Table of Contents
Why a philosopher who spent 30 years as an atheist now believes consciousness goes all the way down to electrons—and returned to Christianity.
Key Takeaways
- Panpsychism isn't about electrons feeling existential angst—it's about incredibly simple forms of conscious experience existing at the most fundamental level of reality
- Physical science only tells us mathematical structure, not what "breathes fire into the equations" to create actual reality we experience
- Consciousness might be fundamental while physical reality emerges from it, flipping our usual assumptions about which comes first
- Galileo deliberately excluded consciousness from science 400 years ago because qualities like colors and smells can't be captured in pure mathematics
- Mystical experiences deserve the same epistemic respect we give ordinary sensory experiences—both could be delusions, both require trust
- The fine-tuning of physics for life suggests possible cosmic purpose without requiring traditional all-powerful God concepts
- Integrated Information Theory shows consciousness corresponds to deep integration between parts, not just complexity or processing power
- Most religious traditions began with direct mystical experiences, not theological arguments or institutional doctrine
- "Heretical Christianity" allows engagement with rich traditions and community while maintaining intellectual honesty about uncertainty
- Starting from "how can I contribute?" rather than "what do I want?" fundamentally shifts your relationship with happiness and meaning
Timeline Overview
• 00:00:00 – 00:18:39 | Goff opens with mystical experience and panpsychism discussion. Defines consciousness going down to fundamental particles as incredibly simple experience, not human emotions. Connects to psychedelic experiences where people sense "living presence in all things."
• 00:18:39 – 00:36:56 | Integrated Information Theory discussion - consciousness corresponds to integration between brain parts, not computational complexity. Contrasts with computers lacking holistic information storage that characterizes conscious systems.
• 00:36:56 – 00:54:54 | Brain structure examination from front to back regions. Global Workspace Theory versus Integrated Information Theory debate reflects philosophical assumptions, not just data. Consciousness isn't publicly observable, requiring science-philosophy partnership.
• 00:54:54 – 01:12:46 | Classical philosophy with Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington. Physics only reveals mathematical structure, not what "breathes fire into equations." Can get physics out of consciousness but not necessarily reverse.
• 01:12:46 – 01:30:47 | William James's "right to believe" - mystical experiences deserve same respect as sensory experiences. VR experience revealing ordinary reality's richness that humans evolutionarily ignore.
• 01:30:47 – 01:48:41 | Goff's 30-year atheist to "heretical Christian" journey through Eastern Orthodox mystical traditions. Explores middle-ground between theism and atheism, cosmic purpose without omnipotent God.
• 01:48:41 – 02:06:36 | Historical "belief" meant commitment, not propositional assent, enabling uncertain religious participation. Life orientation shift from "what do I want?" to "how can I contribute?" as path to happiness.
The Consciousness Revolution: Why Panpsychism Went From Ridicule to Mainstream
Here's something that would have seemed impossible 15 years ago: a philosophical position that was literally ridiculed in academic circles is now taught to undergraduates and published regularly in serious journals. Philip Goff has witnessed this transformation firsthand as one of the leading defenders of panpsychism—the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
But before you picture electrons pondering their existence or quarks experiencing Tuesday blues, understand what panpsychism actually claims. It's not about attributing human-like consciousness to tiny particles. Instead, it suggests that just as we see a spectrum of conscious complexity from humans to sheep to snails, this spectrum continues downward to incredibly simple forms of experience that reflect the incredibly simple nature of fundamental particles.
The resonance with people has been extraordinary, particularly among those who've had psychedelic experiences. On the standard psychological questionnaire for mystical experiences, one of the items participants check is "do you have a sense that there is a living presence in all things?" Many people emerging from these experiences report exactly this intuition—that consciousness pervades the universe in ways our ordinary scientific worldview doesn't capture.
This wasn't Goff's academic starting point. He arrived at panpsychism through what he calls "cold-blooded intellectual reasons"—it solves mysteries and paradoxes of consciousness that other approaches haven't touched. But the experiential dimension adds another layer of support that's impossible to ignore.
The basic insight is surprisingly simple once you think about it. We have this incredibly rich, complex human consciousness that resulted from millions of years of evolution. But consciousness clearly comes in different forms and degrees of complexity. A sheep's consciousness is simpler than a human's. A snail's is simpler than a sheep's. For panpsychists, this process of simplification continues all the way down.
What's fascinating is how this challenges our usual assumptions about what's "really real." Most people think we know what matter is but struggle to understand consciousness. Panpsychism suggests it's precisely the opposite—we know consciousness intimately by being conscious, but matter remains fundamentally mysterious.
Galileo's Great Mistake: How Science Lost Consciousness
The roots of our current predicament with consciousness trace back exactly 400 years to a brilliant but fateful decision by Galileo. He wanted science to be purely mathematical—a revolutionary innovation that had never been attempted before. But he understood there was a problem: the qualities we encounter in conscious experience simply can't be captured in mathematics.
You can map out color in three-dimensional space using hue, saturation, and brightness. You can measure wavelengths and frequencies. But no amount of mathematical description can convey to a person blind from birth what it's actually like to see red. The redness of red—what philosophers call "qualia"—stubbornly resists mathematical capture.
Galileo's solution was elegant and devastating: strip the physical world of all its qualities. The colors aren't really on the objects—they're in the conscious experience of the observer. The spiciness isn't really in the curry—it's in the conscious experience of the person eating. All the colors, sounds, smells, and tastes got relocated to what Galileo called "the soul," which was safely outside the domain of science.
This move worked brilliantly. It launched mathematical physics and led to incredible technological advances and scientific consensus. But here's what people forget: it worked precisely because it was given a limited focus. Consciousness was deliberately excluded from the scientific picture.
If Galileo time-traveled to today and heard about our struggles to explain consciousness in terms of physical science, he'd probably say: "Of course you can't do that. I designed physical science to exclude consciousness." The challenge isn't just adding consciousness back into our existing framework—it's fundamentally rethinking the foundations of science itself.
This is where panpsychism offers a potential solution. It's not telling us to do science differently, but to have a more expansive scientific method that brings consciousness back into the story. Instead of trying to get consciousness out of purely non-conscious physical processes—a project that has gone precisely nowhere despite decades of effort—panpsychism suggests starting with consciousness as fundamental and seeing if we can get physical reality out of that.
The track record speaks for itself. We know we can get physics out of consciousness through networks of simple conscious entities with the right mathematical structure. We don't know if we can get consciousness out of physics. So why keep banging our heads against the wall when we know the reverse direction works?
The Science of Consciousness: Why Philosophy Matters More Than You Think
Twenty-five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers a case of fine wine that the science of consciousness would be wrapped up by now. Last summer, Koch publicly conceded defeat. There's still no consensus on what's called the "neural correlates of consciousness"—those aspects of brain activity that perfectly correspond to conscious experience.
This failure isn't due to lack of scientific effort or funding. The problem runs deeper: consciousness isn't publicly observable. You can't look inside someone's brain and see their feelings and experiences. You can't peer into a fish and determine whether it has conscious states. This creates enormous methodological challenges that pure science can't solve alone.
The best scientists can do is ask conscious humans what they're experiencing while scanning their brains, stimulate brain regions and record responses, then try to extrapolate to non-human cases. It's valuable work, but it will always leave open the fundamental "why" question: why should brain activity have anything to do with consciousness at all?
This is where philosophy becomes essential rather than optional. Science can map correlations between brain states and reported experiences, but interpreting what those correlations mean depends entirely on your philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality.
Consider the dispute about whether consciousness is located in the front or back of the brain. Global Workspace Theory suggests consciousness arises from integration in the frontal regions—the front of the brain acts like a "sketch pad" where sensory information combines with memories and emotions before being broadcast throughout the brain. Integrated Information Theory places consciousness in the grid-like interconnections at the back of the brain.
But here's what's crucial: the split between these theories isn't just about experimental data. It reflects deeper philosophical assumptions about what consciousness actually is and how it relates to physical processes. You can't escape doing philosophy when dealing with consciousness—you can only do it well or poorly.
This suggests we might need to fragment the discipline into communities of scientists and philosophers working together under explicit philosophical assumptions. Some neuroscientists resist this, worried it will make them look less credible as "real" science. But given consciousness's unique properties—its privacy, its qualitative nature, its resistance to third-person objective study—there's no choice but to engage seriously with philosophical questions.
The alternative is continuing to generate correlations without understanding what they mean, mapping brain activity without grasping why any of it should give rise to subjective experience. After 25 years of this approach yielding no consensus, maybe it's time to take philosophy seriously as a necessary partner in understanding consciousness.
William James and the Right to Believe: Mystical Experience as Evidence
When Philip Goff lists his intellectual heroes, William James tops the list even above Bertrand Russell. James represents something rare in philosophy: someone who feels completely contemporary despite writing over a century ago. His thinking remains sharp, reasonable, and directly applicable to questions we're still wrestling with today.
James's most provocative contribution might be his argument about mystical experiences and what he called "the right to believe." Imagine you're having a mystical experience that seems to reveal a higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. Would it be rational to trust that experience?
Most people's immediate response is skeptical: "It's just something funny going on in your brain. It could be a delusion." But James points out a crucial double standard. We think it's perfectly reasonable to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but those could also be delusions. We could be in the Matrix. This could all be a dream.
You might say we can test our senses, but only by using our senses—which makes the whole enterprise circular. All knowledge ultimately starts with a decision to trust your experience. So why is it acceptable to trust ordinary sensory experiences, fallible as they are, but not mystical experiences?
This isn't about being gullible or abandoning critical thinking. James understood the risks of believing false things. But he also recognized there's another risk: missing true things. In areas where rational argumentation and experiments can't settle matters, where uncertainty genuinely remains, maybe it can be rational to choose belief—tentatively, knowingly taking a risk, but with eyes wide open.
This framework becomes especially relevant when considering the relationship between consciousness and mystical experience. If consciousness is indeed fundamental to reality rather than just an emergent property of complex brains, then experiences that seem to reveal deeper levels of conscious reality might be exactly what they appear to be: genuine insights into the nature of things.
The key is intellectual honesty. You're not making an intellectual error when you choose to trust uncertain experiences—you're acknowledging you're taking a risk, going beyond what strict evidence demands, but doing so for reasons you can articulate and defend.
James's approach offers a middle path between dogmatic certainty and paralyzing skepticism. It suggests we can engage seriously with experiences that point toward transcendent dimensions of reality without abandoning our critical faculties or pretending to know more than we actually do.
From Atheist to Heretical Christian: The Journey Back to Faith
For 30 years, Philip Goff was a committed atheist. Raised Catholic, serving as an altar boy who could never remember to ring the bells at the right time, he decided by age 14 that God didn't exist. He refused confirmation, upsetting his grandmother, and spent the next three decades as part of the growing "spiritual but not religious" demographic.
The intellectual journey back began with recognizing that both traditional theism and traditional atheism struggle with major explanatory challenges. Traditional believers have trouble explaining horrific suffering—why would an all-good, all-powerful God allow cancer and earthquakes? But atheists struggle with the fine-tuning of physics for life, the surprising discovery that for life to exist, certain fundamental constants had to fall within incredibly narrow ranges.
This evidence for fine-tuning wasn't available in Bertrand Russell's day—much of it has emerged only since the 1970s and 1980s, with the cosmological constant related to dark energy only discovered in 1998. Goff argues that Russell, who followed evidence wherever it led, would probably believe in some form of cosmic purpose today given this new information.
But cosmic purpose doesn't require traditional concepts of God. Goff explores several middle-ground options: laws of nature with purposes built into them, a God of limited powers who can't prevent all suffering, the simulation hypothesis, or the possibility that the universe itself is conscious and goal-directed.
The personal journey back involved discovering Christianity's mystical traditions, particularly in Eastern Orthodox theology. Unlike the sin-focused Catholicism of his childhood, Eastern Orthodoxy emphasizes God and the universe becoming one, entering deep states of unity. This resonated powerfully with his spiritual experiences and philosophical commitments.
Equally important was learning about different ways of engaging with religious language and concepts. Historical scholarship suggests that our modern focus on propositional belief—"which statements about reality do you accept as true?"—represents a relatively recent corruption of religious engagement.
The word "believe" in early Christianity had connotations closer to "commitment," "trust," and "engagement" rather than intellectual assent to hypotheses. When Jesus spoke about belief, he wasn't primarily concerned with which propositions people accepted about reality's structure, but with where they placed their hearts and commitments.
This opens space for what Goff calls "heretical Christianity"—engagement with rich traditions, communities, and practices while maintaining intellectual honesty about uncertainty. You don't have to claim definitive knowledge that Christian claims are literally true. You can take them as beautiful metaphors, profound hopes, or frameworks for spiritual exploration while still participating meaningfully in religious community.
The practical benefits have been substantial: structured practice, deep community connections, regular rhythms that mark life's passages, and most importantly, a reorientation away from ego-driven success toward contribution and service. Instead of asking "what do I want?" the focus shifts to "how can I contribute?"—a change that paradoxically leads to greater happiness and presence.
The Future of Consciousness: Science, Philosophy, and Spiritual Experience
The convergence of multiple trends suggests we're entering a fascinating period for consciousness studies. Advances in neuroscience provide increasingly detailed maps of brain activity. Philosophical sophistication about consciousness problems continues growing. Psychedelic research is returning to academic respectability. And there's renewed openness to spiritual dimensions of human experience.
But the real breakthroughs may come from recognizing the limitations of purely reductionist approaches. The integrated information theory represents one promising direction—consciousness corresponds to integrated information processing rather than just computational complexity. Systems with higher integration between parts, where information storage depends on the whole rather than individual components, generate consciousness.
This has profound implications for artificial intelligence. Current computers, despite their impressive capabilities, may not be conscious because their information storage is less dependent on integration. Remove a few transistors and you don't lose much information. But remove a small part of a brain and you lose tremendous amounts because information storage is fundamentally holistic.
Understanding consciousness also has crucial ethical implications that extend far beyond academic philosophy. Which animals are conscious? How should this affect our treatment of them? What about people in comas who can't communicate normally? Recent research has found ways to communicate with some coma patients through brain scanning, revealing meaningful thought in cases where none was suspected.
The question of plant consciousness represents another frontier. We've learned incredible things about plant intelligence—their capacity for conditioned learning, the extent of underground communication networks between trees, cross-species cooperation in sharing nutrients. This doesn't necessarily prove consciousness, but it challenges assumptions about where the line should be drawn.
For panpsychists, these questions have particular urgency because the view suggests consciousness is far more widespread than commonly assumed. If trees and plants have some form of conscious experience, our ethical frameworks need substantial revision. You can't just avoid eating conscious beings when consciousness extends throughout the living world.
But the practical implications extend beyond ethics to fundamental questions about meaning and purpose. If consciousness is indeed fundamental to reality rather than just an accidental byproduct of neural complexity, this suggests something profound about our place in the cosmos. We're not isolated islands of awareness in an unconscious universe—we're expressions of reality's deepest nature.
This perspective doesn't solve the hard problems of existence, but it reframes them in ways that feel less alienating and more participatory. Instead of asking how consciousness could possibly emerge from dead matter, we ask how the rich complexity of conscious experience develops from simpler forms. Instead of wondering why we're aware in an unconscious cosmos, we explore how we fit into reality's conscious structure.
The future of consciousness studies will likely require unprecedented collaboration between neuroscientists, philosophers, physicists, and contemplatives. Each brings essential perspectives that others lack. Scientists provide experimental rigor and detailed knowledge of brain function. Philosophers offer conceptual clarity about what questions we're actually asking. Physicists contribute insights about fundamental reality's structure. Contemplatives bring firsthand familiarity with consciousness's deeper dimensions.
Most importantly, this emerging synthesis suggests we don't have to choose between scientific rigor and spiritual openness, between intellectual honesty and participatory engagement with traditions that speak to our deepest questions. The universe revealed by contemporary science—with its fine-tuned constants, quantum mysteries, and integrated information structures—may be far stranger and more consciousness-friendly than our materialist assumptions suggest.
We're still in the early stages of this exploration, still learning how to ask the right questions and develop appropriate methods for studying consciousness. But the convergence of evidence from multiple directions suggests we're approaching something like a new understanding of mind's place in nature—one that honors both scientific rigor and the profound mystery of being conscious in a conscious cosmos.
