GUEST ESSAY: Philip Goff’s error: A review of his book, 'Galileo's Error'

By Stephen Davies 

(This is a guest essay submitted to the Metaphysical Speculations Discussion Forum, where it was extensively reviewed and critically commented on by forum members. The opinions expressed in it are those of its author.) 

Galileo Galilei. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

British philosopher Philip Goff describes how early Italian scientist Galileo Galilei sought to explain the whole world quantitatively, and so decided to take the qualia associated with the world—such as the colors we see, the flavors we taste, the aromas we smell, the textures we feel, etc—and place it within consciousness, away from the matter where it was previously believed to be.

Before Galileo, redness was thought to be in the object perceived as red; sweetness was thought to lie within sugar. Galileo decided that these experiences of the qualities of the physical world, such as sweetness and redness, were instead to be found within the mind of the experiencer, leaving matter to be home for quantitative properties only, such as mass, momentum, velocity and the like.

What Galileo didn’t do was create a new form of consciousness dedicated to the perceptual qualities associated with the physical world. Instead, he took those qualities and placed them within our preexisting understanding of consciousness; the same consciousness where we experience emotions, thoughts, imagination, and other endogenous experiences. He simply moved into the mental domain something that had hitherto been assumed to reside in matter.

This way, sensory qualities associated with the physical world—such as redness and sweetness—were assumed to originate in the circle of mind, not that of matter. The intersection of the circles—the experiential perception of the physical world—was where these then came together.

In the overlap of the circles of mind and matter we, for example, see and taste a sweet red apple. The apple belongs in the physical world and can be described completely quantitatively in terms of size and shape and weight etc. In turn, the experience of redness and sweetness belongs in mind and can be described qualitatively by the experiencer, but not reduced to numbers.

The point here is that the circle of mind was already assumed to be there and the sensory qualities of the physical world were merely added to it. As such, the circle of mind was made bigger.

Goff’s error is to then create a metaphysical explanation for mind and matter that is based upon just this one particular intersection of mind and matter; that of the physical world and the qualities of sensory experience associated with it. He ignores altogether the rest of the contents of mind—such as thoughts, emotions, imagination, etc.—that do not arise from sensory perception.

Goff’s theory is that matter, as described in purely quantitive terms, is the entirety of consciousness in action; consciousness is nothing more than the intrinsic nature of these physical quantities and matter is what consciousness does; it is the extrinsic appearance of consciousness.

This is a huge and costly error, for he has conflated Galileo’s one addition to the contents of consciousness with the whole of consciousness. Maybe the experienced qualities of sensory perception are the inherent nature of the physical world, but there is no reason whatsoever to restrict the whole of consciousness to such a limited role. There is a whole host of other contents of consciousness that has little to do with sensory perception. Goff seems to lose all of this in his account of reality.

Idealism does not. Idealism correctly sees the experience of physicality as what it is: a particular type of the many possible experiences within consciousness (in Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism, this arises as a result of dissociated aspects of consciousness).

Consciousness is not exhaustively described or understood in terms of sensory experience—there is so much more to it! Goff’s panpsychist metaphysics in Galileo's Error is meant to account for all of matter and all of consciousness but is based on—and therefore can only account for—sensory experiences of physicality.

When setting up his theory, Goff uses the word 'consciousness' when he is actually referring to just a particular type of conscious experiences. He then says that his theory explains the role of consciousness and says it is the intrinsic nature of matter. But now he suddenly means consciousness as the whole contents of consciousness and the conscious subject.

We are not just beings that have experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. On what grounds can you coherently argue that all conscious experiences are just the intrinsic nature of the material aspects of these five senses?

In Idealism, consciousness can exist without matter, without an experience of physicality; these are optional extras. For Goff, reality is one coin with one side that is matter and the other side is consciousness; they are inextricably linked as two aspects of one thing. Matter has no intrinsic nature without consciousness and consciousness has no extrinsic expression without matter. There is no possibility in Goff’s metaphysics for consciousness without matter; it is tied to and limited by the physical world.

Goff’s panpsychism is borne out of materialism. He uses consciousness to fill a gap in materialism, the gap of the intrinsic nature of matter. Idealism puts consciousness first and foremost and matter is wholly subservient to it. For Goff, matter is still in the forefront, still limiting what consciousness can be. This is why he fails to provide a metaphysics that truly accounts for consciousness beyond mere sensory perception.

Copyright © 2020 by Stephen Davies. Published with permission.