Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine is one of those books that keeps following you around the house after you’ve put it down. I finished it a couple weeks ago and it still ambushes me in the middle of unrelated thoughts, the way a song you heard at a party will suddenly surface while you’re doing dishes. The passage that has stayed with me longest is her discussion of panpsychism and, specifically, Christof Koch‘s attempt to solve what philosophers call the “combination problem.”
Here’s the setup. Koch, a neuroscientist and one of the leading proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), argues that consciousness correlates with something called phi, which is a measure of how much integrated information a system contains. The more integrated, the more conscious. A neuron, Koch claims, has enough phi for “an itsy-bitsy amount of experience.” Fine. I find that plausible and even beautiful, the idea that experience reaches down into the smallest functional units of the brain, that awareness isn’t some grand emergent magic trick but something woven into the fabric of biological processing at every scale.
The combination problem asks the next question: if individual neurons are conscious, and my brain is made of billions of neurons, then why do I have one unified mind rather than billions of tiny ones? Koch’s answer is that a system can be conscious only so long as it does not contain, and is not contained within, something with a higher level of integration. Neurons cultured in a petri dish might be conscious. Neurons inside an actual brain are not, because they’ve been subsumed by the brain’s greater integration. The whole absorbs the parts. And the argument extends upward: humans are conscious, Koch says, but society as a whole is not, because although society is the larger conglomerate, it is less integrated than the human brain.
Two things bother me about this.
The first is the disappearing neuron. Koch grants the neuron its phi, grants it an “itsy-bitsy” experience, and then takes it away the moment that neuron becomes part of something larger. The logic seems to be that integration at a higher level extinguishes experience at the lower level, that the brain’s unified consciousness replaces whatever the neuron had going on. I understand why this move is attractive: it solves the combination problem cleanly by making consciousness a property of the most integrated system in any given hierarchy, and only that system. No doubling. No overlap. One winner per contest.
I’m not sure I buy it.
If a neuron has enough phi for subjective experience on its own, what is it about being wired into a network that strips that experience away? Koch’s answer is structural: the neuron is now part of a more integrated system, so the system gets the consciousness and the neuron doesn’t. That’s an assertion, not an explanation. It tells me the rule but not the mechanism. What force reaches down into the neuron and switches off whatever was happening there? Why can’t the neuron still experience its own tiny slice of the world, unaware of the macro-level cognition happening above it, the same way I experience my own life without being aware of the specific electrochemistry producing my thoughts?
The second thing that bothers me is the claim about society. Koch argues that human society is not conscious because, despite being larger than an individual brain, it is less integrated. There’s a neatness to this that makes me suspicious. It maps too cleanly onto our intuitions. We feel conscious. We don’t feel like society is conscious. Therefore the theory should confirm our feelings. That feels less like philosophy and more like flattery.
I want to tell you about something that happened last week.
My daughter was at her middle school’s Valentine’s Day dance, held at the local rec hall. She’s thirteen, old enough to be embarrassed by her parents and young enough to still call when she’s scared. The dance was supposed to end at nine. Around 7:15 pm, someone posted in our town’s community Facebook group that police were at a convenience store about a quarter mile from the rec hall because someone had committed a homicide.
One of the kids at the dance saw the post. The news spread through the hall the way only news can spread through a room full of thirteen-year-olds with smartphones: instantly, without filter, and with the exponential amplification that terror provides. Within minutes, someone posted on the Facebook group that all parents needed to come to the hall to pick up their children, that the police were making parents come to the door to claim their kids.
Less than a minute after that, my daughter called me. She was panicking. She said the police had locked down the hall and she wanted to come home. I told her I was on my way.
My wife started reaching out to friends and colleagues trying to find out what was happening. Nobody knew anything. A few people said they’d driven past the convenience store and there were no police there. The information was contradicting itself in real time, which made everything worse, because when you don’t know what’s true and your kid is scared, the uncertainty itself becomes the threat.
We drove to the rec hall. There were no police. There were a lot of frightened children and a lot of anxious parents arriving at roughly the same time. An adult came to the door to verify who we were, then went inside to get our daughter. We drove home.
The next day, we learned that none of it had happened. The police were never called to a scene in our town. They never locked down the dance. The entire event, the panic, the phone calls, the parents racing through the dark to the rec hall, all of it was based on false information that someone posted in a Facebook group and that the rest of the community then amplified, believed, and acted on as though it were real.
And here’s the thing: the kids and their parents were terrified because they had every reason to be. We live in a country where mass shootings happen with such regularity that every parent of a school-age child carries a low-grade dread, the kind that sits beneath your conscious awareness until something activates it, and then it fills every room you’re in. The false post didn’t create the fear. The false post found the fear where it was already living and gave it a reason to surface.
Now. Think about what happened at the level of the community that night. A signal entered the system (the Facebook post). The system processed that signal (kids reading it, telling other kids, parents reading follow-up posts) and generated a coordinated response (parents mobilizing, an adult guarding the door, children being gathered and released only to verified guardians). The system did this without any single person orchestrating it. Nobody was in charge. The response emerged from the interactions between the parts, each person acting on their own experience and their own fear, and yet the collective behavior was patterned, purposeful, and coherent.
If I were describing that sequence of events happening inside a brain, I’d call it cognition. Stimulus, processing, coordinated response. Koch might even say the system was exhibiting integration. The reason he doesn’t say that about society is that he’s already decided society isn’t integrated enough, that the connections between people (language, social media, shared culture, shared trauma) are too slow and too loose to produce the kind of integration that generates consciousness.
Maybe. I’m not sure integration is the right measuring stick.
What I know is this: throughout that entire evening, I never lost my subjective experience. I was conscious the whole time, making decisions, feeling fear, calculating routes, reassuring my daughter on the phone. And yet my actions were not fully my own. I was moved by forces operating at scales I couldn’t see from inside the experience: the love that makes a parent drive through the night without hesitation, the rumor dynamics of social media that no individual controls, the decades of American gun violence that had pre-loaded every parent in that parking lot with a specific and justified terror. I was, in Koch’s framework, a neuron. I was experiencing. I was also being moved by the larger system’s logic. And I didn’t stop being conscious just because the system around me was doing something coherent at a scale beyond my awareness.
Koch wants consciousness to exist at one level of integration at a time. The brain gets it; the neuron doesn’t. The individual gets it; the society doesn’t. I think that framing is wrong, or at least incomplete. I think the neuron can experience its itsy-bitsy slice of the world while the brain experiences its unified field. I think I can experience my fear and my love and my confusion while the community around me generates its own emergent response to a threat that turned out to be imaginary. I think these experiences coexist, nested inside one another, each real on its own terms, none of them requiring the cancellation of the others.
The real combination problem, it seems to me, isn’t how micro-experiences become macro-experience. It’s why we keep assuming they can’t live in the same house.
My daughter is fine. She woke up the next day and probably forgot about it by lunch. I haven’t forgotten. Not because the fear was real (it turned out not to be), but because the experience was. All of it. At every level. Mine, hers, the town’s. Each of us conscious, each of us moved by something larger than ourselves, and none of us any less aware for it.