1. How Galileo Created the Problem of Consciousness

Goff’s claim is that Galileo created a methodological shift in the scientific studies by setting sensory qualities outside the domain of its inquiry and placing them in the conscious mind. According to Goff, this was a great success in terms of developments in mathematical sciences because it allowed for what remained to be captured easily in terms of quantitative and objective language. However, this created the problem that the successful scientific tools couldn’t be trivially applied to study subjective experiences.

To correct this error, Goff in the book discusses three possibilities -

1. Naturalistic Dualism: Says minds are immaterial but not mystical in the sense of being fundamentally void of any sort of subjection to laws. It is only the case that there are physical laws and an inherent independent set of psychological laws that together create a complete description of reality.
2. Materialism: The view most strongly advocated by most modern scientists
3. Panpsychism: The view which concedes that there is an element of truth in both Dualism and Materialism - consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the material world (which, by the way, is the view that I incline towards the most).

2. Is there a Ghost in the Machine?

When I asked Chalmers if he has any spiritual views, he replied “Only that the universe is pretty cool”

Before reading this chapter, I had never thought about how - contrary to popular belief - evidence from neuroscience stands indifferent towards the dualism/nondualist debates.

Philosophers typically reject dualism because of the interaction problem. Scientists reject quantum dualism on the grounds that it involves an allegedly discredited theory named ‘dualism’. Hence, it very much looks like dualism is being rejected by assuming the falsity of quantum dualism and quantum dualism is being rejected by assuming the falsity of dualism.

3. Can Physical Science explain consciousness?

Kieth argues that physical science cannot explain consciousness but infers it from the fact that consciousness is an illusion. Here’s an excerpt by him

Suppose we encounter something that seems anomalous in the sense of being radically inexplicable within our established scientific worldview. Psychokinesis is an example. We could accept that the phenomena is real and explore the implications of its existence, proposing major revisions or extensions to our science, perhaps amounting to a paradigm shift . In the case of psychokinesis, we might posit previously unknown psychic forces and embark on a major revision of physics to accommodate them … or we could argue that the phenomenon is illusory and set about investigating how the illusion is produced.

This is exactly the kind of thinking MeltingAsphalt tackles with in his ‘Neurons Gone Wild’.

If it can neither be verified nor falsified, then panpsychism may seem to fall into the category of theories that the physicist Wolfgang Pauli rejected as ‘not even wrong’.

Philip Goff claims that ‘what Russell and Eddington did for the science of consciousness is what Darwin did for the science of life’. Strangely, I was familiar with the work of Russell that Philip was mentioning but I never made the connection that it might have anything to do with consciousness. I always put those ideas in the neighborhood of Logical Atomism and thought it is just Philosophy of Physics and not philosophy of mind. Feels nice that two of my interests do share a historical and conceptual connection within this context.

In a Royal Society meeting, it was joked that Eddington is one of the only three men in the world who actually understood relativity. … He responded, “… I was wondering who that third one might be”