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

by Annaka Harris

It’s because of the value of simplicity that I tend to favor the branch of panpsychism that describes consciousness as fundamental to matter—as opposed to requiring a certain level of information processing for consciousness to exist. This, once again, is a result of the hard problem of consciousness, which crops up anywhere you attempt to draw a line—whether at neuronal processing or at simpler forms of information processing. Although in many ways it’s more difficult to get our minds around, the view that consciousness is intrinsic to matter is a more convincing solution to me, in part because it is a simpler one (albeit only slightly). Consider the Higgs field as an analogy: Physicists knew that the Higgs field had to exist—if it didn’t, the electrons and quarks that make up all of us would be massless and travel at the speed of light. For years before the discovery of its carrier, the Higgs boson, they posited a Higgs field. Although nothing about its confirmation supports (or provides any evidence for) theories about consciousness, it helps us understand the analogous proposition in panpsychism—that perhaps consciousness is another property of matter, or of the universe itself, that we have yet to discover.