It’s something you might hear late at night, in a room full of smoke, that smells like a
skunk. What if the universe is self-aware? What if it’s conscious? Could it be a giant
brain?
What does science have to say about this? Let’s look at the evidence and also speculate
about how it could actually be true…coming up right now!
The lazy answer goes something like this.
We humans are made of pieces of the universe. We are conscious, so the universe is conscious
through us.
This is the standard short answer to the question, "Is the universe conscious."
But could the universe have a consciousness separate from us or any other conscious being?
This concept has a name. It is called panpsychism.
It is an essential aspect of many religions, from the Old Testament's omnipresent God, to
the Brahman of Hinduism and Buddhism.
In fact, in Buddhism, nothing exists except consciousness.
Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, the man who conceived of the Dyson sphere, embraced
panpsychism, and said that the universe not only operates through our consciousness but
a consciousness of its own.
So could this be true?
First we have to establish what consciousness is.
Neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Giulio Tononi, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has
proposed a way to measure how conscious a thing is.
He proposes that consciousness has to do with how much control a being has over itself or
other things around it.
This theory separates intelligence from consciousness, which are two different things. Super computers
for example, which are highly intelligent, can routinely out-think humans and beat them
at chess and Jeopardy, but they don’t have a will of their own. The programmer controls
it.
So intelligence and consciousness are two different things. A being need not be highly
intelligent to be conscious.
Based on this line of thinking, we can say that a tree is more conscious than a rock.
A worm is more conscious than a tree. A cat is more conscious than a worm.
A human is more conscious than a cat. And the ultimate consciousness could be the universe
itself.
If this is the way consciousness works, then the complexity of an organism’s brain has
something to do with its level of consciousness. And scientists, in fact have good evidence that
the seat consciousness resides in brains.
Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of highly interconnected and communicating
systems, like the brain which is an interconnected network of neurons that can fire chemical
and electronic signals.
And what are neurons? They are triggered by certain stimuli, and can send signals to each
other. And large complex networks of these neurons seem to emerge into consciousness.
The more complex the network, the more conscious something appears to be.
Is there any evidence of such a “brain” or network of connections in the universe?
Well, there is a humongous network of galaxies in the universe, many hundreds of billions
of galaxies. This is not dissimilar to the network of billions of interconnected neurons in our brain.
The difference appears to be that each of our brain cells can communicate or at least
fire signals to other brain cells. Do the galaxies have such a communication mechanism
between them?
It doesn't appear so. But you have to remember that at the center of almost all galaxies,
there is a black hole. It's like the nucleus of a brain cell. What's happening inside a black hole?
We have no idea because our equations break down at the singularity at the center
of a black hole – this is the point where time and space cease to exist and Einstein’s
equations don’t work.
Is it possible that something is happening here that we just don’t know about.
The black hole could only be analogous to a brain cell if somehow they were connected
to each other, and could send signals to each other.
If that was the case, a vast network of communicating trillions of black holes would act like a gigantic
information processor, and indeed be intelligent and possibly conscious.
This would truly be a kind of super consciousness that could theoretically control not only
our universe, but perhaps time and space itself.
But I think I’m getting way too excited about a completely speculative possibility.
Practically, we have to ask, does the universe need to be conscious in order to arrive at
its present state.
In other words, does what we see around us need a consciousness to direct the events
that lead up to what we observe, that lead to life?
Would what we see right now be any different if the universe was utterly without consciousness?
There is no evidence that consciousness is necessary to direct the events that led up
to the present state. Science allows for evolution to occur on its
own over long periods of time, with no conductor necessary.
What about the beginning of time? Did a consciousness direct the big bang to occur?
This cannot be ruled out. It’s possible that a consciousness had a hand in it.
But assigning that event as being divinely inspired through a cosmic consciousness with
no evidence…is just as speculative as saying that it was made through laws of physics which
have not yet been discovered. In addition, there is no evidence that anything
after the big bang has been under conscious control, because events after the big bang
can largely be explained within the laws of physics we understand.
And these laws do not need a consciousness to be carried out.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, former professor at Cal Tech, believes that biological organisms
are conscious because when they approach a new situations, they can change their behavior
in order to navigate it.
He believes this is the way to measure the level of consciousness of an organism. So
even a tree is conscious because it changes its behavior like shedding leaves in winter,
fighting disease.
Would our universe be considered conscious given this standard of measurement?
The universe does not seem to change course given a situation – the laws of physics
appear to apply uniformly all over the observable universe – and no deviation from these laws
has ever been observed.
Yes, there are things we don’t understand yet, like dark matter and dark energy – but
they are present everywhere uniformly, and behave in a way we can predict.
If the universe was making decisions, we would likely see some change in the universe’s
behavior that were not predictable, that could only be explained by a conscious decision-maker.
What then explains the fine tuning of the universe – the gravitational constant being what it is,
for example, being so precise, other laws like entropy and gravity having a magnitude such
that galaxies can form out of stars, and planets can form from the leftovers of stars.
And complex molecules can form on these planets, whose interactions over time lead to intelligent
beings with consciousness as the end result.
Is this just an accident or the product of something deeper, perhaps some kind of consciousness
that permeates the universe and gives it purpose?
The faithful will argue that God had a hand in it. The panpsychist will argue that a conscious
universe set up these laws from the moment of creation in order to maximize its value.
A materialist will argue that there is no fine tuning, no decision-maker, that given
enough universes in a multiverse, and enough time, a universe such as ours, where conscious
intelligent beings can evolve, is inevitable.