DR PHILIP GOFF “WE MIGHT HAVE TO RETHINK WHAT SCIENCE IS”

In his book Galileo’s Error, philosopher Philip Goff argues consciousness is everywhere. All About Space meets with the author to find out more

- Connor Hansford

Is there more to life than meets the eye?

I think you should always be open to that possibility because science and philosophy take strange twists and turns, so we shouldn’t assume the paradigm we are currently working with is correct. We don’t know about our feelings and experiences through observation; we know about them through being immediately aware of them. People agree there is a deep problem of consciousness, but the challenge of consciousness is radically different from any other explanatory enterprise because the thing we are trying to explain is not observable. It doesn’t mean we can’t do science with it, but it might mean we have to rethink what science is.

Many people reading this will be scientists for whom consciousness is still a taboo subject. What would you say to them?

The high point of consciousness-phobia was probably the middle of the 20th century where people struggled to get jobs if they wanted to work on consciousness. A lot has changed since then, andit is broadly taken to be something we do need to address scientifically.

In a way those people who were suspicious of it in the 20th century had good reason to be, because it’s not publicly observable in the way other scientific data is. There’s a similar issue in quantum mechanics. It’s the best-predicted theory we have and so much of our technology is based on it, but the problem is no one knows what that theory is telling us about reality.

What is the difference between being alive and being conscious?