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   experiments have shown that they do a whole lot more than seeking out   
   certain outcomes like sunlight and avoiding others. They remember and   
   learn from experience, a fact the ecologist Monica Gagliano established   
   with the help of Mimosa pudica, a plant known for defensively folding in   
   its leaves in response to physical stimuli. Gagliano dropped these   
   plants from a height onto a foam base and, as expected, the leaves   
   curled up at the shock. But after being dropped several times, the   
   plants learned that the drops were pretty harmless, so they kept their   
   leaves open during future drops even a month later.   
      
   Plants have many other tricks up their leaves: they keep track of how   
   long it’s been since bees last visited, they send out biochemical   
   distress signals to other plants, and they appear to lose consciousness   
   when sedated with anesthesia.   
      
   Levin thinks networks of electrical signals may be making such things   
   possible: storing memories, learning, solving problems creatively in   
   short, cognition.   
      
   "We know that things that don’t have brains have cognitive capacities,"   
   Levin said. "Frankly, I don’t understand how it took this long for this   
   view to really come back." Given what evolution tells us about the   
   gradual development of mind, "there’s no getting away from the fact that   
   cognition exists widely and long before brains and nerves appear."   
      
   In case you’re wondering why Levin prefers to speak about cognition, not   
   consciousness: The former is about functional abilities we can observe   
   from our third-person perspective. The latter is about what it feels   
   like to be a creature from that creature’s own perspective so it’s hard,   
   if not impossible, to get at experimentally. Nevertheless, Levin told   
   me, "If I had to put dollars down right now, I do think that   
   consciousness is very ubiquitous and primary, and I think it does go   
   along with cognition."   
      
   "All life is sense-making"   
   Of course, not everyone is ready to bet on panpsychism. For scientists   
   and philosophers who believe consciousness resides in more than just   
   humans and animals but are not convinced it resides in atoms, there’s a   
   kind of in-between position: biopsychism. That’s the view that all   
   living organisms and only living organisms are conscious.   
      
   Some scientists are busily amassing evidence that could support that   
   view. Aware that anything with "psychism" in its name will probably be   
   branded as woo-woo, they use terms like "minimal intelligence" or "basal   
   cognition." Their goal is to investigate signs of cognition at the base   
   of the tree of life in organisms that have very simple nervous systems   
   or lack them altogether because they appeared early in the story of   
   evolution.   
      
   Some of these researchers note that attributing consciousness to, say,   
   plants gels nicely with a theory of consciousness that’s becoming   
   increasingly popular in the scientific community: integrated information   
   theory, which says that consciousness is basically equivalent to   
   integrated information. "Integration" happens when different elements in   
   a system communicate with each other, whether that’s neurons   
   communicating in a brain, or something else. The more integrated   
   information there is in a system, the greater the degree of   
   consciousness it’s got. If the cells in a plant are sharing and   
   integrating information through bioelectricity, maybe it’s not that big   
   of a leap to think the plant has some minimal degree of consciousness.   
      
   Evan Thompson, a professor of philosophy at the University of British   
   Columbia, argued in his 2007 book Mind in Life that only humans and   
   animals with nervous systems make the cut. But he later changed his   
   mind. After all, he reasoned, any living thing has to make sense of its   
   environment, pursue its goals, and solve problems in order to survive.   
   Whether you’re a tiger or a fern, a slime mold or a bacterium, you need   
   to find a way to get food, reproduce, and adapt when faced with hostile   
   conditions. By its very nature, living seems to be a process of   
   cognition.   
      
   "All life is sense-making," Thompson told me. "The reason I think we can   
   assume that it’s basic to all life is that it’s actually much harder to   
   make sense of the idea that a system that produces itself metabolically   
   can have directed, oriented behavior without some kind of motivation or   
   drive that involves affect."   
      
   In other words, what does it even mean to say that a living being is   
   pursuing goals but doesn’t want anything?   
      
   The downside for biopsychism, though, is that it’s still stuck with the   
   "hard problem" of consciousness, since it reinforces the idea that   
   there’s a sharp break between conscious and nonconscious or between   
   living and nonliving stuff. And so, philosophers like Strawson and   
   scientists like Levin think we need to go further, all the way to   
   panpsychism.   
      
   I asked Levin what he thinks is going on inside a plant when it bends   
   toward the light: Is it just acting mechanically, or does it want the   
   light? "All these dichotomies are false dichotomies," he replied. "What   
   most people say is, ‘Oh, that’s just a mechanical system following the   
   laws of physics.’ Well, what do you think you are?"   
      
   Okay, but how could an atom be conscious?   
   Debates about theories of consciousness are kind of like a party game.   
   The central question is: How low can you go? Are you willing to ascribe   
   consciousness to animals? Plants? Cells? Atoms? Subatomic particles?   
      
   Even if you believe that all living things have some degree of   
   consciousness, you might have trouble with the idea that an atom or an   
   electron is conscious. It’s hard to understand what that could possibly   
   look like.   
      
   Panpsychist thinkers are quick to explain that they’re not suggesting   
   these particles have complex forms of consciousness, like decision-   
   making or meta-cognition ("I want X, and I know that I want X"). They’re   
   envisioning something way more basic. Remember that to have   
   consciousness is just to have a perspective on the world, a feeling of   
   what it’s like to be you.   
      
   "For an electron, there’s no meta-cognition, no decision-making,"   
   Leidenhag said. "But when it encounters another electron with another   
   negative charge, it repels." For any particle, she suggests, "there’s   
   something that it’s like for it to be attracted or repelled." This   
   attraction or repulsion is a minimal sense of wanting or not wanting.   
      
   "Cognition that’s really, really simple looks like physics to us," Levin   
   told me. For example, we typically assume a key feature of cognition is   
   intentionality or freedom being able to choose your own path, as opposed   
   to proceeding down a preprogrammed path. Well, physics tells us that   
   even elementary particles have that, in the simplest possible form:   
   quantum indeterminacy (the idea that the physical facts of the universe   
   seem to be indeterminate on the subatomic level).   
      
   In fact, if you ask Levin the classic question How low can you go? Is   
   there anything in the world that’s not somewhere on the spectrum of   
   cognition? he’ll tell you: "I don’t believe there is a zero in our   
   world."   
      
   He’s happy to acknowledge that the level of indeterminacy in an   
   elementary particle is a "very stupid-low level of freedom," but it’s   
   not nothing. And that’s all the panpsychist needs in order to explain   
   consciousness as a simple story of scaling. Once upon a time, there was   
   a little particle that was a little bit conscious. It got together with   
   more particles, and they formed a cell that was a little bit more   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)