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I was recently interviewed by Francesco D’Isa for the Italian magazine L’Indiscreto. Here’s the Italian version; below is the English translation: Why do we feel something? Where does our experience come from? What’s the purpose of consciousness? Could we function without it? These are very difficult questions and not surprisingly consciousness is known as a…

The March edition of Investigación y Ciencia, the Spanish edition of Scientific American, published a translation of my Scientific American article ‘Galileo’s Big Mistake‘. In June it published my answers to a couple of questions from readers. Below is the English translation of the questions and my replies. First Letter: In “Galileo’s Big Mistake,” Philip Goff argues…

Happy Easter! I hope people are managing to enjoy some leisure and pleasure in these unique circumstances of lockdown. One thing I did was to watch this video of Daniel Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci raising some objections to the (very different) views of Keith Frankish and I. I enjoyed this and I’m very grateful to…

People are mystified by how I can be religious without believing. One thing I find incredibly affecting is the Ash Wednesday service: periods of silence, and then having ashes put on your head and being told ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’. I had a vivid experience this time of…

Goodbye decade that politicised me with the lies of austerity and Brexit. As things stand the future doesn’t look good, but I choose to live in hope. It’s been a shit decade for the world, but this is my blog so I’m obliged to report that the 2010s have blessed me with so many wonderful…

When I was first looking for academic jobs in 2006, I was told by well-meaning professors to keep my research on panpsychism to myself. In the thirteen years since, panpsychism has gone from being something that was laughed at in so far as it was thought of at all, to being a well-respected albeit minority…

There is currently an intense and acrimonious dispute going on within the Labour party over the cause of our recent electoral defeat. Supporters of Corbyn want to put it all down to the fact that traditional Labour supporters wanting Brexit chose to vote Conservative to ensure we leave the EU; opponents of Corbyn claim it…

My political philosophy is simple and evidence based. For 40 years after the war, we (UK, US and much of Western Europe) had highly regulated capitalism with high taxes on the wealthy, and society become more equal and more prosperous. From 1980s onwards (my lifetime), we’ve had Wild West capitalism, resulting in massive inequality and…

Massimo Pigliucci and I have had a series of twitter rows on the topic of consciousness and panpsychism. Recently we decided to go old school and write some letters, which you can access here. I’ve just written my second. Subscribe to follow the debate!

Jerry Coryne occasionally publishes these slightly ranty blog posts on my work. He approved my first comment on the latest (I published this comment as my last blog post) and responded; I counter-responded over a week ago, but my counter-response hasn’t appeared on his blog. I thought I’d publish it here: I agree that panpsychism…