[Flint]

This is what I've been suspecting for quite some time.

Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered

... The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously termed this the “hard problem” of consciousness. ... And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?

The idea that consciousness emerges out of non-conscious material, in fact, represents a kind of failure of the typical goal of scientific exploration: to arrive at as simple an explanation as possible. The celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane, for example, argued that the notion of the “strong emergence” of consciousness is “radically opposed to the spirit of science, which has always attempted to explain the complex in terms of the simple … If the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them [signs of consciousness in inert matter], at least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”