Is The Universe Conscious?

This is an interesting article I was reading and would love to hear peoples thoughts on the following information. Thanks for looking!

---

The history of science — in particular the physical sciences, like physics and astronomy — can be told as the incremental realization that there is large-scale coherence in the universe.

By large-scale coherence, I mean that some of the same physical laws hold at scales as diverse as the atom and the galaxy, and even the universe as a whole. In a sense, the universe speaks one language and scientists act as the interpreters, translating this language in terms that humans can understand and relate to.

For example, physicists base many of their theories on the law of energy conservation, that energy is always transformed but not created or destroyed — or on fancier ones, such as electric-charge conservation, which states that the total amount of electric charge is the same before and after subatomic particles such as electrons and protons interact: The particles before and after the interactions may change, but not the total amount of electric charge. That these laws hold not only in a controlled laboratory environment but also in the Earth's or Jupiter's atmospheres, in the core of stars, and even near the Big Bang itself is nothing short of amazing.

Is this coherence an accident, or the product of something deeper, perhaps some kind of proto-consciousness that permeates the universe and gives it purpose? This is the question many physicists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers have been asking lately, leading to a sort of reawakening of panpsychism. Panpsychism is an ancient belief that has been an essential aspect of many religions, from the Old Testament's omniscience and omnipresence God to the Brahman of Hinduism, "the single binding unity behind the diversity in all that exists in the universe" (see page 122 of An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism.) In a nutshell, panspychism states that mind (psyche) is everywhere (pan). Cognitive scientist Christof Koch has written a poignant defense of panpsychism as a possible explanation for subjective experience.

The possibility of a conscious universe seems to fly in the face of our deep-seated materialist worldview, whereby everything that exists is due to material particles and their mutual interactions, the very successful reductionist view of physics. Philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers have criticized such strict position, beginning with the difficulties we have in understanding our subjective experience of reality from a "it's all about neurons and synapses" mechanistic approach...