{"id":97686,"date":"2019-10-21T19:04:15","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T02:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-is-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility"},"modified":"2019-10-21T19:04:15","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T02:04:15","slug":"the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-is-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-is-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility","title":{"rendered":"The idea that everything from spoons to stones is conscious is gaining academic credibility"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-is-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the \u201ccombination problem\u201d: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn\u2019t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems\u2014from inanimate objects to plants to ants\u2014count as conscious.<\/p>\n<p>An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn\u2019t the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it\u2019s more like seeing it as a \u201ccosmic mess.\u201d Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement\u2014the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they\u2019re separated by such immense distances there can\u2019t be a causal signal between them\u2014suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the \u201ccombination problem\u201d: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn\u2019t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}