Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness - Softcover

Goff, Philip

 
9780525564775: Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0525564772 ISBN 13: 9780525564775
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness—panpsychism.

Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra," beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some even suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved. Decades have been spent trying to explain consciousness from within our current scientific paradigm, but little progress has been made.

Now, Philip Goff offers an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward. Rooted in an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and based on the early twentieth-century work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell, Goff makes the case for panpsychism, a theory which posits that consciousness is not confined to biological entities but is a fundamental feature of all physical matter—from subatomic particles to the human brain. In Galileo's Error, he has provided the first step on a new path to the final theory of human consciousness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PHILIP GOFF is a philosopher who teaches at Durham University. He is the author of Consciousness and Fundamental Reality and has published more than forty academic papers. His writing has also appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement, and he has guest-edited an issue of Philosophy Now. He lives in Durham, England.

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1
How Galileo Created the Problem of Consciousness
 
 
As you read this page, you are having a visual experience of black letters against a white background. You can probably hear background noises: traffic, distant conversation, or the faint hum of a computer. You may be experiencing strong smells or tastes: the smell of coffee, the taste of mint as you chew a fresh piece of gum. Maybe you feel some emotions: a feeling of excitement, or sadness, or maybe you just feel a bit tired or distracted. If you pay attention, you will notice more subtle kinds of experience: the tactile sensation of the chair against your body, perhaps sensations of itchiness or throbbing in a knee or an arm. These are all forms of conscious experience. They are states that characterize your subjective inner life. These feel­ings and experiences make up what it’s like to be you.
 
Consciousness is fundamental to what we are as human beings. This is not to undermine the importance of the body: we are embodied creatures and we relate to one another through and with our bodies. But it is consciousness that defines the identity of the person. Fundamentally we know a person in terms of their feelings and thoughts, and the quirks of their personality. Perhaps one day in the future it will be possible to survive the death of the body by uploading one’s mind onto a computer, making it possible to talk to grandma via email long after her body has rotted in the ground. So long as the conscious mind survives, we feel that the person has survived. In contrast, when the conscious mind has gone, for example, in tragic cases of permanent coma, the living body can seem nothing more than a memorial to the person who once was.
 
Consciousness is also the source of much that is of value in existence. Without consciousness, the universe would still be just as immense and awe-inspiring. But without a conscious mind to appreciate its majesty, is there really any value in the existence of all that stuff? It is our experiences that make life worth living: exhilarating pleasures, sweeping emotions, subtle thoughts. Without consciousness none of these things is possible.
 
As well as being the ground of our identity and a source of great value, consciousness is the only thing we know for certain is real. I can’t know for certain that there really is a world out there. Perhaps I’m actually in the Matrix, naked and hairless, encapsulated in a vat of chemicals being fed information about a nonexistent virtual world by computers that are using me as an energy source. I might not even have a body: perhaps the computers disposed of my body long ago and now all that remains of me is a brain wired up to a computer. Or perhaps I am myself a computer, created by humans to think that I am a living human being.
 
But there is one thing I know for certain: I exist as a con­scious being. If I am in the Matrix, the computers might be deceiving me about all kinds of things, but they can’t be making me think I’m conscious when I’m not. Perhaps my visual experi­ence of the room around me doesn’t correspond to anything real, but I know I am having a visual experience nonetheless. The only thing I have direct access to are my own experiences.
 
Everything else is known indirectly, believed on the basis of what I experience. All knowledge of reality is mediated through consciousness.
 
This was the insight of the father of modern philosophy René Descartes (1596–1650), summed up with his famous line “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” This phrasing is potentially misleading. Descartes wasn’t saying that he exists because he thinks. (Hence the following old joke doesn’t really work: Descartes goes into a bar. Barman says, “Want a beer?” Descartes replies “I think not” and disappears.) Descartes’s point is about knowledge: he knows for certain that he thinks—or more broadly that he is a conscious being—and in knowing this he thereby knows that he exists. The certain knowledge of one’s existence as a conscious being was, for Descartes, the starting point of all knowledge.
 
Nothing is more certain than consciousness, and yet nothing is harder to incorporate into our scientific picture of the world. We now know a great deal about the brain, much of it discovered in the last eighty years. We understand how neurons—the basic cells of the brain—work in terms of their underlying chemistry. We know the function of many regions of the brain, in terms of processing information and negotiating sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. But none of this has shed any light on how the brain produces consciousness.
 
Some people dismiss this as simply reflecting the fact that the physical science of the brain—neuroscience—has a long way to go. But if explaining consciousness is a work in progress, one might reasonably expect neuroscience to have yielded a partial explanation of consciousness, accounting for some human experiences but leaving trickier cases unexplained. The reality is that, for all its virtues, neuroscience has thus far failed to provide even the beginnings of an explanation.
 
This is all the more extraordinary when we contrast it with the great progress science has made in explaining other phenomena. The scientific story of water or gasoline explains the observable characteristics of these substances. We get a satisfying account of why, for example, water boils at 100 degrees centigrade or of why gasoline is flammable. Our scien­tific understanding of genes continues to provide ever greater insight into how certain traits are passed on from generation to generation. Astrophysics is able to explain how stars and planets are formed. In all of these cases we find satisfying explanations. And yet our increased understanding of the electrochemical processes of the brain has failed to yield insight into how those processes give rise to a subjective inner world.
 
 
 
WE’LL GET THERE IN THE END . . .
 
Physical science has a dismal track record in explaining con­sciousness. But the track record of physical science in explaining pretty much everything else is impressive. Many scientists and philosophers take this to be good evidence that, in spite of current disappointments, neuroscience will one day crack the mystery of consciousness.
 
The neuroscientist Anil Seth makes an analogy to life. It used to be thought that life was an inherently mysterious phe­nomenon, which could be explained only via the postulation of mysterious nonphysical “vital forces.” Few people these days take this view, known as “vitalism,” seriously. According to Seth, this was not because some philosophers solved “the problem of life.” We moved on from the days of vitalism because bio­chemists, instead of dwelling on the mystery, got on with the job of explaining the properties of living systems—metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, etc.—in terms of underlying mecha­nisms, and eventually the sense of mystery dissipated.
 
Seth urges us to take a similar approach to consciousness. It’s what we might call the “Get out of the armchair and into the lab” approach. Seth recommends that instead of dwelling on why consciousness exists in the first place, we should rather focus on what he calls the “real” problem of consciousness: the challenge of mapping correlations between what goes on in the brain and what is experienced by the person. Seth predicts that, just as in the case of life, the sense of mystery will...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525564772
ISBN 13 
9780525564775
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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