Panpsychism is a philosophical view that all things are imbued with consciousness. This idea is not new and runs in 19th century western philosophy as well as indigenous beliefs from American Indians or Buddism and is being revisited from a contemporary scientific perspective. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/spacetime-emergence-panpsychism-and-the-nature-of-consciousness/
But the big question has always been the hardest to answer: why does everything have consciousness?
Let’s start with the basics and revisit a famous quote from Nikola Tesla: “If you wish to understand the universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.”
Indeed, if you decompose matter, you will find that the standard model stops at the quarks, leptons and other weirdly named subatomic particles. Then, you get into theoretical debates, one of which is string theory, that all matter is composed of vibrating strings.
If all is indeed energy, vibration and frequency, then lets take it literally: a wave has all three of these properties. However, there is one problem: how do you explain that we can experience such a complex reality with as the sole building block, energy waves.
If you study the interaction of waves, you will find that they interact in three main ways: they ignore each other, they create “interferences” between each other, or they merge. The “merge” part is mostly experienced only in a virtual setting, for instance, when you combine a sine wave and a square wave on a computer synthesizer, because in real life, it is very hard to make sure that two waves interact on the exact same three dimensional plane.
Now, imagine if the Universe was really only energy, vibration and frequency, how do you explain that we, sentient beings, made up of just energy and vibration, can interact with each other and with the external reality the way we do? If we follow the conclusions from above, then either interaction is impossible, or it creates a momentary interference which is a byproduct of two or more waves and unrelated to them, or we should “fuse” and form a new wave which includes the resultant from the two existing waves. This means that anything that you touch with your hand, if your hand is indeed made up of waves, should merge with your hand, or create interferences, or your hand should pass right through it.
This is where the idea of panpsychism or the idea that everything has a consciousness comes in to help. Indeed, if all is “just” energy, vibration and frequency, then subatomic particles are the Universe’s response to allow interactions between particles (made up of waves) via a system of exchange of information which nevertheless ensures that both keep their “individuality” or uniqueness.
How would that look like? Simply look at Nassim Haramein’s Unified Field Theory and you will see how you can wrap energy waves around themselves.
Watch the video linked above and see how via a double vortex you can wrap not only the Universe around itself but anything from the smallest subatomic particle. Every single particle include this system to wrap “energy” or rather “information” about itself around itself in this manner, which allows it to modify it’s energy or information upon interaction with another particle, without necessarily merging or ignoring each other.
In the end, if you wanted to represent a human being accurately from a scientific point of view, you would represent a human as a huge ball of energy, vibration and frequency, wrapped around itself, and which included information in wave form about everything a human is: the exact position of every single “atom” that composes your body, your memories, everything. We are a self-containted black hole of “information” and “energy”. But just imagine if we humans would “see” the world in that manner, just like Neo when he started to see the Matrix’s “code”. It would be impossible to understand. Good luck making the distinction between a dog shit and a flower if you saw everything as “energy” or “information in a self contained vibrational state”. The world we see is simply a convenient “interface” for bundles of information/energy to interact with each other in an orderly and simplified fashion, just like you wouldn’t interact with a computer by a keyboard with just 0 and 1, or you wouldn’t see what a computer displays on your screen in binary code (unless you’re completely crazy).
In conclusion, consciousness is everywhere but it doesn’t mean that atoms or subatomic particles can “think”. What it means is that they have to be conscious of themselves to be able to interact with each other. Now the hard part to swallow is that subatomic particles are much more conscious then we are. Why? Because they never fail to be fully self-conscious, otherwise, they would not interact in such a neat and orderly manner, allowing for matter to “exist” continuously and follow in a very strict sense the laws of cause and effect, or in other words, gravity, electro-magnetism etc. If particles were not as self-conscious, our world would be completely chaotic. Parts of your body could randomly disintegrate etc.
The thing is, in esoteric circles, you read that there is only one universal consciousness, which artificially “splits” into everything we see, every single particle, atom, proton, electron, photon. The level of consciousness of a particle is defined, therefore, by it’s “awareness” to being one, or just a part of the whole, which allows it to interact in perfect harmony and coordination with all other “parts”. This is how you can say that particles are more “conscious” then we are: they are linked to all other particles and constantly agree in a harmonious manner on “where should I be in the future”. Consciousness is thus the ability to create time (create a “story” of cause and effect out of all infinite possible stories) which is in line with the Universal Consciousness (which creates balance and harmony, or the peaceful coexistence of ALL that IS, therefore fully MANIFESTING the ONE, artificially separated into ALL of it’s PARTS).
Our destiny, as humans, is to achieve a higher level of consciousness, just like all the creatures, plans, minerals and particles that came before us, and behave in a manner which is consistent with who we are.