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)

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 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.

Why? The purpose of the Universe - Part 3

Laura Knight-Jadczyk 

In the previous section I covered, very briefly, Philip Goff’s arguments for the Value Selection Hypothesis.  He used the “Fine Tuning” argument bolstered by a series of Bayesian arguments that were fairly extensive.  I’m not re-writing Goff’s book here, you’ll have to read it to get all the detailed discussion there.  He dealt with the Many Worlds or Multiverse hypothesis and was apparently convinced by his own arguments that the Value Selection Hypothesis is the right way to go.

His next move is to bring in Consciousness as evidence for purpose in the Universe.  He states that “The reality of consciousness is a fundamental datum over and above the data of public observation and experiment.”  Goff’s view is that of Panpsychism  . So, let me set out some definitions here.

Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is fundamental and present everywhere in the natural world.  This entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, but not that literally everything has a mind.  That is, a rock does not have mental properties even if the fundamental parts of the rock do. 

Dualism is the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of things.

Physicalism is the view that everything is matter and consciousness arises as an artefact of physical processes.

The various views have been around for a long time.  The Presocratic dilemma was: 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. 

Bernardo Kastrup writes in “The Idea of the World”: “Many people implicitly take every aspect of reality to be either mental (e.g. thoughts, emotions, hallucinations), or physical (e.g. tables and chairs), mentality and physicality being polar opposites in some sense.” 

This view has dominated Western thought since the early 19^th century.  From the early 20^th century, a number of more nuanced theories were proposed including the idea that mind and matter each represent half of reality which makes the implicit assumption that they have comparably epistemic status.  This is a pervasive assumption in Western culture, i.e. that matter is as confidently knowable as mind. 

Among philosophers, this material/mental dualism is considered to be unparsimonious.  For this reason, philosophers have attempted to explain one member of the matter/mind dichotomy in terms of the other.  Idealism attempts to reduce all sense data to mental content, while materialism/physicalism attempts to reduce all mental content to material dynamics. Idealism posits that mind is nature’s fundamental ontological ground and everything else is reducible to, or grounded in, mind.  Materialism/physicalism posits that nature’s fundamental ontological ground is matter, independent of mind, everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, matter. The Western cultural assumption that mind and matter have comparable epistemic status has led to the philosophical conclusion that idealism and physicalism are structurally equivalent mirror images, just reversed.

Kastrup points out that the important epistemic consideration is that we do not – and cannot – know matter as confidently as we know mind.  The epistemic cost of materialism/physicalism is thus too high.

Everything we know – or think we know – presupposes mind.  What we refer to as physically objective matter is not actually an observable fact but rather a conceptual explanatory device abstracted from the patterns and regularities of what we call ‘observable facts’. That is to say, physically objective matter is an explanatory abstraction.

But I digress.  Back to Goff.  He noted, as quoted above, “The reality of consciousness is a fundamental datum over and above the data of public observation and experiment.”  That is the same as saying that physically objective matter is an explanatory abstraction, but Goff does not seem to want to go entirely in that direction.  So, he introduces us to “Meaning Zombies”.  He writes:

“Your consciousness is what it’s like to be you.  If you ask a scientist or a philosopher for examples, you’ll standardly get a list like the following:

• Pain,
• Seeing red,
• The sensation of itchiness,
• The taste of chocolate

These kinds of sensory experience are certainly the most vivid and easy to grasp examples of conscious experience.  There is more to human consciousness than these raw sensations.  Human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding… my understanding of what things are or mean is built into the character of my experience. … My claim is not about how things are in reality but about how experience suggests things to be. … an understanding of what things are or mean … is part of the character of human experience.  I will call this aspect of consciousness ‘experiential understanding.’”

He then develops the difference between experiential understanding and ‘functional understanding’.  This latter is defined as the behavior of a system and its parts.  Goff uses the chess playing computer program that beat Garry Kasparov as an example.  The computer does blindly what it is programmed to do, it does not have experiential understanding of chess. Its programmers may have had such understanding, but they reduced that understanding to a series of "if - then" code statements.  

In the 1950s, Alan Turing proposed a way to determine whether a computer thinks or not and this became known as ‘the Turing test.’  Basically, a human being is engaged in a conversation with two hidden others, one a computer and the other, another human being.  The challenge is to figure out which is which.  If the computer can fool 70% of the interlocutors into believing it is human in five minutes, the computer passes the test.

Does passing the Turing test mean that a computer can think or has understanding?  Turing blew off that question and simply declared that to think is to pass the Turing test!  That is, Turing defined functional understanding.  And this idea of functional understanding predominates in cognitive science.  Goff writes:

“Understanding a mathematical proof, or the punchline of a joke, or the solution to a puzzle, is the ‘ah ha’ moment when one ‘sees’ what the answer is.  A non-conscious computer understands nothing in this sense. No matter how sophisticated its functional understanding, it totally lacks experiential understanding.”

And finally, here we come to the Meaning Zombie proper.

“The word ‘zombie’ is something of a technical term in consciousness research.  We don’t mean the lumbering, flesh-eating monsters we know from Hollywood movies.  We’re rather thinking of an imaginary creature which, in terms of its behaviour and the physical processing it its brain, is indiscernible from a normal human being but which totally lacks conscious experiences. … A philosophical zombie is just an unfeeling mechanism set up to behave like a normal human being.  …. meaning zombies have conscious experience.  But the conscious experience of a meaning zombie is restricted to meaningless sensation: colours, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.  A meaning zombie has no experiential understanding of the world.

“The 19^th century psychologist William James referred to the consciousness of an infant as a ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’. As the infant develops cognitively, its meaningless experience is gradually transformed into a world of people and things.  In contrast, as a meaning zombie grows up, although it develops in terms of its behaviour and the information processing it its brain, eventually behaving just like a normal adult human being, its experience remains the blooming, buzzing confusion of the infant.  When the meaning zombie looks around, it just experiences meaningless colours and shapes. … A meaning zombie has functional understanding, indeed it would pass the Turing test with ease.  But it has no experiential understanding.”

Goff is quick to assure us that he is not suggesting there actually are any real meaning zombies in our world, he has just brought the concept up to ask the question: Why didn’t we evolve as meaning zombies?

“Natural selection is only interested in behaviour, as only behaviour matters for survival.  A meaning zombie, by definition, would behave just like a real human being, and thus would survive just as well as a real human being.  Natural selection has no interest in the quality of your inner life, so long as you’re going to do the kinds of things that’ll make you live longer and pass on your genes.  On the face of it, therefore, we cannot explain in evolutionary terms why we are not meaning zombies.

“This is a profound challenge.  Perhaps more than anything it is experiential understanding that makes us human.  It is our experiential grasp of what things are and mean, including the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others, that connects us so deeply to reality.  … It is experiential understanding that makes life worth living, and yet it’s hard to see how our standard scientific account of how we came into existence – Darwinian natural selection – could explain the existence of experiential understanding.”

And it is right here we see Goff’s dilemma: he is a confirmed, dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist, and he needs to build a theory that will explain experiential consciousness which, apparently, no Darwinist has satisfactorily done up to this point.   Goff writes: 

“On our standard scientific picture of things, what a human does is fully determined by the particles making it up, where the behaviour of those particles is fixed by the basic laws of physics.  … If my experiential understanding is an emergent feature of my brain, that it too may have a bearing on what my brain does.  Still, what that emergent feature does will ultimately be traceable to facts about the particles making up my brain, acting in accordance with the basic laws of physics.

“In other words, our standard scientific view involves the following commitment:

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. 

“If micro-reductionism is true, a meaning zombie will behave just the same as an actual human being, so long as the ultimate story about the particles making it up is the same as that of an actual human being.”

Goff then goes on to reassure us that meaning zombies are not real.  He assures us that when we encounter evolved organisms with high-level functional understanding, those organisms also have experiential understanding.  This puzzles him and he asks: “what is it about our world that ensures that the evolution of functional understanding has gone hand in hand with the evolution of experiential understanding, given that the two notions of understanding are very different?”

Well, apparently, Philip Goff hasn’t spent any time studying psychopathology or he would know that there do appear to be meaning zombies in our world, i.e. psychopaths and other personality disorders.  Psychopaths have often been described as having a sort of semantic aphasia: they functionally understand the words, but don’t get the meaning.

We’ll come back to that later.  For the moment, Goff determines to solve the meaning zombie problem.  He asks provocatively: 

“But how could experiential understanding ‘override’ the laws of physics in the sense of producing behaviour that is new and unexpected from the perspective of the basic laws of physics?  Actually, there is a way of interpreting physics that can allow states of experiential understanding to bring about novel and unexpected behaviour without in any way ‘violating’ the basic laws of physics.”

Because, of course, one must never violate the laws of physics.  (Never mind that it seems to happen a lot anyway.)

The dead/undead cat is coming up next, so stay tuned. 

Why? The Purpose of the Universe part 2

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Here I continue with the series begun with: 

Why? The Purpose of the Universe

In the previous section, I discussed the issues Philip Goff presents in his book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe”. There it was noted that Goff, himself, was an early follower of David Hume’s philosophical empiricism and skepticism until, finding a flaw in Hume’s arguments, he (Goff), became a Nihilist.  I briefly covered Nihilism, Antinatalism, Materialism and its offshoot, Physicalism and Goff’s turnaround to search for a meaning to life.  It appears, from what Goff writes, that this was motivated by the fact that he had become a father.  Goff came to the conclusion that that the only plausible options are between Value Fundamentalism and Value Nihilism.  Since Goff claims that evidence for Cosmic Purpose is strong, that eliminates Value Nihilism; but Value Fundamentalism posits that Value Facts are primitive and lead to the idea of a non-physical realm of value facts. He apparently doesn't like that conclusion. So, let's see where he is going with this.   Here, we turn to Goff’s proof that there is Purpose to our existence.

Goff begins with the Standard Model of particle physics.  He cites the fact that this model contains constants, that is, fixed numbers that are needed for the equations to correspond to reality.  He points out that researchers tried many other numbers in computer simulations of the formation of the universe, and the inevitable results were that the vast majority of such simulations resulted in universes that were incompatible with life or structural complexity.  Goff concludes that we either accept that this outcome is a wild coincidence or that physics is based on these numbers because they allow for a universe of great value.  This, then, is the Value Selection Hypothesis.

The Value Selection Hypothesis:  Mathematical constants are as they are BECAUSE they allow for a universe containing things of significant value.

Obviously, the God Hypothesis would be one version of the Value Selection Hypothesis but Goff isn’t going there.  He notes that there can be impersonal forces directed toward the good.  

Goff tells us that Fine Tuning is really, REALLY, improbable and that the odds of getting a 6 in 70 consecutive rolls of dice (1 in 10⁵⁵⁾  are better than getting a universe that is fine tuned (1 in 10¹³⁶).

And so, Goff states that the rational pressure for us to accept the Value Selection Hypothesis is overwhelming!  The constants of physics are what they are for the sake of the existence of a universe with the goal of that universe containing things of great value.  Et voila!  There IS Cosmic Purpose!

Goff is just staggered by his conclusion.  He can’t understand why this is not talked about more (and possibly why he, himself, was not exposed to this information sooner!), why the physics community doesn’t shout this from the rooftops and embrace Cosmic Purpose!

He suggests that the reason this doesn’t happen is because the Value Selection Hypothesis has always led to the God Hypothesis and that just won’t do!  He then notes that there is a strong cultural resistance not only to God, but also to any kind of purpose or goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality because it would overturn Darwin.  Our Western Culture – and science in general – is so inculcated with Darwin, that we are cemented into a materialistic world view.  Goff laments that science has done away with Cosmic Purpose so thoroughly that they are incapable of opening their minds to their own evidence – the evidence in favor of the Value Selection Hypothesis.

Goff gives the argument a good effort.  He brings in The Likelihood Principle of Bayes: If the evidence is more likely assuming the theory is true that is assuming the theory is false, then the evidence supports the theory. That is, by the Likelihood Principle, the evidence of Fine Tuning supports the Value Selection Hypothesis.

Goff notes that physicists brought in the Many Worlds interpretation (and later, String Theory), in order to explain away the Fine Tuning.  From my perspective, it was just an effort to extend Darwinism into physics.  Given endless time and endless universes, more or less, at least one is going to be suited to life. Goff is having none of that.  He brings in the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy argument.

The regular gambler’s fallacy is that the longer you play, the more likely you are to finally get a winning hand or roll of the dice.  The fact is that your odds of the next roll or hand being a winner are the same as the odds of any other individual roll or hand winning.  How many times you’ve been dealt a hand or rolled the dice, is irrelevant. (Obviously, counting cards is another matter.)

The Inverse Gambler’s fallacy: you walk into a casino and immediately see one player having incredible luck and assume from that fact that the casino must be full of players.  So the fallacy is that the number of people playing in a casino can increase the odds of any one of them having ‘good luck’ and winning.  However, the number of people playing has no bearing on the odds of any one of them getting lucky.  That is, whether or not there are other universes has no bearing on the odds of our universe turning out to be fine-tuned for life. And here, the Anthropic Principle won’t help because it is irrelevant. It is still a fallacy to infer from one person having good luck and winning that the casino is full. So it is a fallacy to infer many universes from one fine-tuned universe regardless of the fact that we couldn’t have observed a non-fine-tuned universe.

Goff says that the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy is a fallacy also because it violates the Requirement for Total Evidence.  The inference to a full casino starts from the evidence that someone in the casino has had an extraordinary run of good luck.  The number of people playing has no bearing on how likely it is that this one person will win over and over again.  The Specific Evidence is that this one person rolls winning dice over and over again.

We have specific evidence that the universe we inhabit is fine-tuned and the existence of other universes has no bearing on how likely it is that this universe turned out to be fine-tuned.  The Requirement of Total Evidence obliges us to take the evidence of fine-tuning to consist of the data point that this universe, the only one we’ve ever observed – is fine tuned.  We have no other evidence.  And that evidence is highly improbable if, as the Cosmic Fluke Hypothesis assumes, the values of the constants were determined by chance (Many Worlds).  The Evidence that our universe is fine-tuned is massively more likely (says Goff) assuming the Value Selection Hypothesis.

Goff concedes that this does not rule out an eternal inflation multiverse, but we are obliged to adopt only versions of inflation in which something is ensuring that a significant proportion of bubble universes are fine-tuned, for only on this basis is it likely that this universe if fine-tuned.

Goff notes that a common strategy used in response to fine-tuning arguments for purpose is to increase the demands for proof. And so, Goff hauls in Bayes Prior Probability argument. This is how likely the hypothesis is based on what we know about the world in a more general way, before we look at the latest evidence.

A hypothesis with a reasonable prior probability won’t need a great deal of evidence to end up having a high overall probability.  On the other side, a hypothesis with a very low prior probability is going to need a lot of evidence to get anywhere near to likelihood.  (Sagan’s famous expression: Extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence.)  Physicist Lee Smolin estimates that the probability of getting fine-tuned constants by chance is 1 in 10²²⁹. 

Philip Goff, Scientific American  January 10, 2021

From the above, I think you can get the idea of Goff’s arguments for the Value Selection Hypothesis.  But, despite railing against the apparent Darwinism of physicists, Goff isn’t ready to let go of Darwinism completely.  

In the next section, we will meet Meaning Zombies which would be the result of plain old Natural Selection if something else wasn’t in play…

Why? The Purpose of the Universe

 This is the beginning of a new series of posts by Laura Knight-Jadczyk (if you are curious - my wife). I was curious about Goff's views, so I asked Laura to have a look at his book with the intriguing title "Why?". I alway ask myself this very question "why?" about next to everything. I also noticed that Goff touches some questions related to physics. But that will come later in this series, and then I will post my own observations as they developed in my discussions with Laura.

So, here it is.

~ ~ ~

Last year, Ark published large excerpts from my book “Comets and the Horns of Moses” here on his blog.  Those chapters discussed the early philosophers’ take on the natural world most particularly how they saw relations between earth and the sky.  A few months back I read philosopher Philip Goff’s book: “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” and, after talking about it with Ark, he asked me to write a book review for his blog.  Well, I didn’t think I knew enough about Goff’s views to do it justice since there were a number of things he wrote that were quite irritating and I didn’t want my irritation to bias my review.  So, I did some online research and ordered a dozen or so books and began to read and make notes.  I think I can now make sense of it to some extent and so, here begins a short series on some furiously interesting developments in philosophy and consciousness research.  In other words, this little series will be not only a review of Goff’s book, but will cover things that are brought into sharp relief by his book.  So, Goff is where we begin.

Goff opens his discussion with the question of meaning: is there any meaning to our very existence.  Nothing like jumping into the deep end of the pool!   Goff believes there is overwhelming evidence for cosmic purpose and I’ll note his arguments further on. For the moment, his recitation of the various views taken on this question is worth a brief recap just to orient ourselves.

Goff cites atheist philosopher, David Benatar, who argues that, from a cosmic perspective, our lives have no meaning at all.  Nothing we will ever do will be worth the concern we might invest into it.  Benatar goes as far as saying it would have been better if we had never been born considering the great suffering and misery that falls upon millions, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia. Benatar even thinks it is morally wrong to have children only to have them grow up and live lives of no significance whatsoever.  According to Benatar, we should let the human race pass out of existence via voluntary extinction.

Reading more about Benatar, I learned that he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town and the son of Solomon Benatar, a global health expert who founded the Bioethics Centre at that university.  Comparing David Benatar’s views to the views of the global elite who apparently are in the process of trying to eliminate millions, if not billions, of human beings from the planet via wars and fake pandemics, one has to ask the question if this kind of philosophy – or something similar - is what is being inculcated into young people these days?  Is this something like the philosophy of the Global Elite?  WEF?  WHO?  In any event, Benatar makes a number of interesting statements and arguments, I just don’t agree with his conclusions.

David Benatar’s position is known in philosophy as Antinatalism.  Arthur Schopenhauer was noted for expressing antinatalist views. 

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism, by Arthur Schopenhauer, Translated by T. Bailey Saunders)

Among the ancients, Sophocles expressed it as follows:

Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries. (Oedipus at Colonus, c. 406 BC)

Oedipus at Colonus, Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust, 1788, Dallas Museum of Art

Antinatialism even finds its way into the Bible: 

And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:2–3)

Going in the other direction, Goff notes that Teilhard de Chardin was inspired by Darwin to believe that the whole universe was evolving toward a higher state of being and all good actions would contribute to this end. 

Another philosopher inspired by Darwin was Samuel Alexander.  He thought that cosmic evolution was driven by a natural tendency of the universe to move toward higher states of being.  He is now best known as an advocate of Emergentism in biology.

Emergentism is the idea that a property of a system may be a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while the emergent property is different from them, a totally new property.  “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, more or less.  This is the idea used to underpin the emergence of consciousness from physical entities.  Thus, Emergentism is compatible with “physicalism”.

Physicalism is the idea that everything is physical, and there is nothing over or above the physical.

Physicalism encompasses matter, but also energy, physical laws, space, time, structure, physical processes, information, state, and forces, among other things, as described by physics and other sciences, as part of the physical in a monistic sense. From a physicalist perspective, even abstract concepts such as mathematics, morality, consciousness, intentionality, and meaning are considered physical entities, although they may consist of a large ontological object and a causally complex structure. According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers. 

Materialism, from which physicalism evolved, is…

… a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist. Materialism directly contrasts with idealism, according to which consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature. 

Thus, Materialism and Physicalism are forms of ontological monism, or a “one substance” view of the nature of reality and are nearly identical. 

Getting back to Goff, he points out that whether or not our lives have cosmic significance does seem to depend on whether the universe has a purpose and he believes there is overwhelming evidence for this, but he did not believe that when he was young.  In fact, he rather liked David Hume.

For David Hume, good and bad, right and wrong, are not features of the external world; they are not objective.  Murder is bad because we feel it is bad.  Good and bad are in the eye of the beholder.  Hume says: “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Hume claimed that it is impossible to move in reason from facts about the world to conclusions about what one ought to do.  Because of this apparently unbridgeable gap, Hume concluded that morality must come from feelings rather than reason.  “Things are good or bad because we feel them to be good or bad.” For Hume, the job of reason is to help us best achieve the goals our feelings have set for us.  If our emotions yearn for something, we must use our brains to figure out how to get it.

But Goff tells us that he realized one day that there is a deep inconsistency, a tension, at the core of Hume’s subjectivist view.  Goff sets the problem up for us as follows:

1.     You can’t move in reasoning from facts that aren’t about value, to facts that are about value or what you ought to do.  There is a gap between "is" and "ought". 

1.     Reason ought to be the slave of the passions.  If you desire to pursue some goal, you ought to pursue it.

Do you see it?  What Goff saw was that making the inference in point 2 violates the Is-Ought gap principle. Hume inferred that that job of reason is to help us best achieve the goals our feelings have set for us.

And so, Goff became a Value Nihilist.  This position posits that value is an illusion and every human activity is pointless.  But then he points out that to fully embrace Nihilism is to accept that you literally have no reason to do anything.  The only non-delusional human actions are those driven by our animal urges, i.e. the Four Fs: Food, Fight, Flight and F*ck.

Goff points out that there are nihilists who smuggle value in by the back door, such as Albert Camus who thought we ought not to despair but live heroically in spite of meaninglessness.

The problem with Nihilism is that, if there is no value, no reason for anything, there is also no reason to believe or disbelieve anything.  The appearances of rational support for a given scientific theory (or any other truth claims) is a delusion.  Value nihilism is the philosophy of the post-truth world, the Woke Generation.  Nothing is rational or irrational.  You can believe whatever you want.  The trick to making Nihilism bearable is to constantly remind yourself that even though all deliberation is a delusional activity, there is nothing wrong with delusions since there is nothing right or wrong to begin with!  Planning, deliberating, weighing one side against another, is just something we do like humming, Goff says.  And remember, he is speaking from experience, from trying to live out the life of a Nihilist.

Goff struggled with it for awhile and found that this philosophy cannot be lived since, so, somewhere along the way, he had the thought that maybe he should search for evidence for Cosmic Purpose since that would also be evidence that value shapes our evolution.  After all, if there is Cosmic Purpose, there must also be Value.  And if Value exists, then we have reasons to do one thing and not another.

To conclude this section, Philip Goff reasoned things down and concluded that he believes that the only plausible options are Value Fundamentalism and Value Nihilism.  Given that he claims the evidence for Cosmic Purpose is strong, we are left with Value Fundamentalism as our only rational option.  And Value Fundamentalism posits that Value Facts are primitive facts in their own right.  Goff states that this is an “incredibly extravagant position.  What on earth could entitle us to believe in a non-physical realm of value facts?”

Well, we will proceed in the next few posts to find out what Goff is going to do with this problem.