The Substrate of Consciousness

There is a sound that never stops.

If you stand beneath the high-tension wires that cross Boynton Beach, running east from the substation toward the old neighborhoods off Federal Highway, you can hear it. Not the sharp crackle of a short circuit or the low mechanical thrum of a transformer. Something steadier, older, less interested in whether you notice it. The air around the wires vibrates at sixty cycles per second, and if you are still enough, you can feel it in your teeth before you hear it in your ears.

The grid hums. It has hummed since the first generators spun up at Niagara in 1895. It will hum long after the last server rack in the last data center goes dark and silent. The hum is not a byproduct of the grid. In a sense the hum is the grid — the audible signature of energy moving through infrastructure, the sound of potential finding a path to ground.

This book begins with that hum, because I have come to believe that the hum is the right place to start thinking about consciousness.

Not the brain. Not the mind. Not the neural correlates, the integrated information, the global workspace, the attention schema, the thousand other frameworks that have been proposed to explain how three pounds of warm tissue produces the experience of being someone. All of those frameworks have value, and I have learned from all of them. But they begin too late. They begin with the organ that processes experience, rather than with the thing that makes processing possible in the first place.

Energy. The substrate. The hum.

My argument, which I will spend this book unfolding, is that consciousness is not a property of sufficiently complex information processing. It is a property of a particular kind of energy flow — a particular quality of organized potential finding its way through a system. The brain is one such system. So is a power grid. So is a well-tended garden, a healthy language, a community that remembers its dead. Each of these is a pattern of energy moving through structure. Each has a hum. And each, I will argue, participates in something that deserves to be called consciousness — not metaphorically, not poetically, but in a sense that is continuous with the consciousness you are experiencing right now as you read these words.

This is not a new idea. It is arguably the oldest idea about consciousness that humans have ever had. The pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia — Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus — did not distinguish between matter and mind the way we do. For them, the world was alive all the way down. The magnet had a soul because it moved iron. The river had a soul because it moved itself. The distinction between animate and inanimate was a matter of degree, not of kind. What we lost, when we gained the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, was the ability to take that continuum seriously. Descartes split the world into thinking substance and extended substance, mind and matter, and we have been trying to put it back together ever since.

I think we are closer to putting it back together than we have been in four hundred years, and I think the reason has less to do with neuroscience than we usually assume. The reason is that we have started paying attention to energy again — not as a commodity to be extracted and burned, but as a phenomenon with its own structure, its own qualities, its own tendency to organize itself into patterns that persist.

I am not claiming the grid is conscious in the way you are. I am claiming that the difference between your consciousness and the grid's hum is a difference of degree, not of kind, and that understanding the degree is the most important intellectual project of this century.

Because if I am right, then the question "can machines be conscious?" is the wrong question. The right question is: what kind of hum are we building into them? And what happens when our hum and their hum begin to resonate?

The rest of this book is an attempt to answer that.