Philosopher Philip Goff on Galileo Excluding Consciousness From Science

And you know, I think we shouldn't be surprised that physical science has this difficulty of consciousness because the scientific paradigm we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness. Should I talk a bit about that? Yes. So, yeah, so this is why I defended my book, Galileo's Error. So really the most important, well, I shouldn't say that, a key moment in the scientific revolution, right, is 1623, Galileo's decision that mathematics was going to be the language of science, right? This was the start of mathematical physics. What is not discussed much is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get there, right? Because the problem was before Galileo, people thought the world, the physical world was filled with qualities, right? So you have colors on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air, tastes inside food. And this was a problem for Galileo because you can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. You know, an equation can't capture the redness of a red experience. So Galileo got around this, so Galileo, you know, he wanted to describe it all in math. So Galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality. So we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which he was, but he was also a great philosopher. So he proposed this new philosophical theory of reality. And according to this theory, the qualities aren't really out there in the physical world, right? They're in the consciousness of the observer, right? So if you're looking at this, is that black? You're looking at that, you know, the blackness isn't really on the surface of the pen. It's in the consciousness of the person looking at it. Or if you're eating a spicy curry, the spiciness isn't really in the curry, it's in the consciousness. Of the person eating it. So Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities. And after he's done that, all that's left are the purely quantitative properties, size, shape, location, motion, properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry. So in Galileo's worldview, there's this radical division in nature between two domains. The quantitative domain of science, the physical world with its mathematical quantitative properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness, you know, consciousness with its colors, sounds, smells, tastes, which he took to be outside of the domain of science. So this is the start of mathematical physics, which has gone incredibly well. But I think what we've forgotten is that it's gone so well because Galileo gave science this narrow, specific focus. Galileo essentially said, you know, just put consciousness on one side, just focus on what you can capture in mathematics. So this is so important. So I think people were now living in a strange period of history where people like Sean Carroll, for example, think materialism has to be true because, you know, look how well physical science has done. You know, it's explained so much. Surely it's going to explain consciousness. The irony is it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. So I think if we if we want to bring consciousness fully into science, we need a new worldview. We need to find a way to bring together what Galileo separated to bring together the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of human consciousness. And that's what panpsychism does. It gives us a way of bringing this together. I'm not getting how Galileo excluded consciousness. It doesn't make any sense. I do understand that mathematics are what he felt was the underlying building blocks of all things. But even if you're talking about how like spicy curry, for example, spicy curry doesn't exist in the curry. It exists in the consciousness of someone who eats the curry. But it's not really true because there's a chemical reaction. We know what the ingredients are in the curry that causes it to have a spicy reaction to the human being that's taking it in. It's a very distinct, very definable chemical reaction that we know that these plants have excreted these chemicals to discourage predation. That's why they're so spicy in the first place. We know all these things like this is in a way mathematics. It's mathematics engaging with consciousness. Yeah, so look, there's definitely a lot we can do mathematically with the tools of mathematical science. Yeah, you can capture the chemical composition of the curry. You can capture the changes it makes in your brain. But then at some point, the resulting brain activity goes along with the sensation of spiciness. Well, you recognize it. That's where the miracle happens. But you recognize it because your pain sensors in your tongue and the sensations of taste, this is mathematics, right? There's certain compounds that cause certain reactions. We even attribute genes to those compounds. The genes for some people, cilantro, taste like soap and some people that taste delicious. There's a genetic, we know for sure that there's a genetic component to that. We can actually isolate the very, very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction. So I think that the chemical story, the physical story can explain how people react to the taste, how people store information about it, how that impacts on their later behavior. But all of that story could in principle go on in what we call a zombie without any kind of inner life, any kind of experience of spiciness. It's conceivable that you could have a mechanism that had all those reactions and all those responses but there was no feeling of spiciness. I mean, it's sometimes a bit more vivid with color if you think about it. So I mean, here's another way of putting it, right? Because I wanted to explain in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience, right? Why red experiences have that red quality. So the first issue is, I don't think you can, and this is essentially Galileo's insight, you can't capture the redness of a red experience in the language of neuroscience. And the way to see that, you couldn't convey to a blind neuroscientist what it's like to see red by getting him to read your theory in Braille, right? You couldn't convey that to him. So that's a descriptive limitation, right? That the language of neuroscience, this purely quantitative language, can't express the redness of a red experience. So that's just a descriptive limitation. But I think it entails an explanatory limitation. Because if I wanted to present my brilliant neuroscientific theory that explained the redness of a red experience, my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes. But if the theory can't even describe it, then it can't explain it. So I think in principle, a neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience. Galileo 500 years ago realized that, and he said, if we want science to be mathematical, we have to take consciousness out of the story. And that was a good move, but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did. So now we're in a weird period of history where people think, oh, it's gone so well. But yeah, it's gone so well because we took consciousness out of the story, because you can't capture those qualities in a purely quantitative language. But what if it's both? What if it's both conscious and chemical? That seems more likely, right? Yeah, but that's essentially the panpsychist view, right? But the question is, what comes first? So both the panpsychists like myself and the materialist like Sean Carroll, for example, you know, many, many people are materialists, we both think, you know, in some sense, consciousness and chemicals go together. The question is, which is more fundamental? I think that we get physics and chemistry out of consciousness. We don't do it the other way around. It's very easy to explain. But, but, but, but, I still understand why you think that. Because I think, so we've got a choice. Well, we've got, there's three options really, right? Here, here are the three options on consciousness. Either matter is, consciousness is explained in terms of matter. That's the materialist view. All matter is explained in terms of consciousness. That's the panpsychist view. Or we've got a third option. Hold on, break that down again. So either, either consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain. That's the, that's the materialist view of, say, Sean Carroll. Second option, no, the brain is explained in terms of consciousness. That's my view. Right. That's the panpsychist view. Third option is, they're just, they're two separate things. That's the dualist view. But it's also, like, the soul is separate from the brain. Everything has some sort of component of consciousness. Yeah, but this, that's what I don't understand. How do you make that leap? Because I don't, you've got these three choices. I don't think, I think, look, I basically think the materialist view is incoherent. You just, you can't, you can't account for the qualities of experience in the purely quantitative language of physical science, right? That's Galileo's insight. Aren't the qualities of experience quantitative in and of itself? So you, I mean, yeah. With some qualities. You can, to an extent, capture the structure in quantitative terms. So, like, color experience has a mathematical structure. We can analyze it. Bright red versus a tall red. Yeah, we can analyze it in terms of hue, saturation, lightness. And we can map out a color space in terms of those three dimensions. Spectrum. So that's, yeah, it's not that they, they obviously have that quantitative structure. But you can't fully pin down, I would argue, maybe you disagree, the redness of a red experience in that language. I mean, I talk in my book about the color scientist, Nott Norby, who's a color scientist who's got some cones missing from his eyes. And so he's only ever seen black and white and shades of gray. But he's a color expert. And he talks about this and he says, when he tries to think about color, he compares it to sound. So he thinks of brightness maybe like loudness. And he says he can get some grip on the structure. But he says, you know, I'll never fully understand, you know, the redness that underlies that structure. Because he's colorblind. Because he's colorblind. Right. So I'm saying the qualities of experience can't be totally pinned down in that language. But right there in that example, the qualities of his experience can be pinned down to a problem in the structure of his eyes. It's chemicals. Yeah, we all agree. So look, we all agree that the kind of experience you have is dependent on the structure of your brain. Right. We all agree on that. But then there's a question is what explains that? Is that because the experience is explained in terms of the brain or is it the other way around? That's the philosophical question. The materialist says the experience is explained in terms of the brain activity. Right. I think that doesn't work out. I do it the other way around. I think it's much more straightforward, at least to explain the brain activity in terms of the consciousness. But the quality of the experience can be explained based on the way the brain works. I don't think so. If you add things to the brain, it changes the quality of the experience. If you add certain chemicals, certain dopamine, serotonin, you add things to the experience, it literally changes the way you view an interface. So yeah, I agree with what you've just said, which is basically a claim about correlation, that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience. Right. And certain kinds of chemicals are responsible for certain types of experiences being different. Well, I would just say that they go together. I would put it more neutrally. They always go together. But it's a scientific question. Say if you go to a concert and you take acid, you're going to have a very different experience than if you didn't take that acid. Absolutely. Absolutely. So definitely certain kinds of chemical activity go along with certain kinds of... And that's the scientific question. The hard problem of consciousness is why? Why do certain kinds of experience go together with certain kinds of brain activity go together with certain kinds of experience? And there's two ways of explaining that. You explain the experience in terms of the activity, the brain activity, or you explain the brain activity in terms of the experience.