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I am the editor of the special topic area on the neuroanatomy of consciousness and the will, for MDPI’s NeuroSci journal.

The philosophical debate surrounding consciousness has been ongoing for millennia, and in all likelihood will continue indefinitely. Views on the importance of a proposed immaterial mind and the material nature of the brain have been repeated and used to justify more practical philosophical arguments. Much of this debate depends on a person’s cultural background or scepticism more so than any scientific evidence. Plato argued that the soul is a separate, non-physical entity that is the seat of our thoughts; Descartes claimed that the pineal gland of the brain was the location of a mysterious junction between the nonphysical soul and the physical body. Our modern interpretation of scientific data describes consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain processing. Sensory information is input into our biological system, the brain processes that information, and we output motive functions to react to the sensory information. Based on various classical neurological experiments that indicate a delay in our conscious decision-making and experience of the environment, consciousness is considered to be present in this middle processing step.

While almost all of us are willing to extend that subjective experience to other people, the philosophical concept of solipsism argues that the only consciousness is our own brain, while other philosophies and religions claim that there is only one consciousness that we all share. Whether we can extend our subjective experience of consciousness in our brain to other structures – such as the delocalised neurons of insects, the intercellular organisation of plants or the crystalline structure of rocks – is something more difficult to answer definitively. Humans are wont to create categories with strict boundaries and make rules that govern our thinking based on those categorisations. Unfortunately, the natural world does not exist within categories and instead exists along a gradient with no clear demarcations.

Even within ourselves as individuals, we can experience the same concepts in innumerable different manners. Take the case of a musical piece and the many ways it exists within our reality. One can hear one of Bach’s fugues, for instance, and process it as music which can elicit emotions;. one can analyse the music theory and experience the mastery of thought involved; we can also convert the sound waves into a visual representation. Similarly, Michelangelo’s David can be experienced visually for its representation of a human figure, or through X-ray crystallography to understand the atomic interactions of its substrate, or it can conjure moral narratives. Clearly, we exist not as a monolithic consciousness, because we experience the world in so many different ways.

The nature of those different experiences may be a starting point for understanding consciousness not as emergent aspects of our brains, but as fundamental elements of reality.

For a truly scientific investigation of consciousness, I would argue that we must provide the space for other hypotheses among the many concepts yet unknown to science.

Researchers have devised rigorous experiments to identify statistical anomalies in human perception in the hopes of identifying unknown methods of non-material interactions that may point to a fundamental form of consciousness. These forms of consciousness may involve electromagnetic waves that interact at a distance, while some physicists may argue that the statistical models used to understand quantum physics allow for non-deterministic aspects of our reality. As an analogy, if neuroscience were to take the same approach as cosmologists, does there exist a fundamental “consciousness particle” like the “dark matter” and “dark energy”? Like the exchange of gluons within the nuclei of atoms that contribute to the mass that holds the universe together, is there a particle interaction that creates a subjective experience at the level of subatomic particles? An electron existing in the orbital of free hydrogen has a different experience of reality from an electron present in a covalent bond between two hydrogen nuclei. Is each electron in the universe experiencing something unique in its own corner of spacetime? Can this be said to be both “subjective” and “experiential”, and thus giving that electron a highly rudimentary form of consciousness? If so, is our consciousness the result of an additive function of the atomic structures and interactions that make up our bodies?

In the end, consciousness of rocks may be as much about semantics as about any scientific investigation. Does a rock have a subjective experience based on its unique place and its surroundings? That depends on how your consciousness chooses to interpret the words. I, for one, hold that neither consciousness nor free will exist and subscribe to an ultra-deterministic view of the reality we experience together as our particles are inextricably tied together from the origin of this universe, duly entangled for infinity.

However, if a rock were ever to choose to speak to me, as a scientist I would be receptive to the experience and excited to learn of its perspective. - James Sonne