[T]here is one thing I know for certain: I exist as a conscious being.
But Goff is leading us not to Rene', but to Galileo Galilei, "the father of modern science."
According to Goff, looking up at the stars, Galileo had an epiphany -- not about what he saw, but how he understood:
[T]he universe, which stands continually open to our gaze...cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
Galileo thought that there was a mathematical language embedded in the cosmos that could only be seen once qualitative phenomena were removed from the quantitative. Thus, in his observations, he removed sensory data derived from the five senses, and was left with a set of quantitative data -- Size, Shape, Location, Motion -- that became the basis for a new paradigm called science, which went beyond the limits of philosophical reasoning to the development of the scientific method.
The subjective world of sensory experience that makes up the mental phenomena of mind could not be accounted for in an objective fashion, and are "forever locked out of the arena of scientific understanding," writes Goff, and he adds that this lock-out is how "Galileo created the problem of consciousness." This mind-body dualism, which has been with us now for hundreds of years, accepts that "reality is made up of two very different kinds of thing: immaterial minds on the one hand and physical things on the other."
To understand this, Goff asks us to creep up behind Susan, sitting in a chair, with the top of her skull sawed off, for our scientific convenience. We're looking at her brain. Can we see her consciousness, her experiences at work, her sensory conjurings? No, we can't, but somewhere, somehow in that brain, consciousness is at work. Goff writes,
For the dualist, the relationship between Susan and her physical body is a bit like the relationship between a drone pilot and his drone. Just as the drone pilot controls the drone and receives information about the world from it, so Susan controls (to an extent) her body and receives information from its eyes and ears.
Raise your hand if you're uncomfortable with the drone pilot analogy.
As opposed to a reality composed of separate physical and "immaterial" properties, these days we're inclined to see everything included under the rubric of physical causes and effects only -- including mental phenomena. In fact, if you go insane you'll discover that the psychiatrist has no interest in your sob story at all -- it's all seen as symptoms and chemical imbalance, and you won't leave the doctor's office without a mandated prescription. (All those years of medical school down the drain, you'll "think," when they could've just brought in an astrologer and handed them a script pad.) De-institutionalization: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Goff rages against the machinery of materialism throughout Galileo's Error. But after he's cooled down some, he offers up another female volunteer in his narrative -- this time it's Mary Black-and-White -- to explain the limitations of materialism. Picture Mary, he says, locked away in a black-and-white room her entire life, no peeky-boo windows looking out onto external reality. Everything she knows about color is from something read, and she's well-read. "If materialism is true and neuroscience is able to give us a complete theory of the nature of color experience, then what pre-liberation Mary has learned is the complete and final theory of color experience."
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