Philip Goff: Consciousness, Mysticism, and God [Mysticism III 2/3]
December 16, 2025
AI Summary
5 min read“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” That line from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, quoted by host David Bashevkin at the close of this episode, captures the central intuition that philosopher Philip Goff has spent his career trying to make intellectually respectable. Goff, a former atheist raised Catholic, began with a puzzle that most people never stop to examine: why does it feel like something to be alive? That question led him to panpsychism—the view that consciousness is not a fluke produced by complex brains but a fundamental feature of reality, present even at the level of atoms and fields. And that view, in turn, opened a path toward cosmic purpose, mystical experience, and a reconsideration of God.
Galileo’s Error and the Hard Problem
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction and Host’s Framing** - Host David Bashevkin introduces the topic of consciousness and the guest, philosopher Philip Goff, setting up the core problem of the episode.
- 2 (13:51) **Galileo’s Error: The Origin of the Problem** - Goff explains the foundational philosophical error that set science on a path that excludes consciousness.
- 3 (18:01) **Why Consciousness is a Hard Problem** - Goff distinguishes the problem of consciousness from other scientific problems, explaining why a purely materialist view fails.
- 4 (24:25) **The Connection Between Consciousness, Meaning, and Mysticism** - Bashevkin and Goff discuss how the failure of materialism opens the door to deeper questions of purpose and mystical experience.
- 5 (30:51) **Panpsychism: The Universe is Filled with Consciousness** - Goff introduces his proposed solution to the hard problem, a view that turns the standard approach upside down.
- 6 (33:30) **From Panpsychism to God and Purpose** - Goff describes his personal journey from atheism to seeing panpsychism as a middle way that makes spiritual experiences intellectually credible.
- 7 (36:36) **The Two Strongest Cases for God** - Bashevkin highlights the two arguments an atheist friend gave for God, which perfectly align with Goff’s work: fine-tuning and consciousness.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we speak with Philip Goff—a philosophy professor who devotes much of his work to investigating the ultimate nature of reality—about consciousness, mysticism, and God.
We also hear from Rabbi Eli Rubin about the possibility of “Jewish panpsychism.”
In this episode we discuss:
- What is the relationship between consciousness and scientific observation?
- How should people find purpose in their lives?
- How does a secular philosopher make the decision to turn to religion?
Interview begins at 9:22.
Philip Goff is a philosophy professor at Durham University, UK, where he devotes much of his work to investigating the ultimate nature of reality. He publishes weekly interviews and articles on his Substack. Goff is known for defending panpsychism as the best available theory of consciousness; his TEDx talk, "Is there consciousness beyond the brain?" presents this view to a wider audience. His recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores panpsychism as a middle ground between traditional belief in God and secular atheism. He is a recent convert to a form of “heretical Christianity".
References:
Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity by Eli Rubin
Galileo's Error by Philip Goff
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
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