Panpsychism and Noosphere: Scientific Perspectives on Universal Consciousness

Diffusion and its action would be functionally evolutionary for the formation of Earth's noosphere, that is the thinking and cogitating layer of Earth currently latent and adynamic that is made dynamic by human action. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 – 1944) was one of the most important English astrophysicists of his time and was the first scientist to openly support panpsychism in these terms: "The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind [...] the matter of the world is mental matter. [...] The mental matter of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we can think of its nature as not entirely foreign to the feelings in our consciousness." (Eddington, A. 1928. The Nature of the Physical World). Dyson, Wheeler and Bohm, just to name a few, found bases for panpsychism in the fields of logic, physics, chemistry and biology. Their arguments were based not only on rationalism and logical arguments, but also on empirical evidence and evolutionary principles. To allow a distinction, even if crude, between different states of consciousness we can define the following terms: • psyche: the most elementary psychic state, only interior, deaf, mineral, unconscious, but endowed with memory; • sentience: existence of external senses, reaction to stimuli, passive sensory life, plant world; • consciousness: capacity to act and react with the external world, active sensory life, capacity for knowledge and experience of the world, animal life; • self-consciousness: consciousness and knowledge of oneself, capacity to deliberate and generate voluntary acts, possibility of choice, typical of man and woman. To these ordinary states of consciousness, in the case of panpsychism we must then add the superhuman states of consciousness, typical of planetary, stellar and galactic realities to which we can correspond the states of supraindividual consciousness, transcendent consciousness, divine consciousness. Panpsychism and Panentheism The psyche is not an anomaly in the universe: the human and the non-human share it. In other words "Everything is psyche". Alongside panpsychism stands panzoism, which affirms the existence of a "Living Universe" in which we are immersed. To the psyche is given a life whereby "Everything is alive in the Universe" and since everything is alive and endowed with psyche, everything in the Universe can potentially be experienced, lived and intimately understood. The observation of a "Living Universe" necessarily pushes us to ask what is the origin and source of these waves of life and consciousness that cross us and animate us. While not being in any way connected to it, panpsychism has been confused with pantheism: the philosophical position for which "Everything", in Greek πάν pan, is "God", in Greek θεός theos. The position we propose is not pantheist, but panentheist, from the Greek πᾶν-εν-θεός pan-en-theos, meaning "Everything in God". God is in the Cosmos through his presence and not through his essence. Just as water can saturate a sponge without being the sponge, so divine energy can saturate all things while remaining transcendent to them. This is the Christian and archesophic point of view expressed by St. Paul: "in Him we live, move and have our being" (Acts 17:27-28). The Mental Universe "The Universe is mental. Everything is mind and is held in the mind of the All. The All creates in its infinite mind innumerable universes, which exist for eons of time, yet, for the All, the creation, development, decay and death of a million Universes have no greater duration than the opening and closing of an eye. The infinite mind of the All is the matrix of universes. Within the Mother-Father mind mortals are at home. No one is without father and without mother in the Universe" (Palamidessi Tommaso, I Principi della Verità Eterna).