An astrophysicist and a surgeon walk into a bar. No, this is not the start of a bad joke. A few years ago, an astrophysicist Franco Vazza I met my childhood friend Alberto FerrettiAnd then he became a neurosurgeon. Vazza was modeling the structure of the universe, while Ferretti was delving into the brain. The two men reminisced and talked about their work. And then an idea occurred to them: What if they compared?
Vazza, based at the University of Bologna in Italy, has done just that. He used statistical techniques to compare neurons in a region of the brain called the cortex to the cosmic web, the pattern of matter distribution throughout the universe. Vazza looked at the number of nodes in each network and how densely connected each node is. The results surprised him.“It's a really interesting level of similarity,” he says. Ignoring the difference in the structures' sizes, which are about 27 orders of magnitude, “the two patterns kind of overlap,” Vazza says.
Some physicists cannot ignore this similarity, suggesting that the universe may “think” – that is, be conscious in some sense – an idea that has roots in the philosophy of panpsychism.
Traditionally, researchers have explained consciousness in one of two ways. Materialists argue that there is only matter, and consciousness somehow arises from that. Dualists argue that there are fundamentally two kinds of matter: matter and consciousness. There has been much discussion about the shortcomings of both views. For example, how can consciousness arise from pure matter?
Panpsychism
For some,…
Source: www.newscientist.com
