Anima Mundi
Fortunately it is not just acid casualties and religious nut-jobs who have come to the conclusion that the cosmos is conscious. Increasingly modern science and in particular the discipline of quantum physics, have begun to posit the theory that consciousness is an integral part of matter and the creation of the universe. Sometimes known as panpsychism, this is the idea that all things have a mind or a mind like quality. Or In other words everything has consciousness. Not just humans and animals, but plants, rocks, planets, stars and even electrons. People who support this idea, don’t generally claim that a photon has the same type of consciousness as you or your cat. Instead a photon can be seen as having a tiny bit of rudimentary consciousness. When all these ‘tiny bits’ group together in an organised fashion, then eventually we have something more complex, that results in awareness, or the desire for a nice cup of tea.
This may sound totally implausible but it was Neils Bohr, one of the fore-fathers of quantum physics who stated in 1952 that, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” Much of what occurs at the quantum level is indeed counter-intuitive and Bohr himself has many quotes that could have come from some mad old Chinese master who has just emerged from a cave. They include such beauties as-“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real” and “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
The problem with quantum physics is that it is really, really weird. Take the famous double split experiment for example. The details of this are way beyond the few hundred words I have here, but it categorically proves, with unprecedented weirdness, that light is both a particle and a wave at the same time and its behaviour responds directly to being observed. Just looking at a photon will affect its behaviour. It gets even weirder still. The photon changes its behaviour even if we look at it after the event has happened. It appears that consciousness is inextricably linked with matter, seemingly making a mockery of Newtonian physics and our previous theories of space and time.
This all sounds seriously New Age but panpsychism is not a new idea, even in Western philosophy. The term itself comes from the Greek – ‘pan’ meaning ‘everything’ and ‘psyche’ meaning ‘soul’ and it was a common philosophy to the ancient Greeks. Plato himself argues for a ‘world soul’ or ‘anima mundi’, and stated ‘this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.’
In fact panpsychism is just a new term for something that has been around probably since mankind became aware of himself and his place in the world. Anthropologists call this ‘animism’ and it is the belief that is held by the majority of indigenous cultures across the globe. Animism perceives that all things, animals, plants, places, objects, rivers, weather systems and even words have a distinct spiritual essence.
The ancient Chinese Taoists also came to the conclusion that cosmos is conscious. It is as if we are a species with a kind of amnesia, forgetting that we are one with the universe, via the illusion of separation. We are akin to the little macrophages in our bloodstream that busily go about their business, completely unaware that they are part of a much larger human organism. This state of separation, however, is a necessary process. It occurs so that the Universe can experience itself from a standpoint outside of itself. This is the real meaning behind the phrase ‘the one, becomes two’ in the Tao Te Ching. It is the separation of Yin and Yang that creates polarities, vibrations and the illusory three-dimensional world. Or as our friend Neils Bohr puts it,
‘a physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.’