Book completed
Feb. 4th, 2024 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeGalileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff. He’s a philosopher whom G had recommended to me. The book is surprisingly readable for a book about consciousness, and the author does a very fine job of explaining the ideas of his rivals and also acknowledging the degree to which he’s convinced by some arguments and not others. I’ll write up a brief summary of his ideas for my own future reference.
Goff begins by explaining that Galileo’s great innovation in the history of science had been to focus only on things that could be measured and “bracketing out” the world of sensation as something that math and physics and such aren’t qualified to deal with. As time went by, people have been tempted to equate science only with those things that can be measured and to forget that sensations and experiences are also part of the universe – and also to forget that physics, for example, doesn’t have much to say about what things are but only how they behave (with force, acceleration, mass, etc.).
In chapter 2 and 3, he discusses what have long been the two main theories for what consciousness (sensations, experiences, etc.) are: something apart from the material world (dualism) and something that is identical with the material world (materialism). We are all intuitively dualists, he notes, but he explains his belief that dualism can’t be true because we have absolutely zero understanding for how a non-physical mind could interact with a physical brain, or any evidence that this is happening. If the alternative is materialism, that’s also unsatisfactory, he tells us, because with materialism we should be able to convey subjective information in objective terms, but sometimes we can't. For example, it is not possible to convey "yellow" to a person whose visual system doesn't allow them to perceive colors.
In the rest of the book, Goff explains that panpsychism is an alternative to those two main theories, which is increasingly becoming more respected (chapter 4), and some of its practical implications (chapter 5). When Goff is talking about panpsychism, he's careful to clarify that he doesn't mean that everything has feelings like humans (and presumably many if not all animals) do. Rocks don't get angry. Rather, it's possible that everything all the way down to subatomic particles has experiences of existence, and that with greater complexity, things can have sensory awareness of these experiences. I'm not qualified to fully follow all of his arguments, but one of his analogies made a lot of sense to me. Starting with Newton, physics focused on things like movement, mass, force, etc., but didn't include anything to do with electricity and magnetism. Then Maxwell came along and expanded physics to include electromagnetic processes. Goff says that having excluded sensations, experiences, awareness, etc., from science for all this time (per Galileo and his emphasis on math and measurement), now we need to add it back in too.
Goff begins by explaining that Galileo’s great innovation in the history of science had been to focus only on things that could be measured and “bracketing out” the world of sensation as something that math and physics and such aren’t qualified to deal with. As time went by, people have been tempted to equate science only with those things that can be measured and to forget that sensations and experiences are also part of the universe – and also to forget that physics, for example, doesn’t have much to say about what things are but only how they behave (with force, acceleration, mass, etc.).
In chapter 2 and 3, he discusses what have long been the two main theories for what consciousness (sensations, experiences, etc.) are: something apart from the material world (dualism) and something that is identical with the material world (materialism). We are all intuitively dualists, he notes, but he explains his belief that dualism can’t be true because we have absolutely zero understanding for how a non-physical mind could interact with a physical brain, or any evidence that this is happening. If the alternative is materialism, that’s also unsatisfactory, he tells us, because with materialism we should be able to convey subjective information in objective terms, but sometimes we can't. For example, it is not possible to convey "yellow" to a person whose visual system doesn't allow them to perceive colors.
In the rest of the book, Goff explains that panpsychism is an alternative to those two main theories, which is increasingly becoming more respected (chapter 4), and some of its practical implications (chapter 5). When Goff is talking about panpsychism, he's careful to clarify that he doesn't mean that everything has feelings like humans (and presumably many if not all animals) do. Rocks don't get angry. Rather, it's possible that everything all the way down to subatomic particles has experiences of existence, and that with greater complexity, things can have sensory awareness of these experiences. I'm not qualified to fully follow all of his arguments, but one of his analogies made a lot of sense to me. Starting with Newton, physics focused on things like movement, mass, force, etc., but didn't include anything to do with electricity and magnetism. Then Maxwell came along and expanded physics to include electromagnetic processes. Goff says that having excluded sensations, experiences, awareness, etc., from science for all this time (per Galileo and his emphasis on math and measurement), now we need to add it back in too.