Philip Goff
1978– — UK
“What if consciousness was never something to be explained by physics — but something physics was always built on top of?”
Primary Contribution
Goff's central argument in Galileo's Error: Galileo's methodological choice to exclude qualities (consciousness, color, sound as experienced) from the scientific description of the world — keeping only quantities (mass, charge, spin) — was a productive choice for physics, but it built the hard problem in from the start. Science can only describe the quantitative behavior of matter; it cannot, by design, explain the qualitative feel of experience. Panpsychism — the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, present at all levels of complexity — is the natural resolution. Not that electrons think, but that the intrinsic nature of physical reality includes experiential properties. His work is rigorous, clear, and directly addresses the standard objections (the combination problem, the simplicity problem). He is currently the most publicly prominent philosopher of panpsychism.
Key Ideas
- Galileo's Error: the decision to exclude qualities from physics was productive for prediction but created the hard problem — consciousness was methodologically excluded, not explained away
- Panpsychism: consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, not something that emerges from unconscious matter at a certain level of complexity
- The intrinsic nature argument: physics tells us what matter does (its relational/dispositional properties) but not what matter is — consciousness may be the intrinsic nature of physical reality
- The combination problem: how do micro-level experiential properties combine into the unified consciousness we experience? This is hard, but no harder than the hard problem itself
- Cosmopsychism: perhaps it is not small things (particles) that are conscious, but the cosmos as a whole — and individual minds are aspects of this cosmic consciousness
Recommended Works
- Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019)
- Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (academic monograph)
- Mind Chat podcast (with Keith Frankish — the debate itself is valuable)
“The hard problem of consciousness is not a problem about consciousness. It's a problem about matter — about why our purely quantitative conception of matter leaves no room for the qualities of experience.”
Further Sayings
Legacy & Influence
Goff has made panpsychism respectable in mainstream analytic philosophy — a position that was considered fringe a decade ago. Galileo's Error became a bestseller and introduced the general public to the philosophical foundations of the consciousness debate. His podcast Mind Chat (co-hosted with illusionist Keith Frankish) models the kind of rigorous, good-faith disagreement that the consciousness field needs. He is a key figure in the growing 'post-materialist' movement in philosophy of mind, and his cosmopsychism has opened a new direction that converges with the idealism of Kastrup and the non-dualism of Advaita.
Knowledge Well & Media
Recommended research papers, debates, and lectures