Is our universe intelligent? Is it populated with consciousness? Since time immemorial, great minds around the world have been asking themselves what consciousness is and where it came from. Today, this topic is more and more occupied by physicists and neuroscientists, and in some scientific circles a new theory is gaining popularity - panpsychism - the idea of the universal animation of nature.
While this theory is being taken seriously by a few scientists, it generates heated debate. Panpsychism is very similar to what Hindus and Buddhists call Brahman - the absolute, "the soul of the world," the fundamental principle of all things.
The point is that everything we experience is filtered and interpreted by our consciousness. Without this, the universe does not exist at all.
In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a specific shape or specific location until they are observed or measured.
Our entire reality is an abstraction, proven by the experiments of scientists, when particles in the past changed depending on their observation and measurement in the future. Until they were measured, their "reality" remained flexible.
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The theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who coined the terms black hole and wormhole, was one of the first prominent physicists to suggest that reality might not be entirely physical; in a sense, our cosmos can be a phenomenon requiring an act of observation - and thus consciousness itself.
Wheeler called his theory "the anthropic principle of participation." She claims that human observation is the key to the entire process.
Wheeler's opinion, which is similar to Buddhist views, does not exist until there is no consciousness capable of comprehending it.
British scientist Roger Penrose is also a supporter of panpsychism; back in the 1980s, he suggested that consciousness exists at a quantum level and is located in the synapses of the brain. In The New Mind of the King, Penrose wrote: “The phenomenon of consciousness cannot be described within the framework of modern physical theory. A new theory is needed that will make it possible to comprehend the meaning of "reality". This missing theory is simultaneously the sought-after link between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity. For this unified theory in physics, the name "quantum gravity" is used.
Attempts to explain the nature of consciousness by traditional methods lead nowhere. This is why established philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including the neurophysiologist Christoph Koch and the physicist Roger Penrose, are increasingly taking panpsychism's views seriously.
The neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin offers a slightly different approach to panpsychism, called integrated information theory. According to the theory, consciousness is a phenomenon that has a real, physical place in the universe. We just haven't found it yet. Perhaps this celestial body radiates consciousness in the same way that our Sun emits light and heat.
Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory is one of the most popular and persuasive contemporary theories of neuroscience in the field of consciousness. According to Tononi, an object will possess some form of “consciousness” if the information contained in its structure is sufficiently “integrated” or unified, that is, if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This applies to all structures, not just the human brain.
Physics is not as good at helping us understand the nature of matter as is commonly believed. Arthur Stanley Eddington (an English scientist who experimentally proved Einstein's general theory of relativity) argued that there is a gap in our understanding of the universe. We know how matter behaves, but not what it is. In this gap we can place consciousness. According to Eddington, it is foolish to proceed from the position that consciousness is not at all based and then wonder where it comes from.
Scientists now believe that consciousness is what breathes life into the equations.
Today artificial intelligence can already beat humans in a multitude of tasks. But he has no will of his own. A supercomputer that can make a difference to the world without the commands of a programmer will be conscious. Many futurists from Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk believe that this day will come in the next decade or so, and that we must be ready for it.