Dumb as Rocks: Gustav Fechner and the Lasting Popularity of Panpsychism
Ours is truly an exciting moment if a Caltech researcher like Daw An Wu can come on Sing For Science and claim alignment with the principles of panpsychism, which, in his words, “is to say that even a rock has consciousness…it just basically has nothing. There’s just almost no information in that consciousness.”
Though we didn’t dip our toes further into the consciousness whirlpool on our episode with Debbii Dawson, I’ll put forth here that I define consciousness as the quality of interiority—not self-awareness per se, but perhaps an active inner experience.
I’d become familiar with the increasing popularity of Daw An’s belief through Annaka Harris’s book, Lights On, where she investigates the claim that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter. And to me, this idea is attractive mainly because it offered a bridge between the sometimes irreconcilable positions of the physicalist (all phenomena have a material form) and anyone who considers that what’s happening underneath the hood may be supernatural or immaterial in nature. The basic argument here is that if you do believe that humans share an attribute of consciousness with apes, dogs, cats, and down the line to a worm, then you can’t pinpoint exactly when the lights get turned off with simpler organisms and even atoms themselves. Framed as such, it becomes just as strange to me to see rocks as unconscious as it does to see them as conscious.
There’s nothing entirely new about any of this, either. The philosophy of panpsychism first emerged 200 years ago alongside the birth of psychophysics, the field of study that measures how the brain processes sensory input from the physical world. The godfather to both the field and the philosophy was German physician and physicist Gustav Fechner (1801–1887). Fechner’s journey from physics to panpsychism is so extraordinary it has the ingredients of a Greek epic: Having gone temporarily blind from self-experimentation staring at the sun, Gustav entered into a period of depression, only to emerge from it with a sort of inner vision that produced panpsychism. Fechner described his awakening as giving him perspective enough to see all matter as “alive” and his renewed outlook the “day view,” while his physicist’s and former understanding was the “night view.” A devout Christian, Fechner 2.0 came to define the divine as being a unifying collection of all consciousness that he described with this analogy: humans are to God what cells are to a human being.
And this, to me, is the big selling point. My Fechnerian-adjacent philosophy has always been that we and everything around us are far more connected than science has yet been able to measure.
