N.B. Footnotes indicated by square brackets.

Goffileo Let Me Go

Subtext is for cowards [The unimprovable Garth Marenghi taught me this.], so I’ll just come out and say it. Galileo’s error (Philip Goff, 2019, Rider) is a rancid argument from ignorance, and in a just world [i.e. a satisfyingly punitive one] Philip Goff would be shot for crimes against thought.

I am tempted to leave it there, but one really ought to earn scorn of this order, and that necessitates a longer treatment. This in itself presents a problem, as when stripped of its fatuous padding, Galileo’s error is a thesis so slight as to be immaterial. The argument can be given in its entirety by two propositions and a conclusion. Physics describes structure. Consciousness does not look structural. Therefore consciousness must be hidden inside matter. This is Goff’s panpsychism - a rhetorically overblown, formally vacuous set of word associations. That’s it. That’s the entire book. Its entire rationale can be rebut by the observation that anything asserted without evidence may be dismissed with equal ease. So how does one approach a text that simultaneously has too much to criticise and too little to critique? The book’s errors are so numerous and so essential - so absurdly load bearing - that it is difficult to know where to start. How do you begin to describe an object with flaws so huge they can be seen from space?

I toyed with launching from some arch sentence like “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and relaxing into the topic with a meditation on the role of knowledge in the cosmology of medieval Christendom. It would have supplied a more elevated register for the review, drawing a thread through history from the predations of Alaric to Augstine’s City of God, and from there to the immense defensive architecture by which a wounded civilisation taught itself to distrust its senses. Then I’d have teased out the distinction between scientia infusa and acquisita, and made plain that the temporal nature of acquired knowledge made it grubby and suspect. I might have garnished it with portentious flavour commentary like in a fallen world, all experience is tainted. The goal would have been to supply the raw material that later thematic motifs could draw on. Regrettably painting these in will have to be a DIY job for the reader, as the plan couldn’t survive contact with reality [It was far more important to establish immediately that I consider Philip Goff an unalloyed cretin. Had to get it off my chest.]. This is a shame, as it would have nicely framed the context of Galileo’s life, and the ultimate significance of his work. Still, we can’t not talk about Galileo. After all, the book is called Galileo’s error.

Galileo is a great subject [An excellent treatment of Galileo is to be found in David Wootton’s Galileo: Watcher of the Skies.]. Not just a brilliant mind, but a radical insurgent against orthodoxy. A figure dancing on the edge of classification between the heroic, the tragic, and the pathetic. The son of a Florentine musician, he built the foundations of modern science within institutions that fought him every step of the way. It is impossible not to reflect on his achievements without feeling a deep comparative inadequacy. He was first to formalise laws of motion, and mapped the heavens with telescopes of his own design. If he had done nothing else, his immortality would still have been assured. And yet these efforts were merely tools in the service of his ultimate goal. Galileo wanted nothing less than to reshape humanity’s relationship to the universe. No amount of conventional success could achieve it, because the demand he made was not of himself but of the world. He wanted the rightness of his perspective made undeniable. He wanted to force recognition that we sit not at the centre of creation but on a cosmic periphery, and that the world does not become less meaningful when it does not revolve about us. His manner of thinking, writing, and being became a living rebuke, a means by which to expose the prior falseness of belief. It was a triumph not just of intellect but of will — though that same animus for greatness also laid him low. He could not bend without breaking, could not resist needlessly making himself a martyr. He was, in every sense, a revolutionary.

It was one of his many flaws. Errors, one might say. Galileo was wrong constantly, most famously in his persistent attempts to explain the tides as a necessary consequence of heliocentrism. He complained that Kepler had "listened and assented to the notion of the Moon’s influence on the water", calling the idea "childish" and "occult”. In fact, Galileo was so taken with his theory that when he finally published his masterwork in 1632, he intended to title it the Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea. Fortunately for Galileo his old friend the Pope did him a solid and insisted the text be kept hypothetical, and any attempt to explain the tides should be removed. The result was the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The Holy See gets a bad rap for its treatment of him, but consider that Galileo’s legacy really would have been tied to an error had the Vatican not stopped him. We tend to forget that Galileo wasn’t persecuted for the Copernican system per se, but as a consequence of his genuinely heroic lack of tact [5].

It’s therefore fair to say Galileo made mistakes. But which does Goff have in mind? Luckily we’re not kept in suspense. The first chapter is titled HOW GALILEO CREATED THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. What a refreshingly blunt lie. Goff clearly agrees subtext is for cowards, and I appreciate that he wastes no time confirming my darkest suspicions. Namely that Goff has written more books about Galileo than he’s read [Another Marenghism.]. It’s genuinely a brilliant choice, and sets the tone for the book. By starting with an anachronistic, thoroughly meaningless accusation, Goff establishes that he is writing a work of fantasy. We are not reading about the Pisan astronomer, mathematician, proto-physicist and father of empiricism Galileo Galilei, but embarking on an avant-garde work of parallel-history fiction. Its world is much like our own, except in this one philosophy has been wrongly unseated by a misguided tinkerer who happens to share a name with Galileo. To avoid the confusion the author plainly intends, I will reserve Galileo for the actual historical figure, and refer to Goff’s bizarro-world creation as Goffileo.

“If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond,

‘Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities not qualities! “

-Goffileo, designer of physics.

Your eyes do not deceive you, this is Goff’s answer to why he doesn’t understand consciousness. He’s looking for someone to blame, and believes he’s found the culprit. It’s that dastardly Goffileo, and his mathematisation of science. In this reality, previous thinkers had chosen not to clothe their theories of nature in mathematical language, because it was incapable of capturing the sensory qualities with which they were concerned. Goffileo’s solution (and the error of title) was to divide the world into the quantitative and the qualitative, and to declare that the latter did not exist. This is not a misquotation, Goff states this verbatim:

“Galileo solved this problem with a radical reimagining of the material world. In this reimagining material objects don’t really have sensory qualities. Paprika isn’t really spicy, flowers don’t really smell of anything, objects aren’t really colored”.

I want to be clear that I am not putting words in Goff’s mouth here. This declaration on the nature of being isn’t an isolated mistake, but a central theme of the book. Later he doubles down, declaring that:

“Mathematical concepts - such as the concept of ‘two’ or the division function - are radically different to qualitative concepts - such as ‘yellow’ or ‘sour’ - and the latter cannot be defined in terms of the former [famously this is why it is impossible to serve targeted advertising algorithmically]. To say that reality can be described in purely quantitative terms is to say that there are no qualitative properties.”

Let that sit with you a minute. In the world according to Goffileo, sensations do not exist. The conceit of this is breathtaking. Goff performs a lot of sock-puppetry through the book, but this one is so profoundly disrespectful to historic and scientific accuracy that I find it impossible not to reciprocate the insult. Even setting aside how violently this misrepresents the methods and motives of mathematical physics, it is impossible to forgive how nakedly Goff leverages this fiction. The only purpose of this lie is to set up a sequence of truly pathetic strawmen. Does Goff really require someone to point out that science has never practiced some solemn apartheid of number and experience? In a world where robots can read our actual fucking minds [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03624-1], maintaining this fiction requires an actively cultivated anti-curiosity. But the book is founded on this false dichotomy, and disintegrates without it. This is a problem for Goff, as no working scientist could sustain the distinction he cleaves to for more than five minutes. Goff’s only solution to this is to maintain a field of active incomprehension surrounding the fallacy. He has no choice but to leap two-footed into the role he has inadvertently cast for himself. Goff and Goffileo cohere together as a modern Simplicio. The effect of this is that the text must constantly be routed around this gaping chasm in his argumentative chain. The effect of this is so massive that it warps entire chapters around it, a kind of linguistic lensing around inconvenient facts. This forms the core of Goff’s method, and marks him as an irredeemable charlatan.

I will be charitable however and say that I do not think this is deliberate on his part. Largely because it becomes rapidly apparent that Goff’s grasp of the scientific method is roughly on par with a Macedonian goatherd. His argument is literally one from ignorance, and to do this with malice aforethought would require a degree of sophistication evidenced nowhere in his writing. For this reason, I suspect the best explanation of Goffileo and his error is simply that their creator is a savant of specious reasoning.

We are spoilt for choice in selecting examples of this pathology. Repeatedly we are told that science can never explain the yellowness of yellow. This is outrageous. Would Goff have us believe that the manufacturers of cameras, screens, paints, inks - really any visible object - have accidentally contrived a set of techniques to generate, and control colour phenomena without understanding it? Are all those ophthalmologists, neuroscientists and lighting grips engaged in an experiential scam? Obviously not, because our perception of colour can be described to arbitrary accuracy with three numbers. Four if you’re a tetrachromat.

I’m sure Goff would answer that this isn’t the experience of yellow however. Like with all Goff’s points, this rebuttal only makes sense from his side of the veil of ignorance. We’ll return to this point later, but for now have too much to get through. Unfortunately Goffileo has a genius for being wrong, and the quantity/quality distinction is just one in a constellation of errors strewn through the book. It appears to be compulsive. For Goff a paragraph isn’t complete without at least one flatly wrong statement of anti-fact. One is confronted constantly by sweeping declarations of jaw-dropping stupidity. Taking a random example, Goff helpfully tells us that “popular myth tells us that Newton was the first person to realize that apples fall to the ground.” [I struggle to understand how a sentence like this comes to be. In my imagination Goff is at his typewriter, wrestling with how to contrive some misconception that is within his power to “correct”.] How can you not laugh at such a risible statement? The man can’t even print the legend correctly.

Another of Goff’s signature moves is a preposterous bait and switch, leaning on a completely unearned air of expertise in his appeals to authority. Time and again he employs an egregious mix of interpreted fact and glaring omission to buttress his stupid fucking opinions. This means his thinking rapidly degenerates into a schizophrenic mess. His entire thesis is based on a flaw in the scientific method that he has invented, and yet (possessing no expertise of his own) to give his ideas the bare illusion of credibility, it is necessary for him to appropriate the achievements of the very methods he is attacking. He wants to sell the lie that truth can be wrung from pure imagination, but the only examples he picks are a hit parade of physicists. You know, the ones apparently ideologically committed to Goffileo’s error. That doesn’t seem particularly helpful to establishing it as an error. Why isn’t Goff listing all the metaphysicists who upended our perception of reality? Could it be that there aren’t any, and that this is nothing but an attempt to launder credibility?

Obviously yes.

Goff uses these kinds of strategic omissions constantly in the other direction too. He handles the many many trivially fatal objections to his argument by cack-handedly ventriloquising his opponents. To his infinitesimal credit, he realises he can’t get away with ignoring them entirely. Besides, there isn’t actually much else for him to substantively engage with, and he’s got a word count in his contract. For all the reasons already mentioned however, his arguments are so weak they can barely withstand even the most thoroughly defanged opposition. Consequently the positions he caricatures are so badly mutilated that they can only be identified from their deontological records.

The one consolation is that it means the arguments he makes are almost more devastating to his own position than his strawman’s. Often hilariously so. When Goff points out that Galileo called himself a philosopher, it does not occur to him that it provokes a secondary question: if that’s the case, why aren’t they called philosophers any more? When he wants to assert the primacy of idle speculation as a source of truth, he picks the law of fall. Galileo is credited with the law of fall because he discovered its mathematical form through years of careful empirical work and geometric calculation. This is irrelevant to Goff, who contrives to present it as arising from pure reason. The problem is that the conclusion of this thought experiment isn’t true. Objects of different mass don’t generically fall at the same rate. We don’t even need gravitational fields to demonstrate this. Once Newton was finished observing the first apple to fall, he dashed off a quick calculation for centre-of-mass frame acceleration under his law of gravitation. In this frame acceleration between two masses M and m is proportional to (M+m). The thought experiment is incapable of predicting this. Look Philip! Look at the m Philip!

This might seem pedantic, but it’s hard to be anything else when this is the entirety of the argument. Goff robs Peter to slander Paul, borrowing the prestige of physics so as to willfully misrepresent it, and then attack that misrepresentation. This is why the arguments tend to end up as a masterclass in self-refutation. I do not believe that Goff is - and I use the word advisedly - conscious of this fact. At their best, these statements reveal the true architecture underlying Goffic thought:

“To be clear, I’m not saying that scientist ought to explain why the fundamental laws of nature obtain. The point is: if it’s okay for the physicist to postulate basic and unexplained laws governing the causal interactions of matter, why isn’t it also okay for the dualist to postulate basic and unexplained laws governing the causal interactions of mind and brain?”

I love it. If formulating question-begging premises was a sport, Goff would be the undisputed world champion. All this argument demonstrates is how unmoored his thinking is from the constraints of reality. When he looks at physics, all he sees is a more prestigious subject that is apparently free to invent what it likes. And if physics can make claims Goff sees no apparent reason for, why can’t he? To make this argument with a straight face requires a persistent and obstinate refusal to engage with elementary principles of physics. I could double the length of this essay and still not touch the sides of how bad it all is. Goff persistently universalises his ignorance, such that I don’t know invariably becomes nobody knows. “Nobody really knows what quantum mechanics is telling us about reality.” I cringe whenever I see statements like this, particularly from non-physicists. We know precisely what quantum mechanics tells us about reality, and this statement does nothing but trade off the popular perception of quantum’s inscrutability. It’s nothing but an argument of obfuscation, designed to establish a spurious link between something the reader (usually) does not understand but accepts as true, and something the reader does not understand because it isn’t true. All one requires to exploit this is some rhetorical sleight of hand, and the con is complete. I truly hate this pseud move, where quantum is invoked as an explanation for phenomenology. If it were up to me I’d bring back hanging as punishment for it.

The collective consequence of these tactics is to render the book a thoroughgoing hypocrite, posing as a source of knowledge while in fact being actively hostile to it. This makes the reading experience one of accumulating outrage. By the time you notice, your piss is already boiling. The reader is constantly reassured how totally legitimate Goff’s methods and conclusions are, but he can only manage this by perpetually asserting authority over domains in which he knows nothing [itself a set of measure 1]. Over and over again, he advocates for the essential role of philosophy, but his examples rely exclusively on the same misdirection he employs everywhere, substituting armchair speculation for whatever actual motive force drives an idea. There is a conspicuous absence of examples where metaphysics generates anything that rises to the standard of knowledge. This is undoubtedly inconvenient to Goff, but he squares this circle by lying. At one point he baldly states that it’s “self-evident that we can know at least some things about reality just by thinking”. He supports this claim by rambling about the impossibility of round triangles, not noticing that his argument relies on a stealthy liberation of shape from the conceptual realm he is trying to discredit.

To give Goff his due, he does present a more ambitious application of his pub bore methodology. Over eight magisterial pages, Goff picks plot holes in time travel movies [ Not to beat a dead horse, but the conclusions Goff draws from his armchair also fail the fact test. In this instance, they’re fatally undermined by the fact that Einstein’s field equations permit solutions with closed time-like loops]. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse. At one point he declares “If you think there’s something special about the present moment then you’re guilty of chronological chauvinism, or TIME RACISM [sic]”. In a book overflowing with deranged thoughts, this one might be the winner. It’s a remarkable cultural innovation, and I look forward to the continued weaponisation of abstraction into hate speech. Then again I would say that: as a spatially localised entity, I’m what Goff would probably call a GEOMETRIC BIGOT.

This profound lack of self-awareness is by far my favourite feature of the book, because all these little fallacies are unintentionally revealing of Goff’s thought process. Once that psychology clicks, and you realise that you are reading the Alan Partridge of philosophy, the book opens like a lotus flower. Take the otherwise inexplicably baggy structure the book employs. There are constant digressions into bathetic name-dropping of people described as dear friends, or analogies that amount to Goff patting himself on the back for what a good academic he is. I initially presumed this was just him doing whatever was necessary to hit that word count, but this was a mistake. Gradually it dawned on me that this is a form of extended self-soothing. He’s _bouncing back [_The Partridge parallel is almost too perfect ]!

As the irrelevant anecdotes accumulate, one forms an impression of Goff as a genuinely unbearable conversationalist. He’s always talking about how at parties he’ll constantly badger people with deep questions on the nature of consciousness. I think this is supposed to convey the extent of both his passion and depth of thought, but it makes Goff come across like an autistic teenager, who needs to be told that normal conversations involve turn taking, and changes of topic. He needs to learn to channel his obsessional interests into a more productive outlet. I wonder if he’s tried writing. It works for me!

In any case, the absolute sine qua non of these self-congratulatory paeons has to be Goff’s recount of a meeting with Dennett. The setting for this is suitably baroque - some oligarch has used a trifle of their obscene wealth to host a philosophy of mind conference on an Arctic yacht, and Goff has been invited along as a punching bag for the actual philosophers. In this role he performs superbly, having what he calls “one of my proudest philosophical achievements”. For Goff, this floating workshop was the arena in which he bested Dennett in intellectual combat. Inevitably the anecdote that follows is an exercise is Bathos. At some point in the discussion it is generally agreed that dualism should be rejected for the eminently sensible reason that energy conservation leaves no room for psycho-physical interaction. Now, Goff isn’t a dualist, but he nevertheless feels compelled to defend its honour, proposing that “there seems no reason to think that we could not add more laws which also respect energy conservation, and no obvious reason they could not be psycho-physical laws.”

The immediate question this raises is how can he possibly know this? Goff has repeatedly demonstrated he has no feeling for physical law as a structure of constraint. Lacking this, he presumes that laws are simply stapled to reality solely to mark the edge of one’s imagination. This leads to the insane belief that one can simply invent new ones from whole cloth. Goff recounts that the reaction from the rest of the group was to (quite rightly) pour a bucket of scorn on his proposal.

This sets up the showdown with Goff’s physicalist nemesis.The rest of the party have taken boats out to do whatever one does in the Arctic, like clubbing seals. This leaves Goff and Dennett alone in each others’ company. Goff’s great moment is approaching. As he puts it:

“As we sat on deck, with Dennett carving a walking stick, I pushed the matter further, continually trying to hone down on the very specific point that conservation of energy is consistent with dualism. Eventually Dennett conceded, “Maybe that’s right.”

That’s it. That’s the triumph. I am stunned that Goff and his editors allowed it through. Because no matter how badly Goff wants to present it as a triumph, his own retelling makes it painfully clear that he was being humoured. Picture it. The night air is dead still, disturbed only by the sound of Dennett’s whittling. It would be peaceful, were it not for Philip. The man is constitutionally incapable of reading a room, and has spent the last hour endlessly banging on about the laws governing a psychic reality neither believes exists. Dennett tries to keep his focus on the cane he is carving. He never anticipated he’d need one, but his right knee aches continuously since the accident. Especially on cold nights like this one. He tries to ignore the pain, made worse by Goff’s relentless wittering. Dennett does his best to be polite. A few monosyllabic grunts, noncommittal sounds meant to politely indicate his total disinterest in the conversation. Goff seems unable to take the hint, and seems in no hurry to leave. Dennett does his best to tune the noise out, trying not to fixate on how easily his whittlin’ knife could find a home in Philip’s face. At some point the buzzing relents. Briefly, mercifully. Dennett seizes his opportunity. He has no idea what Goff has actually said, but is desperate for any opportunity to end the conversation. Maybe that’s right.

Thank God Philip lacked the self-awareness to edit this anecdote out. Probably his contract word count means he couldn’t afford to cut it. Why else would he include a story that makes plain what pathetically low regard his peers hold him in. Even better, Goff immediately detonates his own anecdote. “Despite this small concession with respect to the case against dualism,” he writes, “Dennett has zero time for the case for dualism.” Meaning Goff’s great achievement is that he has “forced” Dennett to concede ground in a position neither of them hold. My toes curl thinking about it, and the fact Goff doesn’t recognise his own humiliation only intensifies the cringe.

All right, I may be blowing this slightly out of proportion, but self-owns like these are a good 97% of the book’s value. The rest of it is just for the word count. There’s an entire chapter where Goff “proves” the impossibility of materialism via Mary’s room and zombies. The essential emptiness of these thought experiments has been demonstrated repeatedly, and it would be boring beyond words to rehash that here. Both arguments depend on a child’s view of language, in which any combination of words names a possible structure in the world. But syntax is not metaphysics. The combinatorics of language vastly exceed the combinatorics of being. The fact one can name a square circle does not mean it exists.

Typically, Goff does not understand this. He mistakes a difference in presentation for a difference in substance. He believes the yellowness of yellow cannot be captured by physics because 580 nm light is not what yellow looks like. He is right that these are not the same thing, but draws entirely the wrong conclusion. “580 nm” is not yellow stripped of its mystery, but one coordinate in an external description of the conditions under which yellow is generated. From inside the visual system, yellow is not an extra metaphysical ingredient added to that description. It’s the combination of the physical stimulus, plus the full chain of mental processing that eventually results in the feeling he calls yellow.

There is no further fact hovering above this, waiting to be inserted by mysticism, panpsychism, or any other smuggling operation. The inside-view of an embedded physical system is not optional content, omitted by physics through some tragic Galilean austerity. It is the structural consequence of the fact that the description of the world can only be contained within it. Of course the inside does not look like the outside! That is what inside means. The mistake is to treat this perspectival asymmetry as an ontological singularity that requires resolution.Goff cannot understand this because it requires understanding what a description actually is, and that bar is so thoroughly beyond him it might as well be on the moon. The illusion is that there are two stories - the objective and the subjective - running on parallel tracks, and that the relation between them is the great unsolved puzzle. But there is only one story, and different representations of it.

This brings us to Russellian monism, which is the one true and beautiful idea Goff gets near. He is for once correct when he describes physics as relational. It does not by itself describe the noumenal pulp of the thing-in-itself. What Goff fails to understand however is that this is not a fatal flaw, but indicative of one of the deepest lessons we can draw from modern thought. There is no thing-in-itself because representation is not unique. What do we think an equality is? Naturally this subtlety escape Goff, who insists that since physics gives us structure, he says, there must be an intrinsic nature behind the structure. Since consciousness is the one intrinsic nature we know, perhaps matter is consciousness all the way down.

It's so stupid. So unbelievably slight, it makes one wonder if the book is missing about eight chapters. Surely Goff isn't serious.

Goff is serious. The easiest way to understand the complete inanity of this argument is to construct one which is structurally identical. Imagine a philosopher who asks the question of what makes stuff go. The thing that makes cars go is not to be located in any of its constituent parts, and it seems implausible that its motive power - its vroominess - could emerge as a brute fact of emergence. The philosopher therefore proposes that the most elegant explanation is that vroominess is a fundamental property of matter. All material has vroominess, but we only see it expressed in particular configurations, such as cars, trains, and planes. The combination problem of vroominess - how the vroominess of fundamental particles compose into the vroominess of vehicles - is the principal mystery of the research frontier. The philosopher will publish a book about this, and will be encouraged by his agent to title it something wildly provocative. They settle for Newton’s error, as the vehicle for panvroomism. This will argue that Newton, by mathematising motion, removed vroominess from physics, and that we will need to put it back if we are ever to understand the intrinsic nature of a Ford Fiesta [I may accidentally have persuaded myself this is actually true.].

The ultimate reason these arguments fail is because they inherit completely spurious intuitions from natural language. The fact we can write about intrinsic nature does not mean it exists. Consider, what would it actually mean to know a thing other than by its relations? Stop pretending this is a subtle metaphysical point and ask the childish question properly. What is the number seven in itself? Strip it of its relational content. It is not six plus one. It is not five plus two. It is not prime. It is not the fourth prime, not greater than six, not less than eight, not the number of days in the week, not the dimension of some representation, not an element in a field, not a residue class, not a mark that can be composed, counted, exchanged, ordered, or transformed. Remove every relation and you have not reached the secret inner nature of seven, you have annihilated it by subtraction. The intrinsic seven is not hidden behind its relations. It is what is left when you delete them, which is nothing.

Worst of all, Goff could have avoided his own endless confusion if he had simply bothered to learn a bit of linear fucking algebra. Not advanced physics by any means, but highly consequential. Linear algebra is a universal language of representation, and the lessons it teaches are immediate and permanently disqualifying to Goff's metaphysics. Representation is infinitely mutable. The same object can be embodied and described in arbitrarily many ways. This can only be true if an object's description is exhausted solely by its relations. That is, there is no intrinsic nature to be found in nature, because there is nowhere for it to live. Pick any embodiment, change basis, and the "intrinsic" content evaporates from wherever Goff parked it. It was a fiction of grammar all along.

This naturally leads to the sharper question. In what world is it coherent to study metaphysics without studying physics first? I'm not saying it should be a general educational requirement, but if one wishes to engage in metaphysics, surely it's worth learning the grammar first? I wouldn't trust a neurosurgeon who decided not to bother with medical school, so why trust the pronouncements on reality when they come from someone who has never actually studied it? This matters immensely, because science in general and physics in particular operates on principles wildly at odds with our primitive intuitions. The act of learning the former inevitably reshapes the latter. The reorientation is not optional, and I suspect impossible to understand if you have not undergone it. It is the price of thinking about nature without merely laundering your intuitions. Anyone who has seriously learned physics has undergone this humiliation repeatedly. You enter with nouns and verbs, but leave with transformations and their symmetries. There is no simple explanation of these ideas because they do not localise. Equations are impotent and incomprehensible in isolation. Like us, it is only their relationships that bring them to life.

That is one of the most beautiful facts about physics: there are so many ways to know the same thing. Leibniz said there was no royal road to truth, and nowhere is that path independence made plainer than in physics. Quantum theory can be axiomatised a dozen ways and still one is dragged, however unwillingly, toward Hilbert space, the Schrödinger equation, and the Born rule. Thermodynamics begins with engines and ends up governing information. Geometry becomes gravity. Conservation laws become symmetries. Every new route tightens the web. A fact becomes real not by possessing some private essence, but by the consilience it generates around itself.

Goff does not appear to understand this. He writes as if the sciences are a collection of local successes, impressive but metaphysically shallow, leaving room around the edges for whatever intuition wishes to preserve. But there is no slack. Poincare put it best. "Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." Our fundamental models of physics cannot simply be a little wrong in the way Goff requires. To take his position seriously, it would be necessary to tear up everything else all at once. Optics, neuroscience, computation, chemistry, statistical mechanics, representation theory, thermodynamics, would all fail in correlated ways. Instead they lock. They keep locking. They lock so tightly that we can manufacture colour from arithmetic, turn thought into silicon statistics, image the brain, model perception, manipulate attention, and build machines that exploit the same representational principles Goff insists do not exist.

This is why books like Goff's aren't neutral. There is so much earnest thirst for truth, and so little willingness to work for it. Human nature is like water, and in the absence of constraints will flow toward the lowest common denominator. Goff's target market is an inexhaustible reservoir of soft-minded credulity, ready to embrace whatever ontology requires least work; and as long as that reservoir exists there will be a niche for epistemic parasites of his kind. Do not fall for their claims that the brain is not a muscle. Like any muscle it requires real mental sustenance to develop, not solipsistic sugar-swill. I have already seen how this kind of panpsychism can fuel complete detachment from reality. A friend of mine harbours messianic delusions that he is a messenger for the fundamental consciousness of the universe, which leads to him doing mad things like taking me hostage in a church [in fairness, there had been some LSD involved]. I mention this to emphasise that this superstitious crap is not a benign presence in our mental environment. Our beliefs are products of what we consume, and what furnishes our mental interior. There is however no firm ground to build belief upon. The only method that has ever worked is to base belief on observation, conditioned by one's best attempt at internal consistency. It is necessarily provisional, requires a completely unnatural degree of self-scepticism, and years of practice. It’s unappetising, but the alternative is the quasi-mysticism Goff peddles, which is capable only of shrinking the universe to less than it is.

That is why I consider Goff an intellectual vandal. I mean, even his name sounds like it would burn down Ravenna. Perhaps that's uncalled for, but offence invites offence, and this book is obnoxiously offensive. It is a precision munition, a depleted uranium shell of meaningless metaphysical dribble, cladding a payload of weapons grade horseshit. It is not simply bad. It is not simply wrong. It is both specifically and generally wrong in such a persistent and categorically imbecilic way that it shatters the bounds of form and becomes a reified object of wrongness. I'd consider it art if it had been deliberate, but then it would be a work of genuine evil. As it is, it rises merely to becoming a perfect example - a non-fiction type-specimen - of the phenomenon of "unskilled and unaware". This is Goff's worst sin. He wants to understand consciousness, but is unwilling to make even the slightest effort to comprehend the world it is embedded in. Faced with the overwhelming success of science in explaining anything one might care to name, he chooses to amputate himself from it. It is unworthy of philosophy. The fact it was written at all bothers me. But the fact it was published (by an imprint of Penguin!) is a stunning indictment of the level to which intellectual culture has sunk. It is not simply that I disagree with it, it is that there is nothing coherent to disagree with. Goff has inadvertently created the Platonic ideal of an argument from ignorance. Either he has no shame, or he really is as stupid as he appears. Possibly both. The fact that his book is being sold, for actual money, suggests Sagan was not wrong to fear a second dark age.

I almost feel sorry for Goff, forced into the only ontology his position of impregnable ignorance can sustain. Almost. A flickering spark of pity for his interior life. It seems a terribly impoverished place to live. Undoubtedly comfortable though, since Goff is no more a philosopher than he is a physicist. After all, to love is to suffer, and this book contains no suffering.

Having said this, Galileo's error is a good gift for anyone you need to mentally handicap, which is why I give it two stars out of five.