“[W]e should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true, not which view we would most like to be true.” — Philip Goff (in Galileo’s Error)
In late December 2019, I wrote an essay called ‘Philip Goff Offers Us Non-Philosophical Reasons to be Panpsychists’. This piece discussed Professor Philip Goff’s forays into what he himself calls the “New Age” and “hippie” aspects of panpsychism. (See also: Panpsychism is Not Just for Hippies: Philip Goff in conversation with Raymond Tallis — YouTube.) Indeed the British philosopher Colin McGinn (who, ironically enough, is often classed as a “mysterian”) has said that panpsychism is
“a complete myth, a comforting piece of utter balderdash. . . isn’t there something vaguely hippyish, i.e. stoned, about the doctrine?”.
(This passage from McGinn has been quoted many times — yet I haven’t been able to find the original source.)
I attempted to be very careful in that original essay; though I don’t deny there are small amounts of rhetoric within in. However, when I wrote it, I hadn’t read Goff’s book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, which was originally published in November 2019 (i.e., a month or so before my essay).
It seems that I was certainly on the right track. And, if anything, I was being far too kind to Philip Goff.
So I happily admit that Goff’s political and religious/spiritual motivations are being focussed upon in this current essay. That said, Goff must know where I’m coming from because, in Galileo’s Error, he too writes the following words:
“I once asked Chalmers if he has any spiritual beliefs or religious commitments. He answered, ‘Only that the universe is cool.’…”
Now it might have been the case that Goff didn’t have Chalmers’ religious motivations for his philosophies in mind here. It might simply have been general chitchat which Goff referred to. Of course that’s very unlikely to be the case for two reasons: 1) Why did Goff bring this subject up at all in his book? 2) David Chalmers’ “religious commitments” had indeed been brought up by some philosophers who were critical of his philosophical positions.
Passages From Galileo’s Error
So just to give a taster of what this essay has in mind, I’ll quote a few passages from Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff. But, firstly, it’s worth noting that Philip Goff often uses academic hedging in many of the statements which follow. (He uses phrases such as “if [x] were true”, “my hope is…”, “is likely to be true”, “has the potential”, “imagine if”, “I emphasise the if one last time”, “in a certain sense”, etc.)
Anyway, here goes:
“For a child raised in a panpsychist worldview, hugging a conscious tree could be a natural and normal as stroking a cat.”
“[] It entails that there is, in a certain sense, life after death.”
“The view of the mystics, in contrast, does provide a satisfying account of the objectivity of ethics… According to the testimony of mystics, it is this realization [“formless consciousness”] that results in the boundless compassion of the enlightened.”
“My hope is that panpsychism can help humans once again to feel that they have a place in the universe. At home in the cosmos, we might begin to dream about — and perhaps make real — a better world.”
“Could our philosophical worldview be party responsible for inability to avert climate catastrophe?”
“[] I also think that [panpsychism] is a theory of Reality somewhat more consonant with human happiness than rival views.”
“… if they were taught to walk through a forest in the knowledge that they are standing amidst a vibrant community: a buzzing, busy network of mutual support and care.”
“Panpsychism has a potential to transform our relationship with natural world.
“[W]e now know that plants communicate, learn and remember. I can see no reason other than anthropic prejudice not to ascribe to them a conscious life of their own.”
“It is no surprise that in this worldview [“dualism” — Goff says almost identical things about “materialism” in these respects] the act of tree hugging is mocked as sentimental silliness. Why would anyone hug a mechanism?”
My Ad Hominems Against Philip Goff
In terms of my amateur psychology and ad hominems, I’m not arguing that motivations alone — or even at all — render Philip Goff’s actual arguments false. In addition, if my accounts of Goff’s motivations aren’t philosophy — then they aren’t philosophy. And? (I suspect that Goff’s academic friends will call this piece — if they ever read it — a “hatchet job” or some other cliché.)
In any case, Goff himself won’t have much ground to criticise what’s written in this piece. Take his words in Galileo’s Error:
“[] One can’t help wondering whether the Churchlands’ early courtship involved poetry expressing the strength of their neuronal activations for each other. []”
Goff also classes Patricia Churchland as a “fearsome firebrand preacher”. He then states that Daniel Dennett is “uncompromising”. We also have this little example of a sarcastic ad hominem:
“Like his fellow materialist, Patricia Churchland, Dennett has little time for thought experiments, unless they are thought experiments intended to debunk the confused and oversimplistic intuitions that he believes drive most philosophical theories. As you might imagine, he is not prepared to learn lessons about consciousness from the far-fetched tale of Black and White Mary.”
But worse than all that, Goff treats many of his philosophical opponents as straw targets who’re also (seemingly) morally flawed in various ways. For example, he claims that Paul and Patricia Churchland “reject [the mind’s] very existence” and claim that “mental phenomena simply do not exist”. As I see it (even if I disagree with these philosophers), they don’t claim that the mind and mental phenomena don’t exist at all — they simply account for such things in ways that are at odds with Goff’s own philosophical positions. Now Goff may well believe that this effectively amounts to the same thing. Yet even then it’s still incorrect to claim that the Churchlands and Dennett deny the mind exists— they don’t!
Galileo’s Error
I quite enjoyed Galileo's Error. That is, apart from the chapter ‘Consciousness and the Meaning of Life’. That said, I don’t agree with much of the proceeding chapters either; but at least they’re well-argued.
So — on the whole — Galileo's Error is a successful popular-philosophy book with just the right mix of argument and (as it were) everydayness. And, at times, it’s even fairly technical. Yet despite all that, and like many other academic philosophers, Goff’s training and philosophical skills are very-quickly dropped once anything vaguely political or religious/spiritual is discussed. Then almost anything goes.
And it must also be said here that the chapter ‘Consciousness and the Meaning of Life’ isn’t at all like the speculation found in David Chalmers’ brilliant book The Conscious Mind (which Goff has clearly been inspired by). That is, no matter how speculative Chalmers is in that book (as elsewhere), he still provides convincing arguments and philosophical detail for his positions. In addition, Chalmers never indulges in rhetoric and poeticisms — as Goff does in the last chapter of his book (as well as, if to a much lesser extent, before that).
I suspect that Goff’s fellow academic (analytic) philosophers have been kind to Goff about Galileo’s Error because they’ve more or less ignored the last chapter. But is is the the themes in that chapter that have secured Goff his fame — or at least his relative fame.
What do I mean by Goff’s relative fame?
Well, for a start, there are well over 50 interviews with Philip Goff on YouTube alone (see here)! And that’s only to name the interviews in which he explicitly discusses panpsychism. Add to that the countless articles — many in mainstream journals and other media outlets — on Philip Goff and his panpsychism (see here).
Another display of Goff’s fame can be found in his own following words:
“The next stage was getting it accepted for publication, and I am indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, for helping me develop the proposal and securing a publisher. The only thing left t do then was to write it.”
In other words, unlike most writers (or at least the ones who aren’t already famous), Goff secured a book deal before he’d actually written his book! Indeed everything was in place before he actually wrote Galileo’s Error.
In terms of Goff’s positions on New-Age themes.
All the analytic philosophers — and academics — who wrote the puffs in my own (Penguin) copy of Galileo’s Error have largely ignored these New-Age accretions. (That’s all except Susan Schneider, who briefly mentions Goff “mulling over our place in the larger universe”.) In fact they’re all written by Goff’s close and slightly-less-close friends (on Twitter and elsewhere). They include David Papineau, Nigel Warburton (who actually came up with the title Galileo’s Error), David Chalmers, Keith Frankish and Stephen Law. As stated, none of them even mention Goff’s infatuations with such New-Age themes . And that’s despite the fact that the last chapter is as long some of the others chapters. Not only that: almost every time time Goff is interviewed or written about, these New-Age additions (are they additions?) are the main feature.
Goff Opens the Floodgates of Panpsychist Woo
In terms of the essay mentioned at the beginning, I concluded that piece with these words:
“Finally, I can’t help thinking that Goff is helping to open the floodgates. (I just mentioned telepathy and ley lines.)”
So it now seems that Goff had indeed already opened the New-Age (panpsychist) floodgates. Indeed that (as already hinted at) mainly explains Goff’s sudden appeal and new-found (relative)fame as a philosopher.
In that essay I also wrote these words:
“[] Goff isn’t doing himself any favours in this video. In it he talks about telepathy (he accepts its possibility, which is fine as it stands), ‘value in the universe’, the ‘universal mind’, etc. Indeed it gets worse as the video goes on. (I was waiting for something on ley lines and astral travelling.) Of course it can be argued that the person interviewing Goff is egging him on.”
As can be seen in the quote above, the stress is put on Goff hinting at (i.e., not explicitly endorsing or discussing in detail) these New Age or “hippie” themes and the fact that the person who interviewed him might well have (as it were) egged him on to cover them. But, as stated, that was before I read Galileo's Error.
It seems, then, that after reading Galileo’s Error, Goff himself explicitly cites his religious/spiritual and political reasons for believing in panpsychism; rather than merely hinting at them.
More relevantly (especially now that I’ve read that book), I wrote the following words in that original essay:
“The hard analytical work may well come after the fact (as it were). That’s my own ad hominem, anyway.”
In other words, Goff already had spiritual/religious and political reasons for believing in — and advancing — panpsychism, and only then did he get to work on the hard analytical work.
Yet Goff has sometimes claimed that it was — in fact — the other way around (i.e., that he was led to panpsychism purely by the arguments).
Yet isn’t it a bizarre coincidence that the political and spiritual aspects of panpsychism which Goff has now drawn out almost perfectly square with his politics and spiritual positions as they existed before he fully endorsed panpsychism? In other words, Goff’s philosophical panpsychism is almost tailor-made to go alongside (or simply back up) his prior political and spiritual beliefs.
In Galileo’s Error, Goff more or less admits all this. That is especially so because Goff claims to have been attracted to panpsychism from very early on — from the beginning of his postgraduate studies. (Goff did his undergraduate work at the University of Leeds during “the dying embers of the 20th century” — i.e., when panpsychism wasn’t fashionable.) For example, in one place Goff states that “[i]t was during this time [as a postgraduate] that I came across Thomas Nagel’s classic 1972 article ‘Panpsychism’”. This, of course, isn’t Goff saying that he was immediately bowled over by panpsychism.
Goff also writes:
“But the new professor at the University of Reading, Galen Strawson, was busy defending panpsychism… This seemed like the place for me.”
This suggests that Goff was sympathetic to panpsychism even before his postgraduate studies at the University of Reading.
Goff also says that because he was (as it were) scared of propagating panpsychism when a postgraduate, he kept his beliefs to himself. Add to that another autobiographical passage from Galileo’s Error:
“I cannot exaggerate the profound effect learning about panpsychism had on me… In panpsychism I found intellectual peace; I could live comfortably in my own skin. Moreover, I suddenly had a renewed enthusiasm for philosophy, and decided to take up graduate study the following September.”
So it can safely be said that Philip Goff was a panpsychist even before his postgraduate studies. And this fact somewhat clashes with his claim (which he’s expressed in various ways) that it has been the arguments which have led him to panpsychism.
In terms of his academic work, Goff wrote his first paper on panpsychism in 2006 (‘Experiences Don’t Sum’). Despite that, he still hasn’t tackled these New-Age additions in his academic papers. He has (kinda) done so when it comes to the various chapters (in various books) he has written — but even that had to wait until 2020 with his ‘Universal consciousness and the ground of logic’ and ‘Cosmopsychism, micropsychism and the grounding relation’.
And since only (on my count) 3 or 4 papers by Goff are explicitly on panpsychism, and none at all is on all these New-Age accretions, then one wonders why all this stuff features so extensively in his interviews and in Galileo’s Error.
(There is one slight complication for my position and that’s Goff’s paper from 2009: ‘Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help Us Explain Consciousness’. Judging by the title and abstract, it appears to be critical of panpsychism. Yet I can’t download a copy and I won’t purchase one from the academic publishers. In any case, perhaps, in 2009, Goff simply fluctuated in his position on panpsychism or the paper may not deliver exactly what the title appears to offer.)
What Philip Goff Wants to be True
In my original essay I quoted Goff stating the following (which can be found in this video interview):
“When we’re doing science or doing philosophy, then we should certainly be thinking about not which view we’d like to be true; but which view is most likely to be true.”
And, in Goff’s Galileo's Error, (more or less) the same words can be found again:
“But we should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true not which view we would most like to be true.”
The basic point, then, is that Goff isn’t practising what he’s preaching.
It’s almost as if he hopes that people will believe that his own motivations are (as it were) pure because he uses phrases like
“we should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true not which view we would most like to be true”.
That’s plainly false.
A thief/sexist may repeatedly make critical statements about stealing/sexism and, at the very same time, be a serial thief/serial sexist. This is a common phenomenon. Indeed it’s clear that the thief/sexist may come out with such grandstanding phrases precisely because he knows that he himself is a thief/sexist.
More specifically, take the following passage from the original essay:
“i) Philip Goff often claims that the ‘good things’ of panpsychism are simply its by-products.
ii) But what if Goff’s panpsychism is a byproduct of his believing in these good things?”
After now reading Galileo’s Error, I now know that I’ve even more reasons to believe that I’m right about this. That said, after i) and ii) above I did conclude with the following words:
“Philosophically, it may not matter either way [i.e., about these biographical details, etc.]. Well, most analytic philosophers wouldn’t care either way. Though psychologically and sociologically, surely it is of some interest.”
The Single Case of Goff’s Rainforest Realism
In terms of the technicalities of Philip Goff’s (as it were) New Ageism, let’s quote these following words:
“Imagine if children were raised to experience trees and plants in the same way, to see the movement of a plant toward the light as expressing its own desire and conscious drive for life, to accept the tree as an individual locus of sentience.”
This is incredible stuff.
Goff knows full well that even non-biological objects display “movement” in response to their environments. Even computers or electronic devices move or change in response to that which is external to them. Yet Goff doesn’t seem to believe that computers are — or even can be — conscious. Indeed he spends some time in Galileo’s Error saying so. (At the very least, Goff seems to be sympathetic to John Searle’s well-known Chinese Room argument.)
This also shows that perhaps the prime motivation for Goff believing that trees or plants have “desire[s]” and a “conscious drive for life” is political — or at least spiritual/religious. (Again, Goff uses academic hedging in most of these statements.) That is, Goff is showing us what he’d (to use his own words) “like to be true”, not what is “most likely to be true”. But, of course, Goff was aiming these words of warning about wanting things to be true at others — primarily at physicalists, materialists and (some?) evolutionary theorists.
Goff goes further when he writes:
“But accepting the consciousness of plant life means at the very least accepting that plants have genuine interests, interests that deserve our respect and consideration.”
And elsewhere:
“[I]f they were taught to walk through a forest in the knowledge that they are standing amidst a vibrant community: a buzzing, busy network of mutual support and care.”
Yet how do those words square with this other passage from Goff? -
“[P]anpsychists do not believe that consciousness like ours is everywhere.”
Yet it seems that Goff does believe that trees and other plants have “consciousness like ours”. So perhaps he doesn’t have the same position as these other panpsychists. Alternatively, perhaps only plants and animals (i.e., not rocks or computers) have consciousness like ours in Goff’s scheme. That said, Goff is far from clear about this. Indeed he stresses that consciousness goes all the way down to electrons and even to spacetime itself. It is true that Goff claims that there may be different levels of consciousness — but he isn’t clear about this when he’s talking about trees or plants. And using words like “vibrant community”, “mutual support and care”, “genuine interests”, etc. to refer to plants certainly shows us (despite the academic hedging) that Goff believes that plants have consciousness like ours. That is, there’s not even a hint from Goff that he’s being poetic or speculative here. Indeed he explicitly states that he’s not. For example, he also writes:
“[W]e now know that plants communicate, learn and remember. I can see no reason other than anthropic prejudice not to ascribe to them a conscious life of their own.”
So it’s ironic that Goff mentions “anthropic prejudice” when he himself is clearly indulging in the most crude forms of anthropomorphism imaginable. (Many people have a problem with anthropomorphism even when it comes to animals — never mind plants.)
So why is anthropomorphism somehow better that anthropocentrism (or Goff’s “anthropic prejudice”)? Don’t they both share the same (as it were) ánthrōpos (i.e., “human being”)? And so aren’t both positions equally suspect?
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Note: More Passages From Galileo’s Error
“My hope is that panpsychism can help humans once again to feel that they have a place in the universe. At home in the cosmos, we might begin to dream about — and perhaps make real — a better world.”
“Could our philosophical worldview be party responsible for inability to avert climate catastrophe?”
“[] I also think that [panpsychism] is a theory of Reality somewhat more consonant with human happiness than rival views.”
“Panpsychism has a potential to transform our relationship with natural world. If panpsychism is true, the rain forest is teeming with consciousness. As conscious entities, trees have value in their own right: chopping one down becomes an action of immediate moral significance.”
“[I]t’s reasonable to suppose that children raised in a panpsychist culture would have a much closer relationship with nature and invest a great deal more value in its continued existence.”
“It is no surprise that in this worldview [i.e., “dualism” — yet Goff says almost identical things about “materialism” in these respects] the act of tree hugging is mocked as sentimental silliness. Why would anyone hug a mechanism?”
My other essays on Philip Goff’s panpsychism:
(1) Against Philip Goff’s (Panpsychist) “Phenomenal Bonding” | by Paul Austin Murphy | Medium
(2) .: John Horgan and Philip Goff on Panpsychism & Geocentrism (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)
(7) .: Neutral Monism, Panpsychism and Intrinsic Noumena (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)
[I can be found on Twitter here.]
