I'm A Rock, Therefore I Am • DaisyDaisy

While we debate about if and how AI will ever gain consciousness, what if everything in the universe is already sentient? The thinking dates back to the ancient Greeks and a term called panpsychism, which means "everything has a mind/soul," and it was described as some shared, animating force that made all living things alive. Bohm saw consciousness itself distributed "in" the level of individual cells, and therefrom extended "out" to a non-local expanded explicate order. Embedding consciousness in material science is music to the ears of thinkers who believe that there's no mind as something separate from the brain (dualists who oppose this thinking believe that minds exist somewhere and somehow above or beyond flesh and bone). Materialists believe that awareness of self and the world at large is produced by the function of complex biological systems, but we just don't yet know how. Then they go even further and suggest that our awareness of self is only the pretense of oversight or control since it's a product of those biological cues.