Philip Goff – Breaking Through the Consciousness Stalemate – The Institute of Art and Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a7VVFPKW4Q[🡕]
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Although this is much discusses, what’s often neglected is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get to there (ndr to the scientific method): we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist which of course he was, but he was also a great philosopher, and he really designed the philosophy that underlay the Scientific Revolution. So, the problem for Galileo was the world seemed to be filled with these qualities (ndr qualia[🡕]); you know, colors, […] smells […] And it doesn’t seem like we can capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics, you know, an equation can’t capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. So this is a problem for Galileo: he wanted science to be totally quantitative, totally mathematical… What we are going to do with these qualities? So Galileo got around this by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality, and according to that theory, the qualities aren’t really out there in the physical world, they’re in the consciousness of the observer. So, the yellow on this sunflower isn’t really on the surface of the sunflower, the surface of the petal, it’s in the consciousness of the person observing it. Which then Galileo took to be outside of science. So Galileo really strips the physical world of its qualities, says: they’re in there in consciousness, that’s outside of the domain of science. Once we’ve done that, we can capture everything else in mathematics in this purely quantitative language.
So, that’s the start of mathematical physics and that’s gone incredibly well, I think it’s gone so well that we’re now going for a phase of History where people think: «That’s the total truth, that’s the complete truth about reality!» The eye really is it’s gone so well precisely because it was designed to be a partial description of reality, one which sets consciousness outside of the domain of science. So that’s why we have a problem of consciousness[🡕]. Because Galileo separated out the purely quantitative domain of science from the qualitative domain of consciousness. I think if we want to solve the problem of consciousness, we need to find a way of bringing these two domains back together.
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Related: Umberto Galimberti about the soul
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So, there is a deep problem at the heart of consciousness science, and that is that consciousness is not publicly observable. You can’t look inside somebody’s head and see their feelings and experiences; we know about consciousness not from observation and experiment but from immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences: if you’re in pain, you’re just directly aware of your pain. Now, people then say: «Oh, but science deals with unobservables all the time: fundamental particles, can’t be directly observed…» But there’s an important difference here: in all other cases we postulate unobservables to explain what we can observe. In the unique case of consciousness the thing we are trying to explain is unobservable.
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What we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness is an explanation of why, why various certain kinds of brain activities are correlated with certain kinds of experience. And because consciousness is not publicly observable, I don’t think that’s a question you can answer experimentally. I think at that point you’ve got to turn to philosophy, and just look at the various options that philosophers have offered to explain why brain activity goes along with consciousness. So, materialism, panpsychism, dualism, idealism…