The extraordinary character of the sense-making animal may be highlighted by contrasting a wild animal looking for the origin of a threatening signal with a team of scientists listening into space to test a hypothesis about the Big Bang, having secured a large grant to do so.

This suggests another way of coming upon the miracle of our sense-making capacity. Consider the relative volumes of our heads (4 litres) and of the universe (4 x 1023 cubic light years). In our less-than-pin-pricks bonces, the universe comes to know itself as ‘the universe’ and some of its most general properties are understood. That this knowledge is incomplete does not diminish the achievement. Indeed, the intuition that our knowledge is bounded by ignorance, that things (causes, laws, mechanisms, distant places) may be concealed from us, that there are hidden truths, realities, modes of being, has been the necessary motor of our shared cognitive advance. Man, as the American philosopher Willard Quine said, is the creature who invented doubt – as well as measurement, provisional generalisation, and modes of active inquiry.

It takes two to tango. The fact that the world is intelligible clearly cannot be just down to us, otherwise our stories about how things hang together would be somewhere between myths and an evolving consensual hallucination. The balance between the contributions of what is out there and what is in us, between the extent to which the mind conforms to the universe and the universe has mind-compatible properties, is an issue that has had a long history, shared between theology and philosophy.

We cannot be sure when something equivalent to Logos first made its appearance in our conversation with ourselves. Some scholars trace it back to the Pyramid Texts of Heliopolis, nearly 2,500 years before St John wrote his gospel. From the primal waters the god Atum arose: he was the light of the rising sun and the embodiment of the conscious Word or Logos, the essence of life.

The Egyptian Logos does not map clearly on to what Logos subsequently became. The term was in common use when the Pre-Socratic philosophers – those “tyrants of the spirit who wanted to reach the core of all being with one leap” as Nietzsche characterised them in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks – employed it, partly to pat themselves on the back for their own reason-based approach to questions about the nature of the cosmos. Although Logos referred to the way human rationality was reflected or expressed in discourse, it also captured the philosophers’ trust in their own arguments and explanations, and the sense of their awakening from the sleep of Mythos. The boundaries between Mythos – stories told as religious myths or in works of art – and Logos – a reasoned account – will always be contested, and their respective claims to truth likewise. After all, myths, too, are reasoned accounts of a kind: they make sense of making sense, and they use words. What’s more, reason itself operates on a given experience of the world, established long before reason does its work. Hence the endless returns of Mythos.

Logos was central to Heraclitus’s philosophy. According to F.M. Cornford in From Religion to Philosophy (1912), Heraclitus developed – “in flashes of mental lightning” – the notion of Logos as being both the rational structure of the world and the source of that structure. Reason was present in all things. This was asserted against the materialism of the Ionian philosophers, for whom the world was just what was visible. By contrast, Logos was an invisible, immanent reason – the general plan ensuring that the world was an ordered Cosmos rather than a disordered Chaos. It was the hidden harmony behind the discords and antagonisms of existence; behind the eternal war between the elements that kept Being in motion, leaving nothing immune from change. This rational order of things did not itself make the world conscious or thoughtful. Rather, the world became conscious and thoughtful in the human Logos, whose most developed representative was the philosopher himself, in whom the human Logos was united with the Logos of the Cosmos. Making sense of the world was the result of a marriage between microcosmic human Logos and the macrocosmic Logos of the universe itself. Logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure.

These ideas inspired the Stoics, for whom the Logos was a supreme directive principle, the source of all the activity and rationality of an ordered world that was both intelligible and intelligent. It was the ‘seminal reason’ or underlying principle of the world, manifest in all the phenomena of nature. It acted as a kind of force, conferring inner unity on bodies and on the world as a whole, and at the same time guaranteed the intelligibility of the world to humans, since the human soul participated in the cosmic Logos. It is also because the one Logos is present in many human souls that we are able to communicate with each other: we all partake of ‘common sense’. The Stoics’ message was that humans were truly happy only when they were living in a state of harmony in which the Logos of their own soul resonated with the universal Logos, the harmony of nature.

For Philo of Alexandria, a first century Jewish philosopher steeped in Greek thought, the Logos was the model according to which the universe was created. It encompassed the creative principle, divine wisdom, the image of God, and man, the word of the eternal God. At the same time, it was the archetype of human reason, that through which the supreme God made contact with His creation. Logos is the intermediary between God and the world, the creator and His creation.

Which brings us back to the Christian notion of Jesus Christ as Logos. The Logos was the means by which God let Himself into a privileged part of His own creation – humanity. Philo’s connecting the ‘divine thought’ with ‘the image’ and ‘the first-born son of God’, ‘the archpriest’ and ‘the intercessor’, paved the way for the Christian conception of the incarnate ‘word become flesh’, and so of the Trinity. The Word by which He made the world, His law, and indeed Himself, known to man, was now identified with Christ. In the New Testament, the Logos is the Word, the wisdom of God, the reason in all things, and God Himself.

It might seem a little strange — bees are insects, after all; what do they know about mathematics? A lot, it turns out. These eusocial flying insects can add, subtract and even comprehend the concept of zero.

“You can see their decision-making process in their movements and flight patterns,” Howard said. While deciding which of two answers is correct, they often fly toward one of the solutions before seeming to think better of it and flying off toward the other.

Howard teaches one bee at a time, placing it next to an apparatus known as a Y maze, a covered box shaped like a block letter Y. The bee enters the bottom leg of the Y and sees a mathematical question, expressed in shapes and colors. In the arithmetic lessons, blue shapes mean “add 1” to the given number of shapes, and yellow shapes mean “subtract 1.” To answer the question, the bee chooses from one of two possible solutions posted at the entrances to the Y’s upper arms. The bee will find a reward — sugar water — in the arm associated with the correct answer, and a punishment — tonic water, which bees find bitter — in the arm with the incorrect answer.

To teach bees about zero, she first trained them to understand the concept of “less than.” As with the addition and subtraction problems, she offered reinforcements for correct choices. Once an individual bee demonstrated it understood “less than,” she advanced that bee to the testing phase of her experiment, where it would decide if any number of shapes is less than zero shapes — a number the bee had never encountered before. Each bee had only one chance to answer. The bees often identified “zero shapes” as smaller than any number of shapes, and Howard concluded that they must possess an innate understanding that zero is smaller than any positive integer.

For each experiment, Howard trains and tests approximately 100 random bees from the thousands in her hives. Handling them is simple enough. After each correct choice, the bee flies back to the hive on its own, to offload its sweet reward. Then, at some point, it’ll come back. That’s because bees are central place foragers, meaning they will remember the experiment and return to it for additional resources. To prepare for her next pupil, Howard changes the stimuli on the Y maze. She has hundreds, possibly thousands of stimuli printed and laminated.

“They’re laminated so we can clean them with ethanol, because bees will scent-mark,” said Howard. “They’ll do anything to cheat the tests. They’re smart! They’ll mark the correct answer. Bees are not as simple as we used to think they are. Or even as some people still think they are.”

The case Goff presents for panpsychism is to a considerable extent based on the failure of alternatives – dualism and materialism – to explain consciousness. He devotes excellent chapters to demolishing these views.

According to dualism, there are immaterial minds and there are physical things. Because minds are not located or extended in space, we cannot see minds by peering into brains. This idea, famously mocked by Gilbert Ryle as the notion that we are ‘ghosts in machines’, has many problems. One of the most striking is that it cannot account for the central role the mind seems to play in our ability to do things. How could an immaterial entity influence the behaviour of a material object such as a brain? If a non-physical mind were intervening in the brain, there would be all kinds of things going on for which we would have no neuroscientific explanation. Such anomalous activity is not observed, so there is no such intervention, Goff argues.

Materialism fails because there is nothing in the brain as objectively (neuroscientifically) observed that is remotely like subjective experience. Here Goff’s critique mobilizes some of the well-known thought experiments in recent philosophy. Among them is Frank Jackson’s story of Mary the genius neuroscientist. For reasons that are not made clear, she has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room, where she has mysteriously acquired complete objective knowledge (whatever that may mean) of the science of colour. When she is liberated from the room into the outside world, she acquires something new: awareness of colours. This is often (incorrectly) described as additional ‘knowledge’, although it is in fact experience. The point however is upheld: experience is not reducible to or captured by objective knowledge. More specifically, what neuroscientists observe in the brain and nervous system does not get anywhere near subjective, qualitative experience. More generally, science-based materialism does not account for, or accommodate, consciousness – least of all the consciousness that is manifest in the ‘what it is like to be’ of a conscious subject.

The elusiveness of experience has persuaded some materialist philosophers to deny that experience is real. They argue that consciousness is an illusion. But this claim does not withstand a second’s thought; for in order to fall victim to the illusion of consciousness, one would have to be conscious of it.

Panpsychists step into the explanatory gap left by the failure of both dualism and materialism to make sense of the relationship between the mind and the brain. They correctly recognize that this is not just a little local difficulty to be resolved as brain science advances. What is needed is a radical rethink of the place of consciousness in the order of things.

Goff draws on arguments put forward by the physicist Arthur Eddington, developing ideas advanced by Bertrand Russell, to the effect that the physical sciences tell us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the ‘stuff’ that makes up the world. They describe only the manner in which bits of the stuff interact with each other. We know what they do, but not what they are. There is, however, a place where the veil of scientific appearance is torn; namely our own brains. We know from first hand experience that brains are conscious. Indeed, consciousness is the only fundamental feature of which we can be certain. If brains are representative of the stuff of the world, it is therefore reasonable to conclude that such stuff has consciousness as one of its fundamental features. (Indeed, Goff holds that the physical properties of particles – mass, charge, spin etc – are themselves forms of consciousness.)

Goff defends this extraordinary extrapolation from brains to the entire universe on the grounds of simplicity of explanation – grounds that, after all, drive science. It is more economical to propose that matter has one kind of intrinsic nature rather than two. But the suggestion that everything in the universe is like the brain raises an obvious question: what it is about the brain that makes it seem to be uniquely associated with subjective consciousness? Why do you and I have viewpoints underpinning integrated worlds, while socks and clouds and pebbles apparently do not?

One manifestation of this puzzle is the so-called ‘combination problem’: “How do you get from little conscious things… to big conscious things, like human brains?” Here we seem to have replaced one explanatory gap with another at least as wide. In the hope of making the combination problem a topic for ‘a new science of consciousness’, Goff translates it into the question of how a disunified brain, made of trillions of conscious particles, becomes a unified brain with a single consciousness. He hints that quantum entanglement might provide a model for such unification, but is not able to indicate what is or might be distinctive about the brain that it uniquely makes use of such entanglement. So long as this ‘emergentist’ model lacks details, it is only a promissory note. Worse problems arise out of the fact that observation – that is, observation by a conscious, macroscopic subject – is required to confer definite values on the quantum elements that go into the making of the brain, and which are supposed to help solve the combination problem.

The last decade has been inarguably incredible for the field of psychedelic science. The term renaissance is hyperbolically thrown around a lot these days but in this context it is perfectly apt. Moving from the fringes of the research world and shaking off years of baggage from illicit recreational circles, scientists have made startling progress in legitimizing the medical potential of these drugs.

With both MDMA and psilocybin on the precipice of approvals as mainstream medicines, and several leading universities opening dedicated psychedelic research facilities, the story of the last 10 years has been one of profound breakthroughs. So, as we stand on the precipice of a new decade, it's worth pausing for a moment and looking forward to investigate what the 2020s may hold in this rapidly accelerating field.

New Atlas spoke to several leading psychedelic researchers to get their thoughts on three big future-forward questions. Where will psychedelic science be in 2030, what is the biggest hurdle psychedelic researchers will face in the 2020s, and what is the most interesting psychedelic research topic that has yet to be fully explored?

In an effort to replicate an experiment conducted over a century ago, systems biologists at Harvard Medical School now present compelling evidence confirming at least one single-cell organism—the strikingly trumpet-shaped Stentor roeselii—exhibits a hierarchy of avoidance behaviors.

Exposed repeatedly to the same stimulation—in this case a pulse of irritating particles—the organism can in effect "change its mind" about how to respond, the authors said, indicating a capacity for relatively complex decision-making processes.
The results are published online in Current Biology on Dec. 5.

"Our findings show that single cells can be much more sophisticated than we generally give them credit for," said corresponding study author Jeremy Gunawardena, associate professor of systems biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

It has been an exciting week for quantum biology enthusiasts, with two separate studies suggesting new ways to leverage quantum principles in life sciences applications.

Researchers from the Quantum Nanophysics Group at the University of Vienna found a “quantum interference in molecules of gramicidin, a natural antibiotic made up of 15 amino acids,” potentially opening a door to a “new era for quantum biology,” according to MIT Technology Review.

A separate paper published in Nature this week also suggested that “the theory of quantum open systems can successfully push forward our theoretical understanding of complex biological systems working close to the quantum/classical boundary.”

This research is the latest in scientific breakthroughs enabling us to better understand and leverage “quantum properties of biomolecules” and “set the scene for experiments that exploit the quantum nature of enzymes, DNA, and perhaps one day simple life forms such as viruses.”

The concept of quantum biology, or the application of quantum principles better known in math and computing to living organisms, has been around since the 1930s.

PitchBook and Crunchbase databases show that most of the private funding is flowing into quantum physics technologies, the hot new frontier, but the earliest applications of quantum principles was in fact in biology.

During and after taking a high dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, something changed. "It was like being on holiday away from the prison of my brain," one person said. "I was a ball of energy bouncing around the planet, I felt carefree, re-energized."

    These testimonies came from a clinical trial for treatment-resistant depression at Imperial College London in 2016. As soon as one week after taking psilocybin—and for as long as three months after—the subjects' depressive symptoms were "markedly reduced," a paper on the results said. Since then, psilocybin and other psychedelics have been hailed as powerful and much-needed interventions for mental illness. Psychedelic research centers have been formed at Imperial College, and more recently at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In October 2018, psilocybin received Breakthrough Therapy designation from the Food and Drug Administration, recognizing it as a promising treatment for hard-to-treat depression, and potentially expediting the process for its approval as a legal medication. (Psilocybin is currently illegal at the federal level in the U.S. and the U.K.)

    As scientists strive to understand exactly how these drugs lead to such dramatic outcomes, there's a growing desire to tease apart the experience of psychedelics from the drugs' other effects. Can the hallucinogenic trips that psychedelics induce be separated from other interactions the drugs might be having on the brain?

    The experiences people have on psychedelics can be profound, emotional, painful, blissful, and seemingly transformative. One patient in an Imperial College study reported that they "had an encounter with a being, with a strong feeling that that was myself, telling me it’s alright, I don’t need to be sorry for all the things I’ve done. I had an experience of tenderness towards myself. During that experience, there was a feeling of true compassion I had never felt before.”

    But what if this "trip" is just smoke and mirrors? A window dressing on a neurobiological process happening elsewhere that itself is reducing depression symptoms? Psychedelic drugs interact with receptors in the brain that cause the trip itself, but there are many other effects that are distinct from the hallucinogenic journeys people go through. For instance, they can create an increase in the connections among regions of the brain, and disruptions in other brain circuitry. Yet, up until this point, many experts have considered the entire psychedelic experience one single thing.