Is there consciousness beyond the brain? | Philip Goff | TEDxNewEngland

Key Concepts:

• Consciousness: The subjective, inner world of experience, including sensations, perceptions, and feelings.
• Dualism: The belief that consciousness resides in a non-physical soul, separate from the physical brain and body.
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Qualitative refers to the subjective qualities of experience (e.g., the redness of red), while quantitative refers to measurable properties (e.g., mass, charge).
• Intrinsic Nature: What something is, considered independently of what it does or how it behaves.
• Panpsychism: The view that all matter, from fundamental particles to complex organisms, possesses some form of consciousness.

1. The Problem of Consciousness

• The speaker begins by asking the audience to focus on their current conscious experience, highlighting auditory, visual, and tactile sensations.
• Despite significant progress in neuroscience, there is no scientific explanation for how the brain produces consciousness, the "inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes."
• The speaker notes that 20 years ago, the only options were that consciousness was either magical/supernatural or simply electrochemical signaling in the brain. The speaker found both options deeply flawed.

2. The Failure of Dualism

• Dualism posits that consciousness resides in a soul, a non-physical entity that controls the body like a drone pilot controls a drone.
• The speaker argues that dualism is incompatible with modern science because scientific investigation shows that everything that happens in the brain has a physical cause within the brain itself.
• If a non-physical soul were influencing the brain, we should observe incoming signals from it, which we don't.

3. The Exclusion of Consciousness from Science

• The speaker argues that modern science was designed to exclude consciousness.
• Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, declared mathematics the language of science in 1623, focusing on quantitative descriptions of the physical world.
• Conscious experience involves qualities (e.g., the smell of coffee, the redness of a sunset) that cannot be captured by mathematics.
• Galileo banished consciousness from science, locating it in the soul.
• To solve the problem of consciousness, we need to integrate the quantitative story of physical science with the qualitative story of human consciousness.

4. Russell and Eddington's Rediscovered Approach

• In 1927, Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington formulated a new approach to consciousness.
• Eddington was the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity.
• Russell and Eddington argued that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is, only what it does.
• Physics describes matter in terms of behavior, such as mass, charge, attraction, repulsion, and resistance to acceleration.
• Stephen Hawking stated that even a final theory of physics would be just a set of rules and equations and won't be able to tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.
• There is a "huge hole" in our scientific story of the universe: physics describes what matter does but not its intrinsic nature.

5. Panpsychism: Consciousness as the Intrinsic Nature of Matter

• Russell and Eddington hypothesized that the qualities of experience are the intrinsic nature of matter.
• It's not that an electron has the same consciousness as a human, but that it has a simple form of conscious experience reflecting its simple nature.
• Panpsychism posits that all matter, from basic building blocks to the human brain, has conscious experience.
• Physical science gives us a limited perspective, describing what physical entities do but not their intrinsic nature. Panpsychism fills this gap.

6. Testing and Implications of Panpsychism

• Panpsychism can be "tested" in the sense that other options fail to account for important data.
• Dualism fails to account for neuroscience data, and current science fails to account for the qualities of conscious experience.
• Only panpsychism can accommodate both the qualitative and quantitative stories.
• The speaker references Sherlock Holmes: "once we've ruled out the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
• The speaker draws an analogy to the Copernican revolution, where people initially clung to the Earth-centered model despite mounting evidence.
• Panpsychism frees us from the hubris that human consciousness is cosmically special. It is just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
• Consciousness is at the root of human identity and arguably the source of everything that's truly important in life.
• Our official scientific worldview tells us that the qualities of our experience don't really exist, leading to a sense of alienation.
• Panpsychism offers a picture of the universe in which we fit in, as conscious creatures in a conscious universe.

7. Conclusion

• Panpsychism has the potential to solve one of the deepest mysteries of science and transform what it means to be human.
• It offers a framework where both intellectual and spiritual yearnings find a home.