The Mind Of A Rock

(Article Link) Confronted by the irritating problem of consciousness, some contemporary thinkers have resorted to what might seem lunacy. Did primitive mental experiences precede the evolution of brains, similar to how living cells and bodies required the existence of atoms beforehand? Or are "qualitative events" a completely brute emergent product of neural activity, without any non-biological causes whatsoever? Some skeptics respond with: Even if they did occur with matter interactions in general, how could such elemental mental states combine to form the kinds of complicated experiences we humans have? After all, when you put a bunch of people in the same room, their individual minds do not form a single collective mind. (Or do they?)

Take that rock. It doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. But at the microlevel it consists of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that supercomputers might envy. And they are not jiggling at random. The rock's innards "see" the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers's slogan, "Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside."

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