How Modern Science Got Consciousness Wrong From the Start | Philip Goff

What It Covers

Philosopher Philip Goff argues that Galileo's 17th-century decision to exclude consciousness from mathematical science created an unsolvable explanatory gap. Goff presents panpsychism — the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe underlying all physical reality — as the most coherent framework for resolving this 400-year-old scientific blind spot.

Key Questions Answered

• •Galileo's Error: Galileo deliberately excluded subjective experience from mathematical science to make physics purely quantitative — a pragmatic move that launched the Scientific Revolution but permanently severed consciousness from scientific inquiry. To make genuine progress on consciousness, researchers must reunite what Galileo separated: first-person knowledge gained from inner experience with third-person knowledge gained through experiment and observation.
• •Panpsychism vs. Physicalism: Physicalism — the dominant view that consciousness emerges from brain processes — is, according to Goff, not merely unproven but incoherent. It fails to explain why any physical process produces subjective experience at all. Panpsychism avoids this by positing consciousness as the foundational layer of reality, with physical properties like mass, spin, and charge emerging from it rather than the reverse.
• •AI Consciousness Skepticism: Despite panpsychism's broad scope, Goff argues large language models are unlikely to be conscious. Panpsychism does not hold that every physical combination is conscious — only fundamental particles or fields carry rudimentary experience. Goff suggests genuine artificial consciousness would require something closer to an artificial living system, such as a synthetic microbe, rather than computational architectures.
• •The Combination Problem: The central challenge for panpsychism is explaining how rudimentary particle-level consciousness combines into unified human experience. Two approaches exist: treating combination as a brute primitive fact, or constructing a reductionist account where unification emerges automatically. Either way, Goff argues panpsychism retains Occam's razor appeal by grounding all of reality in a single type of property.
• •Strong Emergence as Empirical Test: Goff proposes that if consciousness confers genuine survival advantage — which evolution suggests it must — then it likely introduces new causal dynamics in the brain not fully predictable from known chemistry or physics. Identifying these dynamics, analogous to Maxwell adding electromagnetic laws, could empirically distinguish conscious systems from purely mechanistic ones and resolve whether consciousness is biological or computational.
• •Quantum Mechanics Connection: Goff endorses exploring models where consciousness and quantum wave function collapse are explained by a single theoretical posit, following work by David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen. He finds the Penrose-Hameroff microtubule hypothesis less compelling, arguing its philosophical motivations around Gödel's incompleteness theorem are unconvincing, while acknowledging that linking consciousness to quantum mechanics deserves more mainstream scientific attention.