Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

Although some scientists have been led naturally to a panpsychic view in one form or another, the term still carries the stink of the New Age. David Skrbina explains that, at first mention, the idea that the inanimate world possesses consciousness seems so anti-scientific that it incites a reflexive and concerted opposition: Upon laying out a panpsychist position, one is immediately faced with the charge that he believes that “rocks are conscious”—a statement taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand. . . . We may see strong analogies with the human mind in certain animals, and so we apply the concept [consciousness] to them with varying degrees of confidence. We may see no such analogies to plants or inanimate objects, and so to attribute consciousness to them seems ridiculous. This is our human bias. To overcome this anthropocentric perspective, the panpsychist asks us to see the “mentality” of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subset of a certain universal quality of physical things, in which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular manifestations.