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

by Philip Goff

From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness—panpsychism.

Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra," beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some even suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved. Decades have been spent trying to explain consciousness from within our current scientific paradigm, but little progress has been made.

Now, Philip Goff offers an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward. Rooted in an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and based on the early twentieth-century work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell, Goff makes the case for panpsychism, a theory which posits that consciousness is not confined to biological entities but is a fundamental feature of all physical matter—from subatomic particles to the human brain. In Galileo's Error, he has provided the first step on a new path to the final theory of human consciousness.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Neuroscience, Audiobook, Physics

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

University of Liverpool, UK

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

An Aspiring Scientific Revolutionary

Philip Goff is a man on a mission. He wants to assure us that this mysterious human characteristic we call consciousness will eventually be made much less mysterious. And he wants us to know that the way it will be made less mysterious is by a scientific revolution that he is leading. Apparently he thinks of himself as the Darwin of consciousness, informing the rest of us of a reality we have failed to grasp.

Goff’s pitch is to resurrect the ‘cogito ergo sum’ of Descartes. According to Goff, “consciousness is the only thing we know for certain is real.” He repeatedly emphasises this point with the fervour of an evangelical preacher.* He wants us to see inside his head, his own consciousness, to understand that “The only thing I have direct access to are my own experiences. Everything else is known indirectly, believed on the basis of what I experience. All knowledge of reality is mediated through consciousness.”

Although Goff isn’t sure what consciousness is (how could he be since no one has investigated it in the way he desires), he knows that “One thing that science could never show is that consciousness does not exist.” Indeed, nor is science (another term he neglects to define) likely to show that God does not exist along with purple swans, aliens in Area 51, or 9/11 as a CIA conspiracy. But this is typical of the facile assurance with which Goff intends to lead his revolution.

Here’s the thing: when Goff claims that everything is mediated through consciousness, he is presuming his case in order to make it. This is the same rhetorical tactic used by generations of Christian theologians to ‘prove’ the existence of God. The logic is identical: there must be something which allows a situation to prevail. Theologians call that something ‘God’. Goff calls that something ‘consciousness.’ Both ‘God’ and ‘consciousness’ are place fillers. They have no content but are presented as explanatory variables. Any other word would do equally well. This is the key to recognising the absurdity of Goff’s argument.

The idea of consciousness as personal experience, although plausible, is untenable. Birds and other animals (slugs, bacteria, and, who knows, perhaps even viruses) have experiences. It would be solipsistic as well as cruel to deny this. We can’t see into their heads either. But we would not call these animals conscious. Nor can we be sure that the tags we apply to human experiences are the same for everyone. Colour-blindness is an obvious example. But virtually all mental impairments are considered aberrant experiences that don’t fit neatly into standard vocabulary, perhaps lack a vocabulary entirely.

So it cannot be mere personal experience which is the determinant of consciousness. Rather, It is our ability to reflect on experience which is closer to what we call that phenomenon. And what is missed entirely by Goff is that this reflective ability is only exercised in and through language. Language is also one of those things that science cannot disprove without disproving itself. In fact language is not distinguishable from consciousness. Consciousness must have language in order to exist at all.

I think it’s a good bet that language and consciousness may be the same thing. There has been a great deal more progress in correlating perceptions with language that there has been with electrical patterns in the brain. If so then the Cartesian Cogito misplaces the locus of consciousness in the individual - very much in line with the Christian idea of individual salvation from which it is likely derived. Much more likely that consciousness is actually a social construction with the centre in every human being and its circumference unlimited, just like language.

So I have no objection to Goff’s suggestion that “the scientific revolution itself was premised on putting consciousness outside of the domain of scientific inquiry. If we ever want to solve the problem of consciousness, we will need to find a way of putting it back.” Except that such ‘putting back’ has been underway for some time. Goff seems to be unaware of the 20th century philosophical ‘turn toward language’ which does just that. It is clear that we are all trapped in language, and that in our metaphysical frustration we use terms like ‘consciousness’ as if they were outside the control of language. Some of us have learned not to do that.

Goff claims that “Galileo transformed the sensory qualities from features of things in the world—such as lemons—into forms of consciousness in the souls of human beings… [and] thought that physical science could not explain the sensory qualities,” But it was Goff’s beloved Descartes not Galileo who formulated such a dualistic world. The idea that Goff presents as the kickstarter for his revolution, pansychism, which suggests that all matter is incipiently conscious, is hardly a new one (it is yet another 16th century idea which among others the American CS Peirce had used 150 years ago). Goff’s contention that it is a superior philosophical position is simply fatuous.

Perhaps Goff realises that he, as well as the rest of us, are prisoners of consciousness within the same penitentiary of language. If so, he can’t bear to acknowledge it, perhaps for the sake of the revolution. Like most revolutionaries, he seems more than a bit mad.

*It is remarkable in this regard that although Goff equates consciousness with thinking through his use of the Cogito, and fails to explain what he means by either term, he never mentions the philosopher most concerned with thinking as an object of thought rather than a presumption, Martin Heidegger. To classify Goff as a philosophical reactionary would be too much of a compliment to his point of view. He is merely ignorant, and, like most evangelical preachers, entirely unashamed of his ignorance.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable popular science book on the nature of consciousness. The author is a professional philosopher and a big supporter of panpsychism. Obscured by materialism for the last 100 years, this view is currently becoming more and more fashionable. And as the author puts it, now represents a considerable minority.

The book is very accessible, starts from zero knowledge of the problem and leads the reader through 3 main views on the nature of consciousness. The author is good storyteller and competent in explaining the philosophy behind and the main pro and con arguments for each of the main views. All famous buzz words like qualia and "hard problem of consciousness" are explained. The main thought
and lab experiments also are talked through (how a bat feels like; zombies, black and white Mary, Chinese room etc.). Integrated Information Theory (ITT) is touched upon as well.

Three main views are:

-dualism - the brain is material and follows the law of physics; the mind is not material and they communicate somehow;

-materialism - brain material, consciousness is an illusion the brain tricks us all into; or it is there in the brain physical properties we just need to find it.

- panpsychism - the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. And, this kinds of builds up to the level of integrated human brain.

The author is trying to show that panpsychism is at least as good as the other two and better from his perspective. He does it in an entertaining, but informative manner. The last chapter is more or less like a manifesto and sometimes get a tad more speculative that the rest of the book. But it did not disturb me.

I would really recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the problem of consciousness and wants to understand what is fuzz about. But one has to be open-minded:-) The author has also published a proper academic book on the subject for the advanced readership. He maintains a blog as well.

[Glenn Rowe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts off well with a good description of past and present theories of consciousness, but once panpsychism is introduced, things start to go downhill. Materialism is criticized because it cannot explain the qualitative aspects of consciousness, and dualism because there is no neurological evidence of a link between the brain and a disembodied mind. Fair enough. But what hard evidence is there that everything in the universe is conscious? Indeed, how could we ever determine this? If we're not allowed to use quantitative science to investigate this (the use of such quantitative methods is the 'Galileo's error' of the title), then how can we investigate it? Unless I missed something, this question is never answered in the book. If we can't demonstrate objectively that this low-level consciousness exists, then panpsychism relies on faith, and becomes just another religion.

[Ryan Boissonneault · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consciousness is one of the deepest and most perplexing unresolved mysteries of the universe and it would take a fool to believe that we already have a conclusive explanation or that we even know what an explanation would look like. If we’re honest, we can’t even be sure the problem is soluble at all, or whether it is best addressed through better neuroscience or through a conceptual reimagining of the universe.

So the place I start when rating books like this is in regard to whether or not the author seems to understand the inherent complexity of the topic. Consciousness is simply not the place for dogmatism, and a little humility goes a long way. Fortunately, philosopher Philip Goff is anything but dogmatic, and presents his ideas carefully and thoroughly without any pretentiousness. As you might expect, someone who has been studying the topic for 20 years knows enough about it to not be overconfident in his or her beliefs.

Unlike other authors with last names beginning with Harris, Goff gives a fair evaluation and critique to the competing positions and philosophers who would tend to disagree with him. The intellectual history of and literature on consciousness is vast and complex and frankly most books on the topic don’t do it justice. Make no mistake, this is a book for a popular audience and only so much can be covered in a couple hundred pages, but Goff does a commendable job of presenting the major arguments and counterarguments for each approach to the understanding of consciousness.

Goff’s hypothesis is compelling; first, he notes how physical science has been unsuccessful in its attempt to explain consciousness because Galileo, the father of physical science, placed consciousness (and its associated qualitative characteristics based on experiences and feelings) beyond the reach of physical science. As Galileo wrote in 1632:

“Philosophy [natural philosophy or science] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”

Galileo effectively removed subjective experience and sensory qualities (essentially, consciousness) from the study of science. The universe was to be understood quantitatively, with qualitative aspects like senses and emotions and feeling relegated to human curiosities that have no impact on our true understanding of the cosmos. It is no surprise then that more and better neuroscience is getting us nowhere closer to an understanding of qualitative experience (of which consciousness consists) when it is founded on a mathematical basis that only considers quantity, magnitude, and cause-and-effect relationships.

As Goff points out, nobody wants to be a dualist unless they really have to—because it introduces added complexity and brings up the further problem of how an immaterial mind can possibly interact with the physical brain. But a simple aversion to dualism does not automatically make materialism the default correct answer.

If we have trouble understanding the interaction between an immaterial mind and a physical brain, we have even greater difficulty imagining how an arrangement of neurons can experience the sensation of being in pain. If neuroscience has not solved the problem yet, it seems implausible that more of the same will get us anywhere closer, as Goff maintains.

At the heart of materialism lies a deep contradiction. Materialism cannot account for subjective experience, because, as we saw, physical science removed subjective experience from its realm of investigation. The only recourse is for the materialist to deny that subjective experience exists at all.

In response to the idea that subjective experience is an illusion, philosopher Galen Strawson calls this “the silliest claim ever made.” Strawson further points out that the trouble with asserting that consciousness is an illusion “is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an instance of the thing said to be an illusion.” Materialists want to make the claim that my subjective experience is an illusion, yet that illusion must itself be subjectively experienced.

So what’s the solution? We don’t want to be dualists, but the contradictions of materialism seem to force us into that position. But belief in an immaterial mind seems little better than believing in magic, and offers no explanation for the mind’s interaction with the brain. Is there a third way?

It turns out there is, and it was originally championed, to my surprise, by Betrand Russell in his book The Analysis of Matter. The philosophy goes by the name of panpsychism, and asserts that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, present in varying degrees based on the complexity of the life form. This is an interesting position as it seems to avoid the problems of dualism by locating consciousness within the brain, while also avoiding the problem of materialism by not denying the existence of subjective experience.

Goff provides one of the best and clearest accounts of the panpsychist position I’ve seen, and his examples of promising lines of research are fascinating and compelling. However, it’s hard to get too excited yet...

Here’s my main problem with panpsychism: I’m having difficulty seeing how it is not merely a different form of dualism in disguise.

If consciousness is inherent in matter, then this means that, in addition to whatever physical properties it may have, it also has immaterial properties, for that is what consciousness is. Unless Goff is maintaining that the physical world is an illusion, and that only consciousness exists—which I don’t think he is—then there is still a DUAL aspect to reality. Only now, dualism is not confined exclusively to brains—it’s present everywhere!

This is a kind of out-of-control dualism with all the same problems. Whether you say that an immaterial mind interacts WITH matter or an immaterial consciousness is inherent IN matter doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

You still can’t account for how consciousness interacts with the physical world. Are conscious experiences happening in parallel with physical processes or can one cause changes in the other? The panpsychist has no better answer than the dualist, to my mind.

This is why I’m skeptical that the problem can ever be resolved. It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s that the answer seems to lie in the solution to a paradox that our minds are not wired to handle. Further, if we can never experience different degrees of consciousness, then how can we verify or falsify whether or not they exist? And if we can’t, then in what sense can panpsychism count as a solution?

In any case, I won’t fault the author for failing to conclusively solve the most perplexing philosophical issue in the history of the subject—or for pursuing new lines of inquiry. While I’m not yet convinced that we can solve the problem of consciousness, I’m glad to see we’re not giving up on the attempt. Who knows where it will one day lead.

[Jay Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

A missed opportunity to present a convincing case for panpsychism. Having read Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, Stuart Kauffman and several other authors who argue for various forms of panpsychism, I was sympathetic to the idea and hopeful to learn more about the unresolved issues arising from this worldview, particularly that of microconsciousnesses and the construction of more complex consciousnesses from less complex. Are molecules conscious, for example? Metals? All organisms? Kidneys and spleens? The most obvious difficulty, pointed out by other reviewers, is that we have no way of knowing, from the "outside," whether objects have any internal life at all, hence the philosophical zombie or p-zombie concept and the problem of other minds. Consequently, the solution that Goff provides (perhaps science will generate the evidence) manages only to put the problem on the long finger.

Most remarkably, however, this was a book on consciousness that made no mention whatsoever of the continental phenomenologists who, to my mind, have largely resolved many of the issues relating to free will and consciousness decades ago, individuals whom analytic philosophers and materialists studiously avoid or pretend not to understand when presenting their variations on materialism. There is no mention here of Husserl's Ideas, of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, or of Sartre's early works The Imagination and The Imaginary, all of which are salient, let alone Sartre's Being and Nothingness, a handy introduction to the idea of free will if one was ever needed. Indeed, the results of the renowned Libet experiment that is cited here as an argument against free will were anticipated by a good three decades by Sartre in his distinction between thetic and non-thetic (or reflective and pre-reflective) consciousness. The results found by Libet arise from a necessary structure of consciousness, at least, as Sartre understands and describes it, and therefore should have been anticipated in the experiment and presented as evidence for free will rather than determinism: but we can't expect materialists to understand that, can we?

Although I am not a dualist, I was unconvinced by Goff's argument against it that the brain displays no extraordinary evidence of intervention by an immaterial mind. I would argue to the contrary that the brain exhibits such behaviour all the time. Whenever I imagine running, for example, the same neurons that are involved in the actual activity of running spring to life because my imagining involves, to a small extent, sensing what it would be like to run, the bodily feeling of running. I am not preparing to run, I am simply imagining the sensation in my mind, yet this produces activity in my brain. Moreover, the act of imagination is an act of free will, it is a negation of the existing state of affairs, it projects a possibility of a state of affairs that does not exist. An object cannot do that. As Sartre says, an object is "full positivity," it simply "is what it is," with no sense of temporality, acted upon by external forces and with no interior qualitative "life." Consciousness, by contrast, is a qualitative experience that always posits what is not, transcends the present toward the future, projects itself and, from time to time, as in the Libet experiment, is able to make itself the object of its own focus; self-consciousness is a precondition of consciousness since consciousness is always "to oneself" if not always "of oneself." The fact that qualitative, transcendent ideas (in the sense of either looking toward the future or going "beyond" the present) can produce an effect in the brain in this way suggests that this particular argument against dualism is not entirely convincing.

I appreciate that Goff is writing a popular science book here, aimed at a non-academic readership, but he does panpsychism an injustice if he has deliberately omitted the phenomenologists to avoid overcomplicating the subject. That the debate as he presents it is focused wholly on the analytic approach to the problem (that is, excluding the continental philosophers) is, ironically, indicative of a certain lack of imagination, I suggest, in the academic circles trying to confront the "hard problem" of consciousness. I apologize to Goff if his "academic book" Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (frequently mentioned in the footnotes) covers Husserl, Sartre, et al., but from the blurb here on Goodreads, the focus appears to be on Bertrand Russell, as is the case in this book. Panpsychism still awaits its Einstein.

[axegrinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

One would think that we are quite far off from getting to know consciousness, that we are in the dark. Nothing is further from the truth given the progress of neuroscience. Sure, we haven't cracked the code yet but there are promising approaches to tackle a unifying theory.

One of these approaches is panpsychism. Crazy as it sounds, there is strong neuroscientific backing within the IIT community. IIT stands for Integrated Information Theory and there, scientists predict how information integration affects the manifestation of conscious brain states. Turns out that the more integrated part of the brain, the more conscious capabilities does it display. That is indeed promising and exciting, as some IIT theorists conclude that if IIT is necessarily true, then panpsychism is true.

All this entails that consciousness might be the fundamental characteristic of matter, and the more integrated information structures like that of humans, animals (or plants) are, the greater their capacity for conscious thought. Recent, mindblowing research on plant life and communication confirms that such may the case.

In such a system, there are either phenomenal or proto-phenomenal qualities that combine to greater conscious experience. Such a system, if true, is the solution for the everlasting quarrel between materialists and dualists; it is their natural synthesis and offers a fully unified theory.

Philip Goff does a great job at explaining the roots of the current ill-conditioned state of materialistic science, and how the alternative of panpsychism arose among physicists in the XX century. The very discovery of quantum mechanics and the wave function collapsing due to conscious human observation changed everything. Von Neumann was of an opinion that it is a clear manifestation of a missing piece - consciousness. Another great astronomer-physicist Arthur Eddington who uncovered and popularised Einstein's theory of relativity wrote a book The Nature Of The Physical World that was the first serious attempt to describe consciousness as an intrinsic feature of matter. Together with Bertrand Russell, they both wrote interesting things on the possibility of panpsychism.

Goff also concluded that if panpsychism turns true it might have colossal implications for environment and ecology; especially the more serious strain of ecology - deep ecology. All of this is relevant due to the present-day outcome of the Enlightenment project that along with modernism created the image of Anthropocene which in turn spawned consumerism, destroying the ecosystem of the planet.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book, you will never look at grass the same again after reading it.

[Shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book and engaging with the arguments in it, and it was a good, and not overly partisan introduction to issues relating to consciousness. However, I disagreed with almost all aspects of the central argument of the book.

The author tries hard to distinguish himself from New Age philosophies, but by the second-last and most of all last chapter, it becomes clear that underneath the philosophical curtain lies what is, at its core, New Age philosophy. I felt that there was a bit of confusion between consciousness and free will early on, and real confusion about the observer effect in quantum mechanics, which is so often something relied upon in these sorts of arguments.

Ultimately, I began the book not knowing what I thought about consciousness but I’ve ended it thinking that the main arguments the author dismisses (dualism and materialism) are more plausible than his own argument.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hats off to any book that tries to bring very complex philosophical arguments down to non-philosophy graduates, and this book does a fairly good job of outlining dualism, materialism, and panpsychism. I can understand why some would have liked to have seen more of the deeper discussion and argument of those positions, but that wasn’t the purpose of the book. It more or less does the job it set out to do, but I would have liked it more if it had finished the chapters with a slightly more open stance

[Zsombor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Superficial, uninformed, rambling, all-around terrible.

[Brad · Rating 1 out of 5]

A tremendously disappointing and unsatisfying book. The author seems to think that he has made some sort of philosophical breakthrough but somehow is not able to recognize, much less reconcile, the errors and incomplete nature of his theorizing.
The heart of the book, I suppose, consists of chapters 2, 3 and 4 in which the author gives his take on what he considers the three major schools of thought regarding the nature of consciousness: 1. Dualism, in which the physical brain somehow works with the immaterial mind to produce consciousness; 2. Materialism, in which the physical world (the brain) is all there is and somehow "creates" or at least "hosts" consciousness; and 3. Panpsychism, which also posits that the physical world is all there is but is different from Materialism because...well, the author is just not really up to the task of adequately explaining what he considers to be the difference between this school of thought and Materialism. And, to my mind this failure really damages his case.
Nonetheless, he devotes considerable time to trying to disprove Materialism by basically saying that objective matter cannot explain subjective experience - and somehow he knows that IT WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO. How he knows this, he doesn't say. But for example, in discussing color experience, the author more than once dismisses any possibility that future discoveries will increase our understanding. HOW DOES HE KNOW THIS? By definition, the author cannot know what future discoveries will add to and perhaps even explain consciousness, because if he already knew what they were, they WOULDN'T BE DISCOVERIES. There is definitely an unsavory arrogance in the author's tone that seems to say, "Millennia of philosophical pondering and scientific/neurological discoveries have not solved the (admittedly) hard problem of consciousness, but they have gotten close enough for me to know what solutions are incorrect; but somehow I know the answer, so I'll take it from here."
So when he turns his attention to Panpsychism, he seems to be saying "With Materialism, consciousness=matter, and that doesn't work. But with Panpsychism, matter=consciousness, and somehow that DOES work. Basically, the problems he claims invalidate Materialism are the same ones that bedevil Panpsychism, but he doesn't bother addressing why THAT theory is invalidated when the latter is not.
I have no problem with the concept that on some level, all matter is conscious and that consciousness is in many ways a fundamental - perhaps THE fundamental - principle or force in the universe, but the author falls flat on his face when he tries to make the case that Materialism does not allow for this, while Panpsychism does. And his arrogance in trying to make this case and his epic failure at doing so make large sections of his book just plain unpleasant to read.
The last chapter of this book purports to address the "meaning of life." After what I had read in the previous 180 or so pages, I approached this section with more than a little trepidation. After reading it, I'm sorry, but John Lennon succinctly captured the essence over fifty years ago in "Instant Karma" when he sang:
"Why on earth are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear.
Why on earth are you there? When you're everywhere, come and get your share."
Read this book if you want to be subjected to 220+ pages of someone so pleased with how clever they are, otherwise I would surely skip it.

[Peter Gelfan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perennial paradox underlying this book: consciousness is a vividly real subjective experience, yet science cannot explain it. Does that mean consciousness is an illusion produced by brain mechanics, or that science’s self-imposed parameters render it incapable of exploring some of the world’s realities?

Goff explores the history, science, philosophy, and arguments of both answers, which often fall into one of two camps. Materialists say that everything that exists boils down to physics, while dualists postulate a spiritual, non-physical reality coexisting with the physical. More recently, a third hypothesis avoids both materialism and dualism. Panpsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental quality of all matter. Goff allies himself with panpsychism, in part because it avoids many of the internal inconsistences and paradoxes of the first two.

The author does a good job of explaining the history, current status, and pros and cons of each camp. It’s not his fault, but many of the arguments on all sides seem riddled with hair-splitting, semantics, and bizarre “proofs” that seem too far up the garden path to be a good proof of anything. The proof that materialism is wrong is so circuitous that it suggests logical sleight of hand. Yet he puts materialism on the defensive by demonstrating that while physics has gotten very good at predicting what physical objects and systems will do, when, and to what degree, it can’t explain the intrinsic nature of those objects and systems and so is in a somewhat similar pickle to those who have a hard time coming up with a useful definition of consciousness. As Goff acknowledges, his chains of logic are coherent but not waterproof; the most parsimonious explanation isn’t necessarily the correct one. But in following the arguments, you get a good immersion in the various ideas.

One concept seemed to be missing from Goff’s survey: a branch of panpsychism that holds that consciousness isn’t inherent in all matter but only in living matter (as explained in Stuart A. Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics), which goes a long way in explaining why living matter behaves so differently than inanimate matter. It might also explain why the most complex computer in the world may never be at all conscious.

Galileo’s Error seems to have its own logical error right from the beginning in stating that the experience of consciousness with a sense of self proves the existence of the self as a conscious being. The experience may prove that there is consciousness and a sense of self, but the discrete conscious being could easily be an illusion. However, I’m not sure this has much impact on what Goff explains in the rest of the book.

This book’s branching tree of ideas about consciousness also makes a mostly implicit point that may be disturbing for anyone searching for any kind of philosophical certainty. It’s impossible to prove anything true, and the best we can hope for is to shed ourselves of ideas—no matter how much we love them, no matter what comfort they bring us—that can be proven false.

[Linards Jansons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Panpsychism has long made sense to me, even before I knew it was a thing. I remember watching a TV program where some grizzled looking geezer made what I thought was an utterly sound argument: We humans are made of physical matter. We physical humans are conscious. Therefore physical matter must at some level be conscious (or at least have the capacity for consciousness). This is the view Phillip Goff takes, whose fundamental claim is that “consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.”

Goff admits that when he was starting out, panpsychism was still a fringe position. Several decades on, however, panpsychism no longer has to hide in the shadows of intellectual inquiry and has even begun exchanging philosophical fisticuffs with the other big boys of consciousness theory, namely good old dualism (the people’s favourite), and no nonsense materialism (the scientific mainstay). It appears that a conscious universe is back in town.

On to Galileo’s error, then, which really wasn’t so much an error as an unforeseen consequence. What Galileo did (apart from pissing off the Catholic church) was to remove mind and consciousness (which deals with qualities) out of scientific inquiry (which deals only with mathematically measurable quantities). The success of science has in large degree come about precisely because it has bracketed out all that unwieldy emotional and subjective and personal stuff that we call consciousness (or mind or experience or thought or soul).

This is all well and good, except for one small problem: our conscious experience is possibly the thing that matters to us more than anything else. It’s our identity, our sense of being alive, and the only way we even know there is an objective world out there. So the more science advances without taking this fundamental fact into account, the more science becomes, well, an inexact (or incomplete) science. As Goff writes “We know that consciousness is real and so we have to account for it somehow. If a general theory of reality has no place for consciousness, then that theory cannot be true”. Or as Thomas Nagel has written: “The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world….But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind.”

Goff’s book presents an attempt to map out what needs to take place in order to put mind and consciousness back into our picture of the natural world. He does this largely by exposing the shortcoming of the 2 main rival views (dualism and materialism), before sketching out what a panpsychist view of reality might include.

Dualism, to begin with, is the view that our physical brains and immaterial minds/souls are two distinct and independently existing things. The belief that there is a soul that survives physical death is the classic religious form of dualism. But there is also a naturalistic (i.e., non-religious) dualism which claims that minds are entirely natural but non-physical phenomena, and hence beyond the scope of the physical sciences (if this sounds weird, it demonstrates the degree to which we completely associate the ‘natural’ with the ‘physical’). But dualism, writes Goff, has to explain why empirical brain studies show no trace of a non-physical mind (or soul) acting independently of our brains and bodies. If anything, the opposite appears to be the case: consciousness appears entirely tethered to physical brain activity.

So much so, in fact, that materialism, the other major view, claims that consciousness is entirely reducible to brain chemistry, with no wafty-floaty remainder. Your thoughts, feelings, and most profoundly personal experiences are your brain. But this, argues Goff at length, results in circular incoherence. The materialist either has to say that there are no such things as subjective and perspectival qualities (which most normal people are not prepared to do), or they have to admit that that reality cannot be exhaustively described in physical and objective terms (which is precisely what much science tries to do). What this all amounts to is that you cannot pour qualitative wine into quantitative wine skins. No matter how much you sweep consciousness under the carpet of the physical sciences, there will always be a lump in the rug.

How then does panpsychism seek to resolve these shortcomings? For a start, panpsychism does not claim that literally everything is aware and conscious. Nor does it mean that human-like consciousness pervades other parts of nature. Clouds do not get grumpy and cornflakes are not sensitive (although Goff does wonder whether plants feel pain). Goff concedes that even if particles and electrons have some form of extremely simple consciousness, this could not be proven or falsified. However, he writes, “the main attraction of panpsychism is not its ability to account for the data of observation, but its ability to account for the reality of consciousness. We know that consciousness is real and so we have to account for it somehow”. In other words, we have to realize that consciousness is one of the realest things in reality, but a part of reality that the physical sciences are ill equipped to study.

Consciousness therefore presents an undeniable ‘body’ of data about the real world, data which is as important as the stuff of physics, chemistry and biology. “Subjective consciousness” writes Goff “is a basic datum in its own right, equal in status to the datum of observation and experiment”. By identifying subjective consciousness as “basic”, Goff is making the point that it cannot be explained in terms of anything outside of it. It can’t be explained in terms of entities simpler than itself, in the way molecules can be explained in terms of atoms, for example. Subjective experience is a what we might call a 'basic unit'. And that's OK, writes Goff, since “everyone takes some facts as basic and unexplained. Some people take the laws of physics as an unexplained starting point; others the existence of God; others the laws of logic and mathematics. I take the reality of consciousness as a fundamental starting point”.

Goff does not try to amass evidence to prove panpsychism (and I'm not sure there is much). Rather, as a work of popular philosophy, he wants to show that panpsychism necessitates the need for a new way of doing science, one that incorporates consciousness at every level.

There are a lot of thought experiments in the book, most of which are classics in the field (e.g., Mary in her black and white room, philosophical zombies, and Searle’s Chinese room). And if we think that cogitating in one’s armchair is no substitute for real work of science, Goff reminds us that many advances in science were only made possible by this kind of philosophical imagination.

There are all kind of interesting digressions throughout. As is the current trend, consideration is given to quantum mechanics and the very, very tiny space this realm might, possibly, perhaps provide for some kind of proto-consciousness. Integrated Information Theory and AI are obviously part of the discussion. Most interesting was the historical detour touching on the collaboration between Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington, and Goff’s wish to revive Russellian monism as an early form of panpsychism.

Goff concludes with an exploration of the ethical and existential ramifications of panpsychism, in particular our relation with natural world which, as one might guess, is far more alive than we ordinarily suppose. Having listened to Goff interviewed, he certainly tries to live by his panpsychist principles, especially in terms of ethical dietary decisions. He also applies panpsychism to the age-old question of free will, before rounding up with some speculations about spirituality, mysticism and the re-enchantment of the world.

I found Goff’s book to be a great introduction to the whole field of consciousness studies for a general audience (like myself) and especially to what David Chalmers has famously described as 'the hard problem' of consciousness. Despite this, I feel unchanged about the validity of panpsychism in a general sense, but less sure about the specifics. I certainly wouldn't say I'm now more against materialism or dualism, and I’m certainly no closer to understanding what an answer to the hard problem might even look like. Perhaps the question of why there is consciousness is no more answerable than why there is anything in the first place. And as to the hope that panpsychism can transform our relationship with the world and others, that depends, I think, on whether we are already inclined to do so. If such is the case, then the ideas in this book might offer some rational and perhaps even profound support to those inclinations.

By the way, no matter what your view is on consciousness, the important thing is to learn to use it well and enjoy it while it lasts.

[Ramalakshmi shanmugavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consciousness:Is this based on my Experience?or some invisible force gives pressure to my brain to take action?or Is this just mere observer for my rational actions/behaviors?
How Science going to help us for our philosophical quest or vice versa,how can we experience something when we knew only the meaning of it?
What actually title of this book supposed to do with these questions?
Father of Modern Science Galileo define universe in mathematical perspective as size,shape,location,motion(Concrete nouns) and rest of the qualitative terms(Abstract nouns)remains subjective and science never going to answer for these.because its nothing but an illusion.
Then how are we so conscious to perceive these?Integrated informational theory -Neuro science-predicts our behavior due to chemical reactions in brain,in future they may get answers to many insoluble questions of the present.but actually these all comes under Easy problems and why all these happens comes under Hard problem.
What if each particle has its own consciousness or few particles dissolve into one another to create new one to form consciousness.Remember senses alone are not part of this but particles.#Panpsychism.Is this The hardest hard problem?Combination problem?
Author pointed out many analogies over various hypothesis on Science and philosophy.-I took all these remains at the state of superposition(until it observed)-but ended up with Formless consciousness which every conscious beings/doings aspire to be,its simply sort of stop think about consciousness and be a part in universe's particle to feel the nature!!-Is this really Ochkam's Razor's simplicity:)
But the most insoluble question is what am just a physical thing- acting/conceiving commands as like object-stand between Consciousness acts as a force(past experience)and Result (Future)

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good arguments against Dualism and Materialism, though his arguments for Panpsychism seemed weak. Nonetheless, he painted a good argument for the benefits it could derive and showed good signs that we could have good reasoning for it soon. Thought provocation at its finest

[Shahryar Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it. Helped me grok the hard problem of consciousness and led to a major shift in my thinking. I don't endorse panpsychism fully but I'm now much more sympathetic to non-materialist theories of consciousness, since materialism alone is fundamentally incapable of explaining subjective experience (qualia). We need to move beyond the materialist paradigm in some way to incorporate consciousness into our theory of reality and there are many different ways to do this, of which panpsychism is one attractive candidate. Panpsychism also offers a solution to the "Problem of Intrinsic Natures", so it solves 2 major problems in one stroke.

Took 1 star away bcs I didn't agree with the discussion on free will in the last chapter.

But overall a highly readable and engaging book on one of the greatest conundrums of present science and philosophy. Those interested in the problem of consciousness should definitely give this book a read!

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two sections are a very good read. Goff explains consciousness as defined by various schools of thought, and sets them against each other. Dualism, Materialism, Illusionism, Zombieism, Phenomenal Concept Theory, and Panpsychism. He is very patient, and very clear, choosing a few examples and then walking us through, using “thought experiments” to convey the subtle distinctions.

The weakest part of the book is the third section because Goff attempts to summarize ALL of the world’s spiritual traditions as being the viewpoint of a group he calls “mystics,” and Goff tries to connect their views with the Western “panpsychists” who operate more or less in the mainstream scientific community.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapters 1-4 = 4 stars
Chapters 5 = 0.5 stars
Read to page 181, then skip the woo.

[Marko Bojkovský · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filip Gof je jedan od poznatijih panpsihista današnjice. Filozofski stav koji se, na prvi pogled, smešta između materijalizma i dualizma po pitanju prirode svesti.

Autor iznosi u dva dela argumente za i protiv (više protiv) materijalizma i dualizma, da bi u trećem izneo argumente u korist panpsihizma. Naime, svest je osnovni gradivni element stvarnosti. Tačnije i najmanje čestice imaju elementarne oblike svesti - svest tako gubi magična, nadprirodna svojstva koja mu dualizam nudi, ali se i izbegava prilično čemeran i neintuitivni odgovor materijalizma, da je u pitanju tek iluzija.

Uzimajući u obzir istinitost tvrdnje, dolazimo i do zanimljivih ideja i zaključaka, kao i do glavnog problema panpsihizma - kako od elementarnih jedinica svest nastaju kompleksniji oblici (samo)svesnih bića. Sam autor navodi primer rascepljenih hemisfera mozga kod pacijenata obolelilih od teških oblika epilepsije. Kod njih, s obzirom da leva i desna hemisfgera nemaju načine komunikacije i umrežavanja, dolazi do pojave dvojne svesti. Najviši nivo na kojem dolazi do integracije činilaca koji imaju svest jeste nivo na kojem će se celovita svest i pojaviti.

Što se posledica na našu svakodnevnicu tiče, možda je i najzanimljivija ideja da, što proizilazi iz panpsihizma, i biljke imaju određeni oblik svesti. Što Gof pothranjuje prepričavanjem niza relativno skorašnjih eksperimenata čiji su rezultati, malo je reći, zaniljivi.

Meni nije posebno sve ovo bilo interesantno, nešto prihvatljiviji oblik materijalizma (što panpsihizam u suštini jeste) i dalje okovan scijentizmom, nije nešto zbog čega bih mogao osetiti veliko uzbuđenje. Pa, ipak, kako se sama ideja neminovno približava monističkim idejama (pa makar opet to bilo na granici profanog Spinozinog monizma), ne možemo, a da ne kažemo da ovo jeste korak u pravom smeru. Kada Gof već počne da raspravlja o misiticima, mističnim iskustvima pred kraj knjige, pa još poziva na novu nauku čiji će prirodne nauke biti tek jedan niži oblik, tu smo već maltene na predvorju revolucije ili tačnije zaokreta nazad ka ako ne sakralnom, a onda makar holističkom pogledu na znanje.

[Tiago F · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my favorite book about philosophy of mind that I have read. The title alludes to the shift that Galileo introduces in the history of science, and he was a big component of the scientific revolution. I tend to associate the latter more with Descartes and Bacon, but Galileo played an important part as well and it was well argued here. More importantly, the author's choice for Galileo fits perfectly with how he presents his case for science and consciousness in the book.

First, Galileo concluded that nature is mathematical and knowable, but it did so at the expense of taking consciousness completely out of the picture. He thought we could never put the mind into a materialistic and mechanistic worldview. The qualitative reality of subjective consciousness was completely out of our reach. This is quite relevant because we inherit this view, and it is what allowed mathematical physics to flourish. But likewise, we remain with the same "problem", with consciousness being outside of a scientific framework.

Second, while he is known for advancing heliocentrism and Copernicanism, which made him a father of science, he actually did so philosophically, and not in a typical scientific manner. This is ironic because philosophy of consciousness is often dismissed because it is thought that science will provide the answers, and philosophy is irrelevant. Yet, the very foundation of modern science and the most important scientific paradigm shift was done philosophically.

Aristotle believed that the speed to which an object falls is proportional to its mass. This is of course very intuitive and was believed for over a thousand years. Galileo proved this wrong by a thought experiment. If heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, let's say we stick them together with a chain and drop them from a height. Does the heavier object fall faster than if not chained? From Aristotle's perspective, yes and no. The fact that the heavier object is tied to the lighter one slows the heavy object down. But the fact that the heavier object is tied to the lighter one, it speeds up the lighter one.

But if they are chained together, they can be considered as a unit, and with a weight that is higher than both of them (lighter+heavier+chain). Therefore it means that the whole unit will be faster than the heavier object if dropped alone.

Because an object can't be slowed down and speed up at the same time, Galileo concluded that this can't be true, a typical deductive (philosophical) reasoning, and without any empirical method. Thus he claimed that all objects fall precisely at the same speed, regardless of weight. I found this fascinating, and I was both mindblown and annoyed that I never heard about this even once in my life.

Galileo aside, the author goes through the problems of accounting consciousness in a scientific and materialistic lens. The common view is either that consciousness is explained by the brain (which is perceived as the solution to outdated Cartesian dualism), or if you're slightly more educated, that while consciousness cannot be accounted by the brain now, it will be in the future when neuroscience is better developed. Goff goes through these problems and describes them incredibly well. All of it can be understood quite well, and he writes assuming that the reader has no philosophical background at all.

I really appreciate this because this problem isn't one that can be easily described to non-philosophers. When one claims that consciousness cannot be accounted for by the brain, people tend to view it as if it's by default outside the brain, in some sort of magical or religious way. Even for highly intelligent and educated people, if they're very embedded into a scientific background, understanding the nuance of consciousness can be tricky. This book I think is the perfect introduction for someone to start thinking about this problem.

While I was fairly familiar with philosophy of mind, and the book is intended as an introduction to non-philosophers, I still managed to learn quite a bit. For example, thought experiments that are a staple of the hard problem of consciousness, such as The Zombie Argument, or Mary's room, are arguments that I've heard countless times before. Yet, Goff presented them brilliantly, with a lot of detail and nuances that I either forgot or never learned.

The book argues for panpsychism (more specifically, monist panpsychism influenced by Eddington and Russell in the 1920s) to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Panpsychism being the view of mind and matter aren't distinct, but rather the same thing. Mind is matter, and matter is mind. Consciousness didn't just magically pop into the universe but was there all along. This is a very weird view when you first heard it, but it is very intellectually respectable once you learn about it. I don't consider myself a panpsychist, but I'm very sympathetic towards it, and I seem to gravitate towards it more and more over time.

A good thing about this book is that even if you disagree with panpsychism completely, such a large portion of the book is dedicated to explaining what the problem is that it's well worth reading even if you disagree with this particular solution. I also liked that the author connected many other things that aren't typically covered, yet he links them to the problem of consciousness. I certainly wasn't expecting quantum mechanics or time-travel to be featured, but it is!

While it was one of my favorite books I have read lately, there were still a few things I did not like. I think he overly lied on the Occam's razor for some of the arguments, and I liked the last part of the book the least. It tried to tie panpsychism to environmentalist ethics, free will, and morality. I understand the arguments but I wasn't convinced and don't think they are very strong. Not to mention irrelevant from a "metaphysical" stand-point of panpsychism being true or not. It doesn't matter what conclusions it leads to, being favorable or not. I also thought that the book was lacking in arguing for and against the materialistic emergence argument. As flawed as it is, I think it is one of the strongest cases for materialism and was only touched on peripherally.

Overall it's a fantastic book about one of the most interesting philosophical fields. I think it's very fair to call it the biggest mystery in the universe, and if you know nothing about it, you're missing out. And if you belong to the camp that you think philosophy is irrelevant, or consciousness is simply what the brain does, then you definitely need to read the book! While this book was meant for the layman, he also has written a book on the same subject for academics, which covers most of the same topics but goes a lot deeper into the arguments and details of it, called "Consciousness and Fundamental Reality", which I definitely plan to read in the future.

[Alex Ast · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was phenomenal in its brevity yet easy to follow with abstract philosophical concepts like the hard problems of consciousness. I learned so much such as how the modern materialist scientific paradigm is unequipped to answer problems of consciousness because of the way Galileo advanced the scientific method. He did this by separating sensory qualities from features of the world in order to explain the laws of nature strictly through the language of mathematics. In doing so, he sought to explain reality only through quantitative measures, altogether neglecting the qualitative aspects of reality. Goff later highlights how this distinction has made the materialist and dualist quest to answer the problems of consciousness has been faulty due to asking the wrong questions like "how is reality strictly material?" or "how are body and soul separate from each other?" instead of asking "how consciousness is fundamental to reality." Goff also explains how science is incapable of actually explaining the properties of reality and that physics is merely a predictive tool used to explain the functions of mass, matter, and force, but are not actually able to define what they mean without referencing other physical properties, thereby creating a circular argument. Goff thinks that the only way we can have a final explanation to the fundamentals of reality is by ascribing consciousness to the intrinsic nature of physical reality. He highlights the fact that science is always in search of the simplest, parsimonious answer and he provides that answer with panpsychism, the theory that all of reality has some element of consciousness behind it. I want to write more about this like the Integral Information Theory and the ethical implications behind this non-dualist position but I am brain dead rn and need to sleep. Anyways, 10/10 recommend reading this if you want to learn more about the nature of reality and how our consciousness plays a fundamental role in it.

[Vasco Barroso · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meu Deus, preferia ter comido com uma pedra na cabeça!

[Bob Woodley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error” is a pleasure to read. It is easy to follow the arguments, and the writing progresses at a good clip. I read this thought-provoking book in a few hours, and it animated a few family conversations around the dinner table.

Analytical philosophy is forever fighting a rear-guard action against scientific materialism. As indicated by his title, the book is a plea to consider some modest alternatives. But the author (and his colleagues it seems, based on the footnotes), are always on the defensive against critiques from the dominant materialists in our society, so the result is very tentative. In fact, the framework Goff proposes still has a materialistic starting point: where do we find consciousness in the world of things? Rather than asking (for instance) how does the appearance of reality arise in consciousness? So Goff is forced to consider seemingly absurd propositions like: are atoms conscious?

The ongoing search for empirical support for panpsychism is another example of this kowtowing to physical science.

This does explain however, the peculiar centrality of quantum mechanics in this book, because quantum mechanics is one area of science with enough wiggle room to allow one to insert some modestly transcendant POVs. But rather than shoe horn one's theories into the tiny gaps left by quantum mechanics, why not just adopt Karen Barad’s agential realism instead?

The author blithely asserts that the location of consciousness is in the brain, even though many cultures place it in the heart. But locating it in the brain allows Goff to make use of arguments from neuro-science.

The materialist basis for panpsychism is perhaps the cause of its biggest problem: the so-called “combination problem”. This struck me as an odd non-problem. We don’t ask how we can recreate the sun from sunlight on the ground (for instance), or how we can recreate the ocean from puddles, so why do we ask how we create human consciousness from cellular consciousnesses?

I was surprised by the omission of a few issues that I would have expected to be discussed in a book like this:
- If the world is made of consciousness, does that mean reality is all in our minds?
- Why does consciousness so often seem to require a body to experience the world? Is it possible to experience without a body?
- Is consciousness experiencing the world or is it projecting the world?

Finally, I realize that Philosophy of the Mind lies squarely in the analytical tradition. Which means that Goff was never going to refer to psychology like continental philosophers might. Nonetheless, it was jarring to not see a single reference to the unconscious in a book on consciousness. The section in this book on free will can hardly make sense without a discussion of the unconscious and its impact on our supposedly conscious decisions.

Nonetheless, an excellent book and highly recommended.

[Ahmad · Rating 2 out of 5]

The error, according to the author, is when Galileo decided that there are aspects of reality that science can mathematically quantify (size, shape, location and motion of material objects), and others that can’t be described mathematically: subjective, qualitative experiences (like the smell of a flower).
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound when there’s no one to hear it? To Galileo the answer is no. It makes air vibrate, but unless there’s an ear around, these vibrations aren’t sounds. Sound is not part of the material world, it’s a form of consciousness that exists only in the “soul” of a conscious being. By making this distinction, Galileo created the problem of consciousness.

Dualist, like Galileo, would have to explain how a material brain produces non-material experiences.
Materialists solve that problem by denying the existence of non-material experience (to some it’s just an illusion). The brain doesn’t produce non-material experiences, brain states themselves ARE the experiences (mainstream neuroscience).

Panpsychists (like the author, and unlike materialists) maintain that consciousness exists and is distinct from brain states, but they avoid the problems of dualism by claiming that consciousness exists not only in the heads of conscious beings, but EVERYWHERE. There are no two separate domains. Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical reality. Every physical object is conscious (to some extent). Which means we should be able at some point to quantify and study these properties mathematically.

Unless I missed or misunderstood the arguments, it is unclear to me how calling something fundamental solves anything.

[Owlseyes]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing like smashing through a full book during a long day of travel. This book is an obvious 5 star before the final two chapters. Perhaps the best follow-up to Annaka Harris's book that discusses the plausibility of panpsychism and possible implications that are beginning to be considered more and more seriously in the field.

[Venky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Goff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He is also an unabashed apologist for panpsychism. In his rousing and compelling book, “Galileo’s Error”, he makes a measured and reasoned plea for upholding the virtues of panpsychism as a rational ally for plumbing the mysteries and myths associated with the complex and abstruse subject of consciousness. The subject of consciousness has been a duel between two warring factions whose respective logic are placed on two extreme ends of a philosophical continuum. On one end of the spectrum stand the dualists. Following in the footsteps of the indomitable philosopher Rene Descartes, the dualists posit that the mind and body are distinct and separable. The dualists dispute the notion that the mind is synonymous with the brain. The other end of the continuum is inhabited by the materialists. Cocking a snook at the dualists, the materialists are firm in their conviction that mind, and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist. As Goff highlights in his book, the most vociferous and popular proponents of materialism are known by the now famous moniker of “The Four Horsemen”. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett constitute the contemporaneous torch bearers for the philosophy of materialism.

Panpsychism attempts to take a more altruistic and reductionist view on the subject of consciousness. As Goff writes, “Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality….They [panpsychists] believe that the fundamental constituents of the physical world are conscious, but they need not believe that every random arrangement of conscious particles results in something that is conscious in its own right. Most panpsychists will deny that your socks are conscious, while asserting that they are ultimately composed of things that are conscious.”

Panpsychism also suffuses an element of altruism and innate benevolence in individuals towards the very ecosystem that surrounds them. This is due to the singularly unique fact of attributing the feature of consciousness in a ubiquitous fashion to both animate beings as well inanimate objects. Goff attempts to corroborate the munificence of panpsychism by taking recourse to various empirical references. Suzanne Simard, of the University of British Columbia, injected trees with isotope traces, and revealed a complex web of communication between trees, which she had dubbed the “Wood-Wide Web.” “Communication happens via mycorrhiza structures, which connect trees to other trees via fungi. The trees and the fungi enjoy a quid pro quo relationship: the trees deliver carbon to the fungi and the fungi reciprocate by delivering nutrients to the trees. A dense web of connections is formed in this way, with the busiest trees at the center connected to hundreds of other trees.” Another example is that of Monica Gagliano, a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia in Perth, who remarkably demonstrated that pea plants can be subject to conditioned learning.

Goff liberally relies on the articulations and theories pioneered by the physicist Arthur Eddington, and embellished by the brilliant Mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Both Eddington and Russell opined that there was nothing in the Physical Sciences that illuminated the intrinsic nature of the ‘stuff’ constituting the world. The physical sciences only elaborate manner in which stuff interact with each other. But they are woefully inadequate in explaining what they are. For example, an electron is described in extraordinary depth with respect to its properties, qualities and interactions with other elements. But what exactly is the essence permeating and defining an electron is beyond the remit of the physical sciences. Consciousness, however, is the only fundamental feature that accords an element of certainty.

The title of Goff’s book itself derives from a fascinating proposition put forward by the Italian Physicist Galileo. Galileo placed the language of mathematics at the highest observational pedestal when distinguishing material properties from their sensory qualities. In this brilliant man’s imagination, all material objects inhabiting the world can be identified with the following characteristics, only: Size, Shape, Location and Motion. But what about the sensory qualities then? Doesn’t the audacious stripping away of the sensory qualities from the purely physical attributes create an obvious gap when it comes to fathoming the import and gravity of material objects? For example, taking the example of a lemon, what explains the yellowness of the lemon, its smell and the sour taste. Galileo had a ready answer to this conundrum, informs Goff. The solution was – the soul. “For Galileo, the lemon itself isn’t really yellow; rather yellowness exists in the soul of the person perceiving the lemon. Likewise, neither the sour taste nor the citrus smell are really in the lemon; rather they’re in the soul of the person tasting or smelling the lemon.”

But this formulation, on a plain and simple reading, reeks of escapism. Excising the sensory qualities only because they are not amenable to the same degree of explanation or elaboration as is the preserve of the material properties, poses more difficulties than providing solutions. “However, Galileo’s philosophy of nature has also bequeathed us deep difficulties. So long as we follow Galileo in thinking (A) that natural science is essentially quantitative and (B) that the qualitative cannot be explained in terms of the quantitative, then consciousness, as an essentially qualitative phenomenon, will be forever locked out of the arena of scientific understanding. Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious. In other words, Galileo created the problem of consciousness.”

In the year 1994, philosopher David Chalmers, was amongst the participants who had gathered at the first Science and Consciousness’ conference in Tucson. Chalmers stunned his audience by proposing that instead of addressing ‘easy’ problems, such as what happens in the brain when we learn, remember or recognise, there was an urgent need to concentrate on what he termed was ‘The Hard Problem.’ Chalmers asked, “why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” What links a purely physical object such as the human brain with the invisible but perceivable consciousness? Panpsychism, argues that consciousness pervades everything. As Sheldrake once opined, “Panpsychism is not a new idea. Most people used to believe in it, and many still do. All over the world, traditional people saw the world around them as alive and, in some sense, conscious or aware: the planets, stars, the earth, plants and animals all had spirits or souls.” Goff confidently claims that “in twenty years’ time the idea that panpsychism can quickly be dismissed as ‘crazy’ will seem, well, crazy.”

“Galileo’s Error” is at once simple and complex. While the notions of dualism, materialism and panpsychism are explained in a smooth, flowing and easy to rasp manner, thinks become extremely dense and heavy when they venture into the realm of the ‘Gedankenexperiment’. Esoteric and convoluted concepts such as Quantum entanglement, Superposition etc pose formidable challenges to the unsuspected and the uninitiated. In fact, one of the most alluring aspects of Goff’s book, is the reference to a plethora of thought experiments. Thus the reader is dazzled by the “what it is like to be a bat” argument of Thomas Nagel, “The Black-and-White Mary experiment by Frank Jackson that has at its nub a genius neuroscientist Mary, who knows everything there is to know about color but grows up in an entirely black-and-white environment, the Chinese room argument of John Searle, the Theory of Relativity propounded by Einstein, and of course The Hard Problem of David Chalmers.

“Galileo’s Error” a quest inducing work of consequential proportions.

[NN · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the viewpoint of mainstream materialism/physicalism, this book might be perceived as pushing the envelope. For those who have delved deeper into the subject and who don't share the author's prejudice against that which is commonly termed the irrational (think magic, paranormality, the occult etc.), it actually seems rather narrow-minded. In fact, it emits a distinct bourgeois academic, even redditesque energy, which is only reinforced by occasional political signaling of a dull liberal progressive bent. Apart from the penultimate chapter which deals moderately sympathetically with the topic of mysticism, albeit in a cursory and quite shallow way, Goff's intermittent scoffs at the speculative and supernatural, drive home the point, to me at least, that that is exactly the direction we should be looking in in order to get a firmer grasp on the nature of consciousness and existence itself.

I hasten to add that for newcomers to the subject, this could serve as an adequate primer.

[Thomas W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had originally hard if Philip Goff from an interview with (a physicist I believe, but possibly just a mathematician,) in which he advertised this book. Being someone who was interested in Pantheism, and its relation to scientific ways of seeing the world, this book really grabbed my attention

This is a great book not only as an introduction to Panpsychism, (an idea I find highly provacative and I think you'll see why if you read this text...) But also to general theories in the philosophy of mind, and it's relationship in science.

I don't believe you'd need a philosophy background to comprehend this text or need to be science savy.

Good book! I liked it a lot and I'm happy to have this on my bookshelf. Really interesting interpretation on the limits of current science, in Goff's perspective.

[Lukas Stock · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Accessible lay introduction to major issues in philosophy of consciousness with an argument for panpsychism. Geoff’s case is compelling and elegant.

The final chapter drawing out philosophical implications felt tacked on and much less sophisticated philosophically than the earlier chapters dismantling materialism and dualism.

Well worth a read to gain an understanding of panpsychism as a philosophical framework for consciousness and the cosmos.

[Chris Kelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this one. Heard about it on the Mindscape podcast. It takes a bit to get going but is very approachable even though it deals with some pretty deep concepts. The first three chapters setup the alternative arguments to panpsycism and the base arguments in favor of it. The 4th chapter lays out the core argument in favor. The fifth and final chapter explore the implications. If you can make it through 1-3 there is a great payoff in 4 and 5.