Philip Goff's "Galileo's Error: A Fresh Look at the Foundations of Consciousness"

Craig Vander Maas: This book is an excellent presentation on the various conceptualizations of consciousness. Although the subject matter can be challenging, Goff is a wonderful writer, and the read is very enjoyable.

United States on Dec 01, 2023

Steve P: Are you looking for a surprisingly good book that will make you question your beliefs about reality? Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff is a great fit. It's packed with thought-provoking concepts about philosophy and science. The book delves into the exciting idea that consciousness isn't just the result of physical happenings in the brain. Inste­ad, it’s a core aspect of the unive­rse itself.

First up, the book dives into the tricky subject of consciousness. How can physical stuff lead to subjective experience, and why? Goff believes it starts with Galileo. He's known for separating "real" features, like shape, size, and motion, from "felt" features, like colour, sound, and taste. He argued that science should only focus on "real" properties, leaving "felt" properties to religion or metaphysics. Goff labels this splitting as “Galileo’s error." He believes it created a chasm between the physical and mental worlds, which science has struggled to reconcile.

Next, Goff critiques the leading efforts to tackle the consciousness question. These are primarily based on materialism—the notion that the brain creates consciousness—and dualism—the belief that the...

Australia on Nov 08, 2023

Amazon Customer: This review is for people interested in its content and learning about the philosophy of consciousness.

The content presented was very well written and clear so that anyone with no prior knowledge could begin the book and understand the key points.

Subjects & content:
The book introduces the fundamental reasons for discontent with the most popular theories of consciousness and ontology, it then proceeds to explain the author’s view of panpsychism and covers lots of arguments and thought experiments that have lead people down different paths with regards to the question of consciousness and existence. It has a theme of conflict between the modern scientific method and obsession with quantitative data, and the qualitative data necessary to know of consciousness and existence itself. It demonstrates that it is impossible to have a complete ontology and theory of consciousness without taking our qualitative conscious experience as a point of evidence from which we can then build a framework of how it fits into the nature of reality. The book ends with a discussion on the implications of the author’s view of panpsychism.

Quality of literature:
The...

United Kingdom on Sep 12, 2023

Bishub Boruah: Mysticism and spirituality could be discussed more elaborately together with Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and so on. Any modern book (whatever the subject matter) should try to mention the name of at least one black person for the the sake of conscious humanity. However, panpsychism might be the answer!

India on Aug 19, 2023

N: sehr informativ, gut verständlich geschrieben

Germany on Aug 13, 2023

jacob: Goff proposes how his view “panpsychism” solves or avoids the major problems of substance dualism and materialism. Here’s the view:

Panpsychism - Every fundamental feature of our world is conscious. Whatever the smallest bits of reality are, they are conscious. Subatomic particles, for instance, are conscious. Their experiences are extraordinarily simple, to such a degree that they don’t really resemble our experiences at all, but they are nonetheless conscious. Moreover, higher forms of consciousness have somehow emerged from these lower forms. Perhaps cells have more complex consciousnesses than the quantum particles from which they emerge. And perhaps the even more complex human consciousnesses emerge from the less complex consciousnesses of brain cells.

Sound crazy? Well… many people have thought so. But whether it sounds crazy should take a back seat to how well the theory satisfies criteria for a good explanation. Here’s where Goff really shines and argues for panpsychism.

First of all, we must understand that while the language of physics has been extraordinary in describing the world to us, it has restricted itself to describing merely how...

United States on Jun 17, 2023

Janezic: Galileo’s Error is interesting introduction to current philosophical debates about consciousness, criticizing materialistic- naturalistic approach to consciousness and mathematical explanation of matter.
The original fault lies on Galileo, who declared that scientific language is language of mathematics, quantitative, not qualitative, therefore consciousness can’t be explained in this therms. But already Husserl criticized Galileo in his best, last book: “Crises of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. Philip Goff never mentioned Husserl, what is not polite nor academically correct. It is Husserl who blames Galileo for “mathematization of nature” and reality, suffering from illusion of objectivity. According to Husserl Galileo hoped, as all materialistic, empiricist scientists later, that with improvement of measuring methods models in theory will approximate to physical reality, what is naturalistic illusion. Science becomes matter of measuring, loosing its object. Husserl advocated universal philosophy, not separated from science.
Regarding theory of panpsychism, which originates from English physicist Eddington, and is now popularized by...

Italy on Jul 09, 2021

Erik Moeller: Is rudimentary consciousness a fundamental property of matter? The idea strikes many people as bizarre, because it evokes notions of self-aware household objects and tomatoes screaming in pain as they make their way into the pasta sauce. But it deserves more precise articulation and a fair hearing.

In “Galileo’s Error”, philosopher Philip Goff makes the case for this idea, known as panpsychism, for a general audience. He begins by outlining the problems with dualist mind/matter explanations (where the mind is a separate “thing” that somehow interacts with matter), and with strictly materialist explanations that neglect to offer any explanation for the quality of conscious experience.

What if those qualities are the intrinsic nature of matter itself? In this view, the human mind is continuous with the universe in which it is embedded. There’s no need to postulate “special mind stuff”, to invent deities, or to wave your hands and say “emergent property”.

Instead, in this view, subatomic particles like electrons experience change, and more complex forms of consciousness can be built up (or indeed arise) from simple ones. The qualities of human...

United States on Nov 20, 2019