Do Photons and Electrons Think and Feel Like I Do?
As with other types of panpsychism, this doesn't mean anyone believes particles, or most things in the universe, are conscious. The idea is expressed in these three quotes:
In this article, Goff writes:
In this Ted Talk, Chalmers says:Panpsychism is sometimes caricatured as the view that fundamental physical entities such as electrons have thoughts; that electrons are, say, driven by existential angst. However, panpsychism as defended in contemporary philosophy is the view that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, where to be conscious is simply to have subjective experience of some kind. This doesn’t necessarily imply anything as sophisticated as thoughts.
Of course in human beings consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences a horse has are much less complex than those of a human being, and the experiences a chicken has are much less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no subjective experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. For the panpsychist, this fading-whilst-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, which reflects their extremely simple nature.
In Panpsychism in the West, Skrbina writes:Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent, or thinking. You know, it’s not that a photon is wracked with angst because it’s thinking, "Aaa! I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light! I never get to slow down and smell the roses!" No, not like that. But the thought is maybe the photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling. Some primitive precursor to consciousness.
Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.
But What Is Proto-Consciousness?
We don't know. We can't even guess. It is not detectable by any physical means. If it was, it would be another physical property. It would not give rise to something else that is not detectable by any physical means - consciousness.
But consider this. In Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brian Greene writes:
If one of the leading experts in the physical properties of matter says that, despite being able to detect them, measure them remarkably precisely, use them as tools, etc., we don't know what those physical properties actually are, I don’t consider it to be any weakness of the hypothesis that we can’t claim any greater knowledge of proto-consciousness. We don't know what it is.If you’re wondering what proto-consciousness really is or how it’s infused into a particle, your curiosity is laudable, but your questions are beyond what Chalmers or anyone else can answer. Despite that, it is helpful to see these questions in context. If you asked me similar questions about mass or electric charge, you would likely go away just as unsatisfied. I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness. For gravitational and electromagnetic influences, any concern that substituting action and response for an intrinsic definition amounts to an intellectual sleight of hand is, for most researchers, alleviated by the spectacularly accurate predictions we can extract from our mathematical theories of these two forces. Perhaps we will one day have a mathematical theory of proto-consciousness that can make similarly successful predictions. For now, we don’t.
But we know what it does. It builds consciousness.