Philip Goff - "Did the Universe Design Itself?"

[Music] so welcome everyone to this the final humane philosophy project Aaron Ramsey Center seminar of this term I'd like to thank as usual the in Ramsey cent of science and religion Blackfriars Hall Oxford and the Institute of philosophy at the University of Warsaw for making this series possible as many of you know the theme for this series has been God good and evil in a scientific age now that might sound like a very specific topic and as you're probably aware when you try to get a speaker for something as specific as that they usually pick up on on one or two of the themes you've specified but not the whole thing I think we're very lucky today in that by my judgement we're going to have a talk that ties together all of those themes and and effectively just gives the last word on the topic so we might not need to continue next time so our speaker for tonight it's Philip goth Philip is associate professor of philosophy at the Central European University he's authored a great number of influential articles in the philosophy of mind in particular and metaphysics and he's also the author of the 2017 oxford university press book consciousness and fundamental reality which many of you will know about for those of you who don't it might be enough to say that this book has both David Chalmers and David Pavano arguably the foremost proponents of theá-- of the two leading conflicting views in the metaphysics of mind today insisting that this will be the next big thing that sets the debate for for the future which is obviously a really impressive feat so without any further ado I'd like to pass over to Philip Gough who's going to tell us about did the universe design itself thank you very much picking up oh I see thank you very much thank you for that very very kind introduction I'd like to thank Ralph and mikolai for inviting me here - real pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what I have to say so so my argument today starts with the so called cosmological fine-tuning so this is the surprising discovery of the last 30 or 40 years that the physical possibility of life is balanced on a knife edge that is to say for light it now looks like for life to be physically possible certain numbers in basic physics for example the strength of gravity or the mass of the electron had to have numbers falling in a certain range and moreover that that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers could have and it is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the numbers compatible with the existence of life and yet of course they do so as as it's often put it in this sense the laws of physics and the initial conditions of our universe are fine-tuned for the possibility of life so just a few quick examples of this first one from Martin Rees the the strong nuclear force that is the force that binds together the elements in the nucleus of the atom has a value of no point no not seven if that value had been no point no not six or less the universe would have contained nothing but hydrogen if it had been no point no not eight or higher the hydrogen would have fused together to make heavy elements and in either case we'd have absolutely no chemical complexity and hence no life the physical possibility of chemical complexity is also it seems dependent on in a quite precise way on the masses of fundamental particles if the mass of a Down quark had been greater by a factor of three the universe would have contained again only hydrogen if the mass of an electron had been greater by a factor of 2.5 the universe would have contained only neutrons no atoms and no chemical react Asians third example is is the strength of gravity so you tend to think gravity is quite strong but it's actually much weaker than the other three fundamental forces that operate inside the atom and the result of this is that the time scale of astronomical events is much longer than the time scale of of micro micro micro level chemical reactions and this is important so if gravity had been only slightly stronger stars would have formed from much smaller amounts of material and consequently would have been much smaller with much shorter lives typically ten thousand rather than ten billion years crucially not allowing enough time for the evolutionary processes that produce life on the other hand if gravity had been only slightly weaker stars would have been much older and hence would have not exploded into supernovae which are the main source of many of the heavy elements the form the ingredients of life so a lot of these things are to do actually with the formation of stars which are important for getting the ingredients of life okay so these are these are if you hope should give you a flavor if you're not familiar with this stuff so why is this significant and why people often often put it they often say oh well it's just incredibly improbable that as it were those numbers would come up that's for example and so we need a kind of explanation to remove that appearance of improbability I mean that's how for example Richard Dawkins puts it but I think I think we need to say more because I mean although that's true in a sense one could also say you know whatever numbers had come up as it were you know whatever values the parameters in physics had you could you could equally say in a sense that would be incredibly improbable so say the strong nuclear force so then Chong nuclear force has the nunit value no point no not seven suppose it had the value no point no not six you know you could equally say well of all the values it might have had how remarkable that it had exactly no point no not six so I think we have to say a little bit more than just pointing out the improbability I think what is striking is that the actual values are the ones that are required for a universe of value so the fact that the strong nuclear force had precisely the value no point naught naught 7 allowed for the physical possibility of life ultimately intelligent life people that write poked and write poetry and fall in love I think it's pretty plausible that you know a universe in which people can write poetry and fall in love is much more of much greater value than a universe of just hydrogen so I think maybe a little bit controversial but so I think I think what many people are feeling here is that it just cannot be chance that of all the values the constants could have have had they had exactly the values needed in order to bring about a universe of great value so I think that's what's kind of going on now i think i think that explanation I've just given of the significance of fine-tuning is fine as it stands but it's also important to bear in mind that actually I think there is a deeper explanation to be had of what's going on here so I think what's really going on is that possibly the that the fine-tuning raises the probability that the laws of nature were designed so this is from Bayes theorem we get the following analysis of probability raising evidence e raises the probability of hypothesis H if and only if the probability of e assuming H is greater than the probability of e assuming not H so just to take a concrete example suppose there's Jones DNA is found on the body and we take this to be strong evidence that she was the murderer what's going on there well presumably if Joan was the murderer it's quite likely that her DNA would get on the body whereas if she wasn't the murderer it's incredibly unlikely that somehow her DNA would end up on the body so this is how we standardly understand the notion of evidence but analogously it seems pretty plausible that the probability of the fine-tuning if the laws were designed is much greater than the probability of the fine-tuning if it's not the case that the laws were designed if our laws were shaped by a rational agent responding to considerations of value then it's not unlikely that they might choose the values that allow for the possibility of a universe of great value whereas if our laws are just brute and unexplained or if they are the result of non rational processes it seems incredibly unlikely that just by chance exactly the right numbers would come up to allow for the possibility of a universe of great value ok so I think that's what's that's what's really going on it this is what really the the kind of line of reasoning that's implicitly underlying our sense that not just that the fine-tuning is improbable but that it's improbable that it happened by chance so this is very nicely laid out in a recent paper by an unpublished paper by Hawthorne and Isaac's called fine-tuning fine-tuning which you can easily Google to but my one point of disagreement with them is they think we should just drop this talk of you know setting it up in terms of explanation and that you know the fine-tuning crying out for explanation and inferences to the best explanation I think if you do that you're gonna alienate you're gonna exclude a lot of people from these discussions I'm quite passionate about about trying to you know get philosophy across to a broader audience so I think it's fine to talk in the idiom of explanation and that's what I'm gonna do from now on as long as we bear in mind in case it's challenged that there is this deeper Bayesian analysis of what's going on so this is the most technical slide we're gonna have today I mean I think it's fine to just lie on the point that this needs explaining that exactly the right values came up in order to have a universe of value okay so the two standard explanations one finds in the literature are classical theism and the multiverse hypothesis so I'm going to take classical theism to be the view that there is an all-knowing all-powerful perfectly good supernatural being who created the universe and then the thought would be that that being fine-tuned the laws gave them the values there values in order to make possible a universe of great value the multiverse hypothesis in contrast postulates a huge perhaps infinite number of different universes and then I thought is if there are enough universes then it's it's not so improbably at one of them just by chance we'll end up be having the fine-tuned laws the laws compatible with the possibility of life okay so I think both of these explanations are incredibly problematic and that's so I'm gonna spend 15 minutes or so now saying what I think are problematic with these explanations before giving going on to give my own alternative okay so my problem with classical theism it's the familiar problem of evil the difficulty reconciling the terrible suffering and evil in the world with the existence of God so I haven't previously done a lot of work on the problem of evil but just thinking about this stuff I've started researching it quite a lot over the last few months and I've cultivated some thoughts on it some opinions even so I'd like to share them today and see what you think so I want to say that the problem of evil is rooted in the following moral judgment that it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to create the kind of universe we have and a way to get vivid on that I think is to imagine in the future if we're able to quite easily create a simulated universe this is something that's being explored now on a lot of dystopian science fiction but the wonderful black mirror series if you familiar with that so let's suppose that's possible anyone can just sort of create a simulated universe and suppose for the sake of discussion something I probably doubt but let's suppose the suggestion that the the creatures in such a simulated universe if there are any would be conscious so I suppose somebody created a simulated universe exactly like the one we have with all the wars and pain and so on I think the ethics committee would take it off you yeah I think and you could try saying to them the things Richard Swinburne says you say well these people are exercise in their free agency there the you know learning about difficult moral decisions I think they wouldn't buy it so III think this is a pretty plausible moral judgment a pretty solid not certain by any means but a pretty sound a pretty solid rather moral judgment and if this moral judgment is correct then it follows I think that there is no possible world in which an all-powerful and perfectly good being creates a universe like ours so I want to say that this is a middle way between the logical and probabilistic forms of the problem of evil so the way the dialectic is set up at the moment it's thought that you have to choose between you know you're either defending the logical form of the problem of evil where you think that you can logically demonstrate that God is incompatible with the evil we find in the world and most people think that's pretty implausible oh you're defending the probabilistic or evidential version where you're saying the evil is evidence defeasible evidence that God doesn't exist I want to chart a middle way between those two options I want to say the existence of God is probably inconsistent with the evil we find in the world so if this moral judgment is true which is good reason to think it is I think then they're incompatible ok so that's that's all I want to say about the problem of evil they're just no your thoughts on that okay I spend a little bit longer on the multiverse which I've been researching a lot recently so what are the problems here what this I start with a problem that's much discussed by scientists working on this the so called Boltzmann brain problem this starts from an assumption I think most scientists working on this agree with this assumption that if a given multiverse hypothesis entails that we live in a highly unusual universe this counts against that multiverse hypothesis so let's take a silly example to make that clear suppose I have a multiverse theory according to which there are a trillion universes and only one of them is expanding all the others are static that wouldn't be a very plausible hypothesis because you know we'd be in a really strange universe we'd been the only universe that's expanding so that's the thought here it has to be fights lightly because of course we couldn't have found ourselves in a universe in which there are no observers in which observers are impossible so what most people say is what we take that not every universe in the in a given multiverse theory the set of universes in which there are observers we take that subset of possibly of that subset of universes and we ask are we in a really unusual universe within that subset and if we are it's thought that that counts against the plausibility of that particular universe hypothesis multiverse hypothesis sorry so are we in an in an unusual universe according to multiverse hypothesis well Roger Penrose thinks we are so physicist and mathematician Penrose has calculated that in the kind of multiverse favoured by contemporary physicists based on inflationary cosmology and string theory were talk about this a little bit in a moment for every observer who observes a smooth orderly universe as big as our own there are 10 to the power of 10 to 100 23 who observe a smooth orderly universe just 10 times smaller and in fact the most common kind of observers in the multiverse asked these so-called Boltzmann brains that just spontaneously emerge from chaos for a short period of time and then disappear back into the chaos so if Penrose is right the odds of an observer finding themselves in the in the multiverse finding itself in a large ordered universe such as our own are astronomically improbable so Penrose is right according to the multiverse theory we're in a really weird universe and most people think that counts against very strongly the multiverse theory now I don't think anyone takes this to be knocked down because you think well I think the response of most multiverse theories is to say this is a problem but there's the hope that we can tinker with the hypothesis to avoid this problematic implication but I think there is a much more damning philosophical problem with the multiverse hypothesis and I think it just does not explain the fine-tuning which is a which is a big problem in this context and I'm building here on a paper from the year 2000 by Roger white which is pretty well known in academic philosophy but is absolutely unknown in the popin in popular and scientific discussions of this topic so again this is part of I'm interest I think the reason it's not very well-known is it's a pretty technical paper and kind of Bayesian terms so what I would like to do note in order to try and what I'm trying to do more generally in order to get that out get this out there it Mori is translate white paper into the idiom of explanation so that's what I'm gonna try and do today to try and get his point more generally discussed ok so white claim is this essence of his claim is that what we want explaining is why this universe is fine-tuned and the multiverse hypothesis does not explain that no matter how many universes are out there that doesn't add to the probability that our universe is fine-tuned so here's a possible analogy to think about this suppose you wake up in a small room with amnesia don't know how you got there and there's a monkey on a typewriter in front of you typing in perfect English so what are you gonna think you think it's true needs explaining maybe it's a trick maybe it's a trained monkey maybe it's a robot what you're not gonna think is oh there must be trillions of other rooms in this building also with monkeys on typewriters because you're not gonna help because no matter how many monkeys are in other rooms that doesn't add to the probability that this monkey in front of you it is gonna be typing English and that's what you know that's what you need explaining ok there's a lot more to be said though so a lot of people and you might if you're familiar these debates be thinking this yourself right now a lot of people think well this ignores the anthropic principle so the anthropic principle can mean different things but for our purposes it's the just the tautological truth that we could not have existed in a universe that wasn't fine-tuned at least if we're thinking of universes of the same form of laws as our own so it's just that the obvious truth the Trib your chief that we couldn't exist in a universe where life was impossible right that's got to be true and people bring this in and say what okay this shows that we don't need an explanation of why our universe is fine-tuned cuz it was inevitable that we were going to end up in a fine-tuned universe but that's kind of true and it's kind of not true so white thinks people making this argument are conflating two different things one is the anthropic principle that we could not have existed in a universe that wasn't fine-tuned and one is what we might call the converse anthropic principle that a fine-tuned universe could not have existed without us the former is true but the latter is false so the way to think about why the latter is false think about what would have to be the case for the converse anthropic principle to be true it would be true if we were once disembodied spirits waiting for a fine-tuned universe to appear and then we slip into it if that were true then then it would be true that so you know so long as there's a fine-tuned universe we're going to be in it but that's clearly not true it could be a multiverse and it could it could easily be true that were not in it because the next universe down rather than our universe is fine-tuned so in the next universe down there's perhaps life but that's some other folk right it's not us so why thinks it's the conflation of these two principles which leads people to think the multiverse can explain the fine-tuning okay so I've come up with two analogies to try and make this point clear so if this is I think I hope these analogies are a little bit more vivid than those that are currently discussed in the philosophy literature so we've got more monkeys on typewriters okay so I'm going to describe you two scenarios scenario a so both you've been kidnapped by an evil terrorist scenario a you wake up you know in a small prison room and the evil terrorist tells you that in the next room there are an indefinite number of monkeys on typewriters and unless a monkey writes a sentence of coherent English in the next hour you're gonna be shot an hour passes by the terrorists brings in a sentence of English and you're released okay so what are you gonna think in that scenario you might think they're lying but let's suppose you have reason to think they're telling the truth you're gonna think well there must have been a lot of monkeys if there are enough monkeys that it's not so unlikely that one of them just by chance is going to type some English okay so so that that's what the the multiverse theorists think is analogous to our situation with respect to the fine-tuning but it's not that's that's analogous to a world where the converse anthropic principle is true so remember that's a world where you know we're disembodied spirits waiting for a fine-tuned universe to come up and then we slip into it and start our physical existence and then if that were true then you just need one universe to be fine-tuned and we're safe as long as one universe is fine-tuned we're safe and alig ously in this example as long as one monkey types English you get released but that's not our situation our situation is analogous to the situation B I'm gonna describe now okay in this situation the evil terrorist sits you down in front of one monkey and says that unless that monkey types a sentence of cohere in English in the next hour you're gonna be shot the terrorist then adds that in the rest of the building there are an indefinite number of rooms with prisoners could be one could be infinite each with a monkey with a typewriter on whom that prisoners fate depends in the same way an hour passes by your monkey writes a sentence occur here in English and you're released what are you gonna think now in this situation you've got absolutely no reason to think that there are any monkeys in outside your room because no matter how many monkeys there are it doesn't make it any more likely that your monkey is gonna be writing come here in English and that's analogous to our situation right no matter how many universes there are out there it doesn't make it any more likely that our universe is fine so just as in the analogy one has no reason to postulate many monkeys so we have no reason from the fine-tuning at least to postulate many universes ok so I'm pretty persuaded by this ok now it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that the multiverse is entirely irrelevant here white accepts and I think he's right to do so that if we have independent evidence for a multiverse of the right kind then the fine-tuning argument for design is undermined it's a little bit technical why that is the case we could talk about in the discussion but I mean intuitively if it's still the case that if there are enough universes inevitably one of them is gonna be fine-tuned ok so this point many people say well there is evidence in physics for a multiverse so that's fine but actually although there is some speculative evidence in physics for multiverse that there isn't speculative evidence of any kind for a multiverse of the right kind so I think the strongest support in physics for a multiverse comes from eternal inflation so we have to distinguish inflation from eternal inflation so inflation is the hypothesis that our universe began with a period of very rapid expansion and then slowed down a bit many physicists think this this hypothesis explains many observable features of our universe at the moment and this gives us some support that some reason to take this inflation hypothesis seriously now eternal inflation is an interpretation of inflation according to which actually this rapid expansion never slowed down what happened is as time progressed parts of the universe slowed down and became as it were bubble universes in their own right distinguished from the the bigger universe and what we call these universes actually depends how you want to define the universe but I hope the situation is clear to illustrate it here so we've got this larger rapidly expanding universe and these little bubble universes that slow down and we can sort of distinguish in their own right okay so some physicists think that this is the best model the most plausible model of inflation and so to the extent that we have observational reason to believe inflation we've got some reason at least to believe in eternal inflation and it's way outside of my skill set to assess those arguments but some you know very prominent physicists argue for this so we should take it seriously I think but the crucial point is insofar as I've might research this topic there is nothing in the physics that gives us any reason to think these different bubbles would have different laws of nature there's just nothing and so by principles of parsimony we should suppose they have the same laws as as our universe so we're one of these bubbles on this view right but that's not going to explain fine-tuned that's not going to deal with the fine-tuning undermine the fine-tuning argument for design because to deal with the fine-tuning we need these different bubbles to have different laws of nature so that you've got you know so many different universes of different laws that it's inevitable that one of them is gonna have the right laws for life but that's just not what we find as far as I've discovered maybe people can correct me if I'm wrong people that this point bring in string theory so string theory is even more speculative than inflation it's not based on it's not supported by observation but it's supported because the hope is that it brings greater unity to physics so in the standard model we have 12 fundamental particles four fundamental forces string theories try to reduce all that to just 1 vibrating string and you know everything depends on how that string vibrates I mean I'm not unsympathetic to string theory I think it's kind of mathematical metaphysics but I'm a fan of metaphysics though you know that's fine with me ok so what does just what a string theory give you it gives you the possibility that the constants could vary in these different bubble universes so it could be that you know when these bubbles slow down the strings start vibrating differently and weak and it's kind of random so we get different laws could be but again I don't think there's anything in the physics that I've come across that suggests that is the case so I think what happen is really going on here is people get to this stage where you've got to turn inflation and you've got string theory and then you bring in the fine tuning to push it that extra little bit you say well the fine tuning gives us a reason to think probably that strings are vibrating differently in different bubbles but if white is right and I think he is that is just not legitimate because the fine tuning gives you absolutely no evidential support for the fine tuning sorry no evidence of support for the multiverse you need to already have evidential support for a multiverse in order to undermine the fine-tuning argument for design so I mean it could be that future physics that turns up evidence for a multiverse of exactly the right kind but I can see absolutely no reason to think that so it seems to me it's just a wild leap of faith at the moment to suppose that the multiverse theory is somehow going to undermine or remove this fine-tuning argument for design okay so that's all I want to say about the two standard hypotheses so we've got a problem we've got the two standard explanations aren't very good so I'm gonna propose a third which is a form of pen psychism cue zany new-age picture so so pun psychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world so on a standard on a standard view interpretation upon psychism the basic constituents of the physical world perhaps electrons and quarks have unimaginably simple forms of conscious experience and then the the conscious experience of a human or animal brain is somehow derived from the very simple experience of its parts so this is a much-maligned view that in the 20th century was sort of treated as absurd and so far as it was thought of at all but it's recently enjoying something of a renaissance and has become a well-respected or Baird minority position so punt psychism can't strictly speaking be tested just because consciousness is unobservable you can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings and experiences and similarly you can't look inside an electron and see it's simple experience but its proponents such as myself argue that there's a strong case for it on the grounds that it's the best account of the place of consciousness in our scientific picture of the world the consciousness is something we know is real we have to account for it somehow we have to have an account of how it fits into our universe the joy the benefit of pants psychism I use the word joy then benefit opposed like ISM is that it avoids the problems that plagued its more conventional rivals of materialism and dualism which we'll get to in the next slide I just want to mention also I mean I think an important part of perhaps the main reason why philosophers have become somewhat sympathetic to pun psychism again is the rediscovery of certain theses defended by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington in the 1920s which they used to defend a rather novel and promising approach to the mind-body problem so Russell Americans starting point was that physics tells you a lot less than you think about the nature of matter so in in a public mind you know physics is giving us this complete story of the nature of space and time and matter but I think what Russell and Eddington realized in those who sort of building on their insights is that when you upon reflection it turns out that physics is really constrained to telling you about the behavior of matter what it does not what it is so if you think about what physics tells us about an electron physics tells an electron has mass and charge and these properties are characterized in terms of what the electron does mass is characterized in terms of resisting acceleration gravitational attraction charge is characterized in terms of attraction and repulsion these are matters of how the electron behaves physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of the electron how it is in and of itself so the Saudis say there's this big gap in our picture of scientific picture of the world's physical science doesn't tell us what the intrinsic nature of matter so edingtons the edingtons idea building on russell was to say well let's fill that gap with consciousness so the thought is that physical properties these properties that physics characterizes behavioristic alee just are forms of consciousness so physics characterizes them extrinsically in terms of what they do but in themselves they just are forms of consciousness so this is important because when you first think about punt psychism you tend to think about it dualistic lee you know that the electron you know has its physical properties mass spin and charge and it's experiential property sort of sitting alongside but that's not the view here the view is masked spin and charge are forms of consciousness physics describes them as it were from the outside tells us what they do but in themselves their forms of consciousness ok so the thought is this avoids meant that the perennial debate between materialism and dual isms so materialism roughly the view that consciousness can be explained in terms of the chemistry of the brain do you listen roughly the view that consciousness is distinct from the physical properties of the brain materialism faces very serious philosophical difficulties dualism very serious scientific difficulties upon psychism avoids the problem altogether there's lots to be said here I mean about the philosophical challenge to materialism the point I like to press is the difficulty of materialism as of accounting for the qualities of experience subjective experience involves qualities the redness of a red experience the smell of coffee the taste of sugar whereas physic physical science deals with the purely to tative vocabulary and it's hard to see how you can capture qualities than a purely quantitative okay below in my view we've never had any progress on that and on the face of it it looks incoherent do you listen on the other hand has problem accounting for mind-body interaction most dualist don't want to say that although their mind and brain are distinct they want to say they enjoy a close calls a relationship that the light hitting the retina cause of visual experiences conscious decisions of the soul caused actions and there are lots of empirical difficulties I think making sense of this so pun psychism avoids this all together because we avoid forms of dualism because consciousness is not outside of the physical order it's part of the causally closed physical order and we avoid the problems of materialism because we're not trying to account for consciousness in terms of non consciousness ok did we started yeah I'll try and be it leave as much yeah ten minutes should be fine I should get out I haven't actually got onto the main I better speed up a little bit okay I'll try and basically succumb so actually pump psychism comes in two forms so then perhaps the more common form is what I described earlier which is sometimes called micro psychism the V that the most basic micro level constituents of the physical world have a consciousness involving nature and the consciousness of the human or animal brain is derived from the consciousness of its most fundamental parts this view is generally rooted in an assumption of micro reductionism the view that all facts a grounded in facts at the micro level a kind of Lego brick picture of the universe I'm quite persuaded by the arguments of Jonathan Shaffer that micro reductionism really doesn't fit with modern physics particularly the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in quantum entanglement we seem to have holes that are more than the sum of their parts and that looks to be inconsistent with micro reductionism but just because you give up on micro reductionism doesn't mean you give up on reductionism shaffer ultimately depends bends or a view kind of similar to what Schaffer defends is a kind of cosmic reductionist picture according to which all facts are grounded in fact about the universe as a whole and he argues that he's he's not interested in pond psychism at all but he argues that this fits much better with for example quantum entanglement now if you combine this kind of cosmic reductionist top down rather than bottom up view with pond psychism you get Cosmo psychism the view that the universe as a whole is conscious and the consciousness of the human animal brain is derived from the consciousness of the cosmos so this is the view I quick advert another advert this is the view I defend in my recent book but so I argue the universe is conscious but I don't argue my book that the universe is intelligent or a rational agent or anything in fact I suggest that it's consciousness is probably just a mess you know it hasn't undergone millions of years of natural selection which you might think a prerequisite for being kind of a rational agent in substance but I'm now thinking that reflection on the fine-tuning might give us reason to think that the universe is something like a very very unusual kind of rational agent okay so this is the view so the hope is in in we can perhaps explain the fine-tuning inversion in the in virtue of a form of cosmos psychism okay so I think we have to make two modifications to the basic cosmos I Kissed proposal that I defend in my book for example in order to try and explain the fine-tuning the first is that the universe act through responsiveness to value the universe does what it does because it's responding to considerations of value now this is a very peculiar hypothesis it's not how we normally think but I want to suggest it's consistent with ever think we observe like most philosophers I think Hume was right that we don't directly perceive the source of natural necessity or we perceive our regularities the universe behaving in a very regular way we don't perceive the power as it were that drives the universe to behave in the way it does we tend to assume that it's non rational causal capacities but I want to suggest it's equally consistent with observation to suppose that it's the rational responsiveness of the universe that's driving the inanimate world how do the laws of physics fit into this proposal important question I want to suggest in this flow so the laws of physics record the limitations of the universe's capacity to act so this is unlike classical theism this is not an all-powerful agent this is something that acts through responsiveness to to value but in a highly constrained manner it's it's it's it no it's not as it were it's not constrained by something outside of it it just has limited power and the lip its limitations are recorded in the laws of physics physics is sort of capturing the limitations of the universe okay so this is gonna be the idea that the universe through responding to value fine-tuned itself no not very natural question this point is when you know it's it's easy to make sense of easy we couldn't make sense I think of the idea of a supernatural agent fine-tuning the universe if it's sort of independent of and metaphysically prior to the universe then we can suppose it could make the laws however he wanted but if you know if we think of the universe fine-tuning itself if you think the universe always had the fine-tuned laws then it's hard to see when it could have fine-tuned itself because at any past time it already had fine-tuned laws fine-tuning Tremayne is the laws necessary for life but actually it's not at all obvious that the universe did always have fine-tuned laws during the Planck epoch which is the name for the very first period of the universe lasting ten to the minus 43 of a second our current models of physics break down and basically we know very little about what was happening in this period of cosmological history so my proposal is going to be that during this period of time the universe fine-tuned the laws that would govern after the Planck epoch now you might think this is just kind of mystery mongering right I've just picked up on a gap in physics you know part something we know you know period we know nothing about and you know you could say anything but this is not unconstrained speculation you know I'm working here with data the fine-tuning we've got to explain it somehow I think all we can do is lay out the proposals so my proposal is going to be that the laws that operated in the Planck epoch determined the form of laws that would operate subsequently the form that should be sort of italicized the form of the laws that would operate subsequently and so gave it a sort of fixed template but did not determine the numbers contained within them and so the joiners period the universe responding to considerations of value made it the case that the parameters of physics have the values compatible with the universe of great value okay so I think actually you might think a lot of people might think the idea this this hypothesis that the universe is a conscious mind that responds to value is incredibly indulgent and profligate but I want to say actually so far this is a very parsimonious hypothesis at least if Brussels and Eddington a right that physical science tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature matter well I think matter the universe must have some intrinsic nature it doesn't seem to me any less parsimonious to suppose that it has a consciousness involving intrinsic nature than that it has a non consciousness involving intrinsic nature indeed I've argaï argue in my book that following Eddington the only thing we really know about the nature of matter is that some of it ie the stuff in brains has a consciousness involving nature and so from that starting point the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the stuff outside of brains has a nature continuous with the stuff inside of brains living brains and also having a consciousness involving nature so I don't think the postulation of consciousness to the universe is it cost of parsimony moreover we have to suppose that there's something I would argue driving the behavior of the inanimate world it doesn't seem to me I'd want an argument as to why it's less parsimonious to suppose that it's the it's the value responsiveness of the universe rather than that it's non-rational causal capacities so so far I don't think you know I think this is win-win I think it's hopefully explains the fine-tuning and there's no cost of parsimony unfortunately the second modification we have to make does involve a cost to parsimony so it's a problem here if during the Planck epoch the universe fine-tuned the laws in response to valuable consequences billions of years in the future then it must have in some sense been aware of the potential consequences of its actions so my proposal is that we postulate a basic disposition of the universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of the value responses available to it so it has you know some sense awareness of these options and it goes for the one with most value so I I think we have to confess that the complexity of these mental representations is a great cost to the theory in terms of parsimony however two things a all that structural complexity is generated by a simple disposition I think that's important I think you know it's important to have simple axioms to your theory and B I would argue that the view is still more parsimonious than theism in that it's postulating a natural agent rather than a supernatural agent a contingent agent rather than necessarily existent agent and it's more parsimonious than the multiverse hypothesis in him but in postulating no individuals beyond the universe we're already committed to so there's probably going to be a an analogous structural complexity to both the the multiverse theory and theory I'm defending here but in a multiverse theory that structural complexity is realized in a huge possibly infinite number of completely unobservable individuals whereas a theory I'm exploring here all that structural complexity is incorporated within an individual we already believe in namely the physical universe and of course most importantly it avoids I think the two worries that I mean more than parsimony I think the two big problems I discussed with the to two other views earlier okay so finally so this view which we might call a gentle Cosmo psychism I think can account for the fine tuning and in a way that it is that is more parsimonious than and also avoids the problems of the two standard explanations namely theism and the multiverse hypothesis and so as such I think at the very least it's a view although it sounds quite insane it's a few we should take very seriously indeed thanks very much for that really interesting talk and I also I really like the the rhetorical image and the last slide I think I might borrow it and use it on all my future talks so we now have a bit of time for Question and Answer please raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question Mikko I will bring the mic to you thank you very much when you talk about a universe being conscious and driven by values effectively I don't see it that's terribly different from the idea that it it is in fact driven by God no I don't really see the difference between your version of what is natural or other people's version of what is supernaturally very very blurred I think that's a very good point and you know notice I was very careful to talk about classical theism and which is which you know many believers would not necessarily subscribe to classical theism that's really the view I'm attacking my biggest concern with classic affairs and is you know that the three properties of omnipotence omniscience and omnipotence and and the problem of evil does seem to me very powerful so if you want to start talking about God that doesn't have all of those attributes then you know that's a view much more sympathetic to but still even and so you could for example you could just say well we have a God of limited powers and I think that would be much more plausible but still I don't think you get from the fine-tuning any reason to think that this agent is either supernatural or necessarily existent so I mean I'm very keen on metaphysics trying to have you know the the constraint of the Natural Sciences we know we're trying to find the simplest theory consistent with the data and the data I'm talking about here are consciousness and the fine-tuning and I think the simplest account is you have a natural contingent agent here agent in some sense very unusual kind of aid if you want to call that God we could have I've got at the kind of appendix to the paper about whether we should call this God actually but if you want to call that God that's fine and maybe it's a sort of non standard kind of theism but I wouldn't be opposed to that but yeah I was going to ask about free well do you believe we are free agents and how would that affect your agent of universe what do you call it yes how would that affect that because how would it look into the future if we were all free agents yeah very interesting question I think I think the view could be accommodated depending on what your what your what your views on freewill were you know so I I initially said I was the characterizes as sort of reductionist pictures that say I think you can characterize this view in a reductionist or a non reductionist term way and I think if we're just thinking about consciousness the reductionist view is certainly fine that's sort of you I defend in my book I don't talk about free will so to the view would just be then that our conscious minds are just aspects of this cosmic conscious mind and our actions are aspects of its actions that doesn't mean we don't do it I think some that sounds kind of weird how can so we've got a picture you got a picture a mind that's made up of other minds and so I want to say that that doesn't that doesn't stop me doing things my I do things but what I do is an aspect of what the content because the cosmos does okay so it's not but you might you might have views about freewill that strongly libertarian perhaps that it's not obvious to me it seemed compatible even with that but suppose you did think you might think maybe you do think you saw that a certain libertarian views are incompatible with that well then you could have a non reductionist view of this so so where were conscious Minds emerge from the Cosmic Consciousness Urton autonomy and independence of their own that that is that is completely compatible with this and I could I could see how reflections of free will might lead you in that direction yeah again again I just always want to emphasize that I'm I'm always keen on what is the data and then we're looking for the simplest model of the data the data I'm talking about in my book the data is just consciousness here I'm talking I'm bringing in the data fine tuning I'm not talking about free will there might be other data that and I think this is the simplest model that you might think you've got reason to believe in libertarian free will and that might change what is the simplest model and we might have to modify it slightly but I think it wouldn't require too much modification but yeah that would be a whole huge discussion yeah thank you yeah so my question was what you mentioned about the Planck epoch and effectively being parsimonious would well I just want to get your opinion more in the sense of being parsimonious about that is in a sense of looking at something like an unmoved mover going back to mr. taylean concept as opposed to the cosmos psychism which is more effectively neo Buddhist in in the sense of our beginning or end it would have to in a sense look after and contain itself whereas what you're positing would mean that there had to be some kind of start point and then that start point the unmoved mover would come into play yeah very interesting so I think maybe you're worried about you know questions of where did the universe come from and these kind of concerns and again I mean again I want to make it a similar kind of methodological point of the data I'm trying to explain is fine-tuning it's not questions of where the universe came from and I think if I'm just trying to defend this what what I believe to be the simplest account consistent with that and I and the account have defended here we've just got a universe that begins with the Big Bang didn't exist before might not have existed now you might then as a philosopher bring in your other what you think are other data you think no we need an explanation of why the universe exists and we could have an argument no so so suppose you do think there needs to be an explanation of why the universe exists well then you might want to modify this view further but it doesn't seem to me even then you know so that might lead you maybe to Bill to think that the the must be suppose that led you to think there must be a timeless or necessarily existent cause of the Big Bang I said I would still say that the most parsimonious view then would be that the universe wants exhibit can't say like that can the universe let me be a little bit incoherent you know the universe was not always the universe itself is necessarily existent and wasn't always existing in time so the unit so you have that did the universe as it were once existed in a timeless form and then comes to Avatar comes to have a kind of temporal existence so I still think that because that would still be more parsimonious than believing in a unnecessary timeless entity distinct from the universe you know I don't I don't see any reason to to go there so I still think it wouldn't quite get you all the way to classical theism so yeah so I just think you know we've got to look at you know what what what are the different considerations you know some people say oh look just yeah you might want to put them all together and get something close to a more traditional conception of God but I would still certainly want to push it the problem of evil against the very traditional conception of God but even so I think I think I would still resist the need for there to be anything distinct from the universe so I had several questions but I'll limit myself to one which is that it seems like there are as many possible hierarchies of preference that an agent could logically have as there are possible universes well I don't know maybe maybe these are different infinite numbers given that's the case it seems like according to a gential cosmos psychism the hierarchy of preferences of the agent we posit are fine-tuned to our existence just as much as the physical laws on the view without that agent are fine-tuned to our existence if that were the case it would seem like we'd only push the explanation back one stage so do do you have a move to make to it or to avoid this problem yeah it's a very good question there also if I'm understanding correctly it connects pups I don't think this is necessarily a an objection to my view I think this could apply equally to classical theism the direction of these fine-tuning argument say for either my view or classicism you know how do we know the intentions of a designer they could have any intentions you know so it's still kind of oh fortunate they occurred about so I think this whole thing really relies on an honor on a nonhuman account of motivation so roughly speaking there are two different accounts of motivation the one from going back to David Hume says that just at the bottom line is brute desires and as Hume said desires so reason is a slave to the passions right reason is just the slave of the passions to help you get what you want basically we just have wants desires there that's the starting point of motivation there contingent there could be anything if you have that kind of picture then this solution isn't gonna work but then also I think the fine-tuning isn't gonna be a problem anyway maybe this is I think really the whole fine the whole fine-tuning problem to start off with is dependent on a certain conception of objectivity of value and a certain non-human conception of motivation so so I didn't say with a non humane so that's the humane conception that the bottom line is just de bruit desires and they could be anything the non humane conception says no to be a rational agent that's the wrong way around to be a rational agent is to respond to reasons and we have desires to a large extent because we respond to reasons sometimes they might be grand like you know help making the world a better place sometimes it might be just that restaurant would be nice to eat in but we you know we respond to rational considerations not all the time were you know pushed and pulled as well by non rational desires and weakness of will and so forth but we also respond to reasons so if if you have as I do that kind of picture of motivation then we can start to talk about what a what a rational agent is likely to want they're likely to want valuable things it's they're not gonna want sort of lots of blades of grass or something or you know we can start assert it's unlikely the agents gonna want count blades of grass yeah yeah so that was not a good example I don't know that we can we can start up some grip on what an agent is like whereas if you have the humane account where it's just brute desires you know we've got no idea what what this agent is gonna so I think the whole fine-tuning raising the probability of a designer isn't gonna get off the ground there so I mean this is important because you know a lot of scientists like Richard Dawkins what it's worth moved by the fine-tuning and I think they have no idea that the whole need to explain the fine-tuning if if I'm right is is reliant on a very specific commitments about the objectivity of value and a certain account of motivation okay so so so how does this avoid the problem so so I don't think of this agent so you said oh there's an infinite amount of motivations they could have I don't think a motivation like that I think about motivation as responsiveness to value and then we can start to talk about what a rational agent is likely to want and we can start to get a grip on fine-tuning raising the probability of an a general explanation of our laws the your idea of consciousness in the universe throughout its history and is that compatible with a view of that consciousness was a a potentiality in the universe from the beginning and then it emerged so that is that the same yours your theory or own thanks I don't know I think that would be different to my VI I'm talking the view is that the universe and all physical properties are consciousness involving from the very start but I mean to be clear on what I mean by consciousness the word is a bit ambiguous actually sometimes it's used to mean something like self consciousness something would be kind of reluctant perhaps to attribute to some non-human animals while I'm meaning is experience and it seems coherent that that could exist in unimaginably simple forms so the pan psychist tends to think consciousness just in this very simple sense of experience has been all along and then in in evolution perhaps it you know it becomes very complicated sophistical sophisticated forms of agency and so on intelligence but but basic consciousness has been there all along you I think what why think that well the claim is so the two things going on here why be upon psychist the thought is it's it's it's the best account of the place of consciousness in in in in the scientific in our scientific picture of the universe the the two more familiar accounts of materialism and dualism just have such a profound difficulties obvious I haven't gone into that in too much detail today but then the question it but then the further thing I'm going onto is explaining the fine-tuning so so then that the idea is that though from the beginning there was the universe which was a kind of value responding conscious mind from the start sounds crazy but if it's the best explanation of the fine-tuning again we've got the two more standard options but pretty hopeless then I think it's a view we should take seriously we've got to separate from these cultural associations I think it's so hard we're so affected by these cultural associations and we you know repel repelled by the idea it sounds kind of new agey or crazy but i think we've got to be dispassionate and you know we shouldn't follow flights of fancy but we should look at the arguments without prejudice and I think you know this is something this looks like there's a pretty good case for this view it seems to me anyway if I may very quickly jump in on that very point because that's that's that's what I wanted to push back against a little bit I mean I I bulk slightly at the idea of electrons having this unimaginably basic consciousness and this is for the following reason if electrons had this unimaginably basic consciousness it seems to me it'd be as basic as the consciousness of this lectern or of this shoe because normally we seem to think when we refer to something as conscious of at least animal life at least animal life and and and and you said this yourself so I think we would need to account and I didn't think evolution is a good crane here because evolution pertains to life anyways so so it we would still need to explain how we get from this extremely basic consciousness to what we normally understand as consciousness which is the thing that responds to value and has moral Worth and all that so I think I think in a sense the question that you posed when you try to push back against physicalism is still preserved in a way in the pan psychist view because you're still left with a problem of how do you jump from this really basic thing that is nothing like the consciousness that we find as an odd thing in the physicalist picture of the universe appearing maybe I just have to hear more about why you think that would be such a big jump to me that the hard problem of consciousness as it's often called is the problem of experience it's very hard to understand how experience of how experience can arise in a physical system and there are all sorts of I talked about qualities and quantities all sorts of aspects to that but once you've got experience it's not obvious to me whatever features there are that you know that can't be accounted for in terms of evolution by natural selection complicated physical structure so I don't know maybe you think about free will us I don't know we could talk about that it's not obvious to me if you are concerned about free will maybe that could exist in very basic forms you have a similar kind of story not that I'm saying that but depends on you via free will so yeah it's not obvious we'd have to want to hear more about which features you think would be problematic in terms of blocking a kind of account of human consciousness and mental life in terms of more basic forms of experience and physical complexity yeah so first of all thank you I really enjoyed that my question I think is connected to that was has been said so you're concerned with materialism was especially phenomenally conscious and saw the writings of Fred the sweetness of sugar and they're like but I take it that most materialists account of what sometimes laboured access consciousness are fine you might just take your favorite theory of functionalism and then there you go so this being said then I assume maybe I'm wrong in assuming that that pond psychism basically is motivated as a theory of phenomenal consciousness and then I was wondering like how do you actually get the step then to ascribe intentions to the universe which then in way leave this space of phenomenal consciousness and go to access consciousness where we have better theories but we do not depend on pun psychism so like how do you make that step yeah so well I guess you say we've got better Theory we could go with functionalism or just talk back to I mean I guess I would I don't think any of those theories work so in terms if you're talking about counting the phenomenal consciousness always oh maybe I'm missing so I mean look that's a big argument and I've said hardly anything on it to the first half of my book is arguing you know that any you know physicalism cannot account for phenomenal consciousness but you're right but it's that specific target but that's a huge debate you know and obviously that's not an easy case to make and so that's the fundamental motivation for Pan psychism that physicalism can't account for for for phenomenal consciousness experience and so dualism is problematic for empirical reasons so Pan psychism is so that's the whole case there and you know he's quite right but that doesn't get you the universe having motivations as the view I defend in my book that I say the universe is not it's not it doesn't mean any of us is God and it's just nests probably the extra step comes from the fine tuning I think the fine tuning is hard serious empirical data and we're looking for an explanation of it and so if we're already got a conscious mind the universe is a conscious mind then the thought is this extra postulation can account for the fine-tuning and as I say I don't think it's I don't think I actually we could have an argument about this I don't think the supposition that the universe acts the responsiveness to value is any less parsimonious than the view that it acts through rational not sorry through non rational cause of capacities I'd won an argument for that what was their gonna say yes so it's an interesting you made me think no censoring question but what if you weren't a pun psychist if you thought phenomenal consciousness could be completely explained that wasn't a problem and then you were thinking about I don't think now but say you were think about that and then you then but you wanted to explain the fine-tuning what this theory still be plausible I have to think about that but I said probably yeah probably thank you so much that was really interesting so my question also has to do with this slide so you said it's bamsae keys and one of the good things about it is that it fits very well with our scientific view of the world and one of those views is that the causal closure of the physical right so my question is how would you and like do a listen account for mental causation so how does this initial State phenomenal state of the universe calls all the other physical stuff excellent I mean this is exactly the motivation upon psychism that it can it doesn't have the problem if caused the closure the physical it says exactly there what the physical physicalist says because so on this view the important point as I tried on is that it's not that the that physical things have physical properties and these mental properties the view is that physical properties are forms of consciousness so take the brain level there are these states of the brain that the neuroscientist talks about and characterizes extrinsically in terms of their causal role in the brain and the view is in there those those states are forms of consciousness is there aren't two things as it were the neuroscience described scientist describes and from the outside in terms of what they do in their intrinsic nature they are forms of consciousness so there's no cause of closure problem because the the properties a neuroscientist is talking about the phos physical properties are forms of consciousness and the properties this physicist is talking about our forms of consciousness so that's the attraction it avoids all the philosophical problems of dualism and the empirical calls for closure worry worries of of of of dualism and the only problem with it is in my view it feels a bit weird and it sounds new age to us and I just think this is not a serious concern you know it's it solves all these deep difficulties and we should really you know separate they start thinking objectively and separate from these you know unfortunate culture associations but yeah that's precisely the attraction that of cause of closure the scientists Rupert Sheldrake in some of his books I think he argues that these constants could evolved and I wonder whether that could help to explain why we are fine-tuned yeah it's very suggestion oh and when I I mean I wrote a popular article on this recently and a lot of people said well not a lot of piece um people were tweeting me this exact question which had never occurred to me that the constants could have changed now and that would make a profound difference because I mean the biggest problem with this theory is this second modification that the universe has to know what's going to happen in the future so you've got to have these very complex mental representations if the constants could change then you could potentially have a much more attractive theory that is the most worrying part of the theory although I argue it's still better than the other options on that though I just think I'm not a physicist I reporting on here is reading trying to understand the physics as best I can popular level I'm not a physicist so I I just I feel I have to go with the consensus of physicists which is that the constants have not changed since very early on in cosmological history so Sheldrake you know says he has empirical evidence for his non-standard views and I find it very interesting and but I just I don't feel I'm in a position to be able to assess that as someone who's a philosopher rather than empirical scientist so maybe in the future you know Sheldrake will be proved right and you know that the philosophers can start to think difficulty but I feel like I have to work with trust the consensus of empirical scientists so so I am afraid I know there are several more questions in the room and this has been a really energized question-and-answer session however we do promise people we'll finish by about quarter past and we don't want to put people under pressure to stay here there will however be an opportunity to ask Phillip questions personally during the next 15 20 minutes or so when we invite you to have another glass of wine and stick around but before doing that could you please thank once again Phillip Gough for a really interesting time [Music] you

Channel: IanRamseyCentre

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Keywords: philosophy, panpsychism, God, Oxford, Humane Philosophy, metaphysics

Id: I-Uq_5Lj76Q

Length: 76min 30sec (4590 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018