Thursday, April 4, 2024

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.)

 

P.S. 06-04-24 10:40 (AJ)


Caught my attention:

[Submitted on 13 Oct 2023]

Linear graviton as a quantum particle

Maciej Przanowski, Michał Dobrski, Jaromir Tosiek, Francisco J. Turrubiates

That is all new to me. Need to study it as I do not want be a sheep (neither to be a wolf in a sheep clothing).


P.S. 11-04-24 (A.J.) My paper on the subject "Love is Light" appeared online yesterday:

Mathematics 2024, 12(8), 1140; https://doi.org/10.3390/math12081140

Submission received: 25 January 2024 / Revised: 4 April 2024 / Accepted: 8 April 2024 / Published: 10 April 2024


P.S. 12-04-24 Laura's find:

Science Proves Isaac Newton Doesn’t Even Break Into Top 8,000 All Time Greatest Scientists


I have no idea what my h-index is, and I am not interested in knowing it or in purchasing citations. But, of course, I like it when one of my papers is being cited, even if it is clear from the  citing paper that its author did not really understand (or did not read at all) the content of my cited paper.

3 comments:

  1. "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?"

    It does seem like a conscious universe state would fine tune not only the past initial conditions but the future final conditions to make it compatible to come from the conscious universe state (big bang) and go back to it (very advanced life).

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  2. Interesting (for me) beginning of Thomas Nagel's book "The Last Word", Oxfor University Press 1997.

    "In the late 1970s I attended a seminar Saul Kripke gave at Princeton, in which he attacked various forms of relativism, skepticism, subjectivism, or revisionism about logic. He argued that classical logic could not be qualified in any of those ways, that it was simply correct, and that the only response to alternatives such as quantum logic, for example, was to argue against them from within classical logic. In any case, he pointed out, the skeptics all rely on it in their own thinking.

    Since 1987 Ronald Dworkin and I have regularly taught together, and I have been exposed to his constant insistence that the only way to answer skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism about morality is to meet it with first-order moral arguments. He holds that the skeptical positions must themselves be understood as moral claims—that they are unintelligible as anything else. I would not go so far as that, but I have been led to the view that the answer to them must come from within morality and cannot be found on the metaethical level."

    ReplyDelete
  3. I found a couple of quotes from Nagel that made me feel rather sad for him:

    "I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed compels—so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling." (Nagel, Thomas (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

    "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that." (Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, P. 130)

    ReplyDelete

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