Is the Entire Universe Conscious from Subatomic Particles Up?

This comes from Joe Scott’s channel on YouTube. I’m putting it up because some of the great commenters here have a strong interest in mysticism and the paranormal. The video discusses the possibility that the universe may be conscious, acting as a ‘giant brain’. The idea seems to be that subatomic particles, like photons in the famous double slit experiment, may have a limited form of consciousness and can themselves decide the results of the experiment. In resonance theory, these particles consciousness resonates with other particles so that the matter they compose itself becomes conscious at ascending scales, all the way up to galaxies and their interactions with dark matter. It’s quite a far out theory, and at one point it gets too much for Scott himself, who sounds the ‘woo woo’ alert. Nevertheless, such theories have the support of leading mathematicians and physicists like Roger Penrose, and have been published in peer reviewed scientific journals. Although Scott makes the point that it’s more philosophy than science.

As Scott tells his viewers, the theory’s called panpsychism. It’s actually a very old belief. One of the pre-Socratic ancient Greek philosophers believed that every particle in the universe had its own spirit, possibly from observing the behaviour of iron around the lodestone. This philosopher, whose name escapes me at the moment, declared that ‘the world is full of gods’. I bought a book a while ago, From Science to God, by Peter Russell, which sets out the same theory. It also reminds me of the theory of monads proposed in the 17th century by the German philosopher and scientist Leibniz. It was his rival to the atomic theory that was then being seriously considered by scientists after the fall of Aristotelian physics. As I understand it, monads were like atoms except they possessed a form of consciousness. There was an ascending scale of them upwards through the universe, all under the control of the Almighty. Different objects and phenomena were collections of monads under the control of a dominant monad. The theory was rejected in favour of what is now the accepted atomic theory because it made no predictions, and thus could not be tested according to the scientific method.

I’ve heard other people talk about the possibility that subatomic particles and such may be conscious and there are other videos about the theory on YouTube.