Materialism and panpsychism

Is consciousness ubiquitous? I am absolutely convinced that there is no transcendent deity behind the universe. To me, the creation of a universe with so much pain and horror makes no rational sense. I recently saw an episode of Attenborough's The Trials of Life, which featured a bird's nest which was already infested with tiny parasites when the chicks were hatched. As a result the chicks faced a life of unending pain followed by death. For me, this is absolutely and completely sufficient to refute the notion of a transcendent deity. I am not interested in the linguistic legerdemain of those who try to stifle their compassion in order to explain how a benevolent deity could allow such suffering to occur. Such sophistry distorts language and erases the meanings of words, and is really quite contemptible. In Ancient India, by the fifth century BC, philosophy was sufficiently advanced that, as Nietzsche pointed out in The Anti-Christ, the notion of a creator god had already been discarded. For the Buddha, the Mahavira and Gosala, there was no transcendent deity. The gods themselves were not all powerful; they were fortunate and long-lived; they might even be able to grant boons to human beings, but they were subject to decay and death and rebirth, as well as karma, along with everything else. Karma itself was envisaged not as divine judgement, but simply as the operation of a law, as impersonal as Newton's Third Law of motion. It is now believed that this great enlightenment happened in the 5th century BC, not the 6th, as had previously been thought. I find it interesting that the Buddha and Mahavira were preaching in India at the exact same time as Socrates was carrying out his mission in Athens. The difference, though, is that Socrates's mission was to some extent a counter-enlightenment. To somewhat oversimplify, the Presocratics had explained the universe mechanically. Socrates found this offensive, and wished to reintroduce teleology and moralistic ideas. His ideas were so influential that they led to Plato's prejudice against sense-experience, and his reification of verbal abstraction. But if we take the non-existence of a transcendent deity as established, and suppose that the the universe is nothing other than a vast, beginningless, and endless mechanism, what can we say of consciousness? We know that consciousness if associated with human organisms; and, despite Descartes, it is obvious to anyone who has ever had a pet dog or cat that complex animals are conscious as well. There are some creatures that almost certainly have far more subtle and advanced forms of mind and consciousness than humans. The average pilot whale, for example, has 37 billion neurons in its neocortex (responsible for higher thought), way higher than the paltry 20 billion of the average human. But let us consider lifeforms that are lower, rather than higher, on the evolutionary ladder than ourselves. We ascribe consciousness to reptiles, amphibians, fish, and, more uncertainly, to some invertebrates. What about insects? It used to be said that insects have no consciousness because they do not have a central brain but instead independent ganglia that control separate portions of their bodies. This, however, is no longer regarded as accurate. It seems that insects have a central ganglion that operates in much the same way as the mid-brain in humans, which in the latter is responsible for consciousness. We must therefore conclude that the honey bee has consciousness; that is, there is something it is like to be a honey bee. The same is true of crustaceans and spiders. Simple animals such as roundworms, however, do not have a central ganglion, and are thus more like plants. Does this mean that they are incapable of consciousness? Perhaps. But, on the other hand, we must take note of an assumption here: that the only physical mechanisms that can sustain consciousness (qualia, a 'what it is like' to be the something in question) are analogous to the material mechanisms responsible for consciousness in human beings. But is this not a ridiculously anthropocentric assumption? Plants clearly respond to their environment – for example, they can grow towards the sunlight. May it not be that whenever their growth is thwarted they experience something like pain? Let us extend this speculation further. Are there chemical processes that are conscious? We talk of fire “consuming” fuel, and “dying out”. Could these be more than just metaphors? Are the interactions of elementary particles associated with qualia? What can we say in all these cases except that there is no way whatever for us to know the answer? These considerations do not stop me from swatting mosquitos. But then I could plausibly argue that the death of a mosquito is not as bad as the irritation that a mosquito bite causes to a higher animal, such as myself. But I do find these days that I refrain from killing spiders intruding into my bathroom, and instead remove them to the outdoors without injuring them - though I don't suppose their later prey appreciate my tender feelings in this regard!