Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Nine

Laura Knight-Jadczyk 

In the previous post, we learned that Philip Goff proposes that the fine-tuning of the cosmos indicates that the emergence of life is one of the goals of the universe.  He further proposes that the emergence of rational organisms from particles with agency is also part of the purpose of the universe.  These two pieces of evidence lead him to suggest that we can choose to make ourselves and our world better by achieving the highest state possible for our form of existence and our commitment to that aim – which he identifies as the Aim of the Universe – can transform our ethical situation, i.e. make us ‘good’.  It was at this point in his discussion that he indicated 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.”

Yup.  We are to make reality as good as we possibly can and this goal trumps humanism.  Just to clarify that, at the present time, the term ‘humanism’ generally refers to a ‘focus on human well-being and advocates for human freedom, autonomy, and progress. It views humanity as responsible for the promotion and development of individuals, espouses the equal and inherent dignity of all human beings, and emphasizes a concern for humans in relation to the world.”  

That is, Goff is proposing that we go beyond humanism into, I suppose, transhumanism except that his concern is for ‘the reality’ and not the human beings inhabiting it with their petty family and tribal concerns.  Possibly some transhumanism enters into his concerns, but it seems that he is mainly aimed at Globalism and the agenda of those such as Klaus Schwab and the WEF.  This becomes even more evident with the discussion he opens in his section entitled “Owning and Belonging”.  In this section, he does bring forward a number of thorny social and economic issues.  He notes:

In Europe in 1913, the top 10 per cent owned 89 per cent of all private property, whilst the entire bottom half of society owned just 1 per cent.  

Well, that disposes of 60 per cent of society and 90 per cent of private property, which would leave 40 per cent owning the 10 per cent that is left.  It is a little confusing when he then says:

”…during the 20^th century, a remarkable, and historically unprecedented, transformation took place: a middle class emerged.  That is to say, a significant proportion of the wealth at the top was transferred to the middle 40 per cent between the top 10 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent.  In 2020, this middle group owned about 38 per cent of all property, whilst the share of the elite 10 per cent at the top had significantly come down from 89 per cent to 56 per cent.  The bottom half of society benefited a little but not a lot from this transition: moving up from owning 1 per cent to owning 6 per cent.”

This transition was not due to capitalism, which had already existed for hundreds of years.  It was due to the specific form of capitalism that emerged in the post-war years, which involved democratic control of the market, through active trade unions, strong regulation on the movement of capital, and high taxes on the wealthy. The top marginal rate of income tax in the US between 1932 and 1980 averaged at 81 per cent.  In the UK during the same period, the average of the top rate of tax was 89 per cent.  These taxes did not dampen economic activity. On the contrary, this time was referred to as the ‘global age of capitalism” … high taxes on the wealthy succeeded in making society much more equal without negatively impacting the economy…

…restrained capitalism was abandoned in the Thatcher/Reagan ‘neo-liberal’ revolutions of the early 1980s.  Regulation and taxes on the wealthy were slashed, with the promise of unleashing economic dynamism that would produce wealth that would eventually ‘trickle down’ to the masses.  Instead, we got growing inequality, lower growth, and ultimately the global meltdown of 2008.

Now, I’m not an economist, but I was born in the 50s and was an adult from the 70s onwards.  I know that the term ‘made in China’ or wherever became a household expression starting from the 70s and that was due to the fact that manufacturers were moving their business to out of the US mainly due to the controls touted by Goff above.  It was basically an age of divestment in America so it certainly negatively impacted the economy.  And it was due to this divestment that the Thatcher/Reagan reforms were proposed.  I personally think that ‘trickle down economics’ was something of a scam, but then, consider that Goff above, highlights the year 2020 as being some sort of high water mark for the middle classes?  That was a long time after Thatcher and Reagan. Something is certainly wrong with the picture he is presenting.

I’m also aware that the middle class was present in late feudal societies and that the middle class mainly drove the French Revolution and became the new ruling class.  Things are not as simple as Goff suggests in his brief review of economics. His source for these statistics is Thomas Piketty’s “A Brief History of Equality” (2022).

Piketty has a somewhat checkered career based on the Wikipedia bio about him.  There we read:

Piketty specializes in economic inequality, taking a historic and statistical approach. His work looks at the rate of capital accumulation in relation to economic growth over a two hundred year spread from the nineteenth century to the present. His novel use of tax records enabled him to gather data on the very top economic elite, who had previously been understudied, and to ascertain their rate of accumulation of wealth and how this compared to the rest of society and economy. His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. […]

In November 2023, Thomas Piketty called for a ban on private jets to fight against climate change and called for a progressive carbon tax in response to a report highlighting the disproportionate amounts of carbon emissions by the richest 1% of people.

Oh boy, a real live WEF acolyte.

Goff continues:

Historically, Western European countries sucked wealth from other nations through military conquest and empire.

True, and it is still a problem.

However, rich countries continue to steal from poorer countries through the more nefarious means of tax havens.  A multinational corporation can profit in, say, Nigeria, but avoid paying tax in Nigeria by shifting profits to a tax haven. 

True enough.  What Goff and other so-called geniuses don’t seem to catch on to is the fact that this would not be the case if taxes were reasonable across the board.

But Goff and others of his ilk are going after the problem in a more dangerous way:

What can be done?  One of the biggest barriers to change is the myth of natural, inviolable property rights.  The wealthy resent the kind of taxes that did so much good in the post-war years, because they feel that the taxes would be taking ‘their money’ off them. In the most extreme version of this sentiment, fans of the 20^th century Russian-born American pop-novelist Ayn Rand declare that ‘taxation is theft,’ at least if it is used for anything more than funding the police to protect property rights.  But even politicians on the centre-left tend to start from the assumption that the need to fund public services or – heaven forbid – redistribute income must be balanced against a concern about the state taking too much of ‘our money.’

The conviction that the money I get in my pay-packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘min,’ although almost universal, is demonstrably confused.  As we discuss in the appendix of this chapter, ‘P.S. Is Taxation Theft”,’ there is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense.  Nonetheless, the illusion of having a sacred, inviolable right to one’s pre-tax income is hard to shift.  It’s a deep part of our socially conditioned way of seeing reality.  Anyone who has raised children knows how early and with what force they begin to declare ‘Mine!’  This is one reason why the political struggle for justice is inseparable from the spiritual struggle to break our social conditioning.  In our quest for spiritual advancement, we need to see the myth of sacred property rights as part of the enemy we’re battling, both in ourselves and in others.  […]

In the hard copy of Goff’s book that I have, the above mentioned essay “Is Taxation Theft” is at the end of this final chapter.  It is not present in e-book or PDF copies that I also have.  You can, however, read the entire essay online here: Is Taxation Theft?

As I said, I am not an economist and most of what Goff is writing about is outside of my range of knowledge and even interest.  So, I asked for feedback about it on our online forum.  You can read the entire discussion here: Philip Goff Discussion 

Meanwhile, two responses stood out for me and I will include them here.  The first is by forum member ‘Ryan’:  

Goff claims that the morality of natural property rights is conditional upon a society respecting that morality – i.e. the exact moral constructivist argument he claims not to use when he says:

    (Please note, our focus here is specifically on social constructivism about property; we are not considering a more general position according to which morality as a whole is a social construction.)

Goff’s article contains implicit bias. He begins by describing libertarians who hold the notion that taxation is theft as “radical”. He says, “outside of academia”, as if there were “academics” and “everyone else”. He says that the notion is “confused” because it isn’t present in a “serious” political theory, Goff adjudicating what is "serious" political theory, of course. Yet there are many notions, particularly in science and mathematics, that aren’t part of a political theory and yet are completely common sense and justified by airtight reasoning!

He makes a para-logical and para-moral judgement about the notion because:

·       it prevents ‘economic reform’, assuming that the correct ‘reform’ would naturally exclude this notion, and its presence is directly preventing said 'reform'!

·       claims that it’s in the economic interests of those who vote against it, with no evidence, despite that those votes are direct evidence that those voting consider it NOT to be in their economic interests.

·       claims it ‘corrects economic injustices’, as if those ‘injustices’ were self-evident (subjective) and a direct result of that one notion!

His statement that 'theft can be legal, moral, or both', is presupposed on the arbitrary laws of a particular legal system. Different legal systems are based on different laws and customs. Therefore, taxation as a general concept can only be referred to in the moral sense, because only that concept is independent of the arbitrary laws it is being compared with. His dismissal of “legal theft” is also based on circular reasoning: legal theft doesn’t exist because the laws create legal claim! Never mind that the person has to earn the money before it can be taxed, otherwise it’s not income!

Goff claims money is “delivered to you” via the “market”, not earned via agreed exchange! His idea of how people obtain money is a ridiculous abstraction. He then sets up a straw man by bringing up the justification for payment as based on “deserving”, an ambiguous concept, rather than agreement! He then unsurprisingly knocks "deserving" down easily, before setting up another, subtler straw man: "entitlement".

    what you are entitled to is the result of your property rights

A completely meaningless distinction that attempts to shift the reader's focus towards 'rights' that are legally enforced by a central authority, and away from the concept of property obtained through ethical, mutually-agreed exchange.

He then creates arbitrary categories, “Right-wing libertarian; Left-wing libertarian; and social constructivist” and seems unconcerned with possible exceptions. But as we will see, Goff isn't concerned with the philosophical justification of individual theories from first principles.

    it is not possible for one individual to acquire exclusive rights over land or natural resources in a way that excludes the equal moral claims of other citizens.

A side note: this conception of property rights assumes that primacy has no moral value, which may be an incorrect assumption.

    The claims of future generations must also be taken into account, leading naturally to an inheritance tax

It's quite possible to have a “left-wing libertarian” theory of property that excludes this.

    But Left-libertarian theories leave considerable latitude for the state to alter the distribution of wealth, perhaps through taxation, if some take more than their fair share of natural resources.

Goff's use of “taxation” here implicitly contains the idea of forcible seizure - ie. theft, which Goff claims he’s arguing against! And he automatically implies the state is the arbiter of “fair share”.

    The second requirement – the denial of equal rights over the natural world – is particularly implausible, and something I’ve never seen any justification of from Right-wing libertarians.

“I’ve never seen a good argument against it, and I think it’s implausible, so it must be.” Where is his justification FOR equal rights over the natural world, as he demands from the right-wing libertarians about exclusive rights? Again, emotional reasoning and moral bias.

    The reason is that the world that Right-wing libertarianism theorises about is a very different one to the world we live in today.

"RWL'ism isn’t a viable theory because it doesn’t correspond to the 'reality' we live in today."

·       How exactly does the moral argument against taxation not correspond to reality when Goff claims that it prevents economic reform, people are voting based on it, it's causing 'economic injustices', and politicians like David Cameron talk about it in their speeches? Sounds like it's a pretty big part of the "world we live in today" to me.

·       I'm sure Goff's beloved abolitionists heard very similar arguments from slavers in their day. I guess they should have realised they weren't acting ethically because it was "very different to the world they lived in then."

    But this is the case only if the market is perfectly free, ie if the state has no influence on the distribution of wealth. Yet there are very few countries in the world in which this is the case. In almost every country, there is a certain amount of taxation, at least to pay for roads and infrastructure, if not for education and healthcare.

The actuality (or not) of morality in practice does not affect the existence of a moral principle! And yet Goff claims that less than perfect adherence to such principles disproves natural property rights via their own presuppositions! UTTER HORSESHIT.

    In theory, Right-wing libertarianism does entail that people have a moral claim on their pre-tax income, and hence that taxation is theft, but only in hypothetical societies where there is zero or minimal state interference in the economy.

NO, NOT IN HYPOTHETICAL SOCIETIES, BUT AS A PREEXISTENT MORAL PRINCIPLE EVERYWHERE! THAT’S WHAT MORALITY MEANS! Goff comes out of the closet as a totalitarian postmodernist libtard here.

    Even if the most radical forms of Right-wing libertarianism are true, it remains the case that you have no special moral claim on your gross income.

“Even if it’s true, it’s false.”

His whole article is essentially what Lobaczewski called a "paramoralism" - an attempt to justify an incorrect statement via an appeal to morality.  He basically argues backwards from the point he's already determined to reach, and sets up straw men along the way, while studiously ignoring the real crux of the question, which he just declares irrelevant by fiat.

His idea that it is immoral to consider you have a property right to the income you receive is context-independent and applies only to an imaginary world of formalisms. What's more, he completely projects these unconscious presuppositions onto the idea of natural property rights, claiming that they only exist in the imaginary formalism of a 'perfect libertarian utopia'!

The second response that I want to share here brings in other philosophical issues.  This one is written by forum member ‘WhiteMountain’:

I think the big problem here is the guy who wrote this article is a very staunch utilitarian, to the point he cannot even contemplate someone who believes in deontological thought, at least in the field of economics. I felt like tearing apart nearly every paragraph in false assumptions which he did not even take 2 seconds to question himself. I am a huge fan of Locke, and I have massive libertarian tendencies. That being said, I also think that anarcho-capitalists are highly naive in many respects at the same time.

Deontology is basically the philosophy best illustrated by Kant that basically says you treat PEOPLE AS THE ENDS and NOT A MEANS TO AN END. It is in this spirit, although it is more often couched in religious statements on "God Given rights" that naturally predominated at the time, that Locke's and other natural rights philosophies are in the same spirit as. Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill basically argue the MEANS JUSTIFIES THE ENDS for the most part - society and governments are justified in doing whatever is necessary to optimize the collective utility functions of society as a whole. And clearly that is where the author is coming from economically. Then there is sort of the hybrid called "rule consequentialism," that I hold to, that basically says that you treat people as the ends not arbitrarily but because it actually leads to better ends the utilitarians want in the first place. More on that later.

But from a deontological point of view, as pure anarchists will point out, all government is immoral. And that is for the most part provable. So when he says "But this is the case only if the market is perfectly free, ie if the state has no influence on the distribution of wealth," yes that is exactly what a lot of these people believe. The problem is that the world does not exist in a vacuum. If there was no government, in the anarchy people like Jeff Berwick long for, most likely some group of thugs would appoint themselves through some "social contract" that they only signed as leaders and oppress people. Maybe someday we can get to a point we have private institutions form a moral anarchistic society as many write about; I am HIGHLY SKEPTICAL about that as there are numerous issues that arise. I think people with common sense will agree with me on that one.

But when you start from the perspective that all government is inherently immoral, violating fundamental tenets of the nonviolence principle, the question that the libertarian philosophers are making it how to you make it the "least immoral" possible. The least violence via takings like theft. And that is where it actually resonated with most people. That gets back to my primary point - this is really more about a deontological worldview where individuals have rights not to be treated as means to an end giving rise to rights like freedom of speech in addition to the least amount of taxation necessary to maintain a state versus a utilitarian worldview where bureaucrats can do whatever they want as long as THEY DETERMINE the best outcome for society. And generally it will be psychopaths determining that...

When he claims stuff like "Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the money the market delivers to you" again he makes a completely unfounded assumption. Technically under income tax laws, ANYTHING you produce can be taxed by the government. A person who grows simple crops for his family is not involved in the market AT ALL. The market is not delivering ANYTHING to these people. It is then the government that artificially puts a price on those goods and taxes it (if they could spy enough to enforce it - thus they want drones everywhere ). BTW see Wickard v. Filburn in the US where the government went after a guy for growing too much wheat under New Deal artificial restrictions even though he was only growing the wheat to feed his own animals. The government literally argued it was "interstate commerce" even though he was feeding animals on the farm and no money changed hands and the corrupt Supreme Court rubber stamped it...so the government when given the opportunity will interfere with personal property not even related to commerce and calling it commerce!

There is a reason utilitarian thinking is bad and deontology and the respect for "natural rights" (whether you believe they are God given or not) matters is that there is a fundamental uncertainty in life. You never know the second, third, fourth, fifth order consequences of an action. But you KNOW the first order consequences - stealing from someone, killing them, etc. with 100% certainty. For that reason deontological actions over time will produce the best societal results. And this is how you do not have to be a social-constructivist so "property rights are made to serve human interests and not vice versa" The principle of not stealing itself serves a definite human interest the author does not seem to recognize. You might steal money from person A and give to person B thinking you are benefiting them. Maybe it does short term, but over the long term the person becomes dependent and purposeless in life as happens with many welfare programs. You don't know...but in all cases you have taken from the first person and possibly incentivized them to be less productive as well.

"this confused assumption is a major stumbling block to economic reform, causes low and middle earners to vote against their economic interests, and renders it practically impossible to correct the economic injustices that pervade the modern world."

Again this is a false assumption. In many cases keeping more of one's income IS in their best interests. I can keep it or send it to the Ukraine and kill more people for "the greater good"? Even if you have the best of intentions you will not know the outcome, and I can present tons of economic examples. But I would argue it is easy to correct economic injustices within a deontological framework because MOST of the injustices are due to utilitarian policies that could be eliminated!

For example, patents on pharmaceuticals are GOVERNMENT LAWS for the "common good." Not really...more like corporate enrichment so patients can be charge $15k a month for $0.10 pills. A deontologically free market WITHOUT this artificial construct of intellectual property would mean competitive pricing would make medical care more affordable. And it also means that natural supplements would be MORE LIKELY than artificial chemicals to be the subject of rigorous clinical research! And it is not like we ever needed patents for inventions like the wheel or the Welch longbow to be adopted in the past. Patents interfere with the deontological order and hurt the common good, not helping it.

How about corporations? Corporations are the greatest instrument of wealth inequality ever created, and they were created by governments using utilitarian arguments. Now there are also some pretty compelling arguments, but if you are going to have GOVERNMENT CREATED ENTITIES that limit liability so Pfizer could injure the world with vaccines and pay at most a fraction of the damages (even without the laws on vaccine immunity, only the total capital of the company would be at risk, not enough to compensate the world for the damages), then by God you BETTER HAVE LAWS TO STRIP THEM OF THE MORAL HAZARDS. That means you are MORALLY JUSTIFIED in stricter regulation and GREATER TAXATION on them since they are not real people. Most libertarian minded people (but not all) get this wrong. They think corporations and patents are all about "free market capitalism" and benefit society.

I think one of the best policies we could adopt would be to replace the individual income tax with a CORPORATE ENTERPRISE VALUE TAX on publicly traded corporations. The income tax is EASY TO LEGALLY AVOID. I can point to people earning 8 figure incomes in CASH INCOME publicly bragging they do not pay income tax at all (reporting NEGATIVE accounting losses), and even get refunds. And enterprise value tax is simple and cannot be evaded - simply take the volume weighted price for the period of the stock and debt of the company and add it together to get the enterprise value. Then tax that. It could even be a graduated tax to incentivize smaller corporations, not these unaccountable vertically integrated behemoths so we get real competition. But since the tax is aligned with what most managers try to optimize for, it could not be evaded and the more a company benefits from its structure, the more it pays. It is a completely moral tax as well because the government can tax morally what it created. People have the option of not incorporating if they do not like it. But taking a company public results in many times greater wealth through liquidity premiums. They are given the freedom to choose, which is what natural rights are all about.

I could go on, but I think people get the idea. Generally speaking it is better to tax / steal less (because you otherwise get more problems) and if you are going to tax, tax based on the benefit that is directly received from the government arrangement. In that case taxation is not theft, it is a fee for a service voluntarily given up when you sign up for that service. If you don't want to pay property tax, don't register your property, but don't expect the government to come out and protect it when some squatters try to settle down in it :).

Goff makes a point of saying someone who cures cancer deserves more than, for example, a hedge fund manager. But again, think of how you as a utilitarian matter of public policy make that happen. PATENTS were done precisely for that reason!

So companies like Genentech with cancer treatments (and that is what you get instead of CURES when the patent is the vehicle) that made billions of dollars, well more than most head fund managers (while making a bunch of hedge fund managers rich along the way- the guy seems to forget that hedge fund managers often fund this research through their investors). But at the same time, for them to make so much money they use the patents to charge extreme amounts of money as I laid out earlier, which BOOMERANG to the people with cancer who cannot afford the treatment, or the taxpayers who pay out tons of money. And he might argue that is fine because you would not have had the cure without it. He might argue taxpayers are lucky to pay out $15k a month for treatments that would not have otherwise existed. Others like Bill Gates might argue society is better off letting these people die (another utilitarian argument in the guise of population control).

Again, I beg to differ on whether the treatment might exist or not. Because as mentioned above, you are going to incentivize the wrong types of treatments. Symptoms instead of cures. Proprietary medicines with more side effects versus natural treatments with little side effects. There could be certainly better ways of incentivizing treatments than patents. But it is a natural though upfront. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But we have had 100 years experience that shows us the negative consequences of the abuse of the government interference in the market to let us know otherwise.

And so we now know without a shadow of a doubt what Goff’s book was really about: he decided to write a philosophical treatise to underpin the machinations of an oncoming totalitarian world government. The effort was mostly bricolage, not very deep, and yet, certainly, it has captured the minds of many readers and students who are looking for easy answers to very complex problems. Toward the end of the book he writes:

…I wonder whether a mass encounter with the living presence in all things, brought about through widespread safe and legal use of psilocybin, might be the only way to combat the ongoing commodification of nature which is launching us headlong into climate catastrophe.  Here again, spiritual advancement and political progress could go hand in hand. 

And we see that he is trying to make Left/Liberal ideas seem spiritual thereby turning it into a religion. He adds at the very end:

We can only ignore the evidence of cosmological fine-tuning for so long. … A radical change in how we see the universe is on its way.

At the same time, we are living through a scary, uncertain era.  Nothing has filled the vacuum left by the decline of traditional religion.  …no political philosophy has come along to replace neo-liberalism. 

My hope is that cosmic purposivism may point the way to a new optimism in human potential, a faith based not on dogmatic certainties but on a humble and open exploration of an unfolding purpose we don’t yet fully understand. … We have every reason to feel optimistic about the future.

I think Goff has good intentions and is – to whatever degree he is capable – sincere.  But his tendency to see human reality in such a simplistic manner can only lead to bad results. He believes he has found a simple solution to fix things and his writing style indicates that his aim is to impose his own conceptual world view on others, barely hiding his egotism.  He informs us at least 3 or more times in the book that he is a philosopher and he is trained to think and one can infer that others should not try this (thinking) at home, more or less.  His ideas are over-simplified and devoid of psychological color, based as they are on easily available data and material published by others.  He appears to be attempting to recast these into an active propaganda for political purposes.  But, in the end, the book did not answer the question posed as the title.  Not even close.

Sorry, Goff.  No cigar and the fat lady isn’t singing. 

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.