Is the Universe Conscious?

Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma. All this is Brahman. Modern panpsychism rediscovers an ancient truth.

Uddālaka teaches Śvetaketu with a cup of salt water in the Chandogya Upaniṣad. Consciousness is not a late arrival in evolution. It is the ground of everything, a claim modern panpsychism is now reaching again.

The Morning After

A young man walks out of his father's house at dawn in the valley of the Sarasvatī, sometime in the seventh century BCE. His name is Śvetaketu. He is twenty-four years old, newly finished with twelve years of Vedic study, and proud of everything he now knows. His father has just done something that confused him.

The evening before, his father Uddālaka Āruṇi had handed him a lump of rock salt and a clay bowl of water. 'Drop the salt in the bowl,' Uddālaka had said. 'Leave it overnight. Come back in the morning.'

Now it is morning. The lump of salt is gone. The water looks the same as any other water. Uddālaka is waiting.

'Bring me the salt you put in last night,' he says.

Śvetaketu reaches into the bowl. There is nothing to grasp. The salt has dissolved.

'Taste it from the top.' Salty. 'From the middle.' Salty. 'From the bottom.' Salty. Present in every drop. Visible in nothing.

'In just this way,' Uddālaka tells his son, 'the finest essence is everywhere, and you cannot see it. That is the Self of all this. That is reality. That is the Self. Tat tvam asi, Śvetaketu. That thou art.'

Twenty-five centuries later, a philosopher at a conference in Tucson, Arizona will give the question Uddālaka has just answered a new name: the hard problem of consciousness. How can mindless atoms produce an inside, a felt quality, an experiencer? The Chandogya Upaniṣad, in the demonstration you just watched, has already refused the question's premise. Consciousness is not something matter learned to do. It is the water the salt has dissolved into. What follows is the story of how this answer, dismissed for centuries as mysticism, is being reached again in our own lifetimes, slowly and reluctantly, by the most rigorous analytic philosophy in the West.