The consciousness of the Universe[i]

In this short video, Rupert Sheldrake criticizes the mind´s concept of the materialism and defends a kind of universal consciousness, but in layers.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn starts saying that the brain scientists, like neurophysiologists and neuroscientists are materialists and they are argue that consciousness is a (purely) product of the human brain (driven from the physical world).
Sheldrake answers asking how this is possible... would the consciousness come from nowhere? This sounds unconvincing for him and, more than that, this way we would live in a world strictly physical and without free will. It is a bizarre philosophy, in his words.
For Sheldrake consciousness is involved in choice and, as a matter of fact, it is a tiny part of all our unconsciousness processes (the vast majority of what we do). So, consciousness enables different possibilities to be handled together.
Rupert believes that every system in the nature that has possibilities and is not fixed can have consciousness, even the sun or galaxies. If as the materialists say that consciousness emerges from the brain (electrons) why it cannot emerge in the sun as well? If the sun has a mind why not the other stars?
For him, there are different kind of consciousness, one of the Chinese people, another of Americans, other of the sun and another of the earth. Maybe the entire universe has a mind, maybe the molecules have mind. Nature is nested, why consciousness is not?
In his opinion, the connection between brain and consciousness by an electrical way is a pretty good candidate of explanation, even though there are plenty of papers wrote by philosophers discussing on this. But we have electrical compounds in our body, in the starts and also in the plasma. If they are the principle, so every physical body with electrical compounds can have a mind.



[i] A short commentary on the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46kgmgI9fPs. Accessed in Mar, 3rd. “Rupert Sheldrake - Is Consciousness Fundamental?”

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