[Music] On a day 35 years ago, a collection of atoms and particles combined into a discrete,
complex structure that, somehow, was more than the sum of its parts. The elements involved were
mainly Oxygen – 65% of the total mass, to be exact – but the structure also included 18.5% Carbon,
9.5% Hydrogen, 3.5% Nitrogen, and a touch of Calcium and Phosphorus. These elements
combine in our universe all the time, but what was surprising about this particular
structure is that it got up one day and identified itself with the name Alex McColgan. It was me.
The same thing happened to the elements that made up you, and everyone that you know,
and the elements that comprise everyone that has ever lived. Which, when you think about it,
is decidedly odd – how does what is essentially a pile of rocks, air,
water and chemicals have a sense of identity? And yet, somehow that is what happened. Consciousness
arose from dust, and seemingly keeps arising. Which begs the question – where exactly did
consciousness come into this equation? At the end, with a fully developed human brain? With an
animal brain? A plant? A single bacteria? Or can we make the claim that if matter can be conscious,
a single atom of matter is conscious too? I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching
Astrum. Join me down the rabbit hole today, as we enter the wonderland that is consciousness,
our best theories on how it arises, and as we attempt to answer one simple
question – can a particle be conscious? To begin with, I’ll acknowledge that on
the surface that seems like a facetious question. Most people have a fairly good
gut instinct about what is conscious and what isn’t. You are conscious – after all,
you have a sense of identity, you make choices and you consider the information your senses
bring you and you ascribe value to what you experience. To paraphrase a famous philosopher
called René Descartes, we cannot doubt our own consciousness because otherwise who would be
doing the doubting? We think, therefore we are. Beyond that, we are usually quite confident of
the consciousness of the fellow humans around us. Although we cannot see inside their heads,
we can usually ascribe to them the same capacity for thought and experience that we enjoy (except,
of course, when they’re on the other side of the political spectrum to us).
But our instincts start to get a little more hesitant after that. Researchers into animal
behaviour were asked in a survey whether they believed the animals they were studying
were conscious. While 92% of respondents were happy to say non-human primates were conscious,
only 73% extended this attribute to other mammals. For octopuses it dropped to 64%,
birds 61%, and for insects, only 51% of the sampled researchers believed them to have an
intrinsic sense of self. It’s likely that the general population feel a similar way.
However, here we have already strayed into the big problem of consciousness – belief
and feelings. The above survey was based on the gut instinct of those surveyed,
as conscious experience is very difficult to prove – just consider the debate surrounding whether
Artificial Intelligence counts as conscious, when it can mimic humans quite convincingly.
Is a recorded message conscious? A written note? All this is hardly a solid foundation for good
science. We need something a little more precise and measurable if we are to answer
whether matter itself can possess consciousness. Which is unfortunate, as no such test currently
exists. In fact, there is very little consensus amongst philosophers and cognitive
scientists as to what consciousness – or qualia, instances of subjective, conscious experience,
as they call it – actually even is. There are plenty of theories as to how
we get it. Global Neural Workspace Theory (GNWT) notes that particular parts of the brain light up
when we think about certain things. It attaches consciousness to these areas – the parts of the
brain doing “front of the brain” thinking. It points out that we can only “perceive”
one thing at a time, in the stage of our mind. For instance, have you seen the optical illusion
of the vase/face? If you look at this image, you might see a vase, or you might see a face,
but your mind flicks between the two interpretations without trying to see both
simultaneously. Consciousness is a stage, and only so many things can have prominence there at once.
However, another prominent theory called Integrated Information Theory (IIT) takes
a different tact. It claims that consciousness is a product of information, and thus consciousness
is not formed in the parts of the brain that do the thinking, per se, but rather in the parts of
the brain that do the perceiving. A large enough pool of information that can influence itself will
always be conscious, according to this theory. An interesting case study that supports this
idea is what happens to you when you’re asleep, or unconscious.
Now, you might consider consciousness to be your ability to perceive events, evaluate them,
form opinions on them, and then make decisions as to what to do about them. But even when
we are asleep – when we are unconscious – this ability doesn’t completely go away. For instance,
what happens if you tickle the nose of a sleeping person? After a few moments of such tickling, they
might move to swat your hand away, or at least move their face to avoid it. Which means that some
part of their brain, despite being “unconscious” still evaluated information, assigned value to
it – “I don’t like having my nose tickled” – and made and carried out a decision to do
something about it. It might lack the conscious experience, but something in the brain was clearly
aware of what was going on. Can you be said to possess consciousness, even in this scenario?
This is not the only instance of our brains doing thinking quietly, behind the curtain,
so to speak. Some people with sight impairment have been found to possess something known as
blindsight. They are blind – they have no conscious awareness of sight, or anything
around them. And yet the neural pathways in their brain that carry visual information are still
intact. As a result, patients with blindsight can navigate rooms without bumping into things,
in spite of not being able to “perceive” what is there. Their brain knows where to go,
even if they don’t. Consciousness is about more than just the higher-level thoughts we experience.
In spite of all the advances in brain scans that have taken place over the years,
it is still no clearer which of these theories about the origins of consciousness are correct,
if either of them. Because neither really explains the nature of consciousness itself.
Yes, they might try to explain where in the brain it happens, but what it
actually is? That’s still up for debate. Which brings us back to our original
question – can particles be conscious? If there is no consensus amongst the
investigators studying this phenomenon, it seems that we need to ask a few questions of our own.
Let’s try paring down what we mean by the word consciousness. How much thinking needs to occur
before we can say that a thing is conscious? We are usually fairly generous in this regard. If
we are happy to say that even small infants are conscious, even if the thoughts they might be
thinking might be little more than “Happy, happy, oh, what’s that? Sad,” then it seems that not many
thoughts are required before we can call a thing conscious. In fact, if you looked at a rock,
and could prove with absolute certainty that it thought even a single thought, I believe
it’s reasonable to say that for that moment, that rock possessed at least a sliver of consciousness.
Second, let’s describe the apparatus of consciousness. As has been alluded to already,
consciousness is a product of the brain. You likely have an innate sense of this. Consider your
whole body, and ask yourself where are “you” in that body. Look at your hands, look at your chest,
your legs. Those belong to you, and yes, you can control them. But are they where you are? The bit
of you that is aware? Unlikely. Most people when asked about it would say that their core
self exists in the space behind their eyes – i.e. the exact same location as their brain. And this
makes sense. Remove the brain, and the body is no longer alive. Cease all brain activity,
and the sense of self vanishes entirely. Conscious experience is connected to brain
activity. And what exactly is brain activity? Electrical impulses moving through neurons.
Any time we think, neurons are lighting up. We might not be able to explain exactly why
this leads to human consciousness, but that is what the evidence indicates is happening. So,
how many neurons are required before we can say we’re thinking
a thought? A billion? A million? Just one? That seems to be down to your own personal
viewpoint. What threshold of activity is necessary before you’re willing to say a thing is conscious?
Is there a line something must cross, or is it a scale where anything above 0 is good enough?
You yourself will have varying levels of brain activity between sleep and wakefulness. Are you
conscious and unconscious, or do you possess a certain level of consciousness all along?
Perhaps the answer really is that consciousness is a spectrum, just as the IIT theorists would
have it. And if we are willing to agree that only a single thought or even a single firing
neuron is necessary before we can agree to a thing being conscious (albeit barely), then it becomes
possible to conclude consciousness must be present in almost everything that exists – anything
carrying electrical impulses. That may well include things that don’t have brains at all.
And how much further down does this go? If we claim that a single neuron firing represents
an infinitesimal speck of consciousness because of the chemical and electrical processes going
on within it, does that mean we can go even more fundamental with consciousness? A neuron
fires when electrical charge changes, causing an action potential to fire, sending an electrical
signal down the axon. If that electrical signal is the source of consciousness,
does that mean consciousness exists because of the electrons and ions themselves? Are other things
with electrons moving also slightly conscious? Wiring carrying electricity? Atoms chemically
reacting with each other, exchanging electrons and altering their charge?
Or do we go even deeper again, down to the quantum level? We know that particles exist
in a state of superposition, until something happens that collapses the waveform and a
particle is forced to decide if it’s here, or there. Is it actually deciding at that moment,
employing a tiny level of consciousness? I don’t know. This is pure speculation at
this point, as science has no universally agreed upon idea of what causes waveform
collapse. All that we know is that it happens - and oddly enough, it happens somewhere between
the start of the waveform’s propagation, and when something consciously becomes aware of
that waveform in a way that measures it. Do with that information as you wish.
Consciousness down on the scale of particles themselves is certainly strange to consider.
But there are some heavy-hitting physicists today who are open to quantum effects playing
an important role in consciousness, including nobel-prize winner Roger Penrose. There’s
even an official term for it - panpsychism - the concept that everything contains at least a tiny
bit of consciousness, which is how consciousness can arise from matter in the first place. And
what are you other than organised particles you’ve consumed throughout your lifetime?
It seems counter to common sense, but then so do a lot of the universe’s laws. Strange or not,
it has advantages over the alternative, which I find a little worrying. When we say that some kind
of threshold is necessary before we are willing to say that a thing is conscious, there’s a lot
of room to be arbitrary in where exactly we put those goalposts. We might say, “Everything with a
brain is conscious - animals and humans.” We might say, “all humans are conscious, and all animals
are not”. But worryingly, a smarter human with more brainpower and more firing neurons
might decide that every human with fewer firing neurons than him doesn’t pass the consciousness
test. Or maybe one day we’ll discover an alien lifeform, and find ourselves in the
disturbing position where no human is smart enough – or possessing the correct threshold
of electrical activity in their brain – to be considered conscious, by an alien’s definition.
Can a particle be conscious? Certainly, I don’t believe that atoms are bumping around,
thinking to themselves that electrons just aren’t the same as they were back in the good old days,
or that protons feel neutrons are a little bit bland. But if all our consciousness derives
these fundamental elements of physics, and we have not yet found some extra ingredient beyond that,
then is the idea that particles are conscious really that far-fetched? At least a tiny bit?
Naturally, it would be impossible to measure. But in that respect, particles are in good company.
It’s currently scientifically impossible to prove that anything or anyone in the entire universe
is conscious at all, with only one exception. You. Scientifically, you can’t actually prove
consciousness in anyone else. So, how many people do you want to include in the club?
What are your thoughts about consciousness? Are all particles conscious? If not, what is
consciousness and where does it come from? If you liked this topic, there’s a similar one I would
like to do a video on about free will. We didn’t really get into that in this script, but it’s a
fascinating topic. Let me know in the comments below if that’s something you’d like to see!
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