The big
revelation of Stargate Universe came
in Season 2, its final televised season:
The team's mission adapts in season 2, when
the Ancients' mission for Destiny is discovered in "The Greater Good". Dr. Rush cracks the ship's master
code, gaining control of the ship's systems and discovering that the Ancients
found an artificial pattern to the cosmic microwave background radiation said to be a remnant of
the Big Bang. This discovery suggested
the possibility of life before or immediately after the Big Bang, and Destiny
was launched millions of years ago to study and gather data regarding this
possibility. While Destiny has not solved this riddle after millions of
years of research, the series ends with the team continuing its fight for
survival while also dedicating itself to researching this possibility of an
originating intelligence.
--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Universe
This isn’t
just a plot thread to intrigue the viewer; it is an idea being pushed hard by
some of the Elite to revive pantheism under a different, more scientific, guise
(as we saw in last Tuesday’s post about the movie In the Earth). Prof of Philosophy Peter Goff takes us deeper
into the realm of scientific pantheism by explaining his beliefs about
‘agentive cosmopsychism’ (i.e., the universe has consciousness and bestows it on
us):
. .
.
We have no direct access to the nature of
matter outside of brains. But the most reasonable speculation, according to
Eddington, is that the nature of matter outside of brains is continuous with
the nature of matter inside of brains. Given that we have no direct insight
into the nature of atoms, it is rather ‘silly’, argued Eddington, to declare
that atoms have a nature entirely removed from mentality, and then to wonder
where mentality comes from. In my book Consciousness
and Fundamental Reality (2017), I developed these considerations
into an extensive argument for panpsychism: the view that all
matter has a consciousness-involving nature.
There are two
ways of developing the basic panpsychist position. One is micropsychism, the view that
the smallest parts of the physical world have consciousness. Micropsychism is
not to be equated with the absurd view that quarks have emotions or that
electrons feel existential angst. In human beings, consciousness is a sophisticated
thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences.
But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist
in some extremely basic forms. . . . For the micropsychist, this fading-while-never-turning-off
continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical
entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary
forms of consciousness, to reflect their extremely simple nature.
However, a number
of scientists and philosophers of science have recently argued that this kind
of ‘bottom-up’ picture of the Universe is outdated, and that contemporary
physics suggests that in fact we live in a ‘top-down’ – or ‘holist’ – Universe,
in which complex wholes are more fundamental than their parts. According to
holism, the table in front of you does not derive its existence from the
sub-atomic particles that compose it; rather, those sub-atomic particles derive
their existence from the table. Ultimately, everything that exists derives its
existence from the ultimate complex system: the Universe as a whole.
Holism has a
somewhat mystical association, in its commitment to a single unified whole
being the ultimate reality. But there are strong scientific arguments in its favour.
The American philosopher Jonathan Schaffer argues that the phenomenon of quantum
entanglement is good evidence for holism. Entangled particles behave as a
whole, even if they are separated by such large distances that it is impossible
for any kind of signal to travel between them. According to Schaffer, we can
make sense of this only if, in general, we are in a Universe in which complex
systems are more fundamental than their parts.
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. This is the view I ultimately
defend in Consciousness and
Fundamental Reality.
The cosmopsychist
need not think of the conscious Universe as having human-like mental features,
such as thought and rationality. Indeed, 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.
The Canadian philosopher John Leslie
proposed an intriguing explanation of the fine-tuning, which in Universes (1989) he called
‘axiarchism’. What strikes us as so incredible about the fine-tuning is that,
of all the values the constants in our laws had, they ended up having exactly
those values required for something of great value: life, and ultimately
intelligent life. If the laws had not, against huge odds, been fine-tuned, the
Universe would have had infinitely less value; some say it would have had no value
at all. Leslie proposes that this proper understanding of the problem points us
in the direction of the best solution: the laws are fine-tuned because their
being so leads to something of great value. Leslie is not imagining a deity
mediating between the facts of value and the cosmological facts; the facts of
value, as it were, reach out and fix the values directly.
It can hardly be
denied that axiarchism is a parsimonious 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.
But the
cosmopsychist has a way of rendering axiarchism intelligible, by proposing that
the mental capacities of the Universe mediate between value facts and
cosmological facts. On this view, which we can call ‘agentive cosmopsychism’,
the Universe itself fine-tuned the laws in response to considerations of value.
When was this done? In the first 10-43 seconds, known as the Planck
epoch, our current physical theories, in which the fine-tuned laws are embedded,
break down. The cosmopsychist can propose that during this early stage of
cosmological history, the Universe itself ‘chose’ the fine-tuned values in
order to make possible a universe of value.
Making sense of
this requires two modifications to basic cosmopsychism. Firstly, we need to
suppose that the Universe acts through a basic capacity to recognise and
respond to considerations of value. This is very different from how we normally
think about things, but it is consistent with everything we observe. The
Scottish philosopher David Hume long ago noted that all we can really observe
is how things behave – the underlying forces that give rise to those behaviours
are invisible to us. We standardly assume that the Universe is powered by a
number of non-rational causal capacities, but it is also possible that it is
powered by the capacity of the Universe to respond to considerations of value.
. .
.
How are we to think about the laws of
physics on this view? I suggest that we think of them as constraints on the
agency of the Universe. Unlike the God of theism, this is an agent of limited
power, which explains the manifest imperfections of the Universe. The Universe
acts to maximise value, but is able to do so only within the constraints of the
laws of physics. The beneficence of the Universe does not much reveal itself
these days; the agentive cosmopsychist might explain this by holding that the
Universe is now more constrained than it was in the unique circumstances of the
first split second after the Big Bang, when currently known laws of physics did
not apply.
Ockham’s razor is the principle that,
all things being equal, more parsimonious theories – that is to say, theories
with relatively few postulations – are to be preferred. Is it not a great cost
in terms of parsimony to ascribe fundamental consciousness to the Universe? Not
at all. The physical world must have some nature, and physics leaves us
completely in the dark as to what it is. It is no less parsimonious to suppose
that the Universe has a consciousness-involving nature than that it has some
non-consciousness-involving nature. If anything, the former proposal is more
parsimonious insofar as it is continuous with the only thing we really know
about the nature of matter: that brains have consciousness.
Having said that, the second and final
modification we must make to cosmopsychism in order to explain the fine-tuning
does come at some cost. If the Universe, way back in the Planck epoch,
fine-tuned the laws to bring about life billions of years in its future, then
the Universe must in some sense be aware of the consequences of its actions.
This is the second modification: I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist
postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete
potential consequences of each of its possible actions. In a sense, this is a
simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in
these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However,
this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist
or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while
the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent. The multiverse theorist
postulates an enormous number of distinct, unobservable entities: the many
universes. The agentive cosmopsychist merely adds to an entity that we already
believe in: the physical Universe. And most importantly, agentive cosmopsychism
avoids the false predictions of its two rivals.
The idea that the Universe is a
conscious mind that responds to value strikes us a ludicrously extravagant
cartoon. But we must judge the view not on its cultural associations but on its
explanatory power. Agentive cosmopsychism explains the fine-tuning without
making false predictions; and it does so with a simplicity and elegance
unmatched by its rivals. It is a view we should take seriously.
--https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life
The Roman
Catholic ‘mystic’ Fr Teilhard de Chardin is also an important figure in promoting
these sorts of beliefs and, God willing, we will write a little about him soon.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
No comments:
Post a Comment