Philosopher Philip Goff has gained some notice as an advocate of a view of reality called panpsychism, the theory that everything in the universe is comprised of particles which have rudimentary consciousness. When those particles arrange themselves in particular ways, such as in a brain, the thing which they comprise has conscious experience to a greater or lesser degree.
Goff talks about this idea in an interview with Gareth Cook published in Scientific American he discusses what this means.
Here are some excerpts:
GC: Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?
PG: In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.
This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.
It might be important to clarify what I mean by “consciousness,” as that word is actually quite ambiguous. Some people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, such as self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. This is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to many nonhuman animals, never mind fundamental particles. But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.
Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.
GC: You write that you come to this idea as a way of solving a problem in the way consciousness is studied. What, in your mind, is the problem?
PG: Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.
GC: How does panpsychism allow you to approach the problem differently?
PG: The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first; you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter. But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter, what it does.
Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself.
What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.
There's much more from the interview at the link.
As crazy as his theory may sound, he might be onto something, but I think he nevertheless places himself in unnecessary metaphysical handcuffs.
Goff is a naturalist. His ontology doesn't allow for anything "supernatural" in or beyond the universe.
This is an unfortunate restriction, in my opinion, because his theory raises several questions which would seem to be unanswerable in a naturalistic framework. For example, where does consciousness in the universe come from? How did it emerge out of the Big Bang? Is the universe as a whole a conscious entity? If so, is not panpsychism really just pantheism?
If, on the other hand, the universe and every particle in it is more like an idea in the mind of God, as the philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) believed, then there would potentially be a unified answer to the above questions.
The consciousness in, or of, the universe would be the product of a conscious God. Each subatomic particle might then be viewed as something like a pixel of mind or consciousness which make up our reality somewhat like the pixels on a computer screen make up various images.
In other words, Goff's panpsychism may give us an interesting glimpse of reality, but his naturalism seems to place an unnecessary constraint on its fruitfulness.
