Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Universal Values
Mathematical
or
Moral?

Post 15.  02/11/2018 continued . . .

Cosmopsychism vs Enformationism

   Sentient Universe; Cosmic Purpose?

The author goes on to distinguish his new version from Micro-psychism, which is an outdated worldview, that has been accepted by some New Age believers as evidence that the world itself is intimately linked to your mind. Hence, you should be able to influence the atoms in a ten-ton boulder, via the power of mind over matter (telekinesis), to move at your command. But the power of Faith has been repeated shown to work only on suggestible human minds, and to fall on the deaf ears of rocks. After a caveat of his own, he summarizes his novel concept, «If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism: the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself.»

Thus, Cosmopsychism  comes close to the conclusion of the Enformationism theory, that the universe as a whole works like a Mind to generate our reality out of immaterial distinctions such as 1s & 0s, or light & dark, and to-be-or-no-to-be.  But it stops short of the further inference that our physical universe is itself a creation of some pre-existing super-natural agent. Moreover, he disparages the wisdom of whatever universal technician set-up the initial conditions for Life & Mind to emerge from evolution : «In my book I suggested that we think of the cosmic consciousness as a kind of ‘mess’ devoid of intellect or reason. However, it now seems to me that reflection on the fine-tuning might give us grounds for thinking that the mental life of the Universe is just a little closer than I had previously thought to the mental life of a human being.» In other words, not fine-tuned enough to be god-like.

Admittedly, our home world is rather “messy” in some ways, but I prefer to think of it more positively as “order out of chaos”. The chaotic part of reality is what scientists know as Randomness. The orderly part is known by religious people as Design. Put them together, and you get a world with enough order to produce living creatures, and to be understandable to their minds. So, our orderly universe has pockets of sentience, but how could we know if it is a self-aware3 organism? Be that as it may, the creative agency that put the Big in the Bang, must at least have the potential4 for "mental life". Otherwise, that mysterious feature of reality could never have emerged. Until the universe reveals its self-awareness to us though, we are free to imagine the Cosmos as a dumb machine, or as the Ghost in the Machine, or even as an Intelligent Design.

Goff then introduces another theory to explain fine-tuning in terms of “values” embedded as constants in the laws of physics. «It can hardly be denied that axiarchism is a parsi-monious explanation of fine-tuning, as it posits no entities whatsoever other than the observable Universe. But it is not clear that it is intelligible. Values don’t seem to be the right kind of things to have a causal influence on the workings of the world, at least not independently of the motives of rational agents. It is rather like suggesting that the abstract number 9 caused a hurricane.» That’s exactly why the imposition of values in the Initial Conditions of the Big Bang seems to imply that the causative agent had some goal in mind. Because the freedom of randomness was constrained by the limitations of physical laws. The result was a slow, but steady evolution of unformed potential toward the beautiful forms we see today.

Post 15 continued . . . clcik Next

3. Self-aware :
We know our own awareness intimately, but we can only infer the consciousness of others from their self-serving behavior. Does the universe act like a conscious entity?

4. Potential :
Power to become; Possessing latent qualities that could be expressed under certain conditions. Statistical probability that a possible future state could become an actual property or thing.  

Axiarchism :
a metaphysical position that everything that exists , including the universe itself, exists for a good purpose.