Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,90

of physics?) Now, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves—features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons, and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.

Another contemporary thinker who takes panpsychism seriously is the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. What attracts Chalmers to panpsychism is that it promises to solve two metaphysical problems for the price of one: the problem of stuff and the problem of consciousness. Not only does panpsychism furnish the basic stuff—mind-stuff—that might flesh out the purely structural world described by physics. It also explains why that otherwise gray physical world is bursting with Technicolor consciousness. Consciousness didn’t mysteriously “emerge” in the universe when certain particles of matter chanced to come into the right arrangement; rather, it’s been around from the very beginning, because those particles themselves are bits of consciousness. A single ontology thus underlies the subjective-information states in our minds and the objective-information states of the physical world—whence Chalmers’s slogan: “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”

If this metaphysical deal seems too good to be true, I should point out that panpsychism comes with problems of its own. Foremost among them is what might be called the Combination Problem: how can many little bits of mind-stuff combine to form a bigger mind? Your brain, for instance, is made up of lots of elementary particles. According to the panpsychist, each of these elementary particles is a tiny center of proto-consciousness, with its own (presumably very simple) mental states. Just what is it that makes all these micro-minds cohere into the macro-mind that is your own?

The Combination Problem proved a stumbling block for William James, who was otherwise friendly to panpsychism. “How can many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness?” James asked in bewilderment. He made the point vivid with an example. “Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence… . The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher mind.”

James’s point is echoed by many contemporary opponents of panpsychism. What sense does it make, they say, to conjecture that things like electrons and protons are inwardly mental if you have no clue as to how their micro-mentality gets unified into full-blown human consciousness?

But there are a few intrepid thinkers who claim they do have a clue. And it is supplied, perhaps surprisingly, by quantum theory. One of the striking novelties of quantum theory is the notion of entanglement. When two distinct particles enter into a state of quantum entanglement, they lose their individual identities and act as a unified system. Any change to one of them will immediately be felt by the other, even if they are light-years apart. There is nothing analogous to this in classical physics. When quantum entanglement occurs, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. This is so radically at odds with our everyday way of viewing the world that Einstein himself pronounced it “spooky.”

Now, even though quantum theory is customarily applied to a physical ontology, one consisting of particles and fields, there is no obvious reason why it can’t also be applied to an ontology consisting of mind-stuff. Indeed, such a “quantum psychology” could hold the key to understanding the unity of consciousness—considered by Descartes and Kant to be a distinctive mark of the mental. If physical entities can lose their individual identity and merge into a single whole, then it is at least conceivable that proto-mental entities could do likewise and—as William James put it—“agglomerate into a higher mind.” Thus does quantum entanglement offer at least a hint of a solution to the Combination Problem.

Roger Penrose himself has invoked such quantum principles to explain how the physical activities in our brains generate consciousness. In Shadows of the Mind, he wrote that “the unity of a single mind can arise … only if there is some form of quantum coherence extending across an appreciable part of the brain.” And