Panpsychism seems logically more possible than the alternative. If consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is probably conscious because it’s the most complex system there is.
It depends on if you think consciousness is something that emerges from information exchange systems or some higher level “thing” we don’t understand yet, and I lean towards the idea that consciousness emerges from information exchange systems. If that’s the case, then the universe, while containing massive areas of complexity, isn’t entirely exchanging information, only in isolated areas that are borrowing energy even as entropy broadly increases. I would be more open the idea of some possibility of consciousness occurring in the hyper-low entropy state of the very early universe when everything was much closer together and there was enough energy to connect a whole universe worth of information in localized states.
Panpsychism seems logically more possible than the alternative. If consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is probably conscious because it’s the most complex system there is.
It depends on if you think consciousness is something that emerges from information exchange systems or some higher level “thing” we don’t understand yet, and I lean towards the idea that consciousness emerges from information exchange systems. If that’s the case, then the universe, while containing massive areas of complexity, isn’t entirely exchanging information, only in isolated areas that are borrowing energy even as entropy broadly increases. I would be more open the idea of some possibility of consciousness occurring in the hyper-low entropy state of the very early universe when everything was much closer together and there was enough energy to connect a whole universe worth of information in localized states.