Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

"Yes, I commissioned several essays from Philip for Aeon magazine about panpsychism, which is his particular interest, and we talked about his idea for this book a little before he pitched it to publishers. Panpsychism is the idea that, at some level, there is consciousness in all matter. This is a view which, on the face of it, seems absurd, but actually has several prominent defenders like Galen Strawson, for instance. He’s another thinker who seems to be adopting this view on the grounds that, although it’s seemingly implausible, it’s the best explanation of how we could possibly be both physical beings and able to have experience. Otherwise you get a gap: you can put together systems, but where does the qualitative experience come from? The argument of the panpsychists is that it was already there in the bits you put together, at a very low level. Somehow, putting those bits together in the brain of human physiology raises it to a higher level of consciousness. It’s not like something new comes in, it was there already. That’s the angle that Phillip takes. The title, Galileo’s Error , is explained in the book. Galileo, as well as being a scientist, had a philosophical take on the nature of reality, which was that you could plausibly divide the world into things which you could describe in quantitative language—like mass or size—and things which were qualitative or sensory qualities—like colours, smells, tastes and so on. So you could explain, say, the redness of a tomato in terms of the interaction between the stuff which you could quantify, the physical thing out there, which wasn’t in itself red, and its relationship to the sensory system of an observer. I look at the tomato and it looks red to me because that particular combination of physical stuff produces this qualitative experience in me. That immediately divided the qualitative and the quantitative—and science focused on the quantitative. Galileo’s scientific universe was all about the stuff you could quantify. The trouble is that that scientific approach, which focuses on what can be quantified—according to the story that Philip Goff tells—can’t possibly explain the qualitative stuff. He calls it a radical division between the physical science and the qualitative nature of experience. So the error in the title is of separating these things out and assuming that you couldn’t have qualitative aspects to the stuff that constitutes the universe. As he puts it (on p.23), “the problem of consciousness began when Galileo decided that science was not in the business of dealing with consciousness.” “Reading philosophy books is partly about disagreeing with what is said so that you stay alive as a thinker” What Goff argues is that panpsychism can provide a way out. It’s a different conception of science that will, in the process of changing our view of what the nature of reality is, also change our understanding of how we can possibly be conscious. The book makes the case for panpsychism, which, interestingly, the novelist Philip Pullman has also picked up. He’s quite sympathetic to the approach. It’s not a million miles from some of the things that he writes about in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies. I don’t buy the story, and I don’t think Philip Goff is going to find a lot of converts to panpsychism. But he might find lots of fans for the book, because it’s very skilfully written. It takes into account a lot of different philosophical views. It covers many aspects of philosophy of mind and it’s very accessible for somebody who hasn’t studied philosophy before. Also, for me, one of the interesting things about the book is that he speculates at the end about what that implications would be if you were a panpsychist. If you took this view of the nature of consciousness and reality, how would it change your moral view of the world? When you think about the natural world, like a rainforest: for him a rainforest is teeming with consciousness. If you think value comes from consciousness, even though it’s at a low level, then trees have consciousness of a certain kind that gives them a certain value. Irrespective of their value producing oxygen, they have a value in themselves in the same sense that human consciousness does. So if you believe that human consciousness has a value then, depending how far down the scale you want to go, tree consciousness has a value. Even though it’s probably not the kind of reflective consciousness that we have, it’s got some of the things that we value built into its very nature. That might be another attractor towards panpsychism. No, I don’t believe it. He says on page one, line one, “We are conscious creatures embedded in a world of consciousness.” I think that’s far-fetched. He’s too ready to believe that the material account of consciousness won’t provide an adequate explanation of how qualitative experience emerges. I think it’s plausible. It may be that we don’t have the kind of intelligence that could understand our own consciousness. It could be that we’ve got a limit on what we can understand somehow built in, that doesn’t allow us to understand that. Or maybe, like lots of things that we’ve come to understand, like evolution, there could be a breakthrough that allows us to reconceptualise what we are. I think it’s too early to resort to such exotic explanations as panpsychism. But, that aside, I think it’s a great book. He has real skill at explaining philosophical positions in an entertaining way, so that if you read this book, you’ll know quite a lot about contemporary philosophy of mind and you’ll pick it up quite effortlessly. I doubt you’ll be converted to panpsychism. I certainly haven’t been. But I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book. He’s honestly presenting his view and it’s often easier to think against somebody, actually. As with the Schwitzgebel book, reading philosophy books is partly about disagreeing with what is said so that you stay alive as a thinker. He’s challenging you to think in a radically different way about the entire nature of the universe and what it’s made up of. That’s quite a big challenge and whether or not you accept it, it’s going to make you reflect on what you are, what matters, and what matter is. It depends what you mean by philosopher. If you include everybody who writes about the nature of God as a philosopher, then that’s not a surprising figure. Or maybe it includes people who won’t sign a piece of paper saying they’re a materialist because they have some sophisticated philosophical position about consciousness where they’re not a materialist because they believe mind emerges through some kind of software and it’s not a physical thing in that sense. It might be about relationships between things. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be researched by science. I think if you asked the question, ‘Do you think that neuroscience is the best route to understanding consciousness?’ you’d get a much higher percentage, but I might be wrong."