Philosophy Discussion Forums

I read an interesting book called "Galileo's Error" By Philip Goff on the "hard" problem of consciousness and he is basically an advocate for panpsychism. Without wanting to go into that particular subject here, he made a good argument that, since the days of of Galileo, science has been designed intentionally to preclude the subjective and focus strictly on objective, quantitively measurable facts. While that has been so successful in many fields of science, it has set barriers to the ability of science to explain the subjective. Which is why he believes that the problem of consciousness will never be properly understood until that changes.

Lagayascienza wrote:But that doesn't mean that science cannot investigate the subjective. Imagine we want to find out how many people had ever felt depressed. Or imagine we wanted to get a handle on what a heart attack felt like. With well posed questions and a big enough sample we can do studies that will yield statistically significant results on anything that individuals feel subjectively.

That does not investigate the subjective. No amount of surveys can tell you what it's like to feel depressed or what a heart attack actually feels like. No amount of data can tell a blind person what seeing yellow feels like.

And yet we know consciousness exists, and how it feels to feel the things we feel, because we directly experience it.

Furthermore, science has a problem with teleological explanations. We cannot objectively measurepurpose. And yet we experience our own sense of purpose and our actions that are guided by it. Like consciousness, we assume other humans have purpose because we do ourselves. And yet the scientific approach to many social sciences (including economics) eschews a any form of teleological analysis, preferring to study human interactions as if we were mindless physical entities (through strict statistical analysis) as that's more "scientific".

Note, I'm not arguing against science or the scientific method here. Just that there might be some improvements that need to be made in order to develop our understanding reality in certain fields.

Fried Egg wrote: ↑Yesterday, 9:35 am I read an interesting book called "Galileo's Error" By Philip Goff on the "hard" problem of consciousness and he is basically an advocate for panpsychism. Without wanting to go into that particular subject here, he made a good argument that, since the days of of Galileo, science has been designed intentionally to preclude the subjective and focus strictly on objective, quantitively measurable facts. While that has been so successful in many fields of science, it has set barriers to the ability of science to explain the subjective.

I agree. As science was growing-up, it needed to specialise, to become the outstanding tool we know today. To do this, I think it abandoned (probably not 'consciously'), subjective topics and subjectivity — the difficult stuff. IMO.