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

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here