The earth is home to 8.7 million species of
life. Over billions of years of evolution, life has discovered ways of inhabiting every
possible niche, including earth's most extreme environments. And yet for all of the exotic and
colorful displays of life on this planet its most striking feature is invisible. Beyond life's
diverse and complex outward behaviors scientists now agree that not only we humans but millions of
other species are also the subject of a felt inner dimension - a conscious mind. Of all of life's
remarkable displays it is this illumination of the universe through consciousness which makes
life so extraordinary. While consciousness is unmistakably life's most remarkable feature, it
is also its most mysterious. Despite all of our scientific advancements we remain completely
in the dark about how we or any other life came to possess consciousness. How could purely
physical processes, such as those of the brain and nervous system somehow creates a subjective
inner dimension? The very fact that reality supports subjective experience is an extraordinary
mystery, comparable perhaps only to the mystery of existence itself. And yet consciousness is
far more than a tricky philosophical problem, it is through consciousness that all meaning
value and significance enter the universe. In conscious life the universe creates a means
through which it has become aware of itself. As the cosmologist Carl Sagan famously put it,
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Viewed in this way, the emergence of conscious
life is a moment of great cosmic significance. Transforming the universe into a process capable
of reflecting on its own nature and development. But is this simply an arbitrary event in an
absurd and indifferent universe? Or is it a clue to the deeper character of reality itself? An
ancient and divisive question is whether conscious life developed through purely random events or
whether it was in some sense destined to happen. The controversy of considering this
possibility stems from its teleological aspect: that the universe has a kind of purpose or goal.
While teleological views were central to much ancient and pre-scientific thought, the rise of
deterministic science and later darwinian theory, saw teleological explanations appear
increasingly obsolete. Without any inherent purpose or overarching goal, the life
of earth could now plausibly be seen as having slowly evolved over billions of years, driven by
nothing but blind and iterative natural selection. Together with the predictive power of determinism
it now seemed that a complete physical science requires no indwelling purpose - only a rigorous
deterministic account of causes and effects. To argue that nature was predisposed to create
conscious life is therefore to caught controversy. At least on the surface it appears to lend
support to naive and pre-scientific views of the natural world. It also challenges
the completeness of current darwinian thinking as well as the prevailing materialist
view of the universe. Who then, aside from the religiously motivated, would dare
defend such a heretical claim? It may be surprising to learn that several
prominent philosophers and scientists argue that life and mind are no accident of evolution,
and that the universe may indeed contain a type of natural teleology - a cosmic imperative
towards the development of life and mind. It is this fascinating yet controversial
possibility that we will explore today. Part One ~ The Life-Friendly Universe. A
surprising discovery of the last century is that the constants which shape the development
of the universe appear finely tuned to permit the evolution of complex life. Change any one
of a number of extremely subtle constants and the universe becomes utterly inhospitable
to any form of life or complexity whatsoever. The most famous example of this apparent
fine tuning is gravity. The force of gravity is approximately a thousand times weaker than
the other forces affecting the behavior of atoms. It is now known that if gravity was only slightly
stronger, stars would have developed from less material and as a result would have been smaller
with significantly shorter lifespans. From living around 10 billion years typical stars would have
lived only for around 10,000 which is of course, a much shorter time than the billions of years
required for biological evolution to take place. The consequences for life are also catastrophic
if gravity had been just fractionally weaker. Stars would have burnt at cooler temperatures
and so would never have gone supernova. The result would be that the heavy elements required
for life would never have come into existence. Taken on its own gravity is a
conspicuous example of fine tuning, and yet there are believed to be upwards of
20 such cases - extremely subtle constants, any change to which and all hope for even the
most imaginative notions of life are crushed. If all of the discovered cases
of fine-tuning are taken together the probability of a life-friendly universe
occurring through chance is trillions to one. As the cosmologist Michael Turner has put it,
(quote) "The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye
one millimeter in diameter on the other side." So what does this apparent fine-tuning mean?
It is widely considered that there are just two possible answers: That either the universe was
intelligently designed by a powerful creator, or that the universe is in fact just one among
trillions of others, containing the full gamut of possible laws and constants, occupying a
transcendent realm known as the "multiverse." To those who lack faith, the religious explanation
is unsatisfying, and yet the multiverse theory also has staunch critics within
the scientific community. As the physicist Paul Davies has remarked, (quote)
"Invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see
is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen creator. The multiverse theory may be
dressed up in scientific language but in essence it requires the same leap of
faith." (end quote) What naturalistic process could possibly create a universe generating
mechanism that churns out trillions upon trillions of universes, while simultaneously
sustaining their differing laws and constants? How could such a complex mechanism come into
existence and based on what laws, and from where? Worse still, our questions about the multiverse
may never be answered because its transcendent realm lies forever beyond the bounds of our
space and time. The multiverse is a fascinating metaphysical speculation about the larger cosmic
ensemble, but as Davies argues, a more measured response to fine-tuning is not to assume the
existence of trillions of unseen universes, but to first exhaust possible explanations
of the universe we do see from within. And given its mysteriously life-friendly
conditions, Davies argues that we should take very seriously the possibility that life
and consciousness are important features of it. Part Two ~ A Universe of Value This was a view explored by the philosopher Philip
Goff. Goff suggests that the universe may appear to be finely tuned precisely because it is.
For Goff, what is conspicuous about fine-tuning is not that it permitted the existence of humanity
or even life in general, but that the constants are precisely those as to permit the existence
of a (quote) "universe of great value" and with it the necessary existence of conscious life. For
Goff, the possibility that value is the causative force of reality is more plausible than it may at
first appear. He points out that physical science reveals neither what things are in themselves
or the underlying causes of physical events. In fact, all we perceive of the natural world are
its regularities. It is therefore reasonable to consider that it is a responsiveness to value
that animates the causal structure of reality. That, (quote) "the universe, through
responding to value, fine-tuned itself." Another thinker who argues that the universe was
predisposed to the creation of conscious life is the philosopher Thomas Nagle. Like Goff,
an important element of Nagel's thinking is that he is a realist about consciousness.
both Nagel and Goff argue that consciousness is a real and undeniable feature of reality
that science must eventually expand to include. We focused on this type of view in the previous
episode in our exploration of panpsychism, and yet while this has become a respectable
albeit minority position, Nagel also goes further, considering that conscious life may play an
essential role in the universe, that it was required to exist. Nagel points out that
neo-darwinian evolution, as a purely materialist theory, offers no explanation of how consciousness
emerged in living organisms or the function that it serves. And if materialism is insufficient
to explain life's most striking feature, then a strictly materialist view of
evolution is likely to be incomplete in other important respects. One area that
Nagel considers is the origin of life. Several prominent scientists have pointed out
that, as a product of random molecular collisions, even the most primitive self-replicating cell
is such a staggeringly complex system that it may be implausible to occur by chance in the
entire projected lifespan of the universe. The fact that life emerged on Earth approximately
as soon as the conditions for life existed, therefore poses a serious problem to a
purely random account of life's origin. According to Nagel, something other than random
chance is needed to explain life's emergence from a dead environment - something by
definition non-random, something teleological. Problems facing darwinian theory, Nagel points
out, are often minimized because there doesn't appear to be any other natural explanation
on the table. To criticize any aspect of darwinian theory is often viewed as turning
one's back on science and of offering support to supernatural alternatives. Nagel argues however,
that there is another option on the table, what he calls "an alternative to a miracle" -
that evolution is true, but that it is not an entirely random mechanistic process. That
the universe is predisposed to the creation of complex conscious life. But what is it about
conscious life that is required by the universe? Similar to Goff, Nagel believes that the
answer lies in a deeper understanding of value. Nagel defends a position he calls "value realism"
that value is not simply an illusory perception of animal appetites and aversions but actually
points to something true in a deeper sense. We humans, in our evolved and complex societies,
have created elaborate and often conflicting structures around our perceptions of
value, yet Nagel argues that our raw apprehension of value within consciousness,
most clearly apparent in the value of pleasure and the dis-value of agony and suffering,
are not mere social or biological constructs, but are grounded in deeper truths
about the real existence of value. For nagel these truths are equivalent to
the platonic truths of mathematics and geometry - that just like two plus two equals four
would be true even if the universe didn't exist, there are truths concerning value which precede
any physical existence. According to Nagel, if we accept value realism, we must also confront
its larger cosmic implications - that existence entails value and that life and conscious beings
may therefore be required as its realizers. The philosopher John Leslie also defends a similar
view. Leslie's focus goes beyond both evolution and cosmic fine-tuning, to the ancient
question of why anything exists at all. Leslie argues that no physical theory can
ever explain the origin of the universe because any physical cause must always be
preceded by another physical cause. To avoid an infinite regression, Leslie argues that we must go
deeper than physical mechanisms and consider that something altogether different, something more
like value is the realizing force of reality. Like Goff, Leslie believes that there must be
some ultimate metaphysical sense in which it is good that the universe exists, and since it
is only through consciousness that value or goodness enter the universe, conscious beings
may therefore be necessary features (of it). Part Three ~ Future Attractor. As
compelling as teleological views might seem they face a serious problem. If the
universe required conscious beings, how did it exist in the billions of
years before life arrived on the scene? To the best of our knowledge there were no
conscious beings at the beginning of the universe. Significant time needed to elapse, for at
least one generation of stars to go supernova before the heavy elements required for life could
exist. One reason that teleological views are so controversial is that they appear to suggest that
the universe deliberated about its future states and then somehow chose between them. Such an
activity would appear to invoke the existence of a god-like mind, together with all of
the inherent problems of explaining it. It would seem that through teleological thinking
we find ourselves back in theistic territory attempting to explain the necessary
existence of a powerful creator. There is however, an alternative way of
thinking about teleology - that rather than proceeding exclusively from the past,
causes might also arrive from the future. Until recently physics offered no
possible mechanism through which causes could come from the future. That was
until the development of quantum theory. In the quantum world entities have been shown
to exist in either a superposition of multiple states simultaneously or as a distinct actuality.
It is only upon measurement that quantum entities assume the common sense behavior of classical
objects. While this aspect of quantum theory is already strange enough, it turns out
that the measurement of a quantum system not only determines the state of the system in
that moment, but also resolves its entire history. In other words, in our choosing to measure it,
we can decide how a system existed in the past. In quantum theory this is
known as the "post-selection effect" and it introduces a surprising
retrocausal feature of physical reality. Several thinkers have pointed out that this
retrocausality opens the possibility of an entirely new way of thinking about the origins
of the universe. -That its initial state may be intimately related to its future states, and
the past and future exist interdependently. The decorated theoretical physicist John Wheeler
was both the first to recognize this quantum post-selection effect, as well as to explore its
far-reaching implications. According to Wheeler, we have no reason to doubt that measurements
we make at the present time stretch all the way back to the beginning of the universe and
thereby establish a consistent history of the present choice to observe. In Wheeler's thinking
we are not merely observers of the quantum world, we are participators in the origin of the universe
itself. Wheeler considered that this could well be the reason that the universe appears so
finely tuned for life - that only a universe capable of producing observer participators could
establish what he called "a self-excited circuit" that brings the universe into existence. Wheeler
summarized his view as follows, (quote) "The participator gives the world the power to come
into being through the very act of giving meaning to that world. In brief, no consciousness, no
communicating community to establish meaning, then no world! On this view the universe is to be
compared to a circuit self-excited in this sense, that the universe gives birth to consciousness and
consciousness gives meaning to the universe." (end quote) Wheeler: We have no right to say that the
past exists independent of the act of observation. In this sense we have become participators
in the construction of the universe. While it was seriously considered by several
of the founding contributors to quantum theory, attributing any significance of consciousness
in quantum measurement is now a controversial position in mainstream physics. In spite of
this, several contemporary physicists argue that the possibility cannot be ruled out. One
such physicist is the father of inflation theory, Andre Linde who writes, "Avoiding the concept of
consciousness in quantum cosmology may lead to an artificial narrowing of our outlook." (end quote)
Paul Davies: Consciousness enters into quantum physics at the point of observation where the
rules of the quantum game change as a result of that observational measurement. Many physicists
want to get rid of that, but i've always felt that this is a missed opportunity. If we're
going to actually incorporate consciousness into our description of physics it seems to me it's at
the quantum level we should attempt to do that." Part Four ~ The Cosmic Imperative
One way of framing the question of purpose in the universe is to consider what the universe
is maximizing. Looking out on the universe from our current vantage point it is by no means clear
that the universe is maximizing conscious life. What is apparent is that far greater complexity
exists in the universe than at any previous time. Furthermore, this complexity appears to be
accelerating. At first only simple particles existed, then an expanding diversity of stars, a
vast archipelago of galaxies, the birth of heavy elements, and then life - first simple and
then exploding in diversity, consciousness, then consciously driven evolution with the
potential of reshaping planets and perhaps eventually the entire universe. Setting aside
any significance of life or consciousness, how is this explosion of complexity possible? The traditional conception of energy in the
universe is that all order is slave to and ultimately the victim of entropy, the second
law of thermodynamics, which holds that over time all systems will tend towards disorder. And
yet we live in an ordered and intelligible cosmos, not a chaos. And here lies the famous "problem of
entropy" - that the universe, at least for now, appears to be not losing but gaining order. It is important to recognize that entropy is
not the enemy of life. Indeed life's essential functions are deeply dependent on entropy. And
yet as defined as the tendency towards disorder, entropy predicts that eventually all stars
will die, all structure will decay, and finally after trillions of years, there will be nothing
but a cold featureless void. There is no question that entropy accurately describes the behavior of
thermodynamic systems. But can we rule out that another kind of force also drives the universe,
towards complexity? And that the incorporation of this natural principle will dramatically
change our outlook on the future of the universe? This view was defended by the neuroscientist
Christof Koch who also sees a close relationship between complexity and consciousness. For Koch,
consciousness is not an arbitrary emergence out of a sufficient degree of complexity, but
instead that consciousness is among nature's deep fundamentals, and that it develops into
more complex forms as systems acquire higher and higher amounts of integrated information.
According to Koch, this is no accident of evolution - the universe is driven to maximize
consciousness. In his 2012 book, Consciousness: Confessions of Romantic Reductionist, he writes
(quote) "I do believe that the laws of the universe overwhelmingly favored the emergence of
consciousness. The universe is a work in progress. Such a belief evokes jeremiads from
many biologists and philosophers, but the evidence from cosmology, biology,
and history is compelling." (end quote) Let us then consider that a cosmic
imperative compels the evolution of consciousness in the universe. Where
will this evolution eventually lead? Philip Goff has suggested
that the existing universe might be as good as it gets - that the universe is
not all powerful in its ability to realize value, and that this may be why it contains, in addition
to any value, many states of suffering and pain. Speaking personally, it would seem to me
that to regard the present time in history as the apex of value is arbitrary, especially
given the vast projected future of the universe and the possibilities of advanced conscious
beings which could eventually inhabit deep time. It would seem to me that the universe's capacity
for value is enormously greater than is currently represented, and not because of constraints
in the laws of physics, but because it has not yet unfolded in time. A more viable signal
of value to which the universe is responsive would be a singularity - a time, perhaps trillions
of years in the future, in which life and mind have saturated the entire universe, producing
a highly conditioned state and a realized value trillions of times greater than
anything currently in existence. The physicist Paul Davies, who has defended a
role for consciousness in quantum mechanics, has also elaborated on John Wheeler's concept
of the universe as a self-excited circuit. Davies considers that it could well be the
destiny of life to saturate the entire cosmos, resulting in a universe that eventually achieves
closure by becoming what Davies described as, "completely self-known" Davies is not
the first to suggest this possibility. In the early 20th century, the philosopher Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin argued that, over billions perhaps trillions of years, the natural course
of evolution will lead intelligent conscious life to spread throughout the universe, culminating
in a singularity of complexity, consciousness, and intelligence that he called the "Omega Point."
Is it possible that an apex of intelligence and consciousness reaches back across time to the
beginning of the universe and participates in the conditions of its own existence? This theme
has also been explored in science fiction. In the author Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, a
superintelligence finds itself alone at the end of the universe, but now finally with an answer to
its most fundamental question. And as it speaks the answer, creates the cosmos. But is all of
this just wishful thinking? No more than an anthropomorphic projection of human desire onto a
vast and indifferent universe? I would disagree. The arguments we have explored were put forward
by thinkers concerned primarily not with human significance but with a deeper understanding
of the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. To appropriate all value, meaning,
understanding, and purpose to humans alone seems itself to be the height of anthropomorphism.
It seems entirely justified to consider that these most striking features of the world reveal
something important about the basic character of the universe itself. A view of the universe
in which consciousness plays an essential role has the potential of entirely reframing how we
see ourselves. Instead of viewing our lives as a finite and ultimately meaningless struggle for
survival in an indifferent universe, we become participators in a larger evolutionary process,
in which we are aligned with all other conscious beings in existence. In such a view we are a
part of a gradual evolutionary process, billions perhaps trillions of years in the making, through
which the universe itself is slowly waking up.
