Is the universe conscious? - and why it doesn't matter

Recently a number of physicists and philosophers have posited the idea that consciousness may be an innate feature of the universe. This is somewhat different from the previously ascendant view, that consciousness is an emergent property of highly complex structures – like the brain.¹ But does it matter?

Perhaps we should first clarify what we mean by consciousness.

In the 'old days', there was the view that people were made up of body, mind and soul. When you died, the body was gone, but the soul lived on (probably with the mind) so that when you reached the day of judgement you would be able to remember the sins and good deeds you had done.

And the soul was responsible for decision making, moral action and awareness of what you were doing.²

Descartes advanced the theory, removing any theological aspect and concluded that of all the things in our perception that any number of mischievous devils might deceive us into thinking we perceived, there was one perception that could not be manufactured – our conscious awareness of self.³

In the present day, I suspect that this notion of self-awareness is what most people mean by 'consiousness'. But equally most people (at least with a minimum of scientific education) would now conclude that all our memories disappear like a re-formatted disc drive once we die.

Additionally I suspect they would believe that all the things that we remember perceiving or experiencing are only available to us via our nervous system and brain. Indeed this seems to be empirically self-evident; when we're asleep, the only things we recall experiencing when waking are those things that we dreamt – the product of neurological activity in the brain.

And if you have ever experienced a general anaesthetic, you will know that the moment you come round seems to be almost instantaneously the same moment as when you went under. Contrariwise, even when asleep we may have undergone hours of unconsciousness, we still have a sense of how much time has passed when we wake up.

So, if consciousness can be completely switched off by the administration of a medication, then we may conclude that it is entirely the product of our neurological structures.⁴

Furthermore, if the only way we can reflect on our consciousness is by examining our memory, then it might be possible to be consciousness whilst being denied our memories of it, but there would be no way that we could know or communicate that.⁵

This is why, if consciousness is an innate feature of the whole universe, we'd have no way of knowing that, and indeed it wouldn't make any difference since there is no general neurological structure at a universe-wide scale that could generate or recall conscious experiences.⁶

That is why even if the universe were conscious, it wouldn't matter.

Copyright © 2025 Geoffrey Boult, MA (Phil), MSc (Cog Sci)

Footnotes

1. Panpsychism vs. Emergentism – Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter (see: Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error); Emergentism holds that consciousness arises only in sufficiently complex systems, such as the brain (Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained).

2. Soul–Mind–Body Distinction – A tripartite view rooted in ancient philosophy (e.g. Plato’s Phaedo) and Christian theology, often suggesting an immortal soul distinct from the body and mind.

3. Cartesian Dualism & Cogito – René Descartes, in Meditations on First Philosophy, argued that even if all perceptions are illusions, the act of doubting one’s existence confirms the existence of the thinking self: Cogito, ergo sum.

4. Materialism / Neuroscientific View of Consciousness – The position that consciousness is entirely produced by the physical brain. Supported by empirical findings in neuroscience (e.g. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind).

5. The Hard Problem of Consciousness – David Chalmers famously defined this as the difficulty of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience (The Conscious Mind, 1996).

6. Limits of Panpsychism / Distributed Consciousness – Critics of panpsychism note that without memory or integration (as in a brain), the idea of universal consciousness may be unfalsifiable and irrelevant to human experience.