Cosmic Purpose: A Discussion with Philip Goff

APA Substack Newsletter: Public Philosophy Digest

This month’s APA Blog Substack Newsletter revisits the recurring theme of ambitious thought, initially explored in a dialogue with Samuel Kimbriel about his essay Thinking is Risky.  We discussed opening the aperture beyond a purely objective perspective to account for the knower. This month’s guest, Philip Goff, makes a bold case for Panpsychism in his new book, Why - The Purpose of the Universe.  Philip maintains that it is time we move on from both God and atheism. He argues for cosmic purpose drawing on contemporary cosmology and cutting-edge philosophical research. 

Later this month, Philip will have an APA Blog post suggesting that the mystery of consciousness demonstrates there may be a limit to what science alone can achieve, highlighting the vitality of philosophy. In this latest Public Philosophy Digest, we explore his Panpsychism in the context of the history and ends of the discipline, exploring the prospects for unraveling the enduring enigma of consciousness.

Philip, thanks for your willingness to let me extend the dialogue on your provocative book, building on prior APA Blog pieces in my Philosophy and Technology series.  I have tried to construe technology broadly, understanding its import for the discipline. Your argument that “things happen for the sake of some future goal” resonates, as I authored pieces framing technology in evolutionary terms - as literally part of nature.  I contended that its creation reflects our essence in the sense of Nietzsche's fatalism.  Reflecting on cosmic purpose, I believe we should consider the production of technology (such as quantum artificial intelligence) as our aesthetic fate.  

To start by framing your thesis, please summarize your alternative to the dichotomy of conventional religion and secular atheism - explaining how you are collapsing traditional dualism.

So many people in the West think they have to fit into one of the two ‘teams’ of belief in God or belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe. I’ve come to think that both of these worldviews have things they can’t explain about reality. The God Hypothesis struggles to explain the suffering we find in the world. The Purposeless Universe Hypothesis struggles to explain, for example, the fine-tuning tuning of physics for life, the surprising discovery of recent decades that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to be, like Goldilocks porridge, ‘just right.’ Many physicists and philosophers hope to explain this in terms of a multiverse: if you’ve got enough universes with enough variety in their physics, then one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life. However, I argue that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse commit the ‘inverse gambler’s fallacy,’ and that this fallacy infects the way both physicists’ and philosophers’ reason about the multiverse.

Taking both suffering and fine-tuning into account, I think the evidence points to some kind of teleology, or goal-directedness, at the fundamental level, but in the absence of the traditional God. We could make sense of this with fundamental teleological laws, i.e., laws with purposes built into them, and there is a well-developed account of what such laws would look like. Or if you’re sympathetic to panpsychism, which I think is independently the best solution to the mind-body problem, then you could ground teleology in the goals of a conscious universe.

Delving deeper into your case and discussing the key feature of rationality, first, you note how “particles have a kind of proto-agency of their own. Particles are never compelled to do anything, but are rather disposed, from their own nature, to respond rationally to their experience”. Further, you critically add that there is a psycho-physical harmony with pan-agentialism - where organisms respond rationally to their conscious perceptions. Can you discuss why this is so important?

The other thing I think the Purposeless Universe Hypothesis struggles to explain is the mystery of psycho-physical harmony. This is something about five philosophers are talking about at the moment, but I think it’s going to change to the world. The problem is that there’s an aspect of rationality that evolution can’t explain, namely that organisms respond rationally to their conscious experiences. The most obvious examples of this involve pleasure and pain. We tend to avoid things that hurt us and pursue things that bring us pleasure, and this is a rational way of responding to these experiences. It would be profoundly irrational if we did it the other way around, always avoiding things that feel good and pursuing things that make us suffer. This is just the most obvious example of the quite general fact that people tend to respond in a more or less rational way to their conscious perceptions of the world. Indeed, this foundational aspect of rationality is possessed by all conscious organisms.

The reason that evolution can't explain this aspect of rationality is that any evolutionary explanation presupposes it: natural selection is only going to be motivated to make me feel pain when my body's damaged if I'm going to respond rationally to that pain and avoid getting my body damaged. In a weird possible world in which everybody pursued pain and avoided pleasure, we'd have evolved to feel pain when we eat and pleasure when our bodies are damaged. And therefore, we can only explain why we have evolved the conscious experiences we have if we presuppose that organisms in our universe respond rationally to their experiences. But this itself needs explaining! It's a bit like how natural selection can't explain the origins of self-replicating organisms, because natural selection requires self-replicating organisms to get going.

George Orwell said that 'to see what's in front of one's nose is a constant struggle.' It doesn't feel like it needs explaining why, e.g., we avoid pain, because the fact that we avoid pain is such an obvious, mundane, seemingly trivial aspect of life. But we need to reflect carefully on why it feels trivial that people avoid pain. I think it's because when you're in terrible pain avoiding it is so obviously the rational thing to do. But it does need explaining why physical entities in a meaningless, purposeless universe are likely to respond rationally!

Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett have explained psycho-physical harmony in terms of God’s design of the world. I think it’s simpler to suppose that all matter has a basic inherent rationality, and this is the view I call ‘pan-agentialism.’ It’s this primitive rationality that nature exploits to create the creatures walking and swimming around the world today.

To the extent I find your case persuasive, I would like to characterize my qualm as a classification question - where the summary of your book suggests a kind of middle ground alternative between atheism and God. Dare I say you are not taking credit for describing God’s agency!  Specifically, I struggle with your contention that we can leave the design framework completely behind and still have cosmic purpose: “If matter, in its fundamental nature, is directed towards reason, then matter has a goal-directed purpose or nature regardless of whether or not it was designed”. 

To paraphrase a Twitter/X commonsense question from Nigel Warburton, why should we be persuaded by this effective intelligent design argument?  At least superficially, it appears that pan-agentialism (“the roots of agency are present at the fundamental level of physical reality”) resembles intelligent design. However, my contention is that you have advanced the design argument to the point of no return. How is it that only particles know the cosmic purpose?  Which is to ask, have you crossed the Rubicon by considering “limited designers", effectively parsing the divine attributes of an unknown God?  To cite your valuable initial framework, there’s no middle ground between the binary choice between nihilism and meaning.

The shrinking of the spectrum, so to speak, could be reinforced if we also consider that nature itself might be “amoral” and these distinctions are unduly reliant on the problem of evil.  To cite two of the greatest naturalists in the discipline, Nietzsche and Spinoza, if life as such is “will-to-power” or Conatus, and perfection is less of a virtue, the argument from evil against God is weakened and we are not forced to choose between an all-loving God and nihilism.

In sum, then, is it fair to say you have more ruled out atheism?  Can you put the genie (designer) back in the bottle after positing pan-agentialism?

My theist friends say the book is a non-standard take on God, and my atheist friends say it’s a non-standard form of atheism. So probably ‘middle-ground’ is the right label! I was thinking recently about which is stronger: the fine-tuning argument for God or the argument from evil against God. If both are successful, I think you’d have to say the former wins, as the probabilities at play are so huge. On the other hand, the evidence of fine-tuning we currently have may disappear as physics advances, whereas the evidence of suffering is here to stay. So, I’d say they’re about evenly balanced. Fortunately, you don’t have to choose!

The universe, in my view, is a strange cocktail of accident and design. Some things, like fine-tuning and psycho-physical harmony, are too improbably good to be accident. But there is also much that is pointless and gratuitous. I don’t find it at all plausible that a loving God who could do anything would choose to bring us into existence through such a brutal process as natural selection. So, I think we need a theory to explain both, and that’s really the project of the book.

I do consider a range of hypotheses, and I’m open to the possibility of a designer with limited abilities who’s made the best universe she can. I’ve discovered more recently that there are forms of Christianity that take God’s powers to be limited, such as process theology. But why believe in a supernatural designer, if you can ascribe goal-directed consciousness to the universe itself? If that’s Spinoza’s God, then I’ll take it.

I applaud your judicious approach, but it still feels like the horse is out of the barn with fundamental cosmic purpose overriding pointless accidents. The “middle” ground is turning on the ideal of a purely loving god. If the case leads to the legitimacy of limited designers - or “lesser” creators, such as one reflecting a striving world where utility is paramount - are we not stuck on the theistic side of the spectrum? Essentially, I cannot help but see the vitality of your case in ruling out a nihilistic, accidental world.

In closing, these speculations highlight our incomplete understanding and leads me back to your APA Blog piece and a final question about the reach of the discipline and unraveling the mystery of consciousness.

You noted the importance of philosophy given the limitations of empirical descriptions, which I explored with physicist Tim Andersen in a provocative APA Blog Newsletter on physics and religious faith.  At the same time you stress the limits of the discipline:  “it could be that on certain philosophical issues, there are multiple, coherent and equally simple rival theories, in which case we should be agnostic about which is correct.  This would in itself be a significant philosophical finding concerning the limits of human knowledge.”

To the extent you discuss potential breakthroughs in your book, and note that when we try to avoid philosophy, we tend to end up with bad philosophy, please expand on the prospects for solving the mystery of consciousness. How optimistic are you and will progress necessarily be made in conjunction with science?

My own personal view is that a lot of progress is blocked by the scientism of the present moment. We’re going through a period of history in which people are – understandably – blown away by the great success of natural science, and the awesome (in the British English sense of that word) technology it’s produced. As a result, people feel inclined to say, ‘We’ve found the thing that works! Don’t trust anything that’s not science!’. And so, where there’s a philosophical theory that seems to be going beyond what science tells us about reality, there’s a deep opposition to it that’s largely rooted in this scientistic sentiment rather than in the strength of the arguments. The trouble is we tried getting rid of metaphysics with logical positivism in the 1930s and discovered that it’s just not an option (unfortunately, there are many who didn’t get the memo…).

Take the example of physicalism about consciousness. People think that’s the “sciency” option, which I think largely explains it still being the dominant view – 52% pro-physicalist, 32% anti-physicalism in recent survey. But all of the philosophical options on consciousness go beyond the scientific data, and in that, physicalism is no more “sciency” than panpsychism or dualism. We need to get to the position where we take seriously both the scientific task of working out which physical activity is correlated with consciousness, and the philosophical task of working out why physical activity and consciousness are connected in the first place. We’re not even at first base.

Philosophy has to play a part in finding out about reality. If we get to a point where we as a society accept that, and we focus on just trying to assess the quality of the philosophical case for each view, without the pressure to go for the view that at a superficial level feels most “sciency,” then I genuinely think we’ll get closer to consensus. I’m optimistic!

Philip, your enthusiasm is a tonic.  A recurring theme in this series is intellectual ambition with the synthesis of philosophy and science and I welcome your effort to tease out the disciplinary interdependence that will drive advancement.  I greatly appreciate the opportunity to join the fray and explore your provocative case.  I will be following your engaging public philosophy and hope we can use this venue again to share your insights!

What am I reading, listening to, watching:

Quantum Wittgenstein

Wisdom of Crowds

From the APA Archive:                               

The Multiverse and Anthropic Principles are Not Enough

Wittgenstein and the Limits of Intuition and Objectivity