Goff presents the
dualist and
materialist views on consciousness and proceeds to demonstrate their respective failures to explain consciousness.
Dualism Dualism, the idea that consciousness is separate from the physical mind suffers from the apparent lack of unexplained activity in the brain that would be present if it were interacting with a non-physical mind.
Materialism With regards to materialism, Goff's critique is based on thought experiments that aim to demonstrate that objective knowledge cannot be extended to encapsulate the subjective experience. Therefore consciousness, which is a subjective experience cannot be explained in terms of the physical brain, which is objective.
Panpsychism He then goes on to present panpsychism as what he describes to be "a way of accepting the reality of consciousness" while being "entirely consistent with the facts of empirical science". The book defines panpsychism as the view that "consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality", and everything, including
fundamental particles, has consciousness. That's not to say, however, that everything has human-level conscious. Instead, it's the complex arrangement of trillions of those conscious particles in the brain that brings that forth. == References ==