Panpsychism

Grappling with the concept of consciousness can be difficult, because, although we can assume certainty of our own state, we can never be sure of another person’s. Consciousness, therefore, is the distinct experience of one’s own existence, but at the same time, this first-person, mortal perspective obscures recognizing the full experience of the “other,” a perspective unfathomable in the Concert Hall.

Definitively, there is “something like it” to be a human, or, say, a bat. Eyesight largely paints a human’s surroundings, while sonar sketches the bat’s. As we might all agree that these are two very different minds, with two very different subjective experiences of the same objective reality, is there also “something like it” to be an electron, a star, or the universe itself? Panpsychism challenges the idea that one must be “alive” to be conscious, proposing, instead, that consciousness is everywhere. The Novel Universe Model takes this a step farther, suggesting that protons have priorities, that Gaia has goals, that the physical universe’s purpose is driven by its own personal agenda.

If consciousness isn’t everywhere, where does it begin, somewhere between sea squirts and baboons? Bees? Bacteria? Even the emergent mind of slime mold shows intelligence in the way it chooses to spread. Is this consciousness? The real question is, does slime mold have an experience of “being” slime mold? As everything is an SFS, and every SFS expresses goals and priorities (preferences), NUM suggests there’s “something like it” to be anything. It, therefore, follows that no one truly knows what being slime mold is like but slime mold.

Whatever it is like to be a bat, a human, or the universe itself only matters to the Signature-Frequency Set who has chosen that physical perspective. Only the individual might be truly aware of its own perspective and desires. We are what we are because this human story is the computational framework we prefer to learn from. No story is more important than another– the life of an eagle no more “divine” than that of a nematode. A useful life is one that explores the goals and priorities inherent to the body one was born with, whether that be soaring above prey, burrowing for food, or pondering the mysteries of the universe.

We all have an inside and outside– the core concept symbolized by our icon: a circle within a solid ring, surrounded by broken rings representing one’s co-created Ripples. A thing’s state of consciousness– of accumulated personal preference– is not a matter of debate for NUM. Just like that first membrane separating the first protocell from its environment, the foundational condition of any mathematical set is the basic proposition that things exist inside the set, and they are separate from the things that exist outside the set. From the simplicity of a subatomic particle to the complexity of a star, everyone and everything is animated by what’s inside– its Signature-Frequency Set, a competent, conscious, computational system.

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