If you click the search line and type “consciousness,” you will see several posts about “Consciousness.”
The posts address the problem of defining consciousness, a problem whose solution has confounded philosophers for centuries. The problem is in defining its boundaries, i.e., when is something conscious and when is it not.
In previous posts, I have proposed a simple, unifying idea: Consciousness is the capacity to respond to stimuli. The more complex or varied the responses and the stimuli, the higher the degree of consciousness. By this definition, everything — from atoms to humans — is conscious to some degree.
This idea eliminates the need for an arbitrary cutoff. Instead of asking “Is it conscious?” we ask, “To what degree is it conscious?”
Turn to the usual questions: Is a person conscious? While asleep? During anesthesia? Emerging from the womb? Are chimpanzees conscious? Bees? Fish? Trees? Bacteria? The moon? The Sun? The universe? Your AI?What are your answers?
All of them respond to stimuli. In that regard, they are all conscious. They sense and respond. A sleeping person responds to many stimuli including sound, light, temperature, touch.
A tree, for instance, leans toward sunlight, defends itself with chemical signals, and communicates with other trees. Is that conscious behavior?
Yes, because it is a reaction to stimuli.
Some may find this definition unsatisfying. Many prefer to define consciousness as including self-awareness, intention, or thought, typically human traits.
But such definitions are anthropocentric, centered on human experience. We shouldn’t require that consciousness conform to human patterns of introspection or language to be valid.
Consider a fly. Many would say it isn’t conscious — it merely responds reflexively. But I’ve struck flies, watched them fall to the ground, apparently lifeless. They were what is termed “unconscious,” that is, unresponsive.
Minutes later, I saw them revive and fly away. If an entity can shift between states we misleadingly call “unconscious” (unresponsive) and “conscious,” that should be a clue.
Humans clearly cycle between those states. So do sleeping and even hibernating bears. Flies, too. sleep, and clearly are less conscious than when they are awake.
Even deciduous trees enter dormancy in winter and reawaken in spring, sensing what they previously didn’t. Does that seasonal shift demonstrate tree-consciousness?
All entities can be in both an active/reactive state and a less reactive one. They are more conscious during the more responsive state.
This re-measures consciousness not by self-awareness or by mirror recognition, but by change in responsiveness. This test doesn’t give us a hard line, but it offers a gradient.
Consider a bacterium that ceases activity under stress and revives when conditions improve. It has this duality. When reactive, it should be considered conscious.
A virus that lies dormant inside a host, then activates under the right conditions, also shows a degree of consciousness.
What about an atom? It responds to forces and fields. But does it have an unresponsive state? Atoms do have minimal energy (ground) states when they are less responsive, and excited states when they are more responsive. These can parallel the unconscious/conscious test.
I was reminded of this by an article I just read in the May 2025 issue of Scientific American Magazine:
Central Processing Unit Long called the powerhouses of the cell, mitochondria are more like the cells’ motherboards, writes Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University.Consciousness is the degree of response to stimuli; There is no reason to believe it must be binary, centralized, or always synchronized within an organism.His research team and others examined 3D images of the inner membrane of mitochondria, called the cristae, which is jam-packed with folded proteins. They discovered that mitochondria can communicate with their neighbors and influence each other—particularly in the way their cristae are aligned.
Over the years a picture has emerged showing how mitochondria from different parts of the body talk to one another, using hormones as their language.
The organelles also have a life cycle: old ones die out, and new ones are born out of existing ones. Communities of these organelles live within each cell, usually clustered around the nucleus.
Why this is important: The health of mitochondria directly impacts human health. The organelles receive signals about aspects of the environment in which we live, such as air pollution levels and stress triggers, and then integrate this information and emit signalssuch as molecules that regulate processes within the cell and throughout the body.
Just as you can be sleeping (low consciousness), or dozing (higher consciousness), your immune system still responds to infection. Certain neurons remain active.
Consciousness is not a thing one has or entirely lacks, but a universal condition that fluctuates in intensity and distribution.
The whole of you can be partly conscious and partly unresponsive. Even parts of your brain can be unresponsive, while other parts are active and responsive.
Even a rock can be minimally conscious to the degree that it reacts with its environment. If it sits quietly in a desert, it still is conscious. It may change in size because of temperature changes, chemical effects, and erosion. Then, when it is in a river, it reacts chemically and physically with the water, and the river bottom, only to return as part of a geologic layer, eons later.
Bottom Line
Consciousness = responsiveness. It is not an “is/isn’t binary state, with clear boundaries. It does not rely on vague, emotional self-recognition, thought generation factors, or intent. It is not related to the ability to think.
Instead, consciousness is a measure of response to stimuli, with greater response and more stimuli being associated with greater consciousness.
Since everything responds to stimuli, everything, from the smallest quantum particle to the universe itself, is conscious to some degree.
Tests for consciousness are physiological, not psychological. Self-recognition is not a criterion; reaction is.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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Rodger, I have read and continually reference the book “The Self-Aware Universe”. It provides a theory on how consciousness creates the material world. The author is Amit Goswami, Ph.D. Physics. Issued in 1995 and, so, may be out of print. I have found it to be extremely interesting providing a plausible argument.
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Thanks, Roger. My quick AI summary of the book tells me it promulgates the exact opposite of what I claim. It seems to engage in the exact kind of mysticism regarding consciousness that I reject.
I propose a solid, real word, physical description of that effect we call “consciousness.” I say it is the sum of physical responses to stimuli, nothing more. Goswami seems to engage in the mysterious, scientific voodooism that has pervaded discussions of consciousness for time immemorial.
Our brains interpret consciousness as a “thing” unto itself, as does Goswami. I suggest that in humans, consciousness is an illusion created by the brain’s translations and reactions to the stimuli it receives.
Every entity receives and reacts to stimuli, and that is what we call “consciousness.” No mysticism needed.
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Rodger … As I read your AI “brain” understanding, it has it totally incorrect. The book lays out a very detailed, scientifically based theory of consciousness via the pairing the Newtonian physics with modern quantum theory.
An overly simplistic summary of this is … The foundational causation of consciousness, per the author, is the collapsation of the quantum infinite level state into the limited time bounded state of stolid state and induced by some level of consciousness throughout all matter.
This is poorly stated in my rush. If you are looking for a theory based on modern quantum physics you may find this of interest. I can see where “Mr. AI” got the ideas put forward because the author does indicate some of these processes are “hinted” at via Hindu theology.
Those statements are more metaphorical than provided as the basis of the scientific facts which are presented. The book digs deeply into the realms of classical and modern theories of physics in relation to consciousness.
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Roger, your phrase, “. . . some level of consciousness throughout all matter. . .” is pretty much what I felt Goswami was talking about when I wrote:
“Our brains interpret consciousness as a “thing” unto itself, as does Goswami. I have suggested that in humans, consciousness is an illusion created by the brain’s translations and reactions to the stimuli it receives.”
That said, I was in the midst of writing an alternative speculation about consciousness, in which it IS a thing unto itself, like the Higgs particle which provides the universe with mass.
Although even I have some difficulty with some aspects of that later speculation, it does answer questions about quantum mechanics, notably a particle’s lack of a specific location and entanglement.
I’m just editing the post now, and I hope to have it online in a day or two. You might find it somewhat closer to what you were thinking.
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Hey Rodger
If you haven’t read this one before, i think you’d love it! I think there’s something about the MMT-adjacent worldview that makes this sort of understanding more apparent: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
Love your blog, btw, it was transformative for me when i was getting off of the libertarian train many years ago!
Jon
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Thanks, hotels. I liked the article.
Perhaps the key line read, “What evolutionary psychologists can’t explain is why fun is fun.” I’m not sure which evolutionary psychologists Graeber knew, but the answer might be in a follow-up question, “Why is sex enjoyable?”
Hey, that’s not a hard question to answer.
If a few people do something, it’s just random muscle flexing to loosen stiff joints. But if something is common it’s Darwinism.
The first goal of any organism is survival. Any organism that fails to reach its goal, fails to survive. Energy is precious. It’s why we eat and breath so much
Because energy is precious, every widespread expenditure of energy must have survival benefits.
Because play is common among animals — I’ve read how even bees play by rolling pollen balls — play must have survival benefits. When something has survival benefits it befits the brain to translate it as pleasurable — as is eating and breathing fresh air.
The widespread enjoyment of music, dancing, play, discovering, soft textures, eating, etc. indicate they all must have survival benefits.
I am willing to bet that you can think of many ways in which these energy expenditures have survival benefits.
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consciousness is a measure of response to stimuli, or how about an awareness of otherness.
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Thanks tetrahedron,
An “awareness of otherness” would, I suppose, mean that an entity receives stimuli that cause the entity to translate into what the entity would call “otherness.”
People can do that in a vast number of ways, one of which is the effects on the immune system.
All animals and plants can do it, even bacteria. A virus reacts to an appropriate “other” environment.
Bump into a boulder and it may respond by vibrating. Hit it with energy, and it will respond by heating. Every entity in the universe can distinguish between self and other, just by feeling “other’s” gravity or momentum.
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Could gravity be the ultimate awareness of otherness? I say Ultimate because it is not a local event, as in all your examples, but a universal nonevent with mathematical coherence.
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If consciousness is a field, gravity could be its carrier. Remember that gravity ebbs with distance, and I’m not sure that applies to consciousness.
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You’re right. Consciousness does not ebb, while gravity does. But gravity– or mass attraction– is universally among and between all systems, at work inside and outside.
Consciousness is strictly an inside job; you and nothing else can see or experience ‘outside’ yourself. This brings me back to gravity, which isn’t limited to insideness. In principle, it’s everywhere, cohesively, coherently, and perhaps aware of, running the entire show. Maybe that’s what death is: just another form of life transitioned to a higher frequency.
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Roger, reading your more esoteric, non-monetary related proposals is refreshing, though your monetary writings are also valuable.
What piques my interest in your recent “consciousness” writing is its parallels with Arthur M. Young’s 1976 cosmological thesis,/The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness, /wherein Young attributes consciousness to all “things” in the Universe. Of course, we’re forcedby language to use “things” as a limiting descriptor since, to communicate with other humans, we must nominalize “everything:” i.e., turn processes into “things.” Here, even the word “process” becomes a “thing.”
Thus, when you write, “Consciousness is not a /thing/one /has/or entirely /lacks/, but a universal conditionthat /fluctuates/in intensity and distribution.” Which is to say, consciousness is a process.
Sadly (or not), the psychologically motivated “industry” that studies “consciousness” is forced to ignore any realm other than the human. As you point out, “such definitions are /anthropocentric/, centered on human experience,” which explains the measure of human consciousness as a marker toward and beyond ASI.
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