The Mystery of Psycho-Physical Harmony

Another excerpt from Why?: The Purpose of the Universe ->

...if the laws of physics had been fine-tuned for life but the universe did not contain rational matter, i.e. matter inherently disposed to respond in a rationally appropriate manner to the character of its conscious
experience, it’s highly unlikely that experiential understanding would have evolved; the Earth would almost certainly be populated by meaning zombies.

As explained above, experiential understanding of reality is helpful for survival only if physical systems are able to respond rationally to the character of their conscious experience.

Fine- tuning and rational matter need each other to produce creatures that can understand and respond to what things are and mean. Without fine- tuning, rational matter would be unable to evolve into complex organisms which are responsive to their environment, a pre-condition for the emergence of experiential understanding. Without rational matter, even if matter evolved into complex survival mechanisms, those mechanisms—if conscious at all—would have meaningless experience: they would be meaning zombies./

In other words, fine-tuning and rational matter fit together like a key fits the lock it was made for...

"Rational matter" seems like an odd conception, more a way of avoiding [having to say] "soul"?

That said, I do think it is encouraging to see Goff - who once was more mechanistic even with his Panpsychicsm - reach these conclusions.

Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

P. Goff

Here’s a stranger kind of mix-and-match zombie: pain-pleasure inverts who behave just like us but feel pleasure when we feel pain, and vice versa. When you stick a knife in a pain-pleasure invert, they feel great pleasure, but this pleasure causes them to scream and run away. When pain-pleasure inverts eat and drink, they feel terrible pain, but this pain causes them to keep eating and drinking.

I argue a lot about philosophy on social media, and I’ve found that many people think evolution would explain why we’re not pain-pleasure inverts. But if you consider it carefully, that doesn’t make sense. Natural selection is going to favor making me feel pain when my body is damaged only if that feeling is going to lead me to avoid such damage. If we lived in the bizarre universe of pain-pleasure inverts, where pleasure generally leads to avoidance behavior and pain to attraction behavior, then we would have evolved to feel pleasure when our body is damaged and pain when we eat and drink. Pain-pleasure inverts that eat and reproduce would pass on their genes just as well as we do. In other words, evolutionary explanations of our consciousness presuppose that we’re not pain-pleasure inverts, just as they presuppose the existence of self-replicating life. In either case, evolution cannot explain what it already assumes.

Why does this matter? If consciousness and behavior could come apart in other possible universes, then we need to explain not only why they come together in the human brain but also why they come together in a rational and coherent way. This question has become known as the mystery of psychophysical harmony. The pain-pleasure examples are just the most vivid case...