Does the Universe Think?

Pondering the dynamics of consciousness in nature.

There is consciousness within the universe certainly. You and I are proof of that. As human beings, we are self-aware creatures with a strong sense of what’s going on around us. And we interact with each other. Some philosophers float the solipsistic notion that self is all one can know exists, but our practical, day-to-day interaction with each other tells us otherwise. Singular or plural, there is consciousness in the universe. That much is clear. But a big question arises in our minds as we ponder the idea of consciousness: how far does it extend?

Evolution and Consciousness

The universe has not always been the way we see it today. It expanded from white-hot plasma billions of years ago, then transformed into atoms and molecules, then into stars, galaxies, and planets. Life came along much later, and with that came consciousness as we know it — in ourselves to be specific. Other creatures are conscious, as well, but we have not yet figured out to what extent. We also don’t know exactly how or when we became conscious, self-aware creatures. The development of our brains, the seat of consciousness, took millions of years. That much we do know. The rest is a mystery.

It is possible that we are the only fully conscious, self-aware creatures in the universe, but that’s not very likely. We inhabit a planet orbiting a star that is one of a hundred billion in the Milky Way Galaxy, and there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. It’s much more probable that fully conscious beings are scattered throughout the cosmos.

Whether we are alone or not doesn’t matter really. Our consciousness had to arise from something. It didn’t just happen. There are those who believe that the universe and everything in it is the consequence of random events, that even the so-called laws of nature have come about randomly. But the very existence of consciousness, our consciousness, refutes it. Cognition isn’t an arbitrary process. More than anything else, consciousness implies that natural order is real.

The 17th-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza did not believe that the universe came about accidentally. In The Ethics he wrote:

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

This is God-talk, of course — what materialist thinkers find so annoying. But Spinoza’s rather pantheistic notion of divine nature is hard to refute. There is an ordering force at work in nature, and that is divine if anything is. Is it conscious of itself? Does it think in any way that we would recognize as thinking?

Rationalizing Consciousness

The Western Rationalist Rene Descartes is famous for the dictum, I think therefore I am. In Meditations on the First Philosophy, he explained:

This proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Descartes built an entire worldview upon this observation. His philosophy rests upon a foundation of self-consciousness. Only a self-aware creature could say such a thing. Only a self-aware creature could think such a thing.

The German Idealist G. W. F. Hegel, who came along a couple of hundred years later, was not impressed. He found the certainty of Descartes’ dictum to be the poorest kind of truth. Consciousness is merely ego in this case. Hegel believed consciousness to be more than that. Much more. He believed that from the unity of the universe came the many particulars in it, and that these will return to the unity by a process he simply called Force. Behind this force, he argued, is Reason, and Reason is spirit conscious of itself and the universe. He put it right out there in his seminal work, The Phenomenology of Mind:

Spirit is thus the self-supporting absolutely real ultimate being (Wesen). All the previous modes of consciousness are abstractions from it.

Wow! Hegel, like all other Idealist philosophers, pushed consciousness to the extreme. For him Mind is all that is real. Everything else is derivative.

Consciousness and Ultimate Being

Eastern thinkers thousands of years ago took a somewhat different approach to the concept of the ultimate being. In the sixth century BCE, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu said that Tao gave birth to the One. From that came everything else. He never named Tao, also known as The Way, but it’s clear from the words he left behind that he was referring to the ultimate being. In chapter 21 of Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu declared:

Such the scope of the All-pervading Power / That it alone can act through the Way.

Is Tao, then, a form of consciousness? Can this All-pervading Power act in any way that can be construed as something not conscious?

The Hindu worldview is much more explicit. Greater than all things is Brahman, the sages of Hinduism assert. In The Upanishads (p.89) it is written:

We should consider that in the inner world Brahman is consciousness; and we should consider that in the outer world Brahman is space.

Consciousness and space, hmm… Now that’s an interesting juxtaposition. That doesn’t leave much room for anything else. But it’s clear from this statement that Hindu sages believe the universe thinks — that Brahman thinks, that is. What else is there?

Cosmic Consciousness

In 1901 a Canadian psychiatrist named Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In it he outlined a three-tier hierarchy of consciousness: the simple consciousness of animals, the self-consciousness of ordinary people, and the cosmic consciousness of the enlightened. The better part of his book is devoted to the religious icons Gautama the Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed, along with Plotinus, Dante, William Blake, Walt Whitman, and others who, according to Bucke, have experienced and/or demonstrated this higher level of consciousness. In the very beginning of his book Bucke states outright:

The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.

While reading Whitman’s poetry, Bucke claims that he too experienced cosmic consciousness. Perhaps he did. But differentiating between ordinary people and enlightened ones is always a dangerous undertaking. It sets up a qualitative difference between the two. Nonetheless, the cosmic consciousness of Bucke and others like him raises a very pertinent question: Is it possible to elevate our consciousness to that of the universe itself, and is an awareness of natural order enough to do that?

The Indian philosopher, guru and poet Sri Aurobindo said that elevating our consciousness is what the evolution of the universe is all about. He believed that through spiritual realization humankind is evolving towards a higher level of consciousness that will transform us into the divine, thus fulfilling the destiny of the universe. He advocated yoga as a way of inner self-development to facilitate this. In The Life Divine Aurobindo wrote:

Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments.

How strange it is that he and the all-to-rational philosopher Hegel reached the same conclusion regarding universal consciousness. But consciousness is like that. Pondering our ability to ponder takes us places we would not otherwise visit.

Transcendental Consciousness

The 20th century writer Evelyn Underhill recognized cosmic consciousness as an integral part of the mystical experience. In her book Mysticism she wrote:

First in the sequence of the mystic states, we must consider that decisive event, the awaking of the transcendental consciousness.

In other words, cosmic consciousness is that Aha! the moment when one apprehends the grand scheme of things — what is commonly called natural order. As both a mystic and a philosopher, I must concur.

The mystical experience, as I have known it, is nothing more than the apprehension of the divine embedded in nature. Conversely, it is nothing less. Apprehended but not fully understood — not in a way that satisfies me as a philosopher anyhow. An awareness of the Unspeakable. Transcendental in that it transcends ordinary experience. But the big difference between me and Bucke is this: I think all people are capable of such heightened awareness. I would even venture to say that some of our ancestors experienced as much long before the first inklings of civilization, tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s precisely where both philosophy and religion come from.

Is humankind still evolving? Yes, of course, we are. Everything is. Are we on a collective path towards a transhuman realization of the divine, towards a greater consciousness? It’s hard to say one way or another. But this much I do know: the nature of nature itself is hidden in plain sight. In those rare and fleeting moments when we set aside our biases, we see nature for what it really is. That is how we apprehend the divine. That is how we encounter the greater consciousness of the universe itself. The names and attributes we project onto this phenomenon only underscore our ignorance. After all, the force behind nature is unfathomable. Nature’s consciousness goes beyond words.