Philip Goff on Panpsychism: Why Consciousness Might Be the Stuff of Matter

High-Level Overview

In this long, wandering and good-humoured conversation, Lex Fridman talks with Philip Goff, a philosopher of mind at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error, about panpsychism: the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. Goff lays out why he thinks neither materialism nor dualism can handle the "datum" of subjective experience, and why he believes consciousness is not an add-on to matter but what matter actually is. Along the way the two range over Daniel Dennett, David Hume and objective value, mystical experience and universal consciousness, the trustworthiness of experts, integrated information theory, philosophical zombies and robot rights, free will and the Libet experiments, the simulation argument, and what might make existence meaningful.

The tone is playful but serious. Goff is precise and self-deprecating, Fridman keeps pulling the discussion toward engineering, martial arts, love and death, and the pair disagree openly about expertise and pleasure without losing warmth. The conversation swings between rigorous philosophy of mind, personal anecdotes (including a debate on a yacht in the Arctic with Daniel Dennett), and big-picture reflections on ethics and hope.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why consciousness is unique among the things science tries to explain: it is qualitative and not publicly observable
• What panpsychism claims, and how it differs from materialism, dualism and Dennett-style views
• The idea that physics describes what matter does while consciousness is what matter is
• Objective value, David Hume, and what might make humans different from other animals
• Mystical experience, universal consciousness and a possible impersonal life after death
• The value and the limits of expertise, from academic peer review to Brazilian jiu-jitsu belts
• Philosophical zombies, illusionism, moral status, and whether we could ever know if a robot is conscious
• Libertarian free will, strong emergence, the simulation argument and the meaning of life

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Consciousness Is Not Publicly Observable

Fridman opens by recalling that he once asked Elon Musk whether consciousness permeates all matter, and Musk said no, because it could not be tested scientifically. Goff disagrees: "I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter." He grants that there is a real challenge here. Science routinely deals with unobservables such as fundamental particles, quantum wave functions and other universes, but it postulates them in order to explain what we can observe. Consciousness is the one case where the thing to be explained is itself not publicly observable. We know about it not from experiments but from our immediate awareness of our own feelings. That, Goff argues, means we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method rather than giving up on explaining consciousness.

He illustrates the difference with an alien visitor: an intelligent alien could understand our physics and rerun our experiments, but nobody can directly access another person's pain the way that person does. We have perceptual access only to behavior, and if we were strictly trying to explain behavior we would never need to posit consciousness at all. Goff credits Daniel Dennett with being consistent about this: Dennett treats only third-person data, including what people say, as the data of a science of consciousness (what he calls heterophenomenology), and so denies the private datum Goff takes as the starting point. Goff says many people sit in a confused middle position, believing science only accounts for public observation while also believing in feelings, without noticing that this commits them to an extra datum.

Dennett, Narratives and What Makes Humans Different

Fridman describes Dennett's picture of consciousness as something like collaborative editing of multiple stories in the brain, which Goff identifies as the "multiple drafts" model. Goff mentions that the philosopher Luke Roelofs has written a panpsychist version in which all the drafts are conscious, and praises Roelofs as one of the most rigorous philosophers working today. That leads to a point Goff returns to often: contemporary panpsychism comes out of analytic philosophy and is defended through careful argument, not fluffy thinking. On definitions, he notes that philosophers used to chase perfect necessary-and-sufficient conditions (the long failed effort to define knowledge after Gettier's counterexamples) and now aim to be only as precise as a purpose requires.

Goff thinks narrative theories may be plausible accounts of the self and personal identity over time, but not of consciousness. A hamster has experience, feels pain and pleasure, and there is something it is like to be one, without any capacity to tell stories about itself. What is distinctive about humans, he suggests, is the ability to reflect on experience, plan, and above all respond to reasons and objective considerations of value. Here he describes a conversion away from David Hume's view that reason is the slave of the passions. His test case: someone whose basic life goal is counting blades of grass, and who gets no pleasure from it. Goff wants to say that life is objectively pointless in a way that pursuing knowledge or helping people is not, and admitting that means rejecting Hume. Fridman pushes back that anyone deeply engaged in a task would find joy in its mastery, and that struggle, loss and finitude are what give life its richness. Goff notes that this answer itself implies there are facts about a good life beyond whatever goals we happen to have, and that a hamster never asks whether it rode the roller coaster of life.

Materialism, Dualism and the Panpsychist Middle Way

Goff sets out the options. Materialism holds that consciousness can be wholly explained by the physical sciences, ultimately by electrochemical signalling in the brain. Dualism holds that consciousness is non-physical, outside the workings of body and brain though closely tied to them. His core objection to materialism is that physical science works with a purely quantitative description of the world, while consciousness involves qualities like the smell of coffee, the taste of mint or the deep red of a sunset, which cannot be captured in quantitative language.

On dualism he says he has changed his mind since writing his book. He once argued that an immaterial mind acting on the brain would show up as unexplained events in neuroscience, as if a poltergeist were playing with the brain. After more contact with neuroscientists, including an interdisciplinary consciousness group at Durham, he now thinks we know too little to make that argument. We understand basic neurochemistry and large-scale brain functions, but not how those functions are realized at the cellular level. He points out that every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons, that the connectome of the maggot brain is only about 70% complete, and that the human brain has 86 billion neurons. He also mentions Martin Picard at Columbia, who is exploring the idea that mitochondria in the brain act like social networks. Even so, Goff still prefers panpsychism on grounds of simplicity: "why believe in two kinds of thing when you can just get away with one." Materialism is also simple, but in his view it cannot account for the data.

Getting Physics Out of Consciousness

Goff explains that his version of panpsychism turns the usual problem on its head. Instead of asking how consciousness comes out of matter, it starts with networks of very simple conscious entities whose predictable behavior realizes mathematical structures, and those structures are what physics describes as particles, fields, mass, spin and charge. In his words: "I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to get physics out of consciousness."

He uses this to answer a critique by the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who argued that if particles had extra consciousness properties, the standard model would make false predictions. Goff says this misreads the view: panpsychists do not add properties beyond those physics attributes, they offer a different account of what those properties are. Physics tells us what things do, not what they are; he compares it to playing chess when you only care about the moves and not what the pieces are made of. The identity claim, as he puts it, is that "physics tells us what matter does, consciousness is what matter is." He credits Bertrand Russell's idea that physics captures only the "causal skeleton of the world. Fridman, thinking as an engineer, wonders whether it would be more empirically tractable if consciousness were just another property of particles, so that one could build up a kind of chemistry of consciousness. Goff agrees the ultimate goal is a hierarchical story that gets from simple forms of experience up to human and animal minds, and that if panpsychism cannot do that it is game over. He adds a quip about his own position: I think about pan-psychism, actually, it's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest."

Measuring Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory

Asked whether some things are more conscious than others, Goff describes the science of consciousness as an interdisciplinary job that combines experimental work on the neural correlates of consciousness with a theoretical why question that no experiment alone can answer. He is attracted to integrated information theory (IIT), which places consciousness wherever integrated information is highest. On that view a cup of tea is probably not conscious as a whole, while the brain is, because the whole system holds more integrated information than its parts. He explains IIT's unusual notion of information as the constraint a system places on its past and future states, and contrasts a computer, where removing a few transistors loses little, with a brain, where removing a small piece loses a lot because information depends on interconnection.

Goff is less sure that experience itself comes in degrees. Complexity and structure can be graded, but he struggles to make sense of having "five units of experience." Fridman presses with suffering: surely a hamster has less capacity to suffer than he does. Goff agrees humans have forms of suffering unavailable to most animals, such as fear of death or worry about whether existence has a purpose, and he feels emotional suffering is deeper than physical suffering, but he doubts there is a single scale. He also notes, via Thomas Nagel's famous example of bats, that animals have experiences we lack.

Zombies, Illusionism and Moral Status

Goff describes illusionism, the view that consciousness as philosophers usually conceive it does not exist. He co-hosts the podcast Mind Chat with the committed illusionist Keith Frankish: "I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it's nowhere." He introduces David Chalmers's philosophical zombie, a being physically and behaviorally identical to us but with no inner experience, and says he is inclined to think consciousness is the basis of moral value, so switching off a truly non-conscious android would not be murder. As a panpsychist, this also changes how he sees nature: if a tree is a conscious organism of an unusual kind, chopping it down or watching a forest burn takes on new moral weight. That makes diet complicated, since plants no longer offer a clean dividing line, so his working principle is to avoid factory-farmed animal products, which he thinks more people could get behind for harm reduction.

Fridman, who builds robots, says he knows intellectually his robots are not conscious but still feels connected to them and increasingly uneasy about "killing them. He worries both about systems that manipulate people by pretending to have feelings, and about the historical pattern of declaring some group not conscious so it can be harmed. Goff separates the ontological question (there is a fact about whether something is conscious, and that decides its rights) from the epistemological one (how on earth we would know). He cites Ned Block's paper on the harder problem": we could never tell whether pain depends on the specific neural hardware or on its functional role, since in humans the two always come together. Goff says it would be reassuring if consciousness turned out to be strongly emergent, tied to causal dynamics in the brain not reducible to chemistry and physics, because that would offer a way to tell conscious systems from mechanisms.

Expertise, Humility and Mystical Experience

The episode's liveliest disagreement concerns experts. Goff discusses the philosopher Miri Albahari, who argues that experienced meditators reporting a universal consciousness should be treated like expert witnesses, and he cites William James's argument in The Varieties of Religious Experience that it is a double standard to trust ordinary sense experience but not mystical experience, since neither can be checked from outside ourselves. In the experimental last chapter of Galileo's Error, Goff explores how universal consciousness, if real, might allow a kind of impersonal life after death and a basis for altruism, since at our core we would overlap. He is clear that panpsychism itself has no necessary spiritual commitments, and that many panpsychists are secular.

Still, Goff defends academic expertise. We cannot research everything, so we need institutions whose members have read the literature and had their views challenged by peers, protected from conflicts of interest. He criticizes a UK think tank that appears on the BBC without disclosing its funders. Fridman says he is allergic to the word expert because titles breed ego, and criticizes scientists who dismissed public concerns during COVID without engaging them with empathy. He compares it to jiu-jitsu, where a black belt changes how people treat you but no-gi training strips rank away and only the raw exchange matters. Goff largely agrees that the best academics keep exposing their ideas to attack, and complains that philosophers do too little public outreach. His own approach was to write an academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and then the accessible Galileo's Error; he also wrote a Scientific American piece on an argument that reasoning from cosmic fine-tuning to the multiverse is fallacious.

Sean Carroll, Joe Rogan and Mental Causation

Goff recounts debates with physicist Sean Carroll, including a panpsychism debate on Clubhouse. Carroll's objection is that if zombies are coherent, consciousness on Goff's view does not do anything. Goff answers with an analogy: "physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware." Microsoft Word can run on a desktop or a laptop, but that does not mean the desktop does nothing; likewise, the fact that the same physics could in principle run on non-conscious stuff does not make consciousness idle in our universe. For a panpsychist, consciousness is doing everything.

Reflecting on his appearance with Joe Rogan the day before, Goff says Rogan argued that drugs changing brain chemistry and thereby consciousness show consciousness is explained by the brain. Goff separates correlation from explanation: we know certain brain activity goes with certain experiences, but not why. He compares this to quantum mechanics, where the equations work, yet there remains the question of what reality is doing to make them work, and different interpretations answer it differently. He also tells of a yacht trip in the Arctic funded by the Russian philosopher Dmitry Volkov, where Paul Churchland's claim that dualism violates conservation of energy drew a sharp response from Goff and a hostile reaction from the room. Later, alone on deck with Dennett as he carved a walking stick, Goff says Dennett conceded the point might be right.

Free Will and the Simulation Question

Goff says we should be more agnostic about free will than about consciousness, but he sees no good scientific or philosophical case against libertarian free will, putting him at odds with Sam Harris. To the claim that there is no middle way between determined and random, he cites Durham philosopher Jonathan Lowe: free choice differs from a random event because it involves responsiveness to reasons. On the Libet experiments, which claimed brain activity preceding a conscious decision by about half a second (with later claims of seven to ten seconds), he notes they study senseless choices like pressing a button, whereas the free will worth caring about is weighing considerations, which may not happen at an identifiable instant. Whether this conflicts with Carroll's "core theory" of physics depends, he argues, on whether the brain has strongly emergent causal dynamics, which is an open empirical question; if everything proved reducible, he would drop libertarian free will in a heartbeat. Fridman argues that building intelligent, even seemingly conscious, systems is another way to do philosophy, and Goff agrees consciousness research must bring philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists and engineers together; he hopes to build such a network around panpsychism.

On the simulation argument, Goff takes it seriously but rejects its assumption that consciousness is substrate independent. Because he thinks consciousness is the stuff of matter, copying only the software of a brain would not carry consciousness across, and he worries that future mind uploading could amount to suicide even if "Granny" still answers emails.

Meaning and Choosing to Live in Hope

In closing, Fridman quotes Goff's suggested Hitchhiker's Guide entry for our reality: a physical universe whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth a visit. Goff says consciousness is the root of everything that matters in life, yet our official scientific worldview seems to leave no room for it, contributing to what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. Without a framework for meaning, he suggests, people turn to nationalism, fundamentalist religion or consumerism. He believes there are objective facts about value, largely concerning conscious experience.

On whether existence has a purpose, Goff says he does not know, but that faith does not require certainty. His analogy: with a seriously ill friend who has a 30% chance of recovery, you should not believe they will get better, but you can have faith in the sense that "I choose to live in hope about that possibility." He applies the same attitude to cosmic purpose, and Fridman jokingly proposes editing the guide entry to "hopefully worth a visit."

Conclusion

Philip Goff's case is that consciousness is the one thing science cannot observe from the outside, that materialism leaves out its qualities and dualism is needlessly complicated, and that the simplest option is to treat consciousness as the intrinsic nature of the matter physics describes. From there the conversation shows how much hangs on that question: whether animals, trees or robots deserve moral concern, whether free will is possible, whether uploading a mind preserves anyone, and whether the universe can be meaningful. Goff is candid about what remains unknown, especially how little we understand the brain, and Lex Fridman keeps testing his ideas against engineering, expertise and lived experience. Listeners who want the full arguments, the zombie jokes and the Arctic yacht story will find the whole episode worth the time.

This is a summary of "#261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind" from Lex Fridman Podcast, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.