Galileo’s Big Mistake | Policy & Ethics - Scientific American

Photo: Philip Goff

How the great experimentalist created the problem of consciousness, argues Philip Goff, philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University in the UK.

Galileo shows the Doge his telescope, 1609.
Photo: Getty Images

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, does it make a sound? An age-old philosophical conundrum you might think; in fact, this question was given a definitive answer in the 17th century by the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei. And the way in which Galileo answered this question shaped the philosophical foundations of the scientific worldview that remains with us to this day. Moreover, as I will explain, this scientific worldview has a big problem at its heart: it makes a science of consciousness impossible.

A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science; the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. This is a much-discussed moment. What is less discussed is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get to this position. Before Galileo, people thought the physical world was filled with qualities: there were colors on the surfaces of objects, tastes in food, smells floating through the air. The trouble is that you can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. You can’t capture the spicy taste of paprika, for example, in an equation.

This presented a challenge for Galileo’s aspiration to exhaustively describe the physical world in mathematics. Galileo’s solution was to propose a radically new philosophical theory of reality...

Nothing short of a revolution is called for, and it’s already on its way. As I describe in my new book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, scientists and philosophers have begun to come together to lay the groundwork for a new approach to consciousness. And this matters. The change in worldview that is called for cannot help but have profound implications for society more generally. Consciousness is at the root of human identity; indeed, it is arguably the basis of everything of value in human existence. This new scientific revolution will transform not only our understanding of the physical universe, but also of what it means to be a human being.
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Source: Scientific American