The Importance of Data in a Theory of Reality

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think there's this good reason to think that the postulations of physical science alone cannot account for the reality of consciousness. I don't think you can even capture the qualities of consciousness in the language of neuroscience, so that's a kind of expressive limitation. If if you were to explain the qualities of Consciousness in those terms then it seems to me you'd have to explain them in more fundamental terms than what we know from observation and experiment. So when people hear about Dave's hard problems sometimes they think oh, we just haven't got the solution yet. It would be kind of a weird coincidence if they also explained These subjective qualities that were aware of in a completely different way. Which

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.