Consciousness as a basic feature of all matter

HostWe look at a chair or a glass of water and think of them as just things. Just dead blocks of stuff taking up space. But then we look at ourselves, and we know there's someone home. There's a light on inside. It feels like something to be us. So how does that feeling get there?

GuestThat's the huge wall we keep hitting in science. We can map every part of the brain and see which bits light up when you see the color red or feel a sharp pain. But none of that tells us why it feels like something. Why is it not just like a computer doing math in the dark? Some people are starting to think we have it backwards. Maybe we don't have to explain how dead matter makes a mind. Maybe the sense of being here was there in the matter all along.

HostSo you're saying that the chair I'm sitting on right now has thoughts? That sounds like a stretch.

GuestWell, not thoughts like yours or mine. A chair doesn't have a brain, so it's not wondering what to have for lunch. But the idea is that the very small bits that make up the chair, the atoms and the tiny things inside them, might have a tiny drop of what it's like to exist. Think about how we talk about matter. We say it has mass and it has a pull, like a magnet. Those are things we see from the outside. But physics doesn't say a word about what matter is like from the inside. This way of thinking says that the inside of every bit of matter is a tiny spark of feeling.

HostBut we have no proof for that. It feels like we're just making things up because we can't find the answer in the brain. If we can't see it or measure it, why should we think it's there?

GuestIt's true that we can't point a tool at a grain of sand and see its feelings. But we have the same problem with people. I only know I'm awake and feeling things because I'm me. I assume you're awake because you look and act like me, but I can't actually see your mind. We have this gap. On one side, we have the hard world of shapes and weights. On the other side, we have the world of feelings and smells and sounds. Usually, we try to build the mind out of the hard stuff. We say if you stack enough dead cells together in a certain way, suddenly, poof, the light turns on. But no one can say how that happens. It's like saying if you pile enough wood together, it'll eventually start to do long division. It just doesn't follow.

HostOkay, but if we say everything has a bit of mind in it, how do those tiny sparks turn into a big human mind? If I have a billion tiny sparks in my head, why do I feel like one person instead of a billion tiny things?

GuestThat's the toughest part of the whole idea. It's the big puzzle. If each little bit has its own tiny life, how do they glue together to make a whole? We see this in the real world with things like a swarm of bees. It looks like one thing, but it's many. But your mind feels like a solid whole. There's a theory that when bits of stuff share enough info with each other, they merge. They stop being many and start being one big new thing. But we're still trying to find the math for how that happens. It's a huge leap to go from a grain of dust having a tiny hum of feeling to a human being writing a poem.

HostIt still feels a bit like magic. If a rock has this spark, then why does it just sit there? Why does it not do anything?

GuestThink of it like a light bulb. A tiny bit of matter might be like a bulb that's so dim you can barely see it. It's just a glow. It doesn't have the tools to do anything with that glow. It has no eyes to see with, no legs to walk with, and no brain to store memories. It just is. But when you get a brain, you have this incredibly messy and fast machine that can take that glow and pipe it into different rooms. You can use it to think about the past or plan for the tomorrow. The glow is the same, but the machine it's inside of is what makes it look like a high-power beam.

HostSo it's not that the brain makes the light, it's just that the brain is a really good lens for the light that was already there.

GuestExactly. It's like the brain is a radio. The radio doesn't make the music. The music is in the air as waves. The radio just catches those waves and turns them into sound we can hear. If you break the radio, the music stops, but the waves are still in the air. That changes how we look at the whole world. It means we're not living in a universe of dead rocks and cold gas. We're part of something that's alive at every level.

HostIt would definitely change how I feel about my old shoes or the dust under my bed if I thought they were even a little bit awake.

GuestThe real mystery is why we assume the world is a graveyard of dead things in the first place when we're part of it and we're so clearly here.

HostThe next time I pick up a stone on the beach, I'll have to wonder if there's a tiny, quiet spark inside it that has been there since the start of time.