Philip Goff is a British philosopher and professor at Durham University who has become one of the most prominent advocates for a radical idea about consciousness: that it might exist everywhere in the universe.

Goff specializes in the philosophy of mind and focuses on how consciousness can fit into our scientific understanding of the world. He defends panpsychism, the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it—essentially arguing that even electrons and quarks might have some form of basic experience. This might sound bizarre, but Goff presents it as a serious solution to one of philosophy’s biggest puzzles: how physical brain activity creates subjective experiences like the redness of red or the pain of a headache. While most scientists assume consciousness emerges from complex arrangements of unconscious matter, Goff argues this is impossible—instead, he suggests consciousness was there all along, woven into the fabric of reality itself.

Beyond academia, Goff has written popular books including Galileo’s Error and appears regularly in media discussions about consciousness. His work has been published in The Guardian and Scientific American, making complex philosophical ideas accessible to general audiences curious about the deepest questions of mind and reality.