#123 - Meet The Most Persuasive Panpsychist Alive Today

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Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University and
author of Galileo's Error and Why? The Purpose of the Universe.
Stephen Fry called him the most persuasive panpsychist
alive.Physics tells us everything about what matter does — but
nothing about what it actually is. Goff argues this isn't a gap
we'll close — it's a permanent hole. And the best candidate to
fill it is consciousness itself.


Expect to learn why physics can only describe what stuff does and
not what it is, how Evan's sister discovered at 31 she has zero
mental imagery, why Bertrand Russell may have already solved
consciousness a hundred years ago, what 5-MeO-DMT revealed to a
philosopher about the nature of reality, the difference between
weak and strong emergence and why it matters for AI, and much
more…


Timestamps:


00:00 Trailer


02:21 What Makes Consciousness Radically Different


05:24 Evan's Descriptive Experience Sampling Experiment


06:42 Discovering Aphantasia at 31


08:27 Change Blindness and the Invisible Gorilla


10:40 Mary's Room: What Red Looks Like


13:21 Why Consciousness Theories Ignore Subjective Experience


16:48 The Resurgence of Panpsychism


18:14 Bertrand Russell: The Darwin of Consciousness20:13 Evan's
Psychedelic Journey Toward Biopsychism22:12 Taking 5-MeO-DMT as a
Philosopher24:38 Michael Pollan, Plants and Psychedelic
Openness28:45 Is Consciousness Computational or Biological?


30:43 The Combination Problem: How Tiny Minds Become One


37:17 Russell's Inversion: Start With Consciousness


40:21 The Hole in Physics: What Stuff Does vs What It IS


41:50 Why Bernardo Kastrup Gets Cross


44:41 Galileo's Error: The Decision That Broke Science


47:20 Aphantasia, Visual Decoding and the Consciousness Gap


49:50 Front Brain vs Back Brain: Where Is Consciousness?


52:40 Eric Schwitzgebel's Snail Problem


55:40 Philosopher-Scientist Teams: A New Model


1:03:01 Strong Emergence and New Causal Dynamics


1:04:47 Will We Fall in Love With Robots?


1:07:22 The Genome Didn't Solve Life


1:10:54 The $10 Billion Consciousness Experiment


...





GS Episodes Mentioned


Anil Seth — Consciousness, Controlled Hallucination, Perception:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o


Philip Ball — Quantum Mechanics, Brain Organoids, How Life Works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG5lnp51E


Kevin Mitchell — Free Will, Neuroplasticity, Strong Emergence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VGWzGqA32E


Matthias Michel — Consciousness Philosophy, Aphantasia, Fish
Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVWgpVPr1s


Russell Hurlburt — Inner Experience, Descriptive Experience
Sampling: https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg


Robert Prentner — Conscious Agent Theory, Mathematics of
Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKE8eLo8CU


Charles Fernyhough — Inner Speech, Hearing Voices, Memory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFY6dypPc4


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