Plasma Consciousness and Edith Stein: Can Matter Have an Inner Life?

Plasma, empathy, and the interval between relation and experience

I have written several times about plasma consciousness (it’s something I’m really fascinated about from my background of teaching Physics for so many years), especially in a short piece called “Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe.” Of everything I have published here over the past year, that post has continued to find the most readers.

I think I understand some of the attraction. Plasma makes the universe feel strange again.

Most of the visible matter in the universe exists as plasma: charged particles moving through electrical and magnetic fields, forming currents, filaments, waves, instabilities, and structures that stretch from the atmosphere of the Sun to the space between galaxies. Plasma behaves collectively. Its form arises through relation, feedback, disturbance, and response.

That language has always sounded close to the process-relational philosophy that has shaped much of my work. It makes the old picture of inert matter increasingly difficult to sustain. The universe appears less like a collection of finished objects and more like an ongoing formation of relations.

The word consciousness, though, makes a further claim.

Does response imply experience? Does self-organization mean that there is some center for whom the organization matters? Is relationality already a form of interiority, or does consciousness require a kind of embodied organization that plasma does not possess?

My recent work on ecological intentionality, especially through Edith Stein, has made those questions harder and more interesting.

What plasma can do

A recent preprint by Nicolás Hinrichs and several colleagues, “Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio,” caught my eye and approaches plasma through a question that comes before the attribution of consciousness: what physical conditions must a system satisfy before life, agency, or consciousness becomes plausible?

The authors use complex dusty plasmas as test cases. These systems exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium. They require a continuous energy supply, generate and maintain boundaries, respond to noise, retain traces of previous states, and preserve their forms under changing conditions.

The paper identifies several conditions for what the authors call minimal physical autonomy:

• sustained energy throughput;
• organizational closure;
• active information maintenance;
• regulated sensitivity to noise.

Plasma systems appear to satisfy important parts of this organizational picture. They can form boundaries without membranes, maintain structures through energy flow, respond collectively to disturbances, and carry a kind of physical memory through hysteresis and persistent topological patterns.

The authors remain careful. They do not claim that plasma is alive. They do not claim that it thinks or experiences. Plasma lacks the informational heredity required for open-ended biological evolution, and some of the proposed measurements of organizational closure still require refinement.

The significance of plasma lies in what it makes possible to ask. Material systems can display remarkable degrees of autonomy, memory, and responsiveness before we have any reason to attribute consciousness to them.

Edith Stein and the presence of another center

Edith Stein began with a different limit case. In On the Problem of Empathy, she asked how another person’s experience becomes genuinely given to me as my own.

For Stein, empathy is a form of perception. If I encounter another person grieving, the grief becomes present to me through expression, gesture, speech, bodily bearing, and situation. I encounter the grief as real, though I do not live it from the center where the other person lives it.

Stein calls this difference non-primordiality. The other’s grief is primordial there and non-primordial here. I can draw near to it, understand it more fully, and allow it to change me. The experience never becomes mine.

Distance remains inside the encounter.

This is why Stein has become so important for my work. Her phenomenology allows for genuine relation while preserving the other’s irreducibility. Empathy gives access without possession. Another life can become perceptible while retaining a center I do not occupy.

Plasma presses this account toward its boundary.

I can observe a plasma system maintaining form, responding to disturbance, and carrying traces of its past. I can describe the energy flows and fields through which it persists. What remains absent is the expressive fulfillment through which an experiencing center becomes given as an experiencing center.

That absence does not make plasma inert. It makes my language accountable.

The universe may be relational without every relation being conscious. Matter may be responsive without every response being felt. Organization may prepare the conditions for experience while leaving its emergence unexplained.

Stein lets me hold those possibilities open without turning openness into projection.

Intimacy with remainder

I recently described the next stage of my work as “intimacy with remainder.” The phrase brings Stein’s account of non-primordiality into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of flesh and écart.

Merleau-Ponty helps explain how bodies already belong to a shared sensible world. The one who sees is also visible. The one who touches can be touched. Perception arises within a field of belonging that precedes any clean division between an isolated subject and an external world.

Stein protects the otherness within that belonging. Merleau-Ponty’s écart, the divergence or spacing carried within relation, keeps shared flesh from becoming fusion.

Plasma may be a particularly useful limit case for this emerging framework. Plasma belongs to the same material cosmos from which living and conscious bodies arise. Its fields pass through planetary atmospheres, shape stars, produce auroras, and participate in the long material history that eventually becomes soil, trees, animals, and human bodies. That’s real intimacy.

The remainder is everything its organization does not disclose. There may be forms of interiority that exceed our present concepts. There may also be no experiential center there at all. Honest attention has to leave both possibilities open.

Before my next examination

This summer I completed my first comprehensive examination at CIIS, “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and the Ecology of the Cross.” That paper asked how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own directedness, form, and manner of inhabiting a world.

The next examination will return more directly to Stein and Merleau-Ponty. I want to know whether Stein’s protection of otherness and Merleau-Ponty’s account of belonging can inhabit one ecological framework.

The plasma question now belongs inside that work.

If reality is relational, what forms of relation generate interiority? If matter can remember, organize, and respond, when does any of that become experience? How can we remain open to forms of mind beyond the human without filling the cosmos with reflections of ourselves?

These are also questions for the Ecology of the Cross. Plasma reconnection, biological injury, ecological disturbance, and human suffering may all involve vulnerability, though they do so in different modes. A cruciform cosmology must preserve those differences. The language of suffering only becomes meaningful where something can be suffered. Participation in creation does not require every creature or material process to possess the same kind of interior life.

I still return to the black walnut behind our house. At night it becomes a dark form against a sky filled with processes I can barely imagine. The tree, the atmosphere, the solar wind, and my own body belong to one material history. That belonging is intimate and real. It does not make any of us transparent to the others.

I still believe the cosmos hums.

Edith Stein is teaching me to listen more carefully before deciding who is speaking.

References and Further Reading

Harrelson, Sam. “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and the Ecology of the Cross.” 2026.

Harrelson, Sam. “Intimacy with Remainder: Toward Ecological Intentionality.” 2026.

Hinrichs, Nicolás, Mahault Albarracin, Felipe Engelberger, Leonardo Christov-Moore, and Daniel Polani. “Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio.” arXiv preprint, July 2026.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 1989.