Philip Goff

Philosopher and Professor

Philip Goff is a British philosopher and professor at Durham University who has become one of the most prominent advocates for a radical idea about consciousness: that it might exist everywhere in the universe.

Goff specializes in the philosophy of mind and focuses on how consciousness can fit into our scientific understanding of the world. He defends panpsychism, the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it—essentially arguing that even electrons and quarks might have some form of basic experience. This might sound bizarre, but Goff presents it as a serious solution to one of philosophy’s biggest puzzles: how physical brain activity creates subjective experiences like the redness of red or the pain of a headache. While most scientists assume consciousness emerges from complex arrangements of unconscious matter, Goff argues this is impossible—instead, he suggests consciousness was there all along, woven into the fabric of reality itself.

Beyond academia, Goff has written popular books including Galileo’s Error and appears regularly in media discussions about consciousness. His work has been published in The Guardian and Scientific American, making complex philosophical ideas accessible to general audiences curious about the deepest questions of mind and reality.

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2006

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Experiences Don’t Sum

Can your rich inner world be built from tiny, simple feelings? Philip Goff tackles panpsychism—the theory that all matter has basic consciousness. He argues panpsychism fails because it cannot intelligibly explain how billions of “micro-experiences” could sum together to create the single, complex “macro-experience” of a person, calling this a leap of faith.

Mentioned in 3 documents

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

A Landscape of Consciousness

Diverse explanations or theories of consciousness are arrayed on a roughly physicalist-to-nonphysicalist landscape of essences and mechanisms. Categories: Materialism Theories (philosophical, neurobiological, electromagnetic field, computational and informational, homeostatic and affective, embodied and enactive, relational, representational, language, phylogenetic evolution); Non-Reductive Physicalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated Information Theory; Panpsychisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States Theories; Challenge Theories. There are many subcategories, especially for Materialism Theories. Each explanation is self-described by its adherents, critique is minimal and only for clarification, and there is no attempt to adjudicate among theories. The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death. A Landscape of Consciousness, I suggest, offers perspective.

Donald Hoffman

Fusions of Consciousness

This theory proposes that conscious experiences and subjects exist beyond spacetime as fundamental entities with dynamics described by Markov chains. It shows how these conscious agents can combine, fuse, and have their experiences merge to create new agents and qualia. Spacetime and particle interactions are proposed to be projections encoding the dynamics of communicating conscious agents, rather than being truly fundamental.

Bernardo Kastrup

The Universe in Consciousness

Imagine a world where everything is connected by a single mind: Bernardo Kastrup argues that reality is fundamentally mental, not physical. He suggests that what we perceive as individual consciousness is actually fragments of a universal consciousness. Kastrup challenges the mainstream view of materialism, proposing instead that the mind is the primary substance of the universe. By integrating concepts from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, he presents a compelling case for a mental universe, urging us to rethink our understanding of reality.