71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2019

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t understand the mind and how it works. But do we know enough about our experience of consciousness to suggest that consciousness cannot arise from nothing more than the physical interactions of bits of matter? Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness, or at least some mental aspect, is pervasive in the world, in atoms and rocks as well as in living creatures. Philosopher Philip Goff is one of the foremost modern advocates of this idea. We have a friendly and productive conversation, notwithstanding my own view that the laws of physics don’t need any augmenting to ultimately account for consciousness. If you’re not sympathetic toward panpsychism, this episode will at least help you understand why someone might be.

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Philip Goff received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Reading. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. His new book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, is being published on Nov. 5.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host John Carroll and today we're going to go back into consciousness
0:07.0	Not just the easy problem of consciousness how the brain looks at the world and figures out what is where and how to respond to it
0:13.9	But the hard problem of consciousness what makes us who we are how we experience the world what it is like to be us that
0:22.1	Inner subjective first person view that we have of reality now if you've been following me for a while
0:28.3	You know that I'm a naturalist. I mean physicalist in fact, which means I think the world is made of stuff
0:34.3	Obain laws of physics and that's basically it except when that stuff comes together to form complicated things like human beings
0:41.8	There can be new emergent phenomena that arise and consciousness is one of those consciousness is just an
0:48.5	aspect of the collective action of underlying stuff obeying the laws of physics
0:53.4	But you will not be surprised to learn that there are those who disagree and those who disagree need not be hardcore
1:00.5	Cartesian dualists they don't necessarily think that there's a disembodied mind that somehow interacts with the body
1:07.3	It can also be true that you believe the world is made of physical stuff
1:11.4	But the physical stuff has extra properties mental properties and this point of view drives you in the direction of
1:19.6	pan-psychism thinking that everything is a little bit conscious
1:23.3	It's not just that something new happens when atoms and particles come together to form a brain
1:28.4	But there was something that was there all along and it becomes important and noticeable
1:33.8	Once you get something like an organism or a brain so for today's guest
1:37.8	We have Philip Goff who's a professor of philosophy at Durham University in the UK and one of the leading thinkers on
1:44.7	pan-psychism he is all for it. I am against it. So we have a very nice conversation
1:49.5	Philip is the author of an academic book called consciousness and fundamental reality and also a brand new just published
1:56.0	popular level book called Galileo's error
1:59.0	Foundation for a new science of consciousness. So I have fun in the podcast with the idea that I'm on Galileo's side and Philip is against Galileo's side
2:06.6	But basically Philips also pro Galileo he thinks that Galileo made a mistake in overly
	...

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