Skip to main content

Philip Goff - Five Way Interview

Philip Goff is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His research focuses on consciousness and the ultimate nature of reality. Goff is best known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. He is the author of  Why? the Purpose of the Universe (OUP, 2023).

Why philosophy?  

I love science, and try to stay as up to date as I can. But not every question can be answered with an experiment. Philosophy is about how all the different stories we tell about reality fit together. How does free will fit together with (near) deterministic physics? How do ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ fit with the value-less facts of science? How do invisible feeling and experiences mesh with the observable electro-chemical signalling of the brain? Experiments can inform our answers to these questions, but they can’t decisively settle them. 

Why this book?

So many people feel they have to fit into the dichotomy of either believing in the God of traditional Western religion or being a secular atheist. I was raised Catholic, but decided I didn’t believe in God when I was 14, and was happily on Team Secular for a long time. It wasn’t as though there was a God-shaped hole in my life, as far as I was aware. But over a long period of time, I came to think that both of these worldviews – the God hypothesis on the one hand, and the secular atheists belief in a purposeless universe on the other – were inadequate, both of them had things they can’t explain about reality. This led me to write this book defending cosmic purpose in the absence of the traditional God, and exploring its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Your demolition of the multiverse argument from fine tuning is impressive - why do you think we don’t see this argument cropping up in popular science?

I think it’s a typical case of academic talking to themselves. This objection to the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse – that it commits the ‘inverse gambler’s fallacy’ – has been in the academic journals for decades. And yet nobody outside of academic philosophy knows about it, despite huge interest in this stuff. Moreover, believe it or not, nobody has ever linked this specific objection to the science of the multiverse, which is something I do in the book. So I’m really excited to get these ideas out to a broader audience. I’ve always thought fine-tuning needed explaining, and for a long time I thought the multiverse was the more plausible explanation. But I was slowly persuaded – dragging kicking and screaming, might be a better way of putting it – to these arguments from experts in probability theory that there’s some dodgy reasoning going on in the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse. As a result I now think explaining fine-tuning has to involve cosmic purpose. That’s weird, and not how we expected science to turn out. But we should aside our cultural biases – both religious and secular – and just follow the evidence where it leads.

What’s next?

A rest. After that, I want to explore in more depth the under-explored challenge of how to make sense of the evolution of consciousness, which is one of the themes of the book. Natural selection just cares about behaviour, because it’s only behaviour that matters for survival. But recent developments in AI and robotics have revealed to us that you can have incredible complex information processing and behaviour in a system that doesn’t have any kind of conscious inner life. So why didn’t natural selection make survival mechanisms: complex biological robots that can mechanically track features of their environment and initiate complex survival behaviour, without being conscious? If we can’t answer that question, then we can’t explain why consciousness evolved at all.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m excited to see scientists and philosophers coming together to make progress on these big questions. Science and philosophy need each other, especially when it comes to things like consciousness where no one really knows yet what the rules of the game are. In my previous book Galileo’s Error, I explored how the father of modern science Galileo put consciousness outside of the domain of science, to pave the way for mathematical physics. That worked really well for last four hundred years, because it gave scientists a focused, manageable project. But if we now want to bring consciousness back into the domain of science, if we want to answer the ‘Why?’ questions as well as the ‘How?’ questions, we need to find ways for scientists to work hand in glove.

Image © Emma Goff


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more