The doctrine that the world is a living being, rational, animate and intelligent, is laid down by Chrysippus in the first book of his treatise On Providence, by Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius… And it is endowed with soul, as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of it. (DL 7.142-3)[1]
Some people think the idea of a conscious cosmos is an antiquated relic of ancient Stoicism that we must abandon in light of modern science. However, numerous modern scientists and philosophers describe the nature of the cosmos in ways that are compatible with the intuitions of the ancient Stoics. Some now suggest consciousness must be a fundamental aspect of the cosmos and refer to a mind-like background in the universe. A few boldly claim the universe is conscious, just as the Stoic did more than two thousand years ago. Modern thinkers frequently label this idea panpsychism, which entails consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the cosmos.
When we consider a concept like a conscious cosmos and relate it to ancient Stoicism, we first must acknowledge that the Greeks did not have a word for conscious. The word first appears in English in the seventeenth century. Next, we must admit that many definitions of consciousness exist today. The ancient Stoics argued the cosmos is a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent. I cannot imagine an entity that meets all those criteria we would deny is conscious. Instead of a conscious cosmos, we could say a rational, animate, and intelligent cosmos; however, that will not appease those who believe the universe is mechanistic, reductive to matter, and governed by laws that just happen, accidentally, to be conducive to life as we know it here on Earth. Therefore, the term conscious serves quite well as a substitute for a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent.
The ancient Stoics considered their unique conception of a conscious, providentially ordered cosmos a necessary element of their holistic philosophical system. They did so for good reasons. Today, Traditional Stoics think this conception of the cosmos is still viable. First, despite the objections offered by those who adhere to the metaphysical assumptions of the current scientific orthodoxy, there is no objective scientific reason to abandon the conscious cosmos of Stoicism. More importantly, Stoic practice relies on the essential relationship between the way the world is (physics) and the way we should act in the world (ethics). Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoa, argued that universal nature is the source of our knowledge of virtue, good and evil, and happiness.
Further, according to Plutarch, Chrysippus asserted, “physical theory turns out to be ‘at once before and behind’ ethics.”[2] As I have written before, the conscious and providential cosmos is the soul of the Stoic philosophical system. Speaking of soul, the ancient Stoics believed the cosmos has a soul, and it is God. As Plutarch notes:
In his On providence book 1 [Chrysippus] says: ‘When the world is fiery through and through, it is directly both its own soul and commanding-faculty.[3]
Unfortunately, many people recoil, almost reflexively, from the concept of a conscious cosmos because it entails some form of intelligence that preexists human consciousness. They mistakenly assume such a concept necessarily invokes a supernatural divinity akin to those of traditional monotheistic religions. Likewise, many people are unaware of the increasing number of scientists and thinkers breaking out of the pre-twentieth-century, mechanistic, materialist, reductionist box and arguing that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. I will highlight a few of those thinkers shortly.
Consciousness was ignored by the mainstream hard sciences, including psychology, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Science could not explain consciousness via reductive materialism; therefore, they either ignored or explained it away as an illusion or epiphenomenon. They promoted the simplistic notion that the mind is what the brain does. Behaviorist psychology, a product of Logical Positivism, ignored the person's internal experience (consciousness) and treated the human mind as a black box. Behavior was quantifiable and could be subjected to the scientific method. Consciousness, on the other hand, was a metaphysical mystery.
Quantum theory challenged the objective observer model of science at its foundation by discovering that consciousness interacts with the physical world. As a result, during the twentieth century, an ever-increasing number of scientists and thinkers began to give due consideration to the nature and role of consciousness. Many have suggested that consciousness, in some form, must be a fundamental property of reality. Interestingly, some are beginning to describe the essential nature of the cosmos in ways that sound remarkably like the intuitions of ancient thinkers such as Plato and the Stoics. Lothar Schafer, a physical chemist, points out several modern thinkers who think it is reasonable to infer consciousness to the cosmos. Here is an extended quote from his recent book:
However you look at the matter, it seems reasonable to think that the human mind isn’t self-contained or self-sustained, but connected with a mindlike wholeness. “We can ‘infer’” Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau suggest, “that human consciousness ‘partakes’ or ‘participates in’ the conscious universe.
As I have made sure to emphasize, science can’t prove that the universe is conscious. At the same time, the numerous suggestions by serious scientists, including Bohm, Dürr, Eddington, Fischbeck, Jeans, Kafatos, Lipton, Nadeau, and me, that a cosmic spirit exists can’t all be shrugged off as signs of dementia in these authors. It makes more sense to conclude, as psychiatrist Brian Lancaster has done, that “consciousness amounts to a fundamental property, irreducible to other features of the universe such as energy or matter.”[4]
Likewise, the renowned American philosopher Thomas Nagel provoked a heated exchange about consciousness in 2012 when he challenged the core of the “neo-Darwinian conception of nature” in his book Mind & Cosmos. In one passage, Nagel speculated about the connection between human nature and the cosmos as a whole. His position is remarkably similar to the Stoic conception of that relationship. He wrote:
We ourselves are large-scale, complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside. Perhaps the basis for this identity pervades the world.[5]
The Stoics agree with Nagel. Reason (logos), which permeates the cosmos, is the basis for our identity as humans. The idea that rationality existed in the cosmos before human rationality plays a central role in Stoic theory. As Pierre Hadot notes:
all the dogmas of Stoicism derive from this existential choice. It is impossible that the universe could produce human rationality, unless the latter were already in some way present within the former.[6]
Arthur Eddington, an astrophysicist, was a little more direct than Thomas Nagel in the 1930s when he wrote:
To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff… The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness… Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take to be the world-stuff.[7]
Eddington admits, “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.” Nevertheless, as he points out, “no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference—inference either intuitive or deliberate.”[8] Furthermore, he asserts.
We have seen that the cyclic scheme of physics presupposes a background outside the scope of its investigations. In this background we must find, first, our own personality, and then perhaps a greater personality. The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it.[9]
It is fascinating to see a physicist use a phrase like universal Mind and the word logos. Bernard Haish, another astrophysicist, agrees. He wrote:
I am proposing that an equally likely—and perhaps even slightly more likely—explanation is that there is a conscious intelligence behind the universe, and that the purpose of the universe and of our human lives is very intimately involved with that intelligence.[10]
These are not the ramblings of crackpot pseudo-scientists. As Paul Davies, another physicist points out:
An increasing number of scientists and writers have come to realize that the ability of the physical world to organize itself constitutes a fundamental, and deeply mysterious, property of the universe. The fact that nature has creative power, and is able to produce a progressively richer variety of complex forms and structures, challenges the very foundation of contemporary science.[11]
In his book, The Goldilocks Enigma, Davies argues,
Intelligent design of the laws does not conflict with science because it accepts that the whole universe runs itself according to physical laws and that everything that happens in the universe has a natural explanation. There are no miracles other than the miracle of nature itself. You don’t even need a miracle to bring the universe into existence in the first place because the big bang may be brought within the scope of physical laws too,
