What If Everything Is Conscious?

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When you look around you, what do you see ?

Humans, animals, plants, micro-organisms (though not obvious) and lastly inanimate objects. Of all the aforementioned objects it appears that it's only humans that seem to possess consciousness or are we really the only ones?

The topic of consciousness itself is still currently ill-defined because virtually all definitions/conceptions seem to all have conflicts when applied to certain contexts, in part this may be due to semantics. Consciousness as we currently conceptualise it seems to be made up of parts generalized mostly as cognition (mental aspect) and experience (physical interaction), bridging these two is the "perceptor" (sensory organs/body). Viewing it this way may give us clue as to whether we are the only ones that possesses consciousness and the reason being that despite we humans possessing all three, they can be traced to other non-human objects.

In the world of animals, humans aren't the only ones that possesses sensory organs, virtually all animals do, some more developed than the others. In our case when we interact with the environment through our sense organs the information goes to the brain where mental processes begins to take place. These mental processes gives rise to how we interpret (perception) and navigate the world. In our case, the interaction with the environment isn't seen as an ordinary physical interaction instead the word "experience" replaces "physical interaction" simply because mental processes gets involved later. In fact, the general view of experience is that it's a conscious physical interaction or conscious event. For example, try comparing when you hit your head on the wall to when a ball hits the same wall. In the case of the former we feel "pain" which happens to be one type of mental representation and it leaves a lasting impact which in turn affects the decisions we make regarding the wall - experience at play. In the case of the latter (the ball) the general belief is that it doesn't have a nervous system for mental processes to occur and therefore can't experience but one thing to note is that it does have a body.
So, if we should extend this to animals, it then raises an interesting question, they have perceptors and a brain/nervous system, do they also have experiences ?
Also can they be considered conscious too ?

Part of the reasons why it's difficult to give a definitive answer for animals is communication. If we humans never had the ability to understand each other, it would have to some extent affected how we view our fellow humans - just like we view animals.

How about we go lower, to world of plants, microorganisms and even non-living things ?

Every physical object possesses a body and in the world of living things these bodies can be themselves considered perceptors, they generally respond to "stimuli". It happens that humans have the most complex kind of stimuli. One may want to point out cognition but that's where the thing gets tricky. Are you aware that before any mental process can take place or decision to occur "memories" have to exist ?

Every living thing constantly undergoes one event or the other for the purpose of surviving or continuing life and some of these activities, if not most requires "identification" which allows them to know the right approaches to take or chemicals to release - they do it almost every time. What does that tell you?

It tells you that some kind of memory is involved, for example recent discovery seems to be suggesting that bacteria can form memories of their environment and pass it on to their next generation(s) despite having no nervous system/brain and this also has a role in their resistance to certain antibiotics over time.

If we go down to the realm of non-living things it even gets more tricky. A ball for example can be initially at rest and all of a sudden a wind powerful enough causes it to change position in space and time, the usual way of understanding it's behaviour which we see as ordinary physical interaction is through "the laws of physics" but there are other things that are usually being overlooked. The surface of the ball and the surface of our skin both makes up their respective bodies, when the wind touches us we can feel it (mentally) - thanks to our complex nervous system, the ball on the other hand we can't say for sure if it does but we generally believe it doesn't. However, just like we can respond to the wind, the ball too can which in it's case changed position in space and time against it's will or we say the laws of physics is at work. Ok, let's then look at it from this same laws of physics, there are fixed laws of which can be represented with equations that tells us that given this particular initial parameters from the wind, this is how the ball should behave or where it should be. This means everytime such parameters are present the ball should behave a particular way of which ball actually does. Now the question is, doesn't the ball have this information stored somewhere otherwise it would always do something different given that same initial conditions and law ?

It's like I'm told I should always take an umbrella when rain falls, the fact that I was take the umbrella when the rain falls shows that I committed such information to memory. Even computers requires memory for it's programs.

Whether you want to say these non-human entities possesses mental states, cognitive abilities or consciousness is just a matter of personal belief - not everyone can/would agree to it, but what we can all agree on is that there's a lot we don't know and understand, and semantics also has a big role to play. What we have just shown in this article is that there's a nonzero probability that everything could be conscious only that we may now be looking at "levels of consciousness". Because how the f*ck would consciousness just jump over every other entity before us, including our closest relatives in the evolutionary tree and magically appear in our own level. As a matter of fact, there's actually a branch of philosophy that thinks virtually everything is conscious, it's called "panpsychism" and it appears that it may be making it's way into science, thanks to quantum mechanics. It's actually a philosophical school of thought that attempts to resolve the issues of consciousness, including the "mind-body dilemma" and "hard problem of consciousness". It could also help understand quantum mechanics especially when you look at the "measurement problem". I'm actually a big proponent of panpsychism but that doesn't mean that the view is correct, the only entity that can decide is actually the universe itself, given that it is yet to reveal it's true nature/workings, I think it's safe to continue with our personal beliefs but.............carefully.

And this is where we bid ourselves goodbye, until next time.

For further reading

Panpsychism

Everything in Our Universe—Even the Chair You’re Sitting On—May Be Conscious, Scientists Say

Perception

Experience

Bacteria Can Store Memories And Pass Them on For Generations

Cognition

Thank you all once again for stopping by to read my jargons and also thank you @stemng, @lemouth and the @Steemstem team for your valuable supports.

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