Philip Goff

Philip Goff is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His research specializes in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the ontological foundations of consciousness science.

In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Galileo’s Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019), Goff traces the hard problem of consciousness back to the Galilean scientific revolution, which deliberately excluded qualitative properties from physical mathematics. Goff defends Russellian Monism and Cosmopsychism, proposing that physical equations describe only the extrinsic behavioral dispositions of matter, whereas conscious experience is the intrinsic nature of the physical itself.

Goff’s metaphysical framework challenges standard computational functionalism. Because computation is a mathematical abstraction describing relational input-output mappings, mere algorithmic execution on silicon substrate cannot instantiate intrinsic phenomenal consciousness unless the fundamental physical hardware participates in the requisite unified intrinsic ontology.

Known for. Russellian Monism, Cosmopsychism, Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019), Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford, 2023)

Coverage on this site

• Philip Goff Cosmopsychism at CS26 2026 and the Challenge to Functionalist AI Consciousness August 2026

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Philip Goff is listed with the other critics and skeptics, who hold that current evidence and current methods do not support the claims being made. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.