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.

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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.

To be continued...

And here is the culprit: