Cosmic Purpositivism and Exponential Nonsense (Column 690)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

Dedicated to my daughter Rivka, may she live long and well, with wishes for success in her exams.

A few days ago someone sent me a question asking what I think about “cosmic purpositivism.” I had no idea what this was about, so I searched the web. What I found was an article in Haaretz by Gideon Lev, who interviews Philip Goff—apparently the founder of that obscure and enigmatic doctrine—and lays out its main points. The article bears the succinct title: “The probability that life-friendly conditions would randomly arise is negligible. Did the universe itself design it?” I must say that even after reading the article I still didn’t really know what it was about, and I allow myself to suspect that neither the writer nor the interviewee really do either. But I figured that’s reason enough to devote a column to formulating the proper attitude toward such pseudo-intellectual brain-numbing, which characterizes quite a bit of contemporary “thought.” Bored people invent concepts and juggle them as if there were an actual claim here (when there isn’t), and in this intellectual hocus-pocus a new, original philosophy is conjured up ex nihilo (in fact, nothing out of nothing). I have a similar feeling about discussions of pantheism and panentheism and everything adjacent to these empty word-games, which keep various bored philosophy scholars busy and cause massive destruction of Brazilian forests for nothing (see on this in column 587).

Because the article is long, I’m attaching it as a file rather than copying it here. Over the course of this column I’ll bring only the excerpts I address. I assume that at first glance quite a few readers will regard the idea described there as original, innovative, and interesting (I’ve often been asked here on the site about “panpsychism,” a pastime adjacent to our topic. See for example here). Precisely for that reason it’s worth reading the article before this column, since the lesson from the analysis presented here is important and general.

The opening dichotomy

The founder of this view is Philip Goff of Durham University, in his book Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Lev opens with a dichotomy between ancient religious thinking, according to which the entire universe and everything in it has a purpose (presumably implanted by its Creator), and the scientific view that shoved it roughly aside and holds that nothing has any purpose. Science sees the world as a collection of causal chains of events where each event entails the next. Causality replaced teleology (see about this fictional myth in The First Being at the end of the third conversation. There are also several threads in the Q&A on the subject, though to my surprise I discovered I apparently haven’t yet devoted a column to it).

Goff and Lev identify this dispute with religious belief, and so Goff describes how, although he grew up in a religious home that espoused the first view, he eventually found himself joining Richard Dawkins, a high priest of the second camp. But with time, says Goff, evidence accumulated that led him to think that neither of the two views really delivers the goods in full. In my words: he felt there was something beyond scientific causality (at this point in the article we have yet to encounter that evidence), but it’s still clear to him there’s no God (I don’t understand why).

Because of this predicament, Goff developed a third approach, which he says fits all existing evidence, and he calls it “cosmic purpositivism.” According to this view, what lies at the most fundamental level of reality is neither matter nor divinity, but consciousness and goal-directedness—of the universe as a whole. He immediately apologizes for the mysticism in his words, but compares it to the scientific revolution that was also initially resisted at the dawn of the modern era. So before us stands the new high priest of the world, the herald of the post-scientific revolution (this is the “Jewish orthopedic surgeon,” who is neither an orthopedist nor a Jew. See column 688).

If you’re asking yourselves what those many new facts are that he’s talking about, the answer comes immediately: fine tuning.

Fine tuning

I’ll describe the matter in his words:

The evidence Goff speaks of concerns many of the physical constants. The equations that describe the laws of nature include numerous basic numbers, called “constants.” These numbers describe, for example, the masses of elementary particles or the strength of the forces acting among them. Computer simulations run by researchers to check what would happen if the values were different discovered that even minute changes in some of the values would result in a universe that would not permit life.

Later in the article he gives more precise details about the tuning:

Physicist Dr. Luke Barnes of Western Sydney University in Australia, one of the world’s leading researchers in precise fine tuning, told Haaretz Magazine: “As physicists, when we try to understand the universe, we write equations. They’re like a box into which assumptions go and predictions come out. If those predictions are confirmed by experiment, then perhaps our assumptions were right, or close to right.” In many cases, Barnes continued, what you put into the equations as “assumptions” are simply numbers, such as “the mass of the electron” or “the strength of the electromagnetic force” or “the amount of dark energy in the universe.” “We can measure these ‘fundamental constants,’” Barnes continued, “but we don’t know why they are what they are. So what if they were different? We can change those constants in the assumptions and see what ‘predictions’ come out of the box. There are 31 fundamental constants in the standard model of physics, and it turns out that a small change in about ten of them yields a universe that cannot sustain life.”

By Barnes’s calculation, the probability that the constants would fall by chance within the narrow range that allows life, as in our universe, is 1 in 10 to the power of 136. Or in other words, practically impossible.

It must be said honestly that these “new facts” have been known for quite some time. They serve many believers (myself included) as an argument for the existence of a cosmic designer—God. Atheists, of course, don’t accept this. They have no good explanation for it, but they cling to chance (when it suits them, chance is a wonderful solution; when it doesn’t, anyone who speaks of chance is hospitalized in an asylum for irrational non-reasoners).

The only explanation that offers an alternative framework for understanding fine tuning is the anthropic argument. In its crude formulation it says that were life-friendly conditions not to have arisen in our universe (or at least on our planet), we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. I’ve explained more than once why this is nonsense. The fact that we wouldn’t be here doesn’t mean the event isn’t statistically exceptional. If a very rare event happens and no one observes it, it’s still rare and still calls for explanation. In a more precise formulation of the argument, the multiverse theory is offered, according to which innumerable universes were and are being created, each with a different set of constants (or laws), and we happen to be in the one that permits life. No wonder, then, that we are here (and it’s also no wonder that the prevailing conditions here allow life, as the author of Duties of the Heart argues. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here).

Another claim from the same family says that life isn’t special, since in every universe with any system of laws (or constant values) some sort of complex beings would arise, even if not living beings like in our universe. Sometimes simulations are even presented that supposedly show these phenomena (I’ve explained more than once why they really don’t. See briefly here). So in our case the complexity looks like the biological life we know, but there’s nothing special about that. All of these are very flimsy claims, but they’re not our subject.

Lev continues describing fine tuning:

Stephen Hawking noted this in “A Brief History of Time.” “It is clear that there is a narrow range of values for the physical constants that allows the development of intelligent life forms,” he wrote. “Most possible sets of values would lead to the development of universes that might be very beautiful, but would contain no one able to marvel at that beauty.”

In the background, of course, is an attempt to deal with the deistic conclusion from fine tuning—the argument that ostensibly infers from it the existence of God. Despite the similarity to the claims I brought above, note that Hawking is asserting only the last claim. His claim is that indeed only in a universe like ours can life arise—and that is indeed very special—but in other universes other kinds of complexities would arise. Except there no one would admire it because those beings would lack consciousness (he apparently assumes that only life permits consciousness and thought; I’ve no idea on what basis he assumes this preposterous premise. But atheists are allowed everything).

Lev goes on to explain:

With the discovery of more and more physical constants, it turned out that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life. According to Goff, this is “one of the most astonishing discoveries of modern science.” The crucial point, as Hawking noted, is that the constants of nature have no theoretical explanation. They simply are what they are. “It may be that tomorrow we’ll discover why they are so,” says Goff, “but it may also be—and this better accords with the direction indicated by the evidence of recent decades—that when we have a complete theory of nature we’ll discover even more numbers tuned with precision.”

So perhaps the universe isn’t special, and therefore there’s no need to infer the existence of God, but one can indeed say that it’s tuned for the creation of life (i.e., our special kind of complexity). At the margins of his words are two more claims: the first is that later we’ll discover more tuned numbers (I don’t know whence he draws this). The second is that there’s no explanation for the constants’ values. It’s not clear whether Hawking meant to say that for now there’s no explanation or that there’s no need to seek one. The claim that for now there’s no explanation is perfectly simple. Moreover, in a moment I’ll explain why in my view it can’t be that we’ll find one in the future either. Therefore I understand him to be saying there’s no need for an explanation (otherwise we’d arrive at the conclusion that there is a God, Heaven forfend). On this Goff apparently disagrees, as I’ll note immediately.

Why an explanation is impossible: the God of the gaps (God of gaps)

In the background of the question of explanation lies the issue of the “God of the gaps.” Many creationists tend to bring proofs of God’s existence from gaps in scientific knowledge (no wonder that every time the weather forecaster errs, Yated Ne’eman declares a holiday). The problem with such an argument is that scientific gaps tend to close over time. What used to be a gap is now known. Thus to build faith in God on a gap in scientific knowledge is a tactical and substantive mistake, since there’s a fair chance that the gap in question will close as scientific research proceeds. A few hundred years ago one could have adduced proofs of God’s existence from electricity, from gravitation, and from any simple natural phenomenon that we now understand thoroughly. If so, seemingly the lack of an explanation for the constants’ values also can’t serve as a basis for proving God’s existence. This too would be a “God of the gaps” argument, i.e., an argument that relies on a gap that could close later.

Except—no. Here we’re dealing with a different kind of gap and, to my judgment, one that cannot be closed at all. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that in the future an explanation for the constants’ values is found. What could the nature of such an explanation be? It would presumably be a unified theory within which we’d have an explanation for the constants’ values (Einstein’s dream). The constants we know would all be special cases or derivatives of that general theory. But in that theory itself there would also be some constants, and that would raise the question of the explanation for their values. Moreover, there’s no doubt that their values would also be special, since they produce a very special system of constants that is tuned toward the emergence of life. It follows that the constants of the new theory would also demand an explanation just as the constants of current theories do. How can one stop this regress? Only if we succeed in finding a theoretical explanation that has no constants at all. That is, structures that are necessary of themselves, containing no contingent component. Such a theory would derive the values of constants purely from mathematical-logical relations (think, for example, of the special numbers in mathematics like pi or e) and would not be based on observation (for observation always gives us contingent values that therefore require explanation. Were they necessary, we wouldn’t need observation). But if indeed at the end of the process such a theory were found, physics would then become a branch of mathematics. It would not be based on observations but on a priori relations between concepts and forces. The gravitational constant or the speed of light would be special numbers like pi and e. I don’t think anyone today truly believes that empirical science is merely an intermediate state born of a temporary lack of knowledge and mathematical skill. It’s clear to all of us that science is based on observations, and hence the fundamental difference between it and mathematics: science is not necessary and is falsifiable. We draw its content from observation rather than from a priori proofs and analyses. Note that if science were a branch of mathematics, then in every universe that would arise the very same laws of nature would obtain as in ours (just as the same laws of logic hold in every world).

Note: if we’re unwilling to accept this wild and manifestly unreasonable conjecture, the conclusion is that no final explanation for the values of the constants in physics will ever be found. At most there will be explanations in terms of other theories that also contain constants with particular values that we will learn from observation. If so, the constants’ values represent an essential and necessary gap that cannot be closed. Therefore building an argument upon it is entirely reasonable, and there is no flaw here of the “God of the gaps.” Perhaps from here Hawking could have inferred that there is no explanation for the constants’ values—and none will be found. We cannot have a conclusive scientific explanation for them.

The obvious conclusion (which Hawking, as we know, did not accept) is that someone set the values of the constants so that life would arise in our universe. That is God, and this is a particular version of the physico-theological argument.

The structure of Goff’s argument

In the excerpt above we saw that Goff is more optimistic than Hawking. He claims that perhaps we will in fact discover later why the constants’ values are as they are (as noted, in my understanding such an explanation cannot be found). He then adds that it may also be—and this is even more likely—that later we’ll discover more tuned numbers. I already wondered about this, and here I’ll only add that I didn’t understand why this is an “but.” In what way does it contradict the previous thesis?

Let me continue with Goff. Fine tuning is the Archimedean point of Goff’s argument. There is an “astonishing” phenomenon of the universe’s being oriented toward life. He immediately adds and reminds us that according to Hawking it isn’t necessarily in need of explanation, and I’ll add that on that view it isn’t necessarily special and therefore also doesn’t indicate the existence of a cosmic creator (it merely produces life, but every universe would produce some kind of complex beings). This is the recent scientific fact, and upon it he builds his metaphysical thesis.

Something in the reading bothered me at this stage: it seems unreasonable to treat a fact that supposedly requires no explanation as an astonishing fact. To my judgment, astonishing facts call for explanation. I’m not just quibbling over words here; this is the focal point of my critique of Goff’s move. As will soon be seen, after all these preliminaries, Goff himself actually draws conclusions and proposes explanations for these astonishing facts. He merely proposes to replace God with another theological explanation that he thinks is simpler and more reasonable. In other words, at the end of the day he doesn’t agree with Hawking that no explanation is needed. Hawking ought to have believed in God. But fear not: Goff will now save him from this predicament by offering him a much more logical and simple alternative.

As for me, it’s clear that the constants’ values are indeed astonishing and therefore need an explanation. But a scientific explanation cannot exist, as I showed above. Therefore the explanation must include something outside science that set those values for the purpose of life’s emergence. That is God of the physico-theological argument.

In the next passage Goff joins what I’m saying here and disagrees with Hawking and his like-minded colleagues:

In his words, scientists do not ascribe the proper importance to the phenomenon of fine tuning, since a complete theory of nature has not yet been found. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “In no other subject is it so. In science we look at the evidence we have as it stands today, without bias. This is an amazing, fascinating scientific fact—that the existence of life requires an incredibly precise balance, right on a knife’s edge. And it’s something you just don’t hear about.”

Goff truly argues that so astonishing a phenomenon does require an explanation, and he complains about the scientists’ indifference toward it. I suppose that indifference arises from fear of the inevitable conclusion (God). Precisely for that reason Goff, who insists on remaining an atheist, proposes a third way between creationism and Dawkins’s causal materialism. He essentially wants to have his cake and eat it too. An explanation for fine tuning is indeed needed (it is indeed an “astonishing” phenomenon), but he claims to have an explanation that obviates the need to arrive at God. Pure hocus-pocus.

Does he succeed in proposing an atheistic alternative? We’ll see below. But before that, Goff explains why the theory of multiple universes (the anthropic argument) doesn’t solve the problem. It’s important to understand that at this point Goff must join the believers who oppose the anthropic argument, for his theory is meant to offer a solution to the problem (as God does for the believers). If there’s another solution, there’s no need for his theory (just as, to their mind, in such a case there would be no need for God).

Goff’s argument against the anthropic argument

I mentioned above the anthropic argument which, in its precise formulation, requires multiple universes. Goff himself attacks it and says the following:

Many physicists and philosophers explain that strange entity (fine tuning—M.M.) by claiming that our universe is just one of countless universes that exist in parallel. This is a theory that is problematic in many respects, but if there are multitudes of universes, at least the matter of precise tuning is solved—it’s very likely that at least one of them will have physical constants that allow life, and it’s clear that any intelligent life form, like humans, would develop in such a universe and not in the others, less tuned (this idea is called “the anthropic principle”). “I too thought for a long time that this explains the matter,” says Goff.”

Now he explains why in his opinion this isn’t an explanation:

But a philosophical argument changed the picture. “Sometimes science isn’t enough,” he says. “It turns out that the multiverse argument as an explanation for precise tuning can be refuted logically.”

The refutation is based on the “gambler’s fallacy,” the erroneous but common thought that if a random event has occurred at a lower-than-usual frequency so far, it’s expected to occur at a higher frequency later. Thus a person who has lost again and again in a card game thinks to himself, “I’ll try just one more time; I’ll surely get a good hand, because I’ve played so many rounds that it’s unlikely I won’t have one good hand.” This is of course a mistake in thinking, because the odds in each deal are identical regardless of how many failures there have been till now. A similar error is called the “reverse gambler’s fallacy.”

Goff described it: “Let’s say the two of us walk into a casino, and the first thing we see is someone who is incredibly lucky with the dice, winning again and again and again. I say, ‘Wow, the casino must be packed tonight,’ and you wonder why I think so. I explain: ‘Well, if there are only a few people in the casino, it’s very unlikely there will be someone with such extreme luck, but if there are many, it’s much more plausible that one of them will be lucky.’ Clearly this thinking is also mistaken. ‘We’ve seen only one person, and the number of people in the casino has no effect on the probability that the person we saw will throw the dice in one way or another,’ says Goff. ‘It is exactly this fallacy that those who explain fine tuning with parallel universes fall into. Scientists are astonished at the degree of our universe’s tuning and infer that there must be many other universes, in the overwhelming majority of which the constants are not tuned. But all we’ve seen is our universe, and whether or not there are other universes has no effect whatsoever on the chances that our universe will be precisely tuned’.”…

Wow—the anthropic argument falls and shatters. How did no one think of this simple argument?! Only it’s not hard to see that there’s a basic error in his analogy, rooted precisely in the faulty formulation of the anthropic argument mentioned above. In the case of multiple universes there’s a good reason that we observe precisely the universe in which the laws are suitable for the emergence of life: simply because only in such a universe can we exist. So this is nothing like the lucky gambler in the casino, where the fact that we happened to land on him is accidental. Therefore there’s neither a straight gambler’s fallacy here nor a reverse one.

So why really doesn’t the anthropic argument refute the physico-theological proof of God’s existence? In my understanding there are two main flaws in this attempted refutation: 1) We’ve seen nothing of any of those universes, so the supposition that all those exist is highly speculative and hard to accept. This differs from the supposition of God, who in any case is not the sort of thing we encounter. To say that there are innumerable bizarre universes, all utterly unlike the one we see, strikes me as implausible. 2) What I’ve called the Mad Hatter’s tea party (from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass). If there are innumerable such universes and in each different laws of nature prevail, then in them there can exist all sorts of strange beings, utterly unlike us and each other. In some universes there might be demons, unicorns, fairies, flying elephants that dive into the ground (if there’s even ground there), and finally… also Elohim, for example. Why shouldn’t there be universes in which supremely powerful beings arose that can create a world like ours? So what do we gain by moving to the multiverse? In what way is this whole insane frenzy more plausible and economical than the supposition that there is a God who created the world?!

You won’t be surprised to find that Goff now arrives at God (recall that he must reject this solution en route to his own):

Many explain precise tuning by positing a divine entity. If the world was created, it’s obvious that such an entity tuned its laws and could ensure they permit the development of life. But the religious explanation has two other problems. “If God is omnipotent it’s very hard to explain evil, which is a certain fact,” says Goff. “I’m open to conceptions of a non-omnipotent God, but most religions believe that an omnipotent God created the universe.”

Well, if he’s open to a non-omnipotent God, the problem is solved, no? Why should I care what existing religions say? Why do we need hyperbolic purposiveness? As for the problem of evil that seems to him so dramatic, I’ve shown more than once (see for example column 547) that this problem has rather simple solutions, even on the assumption that God is fully omnipotent. But beyond that, his argument shows at most that the God solution isn’t necessary. He still has to explain why his solution is preferable to the religious one, and also to rule out a non-omnipotent God. Therefore he now brings an additional argument:

There is also another consideration for rejecting the religious explanation. “As scientists and philosophers, we always try to find the simplest theory. There’s no reason to assume the existence of a supernatural Creator outside the universe if we can explain the evidence we have in a simpler way.” Goff proposes another explanation alongside the materialist and theological explanations—the constants were tuned by the universe itself, which is a conscious, purposive entity.

That is, he claims that his proposal is simpler than the religious proposal. The “simple” solution he presents is that the universe itself set the values of its constants, since the universe is a conscious, goal-directed entity. In his view this solution is economical and simpler than the claim about God as a “supernatural” being. Thus we finally arrive at “cosmic purpositivism.”

The meaning of “cosmic purpositivism”

After a passage in which he explains that the evidence for this bizarre thesis is plentiful and overwhelming and calls on us not to be alarmed by its mystical character, Lev describes the meaning of this proposal as follows:

If the universe has consciousness and purpose, and “took care” to ensure life-enabling conditions, Goff manages to hit two birds with one stone. And these are perhaps the two biggest birds science fails to contend with—the problem of the universe’s precise fine tuning and the problem of consciousness or the mind-body problem.

Philosophers and scientists have grappled for centuries with how subjective consciousness and the objective physical world, which seem very different, can be subsumed under a single explanation. This is a very serious problem. Consciousness isn’t just “another phenomenon” that science hasn’t yet explained—there are quite a few of those—but the most important phenomenon for human existence. In fact, the only thing in the entire universe that we know in an essential and direct way is that there are conscious experiences. Even if a scientist looks through a telescope, microscope, or computer screen—all that’s accessible to her is her conscious experience of what she sees. And science is in complete darkness when it approaches explaining this phenomenon.

That is, Goff offers here a magic solution to the two foundational problems that science fails to contend with. Seemingly perfect, no? So who needs God at all?! No wonder Nietzsche killed him. He’s simply superfluous.

A few initial misgivings

I wonder in what sense there’s any solution here at all. Instead of speaking about the consciousness of human beings—which we don’t understand and therefore seek an explanation for—we now have the consciousness of the universe and perhaps also of everything in it (see below on panpsychism). This seems to me more like an expansion of the difficulty than its solution. Why is broadening the difficulty a solution? Nor do I understand in what sense this offers a solution to fine tuning. He’s essentially saying: the explanation is that there’s a sprite who ensures that all the numbers are tuned. And if you insist that this is a solution, why isn’t God an identical solution? Perhaps it’s actually the same solution, since what he calls “the universe” I call “God.” It isn’t God—it’s his cousin who’s also called “God.” A similar defect is found in Spinoza’s metaphysical delusions that identify God with the universe.

Oops, I forgot that God is “supernatural” while Goff is talking about something entirely natural. Well, admit that this is clearly an advantage to his explanation. But wait—in what sense does his solution not resort to the “supernatural”? In that he turns all of nature into something supernatural (again, an expanded front)? Why is a conscious universe that tunes its constants “natural,” while God is supernatural? In my book God Plays Dice I criticized a similar claim by Dawkins, who refuses to acknowledge anything “supernatural,” defining “natural” as whatever we understand scientifically or is at least accessible to scientific explanation. So then anything we don’t understand doesn’t exist, and when we do understand it, it becomes existent. He has no independent definition of “natural” and certainly no criterion for what can or cannot be understood in the future, and therefore his claim that only the natural exists is circular and contentless. But with Goff you won’t find even such a bizarre claim. Dawkins proposes things measurable empirically and denies the existence of everything else. Goff proposes the existence of something for which there is no way whatsoever to measure or verify its existence. It’s utterly unscientific, and nothing in his words hints that in future we will be able to measure or explain it. But that doesn’t stop him from claiming that his proposal is a scientific and natural solution and not at all mystical.

How is his “solution” different from the following solution to Newton’s problem of gravitation: there’s an invisible sprite named Yasmin, and when she sees two massive bodies she inserts her two hands into them and constantly makes sure to pull them toward one another so that the acceleration is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. That’s a perfect solution, since there’s no need to resort to the gravitational force. It’s a simple and economical solution—and perhaps also “more natural.” What, you want to tell me sprites are supernatural? Not at all; they operate in nature everywhere. By my proposal every natural body has such a sprite. Even before asking whether the solution is correct (it isn’t), and before asking whether it’s preferable to the alternatives (definitely not), I wonder if there’s any content here at all. It seems to be nothing more than a play on words. We had a riddle: the universe appears tuned for life. So what explanation does Goff propose?… that the universe is tuned for life!! He simply takes the question mark and stretches it into an exclamation mark, without adding anything. Wonders never cease. How did we not think of this earlier?!

On the psychophysical problem, Lev writes:

Over the years, three solutions have been proposed for the problem of consciousness. One is materialism—according to which everything in the universe is at bottom material, including consciousness and subjective experience, which is nothing but electrical activity in the brain. The second is dualism—an approach according to which consciousness and the physical world are two equally basic aspects of reality. The third approach is panpsychism, according to which the most basic thing in the universe is consciousness.

I’ll spare you his further babble. He essentially argues that Goff’s position is a kind of panpsychism (the view that all reality is made out of the stuff of consciousness). So what exactly did Goff contribute? See below. In any case, regarding the question of consciousness and the psychophysical problem, there isn’t even the outline of an explanation here. It’s just gobbledygook.

And what about the question of fine tuning? From what I wrote above, this “explanation” is a paragon of virtues (as opposed to the darkness and supernatural deistic mysticism of God): it’s entirely mystical (and thus gains nothing over the deistic solution), has not a shred of empirical basis (like that solution), it’s not actually different from the theological solution (just a change of name), it isn’t simpler (see more on that below), and in fact it isn’t clear at all what it’s saying (if it has any content whatsoever. As noted, it’s a stretching of a question mark into an exclamation point). It looks far worse even than my proposed gravity-sprite explanation above.

Here’s a representative passage from his later gibberish, where he tries to persuade us of the plausibility of his “explanation”:

But what does it mean that consciousness is fundamental? Let’s try to illustrate. We know that electrons, for example, are attracted to some particles and repelled by others. But that’s only the behavior of electrons, behavior described by physical equations. According to panpsychism, the entity that performs this behavior is a stream of electron-experiences. The claim isn’t that those experiences exist alongside physical properties, but that the physical properties themselves are a kind of experience. Electric charge, as well as mass and any other property, are at bottom exceedingly simple forms of experience.

There’s a stream of electron-experiences (what’s that?), and it is what produces the phenomena we observe. What exactly is the meaning of the sentence “the physical properties themselves are a kind of experience”? To me this recalls the sentence “all rabbits are in fact expressions of the malice of the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.”

This swan-song reminds me of something I once recounted hearing from Prof. Yosef Ne’eman. He complained about his materialist colleagues, who can’t grasp that a sentence like “love is an electrical current in the brain” is a sentence devoid of meaning—simply a category mistake. And this was said by a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. He too understood that love is a feeling and not an electrical current in the brain. As a materialist you can claim that currents in the brain produce the feeling/experience of love, but to identify the two is just a category mix-up. It’s roughly like saying that fire is the light it produces, or that the light is the fire, or that triangles are kind-hearted. I’ve often quoted Bertrand Russell, another well-known atheist materialist, who says that the claim that “yellow light is an electromagnetic wave with such-and-such a wavelength” is nothing but a category mistake. The electromagnetic field is a physical phenomenon, and the color yellow is a mental-cognitive phenomenon. You can perhaps say that the wave causes the appearance of the color in consciousness, but identifying the two is just confusion.

And generally, I wonder who is the subject that has the electron-experiences? The electron itself is a bundle of experiences. So whose experiences are they? This too reminds me of the claims that the entire world is only a dream and we don’t really exist. Much ink has been spilled on those as well, though it’s utter twaddle. For some reason people ignore the question: whose dream? An electron that is nothing but experiences reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s grin without a cat. Goff is essentially saying that it’s not that the cat smiles but that the cat is made of smiles (which can exist even without it). Whose smiles? Does the concept of experience still mean anything after all these tricks?

I asked above what Goff contributed beyond panpsychism. Here is Lev’s answer:

In the standard version of panpsychism, the fundamental conscious entities are elementary particles such as electrons and quarks. In the cosmo-psychist theory Goff proposes, the most basic entity—the deepest level of reality—is the consciousness of the universe as a whole.

“Cosmo-psychist”—did you get that, Baruch?! Well, in my benighted state I didn’t grasp the difference. Is the universe’s consciousness something else, separate from the world, upon or within which are all the entities familiar to us (=God)? Or is that consciousness the universe itself and the rest are its properties (pantheistic twaddle)? What exactly is being said here? Nothing but word-games.

But fear not—Lev immediately adds that this is an evidence-based explanation. Truly empirical and scientific (not base mysticism like that of those who believe in God):

Here too he relies on physics—and not on some esoteric branch of it. The most accepted view in theoretical physics is that the fundamental building blocks of reality are not particles and not even energy or force, but fields that fill the entire universe. In this view, particles are merely local quantum excitations within those vast fields. “If you combine quantum field theory with panpsychism you get a conception in which consciousness is the substrate of those fields,” says Goff. “That is, fundamental consciousness is the universe itself.”

Don’t panic if you didn’t understand. I assume that he himself doesn’t really understand what he said here.

From scientist and philosopher to prophet

To complete the picture, here’s part of the continuation, which casts a pale shadow over all the flimflam you’ve read so far. Now Goff undergoes a metamorphosis—from a dealer in swans to a modern prophet who grants meaning to our lives, and even to the recent events in our region:

I hope you’ll allow me to leave these words as they are, without comment. I didn’t touch a thing.

Summary: the Church of Science

I think we have here an example with all the hallmarks of the Church of Science. It starts with absolute devotion to science and seeing scientists as omniscient priests (and then of course there’s no room for God and religious primitivism). When it becomes clear that this doesn’t really hold water, and the fear arises that we’ll reach God—Heaven forbid—they begin inventing concepts and juggling them. In the end there even arises a hazy sense that these tricks mean something; some of these folks feel they’re even keeping us within the scientific-empirical framework—that they’re original and creative and evidence-based—and finally they even confer on the bold inventor a priestly-prophetic aura that enables him to give meaning to everything that happens in the world. Mazal tov—a new religion is born. How nice that one can remain an atheist and abandon the ancient, irrational mysticisms of the existing religions and God. The Flying Spaghetti Monster comes to life.

I have described here the Mad Hatter’s tea party that atheists concoct to flee the simple conclusion that there is a God. In the name of rationality and empiricism they invent hallucinations with no connection to reality, not empirically testable and in fact saying nothing at all. But hey—they’re rational, unlike us primitive believers. They even get university chairs with a nice livelihood attached (in those parts that require no criterion for success. As the verse says: the “sciences” of baloney). Shas’s “Rabbis Law” seems completely superfluous to me. It’s long been in force in the academy.

If we return for a moment to our gravity sprite, perhaps your mood will improve if I offer an academic-scientific-empirical-rational-evidence-based formulation of the sprite thesis: Yasmin is nothing but a wrinkle in the wave function of a positron flowing along a meridian during reflexological treatment in the consciousness of two massive bodies that are themselves nothing but a swarm of conscious positronic sprites moving at exponential speed along a convex parabola closed into itself (a Klein bottle), while the fairy Tinker Bell fans them with a wind of the strength of an ordinary typhoon. And don’t tell me this isn’t evidence-based. Physics too deals with positrons, typhoons, and masses; Chinese medicine deals with meridians and fairies; and mathematics deals with parabolas, exponents, the topology of Klein bottles, and convexity. I’m sure that with such a scientific, rational thesis—which is of course far more economical and plausible than God—I’d receive a splendid chair at Durham University, presumably in the Department of Philosophy and Gender Studies.

Another note on Occam’s razor

Goff claims an advantage for his proposal by virtue of its being simpler and more economical. The question I received concerned this: is his theory indeed simpler? I’ve already discussed Occam’s razor in the past (see, for example, columns 426 and 593), so here I’ll just note a few points.

First, the razor is meant to choose among explanatory proposals (theories) that are equal in terms of plausibility and logic and in terms of fit with the facts. Simplicity by itself is not evidence of truth. Now it’s worth asking whether Goff’s thesis has any a priori plausibility at all so that we can weigh it against alternatives. Beyond that, why is it simpler than the deistic thesis? The latter adds a single entity (God), whereas Goff proposes innumerable additions to every facet and entity in reality. A whole shadow world swarms beneath the reality we perceive, and we see nothing there. All this assumes that there really is a distinct alternative here with different content—an assumption that, as I explained above, is itself untrue.

But even on Goff’s terms—that there is indeed a saving here—I have far more economical and alluring proposals: 1) The 17th rock from the left on Cliff Beach is conscious, and it is what tuned all the constants in the universe. Isn’t that more economical than assuming consciousness for the entire universe and/or for every part of it? Alternatively, perhaps all the rocks are conscious—or perhaps the snails? That too seems more economical. You know what? I have the ultimate economy: solipsism. The external world doesn’t exist at all, and therefore all the phenomena we described do not call for explanation. Only I exist and everything is present and occurs in my own consciousness. This is the most economical theory I can imagine. So why resort to cosmic purpositivism, to psychish panpsychism—or to reality at all? On Goff and Lev’s terms, I’d choose solipsism. The solipsist thesis at least makes a determinate claim; it’s definitely different from the other proposals; and it is indeed more economical. Unfortunately, it has just one glaring flaw: it isn’t true. Well, but that flaw is shared by “cosmic purpositivism” as well…