Fine-tuning points towards a cosmic purpose

Fine-tuning points towards a cosmic purpose

Phillip Goff

Once ridiculed, panpsychism – the idea that all matter has some degree of consciousness – has gone mainstream. Philip Goff, one of the main defenders of panpsychism, now turns his attention towards another taboo question: does the universe as a whole have a purpose? In this interview, Ricky Williamson asks Goff how to make sense of fine-tuning, and what role psychedelics and mystical experience might have in coming to view the universe as a conscious mind.

In case you can't view the whole interview (which was free at some point)

https://mindmatters.ai/2023/09/if-panpsy...ning-next/

Goff admits that he used to feel comfortable accounting for the fine-tuning of the universe for life by assuming that there is an arbitrarily large number of universes out there that do not host life. But now, he says, “All we’ve observed is this one universe. And whether or not there are other universes out there has no bearing on whether the one universe we’ve observed is fine-tuned.” And then he says,

For these reasons, I’ve been dragging kicking and screaming to the conclusion that fine-tuning points to cosmic purpose, to some kind of goal-directedness at the fundamental level of reality. I don’t feel comfortable with this; I still feel silly talking about ‘cosmic purpose,’ and wish I didn’t have to. But I don’t think we should let these cultural feelings stop us following the evidence where it leads. At the end of the day, it’s just too improbable that the right numbers for life came up just by chance. – Ricky Williamson, “Fine-tuning points towards a cosmic purpose,” IAI News, September 11, 2023

It’s certainly not the ‘omni-God,’ i.e. an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator. I think the argument from evil and suffering against the omni-God is one of the most compelling philosophical arguments there is. Cosmopsychism improves on the traditional idea of God in two ways. Firstly, it’s a much more parsimonious hypothesis, because you’re not committing to anything supernatural. But more importantly, the problem of evil is avoided altogether because this isn’t an all-powerful conscious mind. On the view I develop, the laws of physics track the limited capacities of the universe. Theists can’t explain evil and suffering; atheists can’t explain fine-tuning. Only cosmopsychism can accommodate both of these data-points. It sounds a bit weird, but it’s actually the simplest theory that can explain all of the data. – Williamson, “Fine-tuning, IAI News

There’s only so long we can keep ignoring the evidence for cosmic purpose, or keep pretending we’re mechanisms. Physical science is confined to describing the behaviour of matter. And so physicalism only makes sense if you think being conscious is just a matter of how you behave, or how the bits of your brain behave. But that’s just not what we mean by ‘consciousness.’ When I say my wife’s in pain, I’m not just making a claim about her behaviour or the behaviour of her inner parts. I’m making a claim about how she feels. This is not that difficult to see if you’re not in the grip of an ideological conviction that physicalism has to be true. – Williamson, “Fine-tuning, IAI News

Fine-tuning points towards a cosmic purpose

Phillip Goff


In case you can't view the whole interview (which was free at some point)

https://mindmatters.ai/2023/09/if-panpsy...ning-next/

Everything we experience arises from us, including the experience of us. Why should we be surprised that the outside is perfect for the inside, for the outside and the inside are one and the same.