I have now read about 15 books on consciousness. The most recent was Phillip Goff’s Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford UP, 2023 paperback; originally published in 2017). A very bad book, easily the worst of all the ones I have read on this topic. But, as often happens with bad books, it spurred my thinking wonderfully, since it clarified what I am willing to believe about consciousness and what speculations I find incredible (in the literal meaning of that word, i.e. something I cannot judge worthy of belief).
Goff is a panpsychist—and goes through a torturous path of posited axioms and piled up distinctions (cutting the bologna thinner and thinner, as a colleague of mine used to put it) to make his case. Monotheism has much to answer for. Basically, Goff is striving to be a monist because monism is more “elegant,” more parsimonious, as a theory than any account that multiplies basic entities.
His book just confirmed me in my pluralist views. And pushed me further toward materialism (or what in consciousness studies often gets called “physicalism.) I am, no doubt, ill informed about the basic science here. But I will venture to guess that one of Goff’s major problems is that he takes physics as the fundamental science relevant to his metaphysical project—a project defined by the attempt to identify the “deep nature” of “fundamental reality.” Goff is a believer in substance—and he ends up in a recognizably Spinoza-like place (although he only mentions Spinoza once in his book.) There is only one substance, but it manifests itself in different aspects (Spinoza’s modes) for Goff. And since one of Goff’s axioms is that consciousness self-evidently exists, then the single substance must have some rudimentary consciousness (although he does affirm that consciousness comes in more or less elaborated forms). In his most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Goff substitutes “the cosmos” for God, with what only seems to me a sliver of difference between the two even as he denies belief in God. (I base this on a podcast interview with Goff; I have not read the new book.) You can access the podcast interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFzS8MIhK0
Enough of Goff. What do I now believe? I buy Goff’s insistence that the existence of consciousness is self-evident. Consciousness is not an illusion; the phenomenon of experiencing consciousness needs to be accepted as evidence of its reality—and thus any metaphysical account of “what is” must include consciousness.
From there, accounting for the existence of consciousness leads into the question of whether it is something very different from the things that do not appear to possess consciousness. Just about everyone out there right now hates dualism; they don’t want a metaphysical account that ends up with two radically different fundamental things: consciousness and non-consciousness. So the alternatives seem to become: 1) reduction of consciousness to matter and its processes (physicalism) or 2) panpsychism (baking consciousness into matter from the very start).
On the face of it, neither alternative is very attractive. For the physicalist, the problem is that the actual physical processes by which you get from bio-chemical interactions to consciousness continue to elude us (despite assurances that date back to the 17th century that the connection will someday be uncovered). For the panpsychist, the problem is that basic matter—stones, not to mention atoms and electrons, do not demonstrate any of the features of consciousness. So on what basis do you claim that consciousness is somehow present in such instances of matter?
Let me start from what may be a huge misunderstanding on my part. Still: as I understand it, when we go to the periodic table of elements, we get a plurality of instances of matter that we could say are structured the same (i.e. however you characterize atomic structure) but which are different. A gold atom is not a hydrogen atom. And a gold atom will interact differently with an oxygen atom than a hydrogen atom will. So that seems to me to argue against the notion of a fundamental sameness, a monism, at the bottom of the manifested world. Instead, we begin from a variety of things that then interact in ways that produce further variety. Scientific laws may delineate the forms that interactions typically take—but the actual outcomes of interactions depend on which elements are interacting. Furthermore, modern science (again as I understand it—and I could well be wrong) usually works with probabilities, not certainties. Interactions do not always produce the same results. There is a considerable dose of leeway, even if science can fairly accurately (over a range of cases) predict the probability of one outcome over other possible ones. All of this, to my mind, suggests neither monism, not dualism, but pluralism.
But let’s leave physics behind. I think it’s a big mistake on Goff’s part to take physics as the place to land in any attempt to account for consciousness or for fundamental reality. As I see it, biology over the past fifty years has replaced physics as the science most likely to get us to the root of things. What is most striking to me about Goff’s book is the failure to link consciousness to life. I much prefer the various thinkers—Daniel Dennett (Freedom Evolves, Penguin,2004), Nicholas Humphrey [Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, MIT Press, 2023), Kevin Mitchell (Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton UP, 2023)—who approach consciousness through an evolutionary lens.
What does that mean? A lot of things. So let me list them here—and then try to discuss each of these items in turn. 1) Consciousness should be considered in relation to the ways it furthers an organism’s ability to survive and to produce descendants. 2) Consciousness should be considered within an evolutionary timeframe. It is not static, but something that changes over time. There is no reason to expect that it always existed (just as human beings did not always exist) and there is no reason to think it is not always in process. Adaptation, mutation, and change never stop. 3) The crucial category for thinking about the fundamental nature of things is “life,” not atomic or sub-atomic structure or some version of quantum mechanics. In short, biology leads us from a “substantialist” way of approaching metaphysical questions to a dynamic, process-focused way of addressing such questions. There is not some fundamental “stuff,” but a dynamic unfolding as “stuff” interacts and is transformed over time.
OK. Let me tackle each of these issues in turn. First, an evolutionary perspective on consciousness. I am mostly following Kevin Mitchell here. Basically, consciousness is a tool for evaluation. A living organism must evaluate its circumstances (what are threats, what are opportunities, what are the affordances) and must evaluate possible courses of action in response to those circumstances (which actions are most likely to be effective, require more of less expenditure of energy, have the least harmful side effects etc.) Self-consciousness is a way of evaluating what we can term the “internal environment.” How am I feeling, what do I want? Since circumstances change in a non-static world, the advantage of having the flexibility consciousness provides is a very valuable evolutionary advantage. Automatic stimulus/response mechanisms cannot adapt to different situations with the subtlety that consciousness affords.
On another level of explanation, the evolutionary view seems to entail accepting a dualist understanding of causation. Harkening back to Aristotle, the mechanistic efficient causation of physics now needs to be supplemented with a teleological causation acting at the level of the whole. Basically, the idea is that efficient causation is from the bottom-up, parts interacting to create something new. (That something new may, at times, be something larger, the product of a merger of the parts. But that is only one possibility; efficient causes can produce any number of effects.) A teleological cause is from the top-down. The whole has purposes that cause certain behavior in the parts. In evolutionary terms, the organism has an overriding purpose (survival and reproduction) that then causes the selection of certain capacities (sight, consciousness) that serve that purpose. In the most basic terms, the organism must work against entropy, must expend energy to keep its complex systems functioning, must defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Mitchell touches to some extent on this insistence that efficient cause does not rule the entire roost, but to get the full blown rewriting of our theories of causation to serve an evolutionary account of consciousness, you need to go to Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (Norton, 2013) and Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021). Their work leads to a cybernetic understanding of consciousness and its function within an information-processing model of living organisms. I do not claim to comprehend this model is all its intricacies, but the basic need to establish the credibility of a non-mechanistic form of causality is clear enough.
My second issue—the non-static, dynamic nature of evolutionary time is less complex. The big point here, for me, is that we hardly need (as the panpsychist insists) to have the psychic baked in from the very start. Things emerge over the long, long time spans of evolution; why should it be impossible that consciousness emerges? Improbable, yes. But impossible, no. If there are evolutionary good reasons for consciousness to emerge, then there are forces to work to make that happen. The real improbability is that life itself emerges. Once life does emerge, the emergence of consciousness is less hard to understand since consciousness delivers such substantial advantages for adaptation, survival, and reproduction. In terms or metaphysics, accepting a dynamic and long time frame moves us away from trying to identify basic entities that are there from start to finish. New interactions of pre-existing elements create new things.
So my third issue: life as the crucial category. I think that here I am going to get pushed into something that looks like, most likely is, dualism. But Goff’s book got me thinking about how intimately connected consciousness and life are—and how this intimate connection has not been explicitly addressed in the various books I have read. Here’s what I mean: consciousness is something only living creatures have. A stone is not conscious. But what is a living creature? A stab at a basic definition: a living creature is one that must take in fuel of some sort that it metabolizes to provide the energy required to keep certain life-sustaining processes going. Digestion, consciousness, blood circulation, fighting off infections are just some of these life-sustaining processes. And, crucially, a living creature can be defined as one that can die. To die is to have those various processes come to an end. No more seeking for and then ingesting fuel, no more feeling hungry, no more devising strategies for allaying hunger.
So the dualism seems to be between something that is alive and something that is not. And it seems as if alive things have consciousness and non-alive things do not. Furthermore, things that were once alive can stop being alive; they die and when they die they lose consciousness. All of which suggests to me that consciousness is produced by bio-chemical processes that require energy to occur and, since these processes can go awry in ways that do not sustain life but cause death instead, that the teleology of “life” must organize the multiple processes embodied in a living organism as it tries to ward off death. Consciousness is just one of those processes—and even if it is more mysterious to us than the digestive system, there seems no reason to believe it is different in kind. Hence my physicalism.
But I am still left with a dualism between the living and the non-living. Another way to express that dualism is to say that the processes of geology are also dynamic and non-static, but they are not processes in which natural selection (as understood by evolutionary theory) plays any role at all. Continental drift has nothing to do with adaptation and, thus (if my thinking hasn’t gotten utterly confused at this point), can be seen as solely an outcome of efficient causes, with no involvement of teleological causes.
I will end here. What I have said here does nothing to address the marvels and mysteries of the phenomenological experience of consciousness. Not surprisingly, as a literary person, the phenomenology is in many ways more interesting to me. How different living creatures think and feel is fascinating. We never cease to be surprised at how differently different creatures evaluate what appears to be the same situation. Except, of course, different creatures actually notice different aspects of that situation; different things are salient for them, attract their attention. And that doesn’t even consider different desires. But I don’t know that I have yet found a good way to even begin to sort out the complexities here. I think we need a book titled The Varieties of Conscious Experience—a deliberate echo of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.
McGowanBlog 
Some thoughts:
1. It may be true that Goff is a “monist,” but it seems a strange description of his position, since he is very much arguing against physicalism–hardly a dualist position. Physicalism, too, isn’t an account “that multiples basic entities.” There is one entity–physical matter, whether it’s a rock, an animal, or a brain within an animal. So I’m confused by the idea that your “pluralist views” coincide with physicalism. I would think the point of physicalism, within the consciousness debate, is to say that there is only one substance. (I know you like the idea of pluralism, but…) The “hard problem” poses a challenge that asks how it is that something that seemingly is without physical substance (a feeling of pain, for instance, or the feeling of a rough fabric touched by a hand) might be, in fact, a physical artifact with a physical location–that is, no different than any other physical substance.
2. In that sense, yes, a rock and a dog are both made up of the same stuff, even if one is living and one is not. (By the way, it seems that rocks, too, evolve, along with those “living things” you speak of.) I don’t mean to belittle the distinction, but opponents of physicalism are the ones who argue that a dog is different than a rock, not because a dog is alive but because it has consciousness, and consciousness defies physical explanation. Or am I missing something here?
3. You probably know it, but I think that you’re forced to include plants in what you’re saying, if “consciousness is a tool for evaluation”; they, too, like any other living thing, “evaluate possible courses of action in response to…circumstances,” no? They certainly seem different, in your sense, from rocks.
4. When you say that “consciousness is not an illusion,” I think you may be referring to Illusionism–I’m thinking of Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish. In that odd philosophical way, there is a little consequence to illusionism one way or the other; we continue to feel things exactly the same, whether or not our qualia or feels are real or not. So I would think you’d find it a more interesting theory, if only because it (a) gets rid of the hard problem (okay, perhaps too easily), and (b) counters Goff’s anti-physicalist arguments. Frankish is especially bullish on the idea of generating new research projects on the brain; the “illusion” seems to be, from his point of view, simply another name for a process in the brain whereby we fool ourselves (probably for good reason, but certainly in keeping with other ways we respond to, say, optical illusions.) He is thoroughly a physicalist.
5. I do agree with you that a biological approach is missing in Goff’s view, and I wonder whether this sort of approach amounts to a “functionalist” account of consciousness. (I’m out of my league here.) The point would be, as you suggest, that consciousness is very useful, for any number of reasons, and likely the result of animal evolution. Though I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of evolution having a teleology. There’s a long history of seeing evolution as having some purpose (in its worst version, a divine design, or, just as bad, the goal of humankind as its epitome); I realize that this is not your intent, but I wonder if it’s even necessary to explain the “emergence” of consciousness by some sort of pull of nature. There is a lot of controversy about teleology in respect to both Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theory. (See, for example, John Reiss’s Not By Design, a detailed and historical argument against any teleological understanding of evolution.)
6. Still, I think we can make general observations about the usefulness or function of consciousness: If I reach for the pan on the stove, I will feel the presence of heat and think twice about grabbing it barehanded. The feel of heat is mine, an instance of consciousness. This feel doesn’t seem like a physical thing; and as skeptics of physicalism point out, it’s not as though you’re going to cut into my brain and find that feel (though you might find the neural correlates). For some reason, none of this seems to trouble me (at least not today). I have a sense that the feel is a function of my brain; or it may be function of my brain in coordination with networks associated with other parts of my body; but one way or the other, it’s related to my physical body. Or, again, it may be a less a thing–what I’ve been referring to as a “feel”–than an illusion my brain creates. No difference.
Daniel
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