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   tiniest building blocks atoms, electrons, quarks then it’s much easier   
   to explain how sophisticated forms of consciousness can eventually arise   
   in, say, humans. It’s basically a story about scaling: As matter scales   
   up into more complex creatures, the degree of consciousness shoots up,   
   too.   
      
   This fits very well with the theory of evolution, which says that   
   creatures gradually became more complex as they evolved not that there   
   was some magical "aha!" moment when mind suddenly appeared on the scene.   
   After Darwin published The Origin of Species, philosophers increasingly   
   accepted the idea that something doesn’t emerge from nothing, and that   
   idea is a major reason why super-influential, hard-nosed British   
   logicians like Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell eventually   
   came to embrace panpsychism. As Whitehead said, there are "no arbitrary   
   breaks" in nature.   
      
   In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it,   
   making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails   
   panpsychism. We can break down the argument into six simple steps:   
      
   Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.)   
   Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff   
   exists.)   
   Therefore, consciousness is physical.   
   There’s no "radical emergence" in nature. (We don’t get something from   
   nothing.)   
   Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical   
   emergence.   
   Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.   
   Strawson’s conclusion is as logical as it is surprising: "Any realistic   
   any truly serious materialist must be a panpsychist."   
      
   Plenty of materialists disagree. For example, neuroscientist Anil Seth   
   told me he doesn’t buy the argument because he’s not convinced that   
   nature never makes leaps; he thinks it’s entirely plausible that   
   consciousness can emerge from unconscious matter if that matter is   
   arranged in a complex enough way in, say, a brain.   
      
   "You can still get some property emerging from things that don’t have   
   that property in nature, we see this all the time!" Seth told me. He   
   gave the mother of all examples: the origin of life itself. "I mean, at   
   some point there was nothing alive and now we have living things!"   
      
   Yet panpsychists like Strawson say that doesn’t actually prove Seth’s   
   point. They’re not claiming there’s no emergence in nature. They’re   
   claiming there’s no radical emergence no cases where a new property pops   
   up that can’t be explained with reference to the properties of its   
   parts. To say that "at some point there was nothing alive" assumes that   
   there’s a sharp break between living and nonliving stuff. But zoom in   
   enough, and the biochemistry that makes up life is really just physics.   
   Cells, after all, are made of atoms.   
      
   Seth acknowledges that he can’t disprove panpsychism. He also   
   acknowledges that materialism, in the form of modern neuroscience,   
   hasn’t yet figured out how exactly consciousness could emerge from   
   cells. But give the field more time and he suspects that it could get   
   there, he said: "the hard problem will seem less hard over time, and may   
   dissolve and disappear altogether."   
      
   Since neuroscience labs haven’t cracked the puzzle yet, some scientists   
   are trying a different approach and new experimental evidence that may   
   support panpsychism is coming to light.   
      
   Why is panpsychism becoming more popular now? Check out these incredible   
   science experiments.   
   Michael Levin, a professor of biology at Tufts University, is as   
   empirical as empiricists come. He doesn’t believe we should just be   
   armchair philosophizing about consciousness. "Just having feelings about   
   this stuff is ridiculous at this point," he told me. "You have to do   
   experiments."   
      
   And it’s his experiments that have led him to believe in panpsychism.   
      
   One thing Levin has studied is slime mold. The gooey single-celled   
   organism, which looks like dog vomit, can sometimes be found oozing over   
   a forest floor. Even when it grows to be meters across, it’s always just   
   a single cell. It’s got no brain or nervous system. And yet Levin has   
   found that it can reliably make smart decisions.   
      
   Place a slime mold at one end of a maze and a yummy treat, like oat   
   flakes, at the other end. You can watch as the slime mold branches off   
   to suss out all the different possible routes to the oat flakes. It’ll   
   then pull away from the less promising paths, choosing instead to squish   
   itself down the shortest path through the maze.   
      
   In 2010, researchers from Japan and the UK arranged little heaps of oat   
   flakes in a layout that resembles the population centers of Tokyo. Then   
   they let a slime mold loose. Lo and behold, the single-celled organism   
   cut the most efficient route to each pile of treats, effectively   
   recreating the map of the Tokyo subway system.   
      
   You may be thinking that the slime mold is just acting off pre-   
   programmed reflexes, not choosing or learning anything. A French   
   researcher, Audrey Dussutour, proved otherwise. She put slime mold at   
   one end of a bridge and yummy oatmeal at the other. But she lined the   
   bridge with caffeine, which slime mold hates. At first, the slime mold   
   refused to cross the bridge for several hours. Hungry, it finally braved   
   the caffeine so it could get the oatmeal. Over time, the slime mold   
   stopped avoiding the hated substance. Dussutour showed that the organism   
   had learned something: caffeine wasn’t so scary, after all.   
      
   The obvious question here is: How is any of this happening without a   
   brain?!   
      
   Hold on, because it gets even weirder. Consider Levin’s experiments with   
   planaria, the humble flatworm. It’s got a teeny-tiny brain, but that’s   
   not so important, a fact Levin proved by… decapitating it.   
      
   First, Levin trained these worms to get over their fear of light by   
   dribbling a delicious liver snack into an illuminated section of their   
   petri dishes. The worms, which normally prefer to hang out in the dark,   
   learned to venture into the illuminated section of the dishes for these   
   treats. Presumably, this learning took place in the brain. But then   
   Levin cut off the worms’ heads.   
      
   Planaria have an amazing ability to regenerate their body parts, so   
   within two weeks, they grew brand-new heads. And when Levin tested their   
   willingness to venture into the middle of their dishes, he found them   
   surprisingly willing. They somehow remembered the liver treats of yore.   
   But how could they remember that if their brains had been cut off?   
      
   All these findings suggest that modern science may have made a big   
   mistake in assuming that cognition is all about the brain. Brain cells,   
   known as neurons, are actually not that special. A key feature of these   
   cells the ability to send and receive electrical signals is shared with   
   other cells in your body. And it’s this sensing and communicating via   
   electricity that, Levin suspects, makes basic cognition possible.   
      
   We’ve known about bioelectricity for centuries, as you might recall from   
   high school biology: send a jolt through a frog and its leg will twitch,   
   right? But Levin is demonstrating that it plays a much bigger role than   
   anyone realized. He suspects that organisms store all kinds of   
   information not just in their cells, but in the patterns of electrical   
   currents passing between the cells. The specific pattern would convey   
   information to other cells.   
      
   And what about plants? After all, we know that plant cells use   
   electrical signaling, too. And over the past decade, scientific   
      
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