Panpsychism (Pt. III)

In an article at Aeon philosopher Philip Goff gives several examples of cosmic fine-tuning and asserts that these properties of the universe, and the dozens of others he could have cited, are so extraordinary that they demand an explanation. He offers three possible reasons for this phenomenon: Theism, the multiverse, and his own view, panpsychism, which is the view that the universe is itself a conscious entity and managed to organize itself so that it would have the properties it does.

Goff, rightly, I think, rejects the multiverse explanation and, wrongly, I think, also rejects theism.

I argued Friday that Goff's argument against accepting theism as an explanation for cosmic fine-tuning doesn't succeed because it's based on an unwarranted assumption, namely that a perfectly good and loving Creator would have perforce created a universe without suffering in it. This can only be assumed, however, if we know apriori that there are no good reasons for allowing suffering and this is something we simply do not, nor cannot, know.

His argument against the multiverse - the hypothesis that there are an infinity of different universes of which ours is one - is a criticism that has been in circulation among philosophers for quite a while and is widely employed:

Assuming there is a multiverse, you would expect our Universe to be a fairly typical member of the universe ensemble, or at least a fairly typical member of the universes containing observers (since we couldn’t find ourselves in a universe in which observers are impossible).

However, in The Road to Reality (2004), the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated that in the kind of multiverse most favoured by contemporary physicists – based on inflationary cosmology and string theory – for every observer who observes a smooth, orderly universe as big as ours, there are 10 to the power of 10123 who observe a smooth, orderly universe that is just 10 times smaller. And by far the most common kind of observer would be a ‘Boltzmann’s brain’: a functioning brain that has by sheer fluke emerged from a disordered universe for a brief period of time.

If Penrose is right, then the odds of an observer in the multiverse theory finding itself in a large, ordered universe are astronomically small. And hence the fact that we are ourselves such observers is powerful evidence against the multiverse theory.

Very well. So, what's his alternative? Goff proposes that we accept the hypothesis that the universe is itself a conscious being. His argument is a bit long but these paragraphs capture its essence:

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all things being equal, more parsimonious theories – that is to say, theories with relatively few postulations – are to be preferred. Is it not a great cost in terms of parsimony to ascribe fundamental consciousness to the Universe? Not at all. The physical world must have some nature, and physics leaves us completely in the dark as to what it is. It is no less parsimonious to suppose that the Universe has a consciousness-involving nature than that it has some non-consciousness-involving nature. If anything, the former proposal is more parsimonious insofar as it is continuous with the only thing we really know about the nature of matter: that brains have consciousness.

Having said that....If the Universe, way back in the Planck epoch, fine-tuned the laws to bring about life billions of years in its future, then the Universe must in some sense be aware of the consequences of its actions.....I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist [i.e. one who holds the view that the universe is a conscious mind] postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions.

In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However, this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent. The multiverse theorist postulates an enormous number of distinct, unobservable entities: the many universes. The agentive cosmopsychist merely adds to an entity that we already believe in: the physical Universe. And most importantly, agentive cosmopsychism avoids the false predictions of its two rivals.

I've argued in the past that it's not unreasonable to believe that the universe is fundamentally mental rather than material, so in a sense I agree with Goff, but he's going beyond this to essentially make the pantheistic claim that the universe is itself God, rather than a product of God's mind. For Goff the universe creates itself and is aware of itself. It somehow brings itself into being and then structures itself by fixing the laws of physics, all the while foreseeing the goal of producing intelligent life.

He believes that this view is more parsimonious than theism, but I'm not so sure. He bases his claim in part on the fact that we know that matter, in the form of brains, is conscious, but he seems to assume that it therefore follows that consciousness is a universal property of matter.

Perhaps, but perhaps instead consciousness is a property of a particular level of complexity or configuration of matter or a property of matter plus soul or mind. Dead brains, after all, still possess all of the matter they possessed before they died, but they're not conscious.

In other words, we have no reason to think that it's matter simpliciter which possesses consciousness.

In any case, the Law of Parsimony states that it's not just the simplest explanation that's to be preferred but rather the simplest explanation with the greatest explanatory power, and it's just not clear to me how Goff's theory explains how brute matter could have created both itself and the laws which govern itself, become conscious, be able to pursue goals, and consciously and deliberately organize itself into living beings.

This is a lot to have to accept in order to avoid the conclusion that the God of theism exists and fine-tuned the universe for life, especially if one's only reason for rejecting the theistic hypothesis is Goff's argument from suffering.

Like the argument that the universe is a simulation created by a computer programmer in some other world, the notion that the universe is itself God is an attempt to account for the intelligence needed to adequately explain the astonishing level of precision in the parameters of the cosmos necessary for life to exist without invoking the God of theism.

I sincerely wonder why theism is thought to be so odious that intelligent men will resort to such strange hypotheses in order to avoid it.