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.”
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 7th 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 19th-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.
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.
But the trefoil knot is a torus knot
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