#12 Philip Goff - Everything Is Conscious

Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

How does our consciousness arise?
In this episode, I and Dr Philip Goff explore the increasingly popular view that everything in our universe is conscious (panpsychism).
== What we talk about ==
0:04​ - Introduction
1:02​ - How did you get interested in the problem of consciousness?
5:10​ - The role of philosophy in understanding consciousness
10:30​ - How can philosophy and science come together to help understand consciousness
13:40​ - What is your definition of consciousness?
22:35​ - The philosophical vs scientific frameworks in consciousness. And why does consciousness matter?
29:57​ - How do you situate the discussion on consciousness historically?
45:44​ - What is the current contemporary view of panpsychism?
53:43​ - Dualism vs panpsychism
56:33​ - What are the open questions in panpsychism?
== About the guest ==
Dr Philip Goff is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham in the UK. He’s the author of a book called Galileo's Error in which he defends panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
He acknowledges it sounds a bit crazy, but in his book and research papers he tries to show that it avoids the difficulties faced by its rivals which are materialism (consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the body and brain).