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Philip Goff is a philosopher who teaches at Durham University. He is the author of the seminal academic text Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of…
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Panpsychism does introduce a new Copernican revolution that human consciousness is not something cosmically special, we are not the only physical entity that has an inner qualitative dimension as well as the external quantitative aspects of our nature. Human consciousness for the panpsychist is just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
If we now want a science of consciousness, we need to find a way of bringing consciousness back into the domain of science. We need to find a way of bringing back together these two domains that Galileo separated. And that is really the challenge as I see it.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities so that we can exhaustively describe it in purely quantitative mathematics. This was the start of mathematical physics and it depended on this separation of reality into two domains, – the quantitative physical world, the physical world of the purely mathematical properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation, a sense that we don't fit into the world somehow.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
Consciousness is at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is at the root of everything that really matters in life from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, these are the things that make life worth living.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
Our current scientific paradigm was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness. This goes back to the 17th century, 1623 – Galileo declared that from that point onwards, mathematics was going to be the language of science.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
We seem to be in a strange period of history where our official world view, our official picture of the universe denies the reality of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value. I think people do feel this at an intuitive level, and it can lead to a deep sense of alienation.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it's seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain.
— Philip GoffPhilosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism
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