Dr. Philip Goff, Will Academia Get Beyond Materialism? |409| - a podcast by Alex Tsakiris

Dr. Philip Goff is a philosophy professor who dares to challenge biological-robot-meaningless-universe party line.









photo by: Skeptiko







(clip from Dr. Strange)

I spent my last dollar getting here you’re talking to me about healing through belief…

You’re a man looking at the world through a keyhole and you spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole to see more to know more and now on hearing that it can be widened in ways you can’t imagine you reject the possibility.

I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras, or energy, or the power belief there is no such thing as spirit.

That’s a clip from the 2016 mega sci-fi hit Doctor Strange. This scene really captures a  scientist at the tipping point.

We are made of matter nothing more… just another tiny momentary speck within an indifferent universe.

You think too little of yourself.

Oh you think you see through me doing what you don’t, but I see through (Dr. Strange is thrown out of his body)… what was that?

I pushed your astral form out of your physical body.

What’s in that tea? psilocybin? LSD?

Just tea, with a little honey.

Of course wouldn’t it be great if it was that simple, but the  transition from the materialistic scientific paradigm into what lies beyond is anything but clean, and there are a lot of hangeroners as today’s guest Dr. Philip Goff (author of Galileo’s Error) has experienced.

Philip Goff: There is a philosopher who’s very good friend of mine a very warm and pathetic guy very kind cares about the world but he doesn’t think consciousness exists it’s always incredible to me that it you know in a sense he thinks you know no one has ever really felt pain. I think one of the big problems in that position is all of scientific knowledge is mediated through consciousness… thinking that you could have scientific evidence that consciousness doesn’t exist is a bit like thinking astronomy can tell us that there are no telescopes.

But one of the questions for me is how much of this hangeroner stuff should we tolerate, should we accept as just part of the change process, versus calling it for what it is:

Alex Tsakiris: you know in academia it’s really easy who gets the grants? who gets promoted? who doesn’t get promoted? who doesn’t get tenure? they get pruned off the tree and at the end of the day you wind up with what we have now. we wind up with you debating with Jerry Coyne, which again I  know I get push back when I say this, but he’s just really incompetent. I’ve had him on the show and he just… just gets major things wrong that he’s supposed to know about. and yet he’s put forward and propped up. He’s at University of Chicago, been around forever, and this goes on and on. so that that’s the social engineering project, not that people don’t legitimately believe [in materialism] it’s just that the people who are really thinking this thing through are not presented as credible.

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