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.
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Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
"Every human action is the end product of an unbroken chain of prior causes — genes, hormones, childhood environment, immediate context, culture — stretching back before birth, which means free will in the sense most people believe in, the ability to have decided otherwise with all else being equal, does not exist."