panpsychism

Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University. His new book, "Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness," is available now.

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t understand the mind and how it works. But do we know enough about our experience of consciousness to suggest that consciousness cannot arise from nothing more than the physical interactions of bits of matter? Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness, or at least some mental aspect, is pervasive in the world, in atoms and rocks as well as in living creatures. Philosopher Philip Goff is one of the foremost modern advocates of this idea. We have a friendly and productive conversation, notwithstanding my own view that the laws of physics don’t need any augmenting to ultimately account for consciousness. If you’re not sympathetic toward panpsychism, this episode will at least help you understand why someone might be.

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Philip Goff received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Reading. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. His new book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, is being published on Nov. 5.

• Web site
• Durham web page
• PhilPeople profile
• Amazon.com author page
• Blog
• Talk on Consciousness and Fundamental Reality
• Panpsychism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Twitter

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Sam Harris speaks with his wife, Annaka Harris, about her new book, "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind."

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Today we have Michael Shermer and Philip Goff on the podcast. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, and Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality & Utopia. Goff is an associate professor in philosophy at Central European University in Budapest. His main research focus is trying to explain how the brain produces consciousness. His first book, which was published by Oxford University Press, is called Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Goff is currently working on a book on consciousness aimed at a general audience.

In this episode we cover the following topics:

• Is reasoning the ultimate route to truth?
• What if human rational faculties can’t comprehend the ultimates realities of existence?
• Will the hard problem of consciousness ever be solved?
• Panpsychism as a scientific alternative for explaining consciousness
• The latest neuroscience of consciousness and its implications for understanding the hard problem of consciousness
• The insights that can be gleaned through understanding subjective experience
• Will we ever discover if free will exists?
• To what extent can our understanding of cognitive neuroscience and genetics can elucidate the extent of our free will?
• The possibility for “free won’t”
• Can science ever solve the mystery of the existence of God?
• How can the science of consciousness, free-will, and God help alleviate fundamental existential concerns of humanity?

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