At Closer to Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed Welsh physicist Brian Josephson on the topic, “Must the Universe Contain Consciousness?” (June 12, 2024, 8:39 min). Josephson won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for predicting the Josephson effect.

He sees consciousness as an aspect of the universe that we can’t ignore, even as he is not sure what to make of it:

Our universe seems fine-tuned for life, with the constants of physical laws having to be within tight boundaries. Does this mean that the universe has a goal of consciousness? Is there a directedness of the universe toward consciousness? Is consciousness entirely contingent or is it something special, even a ultimate object of universal development?

Here are a couple of selections prepared from the auto transcript at YouTube:

Kuhn asks how consciousness can underlie the universe, given that the universe has been around for billions of years but conscious life on Earth got started “just in the last few million years, even if you talk about animal consciousness.”

Josephson: But that [2:58] doesn’t tell us how universe begins. There lots of problems there. So therefore I propose that something happening beyond the universe and on a larger and possibly infinite time scale has this organization and is doing things like bringing a universe into being and setting up its laws and so on, and perhaps partly directing its
evolution.

Kuhn: So those are very big [3:31] statements, which you say very calmly and very serenely — any one of which could cause, you know, nuclear wars between between scientists … you’ re introducing some radically new ideas, to claim that biology, that life and consciousness, is so fundamental and yet you don’t rely on traditional religious arguments. Your arguments basically have nothing to do with traditional religious arguments. So I find that interesting, that your arguments come from a, you know, a totally different perspective than others who made proto-consciousness or protobiological creator of the universe or, you know …

Note: Josephson seems to have stumbled on the problem of how consciousness could arise as an accident in a purely physical universe. It makes more sense, he thinks, to assume that it predates, creates, and organizes the universe. Yet, as Kuhn marvels, he reasons his way to precisely the sorts of conclusions generally accepted in major world religions.

Kuhn: How does physics get you to that place where you see biology in such a primordial role? [5:36]

Josephson: Well, it’s in a way more satisfactory [5:47] from the aesthetic point of view because conventional physics, you’re putting all your bets on one particular, rather complicated, piece of mathematics. And people got into that mathematics just by trying to follow the same route as before, postulating symmetries and dimensions. And they like it just because it’s the version which at least is not in disagreement with what we know but on is assuming lots of things that we don’t know. So that’s just as theological, in fact.

But we do know things [6:24] about the mind, that it can do mathematics, create music, and be logical and so on — which, by the way, is not really satisfactorily explained by conventional science. So if we take this biological point of view — it’ s also cognitive — then we have these general principles on which the mind develops which can partly be understood in models and they fit with how we find minds actually developing. So there’s a kind of well-defined basis on which to try and go further and put mind into understanding things like why the Universe has particular laws.

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Josephson is clearly hoping that biology will explain consciousness because physics cannot, and he is unwilling to dismiss it as an illusion.

That hope — situating consciousness in biology — helps account for the growing presence of panpsychism in science. Many panpsychists see consciousness as a natural feature of life forms, contemporary with the very origin of life. As a point of view, it is more coherent than neo-Darwinian attempts to explain consciousness away.

The basic problem, of course, is that the consciousness that both panpsychists and neo-Darwinians most need to account for is the human type — and that remains an outlier. Even if we accept the panpsychist view that consciousness underlies the universe and is a basic property of all living things, we would still need an account of what used to be called the gift of reason, the gift that humans have and other life forms don’t.

Thus, Josephson is right to think he is onto something — even if he is not sure what.

You may also wish to read: Researchers: Living cells’ cognition drives evolution. “Natural selection is cognitive selection,” they say, arguing that cells exhibit meaning and purpose, contrary to Darwinian evolution theories. Cognitive selection, as present even in the earliest living cells, directs the history of life in their view, enabling meaning and purpose.