Think about the device you are holding right now. It is made of glass, metal, and plastic. It seems completely cold and dead. Now, think about your own mind. You have feelings, memories, and the simple sense of being alive. This is what we call consciousness. It is the most familiar thing in the world, yet it is also the hardest thing to explain.

How do we get from that dead metal to your vivid inner life? Many people believe that if you just arrange enough dead pieces in a very complex way, like the cells in a brain, consciousness emerges and pops into existence.

That is certainly a possibility, but some thinkers find it hard to digest the idea that experience only manifest itself once things get complicated. They suggest that the brain doesn’t actually create the mind, but rather provides it with tools like vision, memory, and senses. While complexity gives our experience its shape, the core building blocks themselves must inherently have a trace of consciousness.

Because of this, some people suggest a very bold idea. They say that if we are made of matter, and we have feelings aka consciousness, then matter itself must have some kind of consciousness deep down at its core. Even the smallest parts of the universe must have a tiny, simple spark of experience. If it is already there at the bottom, then it is not magic when it shows up at the top in our human brains.

Now, you might be thinking that this sounds a little crazy. You might say that we are just using consciousness to fill a gap in our knowledge. In the past, people said that gods caused lightning because they didn’t understand electricity. Is saying “matter is conscious” just another way of saying “I don’t know how the brain works yet”? This is often called the “consciousness of the gaps.”

However, there is a catch. If we look at the science of the material world, we notice something strange. Physics is very good at telling us how things move and how they react to each other. It gives us math and rules. But physics is actually very quiet about what things are in their own inner heart. It tells us how an electron acts, but not what an electron is when it is just being itself.

So, we are left with a massive silence at the center of science. We know how the world behaves, but we do not know what it is made of. We only know one thing for certain about the real stuff of the universe, and that is that at least some of it, the stuff inside our heads, is conscious.

This leaves us with a choice that changes how we see everything around us. Is our inner life just a lucky accident in a universe made of dead, silent parts? Or is the universe itself made of the very same “feeling” that we find when we close our eyes?