Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Nautilus publishes a new chapter of feature stories on its monthly theme, every Thursday.Sign up to this list to stay up to date on the latest and greatest.Read about the Nautilus stories and blogs we've been thinking about over the past week.Enter Search Below…Posted By Tam Hunt on May 14, 2020Panpsychists look at the many rungs on the complexity ladder of nature and see no obvious line between mind and no-mind.Illustration by Yurchanka Siarhei / ShutterstockThis month, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner, at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany, told author Michael Brooks that a mathematically precise definition of consciousness could mean that the cosmos is suffused with subjective experience. For example the late Freeman Dyson, the well-known American physicist, stated in his 1979 book, Disturbing the Universe, that “the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when made by electrons.” Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature. David Bohm, another well-known American physicist, argued similarly: “The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mind-like already with the electron.”Many biologists and philosophers have recognized that there is no hard line between animate and inanimate. J.B.S. Haldane, the eminent British biologist, supported the view that there is no clear demarcation line between what is alive and what is not: “We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter…; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who was seminal in developing quantum theory, stated that the “very definitions of life and mechanics … are ultimately a matter of convenience…. Whitehead, a mathematical philosopher, fleshed out in detail this process of “concrescence,” the oscillating nature of entities like electrons moment to moment, in his philosophical works Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Modes of Thought.