Book Review: ‘Galileo’s Error’ A Treat For Consciousness Theorists And The Philosophy-Oriented 

Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Philip Goff. 235 pages. Rs 431.30. Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Panpsychism is the philosophical notion that says that consciousness forms an integral component of existence at the very fundamental level.

There are panpsychists and then there are panpsychists.

One can consider Baruch Spinoza a panpsychist and he was a monist.

Then, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a dualist, was also a panpsychist.

Once considered as outdated, there is today a renewed interest in panpsychism.

David Chalmers, in 2013, proposed what he calls ‘panprotopsychism’, where the very fundamental particles are considered as ‘protoconscious’. This also has its own problem.

In his book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Penguin 2020), Philip Goff, who teaches philosophy at Durham University, takes us through an odyssey into the philosophical universe of panpsychism, explaining experiments and thought experiments that show the reader the reason for the renewed interest in panpsychism.

He also does not fail to tell us the formidable challenges panpsychism still faces.

However, will the problem of consciousness itself naturally disappear as science progresses, as in the case of the ‘problem’ of life?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth thinks so.

If we take up ‘the challenge of mapping correlations between what goes on in the brain and what is experienced by the person’ then the mystery of consciousness may vanish on its own.

Goff is not sure. He says:

Can scientists tell us ultimately that consciousness itself may be an illusion? “We would never, and should never, accept such claims,” says he. Instead, he proposes this:

Goff takes the famous thought-experiment — Mary lives in a totally black and white box and has experienced only black and white all her life. But she has an exceptional comprehensive knowledge of all the colours and colour vision.

Now, when she experiences actual colour vision, what happens?

Is there something new added on through the experience of colour vision to her knowledge of colour experience, even if she had all the neuro-psychological knowledge of colour vision?

Conceived by Australian philosopher Frank Jackson in 1982 and called ‘knowledge argument’, this has been unsettling for materialists.

Though Jackson himself lost his faith in what he wanted to imply through this thought experiment, and became a materialist, the ‘knowledge argument’ still creates serious debates in the field of consciousness studies.

If materialism is true, then for Mary, in her black-and-white realm, having ‘a complete and final theory of color experience, ... it shouldn’t be possible for her to learn about some new essential features of color experiences.’

But when she sees colours in real world stepping out of the black and white realm, she does learn ‘about what it’s like to have color experiences.’ (pp.73-4)

He also narrates his interaction with Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett on board a ship in the Arctic, which was essentially a sailing conference on consciousness arranged by by Dmitry Volkov, the co-founder of the Center for Consciousness Studies.

After narrating his interaction with Dennett, he points out what stand a materialist philosopher like Daniel Dennett takes on the above thought-experiment:

Here, he cites the paper on the knowledge argument written by Knut Nordby, ‘an expert in color vision who has achromatopsia: a rare condition in which, due to the absence of retinal cones, one is unable to perceive any colors, apart from black and white and shades of gray.’

This is almost as close as one can get to the outlandish Mary thought experiment.

Here is the relevant part from Nordby’s paper that Goff quotes in his book:

Then, relating his own experience with the Mary experiment, Nordby says:

At this juncture, let it be pointed out that this particular aspect of the ‘thought experiment’ premise was well known to Saiva Siddhantins in India for a long time. Siddhantins take the famous parable of blind men feeling the elephant and change it thus, explains Dr. K. Sivaraman:

Particularly interesting is the take Goff has on the famous Benjamin Libet experiment.

In this amazing experiment, it was discovered that there is an average gap of 300 milliseconds between the brain initiating an action and the person doing the action actually consciously taking the decision to do that action.

The experiment has since the 1970s generated enormous debates in consciousness studies and as to whether free will is an illusion. Pointing out that Libet’s early findings have been validated by even later experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which have shown that ‘the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of the prefrontal and parietal cortex up to ten seconds before it enters awareness’, he gives an interpretation to this discovery thus:

To him, irrespective of whether free will is an illusion or not, panpsychism stands:

With panpsychism, how do we then judge non-human animals and also the inanimate realm? Here again, Goff makes the following speculation:

When one reads these lines of Goff, it is hard not to be reminded of what neuroscientist Donald Hoffman writes in his ‘Case against reality’, dealing almost with a similar situation:

One should remember that Donald Hoffman considers himself not a panpsychist, which he considers a dualist, but subscribes to what he calls ‘conscious realism’ which he considers as ‘non-physicalist monism’.

The so-called ‘mystic’ or non-dual experiences which are ‘distinct’ and ‘cross-culturally pervasive’ naturally provide a fertile ground for what Goff calls earlier in the book ‘post-Galilean paradigm’ for science:

Here, Dr. Goff is influenced by Miri Albahari, an ‘analytical Buddhist’ and a faculty at the University of Western Australia. A very interesting and significant part of the book is where Goff connects Advaitic experience with what Sam Harris and Steve Pinker emphasise as ‘objective moral truth’.

Contrasting between the Christian theistic approach to objective moral truth, which is philosophically deficient, Goff offers the Advaitic alternative for the ‘objective moral truth’:

Incidentally, both Swami Vivekananda and Dr. B R Ambedkar had made the same argument for social and individual ethics from a non-dualist point of view. At his lecture The spirit and influence of Vedanta delivered at the Twentieth Century Club in Boston on 28 March 1896, Swami Vivekananda explained the ethical implications of the Upanishadic conception of the Self as follows:

To move on to our author, of course, the purpose of Goff is not advocating Advaita as such but to build upon it a framework:

But with a caution typical of a rigorous academic, he does make it clear to which side his own sympathies belong:

On the whole, the book is a feast for the philosophy-oriented. They provide us a great insight into the philosophical debates and dialogues that are happening in the academia and how they, in turn, interact and influence science as well as the values of society and individual.

For Hindus, who have a rich heritage of diverse Darshana-systems and a vast repository of mystic experiences through millennia, the book shows how we can benefit humanity by creating frameworks and epistemological tools out of that Sanatana treasure chest.