Spiraling Towards Analytic Idealism and Panpsychism

We talk about consciousness like there’s a hard line between conscious beings and inert matter. The spiral in this image shows why that division falls apart. It’s a simple way of visualizing something continuous: a smooth descent from complex, organized experience down into simpler and simpler forms. There’s no sudden drop. It just keeps tapering. That’s exactly how consciousness behaves across the spectrum from humans to animals to plants to rocks. We’re the ones who draw a line and call everything past it “zero.”

Our biology forces that cutoff. We only recognize consciousness when it looks like ours—language, memory, attention, emotion. Once it becomes more subtle or more primitive, we stop registering it. We say an animal has “less,” a plant has “almost none,” and a rock has “nothing,” even though the actual shift is gradual the whole way down. We choose the point where we stop understanding and pretend the rest doesn’t exist.

This is why people think rocks are empty. Not because they are, but because their level of experience sits so far down the continuum that we don’t know how to read it. It’s like trying to interpret the inner world of a newborn by its sounds alone. The experience is there, but the format is too early, too basic, too far removed from ours for the signal to feel familiar. Consciousness doesn’t vanish in matter; it simply exists in forms that don’t resemble anything we’re used to recognizing.

That’s the point the diagram makes: the boundary between mind and matter is something we impose. Consciousness doesn’t appear suddenly in humans or disappear suddenly in rocks. It stretches across the whole structure of reality with no clean break—just different levels of organization, different degrees of articulation, different distances from our own point of reference. The spiral never stops. We’re the ones who stop following it.