If the walls have ears, they're probably conscious

I just finished reading a very interesting article on consciousness, an article that proposes the idea that everything has consciousness. It's on Quartz and it's called, The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility. I like the idea that everything is conscious. I think it aligns well with my philosophy about life.

Now that article in Quartz isn't saying that everything is thinking, because they do point out that when scientists talk about consciousness of inanimate matter, it's "an unbelievably simple consciousness". But there is some consensus that everything, in a sense, is conscious.

As I write this, I am reminded of a book I once read called, The Secret Life of Plants: a Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man. I can't recall what inspired me to read that book, but the introductory story was enough to hook me. This is a story about a man who hooked up an EKG to a plant just to see what would happen. So he's watching the needle and nothing much happens. Then he just thinks of putting a flame under a leaf and the needle spikes. The ideas in that book clearly suggest that plants have a sort of consciousness and means of communication.

I know that there is some evidence that when people talk to their plants, they tend to be healthier. I still remember how the Doonsebury character Zonker Harris talked to his plants, and that sort of gave the idea some national awareness. But now we're talking about things like books, chairs and walls. Rocks. What if it all possesses some sort of consciousness?

Maybe it's confirmation bias, I don't know, but I have acted as if this were true since reading another article on Slashdot, which proposed the idea that if humans have free will, then the particles they are composed of, have free will, too. We have to get it from somewhere, right?

If matter has free will, then that would suggest consciousness, right? So I close doors gently. I don't break things in anger. I feather the pedal in my car. I move about in my little sphere of the universe with the minimum amount of effort required to get the job done. But I do so with care, mindfulness and gentleness. I treat the universe the way I want to be treated.

As a practical matter (are we even being practical here?), I like to buy well made things and wear them out. I made a belt last 20 years. I made the first set of brakes from my once new car last more than 50,000 miles. I keep computers running long past their useful lives. The only reason I change furniture is because my wife makes me change it. Whatever I have, I treat it with care to make it last. Now I have another reason to treat things with care - they might be conscious.

This idea that things might have consciousness seems to align well with the laws of attraction. If you think something bad will happen to you, well, buckle up. If you think something good is going to happen to you, don your toga. The universe is listening.

Just for good measure, I'm going to throw in this story I heard from the movie, "What The Bleep Do We Know?". You might recall that movie. It was a total sleeper at the box office at first. I know because I saw that movie twice in the theaters. The first time, there was no line. The second time, about a month later, there was a long line to get in and the theater was packed.

I was so enthused about that movie, that I bought the extended DVD set and watched everything - all 5 hours of it. The most interesting story in it for me was the Random Number Experiments. This started in the late 60's when Flower Power was a thing.

In the Random Number Experiments, they'd sit people in front of a monitor and tell each subject, "OK, a stream of 1's and 0's will appear before you. Just think and make the screen show more 1's than 0's." Over hundreds of trials they found a slight, but measurable deviation from random in the results, with more 1's than 0's.

So they expanded this by setting up servers around the world streaming and recording 1's and 0's. And they would sample and measure the results. They saw a strong deviation from random leading up to the OJ Simpson verdict. What they call "the mother of all events", 9/11, exhibited a very strong deviation from random 4 hours before the event started. Their conclusion is that it appears that when a great deal of human consciousness is focused, it tends to have a subtle, yet profound effect on matter.

We tend to think that we are apart from the universe. We often think that we are, as Alan Watts once put it, "free agents in a bag of skin". But looking at the cumulative evidence, we are just as much a part of the universe as the universe is a part of us. The universe is in tune with our thinking, our feelings and our actions.

I sometimes like to tell people, "If you push really, really hard on the universe, be prepared to duck." That's because whatever you do here, the universe will respond in kind. If you are mean, the universe will be mean. If you are peaceful, the universe will bring peace to you in large trailer trucks.

I used to think that this is just an extension of Newton's Laws. You might know them. Here's a sample. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless some other force stops it.

Now I'm a big fan of physics, but I'm beginning to think that there more at work here than just physics. I'm beginning to think that the universe responds to what we are thinking and feeling in subtle ways because it's conscious.

Ponder that for awhile.