Rocks Are Conscious

Sunday. July 20, 2025 - 2 mins

Imagine for a moment that, like a video game, you could control a player’s stats. And one of these stats is awareness. You could move this scrubber up, and your player’s ability to self-reference might be as complex as a human. You move it down, and your player is closer to a goldfish.

How we view consciousness shapes what we think deserves to suffer. including us.

A common view is that consciousness is a binary: 1, you are conscious, and 0, you are not conscious. This is noticeable in AI discourse where people will ask when a model becomes conscious. If an AI model were to become conscious, I do not think we would notice it. Consciousness, as humans understand it, would gradually emerge. If you were to put up a massive cladogram of all our ancestors, stemming all the way back to the primordial goop that life originated from, could you pinpoint when consciousness arose? Consciousness, as we know it, is emergent.

Now what if you moved the scrubber of your player’s complexity even further lower, until you reached a rock. Is a rock nonconscious? Intuitively, this feels like a “no.” But, why? Why do we feel comfortable saying, a rock is nonconscious, a goldfish is less conscious than us, and we are conscious? Our confidence isn’t scientific; we only know how to recognize our own flavor of consciousness. Who’s to say that if you moved this scrubber past human-level awareness, you might reach something else entirely? Maybe that’s what all these yogis and mystics have been talking about.

Any conversation around consciousness of something nonhuman involves projecting the human experience on to other objects that are perceived within the human experience. “A rock is not conscious!” you say. But what would a rock consciousness look like? What would a dog’s consciousness even look like? Even between organisms we agree are conscious, their experiences differ wildly—because their sensory inputs do.

To me this matters for a couple of reasons:

1. Human consciousness is likely epiphenomenal. This should humble us, our myths, and our problems.
2. Other beings are all experiencing a different reality—and “experiencing” and “reality” look different to every single one of them. Try to develop a panpsychic empathy; our soon-to-be AI overlords will appreciate this.
3. The distinction between consciousness and nonconscious as a binary is unintentionally conflated with deadness and aliveness. A living goldfish is “dead”-er than a living human, so its suffering is easier to look past. This, I see, as the biggest reason to challenge conventional notions around consciousness. When consciousness as a binary is legislated, it enables animal cruelty and violence against marginalized groups.

No rock will read this and have an opinion, but who am I to say that means rocks aren’t conscious? Sentience is a spectrum. We don’t know where we fall on it; we’ve just been talking the loudest.