#123 - Meet The Most Persuasive Panpsychist Alive Today

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Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Stephen Fry called him the most persuasive panpsychist alive.Physics tells us everything about what matter does — but nothing about what it actually is. Goff argues this isn't a gap we'll close — it's a permanent hole. And the best candidate to fill it is consciousness itself.

Expect to learn why physics can only describe what stuff does and not what it is, how Evan's sister discovered at 31 she has zero mental imagery, why Bertrand Russell may have already solved consciousness a hundred years ago, what 5-MeO-DMT revealed to a philosopher about the nature of reality, the difference between weak and strong emergence and why it matters for AI, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

02:21 What Makes Consciousness Radically Different

05:24 Evan's Descriptive Experience Sampling Experiment

06:42 Discovering Aphantasia at 31

08:27 Change Blindness and the Invisible Gorilla

10:40 Mary's Room: What Red Looks Like

13:21 Why Consciousness Theories Ignore Subjective Experience

16:48 The Resurgence of Panpsychism

18:14 Bertrand Russell: The Darwin of Consciousness20:13 Evan's Psychedelic Journey Toward Biopsychism22:12 Taking 5-MeO-DMT as a Philosopher24:38 Michael Pollan, Plants and Psychedelic Openness28:45 Is Consciousness Computational or Biological?

30:43 The Combination Problem: How Tiny Minds Become One

37:17 Russell's Inversion: Start With Consciousness

40:21 The Hole in Physics: What Stuff Does vs What It IS

41:50 Why Bernardo Kastrup Gets Cross

44:41 Galileo's Error: The Decision That Broke Science

47:20 Aphantasia, Visual Decoding and the Consciousness Gap

49:50 Front Brain vs Back Brain: Where Is Consciousness?

52:40 Eric Schwitzgebel's Snail Problem

55:40 Philosopher-Scientist Teams: A New Model

1:03:01 Strong Emergence and New Causal Dynamics

1:04:47 Will We Fall in Love With Robots?

1:07:22 The Genome Didn't Solve Life

1:10:54 The $10 Billion Consciousness Experiment

...

GS Episodes Mentioned

Anil Seth — Consciousness, Controlled Hallucination, Perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o

Philip Ball — Quantum Mechanics, Brain Organoids, How Life Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG5lnp51E

Kevin Mitchell — Free Will, Neuroplasticity, Strong Emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VGWzGqA32E

Matthias Michel — Consciousness Philosophy, Aphantasia, Fish Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVWgpVPr1s

Russell Hurlburt — Inner Experience, Descriptive Experience Sampling: https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg

Robert Prentner — Conscious Agent Theory, Mathematics of Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKE8eLo8CU

Charles Fernyhough — Inner Speech, Hearing Voices, Memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFY6dypPc4

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