Once he understands how the laws of physics work, he says, we will understand how consciousness arises. In the other corner, on the side of materialism, Sean Carroll, is puzzled at what all the fuss is about. As he says, “How can you capture in an equation the spiciness of paprika?” (Understanding consciousness won’t necessarily require equations, though.) That, he says, is useless because it doesn’t enable us to get at the heart of consciousness: subjective experience or “qualia”. Goff avers that materialism won’t help us understand consciousness because all it produces are correlations between brain activity and conscious experience. I won’t summarize it in detail, but if you want to listen to just the heart of the argument, start at about 1:11:00-71 minutes in.Ī brief view of the controversy. The podcast is 94 minutes long, and I’ve listened to all of it. Sean states from the outset that he doesn’t accept panpsychism, and that materialism (his view of the world) is perfectly capable of explaining consciousness, though it’s a hard problem and will take a long time to understand. Debating him is Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University and perhaps the most vociferous advocate of panpsychism (he has a new book about it). Sean, of course, is a physicist, cosmologist, and author, who knows a lot about philosophy. Goff’s claim, in the podcast below and elsewhere, that other philosophers agree with him doesn’t move me, for the number of people who adhere to a falsehood doesn’t increase its truth value.īut on to the podcast: Sean Carroll’s “Mindscape” that you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. And others, like physicist Lee Smolin, authors Annaka Harris and Philip Pullman, and philosopher Stephen Law, have endorsed Goff’s new trade book, though this doesn’t mean they all endorse panpsychism. Goff himself, in the podcast below, repeatedly states that he’s “heartened” by the increasing (but still minority) view among philosophers that panpsychism is the way to go in explaining consciousness. I get emails, ticked-off posts by philosopher/panpsychism booster Philip Goff on his website, and even arguments by some readers who favor panpsychism. We’re already making progress on understanding what neurology requires for consciousness, and how to alter its presence or nature.Įxcept for free will, I’ve never received as much pushback against what I see as a reasonable, science-based stand as I have for my opposition to panpsychism. But neither can materialism or dualism or any other theory of consciousness. I agree that panpsychism cannot be directly tested. As philosopher/panpsychism booster Philip Goff says: And they can maintain it to those who don’t think too hard because there can be no evidence against it-not until they tell us what consciousness means for a rock or an atom. It’s just consciousness all the way down. And, like religion, its advocates won’t admit of any evidence against their theory (i.e., the many palpable connections between the brain and consciousness), but maintain their hypothesis with no supporting evidence. I see panpsychism as a cult or a religion: an untestable proposition that adds no explanatory value to neuroscience or non-wooey philosophical approaches to consciousness. If the constituents of the brain-and all matter-have some kind of consciousness or some component of consciousness, they argue, then consciousness is inherent in our brain, just as it is in a rock or, as Patricia Churchland put it, in a dust bunny. But they see it as a superior alternative to dualism (i.e., the view that there is material “brain stuff” and nonmaterial “mind/consciousness stuff”) and also to materialism (consciousness is an epiphenomenon of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity) as way of explaining human consciousness. Its advocates don’t seem to define what it means for matter (like an electron) to be “conscious”, and they admit that there’s no way to test their theory. I’ll be posting a bit more about panpsychism in the weeks to come as I read and learn more about it, but the more I learn, the more I see it as a form of either woo or religion. Since we’ve been talking about panpsychism lately-that’s the theory that the entire Universe and its constituents are in some way conscious-I thought I’d post a podcast in which two opposing academics hash out the issues.
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