Is Everything conscious?
This seems like a silly question. The immediate answer is something like: ‘Of course not! My coffee cup can’t think!’ This response is, of course, true and accurate in the sense that it’s not planning a holiday to Marbella. But there are a growing number of philosophers who think that consciousness is a fundamental part of nature and that there might be a flicker of consciousness within everything. That doesn’t mean that a coffee cup is conscious in the same way as you or me, but it does mean that there might be something it is like to be an electron or a quark. This idea is called panpsychism.
What is it like to be a bat?
To understand why philosophers talk about how there is ‘something-it-is-like-to-be’, we need to meet Thomas Nagel. Nagel introduced the idea of an inner experience in his paper What is it Like to be a Bat? In this paper, he talks about how humans can’t ever know what it is like to be a bat. We have eyes that see using things retinae, but a bat uses echolocation, which is, for humans, an entirely alien way of experiencing the world. We might be able to imagine ourselves as being a bat and how it would feel for us to fly around and imagine some sort of sonar image, maybe like we see an ultrasound (at least that’s how I imagine it), but that’s still deeply rooted in our own experiences as a human. This means, or so Nagel says, that being you, or being a bat has a feeling to it. In other words, sentient beings have a phenomenal consciousness.
This understanding of phenomenal consciousness has highlighted and reawakened one of the biggest problems for philosophers of mind. The question is: how does the brain create consciousness? This question doesn’t have an answer yet and there is disagreement although most philosophers working in the anglo-saxon tradition fall into the physicalist camp. Physicalists believe that consciousness is the same as the brain and eventually scientists will be able to work out how and why the brain makes us feel things. Other philosophers identify as dualists and believe that consciousness is something separate from the brain but is connected to it somehow. Both theories have flaws that are difficult to overcome, and this is why some philosophers are turning towards panpsychism as an answer to this difficult question. So, what are these issues?
Physicalism is grounded in science and can be studied and tested, leading physicalists to believe that it is the best way for us to understand brains and how we think. The problem is that consciousness is entirely different from other scientific endeavours. When we want to know about gravity, we are looking at it from the outside. We can study the effects of gravity and work out how it all works, but when we look at consciousness, we experience it from within. A scientist can’t look into your brain and see your experience of a beautiful painting, or what it’s like for you to feel pain (remember Nagel?). Only you know what it is like for you to experience those things. The only way to see consciousness is from the inside, not the outside like with other scientific questions. To understand this a bit more, we can talk about two thought experiments: philosophical zombies and black and white Mary.
Mindless Zombies
A philosophical zombie (p-zombie) is different from zombies in films, although both are fictional. Instead, a p-zombie is a being that doesn’t have any sort of inner experience but acts like it does. When it stubs its toe, it says ‘ouch’ and hops around for a little while, but it doesn’t feel any pain. When we look at the zombie, we wouldn’t know that it’s a zombie because it would react exactly like any human would. The fictional nature of p-zombies doesn’t matter for the purposes of this thought experiment. What matters is that we can imagine this kind of being existing. The problem that this presents for the physicalist is that if the brain and consciousness are one and the same, we shouldn’t be able to imagine one existing without the other, just like we can’t imagine Currer Bell existing without Charlotte Brontë. Since we can imagine them being different, consciousness and the brain can’t be the same thing, and consciousness can’t be purely physical. This is called The Conceivability Argument because it is concerned with what we can conceive of, or in other words, what we can imagine.
Some people, like Anil Seth, have suggested that The Conceivability Argument is just based on a lack of knowledge. In his book, Being You, Seth argues that it is possible to imagine an aeroplane flying backwards, then we learn that it’s impossible for this to happen. The problem here is that Seth is concerned with what is naturally possible or what is possible to happen according to science. The Conceivability Argument is concerned with what is logically possible. Something is logically possible if it doesn’t contradict itself, for example, a square is a four-sided-shape and it wouldn’t be possible, by definition, for it to be anything else because then it wouldn’t be a square. It would be some other shape. It’s not a logical contradiction for a plane to fly backwards or for philosophical zombies to exist, and so Seth’s argument doesn’t really stand up.
There’s Something About Mary
If p-zombies aren’t enough to convince you then maybe Black and White Mary will. Mary is a scientist who exists in a black and white room. Her cruel captors won’t allow her to see colour and make sure that she is dressed in black and white, down to her gloves. She isn’t allowed mirrors and has never seen her own face. What she does have is access to every book that explains colour in physical terms. She watches black and white documentaries about colour. She knows every physical fact there is to know about colour, but she has never seen colour. One day, she steps outside of her room and her captors present her with a red apple. The question we are asked to consider here is: does Mary learn anything new? The intuitive answer to this is yes: she learns what it is like to see red. The problem for physicalists is that even if we grant that physicalism could explain all behaviour and structure, it still seems to leave something out: the qualitative feel of experience. This, and The Conceivability Argument shows that consciousness is not purely physical and there has to be another explanation.
Bad Dreams and Evil Demons
For some (although a dwindling number), this other explanation is dualism: the view that consciousness and the brain are different from one another. Dualism has a long history but was most famously put forward in the west by René Descartes who was writing in the 1600s. Descartes began by doubting everything. He suggested that maybe we are being deceived by an evil demon that can hoodwink us so completely that we have completely imagined a fictional world. This caused Descartes to cast doubt on everything... except for one thing. Descartes said that he cannot doubt that he is thinking. He can doubt that every other person exists. He can doubt that the entire world exists. But to doubt there must be a Descartes that exists to do the thinking. This leads him to one of the most famous phrases within philosophy: I think therefore I am. This means that the mind (the thinking thing) can exist separately from the body. This is the opposite of a zombie and can be thought of more as a ghost. This ghost is an entirely thinking being and not physical at all. Descartes argues that since we can think of ourselves as a ghost, this must mean that the mind, or consciousness, is distinct from the body.
The interaction problem causes an issue for the dualist. The problem is that there is no mechanism for a material body to interact with a material mind. If the body is all matter and consciousness is something else that is not matter, there is no way for the body to cause the mind to do anything. When the body experiences some kind of damage, the dualist cannot explain how this causes the feeling of pain in the mind. Think of it like trying to get on Wi-Fi without a modem. This is also a problem in the reverse: beliefs, desires and other mental states cause the body to do things. If I believe that it will rain later (a mental state), I will take an umbrella with me (a brain state). This problem was presented to Descartes by Elisabeth of Bohemia, and he did reply saying that the pituitary gland was the area in which this interaction happened, but the pituitary gland is still a physical part of the brain and so Descartes still didn’t address the problem. This means that we cannot accept dualism as an explanation for why we have a phenomenal consciousness. There must be some kind of middle way: enter panpsychism.
Something in between?
Since both physicalism and dualism have deep flaws, but also unique strengths, the best approach could lie somewhere in between—not quite all physical and not quite all separate. Panpsychism takes this stance. It is the idea that consciousness is just part of physical matter, the same as mass or charge. It’s not a sophisticated consciousness, but there is something-it-is-like-to-be an electron. If our consciousness is like a blazing bonfire, a cat’s experience could be a campfire, and an electron could be a dying ember.
The main problem for the panpsychist is called The Combination Problem. If we are to assert (as the panpsychist does) that things like electrons and quarks have a fundamental phenomenological consciousness, then we need to be able to explain how complex consciousness can result from simple consciousness. An intuitive thought is that it might be like building a house. We stack simple consciousnesses on top of each other and then we end up with somewhere we can live. My worry with this, however, is that there is no explanation for what the ‘cement’ might be. What joins the bricks of simple consciousness together to make the house of complex consciousness?
Hedda Hassel Mørch opts for an idea called fusionism which suggests that simple consciousnesses fuse together to create a complex consciousness, in a similar way to small droplets of water coming together to create a larger amount of water. The water and its underlying structure still exist, but the droplet no longer exists and becomes something else (a puddle?). A difficulty with this view is that there is no explanation as to how this process works. Scientists can explain why water droplets join when placed next to each other, but panpsychists can’t explain why this might happen with consciousness yet.
The answer to this problem might lie in the study of growing brains. In 2018 Madeline Lancaster began to grow human brains in a lab—these are called human cerebral organoids (HCOs). These HCOs are not full-sized brains and are not any sort of complex consciousness (thank goodness), but they are giving insights into how human brains grow and how they are different from less complex brains. In a talk in June 2025, Lancaster explained that while other organoids (like livers and kidneys) required manipulation to become those organoids, HCOs didn’t. She suggested that pluripotent stem cells are inclined to become brain cells. This is where we might find a way through the combination problem. By studying HCOs, we might find a way to explain why brain cells create neurons, through which consciousness arises.
This essay started with the question ‘is everything conscious?’ and whether consciousness could exist outside the brain. For physicalists the answer was a resounding no: consciousness is nothing over and above the brain, but they are unable to explain why there is a ‘what-it-is-like-to-be' something. Dualists say that consciousness is separate from the brain, but they are unable to explain how the physical brain interacts with the ghost of consciousness. Panpsychists overcome both problems by suggesting that consciousness just is part of matter. The problem they must overcome is how fundamental consciousness in all things becomes unified to make a sophisticated consciousness. Currently we don’t have a solution to this problem, but in studying how brains grow in a lab we might be able to get closer to the answer and that answer might be that everything is conscious.
References
Hedda Hassel Mørch. Panpsychism and Causation: A New Argument and a Solution to the Combination Problem. 1 Jan. 2014. Accessed 29 Sept. 2025.
Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 127, Apr. 1982, pp. 127–136, https://doi.org/10.2307/2960077.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, Oct. 1974, pp. 435–450, www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf, https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.
Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. S.L., Dutton, 2021.
