Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Eight

 Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In the previous post, we learned that Philip Goff disposes of one view of Cosmopsychism – that the consciousness of the universe is some kind of meaningless mess - and advocates for the view that the universe fine-tuned itself because said universe had conscious awareness of the full consequences of each option available, i.e. potential many universes.  Goff’s universe ‘recognizes and responds to considerations of value.’ That’s sort of like ‘agentialism’ at the cosmic scale.  The fact that a lot of bad happens in a universe disposed to maximize good is dealt with by proposing that the laws of physics are, essentially, limitations on what the universe can do.  I’ve already noted that Goff imposes his own ideas of ‘good’ on the system and doesn’t even discuss the thorny issue of ‘what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison’.  That is, there are different perspectives on ‘good’ and ‘morals’. And so, the teleological view is the one that serves Goff best.

Goff starts with ‘rational matter’ and states that “particles and the wave function are themselves rationally responsive material entities.” And so he says “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.” For Goff, the Wave Function is something like a deciding god who then castrates himself.  

As I noted, Goff is uneasy with materialism, but continues to argue for a hybrid form of it.  He gives us no idea where the wave function comes from, nor what gives particles ‘agency’.

The whole mess is highly unsatisfactory. And actually, the only idea he brought forward (I think he borrowed it) that seems to me to be useful at all is that of the behavior of particles – mass, spin and charge - are evidence of a primitive form of consciousness: very simple conscious entities that behave in simple, predictable ways and have only rudimentary experience.  That is at the root of his pan-agentialism.  And actually, I like it. But not for the same reasons as Goff.  

In any event, let’s get on with it.  What does Goff consider “Living with Purpose”, which is the title of his 7^th chapter?

He tells us that the fine-tuning of the cosmos indicates that the emergence of life is one of the goals of the universe.  He has also proposed that the emergence of rational organisms from particles with agency is also part of the purpose of the universe. He now proposes that the purpose of the universe is still unfolding.  He writes:

If an alien from another universe had visited a few billion years ago before life emerged and examined the inanimate matter that exclusively filled the universe, observing the mechanical rules governing its behavior, this alien would never have dreamt that this same stuff would one day achieve self-consciousness, rational understanding, and moral awareness.  And yet, that potential was always there in matter, waiting for the right conditions for it to emerge.  It is possible that built into the stardust that makes us up is the potential for some even higher form of existence, as yet invisible and unrealized. (Emphases, mine.)

And there we see it: Goff really is just a materialist who feels very uneasy about materialism and even possibly resentful that his existence – and that of his family – might be reduced to inanimate matter that follows mechanical rules.  And so he is engaged in a fight against his own programming and education that there is no meaning; he is battling for meaning and it’s very difficult to find within the options open to a neo-Darwinist.

But he soldiers on.  He says it can be rational to hope beyond what the evidence supports and we can choose to make ourselves and our world better by achieving the highest state that is possible for our form of existence.  He calls this Cosmic Purposivism and declares that a commitment to our capacity to advance the purposes of the universe can transform our ethical situation.  Never mind that I don’t think he has a single clue about the purposes of the universe.

Goff says that “true ethics is not about helping your kin alone – the exclusive concern of the Mafia boss – or helping your nation alone – the exclusive concern of the fascist.  True ethics is a concern to make reality better.”

Wow. That’s kind of jaw-dropping.  And notice how smoothly he slid those paramoralisms in there.  Now, it is Mafia-like to help your family/tribe, 

and fascist to be concerned about your nation/country?  

Goff’s ambitions along this line are boundless:

“We may be able to contribute to bringing about a vastly superior state of existence to the one we currently inhabit. […] the fulfilment of cosmic purpose has thus far consisted in a process of making the universe progressively better: the emergence of life and later intelligent agents. Assuming the next state continues this story of cosmic progress, our best guess as to how to hasten its coming is by making the world as good as we possibly can.  At the very least, we will bring reality closer to that higher state. […]  The ethical project of the cosmic purposivist may therefore be of vastly greater significance than that of the humanist… the ethical project of the cosmic purposivist is more ambitious than that of the humanist.”

Further on, in a section on ‘spiritual advancement’, we note: “A white racist may experience people with dark skin as subhuman and homogeneous.  Getting to know a variety of non-white people may break this conditioning...”

I frankly don’t know anyone who is a ‘white racist’, nor anyone who does not know a variety of ‘non-white’ people and have perfectly ordinary relations with them.  What the hell gave him the idea to say something like that which is so completely divorced from any reality I know about? It feels forced, as though Goff has been programmed to think or say something along this line.  And we get the strong impression that he is a Leftist/Liberal of the ‘Woke’ variety.  

Then, on art:

“Bad art is banal; it simply follows cultural expectations without doing anything new.  […] I’m a huge fan of the original punk bands.  […] True art is a subtle middle way between succumbing to cultural conditioning on the one hand, and aggressively rejecting it on the other.”

“If art and meditation gently chisel away at our conditioned way of experiencing reality, psychedelics hack of huge chunks in one go. … taking psychedelics can be incredibly liberating and enlightening.”

Then follows a long segment encouraging the use of psychedelics. And, while it is true that some psychedelics are useful in therapeutic contexts for several debilitating mental health problems, a blanket encouragement for people to partake seems recklessly naïve to me.

At this point, Goff manages to say a few things that I found to be remarkably insightful despite his apparent Left/Liberal proclivities.  He writes:

“[M]any who have made significant progress in breaking through their conditioning… testify that there is a higher form of consciousness underlying our culturally conditioned forms of experience.  We call such states of awareness ‘mystical experiences.’ […]

“The content of a mystical experience is reported to be ineffable… Ineffability itself is not unique to mystical experiences: the character of a red experience is also ineffable, in the sense that it cannot be communicate to someone who has never seen red.  However, whereas the ineffable aspect of a red experience just concerns the experience itself, a mystical experience has what the great 19^th-century psychologist and philosopher William James called a ‘noetic feel,’ meaning that it seems to the person undergoing it to be a way of knowing about reality outside of the experience.  In a mystical experience one seems to directly encounter a life or living presence that exists in all things.  Some call it ‘God’ or ‘Brahman.’  … James simply called it the ‘More.’

“If you’re a materialist, this experience must be a delusion.  According to materialism, the fundamental story of reality is the purely quantitative story we get from physics, and this is not a story that features a ‘living presence’ at the fundamental level of reality.  However, if one is a panpsychist, if one already thinks that all of reality is infused with consciousness, it’s not too much of a leap to suppose that the living presence one encounters in mystical experience is an aspect of the consciousness that permeates all matter.

“Imagine you wake up at the bottom of a deep, dark hole with total amnesia.  You have no idea who you are or how you got here.  A voice from the top of the hole is speaking to you, explaining how you got there and what you need to do to get out.  Do you have any reason to think the voice is telling you the truth? Without access to your memory, you have nothing to go on in assessing the credibility of the speaker.  They could be telling the truth but they could equally be lying.  Nonetheless, you have strong pragmatic reason to trust the voice.  After all, what else are you going to do?

“The above is a good metaphor for life.  Each person finds themselves stuck in the ‘hole’ of their own conscious mins, with no means of escape from its boundaries.  But from within this prison, we find ourselves subject to sensory experiences with ‘tell’ us about a world outside of our minds.  …I cannot climb out of my conscious mind to check whether my experiences correspond to the real world.  They could be caused by a physical world around me but they could equally be delusions created by thee evil computers running the Matrix.  I nonetheless have solid pragmatic grounds for trusting my experiences.  After all, what else am I going to do?

“Could mystical experiences be delusions?  Of course they could.  But then so could our sensory experiences. … All knowledge of the reality outside of our minds is rooted in leaps of faith, in decisions to trust what experience tells us about reality, and there’s no good reason to think that faith in one’s mystical experiences is any less rational than faith in one’s sensory experiences.” 

I agree.  But! I would like to make a few comments here.  Physically objective matter is not an observable fact but a conceptual explanatory device abstracted – as knowledge – from the patterns and regularities of observable facts; that is, physically objective matter is an explanatory abstraction.  What we call the world is solely available to us as images from any sensory modality on the screen of perception which is mental.  Physicist Andrei Linde writes:

“Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions.  I know for sure that my pain exists, my ‘green’ exists, and my ‘sweet’ exists… everything else is a theory.  Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions.  This model of the material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description.” (1998)

At the same time we know that the mind is able to self-generate the same kinds of images we associate with matter in dreams and hallucinations.  These are often qualitatively indistinguishable from the ‘real world.’

Does the existence of such perceptual illusions indicate that conscious perception is less epistemically reliable? Less confident?  No, because it is also by way of conscious perception that eventually we are able to distinguish between perceptual illusions and what we call reality.  It is direct, concrete experience that provides us with the epistemic confidence necessary to dispel illusions and delusions.

We must also take note of the fact that the basis for postulating an objective material world goes beyond the problem of “what is really real since it is all in my mind”. The very fact that we talk about ‘objective matter’ reveals our drive to make sense of the patterns and regularities we observe in our experiences.

First of all, we all seem to inhabit the same world.  Secondly, the dynamics of this world appear to unfold independently of our personal volition.  Also, though this is second order, there are correlations between observed brain activity and reported inner life.  If mind is not closely associated with objective arrangements of matter, how can there be such tight correlations between brain activity and experience?  If the world is not made up of matter outside our individual minds, how can we all share the same world beyond ourselves?  Why can we not change the laws of Nature simply by imagining them to be different?

Following on from what I have written above, I would suggest that there are similar applications to mystical experiences.  Research shows that they can be described, catalogued, compared, and that there is consistency, types, consequences, and more. So, when Goff says “there’s no good reason to think that faith in one’s mystical experiences is any less rational than faith in one’s sensory experiences” I have to mostly agree, but with the caveat that mystical experiences can be examined, studied, and assessed, with the result that one can significantly enhance the rationality of accepting a given mystical experience as giving a true report of an unseen reality; as opposed to some other mystical experience that it would be irrational to accept.

Back to Goff.  He discusses and encourages people to get involved in spiritual communities such as attending church.  He notes that it is “myopic to obsess about the ‘belief-y’ aspects of religion at the expense of all the other aspects of the lived religious life.”  He then says: “Spiritual practice is hard. It requires discipline, struggle, wrestling with vice and human frailty.  It can help to have the support of a loving community engaged on the same path, and the resources and structure of a rich religious tradition that stretches back thousands of years.”  Again, I agree.

To wrap this up, Goff proposes that the purpose of the universe is still unfolding and that we can help it along: we can choose to make ourselves and our world better by achieving the highest state that is possible for our form of existence. 

Why? The Purpose of the Universe

Q&A with Philip Goff, Interview conducted by Thomas Burnett

We can embrace Cosmic Purposivism.  And of course, he has his own ideas of what that entails. At the very end of the book, Goff entitles a section “Owning and Belonging”.  That is going to take a post of its own, so I leave it until next time. 

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.)