VII. David Chalmers – Philosopher (How consciousness be explained?) – Crazy ideas.

SERIE: CONSCIOUSNESS and the PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

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VII. David Chalmers – Philosopher (How consciousness be explained?) – Crazy ideas.
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I'm a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works …
I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.
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The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the Universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they're taken as primitive and you build up the world from there.
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The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles…
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… this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can't expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the Universe and to understanding ourselves. It may just take the right crazy idea… If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals -space, time, mass, charge- then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list.
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COMMENTS (Luis Bravo):
It is hard to think in the idea that photons traveling at the speed of light, have the capacity for reflection and are smart per se, but combined with phonons and electrons within the DNA ... who knows.
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The first crazy idea was thrown by Giulio Tononi [neuroscientist, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison / the integrated information theory (IT) model of consciousness] and Max Tegmark (MIT physicist scientist) in 2008. They proposed to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. Tegmark says “I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness”; and Tononi sustains that as consciousness is a phenomenon of information, a conscious system must be able to store in a memory and retrieve it efficiently. It must also be able to process this data, like a computer but much more flexible and powerful than the existing ones. Tegmark intends to explain consciousness through a mathematical model which in my opinion is near to an impossible at least for some time.