The question has captivated me since I was a boy: How can something come from nothing?
How can the isolated singularity of the Big Bang result in time and space, in consciousness, in everything we have today, in everything we have yet to explore? Was it random, indifferent chance? God? A scientific inevitability? Simulation? Something else?
To me there is nothing more interesting to ponder, so when I heard of a new book pursuing a scientific rather than spiritual approach to uncovering an answer I bopped over to the Kindle Store immediately. The book is Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff.
The following is my personal philosophy followed by a summary of what I found to be the book's most memorable and thought-provoking insights...Let's begin.
Nihilism, the belief that meaning and values don’t exist or are, at best, subjective, is a growing sentiment in the modern age. My proclivity so far has been to agree with meaninglessness at the level of the universe but to believe it arises objectively and empirically with the emergent phenomenon of consciousness [See Emergent Divinity].
In the same way highway traffic doesn’t exist without cars and can be measured as light, normal, or Los Angeles, so do values exist in consciousness and scale empirically from good to bad via definable criterion like human well-being, flourishing, and freedom (see my Brave New World analysis for why freedom must be part of the equation). Meaning is as real as traffic, though just as messy and perplexing.
Maybe you agree with me to this point, maybe not. Regardless, the next question likely to pop into your brain is: “Who cares? I’m living one of 8 billion insignificant lives, trudging through the day-to-day attempting to treat the people around me, especially loved ones, with kindness and respect. One day I’ll die, one day humanity will cease to exist (at their own hands or otherwise), and eventually the universe itself will succumb to heat death. Why does it matter if meaning exists or not? Isn’t living day-by-day, in the here-and-now, enough?”
To this I give a resounding “YES” but desperately implore you to reconsider the Big Bounce as a sexier alternative ending to everything. Living for the now IS enough, so long as you don't bring harm to present or future sentient beings, and I believe there is intrinsic beauty in life, in love, in finding eternity in a moment, and encourage everyone to chart a path towards mindfulness and living as such. BUT, I would also ask you...
“Why not have your cake and eat it too?”
I'm an ardent fan of the Butterfly Effect. Not the Ashton Kutcher thriller about altering the past and royally screwing the present, but rather the philosophical notion of orienting your present to divine the brightest future. Every action has impact, and it’s my belief that acts of kindness have a higher probability of leading to further acts of kindness, and vice/versa for acts of malice.
From this perspective, the future is an ever-growing and inconceivably gigantic sand sculpture built by the grains of individual choices, so why not do what you can to foster well-being in the world and make it a beautiful work of art? Such a viewpoint grants us purpose beyond our time and, in a way, makes us immortal.
Our actions ripple through eternity.
To add icing on the cake that you had and also ate, and here we dive a bit deeper into the speculative, why not wield the belief that humanity can survive indefinitely? We don’t know enough about universal laws or macro-sociology to say with absolute certainty that the end of the universe is inescapable or that we’ll eliminate ourselves before we're anywhere close to there.
I mean, HAVE YOU HEARD OF WORM-HOLING TO OTHER DIMENSIONS, BRO?
Saying nothing matters because it all will end is as naive as the Church telling Galileo there's no way the Earth revolves around the sun then karate-kicking him into a jail cell. I assume that's how it happened. There is so much we’ve yet to understand about this beautiful universe so why not choose hope, be it without assurance, that the good things can get better, permeate, and last a very long time, perhaps forever. A bit sci-fi, I know, and less realistic, but that’s why it’s called hope.
Blessed Be Thy Name, Bill Nye:
Having a guiding principle, a background purpose beyond oneself, is something I’ve had since the Sunday school days and, although I’ve traded out a traditional God for the moral progression of the Universe, I do believe subscription to a higher calling is essential to a life best lived and is something less and less folks possess in each passing generation.
In a way, science is to blame for this. It provided explanations for things that were once supernatural and slowly transmuted spirituality into a pseudo-religion of its own called Materialism, which proclaims the only things that exist are those that can be tested and verified via the scientific method. This brought prosperity to humanity beyond anything we'd seen, but it also came at a cost. It killed God, as Nietzsche famously stated, but failed to replace the void that left in human psychology and is a significant factor in the growing mental health crisis.
Plus, from the dawn of the Enlightenment, a crucial detail was swept under the rug: we're already painfully aware of something that can't be validated by the scientific method. I speak here of the experience undergone in your every sentient moment. That slight, icky feeling encountered as you read the words MOIST and CESSPOOL on this page.
Although we can make sense of a few cerebral outputs on MRI scans, the existence of consciousness and felt experience are completely unaccounted for in our current scientific understanding of the universe and were purposefully left out in the development of modern physics.
This leaves room for a lot of creative hypothesizing. Which turns us, finally, to this book.
The objective existence of meaning is something I've felt in my bones since I was a wee lad, but for many this is not the case. And rightly so. Science has made our lives so much better than our ancestors' so why regress back to a pseudo-spiritual belief system without verifiable backing?
Why not accept things as they are without ascribing meaning?
And what about all the suffering endured in our ascension to modern civilization? Or the unspeakable suffering that still takes place on this planet today, to humans and non-humans alike? How could meaning possibly exist in a world like this? If it does, would we even want it to?
Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff is the best case I've seen for addressing materialists with perfectly reasonable skepticisms like these that meaning can (and most likely does) exist in the universe using scientific principles and statistics to back his argument. The book is dense, so I'll only be covering the ideas that resonated most with me - but if you find this sort of thing intriguing I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of your own!
The Fine-Tuned Universe:
Imagine you are a caveman who comes across a shiny, silver watch. You crack it open to find an assembly of tiny gears turning in precise mechanical intervals for some unknown, mystic purpose. Given its complexity, would you believe the watch had formed there by chance in the same way as the valleys and mountains? Or would you believe some sophisticated being built the watch with knowledge you're yet privy to?
This is the way Goff sees our universe; a construction too immensely precise and complex to have been created by chance. And one that didn't have to be this way.
You see, if the physical constants at the beginning of the universe or at the molecular level were even a hair off from what they are, then none of this would have came to be. No life would be possible, and all of time and space would be empty. Scientists have absolutely zero explicable reason for why those constants landed where they did, and the chance of them being within the threshold that allows for life is roughly 1/10^17 (a.k.a. pretty much impossible).
This leads to the Fine-Tuning Argument: that our universe was set up intentionally for the development of intelligent life. Things are too perfectly arranged for it not to have been.
Your reaction to this (as mine was) is likely one or both of the following:
1. Okay, but what about the Multiverse? Rick and Morty, Marvel, hell even Oscar-winning movies are doing it these days, why wouldn't our universe too? Who's to say we're not luckily in one of the many dimensions where life is a thing?
Or...
2. The only way we're able to ask these sorts of questions is BECAUSE we live in a universe with conscious life, ya dummy. It is what it is, don't throw a cosmic fit.
Goff levels the lofty powers of Occam's Razor, Bayesian Statistics, and the Inverse Gambler's Fallacy to argue that the multiverse, for all its popularity, does not have a solid foothold in logical scientific possibility and, even if it did, would not have anything to do with why THIS particular universe was granted life.
It goes something like this: Living in an unlikely universe with consciousness does not explain how that universe exists, just as a gambler should not base his odds on the luck of other gamblers in the casino. In summary, neither rebuttal to why we're here holds up under scrutiny according to Goff.
So Who's the Jerk Who Made This?
If the odds are in favor of our universe being constructed intentionally, then who dun did it and why did they make it like this? Why so much suffering and evil?
Get ready to go full speculation babyyy.
If we take the religious route, the best argument is that a benevolent, omnipotent God included suffering as a means to challenge conscious beings and make them stronger + more faithful over time. But was THIS much suffering really needed to accomplish that? I mean, there are so many examples of atrocities that are horribly pointless in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps instead this is a simulation created by amoral or unrelatably moral beings, or ones with limited resources for creating their simulations, thus requiring suffering as an unavoidable by-product. But then why create a simulation at all? Are we a reality TV show for them?
Here's my zany theory:
It's a middle ground between these ideas; beyond our universe there are benevolent beings with simulation technology and limited resources for their simulations who are facing some kind of unsolvable existential threat (maybe the end of their own universe) - so they must simulate a universe similar to their own but with steeper adversities (including suffering) in hopes we encounter the same dilemma but are better prepared to divine a solution to save ourselves and them.
^Might turn that into a short story, let me know if it's a dud.
We will likely never know who or why made all this something from nothing, but the point here is that there are explicable reasons for someone to do so.
Dawn of the Dread:
In the latter half of the book, Goff focuses on consciousness specifically - with the underlying claim that consciousness exists within ALL THINGS and is goal-directed towards moral progression.
But first, we need to talk about zombies.
It's a commonly held belief that consciousness is an emergent and inevitable by-product of brain evolution that shall be explained away in detail once science catches up. But, as explained earlier, science as designed today will never catch up because it kicked consciousness from its inner circle at the start like a Steven Glansberg.
But, crazy thing is, consciousness itself does not have to exist.
Imagine someone who looks and talks just like you and me. They say, "Hello" with a smile as you pass by, they laugh at your ingeniously constructed jokes, and cry when they lose someone they love. But, internally, they experience nothing. Absolutely nothing. They are, minus the decomposing skin and feral bloodlust, zombies.
More specifically, Meaning Zombies.
This would have been difficult to wrap our heads around a few decades ago, but in the age of AI and ChatGPT it really isn't. A robot can be coded to act and react exactly like a human, but have zero felt experience of anything - just the cold, semi-conductorial processing of zeroes and ones.
This is all to say that consciousness is something we didn't need in order to exist as we do today, and there would surely be a ton less anxiety in our world if it didn't.
So, why is it here then? Another cruel trick of our simulators, burdening us not only with suffering but with the acute awareness of suffering?
Goff believes, to the contrary, that the universe didn't create consciousness at all. To him, the universe IS consciousness. It is tied into the fabric of universal reality at its deepest level and exists, at varying degrees of potency, within everything.
Welcome to the world of Panpsychism.
Soooo this guy thinks rocks got brains?:
That's the wrong way to think about it. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a preliminary fundamental particle - the quark behind the quark - that exists beyond the universe's physical realm much like the quantum particle.
Then, when conscious structures (a.k.a. brains) begin to develop, consciousness accumulates, exponentially strengthens, and is finally allowed to present itself intelligently to the universe.
So, yes, a rock is conscious. But it is so negligibly and indemonstrably conscious compared to a living organism that it might as well not be. It would be like calling a tree a musician because a stem broke off and smacked your guitar strings.
Okay, so, as you might have guessed...none of this can be proven...and it's pretty flippin' ludicrous...so what's the point of even discussing it?
The point is that Panpsychism is a starting point - it's the most coherent theory we have at the moment for solving the hard problem of consciousness - for tying it together with materialism and modern physics. It opens the door for science to chart a new path on which consciousness hasn't been sidelined; towards a new theory of everything that actually includes everything.
And it offers a potential motive to the Fine-Tuning Argument.
Remember those suspiciously convenient universal constants we discussed earlier? What if they were purposefully selected not only to foster life, but to develop increasingly complex structures of consciousness over time?
That would be pretty neat, wouldn't it? If this whole universe was constructed with the aim of slowly building up consciousness, intelligence, morality, maybe even kindness?
This is called Purposivism and the Goal-Directedness of the Universe.
If all this were true, it would mean not only that you and I are made of stardust, but that our consciousness is a direct line to the soul of the universe - to the heart of everything.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, the ideas in this book are wildly nascent and lots of intellectual aerobics + wonky statistics take place to make them flow. But none of it is impossible, and it's exhilarating to discover a scientific approach towards proving what I've always felt to be true.
Regardless of whether you find Goff's theories within the realm of possibility or complete and utter bollocks, I hope it at least gets you to challenge your predisposed opinions and ask yourself what it would take to believe that your life has objective meaning.
I'll leave you with my favorite quote from the book for final pondering:
"Every generation absorbs a worldview that it can't see beyond. In our own time, we are so used to the idea that science has done away with cosmic purpose that we are incapable of dispassionately considering the overwhelming evidence that has emerged in support of [it]."
Now go save the universe y'all!
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