A World Already Awake?

Consciousness, Creation, and the Limits of Our Imagination

A recent Big Think interview with psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, titled “The Consciousness Theory That Connects You to Everything,” raises a question that modern science has generally preferred to approach from the opposite direction. What if consciousness is not something the brain produces? What if the brain, rather than manufacturing consciousness, gives particular form to something already present in reality?

McGilchrist offers an arresting analogy. The human voice depends upon the larynx, but the larynx does not create the air that passes through it. It shapes that air into a distinctive expression. Perhaps, he suggests, the brain does something similar with consciousness.

He offers another image: a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool has an identifiable shape, a particular history, even something resembling an individual existence. Yet it is not a separate substance introduced into the water. It is the river itself, temporarily organized in a particular way.

What if individual consciousness is something like that?

The proposal is speculative, and it should be distinguished from established neuroscience. The dependence of ordinary human consciousness upon brain function is abundantly documented. Whether that dependence establishes that the brain produces consciousness, or whether some more fundamental account is needed, remains a philosophical question.

Still, McGilchrist’s proposal exposes an assumption so familiar that we seldom notice it. We imagine a universe originally populated by objects. Somewhere in the long history of those objects, a few become alive. Eventually some acquire consciousness. Finally, human beings appear, capable of contemplating the remarkable fact that they are conscious in a world that otherwise appears not to be.

But suppose we have the story backward.

A recent Popular Mechanics article by Susan Lahey, “We May Be Surrounded by Trillions of Conscious Beings, Research Suggests—And They Aren’t Human,” approaches the question from another direction. Lahey surveys research suggesting that plants possess capacities once thought to belong exclusively to animals. Plants respond to anesthetics. Some exhibit habituation, altering their responses to repeated stimuli. Trees communicate through chemical signals. Forest ecosystems contain networks of biological relationships whose complexity we are only beginning to understand.

None of this demonstrates that plants possess subjective consciousness. Learning, responsiveness, communication, and consciousness are not interchangeable concepts. A tree’s ability to respond to injury does not establish that the tree experiences pain.

Nevertheless, the research makes an old philosophical question newly interesting.

What exactly distinguishes a subject from an object?

We ordinarily imagine the distinction to be obvious. I am a subject. The tree outside my window is an object. I experience the world; the tree exists within the world I experience.

But the tree has been receiving and responding to its surroundings long before I notice it. Sunlight, water, gravity, temperature, microorganisms, neighboring plants, and seasonal changes enter into what it becomes. Its existence is not independent of these relationships. Indeed, without them, there would be no tree.

Neither, for that matter, would there be me.

The oxygen I breathe, the food I consume, the microorganisms inhabiting my body, the language through which I think, and the relationships through which I have acquired my identity all precede my conscious reflection upon them.

Perhaps the distinction between subject and object describes something real without describing what is most fundamental about reality.

Alfred North Whitehead suspected as much a century ago.

Whitehead challenged the modern division between an objectively existing material world and the subjective experience of those who observe it. His alternative, developed most fully in Process and Reality (1929), understands reality not primarily as a collection of enduring substances but as a process of becoming.

The fundamental constituents of reality, which Whitehead called “actual occasions,” receive their world and integrate its influences into what they become. He called this reception “prehension.”

For Whitehead, experience in this elementary sense is more fundamental than reflective consciousness. Consciousness is a particular achievement within the larger process of experience, not necessarily its beginning.

This does not mean that rocks think, trees contemplate their mortality, or forests possess a collective mind. Whitehead distinguished the experiential character of actual occasions from the sophisticated consciousness associated with human beings. Nor does the presence of countless experiential events establish that an entire forest constitutes a single experiencing subject.

But Whitehead’s philosophy makes it possible to ask a different question.

Rather than wondering how consciousness suddenly emerges from a universe entirely devoid of experience, we might ask how increasingly complex forms of experience emerge within a universe already characterized by relation, reception, and response.

There are important differences between Whitehead and McGilchrist. Whitehead’s philosophy emphasizes the plurality of actual occasions, each constituted through its reception of a world. McGilchrist entertains the possibility of an encompassing consciousness of which individual minds are particular manifestations. These are not identical metaphysical proposals.

Both, however, challenge the assumption that reality consists fundamentally of self-contained objects, some of which mysteriously become subjects.

For Christian theology, the implications extend beyond the philosophy of mind.

Christianity has never required us to imagine creation as fundamentally inert.

The opening of John’s Gospel declares that all things came into being through the divine Logos. The Psalms imagine mountains, rivers, and trees participating in the praise of God. In Romans, Paul describes the whole creation groaning in labor pains, awaiting liberation.

These are not ancient scientific claims about plant consciousness. They belong to the theological imagination of a world whose existence and destiny cannot be understood apart from God.

Thomas Aquinas approached the question through the language of participation. Creatures do not possess existence independently. Their being is received from God, who is not simply another being within the universe but the source of creaturely existence itself.

Aquinas and Whitehead differ substantially in their metaphysical commitments, particularly concerning God and the nature of becoming. Nevertheless, each challenges the notion of an entirely self-sufficient entity.

For Aquinas, the creature cannot be understood apart from its dependence upon God. For Whitehead, an actual occasion cannot be understood apart from the world whose influences constitute its becoming.

The two accounts should not be confused. Participation in divine being is not the same thing as participation in ecological relationships. Nor does either account establish that every creature possesses consciousness.

Yet together they suggest that the familiar picture of creation as a collection of independent objects may be inadequate.

There is also a sacramental dimension to this question.

Christians do not ordinarily imagine that bread and wine are conscious. Yet in the Eucharist, material realities become the means of communion with God. Water, oil, bread, and wine are not merely illustrations of spiritual truths. They participate in the Church’s sacramental life as material means through which grace is communicated.

The sacramental imagination does not require us to attribute consciousness to matter. It does require us to resist the assumption that matter is spiritually insignificant.

The incarnation makes the point more decisively. Christian faith does not announce that God has rescued humanity from material existence. It announces that the Word became flesh.

The material world is not simply the background against which the divine drama unfolds.

It belongs to the drama itself.

This has ethical consequences.

Suppose researchers eventually conclude that plants do not possess subjective consciousness. Would that make an ancient forest less worthy of protection? Would the destruction of a woodland become morally insignificant because no unified forest-consciousness suffers?

Surely not.

The goodness of creation does not depend upon its resemblance to humanity. In Genesis, God declares creation good before human beings appear. In Job, the divine speeches describe a world of wild creatures and untamed places whose significance cannot be reduced to human purposes.

Perhaps the effort to demonstrate that trees are conscious before recognizing their moral significance reveals how deeply anthropocentrism has shaped our imagination.

Must the tree become like us before we acknowledge its goodness?

Must the forest become a subject before its destruction becomes a moral concern?

There is a further irony. While researchers investigate the possibility that plants possess forms of cognition we have failed to recognize, artificial intelligence confronts us with the opposite difficulty.

Plants behave so differently from human beings that we hesitate to attribute consciousness to them. Large language models behave so much like human beings, at least linguistically, that we are tempted to imagine consciousness behind their words.

In one case, the absence of human resemblance becomes evidence against subjectivity. In the other, resemblance becomes evidence for it.

Neither inference is secure.

The question is not simply whether another entity behaves sufficiently like us to qualify as conscious. It is what kind of experience, if any, belongs to that entity, and how we might recognize it without merely projecting ourselves upon it.

Perhaps our most persistent mistake has been to make human consciousness the measure of everything else.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur understood human selfhood as something constituted through embodiment, interpretation, memory, narrative, and relationships with others. We do not begin as isolated selves who subsequently enter a world of relationships. We become ourselves within histories, languages, institutions, and communities we did not create.

Even the consciousness through which I distinguish myself from the world depends upon that world in countless ways.

I am not a solitary subject standing over against a collection of objects.

I am a creature among creatures, receiving a world I did not make and contributing, however briefly, to what that world becomes.

None of this proves that the universe is conscious. McGilchrist’s proposal remains a metaphysical possibility rather than a scientific conclusion. Nor does Whitehead’s philosophy eliminate the difficult distinctions among experience, consciousness, self-awareness, and moral agency.

But perhaps these questions invite us to reconsider something more basic than the location of consciousness.

What if creation is not a collection of objects that occasionally become subjects?

What if participation and relation belong to the very character of existence, and the distinction between subject and object describes only one way of encountering a world more intimately connected than we have imagined?

For Christian theology, that possibility need not dissolve creation into God or erase the differences among creatures. It may instead deepen our understanding of creatureliness itself.

We exist through gift. We become ourselves through relationships we did not originate. We inhabit a world whose goodness precedes our recognition of it.

And perhaps human consciousness is distinctive not because we alone stand outside creation and comprehend it, but because we have become capable of recognizing, however imperfectly, that we belong to it.

The question, then, may not be whether we are surrounded by trillions of conscious beings.

It may be whether we have mistaken our capacity to recognize the world for a reason to imagine ourselves apart from it.