Philip Goff (1) (1978–)

I was surprised to see the top few reviews on here quite critical of this book. I’m not really knowledgeable enough to evaluate its place in the philosophical discourse on consciousness, but I think Goff has done a great job presenting an idea that I’d literally never heard of before encountering this book. In that regard, I guess I’m the ideal audience - Goff references an “academic” book he’s written on many of the topics his dips into he, indicating to me that Galileo’s Error is meant for a layman audience.

If you are coming to this book the same way I did - with curiosity about panpsychism, a school of thought that sounds so outlandish at first consideration - I think you will be rewarded. Goff does a great job laying out compelling arguments of why we should consider other options when it comes to tackling the problem of consciousness. This is no polemic or apologia - Goff is aware of the counterintuitive nature of what he is describing here, and does a good job of keeping his explanation of panpsychism down to earth. That being said, there are several passages in this book that I had to read more than once to truly wrap my head around - maybe they won’t be a problem for all the quantumheads out there, but a lot of the bizarre characteristics of quantum entanglement and the various theories about conscious are so alien to the mainstream way of thinking that I had a hard time comprehending. That’s not to say that Goff writes in an obscure way - actually I think he does a good job describing some of these brain busting phenomena and theories.

There is a passage near the end of the book where Goff says panpsychism has the power to “re-enchant the world.” Part of me really wants the view of reality Goff describes in this book to be real, simply because it brings a sense of wonder to a world that seems to be more and more quantized and quantified with every passing hour. To expand our conception of consciousness would almost certainly bring along with it a more compassionate and careful outlook on our planet, and make the grand ideals of humanity a little bit more exigent. The negative reviewer of this book might say that wanting something to be true isn’t good enough in the academic climes that this book was spawned from, and it Goff’s favor he definitely covered all his bases by engaging with many salient critiques of panpsychism. But for a simple layman like myself, with absolutely no skin in the game, I appreciate this book for its clear depiction of a school of thought that deserves consideration, and contrary to so much of the feeling in the world now, presents us with a workable, and dare I say optimistic vision of reality.… (mehr)

On (Cartesian) dualism: philosopher Goff decisively and rather handily rejects, as anyone should, this approach to explaining consciousness (but he cuts some slack for naturalistic dualists like David Chalmers). On (eliminative) materialism: he seems to think that he refutes it as logically and indubitably as Galileo refuted Aristotelian falling motion, but I just don't see that he does (or that the illusionist ideas of people like Daniel Dennett are disproved). On (nondualistic) panpsychism: this approach, advanced by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington in the 1920s, is the one he plunks for. It comes in both a reductionist variety and an emergentist variety, the latter seeming to be compatible with the quantitative Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. Meaty and eye-opening stuff. I think Goff's call for a "post-Galilean" scientific paradigm that doesn't exclude subjective qualities may be intriguingly consonant with positions taken by some of the physicists advocating psi-epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics.… (mehr)