Where does consciousness come from? Is it an emergent property of the brain or something more fundamental, intrinsic to matter itself? Is it real or just an illusion created by our neurons? These are questions that have haunted philosophers and scientists for centuries, but which today, thanks to advances in neuroscience and quantum physics, are finding new and surprising answers. One of these is panpsychism, the theory according to which consciousness is everywhere, from the simplest particle to the stars in the firmament. Is it a provocation of today or a scientific revolution of tomorrow?
The thinking chair
Imagine sitting in your favorite armchair and hearing them whisper: "be easy... you're crushing me". I don't want to trivialize, but according to panpsychism it works exactly like this: every object, from the most complex to the most banal, could have a glimmer of consciousness. The idea may make you smile (or shudder), but it has ancient roots. Already in the 500th century the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi he argued that the entire universe was pervaded by a cosmic soul. A romantic vision, supplanted in the 900th century by the triumph of scientific reductionism. Today, faced with the still unsolved enigma of consciousness, panpsychism is making a comeback.
One neuron does not make Spring
The starting point is this: despite the progress of neuroscience, we haven't been able to explain yet how one and a half kilos of brain tissue can generate the subjective experience, the "feeling" of being conscious. It is the famous "hard problem" of consciousness, which has caused philosophers of mind to consume mountains of paper and rivers of ink. But if consciousness doesn't emerge from the brain, where does it come from? Panpsychism reverses the perspective: what if a fundamental property of matter, such as mass or electric charge? If every particle had a modicum of “psychism,” then consciousness would not be a biological miracle, but a widespread feature of the universe.
Panpsychism, an Italy-USA issue
Above all, two neuroscientists give credence to this idea: the Italian Giulio Tononi and the American Christof Koch. According to them, consciousness emerges whenever there is a integrated and differentiated physical system, that is, with many interconnected but distinct parts. Like a brain, sure. But also like a crystal or a vortex of water. The more complex and organized a system is, say Tononi and Koch, the more conscious it is. This is why a cluster of neurons is more "awake" than a stone, but less than a cat or a human being. It is integrated information theory, which measures consciousness in bits, as if it were universal software.
But there are those who go further. some panpsychists (and for by Microsoft researchers), stars and galaxies could also be conscious, like giant cosmic brains. A fascinating suggestion, which takes us back to the mystical visions of our ancestors, when the cosmos was seen as a living and sentient organism.
We are in the field of the most audacious speculation. We still have no empirical evidence that consciousness is a property of matter, much less that it permeates the universe. If you want my "poetic" opinion, panpsychism currently has only one merit. That of making us look at the world around us with different eyes, of restoring soul and dignity to even the most humble and insignificant objects.
The Nemesis of Panpsychism: Consciousness or Illusion?
Not everyone, obviously, follows the path of Panpsychism. For many scientists and philosophers, this is just a desperate attempt to circumvent the problem of consciousness, a metaphysical cop-out that explains nothing. Some, like the British philosopher Keith Frankish, come to deny the very existence of consciousness, branding it as an illusion created by the brain. The opposite excess, if you like: according to this "eliminativist" vision, what we call consciousness is nothing but a trick of the mind, a virtuous hallucination that makes us believe we are something more than biological automatons. A disturbing prospect, which deprives us of our most precious treasure: the sense of being an ego, a subject, a spark of awareness in the universe.
The hard problem remains hard
In the end, the only certainty is that consciousness remains the great unsolved mystery of science. Despite advances in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, we still do not have a convincing explanation of how a cluster of cells can generate the subjective experience, the “what it feels like” to be conscious.
Panpsychism is a bold attempt to meet this challenge, but it raises more questions than it answers. If everything is conscious, why don't we hear the cries of pain from the chairs we sit on? And how does the consciousness of individual particles merge into the unitary and coherent consciousness of a living being? These are questions that bring us back to the starting point: the hard problem of consciousness. A puzzle that made the greatest thinkers of every era sweat, from Descartes to Chalmers, and which still leaves us dumbfounded and fascinated today.
But perhaps this is precisely the beauty of consciousness: the fact that it escapes any reductive explanation, that it resists any attempt to objectify and dissect it. Consciousness is the mystery that lives within us, which makes us human and participants in the cosmos. It is the divine spark that makes us say "I", that makes us feel alive and real in an otherwise cold and indifferent universe.
