Post 15. February 11, 2018
Cosmopsychism vs Enformationism
Nature as a conscious Agent
In his article for the online Aeon Magazine, Is The Universe A Conscious Mind?, philosopher Philip Goff begins with the current consensus of cosmologers, that the universe seems to be fine-tuned to produce living beings. Then he proposes a conscious universal agent1 to explain how that improbable scenario came to pass. But first, he acknowledges that, "Some take the fine-tuning to be simply a basic fact about our Universe: fortunate perhaps, but not something requiring explanation." However, some experts, such as Lee Smolin, have calulated the seemingly impossible odds against the emergence of Life, simply by random chance. Which makes it sound like a miracle.
For those not inclined to attribute agency, or miracles, to the natural world, the usual justification for those high odds is that an infinite number of dice-rolls would inevitably hit on the precise numbers found in the fine-tuning observations. Yet, Smolin goes on to say that eternal randomness is not a rational explanation, it's a throw-away excuse. So apparently, a reasonable answer to the "how" question would have to explain the imposition of order upon a chaotic state. But he stops short of calling that organizing force an agent, since he is opposed to the idea of a super-natural creator.
Goff then notes that "The two standard explanations of the fine-tuning are theism and the multiverse hypothesis." He accepts that both theories can rationalize the calibration of initial conditions for life, but finds that they both make "false predictions". For the Multiverse, the odds are a zillion-to-one against such a fluke of luck. But against Theism, he brings up the old Problem of Evil, saying "the flaws of our Universe count strongly against the existence of God." For similar reasons, I have proposed a Neo-Deist revision of the ancient Theist concept, which asserts the eternal existence of an all-good supernatural creator, who loves his creatures, and intervenes in world events on behalf of his chosen people.
Neo-Deism, by contrast, posits the eternal existence of a preter-natural agent, who possesses the potential for both Good & Evil, and who created an autonomous self-adjusting world. Human characteristics, such a personality and love, are not assumed, since historical evidence indicates otherwise. Bad things happen to good people, and love is a human emotion. Perhaps Agape love could describe a non-physical world-maker. But, for all practical purposes, G*D is indistinguishable from Nature. Only, for philosophical purposes would we even try to imagine what a super-natural person might be like.
Pragmatic Science is clearly better than theoretical Philosophy and mythical Religion for explaining the mundane details of the natural world. But for information about the universe as a whole, scientists put on their philosophical hats, and become Cosmologists. "In fact, for all its virtues, physics tells us precisely nothing about the nature of the physical Universe. . . . The truth is that physics is a tool for prediction." So, science can tell us how the universe works, as a reliable mechanical system. Yet when it tries to fathom the essential nature of reality, it comes up with the weird paradoxes and infinities of the sub-atomic (sub-material) realm of Quantum fields2.
Post 15 continued . . . click Next
1. Universal Agent :
To me this sounds like a definition of God, as the eternal entity that acts upon the temporal universe. But that's not Goff's intention. A less comprehensive actor is the "Conscious Agents" of Donald Hoffman. They are the "primitive constituents of reality", and the fundamental elements of Consciousness.
They also seem to be equivalent to A. N. Whitehead's "occasions of experience" or "actual entities", which are the basic elements of both physical reality and conscious beings. But Whitehead also posits a super-natural "agent".
All of these agent theories are more-or-less compatible with my own notion of EnFormAction as the seamless "power to enform", which like Energy particularizes into the various things of reality, and the concepts of consciousness.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-concious-agents-according-to-Donald-Hoffmans-theory
2. Quantum Fields:
are not physical things, but merely variable mathe-matical values for the probabilities of things-to-be. By that I mean, an unreal virtual particle has a non-zero probability of becoming a real particle. Even a quantum particle is not a physical thing, but merely a mathematical symbol, like “X”, used in place of an actual thing. Hence, on the fundamental level of reality, everything seems to be more like the concept of a thing, a virtual code that stands in place of the real thing.
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