Tag: Cosmopsychism

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part II)

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Is the cosmos conscious, or is it all just in our heads?In the previous column, I took Philip Goff’s latest offering Why? The Purpose of the Universe as a jumping-off point to present some of my own rumination on life, the universe, and what it all means. While that prior installment was mainly concerned with looking outward, into the wider cosmos, here, I’ll turn my gaze inward, to riff on Goff’s case that the reality of conscious experience implies a larger purpose to, well, everything.

Goff’s ultimate conclusion should be attractive to many: rather than being thrown by mere random chance into the cold and uncaring void of the universe, to live out a brief, confused existence and then wink out into the nothingness whence we came, the existence of complex life in the world is due to a larger purpose, an overall arc that bends into the direction of greater objective value. Moreover, rather than going the traditional route and appealing to some omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent creator God that sees to it that everything unfolds according to His divine (and commonly, unfathomable) design, he proposes a way to reap those benefits without all the boring Sunday prayer sessions!

Thus, he breaks largely untrodden ground: proposing a middle way between a scientific, materialist, but ultimately uncaring cosmos, and a world unfolding according to a divine, but irreducibly mysterious, purpose. Just as evolution can give us design without a designer, he proposes meaning without a meaner. If this were a religion, I could well see myself signing up for it—but since it’s not, I don’t even have to do that! However, as also hinted at in the last column, the more alluring the conclusion, the more we have to critically examine the arguments leading up to it. Read more »

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part I)

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Is there mind and purpose even at the base level of reality? Philip Goff thinks for anything to matter, there has to be.

I’m inherently suspicious of overt declarations of having arrived at a certain position only through the strength of the arguments in its favor, even against one’s own prior commitments. If that were typically how things happen, then either there ought to be much more agreement than there is, or the vast majority of people are just irredeemably irrational.

There are several junctures in Philip Goff’s most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, at which we are treated to a description of the author’s intellectual journey, detailing how the force of argument necessitated course corrections. Now, changing your mind in the face of new information is generally a good thing: nobody gets it right on the first try, so everybody who’s held fast to their views probably just hasn’t examined them deeply. But still, very few people arrive at their position solely thanks to rational forces.

Luckily, most of the arguments in Goff’s book really are good ones. And what’s more, they’re presented in a way that’s accessible, without overly sacrificing detail, which he achieves by presenting them in a first pass, and then including a ‘Digging Deeper’-section devoted to clarifying various points and defending against some possible objections. That way, you can first get the gist, and perhaps return later to engage with the subject more deeply. Would that more philosophers, when writing for a non-specialist audience, showed that much consideration towards their audience!

Goff’s main contention is that the best available evidence, filtered through the understanding bestowed to us by our best current theories, does not paint a picture of a meaningless cosmos, as is usually claimed. (In the words of physicist Steven Weinberg, in his account of the creation of the universe, The First Three Minutes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”) That may have been true in the days of the mechanical cosmos of Laplace, but, Goff holds, is no longer the case.

He marshals two main arguments in support of his conclusion. Read more »