71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere
What this covers
Philip Goff and Sean Carroll conduct a structured debate on whether consciousness can be explained by physical science alone. Goff, a philosopher arguing for panpsychism, contends that physics by design captures only the quantitative behavior of matter—how things act—and is therefore incapable of explaining the qualitative nature of consciousness: what it is like to experience red, or the smell of coffee. He proposes that consciousness itself is the intrinsic nature of physical reality. Carroll, a physicist and materialist, counters that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from physical matter and requires no modification to physical theory. The two work through the logical terrain systematically, with Carroll questioning whether Goff's panpsychism genuinely adds anything to materialism if both views predict identical behavior in the world.
Goff draws heavily on early-twentieth-century work by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington, arguing that the Problem of Intrinsic Natures—the claim that physics describes only relational properties, leaving a hole in our account of what matter fundamentally is—can be solved by identifying consciousness as that missing intrinsic nature. He addresses the knowledge argument (Mary's Room), the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment, and the Explanatory Gap between physical description and qualitative vs quantitative experience. Carroll defends materialism by questioning whether these arguments genuinely constrain physical explanation, proposing that the Domain-of-Competence Fallacy underpins Goff's reasoning, and arguing that emergence and ontic structuralism provide resources materialism already possesses. Throughout, they maintain mutual respect while disagreeing sharply on whether consciousness poses a genuine threat to physicalism.
Goff argues that physical science, by Galileo's design, captures only the quantitative behavior of matter and is therefore in principle incapable of explaining the qualitative reality of consciousness, so the best solution is panpsychism: consciousness is the intrinsic nature of physical reality itself. Carroll counters that materialism is complete and consciousness is a higher-level emergent phenomenon requiring no augmentation.
- Physical science uses a purely quantitative vocabulary that cannot capture or convey qualities like the redness of red
- Physics describes only what matter does, not its intrinsic nature, leaving a 'hole' that consciousness can fill (Russell-Eddington)
- Consciousness is a datum known directly, distinct from the data of observation and experiment, so it cannot be assumed to fall out of physical theory
Physical science uses only quantitative vocabulary and cannot express or explain qualitative consciousness.
- 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.
“that expressive limitation implies an explanatory limitation”
- 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.
“physical science has been so successful precisely because it was designed to ignore consciousness”
- Inferring that physics will explain consciousness because it has been so successful commits a fallacy of extrapolating beyond a domain of competence: physics is impressive only at the limited task of describing the behavior of matter via mathematical models, never at accounting for subjective qualities, just as being good at teaching and research gives no reason to expect being good at administration.
“physical science has been so successful precisely because it was designed to ignore consciousness”
- The core of the problem of consciousness is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary, whereas consciousness is essentially qualitative (the redness of red, the smell of coffee), and you cannot capture these qualities in the quantitative language of neuroscience, so any purely quantitative description of the brain misses an essential component of consciousness.
“that expressive limitation implies an explanatory limitation”
- 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.
“Galileo as it were stripped the world of its qualities and after he'd done that, all that remained were the purely quantitative features of matter”
- Physics tells us far less about physical reality than commonly assumed: it characterizes properties like mass and charge entirely in terms of what they do (gravitational attraction, resistance to acceleration, attraction and repulsion), and is completely silent on the intrinsic nature of physical entities—how they are in and of themselves independently of their behavior—leaving a 'problem of intrinsic natures,' a huge hole in our scientific story of the universe.
“Physics is completely silent on what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of a physical entity, how it is in and of itself independently of its behavior”
Russell-Eddington panpsychism unifies consciousness and intrinsic natures by making consciousness fundamental.
- 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.
“The problem of consciousness is roughly a need to find a place for consciousness in our scientific story, the problem of intrinsic natures is that we have this huge hole... So the unified solution is put consciousness in the hole.”
- 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.
“these guys did in the 1920s for the science of consciousness what Darwin did for the science of life in the 19th century”
- 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.
“the view is mass, spin and charge are themselves forms of consciousness... physics tells us what mass, spin and charge do, but it doesn't tell us what they are”
- 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.
“The problem of consciousness is roughly a need to find a place for consciousness in our scientific story, the problem of intrinsic natures is that we have this huge hole... So the unified solution is put consciousness in the hole.”
- The Russell-style argument holds that without intrinsic natures every physical property ends up defined in terms of every other property (mass via attraction, attraction via distance, distance via mass and charge), producing a vicious circle with no independent grip on what any property is—illustrated by matchboxes containing a 'splurge,' 'blurge,' and 'curge' each defined only in terms of the others, so you never learn what is actually in the boxes.
“without intrinsic natures everything ends up being defined in terms of everything else, and you end up in a kind of vicious circle”
Materialism incurs an explanatory obligation to account for consciousness but cannot meet it.
- 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.
“you then have an extra explanatory obligation”
- 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.
“a lot of people who think of themselves as materialists, actually turn out to be property dualists”
- Mary, a genius color scientist who knows everything neuroscience can teach about color experience but has lived in a black-and-white room, learns something new when she first sees color; if materialism were true neuroscience would give a complete account leaving nothing to learn, but since she gains new information about the qualitative character of color experience that could not be obtained from neuroscience, the neuroscientific account must be incomplete.
“she does gain some new information about the essential nature of color experience. She learns what it's like to see color, and this is information that couldn't be got from the neuroscience.”
- 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.
“that expressive limitation implies an explanatory limitation”
Consciousness deserves methodological priority because it is known directly, unlike other phenomena.
- Against the dominant 20th-century view (Fodor, Davidson, Dennett) that thought can be fully accounted for in functional/behavioral terms with nothing to say about consciousness, a growing minority holds that thought is itself a kind of consciousness; on that view a zombie would have no thoughts at all, and the speaker's knowledge of his own consciousness is grounded not in self-observation but in immediate awareness of his own experiences.
“I'm actually one of a growing minority of philosophers who think actually thought is a kind of consciousness, and if that's true, then the zombie wouldn't have any thoughts at all”
- 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.
“with consciousness it's a reality that we know in such a direct way, that I don't think it's an option to either deny it or revise it”
- 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.
“There's something else we know to be real, namely consciousness. And it's not something we know from observation and experiment.”
- Carroll's optimistic story applies to every phenomenon except consciousness because all other phenomena are known via capturing the causal structure of the universe, whereas consciousness is apprehended directly—we know something of its nature by attending to the qualities in our experience, which we cannot do for tables—so this different epistemological relationship entitles us to give a different, lower credence to the prospect of a purely physical explanation.
“I think we apprehend its reality directly and we know something about its reality directly... with consciousness I think I have some direct access to its nature”
The ability hypothesis cannot explain 'what it is like' sentences as genuine 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.
“it seems you can put these sentences about what it's like to see red into deductive syllogisms”
- One should not adopt a view because one would most like it to be true but because it is most likely to be true; nonetheless it is legitimate to be relieved and happy if a view one believes to be true happens also to be comforting.
“we shouldn't be thinking about which view we'd most like to be true. We should be thinking about which view is most likely to be true”
- 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.
“we don't want our theory of consciousness to get in the way of physics”
- 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.
“An electron has an unimaginably simple form of experience. So we can't even imagine something so simple.”
- Modern knowledge has become so specialized that it is hard to learn about everything, in contrast to the 17th century when one could plausibly know everything.
“everything is so specialized these days, it's hard to learn about... I'm jealous of people in the 17th century where you kind of know everything”
- 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.
“if you think a tree is some sense a conscious entity in its own right, then I think that's an object of immediate moral concern”
Panpsychism is a framework requiring decades of interdisciplinary work to develop fully.
- The crucial next step for panpsychism is the relationship between particle-level (or lower-level) consciousness and higher-level consciousness: whether it is a causal relationship requiring basic laws of nature to bridge the gap, or a constitutive relationship where higher-level consciousness comes for free once the basic forms are in place—a question split-brain cases (where one mind fragments into two) may illuminate by reverse-engineering the converse of mental combination.
“the crucial next step is how we think about the relationship between particle consciousness... and consciousness at higher levels”
- 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.
“it's a framework, and it will take decades or centuries of interdisciplinary labor to fill in the details, just as Darwin's principle of natural selection is a basic framework”
Substance dualism lacks empirical support because causally impacting the brain would show physical anomalies.
- 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.
“if there were an immaterial entity impacting on the brain every second of waking life, I think that would really show up in our neuroscience”