Philip Goff (Durham): 'Meaning Zombies, Free Will and Panpsychism'
The first half of my talk will introduce the basic case against materialist views of consciousness, which are roughly those views that try to explain consciousness in the terms of physical science. In the second half, I will introduce a new problem: the Meaning Zombie Problem. Meaning zombies behave just like us, share our sensory experiences (colours, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.) but lack conscious thought and understanding. The coherence of meaning zombies raises the challenge of explaining why conscious thought and understanding exist at all, given that we would have survived just as well if we had been meaning zombies. As a solution to this problem, I will defend a form of 'pan-agentialism', the view that free will exists at the fundamental level of physical reality.
The talk will be online only. Please join us on Zoom here.
