Philip Goff

speaker

549 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Philip Goff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Eye On A.I. · How Modern Science Got Consciousness Wrong From the Start | Philip Goff · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

So why didn't natural selections make us sort of complex survival mechanisms that mechanically track features of the environment and initiate various forms of survival conducive behaviour?

Um why do you need to have an inner life?

Now th actually this connects to s to what I was saying in my last answer.

I think uh and this is just this is just me pressing this at the moment, but anyway

I talk about this a lot in my oh my my book, modestly titled Why the Purpose of the Universe that is just out in paperback.

Quick advert there.

I think the an ex solving this mystery of why consciousness evolved must involve some kind of strong emergence, must involve consciousness bringing into being new forms of behavior behavioral response, new forms of causation that are not predictable just from the underlying chemistry or physics.

Because it's only in that way it could give you.

some kind of distinctive survival advantage that would

make natural selection think I want a little bit of that, uh, if I can carry on the personification.

So yeah.

Well, if if I'm right that consciousness does involve some sort of strong emergence, then in principle there must be a a a noticeable behavioral difference.

Um but the question is, do uh we at the level of our understanding of the brain um to be able to to make that problem tractable?

So I mean I I've

I recommend to people uh excellent book by Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain, which traces the the whole intellectual history of our understanding of the brain and the mind, going back to when we thought the mind was in the heart.

And, you know, really the take-home message is

We know very little about the workings of the brain.

I think people get a bit carried away with uh, you know, brain imaging, fMRI imaging, but there's i in in a sense it's very low resolution, you know, every every pixel corresponds to what is it, ten thousand neurons or something.

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