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matter is conscious

After a long conversation with Francesca, I realized a good way to explain my philosophy. There are three approaches to describing the universe based on the only fact we know: I think, therefore I am.

Nihilism stops there. Only one thing exists: oneself.

Because this makes me uncomfortable as the basis of any philosophy, I go one step further, postulating that everything else also exists. One could ask, for example, how self can be defined without other. But what is other? The simplest answer is to assume everything follows the same rules as I do, and that all rules are the same for all observers; that is, everything must be conscious. In other words, two categories of things exist: me, and things that aren't me but that are like me in all other respects. (I still have a slight problem in this theory, namely that other things must be different somehow; simply the fact that they aren't me isn't enough, what makes them not me? It would be more philosophically airtight to conclude that nothing else is conscious, since that's my experience, but as I said I don't like this.)

Most modern humanist philosophies go even further and divide the world into things with souls and things without. There are no rules for how this distinction is made, so this violates my principle that all things are governed by universal rules. Tables and humans follow different rules (one has a conscious soul, the other not), but there is no way to tell the difference between the two.

As I told Francesca:

"I can't tell the difference between you and this chair. So I am forced to conclude that you are both conscious, or both not; out of respect to you, I conclude the former."