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What if everything is conscious?

Scientists spent ages mocking panpsychism. Now, some are warming to the idea that plants, cells, and even atoms are conscious.

From the Greek words pan(all) and psyche(soul), panpsychism is the view, held by many peoples around the world since antiquity, that consciousness resides in everything at least to some degree — that it’s a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical universe. Aware that anything with “psychism” in its name will probably be branded as woo-woo, they use terms like “ minimal intelligence ” or “.” 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. “The reason I think we can assume that it’s basic to alllife 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.”

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