Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Seven

 

By Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In the previous post, we looked at Philip Goff’s take on “Cosmic Purpose Without God”.  He covered Non-Standard Designers, Teleological Laws, and left Cosmopsychism dangling. But we ended with a hint as to the direction he was going:

Teleological laws are the most parsimonious accounts of cosmic purpose.  They simply accept the brute existence of cosmic purpose without feeling the need to postulate any deeper explanation of it.  On the other hand, the deeper explanation of cosmic purpose provided by non-standard designer hypotheses is an attractive feature.  We arguably have a tie here, with one theory ahead in terms of parsimony, the other ahead in terms of explanatory depth.  The idea would be to find a way of securing the extra explanatory depth but with minimal cost in terms of postulating extra entities.

Fortunately, there is such a theory: rather than postulating a supernatural designer, we can instead ascribe mentality to the universe itself. 

And so, in the next chapter, we enter “A Conscious Universe”.  Goff warns us that this is a view that was once laughed at, is wildly controversial, and yet, nowadays, is being taken quite seriously. How did this happen?  The following is gleaned from Goff’s discussion.

Bertrand Russell, in the 1920s, was considering the fact that our most fundamental science, physics, is purely mathematical.  The math has changed and become more complex and abstract over time, but it’s still basically mainly equations that describe the mathematical structure of our reality.  This is apparently due to the fact that Galileo made the decision that ‘natural philosophy’ must take a purely mathematical form.

This isn’t of much use to a philosopher.  And so, quite a number of them, inspired by Bertrand Russell, are positing that consciousness is what underlies the mathematical structures of physics. 

The standard form of this view is that, at the fundamental level of reality, there are networks of very simple conscious entities that behave in simple, predictable ways and have rudimentary experiences. 

The idea is, then, that what we call mathematical structures are just descriptions of the interactions and patterns of these micro-entities and their rudimentary behaviors and experiences.  These patterns and structures are what we call ‘physics’.  The micro-entities reveal their consciousnesses in ‘mass’, ‘spin’, and ‘charge’. And so, the view of the Russellian panpsychists is that physics emerges from consciousness. And, if this view is the right one, what you are doing when you are doing physics is simply studying the behavior of very, very simple conscious entities.

And of course, here we see the basis of Goff’s “Pan-Agentialism” wherein matter is inherently disposed to respond rationally to reality.  Particles have ‘conscious inclinations’ even if their behaviour is imposed on them by Pilot Waves, according to Goff, thus casting doubt on the idea that matter is ‘inherently disposed’ to anything in its responses.

Goff reports that Sabine Hossenfelder doesn’t like this idea because the Standard Model of particle physics, (best model of the 25 kinds of fundamental particles), predicts behavior based on physical properties, i.e. mass, spin and charge.  If you add non-physical properties such as consciousness, then you lose control of your ability to predict behavior.  She declares that if particles were conscious, then their consciousness would show up on the behavior and physicists would easily be able to spot it.

Goff points out the Hossenfelder obviously does not understand the panpsychist hypothesis and she is interpreting panpsychism in dualistic terms, i.e. as if the particle has physical properties – mass, spin, and charge – and additional properties of consciousness.  She assumes that the micro-level consciousness proposed by the panpsychist exists at the level of the most basic mathematical structures.  The panpsychists, however, are actually concerned with the reality that underlies the mathematical structures. Goff’s view of the matter is:

… panpsychism offers the best solution to the mind-body problem, the philosophical challenge that arises from the fact that we access objective reality in two very different ways: perception and introspection.  In perception we access the physical world through our senses, something we’ve learnt to do more accurately and precisely through science.  Through introspection we access consciousness, via our immediate awareness of our feelings and experience. 

The problem is, of course, how to bring consciousness and the physical world together into a single unified theory of reality?  There are three main philosophical solutions to the problem:

1. Materialism:  The physical world is fundamental, and consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain.

2. Panpsychism: Consciousness is fundamental, and the physical world arises from more fundamental facts about consciousness.

3. Dualism: Both consciousness and the physical world are distinct but equally fundamental aspects of reality.  Contemporary ‘naturalistic’ dualists like David Chalmers postulate special ‘psycho-physical’ laws of nature to hook consciousness up to the physical world.

Goff notes:

In terms of materialism, nobody has ever made the slightest progress on its central explanatory task of explaining how we can get consciousness out of purely physical processes in the brain.  Moreover, I think there are good arguments that show that such a thing cannot be done in principle.

That is a useful point, but for me, the even bigger problem is actually the converse:  how can anyone possibly explain the existence of a single particle at all… a single grain of sand?  Where did the stuff of the Universe come from?  Especially considering the Standard Model of Physics and its ‘Big Bang’! If the physical world is fundamental, what made it?  Where did the ‘stuff’ come from and how?

Goff then states the most obvious thing of all:  “The mathematical structures of physics cannot produce consciousness, but consciousness can produce the mathematical structures of physics.”  That, right there, makes the materialists/physicalists shudder in horror! 

The Dualist option is problematical because it leads to positing two distinct entities when one should do (Ockham’s Razor) and, again, cannot explain the existence of matter in any coherent way.

In any event, Goff concludes (after a brief foray into neuroscience that need not detain us), that:

Our choice is between a philosophical explanation nobody’s ever managed to make sense of (materialism) and a philosophical explanation we know how to make sense of (panpsychism).  Once the options are correctly understood as philosophical – rather than scientific – rivals, there is, to my mind, an obvious winner.

Goff next brings in the ‘combination problem’, or the challenge of figuring out how many conscious particles come together to form a complex system which has its own unified consciousness. He considers that this problem is of concern only to those who advocate very reductive forms of panpsychism. Goff himself argues for a hybrid of reductive and non-reductive views; he distinguishes between conscious experiences and the ‘I’ that has the conscious experiences.  Goff’s “‘I’ is more than the sum of its parts, but its conscious experiences are ‘inherited’ from streams of consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.”

Are you confused by that?  I am.  Goff appears to want to have his cake and eat it too.  He doesn’t like materialism, and yet he continues to try to argue for a hybrid form of it.  He didn’t tell us anything about where his favored Pilot Waves come from, nor what foundation gives particles ‘agency’.  He appears to propose that a bunch of particles with this ‘agency’ jostle about guided by pilot waves and over vast expanses of time, eventually form consciousness with an ‘I’ somehow.  This consciousness then has the ability to make choices against what it wants itself and what it knows to have value; and all in the frame of Darwinian evolution. Because, of course, if there is a designer s/he is limited somehow to just getting the ball rolling.

Goff goes on to say:

Even if human consciousness ends up being utterly irreducible, it’s still better to be a panpsychist than a dualist.  Panpsychism earns its keep through its reduction of the physical world to consciousness.  If it can also reduce human consciousness to particle consciousness, whether partially or wholly, then that’s a bonus: the more we can reductively explain, the simpler our basic theory of reality.

That is to say, Goff’s Panpsychism pretty much says that the complex consciousness of a human (or animal) brain is built up out of, or emerges from, the consciousness of particles with agency guided by Pilot waves.  Goff says nothing about where the particles, the agency, or the pilot waves come from.

He notes that many theoretical physicists think that the fundamental building blocks of reality are not particles at all but rather universe-wide fields in which particles are simply local vibrations within those fields. That is, some fundamental form (or forms) of consciousness underlie these universe-wide fields and that a fundamental mind is the origin and bearer of those fields.  This hypothesis is known as Cosmopsychism.

Goff’s view of this hypothesis is that the consciousness of the universe is just some kind of huge meaningless mess.  “The kind of experiential understanding enjoyed by human beings is the result of millions of years of evolution, but the consciousness of the universe has not been shaped by the pressures of natural selection.” 

Again, Goff is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

Goff doesn’t think that a “meaningless mess” consciousness of the universe can explain the consciousness of beings nor the Fine Tuning of the universe.  So he tries to wrangle that problem that simply wouldn’t exist if he would make a different assumption. Goff presses on with his “meaningless mess” universal consciousness, proposing something like the ‘agency’ of particles in his pan-agentialism:

…replace the picture of a universe of messy meaningless experience, blundering from one moment to the next, with a view of the universe as something that recognizes and responds to considerations of value.  On the view we can call ‘teleological cosmopsychism', the universe is essentially driven to try to maximized the good. […]

Many philosophers postulate impersonal causal powers to explain the behavior of the universe.  But it’s equally consistent with observation to suppose that the universe’s drive to maximize value is running the show.

Or is it?  Doesn’t this lead straight back into the problem of evil?  If the universe is trying to maximize the good, how do we explain the terrible things that happen within it, at least on the planet we live on? Also, how do we think about the laws of physics on this picture?  If the universe is driven by a compulsion to maximize the good, shouldn’t there just be one law of physics, … ‘Do Your Best’?

We can kill both of these birds with one stone.  On teleological cosmopsychism, the laws of physics record the limitations of the universe.  Each moment, the universe is pushing to maximize the good, but under quite severe constraints as to what it is able to do.  As with the Limited Designer Hypothesis… it’s not that something outside of the universe is limiting the universe.  It’s just a primitive fact about the universe that it is able to do some things but not others.

Here I simply must comment.  Goff keeps talking about ‘good’ but he never discusses the fact that there can be many perspectives and what is ‘good’ to one perspective, is ‘evil’ to another.  He talks about morals, but what morals?  Whose morals?  What is moral in one culture, can be deeply immoral in another culture.  From the perspective of Goff’s beloved Darwinism, killing is a great moral good as long as it is the weak and stupid that are killed off and the strong and intelligent survive. The very thing that Goff most hates – suffering – about our reality, is in-built into the theory he is fighting so hard to conserve with his feats of philosophical legerdermain.

Getting toward the end of this discussion, Goff decides that the teleological cosmopsychist can propose that the universe fine-tuned itself. That is, teleological cosmopsychism is extremely parsimonious. Goff writes:

We know, or so I would argue, that there must be something underlying the mathematical structures identified by physics, otherwise our universe would contain no consciousness.  And we know there must be something that drives the predictable behavior of the universe.  It’s certainly possible that the fundamental level of reality is wholly impersonal and non-conscious.  But the alternative hypothesis of a universe responding to value under limitations recorded by the laws of physics is empirically indiscernible and no less parsimonious.

So Goff proposes that during the first split second of time, the universe fine-tuned itself because the universe must have been aware of future possibilities, and to account for this, we can attribute to the universe conscious awareness of the full consequences of each of the options available in that instant of time. And he then “cheekily” (his word) borrows the multiverse theory which he previously discarded, and which he now tries to slide in with a twist of Ockham’s razor; again, most confusing.

Goff next brings his pan-agentialism together with teleological cosmopsychism, and is quite satisfied with the results.  He writes:

If we stripped away the Bohmian mechanics, we could bring together pan-agentialism and cosmopsychism by identifying the universe with a universe-wide field, with the result that the universe will behave in a predictable way because the universe is conscious but lacks experiential understanding, and so inevitably acts through the basic rational response: do what you feel like doing.  But, contrary to the teleological form of cosmopsychism, this would not be a view on which the universe is maximizing the good; it’s just doing what it feels like doing.  […]

…we need to identify the cosmic fine-tuner with the wave function itself.  On the resulting view, the wave function is a conscious entity that is aware of the complete future consequences of the options available to it, and acts by choosing the best one.  During the Planck Epoch, the best option available to the wave function was to put itself in a state whereby the universe would become life-permitting.  The apparently mechanical behavior of the wave function thereafter reflects the limited options available to it. […]

On teleological cosmopsychism we start with rational matter, as particles and the wave function are themselves rationally responsive material entities.  The wave function then fine-tuned itself in order to allow mater to reach a greater realization of its rational nature. 

And there you have it, Glory Be!  Goff declares that the fit between fine-tuning and matter is not a coincidence! 

Goff has a twisty sort of brain.  I normally wouldn’t make the following discursus, but this problem is too big to just sweep under the rug.  The way Goff works through problems reminds me of a passage in Lobaczewski’s “Political Ponerology”:

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible: including those generally described as conversive, such as subconscious blocking out of conclusions, the selection, and, also, substitution of seemingly uncomfortable premises.

We speak of blocking out conclusions if the inferential process was proper in principle and has almost arrived at a conclusion and final comprehension within the act of internal projection, but becomes stymied by a preceding directive from the subconscious, which considered it inexpedient or disturbing. This is primitive prevention of personality disintegration, which may seem advantageous; however, it also prevents all the advantages which could be derived from consciously elaborated conclusion and reintegration. A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be totally harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness.

We speak of selection of premises whenever the feedback goes deeper into the resulting reasoning and from its database thus deletes and represses into the subconscious just that piece of information which was responsible for arriving at the uncomfortable conclusion. Our subconscious then permits further logical reasoning, except that the outcome will be erroneous in direct proportion to the actual significance of the repressed data. An ever-greater number of such repressed information is collected in our subconscious memory. Finally, a kind of habit seems to take over: similar material is treated the same way even if reasoning would have reached an outcome quite advantageous to the person.

The most complex process of this type is substitution of premises thus eliminated by other data, ensuring an ostensibly more comfortable conclusion. Our associative ability rapidly elaborates a new item to replace the removed one, but it is one leading to a comfortable conclusion. This operation takes the most time, and it is unlikely to be exclusively subconscious.

That passage in PP reminds me of a passage in Barbara Oakley’s book “Evil Genes”:

A recent imaging study by psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues at Emory University provides firm support for the existence of emotional reasoning. Just prior to the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential elections, two groups of subjects were recruited - fifteen ardent Democrats and fifteen ardent Republicans. Each was presented with conflicting and seemingly damaging statements about their candidate, as well as about more neutral targets such as actor Tom Hanks (who, it appears, is a likable guy for people of all political persuasions). Unsurprisingly, when the participants were asked to draw a logical conclusion about a candidate from the other - "wrong" - political party, the participants found a way to arrive at a conclusion that made the candidate look bad, even though logic should have mitigated the particular circumstances and allowed them to reach a different conclusion. Here's where it gets interesting.

When this "emote control" began to occur, parts of the brain normally involved in reasoning were not activated. Instead, a constellation of activations occurred in the same areas of the brain where punishment, pain, and negative emotions are experienced (that is, in the left insula, lateral frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Once a way was found to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted, the neural punishment areas turned off, and the participant received a blast of activation in the circuits involving rewards - akin to the high an addict receives when getting his fix.

In essence, the participants were not about to let facts get in the way of their hot-button decision making and quick buzz of reward. "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones." {...}

Ultimately, Westen and his colleagues believe that "emotionally biased reasoning leads to the 'stamping in' or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's 'revisionist' account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,'" Westen says. Westen's remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms "motivated reasoning" ... appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached.

The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: "Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts,'" according to Westen.

My point is that Goff seems to be very attached to a materialist view of reality, while trying to argue for some form of consciousness that is above and beyond materialism.  Sort of like the “participation prize” that kids are given nowadays for just showing up and making half-hearted efforts.  He argues that the Universe has purpose and next, he is going to tell us how to “Live with Purpose” based on his twisted, bizarre reasoning. But, that’s the next post.

Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Six

Laura Knight-Jadczyk 

In the previous post, we discussed the Cosmological Argument according to Philip Goff. Apparently, because of his “Cosmic Sin Intuition” (“it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours”), no Omni-God can exist; i.e. a god who has the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence;  emphasis on the omnibenevolence part.  Goff says: “Those who deny cosmic purpose cannot explain cosmological fine-tuning, believers in the Omni-God cannot explain the evil and suffering we find in the world.” 

So, having disposed of any idea of an Omni-god, Goff proposes to explore “Cosmic Purpose Without God.”  This is actually one of the more entertaining chapters in the book.

Goff starts off by complaining about people getting stuck in dichotomies such as that between the traditional God of Western religion and materialist atheism.  He notes that there are other options in between these two extremes.  And he’s right enough on that, in my opinion.  So he is going to explore three options:

·       Non-Standard Designers: Intelligent cosmic designers, but without the perfect qualities of the Omni-God.

·       Teleological Laws: Impersonal laws of nature with goals built into them.

·       Cosmopsychism: The idea that the universe is a conscious mind with purposes of its own.

Under the heading of Non-Standard Designers, he first introduces “The Evil Designer Hypothesis”.  For some people, the easiest way to make sense of the horrible suffering of living things is to postulate an Evil Designer.  That is, after all, pretty much what the Gnostics did.  So, we in the West (and elsewhere to some extent), are left with this legacy of an Omni-God created as a psychological defense against political realities on the ground. The battles between materialists and creationists have largely been fought within this frame. So Goff is correct when he decries thought dichotomies such as those between Richard Dawkins’ ‘meaningless universe” and the Pope’s all-powerful and all-loving creator.  And he is right to bring in ideas for exploration that are different options than just those two. 

Considering the Evil Designer hypothesis, I wonder why Goff didn’t mention how old and venerable this idea is?  He writes in a rather silly way about this idea, arguments suited more to a 10 year-old child than a sincere discussion.  At the end he states that “The Evil Designer Hypothesis is just as implausible as the Good Designer Hypothesis.”  He has apparently never read Gurdjieff and the Eastern tale of the Magician and the Sheep.

But, moving on: Goff next entertains ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’. This is actually sillier than the Evil Designer Hypothesis.  He writes:

Perhaps our creator is just a normal scientist in a technologically advanced civilization where simulated universes can be created with ease.  To avoid both the problem of evil for the Good Designer Hypothesis and the problem of good for the Evil Designer Hypothesis, we can suppose that our creator has some purpose independent of how well or how badly humans and other animals are doing. … This is a hypothesis in which our universe has a purpose, but not the kind of purpose religion typically envisages.  We exist to serve the intellectual advancement of our creator.

One of Goff’s objections to the simulation hypothesis is the thesis of ‘substrate independence’.  That is, whether consciousness depends more on structure or more on stuff. He doesn’t think his consciousness could run on a computer because it is not made up of the same kind of ‘stuff’ his brain is made of, i.e. gooey stuff.

He also points out that if we suppose we are a simulation, we have only deferred the explanation for Fine Tuning.  Our creators would also have to be Fine Tuned for life too, so who Fine Tuned them?

Next he presents the idea of An Amoral Designer, a designer with no conception of good and evil just a basic impetus to create. He rejects this because such a hypothesis lacks any predictive power.  He proposes a way around this: a designer that is responsive to value which is not the same as a perfectly good designer. Or, how about two of them: a Good Designer and a Bad Designer?  (Another very old idea.)

Goff’s favorite idea is the ‘Limited Designer Hypothesis’.  He writes:

Maybe our creator is only able to create from a very simple starting point, such as a Big Bang singularity, and has limited flexibility in the kinds of laws of nature she (sic) can establish in her (s9c) universes; she can fiddle with numbers, but that’s it.  Hence, the only way she can create intelligent life is by creating a universe with the right numbers, so that life will eventually evolve.  This cosmic designer knew that this would create a hell of a lot of suffering along the way, and was pained by this fact, but it was either that or nothing and she judged, somewhat reasonably, that it would be better to have the imperfect universe we find ourselves in rather than no universe at all.

His answer to what it is that limits the designer’s powers is very weak:

Explanations have to end somewhere.  Why can’t it just be a fundamental fact about the cosmic designer that she is able to do some things but not others?  Why think that a cosmic designer has to be all-powerful?  … But the constraint on powers under consideration here is pretty simple: the cosmic designer can only create from a Big Bang singularity a universe with physics of a particular form.  This is a simply hypothesis that accounts for the data as we find it.  What’s not to like? … It’s above my paygrade to work this out. 

In summary, whilst I reject the Omni-God hypothesis, I am open to the possibility of a non-standard designer hypothesis.  However, design is not the only way to make sense of cosmic purpose…(Goff)

And so, the next proposal is ‘Teleological Laws’. Here he brings in Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos.  In this book, Nagel rejects both neo-Darwinism and the Omni-God.  He thinks that any philosophy that is unable to include ‘mind’ is pretty much no philosophy at all.  He states that not only is mind fundamental, but that the world is intelligible to our minds and this intelligibility is no accident.  Nagel is also anti-materialist.  He writes:

“Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing.  This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded.” (Nagel, Thomas. (2012). Mind and Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

Nagel argues that trying to explain how life could arise from inorganic matter has never been achieved within the materialist neo-Darwinian framework.  And what about the appearance of reason via evolution? Nagel points that it’s impossible to explain our human minds with their rational cognitive capacities in reductive terms of any sort. The mind problem for materialists is that we know even if subjectivity is the irreducible feature of consciousness, we are not locked in our own interiority.  Nagel writes: “It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem.”  Though our reason is not infallible, it’s generally pretty good at acquiring objective knowledge, especially when working with others.  For the evolutionists, reason is nothing but a fluke.  What Goff calls Experiential reasoning, however, according to Nagel, rules out any materialist mechanism as it needs to be thoroughly intentional.  And here we meet ‘teleological’.

Nagel insists that value is a real feature of the world that cannot be accounted for in quantitative descriptions. The features of the world we experience are real even if they can be explained in terms of chemicals, sounds, light etc.  Nagel begins his chapter on ‘value’ with: “The idea of teleology implies some kind of value in the result toward which things tend, even if teleology is separated from intention, and the result is not the goal of an agent who aims at it.”

So, basically, Nagel’s proposal, as explicated by Goff, is that we are used to laws of Nature that move from past to future; what if there are laws of Nature that move from future to past? 

The inherent weakness in this is, as Goff notes, that it is hard to make any sense of the idea of purpose in the absence of mind or consciousness.  But, he suggests we can just try to get used to the idea.  He then writes:

It seems, therefore, rather fortuitous that, of all the goals our universe might have had, it happens to be directed towards something of great value.  Does this push us back to the idea of a good designer who instituted the teleological laws in order to ensure that the universe is directed towards something of value?

Maybe, says Goff.  But then he takes us one step deeper:

Another option is to accept that the universe has the goals it does because they are good, but to insist that there is no deeper explanation of why the universe had good goals.  … explanations have to end somewhere.

But Goff doesn’t want to end it there as it is unsatisfying.

Teleological laws are the most parsimonious accounts of cosmic purpose.  They simply accept the brute existence of cosmic purpose without feeling the need to postulate any deeper explanation of it.  On the other hand, the deeper explanation of cosmic purpose provided by non-standard designer hypotheses is an attractive feature.  We arguably have a tie here, with one theory ahead in terms of parsimony, the other ahead in terms of explanatory depth.  The idea would be to find a way of securing the extra explanatory depth but with minimal cost in terms of postulating extra entities.

Fortunately, there is such a theory: rather than postulating a supernatural designer, we can instead ascribe mentality to the universe itself. 

And that is the segue to the next chapter ‘A Conscious Universe’.  That will be the next post.

Meanwhile, for those who like esoteric tidbits, here is Gurdjieff’s story of the Evil Magician:

"But there are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep.

"First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.

"There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.

"At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.

"And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

"This tale is a very good illustration of man's position.” (P. D. Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous (1950) Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd London.)

 

Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Five

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

The Cosmological Argument

 

Plato (c. 427–347 BC) and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC) both posited first cause arguments, though each had certain notable caveats. In The Laws (Book X), Plato posited that all movement in the world and the Cosmos was "imparted motion". This required a "self-originated motion" to set it in motion and to maintain it. In Timaeus, Plato posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the Cosmos.

Aristotle argued against the idea of a first cause, often confused with the idea of a "prime mover" or "unmoved mover" in his Physics and Metaphysics. Aristotle argued in favor of the idea of several unmoved movers, one powering each celestial sphere, which he believed lived beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, and explained why motion in the universe (which he believed was eternal) had continued for an infinite period of time. Aristotle argued the atomist's assertion of a non-eternal universe would require a first uncaused cause – in his terminology, an efficient first cause – an idea he considered a nonsensical flaw in the reasoning of the atomists.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed in an eternal cosmos with no beginning and no end (which in turn follows Parmenides' famous statement that "nothing comes from nothing"). In what he called "first philosophy" or metaphysics, Aristotle did intend a theological correspondence between the prime mover and a deity; functionally, however, he provided an explanation for the apparent motion of the "fixed stars" (now understood as the daily rotation of the Earth). According to his theses, immaterial unmoved movers are eternal unchangeable beings that constantly think about thinking, but being immaterial, they are incapable of interacting with the cosmos and have no knowledge of what transpires therein. From an "aspiration or desire", the celestial spheres, imitate that purely intellectual activity as best they can, by uniform circular motion. The unmoved movers inspiring the planetary spheres are no different in kind from the prime mover, they merely suffer a dependency of relation to the prime mover. Correspondingly, the motions of the planets are subordinate to the motion inspired by the prime mover in the sphere of fixed stars. Aristotle's natural theology admitted no creation or capriciousness from the immortal pantheon, but maintained a defense against dangerous charges of impiety. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument)

~ ~ ~

 In the previous post, I laid out Philip Goff’s ‘Pan-agentialism’ idea which required that he dispense with Schrödinger’s Cat and Many Worlds, resulting in his adoption of Pilot-wave Theory which included ‘rational matter’.

… the stuff of the world is rational stuff.  Even when behaving in a predictable way, its behaviour is the result of a rational impulse, albeit of a very crude kind.  As matter evolves into complex forms, more and more the potential for rational thought and action begins to flower, blossoming in the reflective consciousness of a human being able to discern and respond to practical and theoretical reasons.  This is not just matter changing, but matter maturing, coming to a greater realization of its inherent rational nature.

The pan-agentialist world is, by definition, a world that embodies purpose.  Crucially, however, purpose in this sense does not imply design.  Aristotle did believe in some kind of first cause – an ‘unmoved mover’ – but not a beneficent designer who had crafted the purposes of things.  In Aristotle’s worldview, things just had goal-directed natures, regardless of their origins.  Likewise, if matter, in its fundamental nature, is directed towards reason, then matter has a goal-directed purpose or nature regardless of whether or not it was designed.  It is in this sense that consciousness points to purpose, as an essential component of the best explanation of the emergence of experiential understanding.

Goff proposes that we take pan-agentialism as established (!) and consider it in light of the fine-tuning of physics and, voila! we discover that the two mutually reinforce each other and reinforce the reality of purpose.  And so he declares that the laws of physics are fine-tuned not just for life, but also for the possibility of rational matter achieving a high realization of its nature.  That is, fine-tuning and rational matter need each other; they fit together like a lock and key!

He then launches into a series of Bayesian arguments for Pan-Agentialism. He had previously argued based on the Likelihood Principle, that the fine-tuning of physics for life supports the Value-Selection hypothesis against the Cosmic Fluke Hypothesis.  And now, he uses the same principle saying “the existence of experiential understanding supports pan-agentialism over our standard scientific worldview, as it is much more likely that experiential understanding would have evolved on the former hypothesis than on the latter.”

Goff moves through some cursory discussion about free will that is uninspiring and need not detain us.  He then plunges directly into Theodicy in order to engage with “does God exist?” He points out that there are many examples of horrific suffering in Nature, and that, in fact suffering is built into Natural Selection. He asks “Why would an all-powerful being choose to bring us into existence through such a gruesome, long-winded, tortuous process as a game of ‘survival of the fittest’? … why give us bodies that age, get sick, and fall apart so easily?  Why not instead create immortal, spiritual beings to spend eternity in loving union with God and with each other?”

He then trots out the usual arguments for review, but Goff isn’t having it. He writes:

Personally, I am unconvinced by these proposals.  I agree that there are certain goods we find in the real world – compassion, courage, adventure, scientific enquiry – that would not exist in a more perfect world.  But it seems to me to massively reduce the value of these goods if they were brought about through artificially engineering challenges and difficulties.

Did Goff forget that he just argued for “matter maturing, coming to a greater realization of its inherent rational nature” and did he not note that horrific suffering was part and parcel of Natural Selection?

Of course, Goff has set the argument up to be a Straw Man – an omnipotent, omniscient god who created the world via fiat – and who is immoral, in Goff’s opinion, for deliberately creating a world such as ours. But he slogs on toward the Cosmological argument: without a creator God, we have no explanation for why the universe came to be nor any explanation for anything at all.  He notes the atheist response: why does the universe require an explanation, but God gets a free pass?

·       The Kālam Cosmological Argument:  The crucial difference between God and the universe is that the universe began to exist whereas God did not.  Things that begin to exist require causal explanation, whereas things that are timeless, do not.  See: Kalām cosmological argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

·       The Contingency Argument:  the reason the universe cries out for explanation is that it is contingent, which means that it might not have existed. If something exists but might not have existed, then we need to give some explanation as to why it does exist.  God, in contrast, is not contingent; God is a necessary being, a being that has to exist. See Aquinas Argument from contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

Goff tells us that Cosmological arguments proceed in two stages.  First, the argument tries to establish that a timeless/necessary being has to exist to complete the Great Chain of Explanation.  Second, the arguments try to show that this timeless/necessary being must have the characteristics of the Omni-God: omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.  Goff then makes an eminently rational remark: “If we are rationally compelled to accept the existence of a timeless, necessarily existent entity, why not suppose that the entity is the universe itself, rather than postulating something supernatural outside of the universe?” Good idea, in my opinion. He then says something more: “… at best, these arguments prove that the universe’s existence as a spatiotemporal entity is contingent and began at a finite point in the past.  A possibility rarely considered in these discussions is that the universe, prior to the Big Bang, existed in a non-spatiotemporal form.  … once we have committed to the existence of a necessary and timeless foundation of existence, we face a choice between two theoretical possibilities:

Option 1: The necessary and timeless foundation of existence is distinct from the universe and brought the universe into being.

Option 2: The necessary and timeless foundation of existence became the universe a finite period of time ago, undergoing a radical change analogous – although obviously more extreme – to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.

That is, the basic cosmological argument of either type merely establishes that a first cause exists, not that it has the attributes of a theistic god, such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. 

However, some cosmologists and physicists argue that a major challenge to the cosmological argument is the nature of time:  The Big Bang theory states that it (the Big Bang) is the start of both space and time. The claim of the cosmologists and physicists is that the question "What was there before the Universe?" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. Some even say that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole?  (Gott III, J. Richard; Gunn, James E.; Schramm, David N.; Tinsley, Beatrice M. (March 1976). "Will the Universe Expand Forever?" Scientific American. p. 65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950306).

Getting back to Goff.  He notes that Ockham’s razor enters and eliminates option 1 since option 2 postulates fewer entities. Fine. Goff then brings to our notice the ideas of Joshua Rasmussen who argues that “the Ultimate Foundation of all reality cannot involve arbitrary limits.  … The Ultimate Foundation, by definition, must leave nothing to be explained.  The Ultimate Foundation cannot have a certain amount of power, knowledge, and goodness, whilst not being all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.  For it would then cry out for explanation why the Ultimate Foundation has precisely that level of power (and not more or less), that level of knowledge, and that level of goodness – and these explanatory demands would undermine its putative status to be the point where explanations come to an end.”

Goff agrees.  Arbitrary limits demand explanations. He then says: “We would still want to know why that maximally perfect exists rather than the even simpler hypothesis of nothing at all existing… And the Omni-God hypothesis, even if it is very simple, is not compatible with the data of evil and suffering.  …Those who deny cosmic purpose cannot explain cosmological fine-tuning, believers in the Omni-God cannot explain the evil and suffering we find in the world.”

Goff next engages with Theists, sceptical theists, etc. He allows that the sceptical theists’ way of defusing the problem of evil is at least somewhat effective: “If God did have a reason for allowing suffering, would I likely know about it?”  And the answer is “no” because the cognitive gap between humans and God is so vast that there is no comparison, no way humans could understand any such reasons.  But then, Goff diverts to his own idea: the ‘Cosmic Sin Intuition.’  That is, “it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours.” He writes:

I cannot rule out that there might be all sorts of goods and evils I have no clue about, and maybe if I took them into account, the Cosmic Sin Intuition would lose its force.  But we do have substantial knowledge of morality, and no reason to think that this knowledge isn’t up to the task of assessing the Cosmic Sin Intuition.

Following a few desultory feints, he then concludes that the only rational position to take is to conclude that the Omni-God does not exist and that “we have very good reason to accept the Cosmic Sin Intuition.  And the Cosmic Sin Intuition entails that the Omni-God does not exist.” His case is as follows:

The standard line in the philosophical literature goes as follows:

In the old days, atheist philosophers tried to demonstrate that God’s existence is logically incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering, and hence that, given evil and suffering exist, God’s non-existence can be logically demonstrated.  This approach is known as the logical version of the argument from evil.

Nowadays, most philosophers on both sides of the debate accept that the logical version of the argument is too strong.  Even if we can’t think of any good reasons why God might have allowed suffering, we can’t logically demonstrate that there are no such reasons.  Thus, contemporary atheists tend to argue not that evil and suffering logically entail God’s non-existence, but rather that they are good evidence for God’s non-existence. 

·       The Cosmic Sin Intuition.  It would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours.

·       Therefore, if our universe has a creator, She (sic) is either not all-powerful or not perfectly moral (or both).

·       Therefore, there is no such thing as the Omni-God.

By defending the inherent plausibility of the Cosmic Sin Intuition, we can build a very strong – although not logically certain – case against the existence of the Omni-God, one which avoids the sceptical theist critique.

Goff then announces that he is going to propose “Cosmic Purpose Without God.”  That will be the next post. But before I end this one, I’d like to just mention that there is an old solution to the problems that Goff and so many others appear to be struggling with, and not very successfully in my view: the ‘Unity of Being’ theory of 13th century Andalusian mystic and philosopher Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi.  But, I will come to that eventually.

Poet in a Garden, by Ali of Gloconda, c.1610-15, via Wikimedia.

Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part 4

 Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In part 3, I briefly covered Philip Goff’s arguments about consciousness in his book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe”.  There I noted the Presocratic dilemma:

Either mind is an elemental feature of the world, or mind can somehow be reduced to more fundamental elements.  If the view is that mind is reduced to more fundamental elements, then one must explain how the reduction happens.  If one takes the position that mind is an elemental feature, then one must explain the apparent lack of mental features at the fundamental level of material reality.

Goff pointed out that our Standard Scientific View is the second option of the Presocratic problem and that it is committed to:

Micro-Reductionism:  What a human being does is ultimately fixed by the fundamental particles making them up, and the behaviour of the fundamental particles making up a given human being is entirely determined by the basic laws of physics. 

Goff has a problem with that and points out that if it were true, we would all be Meaning Zombies. But he sees that this is not the case, that there is Experiential Understanding above and beyond what a Meaning Zombie ought to be able to manifest.  He then makes clear what his goal is: to interpret physics in such a way as to allow experiential understanding to bring about novel and unexpected behaviour which can ‘override’ the laws of physics. 

Goff announces that the first step to solving the Meaning Zombie problem is to deny micro-reductionism. If the basic laws of physics determine how an individual behaves regardless of whether or not experiential understanding emerges (<- note Goff’s term here), then Natural Selection will not care whether or not experiential understanding emerges.  It is only if the emergence of experiential understanding makes a difference, better survival, that sense can be made of the emergence of experiential understanding.

So, how is he going to demonstrate this emergent behaviour within the Standard Interpretation of Physics?

First of all, he just disposes of Schrödinger’s Cat. He writes that:

“… on the ‘consciousness collapses the wave function’ view, the unobserved system exists in this weird indeterminate state because there is no consciousness involved in it. … This interpretation is no good for a Panpsychist.  Given that conscious particles are everywhere, including in the locked box with the unconscious cat, there would be no quantum indeterminacy anywhere.”

But then, according to the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics, what we think of as collapse of the wave function is actually the universe splitting into numerous branches.  By removing the collapse of the wave function, Many Worlds removes the need for consciousness.  But Goff doesn’t like that because “it’s hard to make statements about probability when everything that could happen does happen.”

Goff likes the Pilot Wave interpretation because there are both wave-like things and particle-like things.  He declares that “the appearance of uncertainty is simply a reflection of our lack of knowledge as to the initial location of particles.”  The pilot-wave view dispenses with the collapse of the wave function.  The Pilot Wave theory (known also as Bohmian Mechanics) accepts the existence of the wave function but also adds particles.  This means two distinct spatial realms: the very high dimensional space inhabited by the wave function, and the familiar three dimensional space inhabited by particles.  For the Pilot Wave Theory, all the many possibilities represented by the wave function exist, but only one will ever correspond to three-dimensional, concrete reality.  In addition to Schrödinger’s Equation, Pilot Wave Theory postulates an additional equation – the guidance equation – which specifies a lawful connection between states of the wave-function and locations of particles.  The wave function pulls around the particles a bit like the moon pulls the tides.

The problem with Pilot Wave Theory, according to Goff, is that it appears to leave particles causally impotent – dead matter that can only be dragged around by the wave function. So, he proposes his theory: Pan-agentialism.

Pan Agentialism

·       Consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality.

·       The physical universe is made up of tiny fundamental particles each of which has conscious experience of a very rudimentary sort.

·       There seems to be no inherent limit to how simple subjective experience can be.  If particles have experience, then it is presumably of an incredibly simple form.

·       Particles have a kind of proto-agency of their own.  Particles are never compelled to do anything, but are disposed to respond rationally to their experience.

·       The conscious inclinations of an electron would be unimaginably simple compared to the conscious inclinations of the simplest organism.

·       So long as conscious inclinations of particles arise in a simple and predictable way, the actions will be simple and predictable.

·       The Wave Function is what causes the particles to have certain conscious inclinations.

·       The particles then respond to do what they feel inclined to do.

·       Thus: It is particles rationally responding to the conscious inclinations produced in them by the wave function that results in the standard predictions of Quantum Mechanics.

My own impression of Goff’s proposal is that it is somewhat incoherent.  Particles have a sort of consciousness and proto-agency, yet it is the Wave Function that ‘implants’ the conscious ‘inclination’? That is like giving with one hand and taking away with the other.  The particle’s ‘agency’ is subject to a sort of mind control which is no agency at all.

According to Goff’s Pan-agentialism, matter is inherently disposed to respond rationally to reality.  Particles simply follow their conscious inclinations; never mind that those inclinations are imposed on them by Pilot Waves, thus casting doubt on the idea that matter is ‘inherently disposed’ in its responses.  Here Goff brings in Evolution. He writes:

“As complex conscious minds emerge, they start to have experiential understanding of the world around them.  That is, the capacity for rational response of the particle can do very little, but when that capacity is married to the rich cognitive understanding of a human being, it flowers into a complex engagement with the world around it.”

Goff’s Equation:

Proto-agency + experiential understanding = Agency.

The problem is that this ‘proto-agency’ sort of got swallowed up by the Pilot Wave’s imposition of ‘inclination’ though Goff tries to distinguish between ‘capacity to respond rationally’ and ‘imposition of inclination.” 

Now, if human agency is simply a matter of doing what we feel like doing, as Goff says the particles do, guided by the pilot waves, then we are back to David Hume’s “Reason is the slave of passion.”  And Goff doesn’t like that.  He refutes Hume saying:

“It is not desire that is determining action but judgement, specifically the judgement that a certain action is objectively worth doing.” 

He explains that humans have the capacity to choose whether to follow their desires or their value judgments.  Humans can pursue something because it is worth doing.  That is, radically undetermined free choice or “Libertarian Free Will.’ Goff writes:

“If there are objective facts about value, which the kind of cosmic purpose defended in the book commits us to, then presumably human beings are able to recognize and respond to considerations of value: I can do something because I think it’s worth doing, regardless of whether or not I feel like doing it. … Recognition of value brings with it Libertarian Free Will, the capacity to choose whether to respond to one’s inclinations or to one’s judgement about what is worth doing.  Free Will consists in my capacity to choose whether to follow my desire or my judgement.”

And so, we come to this progression:

1.     Proto-agency: The capacity of a particle to respond to its immediate inclination to perform a specific action in the here and now.

2.     Agency: (proto-agency + experiential understanding) The capacity of an organism to pursue objects of desire spread out over space and time.

3.     Free Will: (proto-agency + experiential understanding + recognition of value) The capacity of a human being to choose whether to respond to their conscious inclinations or to their value judgements.

In regard to the above sequence, Goff writes:

“Note that in each case there is not some magical new capacity that appears totally out of thin air.  Rather, the basic capacity to respond rationally – that very capacity possessed by the humble particle – has latent within it all of these possibilities.”

Freedom From Physics?

Micro-reductionism ties us to the view that everything that happens in the biological world is ultimately determined by what is going on at the fundamental level of reality. To describe higher level processes, you just need to employ higher level descriptions of processes that can, in principle, be exhaustively described at the level of particles and fields.

In contrast to Micro-reductionism, Goff’s Pan-agentialism claims that, as complex conscious systems with experiential understanding begin to emerge, they bring into being new causal principles over and above the basic laws of physics and that such systems are those that behave in ways that depart from the predictions associated with Quantum Mechanics which are generated by the Born Rule, i.e. the ‘Core Theory’, which combines the Standard Model of particle physics with the weak limit of General Relativity.  Goff claims that what the Born Rule tracks is how physical things behave when they’re responding to the very simple inclinations imparted to them by the wave function in accord with the particle’s own ‘capacity to respond.’  More or less.  Goff writes:

“If there is no logical connection between our experience and the behaviour that results from it, why would it be that conscious experience and behaviour line up in a rationally appropriate way?  If we just live in a fundamentally meaningless universe where what stuff does is determined by mathematical laws of nature, why should the behaviour that conscious states produce respect norms of rationality?  […]

“If we did not live in a pan-agentialist world where things are somehow set up to ensure that the behaviour of a physical system is rationally appropriate (relative to its conscious experience), then physical systems would likely respond to their experience in a way that had nothing to do with norms of rationality.  And if it is unlikely that a physical system would respond rationally to its experiential understanding of the world, thereby surviving well, then evolution has no motivation to endow physical systems with experiential understanding in the first place.  Without some inherent push for matter to respond rationally to the character of its experience, our universe would almost certainly be populating by meaning zombies. […]

“We need to give an evolutionary account of the emergence of experiential understanding.  But this is possible only if we assume there is something about the universe that ensured, or makes likely, psycho-physical harmony.  Pan-agentialism seems to me to be the simplest way to do this.”

And that is the centrepiece of the book: An evolutionary account of the emergence of experiential understanding; an evolutionary account of the emergence of consciousness. 

I haven’t decided yet what part of the remainder of Goff’s book I’m going to cover here; probably not much of it, but there are a few points I’d like to mention.  That will be the next post.