The Mystery of Psycho-Physical Harmony

“Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism"

Brian Cutter & Dustin Crummett

Dustin Crummett and I have a new paper, “Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism,” forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. It concerns a puzzle about consciousness that, according to Philip Goff, is “going to change the world.” In this post, I’ll explain what psychophysical harmony is, why it seems to call for explanation, and why it seems especially puzzling from the standpoint of naturalistic atheism. Dustin and I aren’t the first to discuss the puzzle of psychophysical harmony. Versions of it have been discussed by Adam Pautz, Philip Goff, David Chalmers, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Brad Saad, among others. Nor are we the first to suggest that it poses a prima facie threat to naturalistic atheism. Pautz writes, concerning one kind of psychophysical harmony, “What—short of an intelligent designer—might explain why the psychological laws are actually ‘fine-tuned’ to result in normative harmony?” Noa Latham writes, concerning another kind of psychophysical harmony that seems to be implied by David Chalmers’ views in The Conscious Mind, that it’s “in need of a benevolent God to make it credible” and that “actual theists might herald this as a new argument from design.” But unlike most other philosophers who have discussed the puzzle of psychophysical harmony, we draw the natural inference. We think of the psychophysical harmony argument as loosely analogous to the more familiar cosmological fine-tuning argument for theism, focused on the psychophysical laws (laws linking physical states to phenomenal states) rather than laws of physics and cosmology. But the psychophysical harmony argument has one major advantage: it’s not vulnerable to multiverse responses (or so we argue—see sect. 4 of paper).