Galileo's Error
Philip Goff · 2019
"Consciousness cannot be fully explained by physical science because physics, since Galileo, deliberately excluded qualitative experience from its domain to make nature mathematically tractable — so the fix isn't a better physical theory of consciousness, it's recognizing consciousness as a fundamental property of matter itself, present in some minimal form even at the level of basic particles."
Goff's title refers to a specific historical decision: Galileo, in founding modern physics, split the world into quantitative properties — mass, motion, shape, measurable and mathematizable, the proper domain of science — and qualitative properties — color as experienced, taste, pain, treated as a separate, non-physical realm. Goff argues this founding split is why physical science, no matter how advanced, will never on its own terms explain subjective experience — it was designed from the start to describe everything except that.
Rather than treating this as proof consciousness is supernatural, Goff's panpsychism proposes the opposite move: build a minimal form of experience into the definition of physical matter itself, rather than trying to derive experience from non-experiential particles later. On this view, fundamental particles have some unimaginably simple form of experience, and complex consciousness, like human minds, emerges from these combining in the right structure — avoiding both traditional dualism and standard materialism, which Goff argues both fail for related reasons.
What historical decision does Goff's title 'Galileo's Error' refer to?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Galileo's ErrorPenguin Random House
- Galileo's Error (book review)Philosophy Now, Issue 135
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