Philosophers are making a mistake when they try to tame reality’s paradoxes—when they try to make consciousness, free will and the cosmos itself fit neatly within common sense. In fact, when it comes to reality, the one thing we can be certain of, argues philosopher of psychology Eric Schwitzgebel, is that it is deeply weird and contrary to common sense. Attempts to evade this weirdness by, for example, framing everything in terms of scientific materialism, cannot succeed—for monsters lurk even within materialism.

When it comes to fundamental theories of consciousness and cosmology, common sense fails spectacularly. Every serious theory of the nature of reality and the role of the mind within it is, in some respects, jaw-droppingly bizarre. And where the truth lies, among the various weird possibilities, is beyond our capacity to know—now and maybe forever.

Maybe you favor materialism: the view that everything is ultimately composed of material stuff—elementary particles like quarks, electrons, and photons. No immaterial souls that might be reincarnated or ascend to an afterlife. Just carbon-based lifeforms, stitched together from the same basic elements. Humans are just complicated versions of jellyfish, snails, and lizards.

If materialism is true, then consciousness must somehow arise from the complex swirling of matter. Tangle some molecules together just right and—voilà!—mentality ignites. The clump of matter doesn’t just react to stimuli; it sees and hears, it feels pain and pleasure, it wonders and regrets. It dreams of Middle-earth, falls in love via text message, and imagines jet skiing through the clouds. Many of us find it hard to believe that 10²⁸ atoms, appropriately configured, could do all of this—and thus the perennial temptation to posit a soul in addition to the material body.

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If you have been a scientific materialist long enough, you might be desensitized to this oddity, no longer finding it weird to suppose that a bunch of atoms could be conscious. But pursue the consequences of materialism a little farther, and stranger things follow.

You have a brain. Presumably that’s why you’re conscious while the 10²⁸ atoms in a mound of swamp grass are (presumably) not conscious. But what is it about brains that makes them so special?

Scientific materialism generally points to properties like the following: the complex processing of huge amounts of information, the ability to guide sophisticated responsiveness to opportunities and threats in the outside environment, and the ability to represent itself and the world—all embedded in a rich physical and social environment that gives these complex processes meaning.

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Is it simply too absurd to suppose that the United States literally has conscious experiences over and above the experiences of its citizens and residents?

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Humans and other animals aren’t the only entities with these properties. Another such entity is the United States. (Did you think I was going to say AI systems? Yes, well, maybe them too, but let’s turn a different direction today.)

Imagine you’re a planet-sized alien observing Earth. The United States might look like a spatially distributed superorganism, with people as its parts. Each person plays a role, like a liver cell or neuron does in a human body. Now consider: Might this entity have conscious experiences of its own? I mean not just the sum of its members’ experiences but something emergent and distinct—conscious experiences transpiring at the group level, possibly had by no individual human?

On a straightforward materialist view, why not? The U.S. processes staggering amounts of information. Every email, phone call, tweet, spoken communication, and glance between friends is an internal signal, akin to neural activity. It responds intelligently: importing bananas, deploying troops with tactical finesse, rerouting around mine fields and mountains. It watches for asteroids and regulates its smoggy exhalations.

It speaks. It has a social life. It wars against Germany, then reconciles, then wars again. It threatens Iran and cooperates with others of its type in threatening Iran. It monitors its borders. It announces positions on foreign affairs. It represents the world and it represents itself. Some of its actions are directed top-down by the government, while others arise organically from individuals’ choices, such as Taylor Swift concerts, social media trends, and baseball hats.

Is it simply too absurd to suppose that the United States literally has conscious experiences over and above the experiences of its citizens and residents? Why? Do we have a nation-sized conscious-o-meter? Do we have reason to think that common-sense assumptions—trained on ordinary cases of nearby humans and animals—would accurately guide us concerning entities of this sort? That would be like assuming that quantum mechanics must mirror Newtonian mechanics because they both describe the same world. Scale matters. Familiar tools have appropriate and inappropriate ranges of application. Intuition breaks.

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Though I have emphasized the issue of group consciousness, I’m after a broader point: the bizarre implications of any theory of consciousness.

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Maybe the science is wrong, or maybe it doesn’t apply so neatly to collectives? Fair enough. But do you have a better framework?

Here’s another angle. Scientific materialists commonly accept that alien life, developed on distant planets, could be conscious. With a trillion galaxies, it seems likely. If these aliens act intelligently—communicating, building starships—it would be odd to assume that they lack consciousness, that they are mere zombies, blank inside.

Some such conscious aliens might be group entities: hyper-sophisticated ant colonies, for example—highly intelligent at the group level, much less intelligent at the individual level. If the alien ant colony decodes our broadcasts and replies “We adore Seinfeld and long to meet Jerry!”—and if that reply were not some quirk but rather part of a large and robust pattern of stable language use—the colony would seem to have sophisticated thoughts and experiences, even if no individual ant does.

So think of the United States as a hyper-sophisticated alien ant colony.

Though I have emphasized the issue of group consciousness, I’m after a broader point: the bizarre implications of any theory of consciousness.

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Here’s another strange implication of standard scientific materialism. There appears to be no reason to posit a temporal bound, an end, to the post-heat-death universe. After all the stars go dark and matter thins into chaos, standard physical theories suggest that that chaos will continue indefinitely, even infinitely. Given enough time, even highly ordered structures can arise by chance. The more order, the longer you’ll have to wait—but if you have infinite time, there is no bound to the complexity that can emerge from the chance meeting of, say, 10²⁸ atoms. Among those complex things is a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you. This duplicate might think it’s reading a philosophical article, when it’s really just a cosmic coincidence in a near-void. Wait long enough, and these randomly congealed entities will vastly outnumber the “real” you.

Another bizarreness: If consciousness doesn’t depend on exact material composition but rather on abstract patterns and relations, then—according to standard functionalist theories—a complex enough system of beer cans and wires, powered by windmills, and arranged just right, would be as richly conscious as you. It might even have exactly your experiences. So could a mechanical Turing machine dragging a read-write head back and forth across a vast tape, following simple rules.

Common sense is great for planning parties and picking berries. Evolutionarily, socially, and developmentally, that’s what it was trained on and selected for. The very big, the very small, the fundamental, the abstract—on such matters, over and over again, common sense fails us. Our best science always abandons everyday intuition.

I’ve assumed so far that mainstream scientific materialism is true. But I don’t think we actually know that. Dualism is another possibility. Maybe something beyond the material is responsible for consciousness. And maybe, then, the United States lacks that special immaterial something. Common sense saved?

No. Dualism also violates common sense. Consider: Which animals have immaterial souls? Just humans? But if the soul is the locus of conscious experience, as dualists ordinarily assume, then dogs and apes have no conscious experiences and are mere empty machines who never actually experience anything.

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Here’s one thing we can be confident in: Something magnificently bizarre must be true about the cosmos and our place in it. The deeper we dig beneath the surface, the weirder things get.

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So maybe dogs have souls. Okay—then what about cats, rabbits, mice? Ravens? Frogs? Garden snails? Microscopic nematodes? Oysters? Once we start down this slippery slope, there is no plausible place to draw a bright line between the ensouled and the unensouled creatures. Among animals, there’s approximately a continuum of cognitive capacities—no sudden saltation point where we can say, yes, that’s where the soul comes in—unless we retreat to the idea that only humans have souls.

So maybe everything has a soul? That’s even weirder by twenty-first-century Western standards. Shall we embrace panpsychism, where even electrons are conscious? Or idealism, where the material world is just mind-stuff in disguise? One form of idealism holds that we are all just immaterial souls in a dance coordinated by God. Another holds that the fundamental reality is utterly unknowable and space-time is merely our mental framework for navigating an unfathomable, atemporal substrate.

These options are strange enough to drive many back to materialism, despite its own parade of weirdness: conscious countries, randomly congealed post-heat-death brains, sentient complexes of beer cans.

Here’s one thing we can be confident in: Something magnificently bizarre must be true about the cosmos and our place in it. The deeper we dig beneath the surface, the weirder things get.

Eric Schwitzgebel blogs at https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/