Goff’s Panpsychism

Philosopher Philip Goff starts from the premise “one thing that science could never show is that consciousness does not exist” and he mounts a vigorous, rigorous case for panpsychism, the staggering idea (at least initially) that “consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.” He positions consciousness as “fundamental to what we are as human beings,” “the source of much that is of value in existence,” “the ground of our identity and a source of great value,” and “the only thing we know for certain is real.” He sets up the explanatory tension: “Nothing is more certain than consciousness, and yet nothing is harder to incorporate into our scientific picture of the world” (Goff, 2019a, Goff, 2019b).

Goff sets out to undermine materialism's traditional argument that neuroscience has both made enormous advances, evincing its power, and it has a long way to go, explaining its lack of success. None of the neuroscientific advances, Goff says, “has shed any light on how the brain produces consciousness” and while many neuroscientists take this as evidence that one day neuroscience will “crack the mystery of consciousness,” Goff turns their argument around and claims it is evidence that the cause of consciousness differs in kind from the causes of other scientific problems.

“Explaining consciousness will require a change in our understanding of what science is,” he argues; this is because “the scientific revolution itself was premised on putting consciousness outside of the domain of scientific inquiry” (i.e., Galileo's Error). “If we ever want to solve the problem of consciousness,” he declares, “we will need to find a way of putting it back” (Goff, 2019a, Goff, 2019b).

Goff positions panpsychism as conceding that “there is an element of truth” in each of the claims of naturalistic dualism, that immaterial minds are part of the natural order, and materialism, that the physical world will ultimately explain inner experience. No doubt, as Goff states, “An increasing number of philosophers and even some neuroscientists are coming around to the idea that it [panpsychism] may be our best hope for solving the problem of consciousness” (Goff, 2019a, Goff, 2019b). It's fascinating to explore why.

Targeting each of the major competing theories of consciousness, Goff claims to show their inadequacies—which, given the challenge of explaining consciousness, is not the most difficult of tasks. Goff defends panpsychism, stressing arguments from simplicity and parsimony. Panpsychism, obviously, has its own problems—especially the pesky combination problem—which Goff gamely addresses. His debates with intellectual opponents are probative (Kastrup, 2020a, 2020b).

Critiques and Responses

Goff responds to Christof Koch's “startling counter-example to Goff's claim that qualitative aspects of conscious experience cannot be captured by quantitative considerations.”^[1] But while Goff voices “no doubt that we can in principle map out the quantitative structure of visual experience in mathematical language,” he denies that such a mathematical description can fully capture the qualities that fill out that structure. If it could, he says, “we could use the mathematical description to explain to a colorblind neuroscientist what it’s like to see color,” which, he says, is absurd. Purely quantitative language entails an “explanatory limitation,” Goff contends, and “if a purely quantitative theory can't even convey the qualities of experience, then it certainly can't reductively account for them” (Goff, 2021).

In a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies dedicated to Goff's panpsychism, Goff responds extensively to commentators and critics (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2021). He frames his argument broadly: “The problem of consciousness is rooted in the philosophical foundations of science” such that “we can't account for the qualities of consciousness in the purely quantitative language of physical science” (Goff, 2021).

In his multifaceted replies to scientists, Goff stresses science's explanatory limitation and he is not persuaded that the various arguments, such as Rovelli's relational or perspectival approach, can solve the “two aspects of consciousness that give rise to a hard problem: qualitivity and subjectivity”^[2]—either, in Goff's view, would be “sufficient to refute materialism” (Goff, 2021).

In his multifaceted replies to philosophers, Goff focuses on panpsychism's combination problem and offers a form of “hybrid panpsychism,” which distinguishes sharply “between subjects and their experiences, holding that the former are ‘strongly emergent’ (i.e., they can't be reductively explained) whilst the latter are ‘weakly emergent’ (i.e., they can be reductively explained, in terms of consciousness at the level of physics)” (Goff, 2021).

Thus, Goff addresses the challenge that strong emergent panpsychism, which postulates fundamental psychophysical laws of nature, suffers problems similar to those of dualism, and weak emergent panpsychism, without such extra laws, suffers problems similar to those of physicalism. He argues that this "new hybrid of the strong and weak emergentist forms of panpsychism"—where "subjects of experience are strongly emergent but their phenomenal properties are weakly emergent"—is a form of cosmopsychism rather than micropsychism (Goff, 2024).

Hybrid Panpsychism and Theology

In his multifaceted replies to theologians, Goff disputes the notion that “the case for panpsychism should also lead one to theism,” because, for one, a “self-explainer” can be the universe itself; God is not the only choice here (Goff, 2021).

Footnote

[1]. Koch compares Integrated Information Theory with Panpsychism.

[2]. Goff in “Chalmers's Hard Problem of Consciousness” at “Exploring Consciousness.”