This story is part of our Cosmic Perspective series, in which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Read the rest of the series here.
An astrophysicist and a surgeon walk into a bar. No, this isn’t the start of a bad joke. A few years ago, astrophysicist met his childhood friend , who had become a neurosurgeon. As they reminisced and chatted about their work – Vazza modelling the structure of the universe, Feletti poring over the composition of the brain – a thought struck them: why not compare the two?
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Vazza, based at the University of Bologna, Italy, did just that. He used statistical methods to compare the neurons in one area of the brain, the cortex, with the cosmic web, the pattern of matter distribution across the universe. Vazza looked at the number of nodes in each network and how densely each node was connected. The . “It is a tantalising level of similarity,” he says. The structures differ in size by some 27 orders of magnitude. But if you ignore that, “the two patterns sort of overlap”, says Vazza.
For some physicists, this likeness is too tempting to ignore. Some have even suggested the possibility that the universe “thinks” or is in some sense conscious, an idea with roots in the philosophy of panpsychism.
Traditionally, researchers explained consciousness in one of two ways. Materialists say matter is all there is and consciousness – somehow – emerges from it. Dualists say there are fundamentally two kinds of stuff: matter stuff and consciousness stuff. Much ink has been spilled on the shortcoming of both ideas. For instance, how exactly does consciousness arise from pure matter?
Panpsychism
For some, panpsychism offers an elegant middle way. It says that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of reality, that all matter, including particles, has some form of very basic consciousness. This arguably makes it easier to see how you could explain the way human-level consciousness arises – in the sense that the brain is already built from more basic units of consciousness. “It’s definitely having a moment,” says philosopher , who studies panpsychism at the University of Leeds in the UK.
It is an extension of this concept, called “cosmopsychism”, that posits the universe is conscious. For his part, Vazza is unimpressed by the idea, on multiple levels. “Consciousness is already something we can’t define, so it’s pretty weird to attribute it to the universe,” he says. The motivation for his study was more to understand how complex networks organise themselves. Plus, just because two things have the same structure doesn’t mean they have the same character. A living brain and a dead brain, after all, are organised in the same way. On top of that, the universe is so vast that it would take eons for even light-speed signals to traverse the cosmos: if it does “think”, it does so extremely slowly.
In his book , the philosopher suggests a slightly different vision of cosmopsychism. He points out that physicists see particles as manifestations of quantum fields, and thus you could argue that these fields are the basic units of consciousness. Goff doesn’t think this necessarily means the universe has the capacity for reflective thought, but he muses on whether this fundamental mind could influence the way the universe evolves over time.
Whether any of this is true is beyond empiricism – at least for now. In any case, maybe the rise of panpsychism says more about society than the universe. “As the industrial revolution happened, nature was conceived as a machine, and when the digital revolution happened, everyone was into metaphors of the brain as a computer,” says Leidenhag. But the climate crisis has changed the discourse. “Now we’re becoming more ecologically aware, it’s not surprising that we’re turning to more organicist metaphors,” she says.
