Philip Goff and the Purpose of the Universe

One of those insides: the Oxford Literary Festival 2024, where Philip Goff had also come for war. As the Goths disrupted the Pax Romana, or as Philip of Macedon marshalled against the Achaemenids, so are his chosen minefields of debate: panpsychism and teleology, two contentious topics.

How contentious? Take Mind and Cosmos released by the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel in 2012. A sort of army of anti-teleological sceptics emerged to contain the Nagelite temerity’s ‘head above the parapet’. The heresy? Claiming that purpose or directedness (teleology) was innate to the inner most structure of the physical world, not a mere addendum.

Or take, in 2006, the philosopher Galen Strawson openly arguing for panpsychism – a ‘mind fundamentally everywhere and in ‘everything’’ position – against the mainstream ‘physicalist’ view. Physicalism was incoherent, said Strawson, because it claimed that consciousness (something able to experience itself, however simply) had emerged from a physical reality that was ‘non-conscious’ and ‘non-experiencing’. There was no ‘like to like’ aspect.

This chasm was so vast – and tortured in speculation and circular reasoning – that the parsimonious answer was to see some form of basic experience or consciousness as innate and fundamental to this underlying physical reality.  From philosophic and scientific quarters there was a befuddled sense that Strawson had crossed some sort of red line.

Yet the panpyschists have not retreated. The ‘Nagelites’ have pressed on. A new set of teleological possibilians now push their wedge into the field. Philip the Goff is the cutting edge of a Māori-like ‘warrior of telos’ intent of outlawing an easy to get away with soft nihilism.

The overriding message:  attentiveness to evidence without bias or intuition to dismiss it. This is compatible with a fair-minded theism or atheism, but Philip has also begun to argue for a middle way between standard atheism and standard theism.

The Scientific Evidence?

Science vs religion debates, though perhaps conceptually mistaken (see the work of historian Peter Harrison), have made two ideas widely known – the anthropic principle and fine tuning. Philip tells us that these provide Goldilocks ‘just the right amount of warmth’ empiric data. Between parts of physical matter four forces are at work – the strong force and the weak force, and gravity and electromagnetism. Evidence for a fifth force – dark energy – grows. All five forces have an exact strength, constrained by Quantum Physics in a measurable way.

These exact strengths form the structure of the physical ‘measurable’ universe. Were each strength only slightly different the physical universe could not exist as we know it.  
 
They also link to its beginning. The strengths of physical laws and the values of the density and acceleration of the mass of the universe at the initial Big Bang, 13.5. billion years ago, had narrow confines for metamorphosing the conditions for life.

Were dark energy, understood to be powering the expansion of the universe, a little stronger than no two particles would have been able to meet, meaning no conglomerations, no planets, no stars, no structural complexity. If too weak, the physical universe would have collapsed back in on itself. Only a very narrow range of strengths allows a measurable Universe to exist and to form as we know it.

The multiverse possibility

Could this be chance? The odds, asserts Philip, are unparsimonious and only elaborate numbers-based explanations are an alternative, with the multiverse as the most popular.  What if every possible universe exists (with different strengths dialed up by chance) and we – by necessity – are in the one Universe out of the many, where the strengths are chanced “just right”.

Goff draws the sword of Bayesian logic – the top draw of the analytic philosopher’s toolkit for working out probability. The logical error being committed by the ‘we are in a chance selected universe generated by a multiverse’ faction, says Phillip, is the “inverse gambler’s fallacy.” Picture walking into a casino and witnessing the dice game Craps being played.

Approaching a table, a series of two double sixes is being rolled. Since this is unlikely it is inferred that the other tables nearby must not be coming up with double sixes in the same way. However, this is a fallacy because the chances of double sixes always remain the same.

Given the choice of innate purpose built into the universe versus many universes forming based on chance (and we are just in the right one that is finely tuned), the odds favour the former, not the latter.

An audience backlash

An older gentleman is intent on cutting Philip to size and his response is powerfully emotive. The Universe is too big, too encompassing. We cannot claim much about it with certainty. Why interpret an ‘extravagance’ like purpose as innate to it. Some of us – glancing at each other – see this as playing the game of “My Intuition says…”.

But for Goff, the art of fencing is a ready skill. There is no touché moment: “Sir, we could play my intuition versus your intuition, but why not go with evaluating the evidence? What specific evaluation of the evidence presented do you have for your position, sir?”

There is a deeper point Goff points to here. Bayesian Logic shows us that it is normal in science to seek for the best inference that fits the evidence. This happens all the time and is not typically seen as a problem. The difficulty in this case arises because a bias that prevents the normal process being applied ‘is being applied’. If we put aside this bias, then the logical inference of fine tuning linking to innate purpose is probable and reasonable.

Problems with Goff’s view

On the terms used only an ideologue would take serious objection, but there may be background problems that are philological, phenomenological or theological. Is the empiric evidence of Goff’s talk perhaps too exclusionary or overemphasised?

Take, for example, the very words in use here – which convey a complex range of meanings in each word and sentence read – this raises the question of where such meaning originates from. Heidegger, for example, would see language as conversant to “what being Is”. Evidence of innate purpose would then be found by focusing on the ontological aspects of words themselves, as was the case in medieval philosophy with its focus on Grammar as one of the means to draw epistemologically closer to the mind of God.

Romantic philosophers have argued a variation of this view. The arts theologian Malcolm Guite, drawing from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, points to how the application of poetic imagination enlivens words and makes their meaning have more clarity. This suggests that innate purpose and meaning can be discovered by realizing that language IS metaphor, and that the meaning in language connects us directly (phoria implies a bridge) to an existing source of meaning – a Meta world, a Logos or a World of Ideas.

The analytic school of philosophy – of which Goff remains a part – may struggle to escape being reductionist here, partially hand waving away these kinds of experiential and phenomenological forms of ontological argument and viewpoint; at least in terms of emphasis.

What about personal reality?

The late Milan Kundera argued in The Art of the Novel that mainstream Philosophy abandoned the centrality of human meaning and became focused on the obscure and abstract as the early modern era began. Such a view would see Cervantes and Don Quixote – or Shakespeare and his plays – as representative of actual philosophy because they deal with the relationships and inner life of human beings and treat it as basic and fundamental to Reality, not peripheral. 

The philosopher John Macmurray, similarly, has systematically and perhaps convincingly defended the innateness of the personal as a starting assumption to true philosophy. On this view, panpsychism and natural teleology, would be asked to explain awareness, thinking and feeling in all the vast storied and narrative sense that humans have. A convincing account of consciousness and apparent purpose as relationship, as self-reflection and as the capacity to create, imagine and feel would be needed. 

This considerable gap between a relatively primitive form of consciousness, or an innate natural purpose found in Physical Reality versus a full-blown human being is a particularly realistic difficulty. The philosopher Raymond Tallis encapsulates the problem as human consciousness being highly elaborate even compared to other forms of consciousness we know of, and that the gap may be insurmountable on any current theory due particularly to a shared sense of the world allowing human consciousness to collaborate in complex ways and generate elaborate forms of meaning ; such that mind at large exists, and is perhaps immeasurably complex. Further, unlike animals, humans have an incredibly rich and storied sense of the past and the future.

The onus is perhaps on Panpsychists and Natural Teleogians to address the existence of the personal in terms that are not so basic that they seem to leave yet another chasm to explain. Escaping from one chasm to yet another chasm – even if less wide – does not quite seem satisfactory.

What about the history of thought?

R.G. Collingwood famously wrote that “all history is the history of thought”. What if we are mistakenly projecting our current experience and perception (our everyday psychology and sense of ‘the world of appearances’), to earlier periods of human perception?

The literary philosopher Owen Barfield has suggested that modern thought exists in a “camera mode of consciousness” that enables it to treat Reality as object ‘out there’ and subject as ‘in here, inside my head’.  Our pre-modern ancestors by contrast – at least according to their own accounts – had a much more unified experience of subject and object.

If there are indeed such stark experiential differences, it may be an open question of which era has got its perception righter. Iain McGilchrist’s view that we are now suffering a crisis of meaning and that one sort of brain attention has triumphed over another; to our detriment, comes to mind.

Such a critique of our perception and its potential inaccuracy would imply that a new unity of all that is experienced and perceived is required, not merely the ‘scientific empiric measurable’; much as phenomenologists began to argue in the 19th Century.

The zeitgeist

And yet, where the battlefield of ideas nominatively lies, Goff has a zeitgeist role that makes it comprehensible – on standard empirical and logical terms – that standard physicalists have no exalted claim to be standing atop the hill of knowledge waiting for all the other views to prove themselves to them.

In a backdoor sort of way this allows the phenomenologists and theologians to start being part of a conversation with analytic philosophers once more. Goff himself has begun reaching to an epiphany of sorts here (post his Oxford lecture), arguing for a Godish form of theism that is mid-way between atheism and theism.

The mainstreaming of his position suggests that what can be brought to philosophical discussion, is that bit more open to surprising directions than the panpsychists and natural teleogians of the early 21st century initially imagined.