Knowledge Tree
Philip Goff
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Panpsychism: Conscious Rocks and Socks - Free Thinking Ministries freethinkingministries.com Nov 24, 2023 18 facts
claimPhilip Goff argues that panpsychism should be considered despite its counter-intuitive nature, drawing parallels to the initial reception of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and the theory of evolution.
claimGalen Strawson is a prominent advocate for the panpsychist views held by Philip Goff.
claimPhilip Goff rejects the existence of God due to arguments categorized under the problem of evil.
quotePhilip Goff stated in a debate with Farris that he is open to the "God hypothesis" only if it involves a creator who is doing the best they can do, acknowledging that the world is "messy."
perspectiveDr. Tim Stratton considers philosopher Philip Goff an ally because Goff makes a strong case against the views advanced by many atheist scholars and influencers.
quotePhilip Goff cites the existence of the North American long-tailed shrew, which paralyzes its prey and eats it alive slowly, as an example of natural evil that contradicts the existence of a maximally great being.
claimPhilip Goff argues that it is logically incoherent to claim that consciousness is an illusion, because an illusion is itself a state of consciousness.
claimPhilip Goff rejects substance dualism primarily due to Ockham's razor and the interaction problem.
claimPhilip Goff argues against the materialistic views held by Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett in the first three chapters of 'Galileo's Error: Foundation for a New Science of Consciousness'.
perspectivePhilip Goff argues against the materialistic worldview, which posits that only physical or material things exist.
claimPhilip Goff stated during a debate with Farris, hosted by Cameron Bertuzzi, that if a maximally great being existed, he would expect to find "Heaven right away."
claimDr. Tim Stratton defines Philip Goff's panpsychism as the theory that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the material world, implying that material objects are composed of more fundamental, conscious components.
claimPhilip Goff prefers panpsychism because he argues it does not violate Ockham's Razor.
claimPhilip Goff suggests that panpsychism provides a potential framework for libertarian free will within a naturalistic worldview.
claimDr. Tim Stratton suggests that Philip Goff may prefer substance dualism or panpsychism over materialism because of the philosophical challenge known as 'the hard problem' of consciousness.
claimPhilip Goff argues that materialism is incoherent and finds substance dualism unsatisfactory.
perspectiveThe author asserts that Philip Goff prefers substance dualism over materialism, but prefers panpsychism over substance dualism because he views materialism as incoherent and panpsychism as simpler than dualism.
perspectiveBoth the author and Philip Goff are skeptical that libertarian free will is compatible with the panpsychist worldview.
Critique of Panpsychism: Philosophical Coherence and Scientific ... thequran.love May 7, 2025 16 facts
perspectivePhilip Goff and other proponents of panpsychism advocate for a 'post-Galilean' science that incorporates first-person data as fundamental, rather than restricting science solely to third-person data.
perspectivePhilip Goff asserts that dismissing panpsychism as 'crazy' without providing a substantive argument may appear irrational in hindsight.
claimContemporary panpsychists, such as Philip Goff, argue that while modern science excels at modeling the mathematical relationships and behavior of matter, it fails to explain why matter behaves in that way or what underlies those patterns.
claimPhilip Goff argues that current physical science describes electrons only through relational properties like charge, mass, and spin, leaving the intrinsic nature of the electron unknown.
referencePhilip Goff's 2017 book 'Consciousness and Fundamental Reality' develops the intrinsic nature argument and provides a critique of dispositionalism.
referencePhilip Goff's 2019 book 'Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness' provides a popular exposition of panpsychism, notes an increasing openness to the theory, and addresses the 'crazy' objection.
accountPhilip Goff recounts that Galileo Galilei established a sharp distinction between the quantitative, mathematically describable aspects of matter and the qualitative aspects like colors, sounds, and feelings, stipulating that physics would confine itself to the former.
perspectivePhilip Goff argues that by limiting physics to the quantitative aspects of matter, science rendered consciousness invisible to physical theory by design, leaving physics to describe what matter does rather than what it is intrinsically.
perspectiveGalen Strawson and Philip Goff argue that the seeming strangeness of panpsychism is not a decisive strike against it, noting that science has previously accepted counterintuitive ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics.
claimPhilip Goff has proposed that an unknown 'bonding relation' at the level of consciousness might exist to explain how experiences fuse, suggesting that the lack of a current concept for this relation reflects the limits of human imagination rather than the impossibility of the phenomenon.
quotePhilip Goff predicts: "In twenty years’ time, the idea that panpsychism can be quickly dismissed as ‘crazy’ will seem, well, crazy."
claimPhilip Goff and Galen Strawson advocate for a neo-Russellian monist view of consciousness, which is based on Bertrand Russell's insight that physics reveals the structure of matter but not its intrinsic character.
perspectivePhilip Goff argues that panpsychism should be accepted despite its strangeness because it offers the best explanation for human and animal consciousness and serves as the most parsimonious theory regarding the intrinsic nature of matter.
referenceIn his book 'Galileo's Error' (2019), Philip Goff argues that modern science achieved its power by intentionally excluding the mind from its domain.
claimPhilip Goff asserts that the combination problem is the central challenge for panpsychists and that no existing account of how micro-experiences combine is fully satisfactory.
claimGalen Strawson and Philip Goff are prominent contemporary advocates of panpsychism who view the theory as the only viable way to take consciousness seriously without abandoning a monistic worldview.
Panpsychism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 18, 2017 13 facts
referenceThe chapter "Orthodox Property Dualism + Linguistic Theory of Vagueness = Panpsychism" by Philip Goff was published in the book "Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience", edited by Richard Brown, by Springer in Dordrecht in 2013, pages 75–91.
claimThe 'Intrinsic Nature Argument' for panpsychism has historical roots in the works of Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell (1927), and Alfred North Whitehead (1933 [1967]), and is supported by contemporary philosophers including T.L.S. Sprigge (1999), Galen Strawson (2003), and Philip Goff (2017).
referenceThe article "Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help Us Explain Consciousness" by Philip Goff was published in Dialectica in 2009, volume 63, issue 3, pages 289–311.
perspectivePhilip Goff (2006, 2017) argues that panpsychists may be unable to provide a wholly intelligible explanation for how macro-level consciousness emerges from micro-level consciousness, which challenges Galen Strawson's claim that panpsychism avoids radical emergence.
claimPhilip Goff has argued that consciousness is not vague, and this leads to a sorites-style argument in favor of panpsychism.
referenceThe chapter "Micropsychism, Cosmopsychism and the Grounding Relation" by Philip Goff is forthcoming in the book edited by Seager.
claimPhilip Goff (2009, 2017) proposed a conceivability argument against mental combination, which attempts to demonstrate the impossibility of subject-summing.
referenceThe chapter "Against Constitutive Panpsychism" by Philip Goff was published in the book edited by Alter and Nagasawa in 2015, pages 370–400.
perspectivePhilip Goff argues that the most simple, elegant, and parsimonious hypothesis regarding the intrinsic nature of matter is panpsychism, which posits that matter outside of brains is continuous with brain matter in possessing a consciousness-involving nature.
perspectivePhilip Goff (2017) argues that brain structure is isomorphic with the structure of consciousness when considering less basic brain structures, implying that there is more consciousness present in the brain than is typically assumed.
referenceThe article "Experiences don’t sum" by Philip Goff was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2006, volume 13, issue 6, pages 53–61.
referenceThe chapter "The Phenomenal Bonding Solution to the Combination Problem" by Philip Goff was published in the book edited by Brüntrup and Jaskolla in 2016, pages 283–302.
claimPhilip Goff wrote the July 2017 version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Panpsychism, which was almost entirely new.
Panpsychism - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 9 facts
perspectivePhilip Goff argues that the counterintuitive nature of panpsychism is not a valid objection, noting that the theories of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin are also counterintuitive.
perspectivePhilip Goff argues that panpsychism avoids the disunity of dualism, where mind and matter are ontologically separate, and avoids dualism's problems in explaining how mind and matter interact.
perspectiveDavid Chalmers and Philip Goff describe panpsychism as an alternative to both materialism and dualism.
perspectiveDavid Papineau expressed sympathy toward panpsychism in a 2017 debate, though he noted his reasons for doing so differ from those of Philip Goff.
perspectivePhilip Goff believes that neutral monism can reasonably be regarded as a form of panpsychism in so far as it is a dual aspect view.
claimPhilip Goff distinguishes between panexperientialism (the view that conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level) and pancognitivism.
perspectivePhilip Goff calls panpsychism an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism.
perspectivePhilip Goff, a philosopher, advocates for panpsychism as a perspective on consciousness.
claimRecent proponents of panpsychism include David Ray Griffin, David Skrbina, Gregg Rosenberg, Timothy Sprigge, Philip Goff, and William Seager.
Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 Edition) plato.stanford.edu May 23, 2001 9 facts
claimPhilip Goff (2019) developed a form of cosmopsychism where the universe is a value-responding agent to explain the fine-tuning of physical laws for life.
perspectivePhilip Goff (2016, 2017, 2019a) argues that because the intrinsic nature of brain matter is consciousness-involving, the most simple and parsimonious hypothesis is that matter outside of brains also possesses a consciousness-involving nature.
claimPhilip Goff's sorites-style argument for panpsychism posits that if consciousness lacks borderline cases, the emergence of consciousness would require an arbitrary, precise micro-level change in particle arrangement.
formulaPhilip Goff defines the 'Conceivable Isolation of Subjects' (CIS) as: For any group of subjects, S1, S2, …, Sn, and any conscious states, E1, E2, …, En, the following scenario is conceivable: there are S1, S2, …, Sn instantiating E1, E2, …, En, but it’s not the case that there is a subject S* such that S* is not identical with any of S1, S2 … Sn.
claimPhilip Goff (2009, 2017) argues that constitutive micropsychism is incoherent because arguments against subject-summing apply to micro-level subjects.
claimDavid Chalmers and Philip Goff identify the need to account for mental causation within the causal closure of the physical—the thesis that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause—as a motivation for panpsychism.
claimResponses to Philip Goff's simplicity argument for panpsychism have been provided by Taylor (2019) and Dainton (forthcoming).
claimThe intrinsic nature argument for panpsychism is defended by philosophers including Michael Lockwood Sprigge (1999), Galen Strawson (2003), and Philip Goff (2017).
claimPhilip Goff is the primary author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Panpsychism starting from the July 2017 version, with Section 1 developed from a previous version by William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson.
Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness cambridge.org Dec 20, 2023 3 facts
accountThe author acknowledges David Chalmers, Kelvin McQueen, Philip Goff, colleagues at the department seminar at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and Morten Hassel Mørch for their contributions to the work.
claimPhilip Goff argues that the phenomenal bonding relation must correspond to a fundamental physical relation, such as the spatial relation.
claimIn recent decades, dual-aspect monism has gained wider recognition as a distinct non-physicalist theory due to defenses by philosophers including David Chalmers (1995, 1996, 2003, 2013, 2016), William Seager (1995, 2010), Daniel Stoljar (2001), Galen Strawson (2006, 2016), and Philip Goff (2017).
Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 3 facts
referencePhilip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson authored the entry 'Panpsychism' for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta in 2017.
referencePhilip Goff authored the article 'The Case for Panpsychism', published in Philosophy Now in 2017.
claimThomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, and David Chalmers have revived interest in panpsychism and neutral monism in recent decades.
Philp Goff on Dualism About Consciousness - YouTube youtube.com Apr 30, 2024 2 facts
claimRobinson and Philip Goff discuss the major philosophical perspectives on consciousness, specifically physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism, in the YouTube video titled 'Philp Goff on Dualism About Consciousness'.
claimPhysicalism, dualism, and panpsychism are identified as the major camps in the debate over consciousness by Robinson and Philip Goff.
Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind youtube.com Feb 3, 2022 2 facts
Unknown source 2 facts
quotePhilip Goff, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK, stated: 'New insights are required to tackle consciousness, and the essays in this volume may be an important piece of the puzzle. It brings together some of the greatest thinkers on this topic of both East and West. Essential reading for anyone interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness.'
claimPhilip Goff engages in conversations with philosophers in the YouTube video titled 'Philp Goff on Dualism About Consciousness'.
(PDF) Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness - Academia.edu academia.edu 1 fact
referencePhilip Goff authored 'Consciousness and Fundamental Reality', published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Philosophical perspectives on consciousness | Humans - Vocal Media vocal.media 1 fact
claimAlfred North Whitehead and Philip Goff argue that panpsychism provides a more coherent explanation for the emergence of consciousness than physicalism.
Cross-Cultural Approaches to Consciousness: Mind, Nature, and ... amazon.com 1 fact
quotePhilip Goff, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK, stated: 'New insights are required to tackle consciousness, and the essays in this volume may be an important piece of the puzzle. It brings together some of the greatest thinkers on this topic of both East and West. Essential reading for anyone interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness.'