Philip Goff
About
Philosopher who presents fine-tuning arguments and panpsychism
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Claims by Philip Goff (20 of 28)
Neuroscience gives correlations, not explanation
Neuroscience provides rich correlations between brain activity and conscious experience, but correlations alone are not a complete theory; to solve the hard problem we must explain why a given brain state is accompanied by a given experience, and the quantitative vocabulary of physical science makes it hard to see how such an explanation could be provided.
Galileo stripped qualities from the physical world
Galileo's founding move in mathematizing science was a philosophical theory that relocated qualities (color, smell, taste) out of the physical world and into the consciousness of the observer, which he placed outside the domain of science; this left only quantitative properties (size, shape, location, motion) in the physical world, creating a radical dualism between quantitative physical reality and qualitative consciousness.
Dualism would show up as unexplained brain events
The main problem with substance dualism is empirical rather than philosophical: if an immaterial mind were causally impacting the brain every second of waking life, this would show up in neuroscience as physical events with no physical explanation, like a poltergeist playing with the brain; since we do not observe this, there is a growing inductive argument against dualism.
Physics succeeded by being designed to ignore consciousness
Physical science has been so successful precisely because it was designed from the outset to deal only with quantities and to set consciousness outside its domain; therefore the common inference that science's track record guarantees it will eventually explain consciousness does not follow, because it is being asked to do the one thing it was constructed to exclude.
Consciousness is an extra datum beyond observation
Beyond the data of observation and experiment, there is an additional datum—consciousness—known not through observation but through immediate first-person awareness of our own feelings; since you cannot see someone's experiences by looking inside their head, a theory aimed only at accounting for observation and experiment would never have reason to postulate consciousness, yet we know with Cartesian certainty that consciousness exists.
Ability hypothesis fails to capture truth claims
The ability hypothesis (Nemirow/Lewis) says Mary gains only new know-how—abilities to imagine, categorize, and remember red—not new information, which would rescue materialism; but 'what it's like' sentences can be placed into valid truth-preserving deductive syllogisms, showing they are genuine truth claims, and the ability hypothesis, dealing only in abilities, has no account of this.
Consciousness can be denied or revised, except consciousness
Many phenomena that resist scientific accommodation—value, free will, abstract objects, folk solidity, folk time—can be dealt with by either denying the phenomenon or revising our understanding of it; but consciousness is known so directly that neither denial nor revision is an option, giving consciousness a special place in our methodology and warranting hesitation about whether postulates designed for observation can also account for it.
Mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness
On panpsychism, mass, spin and charge are not accompanied by additional consciousness-properties (which would be dualism and would show up in physics); rather mass, spin and charge are themselves forms of consciousness—physics tells us what they do but not what they are, so it is a radically non-dualistic view that is automatically consistent with all empirical science.
Simpler matter has simpler consciousness; electrons too
Consciousness grades with complexity: human consciousness is rich, horses' less so, mice's less still, and as we descend to simpler forms of matter we have simpler forms of consciousness, such that an electron has an unimaginably simple form of experience; only at the fundamental level need everything be conscious, not arbitrary aggregates like rocks, socks, and beds.
Theory of consciousness judged by external and internal constraints
A theory of consciousness should be judged by two constraints: an external constraint of fitting the empirical data, and an internal constraint of minimizing or eliminating explanatory gaps—places where the theory jumps from one set of facts to another with no account of how; materialism, while fitting data, has an enormous internal explanatory gap between quantitative properties and qualitative consciousness, whereas Russell-Eddington panpsychism makes progress by identifying conscious states as the intrinsic nature of physical states.
Panpsychism's physics is identical to materialism's
A panpsychist's theory of what actually happens in the world need not differ at all from the materialist's; the benefit of the view is precisely that the theory of consciousness does not get in the way of physics—an exchange in which Carroll questions what panpsychism then adds, since both ontologies predict identical behavior.
Panpsychism is a framework needing decades to fill in
The Russell-Eddington view is not a complete theory but a framework, like Darwin's principle of natural selection, that will require decades or centuries of interdisciplinary labor to fill in—just as it took a century from natural selection to DNA—and progress will come less from arguments than from actually doing the interdisciplinary research.
Russell and Eddington as Darwin of consciousness
The 1920s work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell did for the science of consciousness what Darwin did for the science of life in the 19th century, and its being largely forgotten is a tragedy of history; its rediscovery over the last 8-10 years has driven a resurgence of panpsychism in academic philosophy from being laughed at to being taken seriously.
Panpsychism may improve our relationship to nature
Although a view should be accepted because it is likely true rather than because it is comforting, panpsychism may be better for our mental and spiritual health and may improve our relationship to the environment: whereas materialism treats trees and plants as unfeeling mechanisms with only indirect value, regarding a tree as a conscious entity in its own right makes it an object of immediate moral concern, potentially helping us address the environmental crisis.
Put consciousness in the intrinsic-nature hole
The genius of the Russell-Eddington approach is to unify two seemingly unrelated problems—the problem of consciousness (finding a place for consciousness) and the problem of intrinsic natures (a hole in physical science)—by putting consciousness in the hole: physical reality's intrinsic nature is constituted of forms of consciousness, yielding a panpsychism with nothing spiritual or supernatural that is fully consistent with everything we know empirically.
Self-described materialists are often property dualists
Many people who consider themselves materialists actually hold that the brain produces consciousness, but that is dualism rather than materialism, because if the brain produces consciousness then consciousness is extra stuff; when the genuine materialist view is explained to them, they are often horrified by it.
Expressive limitation implies explanatory limitation
Neuroscience cannot even express the qualities of consciousness—you could not convey to a blind-from-birth neuroscientist what it is like to see red using the language of neuroscience—and this expressive limitation implies an explanatory limitation, because explaining the qualities would require first conveying them in physical terms; if you cannot even express them, you cannot explain them, so physical science can be neither complete nor true as an account of reality.
Materialist owes an explanation of qualities
Even if materialism is a coherent position, the materialist incurs an explanatory obligation: because we know directly from first-person awareness that consciousness has a qualitative nature, the materialist must show how those qualities are accounted for in the purely quantitative language of physical science, analogous to how chemistry explains the boiling point of water.
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