Are electrons conscious?
This may look absurd on first sight, but panpsychism seems to be a realistic view on consciousness and if everything is conscious why not electrons?
A case can be made like this: consciousness is about knowing, maybe knowledge. Electrons seem to know. They seem to know certain rules in the first place. A rule may be put like: you are allowed to move and you have energy for moving. Your movement is restricted to an area around an atom’s nucleus and if the nucleus is moving somewhere you have got to follow. This resembles the Woody Allen version of ‘how is it like to be an electron’, but actually we look at electrons in similar ways.
Electrons seem to know many things and their knowledge is extremely relevant, because if they would not know, how could they behave the way they behave?
This kind of knowledge or if we would grant the term consciousness for this phenomenon is immediate in one respect. The second respect is permanent or at least knowledge that lasts some time. This could be called a rudimentary sort of memory. There are probably a few things electrons would know in the sense of remembering it. The most important things would be the rules it has to follow. If an electron would ever forget that it has to move or not move out of a certain range from the nucleus it is moving around, there would be chaos. There is no chaos in that sense. We can rely on electrons.
In a philosophical talk a famous German astrophysicist, Harald Lesch, was to make choice which would be to phenomenon we can be most certain about: his choice was the electron!
So obviously the electron is one of the best established concepts in science and we can very much rely on this concept. If electrons would be conscious and have memory, in an ever so basic way, would that change our view of the world?
Maybe that is a good enough reason to make up one’s mind about the proposal panpsychism makes.
Tags: consciousness, electron, panpsychism
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