Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness By Philip Goff
The book discusses the challenges physical science faces in explaining consciousness. It explores the idea that science can reveal new ways of understanding the world and consciousness. The author argues for panpsychism as the most probable hypothesis for understanding the intrinsic nature of the universe.
Highlights
The Post-Galilean Manifesto • Realism About Consciousness: The reality of subjective consciousness is a basic datum in its own right, equal in status to the data of observation and experiment. • Empiricism: The quantitative data of observation and experiment are foundational, equal in status to the qualitative data of consciousness. • Anti-Dualism: Consciousness is not separate from the physical world; rather consciousness is located in the intrinsic nature of the physical world. • Panpsychist Methodology: We should aim to account for human and animal consciousness in terms of more basic forms of consciousness, basic forms of consciousness which are postulated to exist as basic properties of matter.*13 Within this unified research program there are two camps: reductionists and emergentists. Their immediate goals are as follows: • Reductionist panpsychists—To solve the combination problem, by giving a general account of how complex forms of consciousness can be built up from simpler forms of consciousness. • Emergentist panpsychists—To formulate and test theories of the basic principles of nature underlying the emergence of higher-level forms of consciousness from more basic forms of consciousness.
And this is because our scientific knowledge of the world is itself mediated through conscious experience. We are able to perform observations and experiments only because we have conscious experience of the world around us.
the objectivity of science depends on the subjectivity of conscious experience.
If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond, “Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities not qualities!”
Whereas Galileo set the soul outside of the domain of natural science, the naturalistic dualist wants to expand science in such a way as to include nonphysical minds.
Radical materialists argue that consciousness is an illusion. More moderate materialists hope that we will one day be able to explain the subjective inner world of consciousness in terms of the chemistry of the brain.
Panpsychists believe that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
To solve the problem, we must somehow find a way of making consciousness, once again, the business of science.
According to dualism, a human being is a kind of composite entity: a combination of a physical body and an immaterial mind.
The psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that dualist thought is hardwired into us and that from an early age children start to categorize “mental things” as distinct from “physical things.”
When it comes to the basic causal workings of the universe, scientists provide mathematical laws which describe with great accuracy how matter behaves, but they provide no explanation of why matter behaves in that way.
It turns out that, although the cerebellum has more neurons, its neurons are much less connected than those of the cerebrum. As a result, there is a lot more integrated information in the cerebrum than in the cerebellum, which is exactly what IIT predicts is important for consciousness.
In the specific case of IIT, it is proposed that consciousness is correlated with integrated information: wherever you have integrated information you have consciousness and vice versa. But IIT does nothing to explain why that correlation holds.
If a naturalistic dualist were persuaded of the truth of IIT, then her view would be that there is a fundamental psycho-physical law of nature—as fundamental as the law of gravity—that wherever you have integrated information you have consciousness.
But if quantum dualism is true, the immaterial mind plays a role complementary to, rather than at odds with, physics. On the face of it, physics suggests that something in the vicinity of observation changes superpositions into definite values. The quantum dualist merely adopts this role for the conscious mind.
Still, an important aim of quantum dualism is to preserve the commonsense idea that my mind is the cause of many of my actions.
The Law of Noncontradiction—Any hypothesis which involves a contradiction is false. This is the principle which mathematicians and logicians rely on in order to reach their conclusions.
the main motivation for embracing materialism arises from an incorrect view of the history of science. It is thought that the great and rightly celebrated success of physical science gives us overwhelming reason to embrace materialism as the true theory of consciousness (as well as everything else). In fact, physical sciences have been so successful precisely because from Galileo onward they set aside the qualitative in order to focus on the quantitative. The fact that physical science has done well when it ignores consciousness gives us no reason to think it will do well when it tries to apply its quantitative methods to consciousness itself.
putative
putative (adjective): commonly accepted or presumed; assumed to be so without definitive proof 🤔🔍
This is not how Russell and Eddington saw physics. To the surprise of the scientific community, they argued that physics had been so successful precisely because it had stopped trying to tell us anything about the nature of matter.
In 1623 Galileo declared that mathematics was to be the language of science. In the above quotation of 1928 we find Eddington fully appreciating, perhaps for the first time in the history of modern science, what this amounts to.
It is this predictive capacity that has enabled us to manipulate the natural world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological revolution that has transformed our planet.
The Problem of Intrinsic Natures—Physical science restricts itself to providing information about the behavior of the things it talks about—particles, fields, spacetime—and tells us nothing about their intrinsic natures.
There is a very real sense in which we have no idea what hydrogen and oxygen are, and hence we have no idea what water is!
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
In other words, I have but one small window onto the intrinsic nature of matter: I know that the intrinsic nature of the matter inside my brain involves consciousness. I know this because I am directly aware of the reality of my own consciousness. And, assuming dualism is false, this reality I am directly aware of is at least part of the intrinsic nature of my brain.
We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own fibres that we actually know; from these ends we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.
Problem 1: We need a place for consciousness. Problem 2: We have a huge hole at the center of our scientific story. Solution: Plug the hole with consciousness. In other words, Eddington’s proposal is that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. It is consciousness, for Eddington, that breathes fire into the equations of physics.
“So long as a physical system can differentiate itself from its environment,” she told me at a philosophy event in Hay-on-Wye in Wales in 2018, “that system could be said to have experience.”
antipathy
antipathy (noun): a deep-seated feeling of aversion or dislike; hostility 💔😒
In other words, those who think of consciousness as only in the brain are implicitly thinking in dualist terms, as though consciousness were some special magical substance that only comes about in very special circumstances.
The equations governing the behavior of a system of entangled particles in superposition govern the whole system rather than its individual parts. Even if Laplace’s demon knew all the facts about each particle, she still wouldn’t know everything there is to know about the system as a whole. A system of entangled particles is more than the sum of its parts.
If IIT is to be believed, then we should perhaps be wary of the growth of social connectivity. This is because IIT predicts that if the growth of internet-based connectivity ever resulted in the amount of integrated information in society surpassing the amount of integrated information in a human brain, then not only would society become conscious but human brains would be “absorbed” into that higher form of consciousness. Brains would cease to be conscious in their own right and would instead become mere cogs in the mega-conscious entity that is the society including its internet-based connectivity.
Consciousness is not a “mystery”; nothing is more familiar. What is mysterious is reality, and our knowledge of consciousness is one of the best clues we have for working out what that mysterious thing is like.
New highlights added July 28, 2024 at 1:17 PM
How does a disunified brain become a unified brain? The problem is not solved, but possible ways forward open up. It could be the unified cognitive goals of the brain, in terms of processing information and representing the environment, that focus its disunified consciousness into unified states of experience.
To properly understand the human situation is to appreciate that less than certainty can be enough to trust, to engage.
Could our philosophical worldview be partly responsible for our inability to avert climate catastrophe? The writer and campaigner Naomi Klein places blame at the foot of mind-body dualism, or as she puts it, the “corrosive separation between mind and body—and between body and earth—from which both the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution sprang.”
When our official worldview is that biological systems are mechanistic, most of us end up believing that consciousness is really something over and above those mechanistic biological systems. In other words, we end up being closet dualists.
New highlights added July 30, 2024 at 4:32 PM
profligate
profligate (adjective): recklessly extravagant; wasteful 💸😩