source: Galileo’s Error, by Philip Goff (Chapter 1)

The book is about conscious experience, and states that characterize our subjective inner lives

  • experiences are what make life worth living
  • it’s the only thing we know for sure is real
  • Rene Descarte - “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefor I am)

but we have not incorporated it into our scientific picture of the world

  • at this point, neuroscience hasn’t even started to explain it

We’ll get there in the end

In other branches of science (like biochemistry), we can focus on the answerable questions first. Then we might have the tools to get to the harder questions

the real problem of consciousness: mapping brain activity to conscious experience

  • we should take this problem seriously
  • we’ve started working on a theoretical framework to address the problem

Patricia Churchland - neurophilosopher, “get out of the armchair and into the lab” proponent

  • eliminative materialism the mind doesn’t exist and we shouldn’t try to explain it
  • thinks that complex functions of the mind (”thought”, “desire”) are outdated concepts
  • thinks we should talk about human behavior in terms of electrochemical processes in the brain

Science can tell us counterintuitive things about the world, but it can’t tell us we don’t have experiences

What is Science?

Science helps us reimagine nature

  • example: gravity is responsible for apples falling to the ground and the orbit of the moon
  • example: space and time aren’t two distinct entities. They’re both spacetime

We think of science as driven by experiments but thought experiments are powerful tools

  • Einstein used thought experiments to identify gravitational force as the result of curvature in the fabric of spacetime

The scientific revolution worked because it excluded consciousness from the domain of science

Philosophical Foundations of Science

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) - father of modern science

  • declared that math is the language of science

Aristotelian orthodoxy acceptance of Aristotle’s worldview

  • Ptolemaic view of the universe (earth at the center)
  • teleological theory (inanimate objects have goals)

We all assume that Galileo disproved Aristotle’s view through scientific method, but he did it using a thought experiment

Before Galileo, philosophers thought the world was full of sensory qualities. After, scientists thought of material objects as existing without sensory qualities

  • example: lemons aren’t yellow. We perceive the yellowness in our souls
  • example: sound exists in the material world only as waves. It only exists as sound when we listen to it

Galileo divided the world into material objects and souls

This was meant to be a partial description of reality

  • by narrowing the scope of inquiry, we’ve been able to achieve a lot using science

This means that science as we know it might not solve the problem of consciousness

First Option: Naturalistic Dualism

dualism divides nature into two categories:

  1. physical objects
  2. incorporeal consciousness

naturalistic dualism says the mind is not magical, but it’s part of the natural order

Second Option: Materialism

Radical materialists argue that consciousness is an illusion

Third Option: Panpsychism

Panpsychists believe that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world