A Post-Galilean Paradigm

A Post-Galilean Paradigm: A Conversation with Philip Goff

Effectively, by excluding qualities from the domain of science, Galileo excluded consciousness from the domain of science. To be fair to Galileo, he was completely clear about this. He only ever intended physical science as a partial description of reality. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in physical science terms, he'd say, "Of course you can't do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities."

Contrast an electron with a chess piece. What might you want to know about a chess piece? You might want to know what it does (if it's a king, it moves one space in any direction). But you might also want to know what it's like in and of itself (is it made of wood or plastic?). What is its intrinsic nature independently of its behavior? Similarly, you might be very interested to know what physicists have to say about the behavior of the electron, but you might also want to know what the electron is in and of itself. What is its intrinsic nature independent of its behavior? It turns out there's this huge hole in the center of our scientific worldview. Physics—and physical science more generally—tells us lots of stuff about the behavior of matter, but it's completely silent on its intrinsic nature. So what does this have to do with consciousness? The genius of Russell and Eddington was to bring together two problems that, on the face of it, have nothing to do with each other—the problem of consciousness and the problem of intrinsic natures.

The problem of consciousness is this challenge of finding a place for consciousness in our scientific worldview. The problem of intrinsic natures is that we have this huge hole in our scientific worldview. The solution is to put consciousness in the hole. The resulting theory is that there's just matter. This is not dualism, there's nothing spiritual or supernatural. Matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter from the outside, in terms of its behavior. But from the inside, in terms of its intrinsic nature, matter is constituted of forms of consciousness. This is a form of panpsychism, the ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of matter. This has new agey connotations that some people feel a bit uncomfortable with, but we should judge a view not by its cultural associations but by its explanatory power. What this Russell-Eddington panpsychism offers us is a way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. We know that consciousness exists. Nothing is more evident than the reality of our feelings and experiences. We have to fit it into the scientific story somehow. The Russell-Eddington panpsychist view offers us a beautifully simple, elegant, unified way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, and in a way that, unlike dualism, is completely consistent with everything we know about the brain scientifically.

A Post-Galilean Paradigm: A Conversation with Philip Goff


"...from the inside, in terms of its intrinsic nature, matter is constituted of forms of consciousness. This is a form of panpsychism, the ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of matter.
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What this Russell-Eddington panpsychism offers us is a way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. We know that consciousness exists. Nothing is more evident than the reality of our feelings and experiences. We have to fit it into the scientific story somehow. The Russell-Eddington panpsychist view offers us a beautifully simple, elegant, unified way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, and in a way that, unlike dualism, is completely consistent with everything we know about the brain scientifically."

But completely inconsistent with a host of different kinds of paranormal empirical evidence. In this panpsychism, consciousness, mind, is literally the brain. What about veridical NDEs? What about verified reincarnation memories and birth defects/birthmarks? What about verified mediumistic communications? This panpsychism only works by completely ignoring a large body of paranormal data, but of course that is normal for science.

Some related notes:

Galileo’s Big Mistake: How the great experimentalist created the problem of consciousness
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Ongoing debate between Goff and Massimo Piggilucci.

Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about “panpsychism”

interview by Gareth Cook

[Laird]

Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about “panpsychism”

interview by Gareth Cook

Quoting from the interview:

What are the objections to this idea that you hear most frequently? And how do you respond?

Of course, the most common one is “That’s just crazy!”

Hmm. Combination problem, anybody?

Quoting from the interview:


Hmm. Combination problem, anybody?

Yeah Tallis was largely sympathetic but he also notes this as the primary objection:

Goff defends this extraordinary extrapolation from brains to the entire universe on the grounds of simplicity of explanation – grounds that, after all, drive science. It is more economical to propose that matter has one kind of intrinsic nature rather than two. But the suggestion that everything in the universe is like the brain raises an obvious question: what it is about the brain that makes it seem to be uniquely associated with subjective consciousness? Why do you and I have viewpoints underpinning integrated worlds, while socks and clouds and pebbles apparently do not?

One manifestation of this puzzle is the so-called ‘combination problem’: “How do you get from little conscious things… to big conscious things, like human brains?” Here we seem to have replaced one explanatory gap with another at least as wide. In the hope of making the combination problem a topic for ‘a new science of consciousness’, Goff translates it into the question of how a disunified brain, made of trillions of conscious particles, becomes a unified brain with a single consciousness. He hints that quantum entanglement might provide a model for such unification, but is not able to indicate what is or might be distinctive about the brain that it uniquely makes use of such entanglement. So long as this ‘emergentist’ model lacks details, it is only a promissory note. Worse problems arise out of the fact that observation – that is, observation by a conscious, macroscopic subject – is required to confer definite values on the quantum elements that go into the making of the brain, and which are supposed to help solve the combination problem.

Another good review:

Panpsychism Involves Simplistic Shrinkage

Mark Mahin

The book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness by philosopher Philip Goff is a book with quite a few misfires. The biggest one is an extremely common one among today's philosophers. The error is to use the way-too-small term “problem of consciousness” in discussing current shortfalls in explaining the human mind.

What we actually have is an extremely large “problem of explaining human mental capabilities and human mental experiences” that is vastly larger than merely explaining consciousness. The problem includes all the following difficulties and many others:

1. the problem of explaining how humans are able to have abstract ideas;
   
2. the problem of explaining how humans are able to store learned information, despite the lack of any detailed theory as to how learned knowledge could ever be translated into neural states or synapse states;
   
3. the problem of explaining how humans are able to reliably remember things for more than 50 years, despite extremely rapid protein turnover in synapses, which should prevent brain-based storage of memories for any period of time longer than a few weeks;
   
4. the problem of how humans are able to instantly retrieve little accessed information, despite the lack of anything like an addressing system or an indexing system in the brain;
   
5. the problem of how humans are able to produce great works of creativity and imagination;
   
6. the problem of how humans are able to be conscious at all;
   
7. the problem of why humans have such a large variety of paranormal psychic experiences and capabilities such as ESP capabilities that have been well-established by laboratory tests, and near-death experiences that are very common, often occurring when brain activity has shut down;
   
8. the problem of how humans have such diverse skills and experiences as mathematical reasoning, moral insight, philosophical reasoning, and refined emotional and spiritual experiences;
   
9. the problem of self-hood and personal identity, why it is that we always continue to have the experience of being the same person, rather than just experiencing a bundle of miscellaneous sensations;
   
10. the problem of intention and will, how is it that a mind can will particular physical outcomes.
    

It is therefore a ridiculous oversimplification for philosophers to be raising a mere "problem of consciousness” that refers to only one of these problems, and to be speaking as if such a “problem of consciousness” is the only difficulty that needs to be tackled by a philosophy of mind. But that is exactly what Philip Goff does in his book.

Here is Goff on New Thinking Allowed:

Solving the Problems of Consciousness with Philip A. Goff

Philip A. Goff, PhD, is professor of philosophy at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He is author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness and also Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

Here he describes the philosophical approach of addressing the many problems associated with consciousness through logical analysis. He maintains that strict materialism logically implies that consciousness does not exist. While many criticize dualism for failing to define how mind and matter can interact, he maintains that this is not necessarily a fatal flaw. He suggests that panpsychism, the view that the essence of the physical world is mental, avoids many of these problems.