BEAUTIFUL MINDSGalileo’s
Big Mistake
How the great experimentalist created
the problem of consciousnessI
f a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there
to see it, does it make a sound? An age-old phil-
osophical conundrum you might think; in fact,
this question was given a definitive answer in the
17th century by the father of modern science, Gal-
ileo Galilei. And the way in which Galileo answered
this question shaped the philosophical foundations
of the scientific worldview that remains with us to
this day. Moreover, as I will explain, this scientific
worldview has a big problem at its heart: it makes
a science of consciousness impossible.
A key moment in the scientific revolution was
Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be
the language of the new science; the new sci-
ence was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary.
This is a much discussed moment. What is less
discussed is the philosophical work Galileo had to
do to get to this position. Before Galileo, people
thought the physical world was filled with quali-
ties: there were colors on the surfaces of objects,tastes in food, smells floating through the air.
The trouble is that you can’t capture these kinds
of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary
of mathematics. You can’t capture the spicytaste of paprika, for example, in an equation.
This presented a challenge for Galileo’s aspira-
tion to exhaustively describe the physical world in
mathematics. Galileo’s solution was to propose a GETTY IMAGESGalileo shows the Doge his telescope, 1609.Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher
at Durham University in England and author of Galileo's Error:
Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. His research focuses
on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview.
His Web site is at http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com, and he blogs at
https://conscienceandconsciousness.comOPINION