Philip Goff

Consciousness is fundamental to what we are as human beings. This is not to undermine the importance of the body:

consciousness is the only thing we know for certain is real. I can’t know for certain that there really is a world out there. Perhaps I’m actually in the Matrix

encapsulated in a vat of chemicals being fed information about a nonexistent virtual world by computers that are using me as an energy source.

The only thing I have direct access to are my own experiences.

Everything else is known indirectly, believed on the basis of what I experience.

All knowledge of reality is mediated through consciousness.

But none of this has shed any light on how the brain produces consciousness.

“eliminative materialism.” Paul and Patricia argued that we should not be trying to explain the mind but rather rejecting its very existence. Like fairies and magic, science has shown that mental phenomena simply do not exist.

Science could no more prove that consciousness does not exist than astronomy could prove that there are no telescopes.

Nonetheless, the point remains that many important moments in scientific progress involved dreaming up new possibilities, conjuring up in the imagination new ways of thinking about the universe.