The mind is matter

In recent weeks, the talk of the town has been the visit of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari to Brazil. The researcher has become known not only for his work on the historiography of the past, but also for addressing the present (as in his book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century") and the future (as in "Homo Deus"). Unlike other authors such as Ray Kurzweil, what Harari brings as a novelty to his presentation of singularity and transhumanism is a philosophical and critical reflection on this trend.

Back in 2016, in an interview published in Folha de S. Paulo, Harari discussed technological revolutions and how science, for many years, became the primary tool for explaining (or even manipulating) the world. Today, however, we face the problem that not everything can be explained scientifically, or that scientific explanation is no longer sufficient on its own. We have major issues, such as consciousness and the human brain, that still point to a mystery for scientists and a topic for religion and philosophy. Nevertheless, Harari believes that it is possible we will be able to explain what consciousness is within this century, which would signify another revolution in human history.

Indeed, it is a major challenge for scientists to understand how an organ like the brain works. After all, it is an organ with nearly 100 billion cells—neurons—that connect to 10,000 others, thus forming something like ten trillion nerve connections. Despite this, we already have some clues that have helped us better understand human behavior, though not enough to accurately explain issues like feelings, emotions, and experiences—that is, how they are felt and interpreted by the brain.

According to an article published on the website The Conversation, there is significant doubt among scientists as to whether we will actually be able to explain these issues through scientific methods. However, we are facing a new community of researchers who have a different strategy for solving the mystery. Throughout the 20th century, studying the mind or consciousness became frowned upon by the scientific community due to the difficulty of observation: "You cannot look inside a person's head and see their feelings and experiences. If we are only going to use third-person observation, then we will have no foundation for postulating consciousness."

This, however, is not an argument that precludes research; after all, electrons are also too small to be seen, yet they do not cease to exist or be studied. Scientists, therefore, use unobservable entities to explain what we can see, as is the case with lightning, for example. But in the case of consciousness, there is nothing truly visible—"we know that consciousness exists not through experiments, but through our immediate perception of our own feelings and experiences."

"So how can science explain it? When we deal with observational data, we can conduct experiments to test whether what we observe is in accordance with what the theory predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this method fails. The best scientists are those capable of correlating unobservable experiences with observable processes by scanning people's brains and relying on reports of their private experiences of consciousness."
With this method, we can establish, for example, that the invisible feeling of hunger is correlated with the visible activity of the hypothalamus. But the accumulation of these correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness. What we really want to explain is why conscious experiences are correlated with brain activity. Why does such activity in the hypothalamus accompany the sensation of hunger?"

In "Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness," Philip Goff, author of the article on The Conversation, highlights exactly why the modern scientific method ends up excluding consciousness. Before Galileo Galilei, scientists believed that the physical world was formed by qualities such as colors and smells. However, Galileo opted for a quantitative approach to the physical world, and for this reason, he proposed that these qualities were not part of the physical world, but rather of consciousness, which he himself denoted as something outside the domain of science. This perspective remains present in contemporary science, hence the persistence in correlating quantitative data with qualitative experiences and the frustration arising from this impossibility.

For Goff, the proposal by philosopher Bertrand Russell and scientist Arthur Eddington may be more successful, despite having been proposed in the 1920s. The researchers argued that physical science does not actually tell us what matter truly is, but rather how it behaves. That is, physics can tell us that matter has mass and charge—properties that, for Goff, are expressly behavioral because they deal with properties like attraction, repulsion, and resistance to acceleration. "Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers call 'the intrinsic nature of matter,' what makes up matter and what it is in itself."

According to Goff, this is a major gap in our science that Russell and Eddington wanted to fill with the notion of consciousness. Thus was born a type of "panpsychism," an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But this new wave of panpsychism does not carry a mystical perspective like previous ones: it is believed that there is only matter (nothing spiritual or supernatural) and that it can be described from two perspectives. While physics describes matter "from the outside" in relation to its behavior, matter "from the inside" is constituted of "forms of consciousness."

In other words, Goff assumes that the mind is, in fact, matter and that even elementary particles possess basic forms of consciousness, after all, consciousness can vary in its complexity. "We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of humans, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there will be a point at which consciousness suddenly switches off—but it is also possible that it fades but does not disappear completely, which means that even an electron might have a little bit of consciousness," the researcher writes.

"What panpsychism offers us is a simple and elegant way to integrate consciousness into the scientific perspective. Strictly speaking, this cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness requires that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations not be strictly based on the testable. But I believe this can be justified by a form of inference that may be the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits into our scientific story."
While our scientific method offers no theory at all—only correlations—the traditional alternative that claims consciousness resides in the soul leads to a dishonest representation of nature in which the mind and body are distinct. Panpsychism avoids these two extremes, which is why some of our most prominent neuroscientists are using it as the best framework for building a science of consciousness."

Goff believes that, in the future, we will be introduced to a new field of science strictly focused on consciousness, though it will not resemble the scientific method as we know it today. It is possible that it could result from or be impacted by other fields of physics, such as quantum physics, but it is still too early to establish more precise correlations regarding what this new area and its researchers will contribute to our understanding of ourselves and, perhaps, how much this may relate to the arrival and recognition of new artificial consciousnesses.