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I’m flattered that Jerry Coyne has once again chosen to respond to my work. I just posted a counter response on his blog. Thanks for this Jerry. But you haven’t really addressed two central arguments: Consciousness is unobservable, and hence we can’t straightforwardly test theories of consciousness. The best we can do is map correlations,…

My book ‘Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness’ was published this week. To mark the occasion, I have been involved in putting out a variety of podcasts, videos and articles on its themes. Here is a selection: Philip Pullman and I were interviewed on the consciousness, panpsychism and the philosophy of His Dark…

I’ve just finished a draft of a new paper, exploring whether reflection on consciousness can help us make progress on foundational questions in quantum mechanics. You can access it here: http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/uploads/1/4/4/4/14443634/quantum_mechanics_and_the_consciousness_constraint1.pdf It’s going to come out with a volume called ‘Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness,’ which will be published with Oxford University Press (edited by Shan…

Panpsychism gets flak from a lot of directions. But a new one on me was John Horgan’s accusation that panpsychists are guilty of ‘geo-centrism,’ the attempt to drag us back to the pre-Copernican view that reality revolves us human beings: As far as we know, consciousness is property of only one weird type of matter…

Last week I had a twitter argument with Barry Smith about panpsychism and this week I had a twitter argument with Massimo Pigliucci about panpsychism. A similar issue came up in both, so I thought I’d write a post about it. Actually, it concerns an objection that is often raised against panpsychism, which goes as…

Half the people wanted Jon Snow to be executed for treason; half the people wanted him to be exonerated. The decision to send him permanently to the wall left no one happy, which, as Tyrion wisely observed, is the definition of a compromise. No one was happy but no one went to war.   In…

This is just a quick plug for some recent/forthcoming things I’m doing, in case anyone’s vaguely interested. Last week I did a talk for Trivago Academy, which is a series of talks by academics Trivago put on for general public at their HQ in Dusseldorf. It was really nice to talk to the general public…

Last week I published an article for the Times Literary Supplement outlining three alternative approach to religion, one of which was religious fictionalism. A religious fictionalist is (roughly) someone who finds value in practicing a religion despite holding that the contentious claims of the religion (e.g. God exists, Jesus rose from the dead) are false.…

I’ve been commenting on this piece that tries to argue in a not particularly sophisticated way that panpsychism is inconsistent with physics. For some reason, my comments have come up under the name “Art Uncut,” which was a now defunct campaigning group I was involved in 8 years ago. Here is my final comment: I’ll…

You might have noticed things are going a bit wrong of late. Far right parties have gained ground in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and France; they have cabinet seats in Norway, Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, and one is in coalition government in Italy. And then there’s Trump in the US…