In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, my guest is leading philosopher and consciousness researcher Philip Goff, Ph.D. He studies how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview and how consciousness blends with our general theory of reality. “Consciousness is everywhere,” he says.
His approach to consciousness is “a very general framework for bringing together what we know about ourselves from the inside with what science tells us about the body and the brain from the outside to bring them together in a single integrated picture of reality.”
“All we mean by consciousness here is subjective experience, pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experiences and so human experience is incredibly rich and sophisticated,” says Philip, who teaches at Durham University in England. “This is the result of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.”
In his new book “Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness,” he goes all the back to the foundations of the scientific revolution, when Galileo's decided to set consciousness outside of the domain of science.
Philip suggests that we need to rethink what science is in order to solve the problem of consciousness and offers up panpsychism as a radically new picture of human consciousness.
“So that's the idea that basic building blocks have some kind of very rudimentary conscious experience," Philip says. “But it doesn't mean every random arrangement of those particles of those building blocks is conscious. It doesn't mean that your cup of coffee is conscious. It just means that your cup of coffee is made up of little things that are conscious.”
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