71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

/ Philosophy, Thinking / 19 Comments

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surprising that we don't understand the mind and how it works. But do we know enough about our experience of consciousness to suggest that consciousness cannot arise from nothing more than the physical interactions of bits of matter? Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness, or at least some mental aspect, is pervasive in the world, in atoms and rocks as well as in living creatures. Philosopher Philip Goff is one of the foremost modern advocates of this idea. We have a friendly and productive conversation, notwithstanding my own view that the laws of physics don't need any augmenting to ultimately account for consciousness. If you're not sympathetic toward panpsychism, this episode will at least help you understand why someone might be.

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Philip Goff received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Reading. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. His new book, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, is being published on Nov. 5.

19 thoughts on “71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere”

  1. Paul Topping

    Although I am a cold, unfeeling materialist, I did enjoy this podcast. You show remarkable powers of restraint. And I will leave that there.

    One thing I did want to say though is that you hint that the consciousness issue will be resolved once neuroscience solves the problem. It seems doubtful to me that this will resolve the issue, assuming that the description of how consciousness works is in terms of neurons firing and such. There seems to be no level of description in the materialist universe that would really explain what it feels like to see red. Not to anyone, let alone someone like Phillip Goff. The self-referential nature of consciousness makes a satisfying description of it impossible. You hint at this here when you say that there are no words to convey what it is like to make a basketball free throw. Even with a neuroscience explanation of consciousness, we still won’t be able to do this.

  2. Mike Lensi

    Such a fun episode! So very fun. Prowess and fairness in equal amounts. I will add only, as someone sympathetic to Sean’s side, on Mary’s Room, that while it is proposed she has learnt every fact of color, this is untrue, as she was not provided in the room with the very personal facts of what it is like to be Mary seeing color. Subjectivity, it seems, is information indeed, but information hidden to the world at large.

    Just one more thing, against Goff’s panpsychism I would ask, then how do you explain that our brain operates with both conscious and non-conscious processing (c.f. Dehaene)? Ultimately you will need a physics-based mechanism, which is what materialists seek anyway. (Tononi’s “level of integration” needs no panpsychism grafted onto it, btw 🙂

  3. Danit Ben-Kiki

    It seems to me that panpsychism is just a new form of dualism that moves the dual nature of consciousness from the human level down to the elementary level of the universe. It still does not explain what consciousness IS.

  4. einniv

    I’m always curious how guys like him square his view with biological evolution. If there are two different aspects to the nature of things, it would be a gigantic coincidence if the physical arrangement of matter that leads to complex information processing systems, also leads to consciousness. Especially given the fact that those information processing systems arose over 3.5 billion years of “tinkering” and, at least at the least complex end of the scale, need nothing other than physical explanations.

    There is also the fact that sensory input is encoded in the brain as electrical and chemical flows in the brain. The thing we experience isn’t the world directly but those flows (thus optical illusions). It would again be pretty amazing if the “coding system” the physical aspect stumbled on to turn sensory input into brain patterns is exactly the same coding system the consciousness aspect knows how to “read”.

    I’ve always felt those coincidences make the panpsychism view about as plausible as creationism.

  5. James Wade

    Thanks for a very interesting discussion of panpsychism and materialism. One way to think about this is truly elemental. We know that we are carbon based entities incorporating other elements to form the organic molecules that constitute life. For simplicity, if we allow carbon to represent all of the physical elements that are involved, we can say that at some point in evolution carbon began to speak. Eventually, carbon became aware that it was carbon. No matter how complex the organization of the carbon in the brain became, unless the carbon had some spark of proto consciousness, it seems unlikely that human awareness could have emerged.

  6. ConsciousnessDebunksMaterialism

    The idea that conscious minds can spring into being if the atoms are arranged “just right”, is like saying demons can arise if the pentagram and candles are aligned “just right”.

    Sam Harris is right, it’s nothing more than the restatement of a miracle.

    It’s the superstitious voo doo and magic that’s being advocated here by the Materialist that’s an issue, and no rational person should ever believe that consciousness can come into being from crude material interactions.

    If you believe that, you will probably believe genies can be the result of rubbed lamps.

  7. Charlie

    The notion of using something that we dont fully understand like “consciousness” to plug holes in other concepts that we don’t fully understand is no different to the “god of the gaps” arguments.

  9. Tara

    Next up…Bernardo Kastrup…..please and thank you.
    I’m rather amazed that I can’t find any debates between him and Goff?
    As to Mary’s room, the information she is missing is the first person subjective experience of the color red.
    Which was Goff’s point, and it seemingly flew right over your head Sean.
    Ahhhh well, these things take time. At least Consciousness as fundamental has moved into the fight stage.

    Ignore
    Laugh
    Fight
    Win.

    Love and Light
    Tara

  11. Bruce S

    Keith Frankish gives a very clear explanation of Dennett’s illusionism in this podcast. He also gives a nice overview of the philosophical lay of the land for consciousness.

    http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-242-keith-frankish-on-why-consciousness-is-an-illusion.html

    There is a transcript if you prefer reading Or this academic paper:

    A rough gloss is that conscious experience is not what it seems to be based on naive introspection; illusionism details what it is instead. Frankish explains why he (and Chalmers!) think it is the best approach for the physicalist who does not want to add panpsychism to physics.

    If you prefer an academic paper
    https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf

  12. Nick Hawes

    Im afraid you are not really understanding P.Goff. Consciousness is a process a reaction to the very essence of life it self.It cannot be understood by defining it,or labelling it.. It is. It can only be experienced, never quantified.

  13. Michael

    …Oooph. I was hoping to get some insight that would elevate my perception of panpsychism from “summarily dismissable” to “at least plausible,” but gentle as this was, Prof. Goff’s defense seemed to debunk itself with little real prompting. He went right up to the door of ontic structuralism (for example), named it, and seems to by shying away on the basis that a dry description of reality doesn’t feel right. Generously, I might say that “it isn’t obvious to me that panpsychism is incoherent,” but more honestly, I think I’d have to admit that it is clearly taken up either as a linguistic trick to try and slide a layer of language onto a dryer framework (whether materialist or structuralist or something else), or a somewhat religious adherence to a claim which could in principle have no empirical or theoretical meaning (depending on who is doing it and why.) Either it is completely compatible with some fundamentally simpler naturalist theory, and thus by definition adds nothing but assumptions and language to that theory, or it is incompatible, and if incompatible, it either is falsifiable with some physical data, or it is in fact correct and supported by data, and is performing the predictive function of describing “what physical objects do” instead of some *independent* claim about what they “are.” Either way, a minimum-assumptions predictive theory of reality will be comprised exclusively of statements about “what things do,” and people will have to come to terms with that being the best answer to “what things are” that could in principle exist.

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  16. PanLamda

    Problem is “panpsychism” doesn’t-in itself-clarify what the relation between mind and matter is, it just states that this relation-whatever that is-is everywhere. Thats why you can have physicalist panpsychism, dualistic panpsychism (both substance and property dualism), neutral-monistic panpsychism and idealistic panpsychism.

    Actually Goff’s view of “consciousness as intrinsic nature” is a form of idealist view, objective idealism more specifically in which the world is mental and this mentality follows some rules (in contrast to subjective idealism such as Berkeley’s in which the world is in my mind-or God’s mind when i don’t look). Leibniz had a similar micro-idealist view, in which the true intrinsic nature of fundamental units of reality are first-person viewpoints (called “monads”) so what we call particles are trully “monads”.

    Kastrup is the one who has recently done a very sophisticated defence of such a view. In this, the whole universe is a mind and what physical science describes is the appearance of the universe’s structured thoughts (which follow some rules which we call “physical laws”). So our minds-e.g. animals-are sub-partitions of the whole mind, we are all parts of it. The 4d reality is simply the appearance of the universe’s structured ideas from our vantage point.

    Furthermore, in this view, particles don’t have minds, they are parts of the grand mind’s ideas, they can be described as “mental buidling blocks”. It is also similar to a type of simulation hypothesis in which the universe can also be thought as a self-organizing program (but Kastrup doesn’t like the sim hypothesis if one must stipulate an actual concrete hardware computer of some “higher” universe and i agree with him, the program with its own first-person view is all there is). I would like to see an interview with him. I myself am undecided between hardcore physicalism (with illusionism for consciousness), neutral monism and this form of objective idealism, some monistic view of sorts.

  17. Pete

    Love these discussions. I tend to view panpsychism as a form of dualism (and that’s not a bad thing). RE: Descartes comment, I would say that we FEEL our subjective consciousness (rather than “know”) with greater certainty than anything else.

    The way Goff defines it seems to be a version of a consciousness-first Monism.

  18. Bill McKim

    Thanks for this, Sean. It was interesting to hear about panpsychism, I always thought if it as sort of a hippie cult from the 60s and did not realize that it had been taken quite so seriously by academia.

    This version, at least as it is represented by Goff, has not changed my original estimation. It rather reminds me of creationism with its argument that such a complex and wonderful thing as consciousness, could not possibly have evolved on its own, but must have been “created” by some supernatural force – that somehow modern science, is constrained to explain quantities and cannot handle qualities. Where did that come from?

    What is it like to be Mary experiencing red? That, must forever be a mystery. That is like asking “what is it like to be a bat.” It cannot be answered. Nor should we bother trying. Consciousness by definition is a brain (mind if you like) observing itself observing something else. When you have a microphone listening to itself hearing a noise, strange things happen -like feedback. It should not be too surprising that a brain observing itself looking at something red might experience something more than information about the wavelength of the light reaching the eye. Something something we might call qualia. There, we have just solved the “hard” problem of consciousness. Nothing the laws of physics can not handle.

    Oh yes, we might be able to take panpsychism seriously when it comes up with a falsifiable hypothesis or two.

  19. Ryan

    The more I listen to and read Sean Carroll, I seem to pick up on an emerging lesson to be learned. If one disagrees with Sean Carroll on literally any subject, he or she should probably just keep it to themself. Especially anything science related. This guy is an intellectual giant and he can easily destroy any opposing logic so effortlessly. And he does it with humility and tact like a respectful human being. I am almost convinced that this guy actually knows all the answers to the Universe but only reveals them in small increments. In this podcast, I get the sense that in areas of disagreement, even Philip is a little uncomfortable and tries to first direct the conversation into a joking disagreement mood with laughter instead of actually challenging Sean’s difference of opinion. Sean would definitely be an interesting person to have an non-broadcasted, one-on-one free conversation with to hear his ideas on a lot of topics.

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