A materialist philosopher enters a bar… He sits down amidst the deafening noise and drinks his lager, feeling the nicotine of the first cigarette of the evening coursing through his body. Then it happens. He is overwhelmed, can no longer defend himself and has to surrender. He pushes himself out into the rain and lets it stream down his face with his eyes closed. “I knew I wasn’t a zombie; I was a thinking, feeling human being and I could no longer deny my own consciousness.”
The philosopher was the British shooting star Philip Goff and this confession is reproduced in his book “Galileo’s Error. In Defense of Panpsychism” (2021). Goff belongs to a new generation of analytical philosophers for whom questions of consciousness, metaphysics, and meaning have gone from taboo to fashion.
When I came to Lund When I read Theoretical Philosophy in the late 1990s, the first title on the reading list was “What Does It All Mean?” by Thomas Nagel. But it was also the last book that dealt with the meaning of life. Such chatter was less interesting. When Goff’s new book “The Meaning of the Universe. Argument for a Cosmic Purpose” (2025) is now published in Swedish and also by the publisher Fri Tanke, which claims to work “in the spirit of the Enlightenment”, then we know that the philosophical tectonic plates are faltering.
Natural scientists also ask philosophical questions. Most recently, it was Maria Strømme, professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University, who expressed this in a well-received article: She claimed that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter. Should all of this be interpreted as a sign of a general move away from a materialistic worldview? Has materialism reached its end? Was it just a bracket in the history of ideas?
Goff has become known as a proponent of panpsychism – the hottest thing in the philosophy of consciousness (which may not be saying much). The theory implies that consciousness is understood as a fundamental component or aspect of reality, of everything that exists, and not as something that arises secondarily from purely material processes. To understand why anyone would seriously claim this, we need to take a step back.
The modern view of science was formulated by Galileo in the 17th century and means that science should study the properties of nature that can be relied upon: size, shape, position and movement, but ignore the qualitative dimensions of experience, the sensory qualities that we constantly perceive: colors, smells, tastes, sounds. These properties lie not in things themselves, but in our experience of them, in the soul, and they cannot be studied scientifically.
This mathematized way of understanding material reality is proving extremely successful. But little by little, this methodology gives rise to a materialistic worldview, according to which everything that exists is matter – something Galileo never claimed. And then, of course, the question arises: how to explain the phenomena that were previously placed in the soul and of which consciousness largely consists – the sweetness of the strawberry, the blue of the sea, the sound of the beloved’s voice? Is it possible to make such a conscious experience materially understandable? It turns out it’s a harder question than anyone could have imagined. In fact, it is so difficult that many philosophers reject materialism.
Scientific knowledge about the brain has made enormous progress, but on the crucial point we have not moved an inch: We still have no idea what consciousness is and how it arises. A coincidence? Goff doesn’t think so. As long as we view matter, like Galileo, as something completely devoid of the subjective aspects of consciousness – what it feels like to experience something from within – we will continue to go in circles. Hence the title of his book: Galileo’s Error.
How can something material cause something intangible? What kind of mystery are we dealing with here?
An example can illustrate the problem. Let’s say Anna is madly in love. We know that feels Being in this state in a certain way is the subjective aspect of falling in love. Suppose further that some neuroscientists are simultaneously studying their brains in detail – observing gray matter, recording synapses and electrochemical charges, determining relative blood flows, and so on.
However, nowhere do they see love. That’s not it the same like the brain processes taking place. Spontaneously we might think that the material processes in the brain must produce the subjective experience. But how can something material cause something intangible? What kind of mystery are we dealing with here? In the philosophy of consciousness, people have been talking about the “difficult problem” in this context since the late 1990s.
It is against this background that Strømme’s article “Universal Consciousness as a Fundamental Field” should be understood. She’s not a panpsychist, but like Goff, she’s trying to get out of the Galilean straitjacket. For them, universal consciousness is even primary in relation to matter – it arises from consciousness.
The most interesting thing The scientific arguments do not agree with Strømme’s article. They were criticized by representatives of Uppsala University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy for being both “pseudoscience” and “bad physics” and for publicly distancing themselves. Rather, the article should be seen as a contribution to a lively debate that deals with a very difficult problem. Is the argument convincing? No, not directly, it’s a first sketch. Is it new? No, the connection between quantum physics and the philosophy of consciousness has been a prime example since the breakthrough of quantum physics, which Strømme is well aware of. Is it science? It depends on what you mean, and here Strømme himself could have been clearer.
“I believe in math and physics tools,” she says in P1’s Sunday interview, “because they have proven useful throughout history.” Sure, but if Goff is right about Galileo, they won’t be enough in this case. The problem is not speculative. The problem is that speculation requires philosophical premises that physics itself does not provide. But in the article, Strømme still makes it clear that she borrows from “physics, metaphysics and philosophy.” We usually call it interdisciplinarity – what’s the problem?
In any case, it is a delicate irony that cannot go unnoticed that a professor of materials science happens to be in the dark because he has rejected materialism.
Has materialism reached its end? Was it just a bracket in the history of ideas?
Goff and Stromme both point out that consciousness cannot be understood within a strict materialism. But does it matter much? What will be the consequences if the worldview changes in the direction they suggest?
Strømme sees “profound ethical and social implications,” which she briefly mentions. If it had been a student essay, I would have written in the margin: “Don’t just argue! Develop the argument!” But it’s still nice, perhaps even brave, of a professor of nanotechnology to write like that. Goff develops the argument in a similar way, moving further towards mysticism. But it’s thin, as if a philosopher of consciousness had started freelance work as a spiritual guide. Rather, the strength lies in the argument for a panpsychic turn.
“It takes time for culture to catch up with the evidence,” Goff notes. And the evidence points in the same direction: materialism as a worldview is losing its influence. So far we agree. The question remains where we are going as a culture.
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