Galileo's Error is philosopher Philip Goff's book stating his version of panpsychism - pretty impressive to have 20 or so academics interested enough in your idea to take potshots at it in a special journal issue! - but if you wondered as I did what was the specific error, I can save you a visit to google by suggesting this sci-am blog: [1].
> A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science; the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. This is a much-discussed moment. What is less discussed is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get to this position. Before Galileo, people thought the physical world was filled with qualities: there were colors on the surfaces of objects, tastes in food, smells floating through the air. The trouble is that you can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. You can’t capture the spicy taste of paprika, for example, in an equation.
> This presented a challenge for Galileo’s aspiration to exhaustively describe the physical world in mathematics. Galileo’s solution was to propose a radically new philosophical theory of reality. According to this theory, the qualities aren’t really out there in the world, rather they’re in the consciousness of the observer. [...] when a tree comes crashing down in a forest, the crashing sound isn’t really in the forest, but in the consciousness of an onlooker. No onlooker, no consciousness, no sound.
> Galileo, as it were, stripped the physical world of its qualities; and after he’d done that, all that remained were the purely quantitative properties of matter—size, shape, location, motion—properties that can be captured in mathematical geometry.
I'd be surprised if many people here agreed with this POV, but (to me at least) it's a very interesting way to look at things.
> A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science; the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. This is a much-discussed moment. What is less discussed is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get to this position. Before Galileo, people thought the physical world was filled with qualities: there were colors on the surfaces of objects, tastes in food, smells floating through the air. The trouble is that you can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. You can’t capture the spicy taste of paprika, for example, in an equation.
> This presented a challenge for Galileo’s aspiration to exhaustively describe the physical world in mathematics. Galileo’s solution was to propose a radically new philosophical theory of reality. According to this theory, the qualities aren’t really out there in the world, rather they’re in the consciousness of the observer. [...] when a tree comes crashing down in a forest, the crashing sound isn’t really in the forest, but in the consciousness of an onlooker. No onlooker, no consciousness, no sound.
> Galileo, as it were, stripped the physical world of its qualities; and after he’d done that, all that remained were the purely quantitative properties of matter—size, shape, location, motion—properties that can be captured in mathematical geometry.
I'd be surprised if many people here agreed with this POV, but (to me at least) it's a very interesting way to look at things.
1: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/galileos-b...