Why? The Purpose of the Universe

by Philip Goff

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a palaeontologist and heretical Catholic priest, who lived in the late nineteenth and early 20th century.6 At a time when the church was anxious about Darwinism, Teilhard was inspired by the idea of evolution. Whereas Darwin saw evolution in biology, Teilhard believed that the whole universe was evolving towards a higher state. Teilhard’s argument was partly inductive. He looked to the past and saw the emergence of phenomena that, in his view, could not be accounted for in terms of what had gone before: life, consciousness, reason, moral awareness. The emergence of these phenomena seemed to Teilhard to point to a trajectory to ever greater states of existence, and he anticipated that this trajectory would continue into the future. Some have even argued that Teilhard predicted the internet, as he believed the next state of cosmic evolution would arise from human beings becoming more and more informationally connected up, leading ultimately to a new form of life and consciousness which he called the ‘noosphere.’

Whilst Teilhard believed that cosmic evolution was in some sense inevitable, our actions could hasten or delay its progress. The emergence of the noosphere depended upon humankind being in a spiritually advanced enough state to move to that new stage of cosmic evolution. By choosing to build a world of peace and justice—rather than to sow hatred and division—and to raise our consciousness through meditation and simple living—rather than to indulge in wealth and excessive consumption—Teilhard believed that we can collectively contribute to the advancement of the universe, the end point of which would involve the physical universe becoming unified with the Divine.

In fact, the 19th-century philosopher Samuel Alexander defended such a view.7 For Alexander, the cosmic evolution of the universe was driven not by a personal God but by a natural tendency of the universe to move towards higher states of being, a drive Alexander called Nisus.

What is important for the possibility of human life having cosmic significance is that the universe has a purpose, that it is directed towards some higher state of being, and that human beings can play a role in advancing the universe towards that higher state of being. Whether cosmic purpose is imposed on the universe externally by a supernatural god, or whether it arises from natural tendencies of the universe itself, is irrelevant.

(the interview with Dancy on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson is well worth a watch on YouTube).

Philosophers distinguish between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ goals. An instrumental goal is one pursued for the sake of some other goal. For example, most people work not for the sake of working, but for the sake of earning money. An intrinsic goal, in contrast, is one pursued for its own sake. Pleasure is a standard example. I seek the pleasure of the ice cream not for the sake of some other goal, but as an end in itself.

To say that an activity is so pointless that nobody would centre their lives around it is to appeal to some external, objective standard of which activities are or are not worth doing. But if subjectivism is true, there is no such external standard. People’s arbitrary whims are the ultimate arbiter of what is worth doing.

It was because of this logical gap between facts and values that Hume decided that morality must come from feelings rather than reason. If what ought to be done were logically entailed by the cold-blooded facts of science, then it would be the job of reason to sniff out these logical implications, and thereby discern the truths of morality. But in the absence of any such logical connections, it seems that reason is powerless to discern moral truths.

spent the next year or so in intense study of the various forms of ‘value naturalism’, the name for the broad family of theories which all hold that although value doesn’t exist at the fundamental level of reality, value somehow emerges, perhaps from our desires, or from certain other observable facts about the natural world.

Value Fundamentalism: There are fundamental facts—as basic as the laws of physics or the axioms of mathematics—about what kinds of things are better and worse, and about how people ought to behave. If you can’t get facts about value from other kinds of facts, then the value facts—if there are any—must be primitive facts in their own right. Perhaps, e.g., it is just a fundamental fact about reality that pleasure is good and pain is bad, or that sentient beings ought to be treated with respect. Value Nihilism: There are no facts about better or worse, or about what ought to be done. In other words, value is an illusion.

When the great economist John Maynard Keynes was challenged on the grounds that he’d changed his mind, he retorted ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

The Firing Squad Analogy: You are to be executed by firing squad. Five expert shooters take aim at short range. They all miss. ‘Wow, that was lucky,’ you think, as they reload. The second time, again, they all miss. This continues, time and time again. You start to think something must be going on, as it’s too much of a coincidence that all five would miss every time at close range. Perhaps you are being subject to some kind of cruel, mock execution, such as Dostoyevsky suffered. But then you remember: anthropic reasoning! If they hadn’t missed every time, you wouldn’t be around to reflect on it. Conclusion: you shouldn’t be surprised at all, and certainly shouldn’t try to explain why they keep missing.23 This seems entirely the wrong conclusion to reach, which, by analogy, has convinced many philosophers that the Anthropic-To-The-Max response to fine-tuning is misguided.

if you accept that consciousness exists, then there is something we know to be real that is not postulated in order to explain the data of public observation and experiment. And if it’s real, then it needs to be accommodated in our overall theory of reality. In other words: The reality of consciousness is a fundamental datum over and above the data of public observation and experiment.

In my last book I defended panpsychism: the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. In this chapter, I will take this to the next stage by defending pan-agentialism, the view that the roots of agency are present at the fundamental level of physical reality.

Human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding. When I look out of the window in front of me—and I invite the reader to do the same—I don’t just experience a meaningless mess of colours and shapes. I experience people, cars, houses. When I look at the screen of my laptop, I don’t experience meaningless squiggles but meaningful words. If I look at my crying child, her sadness is evident on her face. In all of these examples, my understanding of what things are or mean is built into the character of my experience.

When we think about ‘understanding’ in this context, for example when thinking of artificial intelligence, we are more likely to focus on what we might call ‘functional understanding,’ a notion of understanding defined in terms of the behaviour of a system and its parts.

is true that humans enjoy an astonishingly sophisticated form of rationality: the capacities for abstract thought, counterfactual reasoning, and logical deduction. But the first flowerings of reason are found in the most primitive drives. To pursue what you’re attracted to or to avoid what you dislike are rational responses. It is rationally appropriate—all things being equal—to do what you feel like doing, and to avoid what repels you. To this extent, when simple organisms respond to their likes and dislikes, they are exhibiting a basic form of rational responsiveness, whether they recognize it or not.

In fact, science-osophers on this side of the debate tend to hold that we only experience about four things at a time, despite our sense of having a much richer visual experience.

The term ‘Overflow’ has been introduced to refer to the thesis that our conscious experience is richer than what we are able to report on. Science-osophers who accept Overflow deny the Report Principle (as, by definition, overflowing consciousness can’t be reported on) and conversely those who accept the Report Principle deny Overflow.

the global workspace theory. According to this view, information in the brain becomes conscious when it is available not only locally—to one specific system in the brain—but globally—to many different systems in the brain, including perceptual systems, long-term memory, and motor control.20 On this view, to steal a metaphor from Daniel Dennett, information is conscious if it’s ‘famous’ in the brain: if lots of different systems know about it.

In fact, as far as I know, there is only one extant theory of the neural correlates of consciousness that passes this test: the integrated information theory.23 This theory revolves around a certain measurable characteristic of a system, which the theory refers to as ‘integrated information’. We don’t need to worry too much about what integrated information is, but we can roughly think of it as how much the system’s parts work together to constrain its possible past and future states. For example, the retina of the eye has low integrated information, as its state at any given time is compatible with a wide variety of possible states at the next moment, dependent on what light hits it. The brain, in contrast, has very high levels of integrated information, as the range of states it could enter into at the next moment is very narrow. The crucial point for our purposes is that this theory offers us an utterly precise threshold that marks the difference between a system having and lacking consciousness. According to integrated information theory, at the precise moment when there comes to be more integrated information in the system as a whole than there is in its parts, the system becomes conscious. Conversely, at the exact moment when there ceases to be more integrated information in the system as a whole that there is in its parts, the system ceases to be conscious. By avoiding the incoherent idea that some organisms are neither definitely conscious nor definitely non-consci...

Giulio Tononi is the neuroscientist who came up with the integrated information theory of consciousness. Hedda Hassel Mørch is a philosopher who spent a year in Tononi’s lab, developing a panpsychist version of the integrated information theory, according to which at the moment conscious entities combine to form a system in which there is more integrated information in the system as a whole than in any of its parts, those conscious entities fuse together to form a unified conscious system, ceasing to exist as separate conscious minds in the process.

My proposal is that the very same capacity for rational responsiveness possessed by the tiger is also possessed by the particle. But whereas the particle can do very little with that capacity, when that capacity is married to the rich cognitive understanding of the tiger, it flowers into a complex engagement with the world around it. The potential for agency was always latent in the proto-agency of the particles, but it needed to combine with experiential understanding to come to fruition:

On the contrasting view of micro-reductionism, everything that happens in the biological world is ultimately determined by what’s going on at the fundamental level of reality. Although we can truly describe the tiger as ‘chasing the gazelle because it’s hungry and understands that this is a way to get food,’ this is a just a higher level description of processes that can in principle be exhaustively described at the level of particles and fields.

In contrast, according to pan-agentialism, as complex conscious systems with experiential understanding begin to emerge, they bring into being new causal principles over and above the basic laws of physics. Physical entities are no longer just responding to the very basic inclinations imparted to them by the wave function. They are rather responding to their conscious understanding of reality, and their attractions to certain goals within that reality. The result will be systems that behave in ways that depart from the predictions associated with quantum mechanics, which are generated by a principle known as the Born rule.

We’d have to know a lot more about how the functions of the brain are realized before we could be confident that everything that happens in the brain is reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.

Experiential understanding is good for survival only if physical systems are likely to respond to it in a rational way, i.e. by pursuing what they desire in the light of what they believe.

Therefore, an evolutionary explanation of the emergence of experiential understanding depends on there being something about our universe that ensures (or makes it likely) that behaviour and experience are paired up in a rationally appropriate way.

The most common response I’ve had when explaining the mystery of psycho-physical harmony is: ‘natural selection solves it.’ But if you think natural selection is the answer to psycho-physical harmony, you haven’t understood the problem. This is because any evolutionary explanation of the character of our conscious experience already assumes a solution to the problem of psycho-physical harmony, and therefore cannot also solve the problem, on pain of circularity. Natural selection will be motivated to make us feel repulsed by eating excrement only if we are generally going to respond rationally to that conscious aversion (by avoiding eating excrement), but the fact that we tend to respond rationally to our experiences is the very thing we are trying to explain.

On the pan-agentialist view, physical systems respond rationally to the character of their experience; assuming this view, systems that happen to develop a little experiential understanding are likely to survive better, as they will respond rationally to their experiential understanding and thus negotiate the world more successfully.

For compatibilists, what’s important for freedom is not whether your choices are determined, but whether or not your actions flow from your desires.

Why would a loving God allow terrible pain and suffering to occur? Attempts by philosophers and theologians to explain what God’s reasons might be are known as ‘theodicies.’

In response, Swinburne argues that ‘as author of our being [God] would have rights over us that we do not have over our fellow humans.’ To make a case for this, Swinburne argues that a parent has the right to force one of her or his children to suffer ‘for the good of his or his brother’s soul’; given that the parent is responsible for their child’s existence and continued life, they have ‘the right to demand something in return.’5 If a mere human parent has this right to some extent, argues Swinburne, so much greater must God who is the source of all being.

Non-Standard Designers: Intelligent cosmic designers, but without the perfect qualities of the Omni-God. • Teleological Laws: Impersonal laws of nature with goals built into them. • Cosmopsychism: The idea that the universe is a conscious mind with purposes of its own.

But perhaps it’s wrong to think of our creator as a kind of cartoon villain intent on causing mayhem and suffering. Maybe the cosmic designer is a kind of Hannibal Lecter character, who loves beauty but has no empathy, and has created this universe because it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing, despite the great suffering it contains. Paul Draper calls this hypothesis ‘aesthetic deism.’

Nagel’s proposal is that there may also be laws that move from future to past—ensuring that the present is shaped by the need to get closer to certain goals in the future, such as the emergence of life. In other words, there may be laws of nature with goals built into them. We call these ‘teleological’ laws, from the Greek word ‘telos,’ meaning purpose or goal.17

Here’s a prediction: in fifty years, further investigation in the brain will reveal the causal dynamics in the brain associated with consciousness to be strongly emergent, that is to say not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. This rules out the materialist view that everything can be ultimately reduced to fundamental physics. At that point, the choice will be between naturalistic dualism and panpsychism (unless the former is ruled out because the partial reductionist picture described above is confirmed).14 As a result of the greater simplicity and elegance of panpsychism over dualism, panpsychism will, over time, come to seem just obviously correct.

However, many theoretical physicists are inclined to think that the fundamental building blocks of reality are not particles but universe-wide fields, and that particles are simply local vibrations within those fields. If we combine a fields-based picture of the universe with panpsychism, we end up with the view that the fundamental forms of consciousness underlie these universe-wide fields, and that a fundamental mind is the bearer of those fields: the universe itself. This hypothesis has become known as ‘cosmopsychism,’ and I have explored various forms of it in my academic research.

However, I believe that David Hume—the 18th-century Scottish philosopher discussed in Chapter 1—was right that we can’t directly observe what drives the universe to behave as it does; we can observe how the universe behaves but not why.

The Truth-Demon Thought Experiment: The Truth Demon asks for your answer to a certain theoretical question and will send you to hell for eternity if you give the wrong answer.

is more likely that the purpose of the universe is still unfolding, and that new forms of existence will emerge, as unfathomable to us as our existence is to worms.

True ethics is not about helping your kin alone—the exclusive concern of the Mafia boss—or helping your nation alone—the exclusive concern of the fascist. True ethics is a concern to make reality better.

there is no cosmic purpose, then making reality better is mostly a negative project, in the sense that it largely consists in removing bad stuff, such as suffering and injustice. Removing suffering and injustice is incredibly important, and one can live a highly meaningful life as a humanist dedicated to this end. But if cosmic purpose is still unfolding, and if our actions can contribute—even in some small way—to bringing about the next stage of cosmic evolution, then the potential consequences of our actions are so much greater than they would be in the absence of cosmic purpose. We may be able to contribute to bringing about a vastly superior state of existence to the one we currently inhabit.

I don’t want to definitively say that the life of a cosmic purposivist is more meaningful than that of a humanist. I can say that I have found living as a cosmic purposivist to be a deeply meaningful form of life. For me, ‘prayer’ consists in a daily effort to commit to living not only for my own interests, and those of my loved ones, but ultimately for the sake of advancing the good purposes of ultimate reality. This does not mean caring less for family and friends or relinquishing one’s personal life goals. Rather it means seeing these narrow interests as part of a broader project that transcends them.

But a little reflection renders it obvious that we experience reality in a highly culturally conditioned way.

Even if all of this is consistent with panpsychism, surely we should require evidence before accepting the bold claim that mystical experiences put us in direct contact with the ultimate nature of reality? To the contrary, James argued that the demand for evidence to ‘prove’ that mystical experiences correspond to reality when we don’t, and indeed can’t, require proof that our ordinary, sensory experiences correspond to reality, introduces a pernicious double standard.

Could mystical experiences be delusions? Of course they could. But then so could our sensory experiences. In a particular case we can test the reliability of our senses, but we can do so only by using our senses, thus rendering circular any attempt to prove that sensory experience as a whole puts us in touch with objective reality. All knowledge of the reality outside of our minds is rooted in leaps of faith, in decisions to trust what experience tells us about reality, and there’s no good reason to think that faith in one’s mystical experiences is any less rational than faith in one’s sensory experiences.

In secular life, almost all social encounters happen because of what you can get out of the other person. I don’t mean that in a cynical way; there’s nothing wrong with getting together with someone because you enjoy their conversation, or because you share a passion for playing tiddlywinks. But in the church of my youth, you connected with people just because they were your neighbours.

have been a consistent atheist about the Omni-God since I was 14. However, I have always taken seriously the reality of the ‘More’ that is known in mystical experiences.

What about the story of Jesus, including its many miraculous occurrences? While there is much history we can get out of the gospels, Borg argued that, from a religious perspective, we should think of the Christian story not as conveying historical fact, but as expressing what he called the ‘character and passion’ of God.