Galileo's Error

Philip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error” opens with a startling historical claim: the scientific revolution contained a foundational mistake, and we’ve been living with the consequences for four centuries. When Galileo stripped qualities like color, taste, and smell from the physical world, relocating them to the mind, he made modern physics possible. But he also created an explanatory gap between the quantitative world of science and the qualitative world of experience, a gap that no amount of neuroscience has been able to close. This is, Goff argues, the real origin of the hard problem of consciousness.

Raymond Tallis, writing in Philosophy Now, called Goff “one of the most fearless of contemporary philosophers” and the book’s journey “exhilarating.” It is exhilarating. Goff writes with a clarity that’s rare in philosophy of mind, moving from historical narrative to rigorous argument with genuine skill. Alex Moran in the Times Literary Supplement called it “a powerful defence of the idea that philosophy itself can plumb reality’s depths.” Galen Strawson, reviewing in The Guardian, described it as “an illuminating introduction” that “addresses the real issue” and has “a good chance of delivering the extremely large intellectual jolt.”

Goff’s proposed solution is panpsychism: the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, present in some form in all matter. This is not the claim that rocks think or that electrons have feelings. It’s the subtler suggestion that experience is woven into the fabric of the universe at the most basic level, and that complex consciousness (like ours) emerges from the combination of simpler experiential properties. If that reminds you of certain readings of the Upanishadic insight that consciousness pervades all things, you’re not wrong, though Goff approaches it through analytic philosophy rather than contemplative practice.

The book has drawn sharp criticism. Julian Baggini in the Wall Street Journal found it “not entirely convincing” and warned that “any number of materialists will be furious at how Mr. Goff portrays them.” Stephen Davies, writing on Kastrup’s blog, argued that Goff’s panpsychism “is borne out of materialism,” meaning it still grants too much reality to the physical world as independently existing stuff that happens to have experiential properties. This is an important criticism from a nondual perspective. Panpsychism keeps matter in the picture, sprinkling it with consciousness, whereas a more thoroughgoing idealism would say consciousness is all there is and matter is how it appears.

Goff is honest about the unsolved problems. The combination problem, how do micro-level bits of experience combine into the unified consciousness you’re experiencing right now, remains genuinely hard, and Goff acknowledges this. The book is more successful as a demolition of materialism and a case for taking consciousness seriously as fundamental than as a completed alternative. But demolition is valuable work. At Goodreads, readers gave it 3.93 out of 5, reflecting both genuine enthusiasm and the sense that the project is still unfinished.