desire— which can not be traced to physical matter 3) these things are properties of something 4) these properties must come from somewhere, because things do not arise from nothing (non-emergence theory). Thus, 5) Panspychism: the constituent matter of our being must have some inherent tendency towards subjectivity. The way I interpret this is that each of our individual ingredients, each of the trillions of particles which aggregate into us, have their own little urges towards awareness. They each have a claim on Being, and each deserve to be regarded as having as much Consciousness as we do.

Woo-woo, I know, but bear with me. With the last forty years of Super String Theory, the apparent truth that what we thought of as the smallest possible particle is just a rotating, humming thread with a distinct frequency, why shouldn’t this be true? Why should the tendency for awareness lie at this level? Zoom out and, bear with me, oughtn’t we apply our definition to other aggregates of particles, namely, everything? Worms, yes, as well as dirt. As well as planets, as well as oxygen. If we may be made up of any material floating intergalactically, if every known thing is made up of the same material, then what would differentiate us from that ether?

I was ready to accept the argument that we were Conscious, so long as everything else was as well. And if anything wasn’t— if you left out a rock or an ear-lobe, then you had to remove us from the list as well.

A Hiccup, Solved by Staring Into a River

I rested on this stage for a few months, bringing us to the spring of ‘23. It was very nice to think these things, and I felt a great comfort in the belief that all Things were one, that awareness and Consciousness and the soul are not painful human burdens but universal concepts, ones which precede us and will continue after our demise. I actually remember the moment, reading Nagel on my toilet, that this idea clicked; and suddenly I felt less alone in the universe, having accepted that I was but one entity in a cosmic sea of entities. It was fun, you should try it. If this idea feels good to you, stop reading. Just hang out in the flow of panpsychic bliss like I did.

*pause for exit*

Eventually it ended. Having spent years on forming a personal conception of Consciousness the ball continued to roll, and against objections from my friend I realized there was a conceptual-gap. I maintained that each particle had tendencies towards awareness, but if this is the case, why am I Conscious? Why is Ryan a single thing, and not the collection of billions of awarenesses physically inclined towards one solid body? As my particles drift off onto surrounding surfaces, float into the air, decay, why do certain Ryans not go with them? At first, I believed maybe they did. I considered that I wasn’t a thing, that I was countless things, was constantly dying and drifting, forging new things and then being the new thing forged. This was a very different era of my thought-life. Suddenly I was disparate, I was cast into plurality and had no core. I stopped trusting any given momentary sensation of self-existence, and saw patterns in my behavior as coincidental realignments of molecules.

It is very hard to hold in your mind the possibility that you are more than one thing. Try it. You may tell yourself, I contain multitudes. Of course I am not a singular entity, I am a nuanced collection of entities. Several of them, hundreds! But try to be the awareness of your asshole. Not just aware of your asshole, but aware as your asshole. Try to be the awareness of one of those molecules which has just exited its orbit, flown off your finger and become a part of the entity that is your phone, the ceiling of the room you are in. Uh-oh.

I was back at the original issue, back to begrudgingly admitting that there does seem to be a singular, subjective character of Being, and I still insisted in frustration that this can’t be right. The problem to solve became: if each of my ingredients has this tendency towards awareness, why do I seemingly have a single, consistent one? Which particle is that?

This is when I started staring into rivers. I’ve found many answers in life by doing this, and when answers don’t arrive, there’s at least some comfort. The particular river which supplied the answer here was the east branch of the Pequonnock, the river I grew up playing in, one which I know so well I can smell incoming rain off of, can gauge the water table of southwestern Connecticut by. It is barely a river, at some points is hardly a stream, but it flows sixteen miles from Monroe and into the Long Island Sound and is a Thing, by any stretch of the definition³. While staring into the meandering flow I wondered about its Thingness against the individual droplets which added up to It, droplets which might get splashed onto the banks and out of the river-system, droplets which would be dumped into the sound and no longer be Of The Thing, droplets which themselves were the aggregate of molecules which each had their own tendencies-towards-awareness. I considered all of this, considered the way in which the river, too, must have wrestled with the discrepancy between its oneness and the fact that it was made up of all these ingredients with their own claim on existence.

A conversation I had in El Salvador suddenly returned to me from twelve years earlier. I was speaking with Sister Elena about the horrendous actions of our CIA during their civil war, of the way US-trained and financed guerrillas suppressed citizen-led revolutions and massacred thousands. Learning all this for the first time, I felt moved to apologize. “It’s okay,” said Sister Elena. “We understand more than anyone the difference between a person and their government.”

Suddenly a line was drawn, from Strings through molecules, from molecules through me, from me through my community, from my community through mankind, from mankind through history…. I saw at once that the same way a droplet is of a river, the way I am of my body-politic, our ingredients are of us. There was no leap from the physical to the subjective necessary: I was a river, an entity which moved due to influences but which was made up of other entities, which moved via their own influences. In the same way, I was a being which flowed alongside countless other beings to create another entity, humanity. In the same way, molecules flowed together to be rocks, and those rocks flowed together to be planets. Certain Strings hummed like gravity, and those gravitons flowed together to make that ageless pull that defines all known movement and being.

The Thought Experiment

This is where I am, at the age of 26, in the fall of 2023, with a life-long struggle to conceptualize, understand and appreciate that strange quality which is Being. While reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, a book which attempts to trace the progress of 20th century theory from Relativity through Quantum and into Super String, I was caught in a confusion. It should be said that my understanding of these concepts is very thin. What I’m about to suggest does not rely on me really knowing these things well, it’s just a way of considering what I’ve learned (or my perception of what I’ve learned), to move my theory of Consciousness one step further.

It goes like this: Einstein was working on the dilemma that Light seemed to react to gravity despite moving at a constant speed (C). He coined his famous theory of Special Relativity, namely, that the experience of light is beholden to an entities mass and energy (E=MC^2). He realized that objects create an indent in the space-time fabric, and that light does not move through pure space as much as it curves and rolls along these indents. You may have seen this illustrated with a blanket and a couple of balls in the following demonstration: two scientists will hold the blanket taut, while a third places something heavy like a bowling ball in the middle. Predictably, the blanket will curved inward to form an indent around the ball, its depth corresponding to the weight of the object. Then, they will roll a golf ball onto the blanket and, rather than travel unperturbed, it will fall inward towards the heavier object. If the ball is rolled with enough speed, it will rotate around the indent and form an orbit. Otherwise, it will fall into the hole towards the bowling ball.

The blanket here represents the fabric of space-time, which we have learned is not emptiness but a cohesive entity, a malleable surface on which all existence takes place. Everything with mass, we learn, makes an indentation which deviates this fabric. Here is my question: what is it that these entities are deviating from. In the blanket demonstration, what is represented by the scientists holding the edges of the blanket? Why do objects not just press down, lowering the blanket altogether, but instead press in, creating a warp with diminishing depth. Is there some anti-body, a perfect contradictory force on the other side of the space-time fabric, which pushes back up on the blanket? Are there edges to the universe, pillars at the confines of existence, which hold the fabric up? Or, perhaps, is the fabric itself pushing against mass?

Now for Consciousness. Perhaps that anti-force, that perfect, omniscient rebuttal to all existence, is everything seemingly “emergent—” everything that we insist exists but which we can’t locate in matter. Things like perception, like the divine, like thought and experience, are all anti-concepts to our very physical existence. This explains that very human dichotomy, the experience of somehow being both animals and gods, the sensation of walking in the dirt but staring into the cosmos, of needing food but obsessing over the existential. Every action we inhabit has this metaphysical reactive force, the very blanket on which our essence rests.

Consider Consciousness in this framework. It is not our being, per sé, but the universal response to it. For all of our being, then, we have an equal supply of Being. Consciousness is not our existence, but the response to that existence. For some reason, this adversarial conception works for me. Maybe that’s due to the frustration I felt, how adamant I was that all we’re doing is existing. This can be true, in this new paradigm. All we are doing is existing, and meanwhile an opposite and equal force, Consciousness, is pushing against that existence. Think of how limited our existence is— the way in which we are confined by time, by physical constraints, by necessitation— and how perfectly reflected it is in all of our spiritual limitations. Our failure to perfectly sympathize, to supremely consider, our inability to transcend. We can rest easy knowing that for every byte of life we inhabit there is a counter-byte, a small token, which matches that force.

And suppose in that anti-existence, in that universe which is the response to ours, there is a counter-you and a counter-me; a Ryan who is utterly Conscious, arguing against his own physical nature the way I am arguing against our spiritual one. A metaphysical entity with a friend who argues that he does exist, is real. I hope he wins that argument, too.

Conclusion

I am excited for this conception to evolve. For me to stumble upon another piece of arcane literature, for me to get lost in another river, an ocean, to be struck by another buried memory and for the ball to roll one inch further, one inch closer to the endlessly expanding arena walls. These are the games of a lifetime, the ones I intend to play as long as my hardware functions.

1. A reminder from Scott Siskind: humans don’t owe society anything. We were here first.

2. Heidegger’s Dasein, as opposed to lower-case “being,” the objective existence of physical matter.

3. Its name, appropriately, either means “cleared field” or “place for slaughter.” What better metaphors for existential revelation could there be?