Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, by Philip Goff

Thanks to Jane O'Grady for her penetrating review of Philip Goff's book, which provides an opportunity to elaborate here one particular argument in denial of panpsychism [1], and perhaps one rather unlikely one in its favour. To quote David Chalmers, a leading proponent of panpsychism: “…we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. For example, if quarks or photons have mental states, that suffices for panpsychism to be true, even if rocks and numbers do not have mental states. Perhaps it would not suffice for just one photon to have mental states. The line here is blurry, but we can read the definition as requiring that all members of some fundamental physical types (all photons, for example) have mental states.” [2] So, full-blown panpsychism effectively demands that the fundamental particles of the Standard Model [3] possess some intrinsic – if very elementary – characteristic(s) of consciousness (rather than merely participating as “spear carriers” in the neural processes of biomolecular brains from which animal consciousness appears to emerge) – otherwise consciousness is ‘just’ a function of the organisation of matter at some higher (non-fundamental) level. (For example, I can agree that chemotaxing single-celled creatures [4] are, in some very primitive sense, making "decisions" about the optimal nutrient gradient, which arguably is a very primitive sensory-motor function [5] and therefore likely a precursor of consciousness – before even the proposed Cambrian-Period origin of consciousness [6]). However, it seems to me that quantum electrodynamics’ ability to calculate with extreme precision the values of properties of fundamental particles (e.g. the electron's spin g-factor [7]), to better than one part in a trillion) suggests that fundamental particles do not have sufficient “degrees of freedom” to possess what Chalmers (op. cit.) calls “mental states”. Incidentally, panpsychism only seems arguable to me if, as some have speculated, our universe is but a simulation in a superordinate universe [8] in which panpsychism might be programmed – though we’d probably never know it. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ [2] Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism1 - David Chalmers consc.net/papers/panpsychism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-motor_coupling [6] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00667/full [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

In this review, Jane O’Grady writes quoting Galileo: “ Galileo claimed that they “reside only in the consciousness”, the result of external stimuli. …”. I just bought Goff’s interesting work. However, at a first glance the author does not give this quote. Rather he writes that “sensory qualities reside in the soul.” (p. 19) However, Galileo has never written this! This phrase, which is often quoted, is based on an incorrect translation by S. Drake of the Italian text: “Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only consciousness.” Instead, Galileo writes : “ I Per lo che vo io pensando che questi sapori, odori, colori, etc., per la parte del suggetto nel quale ci par che riseggano, non sieno altro che puri nomi, ma tengano solamente lor residenza nel corpo sensitivo,nstead, … » Which has been more recently translated by M. Finocchiaro as : “Thus, from the point of view of the subject in which they seem to inhere, these tastes, odors, colors, etc., are nothing but empty names; rather they inhere only in the sensitive body,…” So, the sensory qualities are just as the primary qualities presented in the Assayer (1623) as something corporeal of which we have ideas that we sense. The corporeal aspect of the sensory qualities is consequently just as the priary qualities accessible to physical research applying physical laws. I have written a paper on this subject which might be helpful: https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/docs/GSC3790/F569504904_CSQPM_WPQSEMP_No1_2015.pdf Best wishes, Dr. Filip Buyse