Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

A short, accessible case for panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and widespread feature of the physical world. Goff argues that the problem of consciousness was created at the birth of modern science. Galileo decided that physical science should describe matter purely in mathematical terms and set aside qualities such as colours, smells and tastes, placing them in the soul. This made physics enormously successful but, by design, left consciousness out. Materialism, he argues, cannot capture what experience is like, and dualism struggles to explain how an immaterial mind could act on the brain. Following Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington, he suggests that physics tells us only what matter does, not what it intrinsically is, leaving room for its intrinsic nature to be consciousness. He faces the combination problem: how tiny conscious subjects could make up a single mind. Critics reply that panpsychism is hard to test and that the combination problem remains unsolved.

It is the clearest short introduction to panpsychism and to why consciousness is such a hard problem for science, written by one of the view's leading defenders.