Philip Goff is a philosopher, and if like me, you have ever wondered what the point of philosophy is, then this book might help. In a little over 200 pages, he takes on consciousness, explaining why our current science cannot even hope to understand it, before concluding with a new explanation.
This is important. The experiences of dowsers, and the research of parapsychologists, suggest that consciousness is at least as fundamental as space and time. This is demonstrated through various psychic abilities. But until we radically improve our understanding of consciousness, it will remain difficult to convince people that a practice such as dowsing could ever work.
When Philosophers talk of consciousness, they refer to phenomenon in which it is
like to be something
. We are all familiar with feelings and experiences that make up what it is to be ourselves. But despite decades of neuroscience, our understanding of this fundamental phenomenon is incredibly poor. Why is this?
Goff suggests that it started 400 years ago with Galileo.
Galileo, the first modern scientist, wanted to describe nature in terms of mathematics, based on observation. He was also a philosopher. He could describe the quantitative properties of matter, such as size, position and movement, but how to describe the quality of experience? His solution was to separate the two, placing experience solely inside the consciousness of the individual and leaving it there. The result was the birth of physics, which has since gone on to successfully describe how objects behave and interact down to the atomic level, giving rise to the technologies we enjoy today. But the legacy of Galileo’s decision is that consciousness has been left out of science.
In his book, Goff reviews the pros and cons of the three current contenders that might explain consciousness going forward. These are dualism, materialism and
Panpsychism
, the latter being the real focus of the book.
The most famous dualist was Descartes, of
I think therefore I am
. The idea is now promoted by the well-known philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers, who first coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”. Dualists assert that reality is made of both physical stuff, that can be observed with the senses, and non-physical stuff, that cannot.
Minds are made of the latter and are the bearers of consciousness. Goff is wary of the idea, he thinks that the theory is not well advanced, and more fundamentally, it is the least simple of the explanations, since it divides the World into two parts. Simplicity is preferable (think Occam’s razor).
From the materialist’s standpoint, Goff points out that they are logically driven to believe that consciousness does not even exist! For a start consciousness cannot be objectively observed, it is something we experience, there is no way we can say something is conscious by looking at it from outside. But to Goff this does not makes sense, as with Descartes, we can only be sure of our own experiences. There are other arguments against the widely held materialist view, one involving zombies (of the philosophical, rather than Hollywood kind)!
Although Goff does not refer to the evidence of psi research, he acknowledges that the meaning and information aspect of psi cannot be explained from a materialist perspective, there must be something deeper.
The latter half of the book introduces us to Panpsychism, which might well provide that meaning. One might suppose from the name, that this is the belief that everything has consciousness, as Goff puts it
“… that your socks, for example, may currently be going through a troubling period of existential angst.”
Instead, it supposes that the fundamental constituents of reality are conscious, but not all combinations of these constituents are conscious, and if they are, their consciousness is not necessary like our own complex thoughts and experiences.
The idea of Panpsychism began with the Ancient Greeks, but now stripped of its mystical elements, it is a hot topic amongst Philosophers struggling to explain consciousness. They draw on initial ideas by the philosopher Bertrand Russel and refined by the scientist Arthur Eddington.
Russel first discussed the problem of the
intrinsic natures
of matter, meaning that science is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter, but it has nothing to say about what matter
is
. Their solution was to suggest that we do have one insight – our own conscious and experiences. If we assume that this is the nature of things, then the matter outside of our brains has the same nature as the matter within. It is a simple, but powerful idea. We preserve our physical understanding of the behaviour of matter from the outside, but from the inside matter is constituted from forms of consciousness.
Panpsychism is not without its problems. Perhaps the biggest is just how does the bigger consciousness of our brain arise from the combination of the consciousness of particles? But Goff points out that Panpsychism is just a framework, indicating paths for future research, akin to Darwin’s concept of evolution. Whether it turns out to be a good description of consciousness will depend on the results of that research, but this could take a long time. However, Goff thinks that the problems facing Panpsychism are easier to tackle than those facing other ideas.
Finally, Goff reflects on how a Panpsychic philosophy might transform our relationship with the World around us. Materialism tells us that there is no inherent meaning, or purpose to anything, we are currently aliens in our World.