In our standard view of things, Consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history.

According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. This does not mean that literally everything is conscious.

The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality have incredibly simple forms of experience.

And the very complex experience of the human brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience.

Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears.

The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science does not actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first.

you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter.

But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter, what it does.

Physics tells us, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration.

Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself.

It turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter.

Matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter ‘from the outside’, in terms of its behavior.

But matter ‘from the inside’ – in terms of its intrinsic nature – is constituted of forms of consciousness.

This offers us a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the Human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.

These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.

So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they are small and the universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There is a level of connectivity.

That is really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you are a participant in the goings-on of activities and events around you. That is precisely what we are, just by being alive.