Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
scientificamerican.com

I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions. The whole concept of truth, for me, reflects the extent to which reality conforms to belief. So if there isn't and will never be a way to test a belief, then it's neither true nor false.

IMO, this is the type of thinking that gives philosophers a bad rap.

It doesn't even do that, it just pushes it down the stack.

If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff."

Not only is it wrong, it doesn't have any explanatory power at all. Ultimately if you want to understand why something has a certain property, you want to know how it arises from the emergent behavior of something more fundamental. A hurricane isn't made of hurricane bits, and brains aren't made of consciousness particles.

> Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.

We can make a very simple robot that reacts to the environment - for example follows light and learns where the walls are so as not to collide with them in the future.

It checks all the boxes that simple life does - if you say that a bacteria experience world then so does that robot. So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. There's no magical spiritualism around it, it's just nested if-then-elses + memory + feedback. Which btw is as good a definition for consciousness as any other. When you become unconscious the feedback loop is interrupted.

> “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.”

"Quantity has a quality of its own". There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them.

In the end I think "is X conscious" is as productive a question as "is Pluto a planet" or "can submarines swim".