For Goff consciousness goes to the core of the meaning of life -- literally. Citing Thomas Nagel's 1972 article, "Panpsychism," Goff calls it the "third way" between dualism and materialism. On the surface, it smells of rancid pantheism, but with a privileged consciousness taking the place of a murdered God in the cathedral.
But, Goff, however enthusiastically he waxes, like a reborn sinner, about the joy of panpsychism and the many rivers in one to cross, wants to bring in the authority of science. First he cites, Stephen Hawking, who has insisted that humans will one day come up with a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything -- even he seems to have doubted that it would be fully "satisfying," as Goff puts it. Hawking noted: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" For Goff, consciousness is the heavy breather.
Goffs pushes quantum mechanics. In it he sees an integral place for consciousness. But more specifically a pilot seat for observation. Explaining the concept of superpositioning, Goff cites the example Schrà ¶dinger's cat, put in a box, with a vial of poison and radioactive material. If the material decays, the vial will smash, and the cat will die. But, notes Goff,
If the radioactive substance doesn't decay, the cat will be saved. While the box is closed and the system unobserved, Schrà ¶dinger's equation rules the roost, with the result that the radioactive substance exists in a superposition of both decaying and not decaying, from which it follows that the cat is in a superposition of being both alive and dead.
But when the box is opened, and the cat's observed, it will be either dead or living.
This is conceptually weird, this on-and-off at the same time stuff, but it's the promise that quantum computing holds, and it is, says Goff, scientifically sound, and goes to the heart of particle physics. Picture the famous rabbitduck illusion, where both the duck and rabbit are present together before you, but only one of them can be seen at any given moment. Imagine a computing system that could on and off like at the same time like that. But it's the observational aspect of this phenomenon that Goff is keened to.
However, the more you delve into this, the stranger it gets -- even in Freud's Uncanny sense -- as though, extrapolated to Reality, you could come to believe you were in two places at once. While some of this thinking leads toward multiverses, and the like, there's an area Goff concentrates on that is most eerie of all: Integrated Information Theory (IIT). According to Goff, "The theory tells us that, in any physical system, consciousness is present at the level at which there is the most integrated information." The system needn't be human. At the same time, Goff is not articulating that everything in the universe has a form of consciousness. It depends on the level of integration.
There are levels, leading to a 'maximum of integration'. Goff explains that a single neuron is highly integrated, but not as integrated as the brain it belongs to, which contains a forest of neurons. Further, and from a different perspective,
A human society has a great deal of integrated information, due to its complex social connections. However, a society is not a maximum of integration, as it is surpassed from below: people make up societies, and their brains have significantly more integrated information than does the society as a whole.
That's all fine and dandy, that leaves room for people to go all shape-shifting Shangri-La when they discover the beam-me-up-Scotty joys of panpsychic integration -- "consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter" -- but then the other shoe drops on a phenomenological turd.
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