A little-heralded change is taking place in mainstream science, marked in a way by the death earlier this year of philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024). Dennett was a naturalist or physicalist in the sense of believing that nature/the physical world is all there is. We usually hear that view called “materialism” in popular media. Dennett, along with many others, defended naturalism by explaining immaterial consciousness away. It is, he said, an evolved illusion.

His approach felt satisfying to many thinkers over the years even though it never quite made sense. For one thing, whose illusion is human consciousness? Actually, we needn’t peer into the depths of the human mind for that. If a fevered dog hallucinates a terrifying enemy, the hallucination is not real. But the consciousness that produced it surely is.

Probably as a result of such dilemmas, an alternative approach has been growing quietly in the background — panpsychism, the view that everything is conscious to some degree. Panpsychism minimizes the exceptionality of human consciousness without asserting that it isn’t real. On that view, it is exceptional only in degree, not in kind.

In 2021, we looked at the way philosopher Galen Strawson moved from physicalism to panpsychism. He told Robert Wright, “I simply replace the picture of energy that most people have with the idea that this energy is somehow experiencing.” In his view, even energy experiences things.

Universalizing Darwinism

But then Strawson is, after all, a philosopher. Let’s look at how prominent Ben Gurion University chemist Addy Pross arrived at the same sort of conclusion. Pross, author of What Is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford 2012) states his guiding principles up front. He bases his approach firmly in Darwinian natural selection/survival of the fittest and enlarges it to include non-living things:

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ principle can be expressed in more general, non-biological terms as survival of the more persistent. In other words, persistence doesn’t have to be about low energy, high entropy forms. Living things are energetically unstable, yet they persist. They persist for what chemists call kinetic reasons. Unstable things can be persistent if they are powered by an energy source. Thus, evolution’s driving force can be stated in persistence terms as one that directs living systems toward increasingly persistent forms. Reassuringly, the mathematics of persistence and evolution broadly indicate that more persistent entities tend to drive less persistent ones into extinction.

Addy Pross, “The chemical roots of consciousness,” IAI TV, July 12, 2024

Together with PIIM physicist Robert Pascal, he has developed the concept of dynamic kinetic stability (DKS) by which a water fountain can be thought to share critical characteristics with life forms. He goes on to say that chemical DKS systems have been prepared that display rudimentary cognition, “the mechanisms by which living things acquire, process, store, and act on information from the environment.”

One can’t help wondering why, if a chemical preparation truly showed “rudimentary cognition,” the achievement is not more widely known. Many biologists would welcome the support to Darwinism that a demonstration of the beginnings of the chemical evolution of consciousness would offer. It would universalize Darwinism.

From Pross’s perspective, these uncited chemical experiments point to all life forms being conscious to some degree:

If being alive necessarily means being self-aware, it suggests that all living things are to some degree conscious. The answer to the frequently posed question as to why life’s cognitive processes don’t take place ‘in the dark’ becomes straightforward: because they can’t. Living things are intrinsically self-aware, intrinsically conscious. Cognitive processes are intrinsically ‘lights on’, though the level of consciousness that may exist in any living thing – how it would feel to be that living thing – is a separate (and likely intractable) issue. Presumably, however, the ‘lights on’ in a bacterium with no neural system would be less than in a human with its complex neural system. So, yes, bacteria, being alive, are conscious, a view that is consistent with recent biological research that concluded that bacteria can ‘think’.

Pross, “The chemical roots of consciousness”

Pross does not use the term panpsychism in his essay but that’s what the view that “all living things are to some degree conscious” is generally called.

Nature as a technologist

Pross’s approach also endows nature with decision-making abilities that we would normally expect of humans:

So let me now address the question at the heart of this essay: how, and why, did mind emerge from matter? Why consciousness?

The answer to the ‘why’ question is relatively simple: nature, the ultimate technologist, ‘discovered’ that mind is functionally useful. Mind enables cognitive processes such as thinking, decision-making and memory. A mindful entity has survival advantages over a mindless one. Simply put, mind enhances persistence.

Pross, “The chemical roots of consciousness”

The underlying problem with any such claim is this: Perceived future advantage does nothing, in itself, to make things happen. For example, chimpanzees might avoid extinction in the wild if they developed human-like minds but that fact does not make them one bit more able to do so.

In saying that, I am making the assumption that nature is not a technologist but is rather the sum of what life forms do.

Essentially, Pross’s approach — exemplified by the claim that chemical preparations show rudimentary cognition — attempts an end run around the Hard Problem of human consciousness by defining select chemical reactions as a form of cognition and thus adopting panpsychism. But in the end, he must personify nature (shades of Gaia?).

So, as always, someone ends up having to do the thinking around here. That will likely prove to be a problem with all forms of panpsychism that attempt to explain away the immaterial element of the human mind.