All Is Consciousness
E. coli has no brain. It’s a single cell, far simpler than any cell in your body. Yet it has a nose: its receptors pick up fewer than three molecules of food in the volume of the cell. And a memory a few seconds long, enough to tell whether things are getting better or worse. When it smells food, it rejoices and swims toward it. When it smells acid or poison, the same machinery steers it away. I wrote about this in Enter Fear.
Here is how the nose of a single cell works, step by step, with live diagrams.
Where does a cell with no brain get something that looks so much like a mind? And wider still: why life? Why consciousness? Why build creatures as complex as us, when everything was doing fine without them?
Science has two answers. One says consciousness appears once a brain gets complex enough. The other is panpsychism: consciousness is woven into the fabric of the universe and fills any shape that fits. I’m with the second. Like gravity, it doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just there. And to me, the whole of evolution points that way.
Gravity acts on any mass, even a speck of dust. You only notice it next to something big, like a planet. Consciousness works the same way: it’s everywhere, and it shows where the form is complex.
Even viruses, which barely count as alive, act with a kind of sense: they use cells to multiply. Outside a cell, a virus is just a particle. Its proteins fit a lock on the surface of the right cell like a key, and from there the cell itself prints the copies.
Look closely, and even a crystal or a snowflake seems to “know” what it’s meant to become. A physicist will say those are the laws of nature. I won’t argue. Looks like consciousness is one of them.
Sometimes I feel myself as consciousness. I sit by the window and just watch this world through my own eyes. Consciousness was never born and it will never die. I’ll shed the body like a skin. We don’t choose to be born. We simply fill everything.
The brain is a kite. Consciousness is the wind.
Everything is in consciousness. Consciousness is all around. We walk through consciousness inside consciousness. And then there’s nothing to fear.
I am consciousness. Tat tvam asi. You are it.
The theory ends here. There’s one way to test it: with your life. And life tests hard.