Galileo’s Error: Can Physical Science Explain Consciousness?

I had intended to go into more detail on these chapters than I’m going to, because things have been a bit hectic and enough time has passed that some of the thoughts I had while reading them have faded from my memory. But there are still some things I’d like to comment on, so I’m going to continue going chapter by chapter anyway.

As I noted in my first comment on the book, Goff wasn’t quite as fair to the physicalist view as he was to the dualist view. He outlines a lot of problems with the view, but unlike with dualism he doesn’t spend a lot of time outlining ways physicalists can respond to those problems. This can leave the impression that all they have are problems and no solutions. Ultimately, his objection to dualism is going to be that it isn’t simple enough, but the impression one can get of his view is that he just thinks that physicalism is wrong or only has problems. Physicalists will surely disagree with that interpretation.

But the most interesting thing in the chapter is his comment that while people think that Galileo’s theories were empirically driven and his conclusions proven by experience, the thing that Galileo used to convince the most people of his idea that things all fall at the same speed was instead a thought experiment. According to Goff, Galileo asked what would happen if you tied a really heavy object and a much lighter object together with a cable and dropped them. If heavier things fell faster, then this should have an impact on how the two things fell. But he pointed out that the theory led to two contradictory conclusions. The first is that the two objects have a greater mass than just the one object, and so the two of them combined should fall faster than just the heavier object alone. However, the second is that the lighter object would fall slower and so provide some “drag” and so the two objects should fall slower than just the heaver object alone. Since the theory produced two logically contradictory conclusions, there seems to be something wrong with the theory.

The thing is, I don’t think that modern scientists would be all that impressed by that thought experiment. It looks quite a bit like Xeno’s Paradox, where we reason to a specific conclusion but that doesn’t mean that that’s how it will work in reality. From this, I suspect that most naturalists and scientists today would simply say that we should try it out and see what happens (eliminating things like air resistance). Once we try it and see what happens, then we can see how our theory should react to it and adjust accordingly. So while people may have been convinced by the thought experiment, they probably should have been. So I think that most of the people who need to be convinced that thought experiments can be useful either won’t or shouldn’t be convinced by the example he used. Thus, they’d have to be convinced of it simply by the fact that Galileo used them, but they all know that in the olden days more philosophical methods were mixed in with the scientific ones, but the incredibly success of scientific methods means that we don’t feel the need to do that anymore. So while, initially, the idea that Galileo’s big success came from a thought experiment seems like a win for philosophical methods, upon examination it’s probably just the sort of thing that scientismists will use to show how thought experiments fail to describe anything useful about reality.

Next up will be some comments on his chapter on panpsychism itself.