Psychedelic Apes

by Alex Boese

  This world view framed the origin of life as a particular problem, because it now had to be explained in terms of non-life, rather than vice versa. Researchers had to explain how what was entirely inanimate could somehow become animate.

  But, although panpsychism may have been eclipsed by mechanism, it evidently still lingers in the cultural memory. Philosophers have noted that the concept of ‘the Force’, featured in the Star Wars movies, described as a living energy that connects everything in the universe, is essentially panpsychism. In the 2011 UK census, 176,632 people claimed to be practitioners of the Jedi religion, and so would be believers in the Force. Jediism, in fact, ranked as the seventh most widely practised religion in the UK.

  That’s all well and good, one might say. Perhaps panpsychism represents an old way of understanding nature, but people didn’t know any better, back then, and we’ve now corrected the naive assumptions of our ancestors – not counting those Jedi among us (whose professed belief may, anyway, be more tongue-in-cheek than genuine). The proof of the accuracy of our present-day view lies in all that modern science has accomplished. We’ve put men on the moon, built supercomputers and unlocked the genetic code.

  Proponents of panpsychism concede that the mechanistic world view was an important development in Western thought, but they argue that it has now, in turn, become limiting, because it’s bumping up against phenomena it can’t explain. In particular, it struggles to explain consciousness.

  The problem, they say, is that physics only explains the behaviour of things. It reduces the natural world to a series of forces – such as electromagnetism and gravity – that act on particles, modifying how they behave in various ways. These behaviours are all external properties and are susceptible to measurement. What physics doesn’t examine, or even attempt to explain, is the inner nature of particles, what they intrinsically are.

  Take yourself, for example. If physicists were to describe you, they might point out the complex forces acting on your body and how they cause you to behave. There’s the gravity pulling down on you, the electrical signals running along your nerves, and the chemical reactions within your cells. But you’re more than just these external measurable properties. You also have an inner life, or consciousness. You see colours, feel pain and smell aromas. You experience things such as fear, anger and happiness. You have a subjective awareness of reality. All this is invisible to physics. Left to its own devices, physics would never be able to predict that a phenomenon such as consciousness even existed.

  So, the panpsychic argument goes, if physics can’t fully describe a person, because it overlooks their inner being, then why do we assume that physics would be able to describe fully any other form of matter? Or, to put it another way, why should we believe that matter can be fully described by measuring only its external properties, as scientists claim, if we know this isn’t true for ourselves? Instead, it would make more sense to assume that all matter has some kind of interior perspective, just as we do – that it has some kind of awareness of its surroundings. In which case, it must feel like something to be a rock or an electron, even though that feeling would be completely alien to our experience.

  The scientific response to this argument is that we can be pretty sure electrons, rocks and tables aren’t conscious because they display no mind-like behaviour. All the evidence indicates that consciousness is a special feature of brains, and brains alone.

  Furthermore, they insist, there’s a perfectly good explanation of consciousness, grounded in physics. Atoms form into molecules, which form into neurons, which then form into brains. Consciousness emerges when enough neurons are collected together in a brain and start interacting with each other. The details of this are admittedly murky. Researchers aren’t sure how many neurons are necessary, or what exactly about their arrangement triggers consciousness, but the overall picture seems clear enough. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuron communication. Or, put more plainly, it’s a result of clever wiring.

  Panpsychists, however, have another line of attack. They argue that while this explanation of consciousness may sound reasonable in principle, it actually poses a logical paradox because it suggests that non-aware particles can, merely by arranging themselves in a certain way, achieve awareness. But how can awareness emerge where there was no awareness before? If that were true, it would imply that something was emerging from nothing, which is impossible.

  By way of analogy, consider electricity. It assumes many forms throughout the universe. It flows through wires in your walls as current, flashes through the sky as lightning and makes your hair stand on end as static electricity. These different electrical phenomena emerge as atoms arrange in various ways. However, they don’t emerge out of nothing. They’re a consequence of the fact that, at the most fundamental level, subatomic particles such as electrons have the property of either positive or negative charge.

  Or consider gravity. It causes the emergence of many different phenomena, such as planets, suns, galaxies and black holes. But, again, these phenomena don’t emerge out of nothing. Gravity is a property of particles at the smallest level of matter.

  But when it comes to consciousness, unlike electricity and gravity, there is (according to science) no specific subatomic property out of which it emerges. It simply springs into existence, fully formed, as a consequence of atoms being arranged into brains. Where there was no awareness before, suddenly it’s there. Panpsychists protest that this makes no sense. It would be like claiming that lightning could emerge into existence even if electrons didn’t possess the property of charge. Or that planets could form even if gravity wasn’t a universal property of matter.

  Therefore, panpsychists argue that some form of primitive consciousness must be a property of subatomic particles. If this were the case, it would eliminate the paradox of awareness seeming to emerge into existence out of non-awareness. The consciousness that we as humans experience could then be seen as merely one manifestation of the consciousness inherent in all matter, in the same way that lightning is one manifestation of the force of electromagnetism inherent in all matter.

  That’s the basic argument for panpsychism, but critics offer a battery of reasons why no one should believe it. The most frequently repeated reason focuses on the so-called ‘combination problem’. If every individual subatomic particle possesses its own consciousness, ask critics, then how do all these tiny consciousnesses combine to form a larger unified consciousness, such as a brain? Because it seems to be a distinctive feature of consciousness that it doesn’t combine. If you put twenty people together in a room, their brains don’t meld together to form a single mega-brain. So, why would electron consciousnesses combine seamlessly together?

  But the most fundamental problem of all, according to critics, is simply that panpsychism is useless. It’s completely untestable, which makes it unscientific, and it also generates no predictions. The neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey has complained that the theory ‘crumbles to nothing’ when asked to do any kind of useful explanatory work. After all, scientists could argue until they’re blue in the face about what the inner being of an electron is, but the fact is, for better or worse, they can only ever know its external properties. They gain nothing by attributing consciousness to it.

  Panpsychists counter that the same argument could be used against the mechanistic view of matter. It’s equally unprovable that matter is mindless and lifeless. Moreover, they contend, there actually are some things to be gained by adopting a panpsychic outlook. It arguably offers a more naturalistic way of understanding consciousness because it fully integrates the phenomenon into nature, whereas the mechanistic view assumes there’s a radical difference between non-conscious matter and the conscious mind.

  Shifting to a moralistic line of argument, they also maintain that panpsychism offers a more spiritually enriching perspective on the universe. They accuse the mechanistic world view of having de-animated nature by reducing it to mere mechanical interactions. This,
they allege, has contributed to present-day social and environmental problems by facilitating the exploitation of natural resources. As David Skrbina, author of Panpsychism in the West, has put it, ‘It is easy to abuse dead, inanimate matter, or unconscious forms of life.’ So, panpsychism is presented as a more compassionate and sustainable philosophy.

  But having said all that, at the end of the day, panpsychists do acknowledge that the mechanistic world view is so deeply ingrained in modern society that it might be difficult to convince many people to abandon it. The panpsychists themselves admit to having moments of doubt, moments when they wonder if it’s worth it to have their colleagues think they’re crazy. The Finnish philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has even coined a medical term to describe such doubts. He calls it panphobia, which he defines as the fear a person feels when he realizes that he actually finds the arguments of panpsychism compelling. Alternatively, if you do find yourself drawn towards belief in a panpsychic universe, you might be cheered at the thought of becoming a Jedi. Although, unfortunately, that won’t get you a lightsaber or powers of levitation.

  What if diseases come from space?

  When there’s a cold going around, it always seems as if you end up catching it no matter what precautions you take. You may shun runny-nosed friends, scrupulously avoid touching doorknobs, clean your hands constantly with antiviral sanitizer and even wear a face mask when on public transport – but no luck. You get sick anyway.

  What did you do wrong? Perhaps you didn’t cast your net wide enough when considering the possible sources of infection. You probably assumed that you would catch the cold from other people, but what if the germs were coming from a more exotic source? What if they were raining down upon you from outer space?

  In 1977, the astrophysicists Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed that exactly this was the case. This was the same Fred Hoyle whom we met earlier as the co-author of the steady-state theory. Now, at a later stage in his career – in his early sixties, when most people might be looking ahead to retirement – he had joined forces with Wickramasinghe, his former student at Cambridge, to argue that passing comets were shedding pathogens which then drifted down into the Earth’s atmosphere and caused outbreaks of disease. And not just the common cold. The two theorists speculated that many of the great epidemics of history, such as the fifth-century-BC plague of Athens, the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the flu pandemic of 1918, might have been caused by these tiny extraterrestrial invaders.

  If true, this alone would be of great significance for humankind, but Hoyle and Wickramasinghe imagined implications that extended far beyond the history of medicine. They maintained that pathogens have been raining down from outer space for billions of years, and that this was the reason life first emerged on Earth. In other words, they claimed that we are all the descendants of space germs.

  What Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were proposing was a form of panspermia, which is the idea that life didn’t originate on Earth, but instead arrived here from elsewhere in the cosmos.

  The prevailing view among scientists is that life began right here on Earth – perhaps, as Charles Darwin put it in 1861, in some ‘warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present.’ This seems like a reasonable assumption given that the Earth remains the only place we know of in the universe where life exists. Nevertheless, panspermic notions have been kicking around for a long time in Western culture. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Anaxagoras suggested that life originally fell to Earth from the sky, and in the nineteenth century leading scientists such as Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz advocated versions of this idea. Kelvin compared it to the way that seeds blown by the wind take root in the scorched earth surrounding a volcanic eruption. In 1906, the Swedish chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Svante Arrhenius gave the concept its name, adapting it from the Latin phrase panspermia rerum, meaning ‘the universal seed of things’.

  Panspermia theorists have imagined life arriving on Earth in a variety of ways. Arrhenius speculated that tiny bacterial spores might be able to float up into the upper atmosphere of a planet and from there drift into space, where the force of solar radiation would propel them throughout the galaxy until some arrived here on Earth. Others believe that microbes from other planets could have arrived here inside rocky meteors. In 1960, the physicist Thomas Gold even suggested that aliens might have landed a spaceship on our planet sometime in its early history and then accidentally left behind microbe-contaminated garbage from which all life on Earth then evolved.*

  The notion of panspermia has struggled to achieve mainstream acceptance, though, because critics have complained that it doesn’t actually address the problem of how life emerged. It simply kicks the problem down the road, removing it from Earth to somewhere else. Many scientists also believe that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for organisms to survive for extended periods while travelling through the vacuum of space.

  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe addressed both these concerns simultaneously. They argued not only that life could survive in deep space, but that it had originated there – not on the surface of a planet, but in the vast clouds of dust that span the distances between the stars.

  Wickramasinghe had been studying interstellar dust, trying to figure out just what the stuff was, and it was from this research that the germs-from-space theory evolved. When he began his research in the 1960s, the prevailing assumption had been that the dust mostly consisted of dirty ice (frozen water mixed with a few metals), but, by analysing the wavelength of radiation that the dust absorbed, Wickramasinghe concluded that this wasn’t correct. Instead, and quite surprisingly, its absorption spectrum seemed to be a good match for a range of organic compounds that included the plant matter cellulose.

  Organic compounds are loosely defined as molecules containing carbon. They’re the material out of which living things are made. In the scientific effort to discover the origin of life, great emphasis has been placed on understanding ways in which organic compounds might have formed out of inorganic matter, because, the thinking goes, once you have organic compounds, you have the building blocks of life. All that remains is to figure out how these building blocks arranged themselves in the appropriate way.

  In 1953, the chemist Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller made headlines by designing a simple experiment that appeared to show that the atmospheric conditions on the early Earth might have allowed organic compounds to form quite easily out of inorganic materials such as methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The implication of this research was that the early-Earth environment must have given birth to life. This was widely hailed as the first real scientific breakthrough in understanding the origin of life.

  However, Wickramasinghe’s research was indicating that organic compounds existed in vast quantities in deep space. He shared these results with Hoyle, which prompted him to realize that Urey and Miller’s assumption that the building blocks of life had first formed on Earth was mistaken.

  Hoyle suggested that, if organic compounds exist in interstellar dust, then this, rather than the Earth, might logically be the place where life first formed. This was the Eureka moment for the germs-from-space theory and the observation that got both researchers hooked on the idea. But there was an obvious problem, which they acknowledged. Interstellar dust is very cold. Temperatures out there in the dust clouds hover close to absolute zero. It’s not the kind of environment, one imagines, that would generate the complex chemical interactions associated with life.

  The two researchers concluded, therefore, that life must not have emerged directly in the dust itself, but rather in the comets that were created as a dust cloud collapsed to form our solar system. In the interior of these comets, they pointed out, there would have been all the necessary ingredients for life: organic compounds, water, protection from ultraviolet radiation, and possibly even heat created by the decay of radioactive elements. Plus, there were billions of these
comets, a vast chemical laboratory in which nature could have tinkered until it found the formula for life.

  Once life had formed in a single comet, they argued, that comet would have begun scattering cells as it orbited the sun, spreading organisms to other comets, which would then, in turn, have scattered them even more widely. In this way, life forms would have eventually drifted down upon the newly formed planets in the solar system, taking root wherever they could, and these life forms would have found a particularly welcoming home on the young Earth.

  The two researchers became obsessed by their germs-from-space theory. Over the following decades, they churned out a series of books and articles on the subject, seeking to amass evidence to persuade the sceptics, a group that included most of the scientific community.

  One of their arguments focused on the speed at which life had emerged on Earth. As far as scientists can tell, single-celled microorganisms appeared almost as soon as it was physically possible for this to happen, once the surface of the planet had cooled down sufficiently to allow it. This seems remarkable when one considers how complicated the chemistry of life is. Hundreds of thousands of molecules have to be arranged in exactly the right way for even the simplest cell to function. How did such staggering complexity manage to arise so quickly? Hoyle and Wickramasinghe countered that if you move the creation of life off the Earth, into space, that buys a lot more time for the process to have happened. It could potentially give life billions of years to have emerged, rather than just a few million.

  They also pointed out that bacteria are amazingly hardy. Research has revealed that many can survive intense radiation. But how, the two authors asked, did bacteria ever evolve this ability, given they would never have been exposed to such high radiation levels on Earth? Again, this is a challenge for the Earth-origin theory to explain. Such resistance makes perfect sense, however, if bacteria first evolved in the high-radiation environment of outer space.