Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Philip Goff: Is There Cosmic Purpose Without God? (#384)

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

What is the purpose of the Universe? Why do we exist? And does the truth lie beyond traditional religion and secular atheism?  Here today, to discuss all these fascinating questions with me is leading philosopher of mind and returning guest Philip Goff! Philip is a British author, renowned philosopher, and professor at Durham University.  In his recently published book, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe", he explores meaning and purpose beyond Western thought, which is precisely what we’re doing today in this insightful interview. Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:27 Judging a book by its cover 00:03:46 What is panpsychism? 00:09:35 Consciousness and its relationship with physical reality  00:14:39 What’s wrong with God?  00:20:32 Agnosticism, free will, and addressing the problem of evil  00:28:09 Is antinatalism a slippery slope?  00:35:37 Fine-tuning and the inverse gambler's fallacy paradox 00:47:14 Do we have a use for purpose?  00:50:18 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Check out Philip Goff:  📚 Books: https://philipgoffphilosophy.com/books  💻 Website: https://philipgoffphilosophy.com/  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MindChat   ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we feature Philip Goff, a leading professor and philosopher of the mind. Durham University. He's also a best-selling author and a good friend. You've seen him on Joe Rogan and on Lex Freeman, and his work revolves around the intricacies of consciousness, exploring profound questions that challenge our understanding of reality. Critical of materialism and dualism, he advocates a new kind of pan-psychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. I found it fascinating. Even if I don't know, agree as you'll see. In his most recent book, aptly titled Why, the purpose of the universe, he explores the meaning and purpose and challenges to the Western thought dominated by the dichotomy

of traditional religion and secular atheism. Join us on a thought-provoking, sometimes provocative and confrontational journey into the mind, the nature of existence and the ultimate purpose of the universe. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. the pod bay doors. Welcome everybody to a meaningful and purpose-filled edition of the Into the Impossible podcast featuring a second time returning guest, the incomparable Professor Phil of Goff, joining us all the way from the UK. How are you today, Phil? I'm very well. Good to see you again, Brian. I'm looking forward to chatting. Yes. Some people were surprised that I had you back on because you wrote this book and it sort of suggests that my hero, Galileo, made some mistakes. So we already talked

about that in your previous wonderful book, Galileo's Err, sitting behind you on your shelf. But today we're going to talk about really some incredibly audacious goals such as meaning, existence, religion, and the ultimate purpose of the universe. I'm a cosmologist and you're a philosopher. and I think between the two of us we can get it solved in the next hour. So what I love to do is always have an author walk through the process of the cover books judgment. So you're not supposed to have a categorical imperative, but I do want to understand what was the origin, the genesis, the purpose of the title, the subtitle, and the beautiful color illustration. I should say this is by Oxford Press. And it's incredibly well.

It's just a beautiful book. So they did a great job as usual. Phil, judge this book, buy its cover. It is a great cover, isn't it? Yeah. There is a bit of a story, actually. So I think my editor had the idea initially of Aztec ruins. I think he thought like he didn't want it to be too cliched.

If you think you know, the purpose of the universe, you know, you might have stars or a face in the star. So he wanted it to be really different to that. And then my wife found this wonderful series of photographs online. of nature overpowering old buildings and it's sort of the sense of this broader purpose than human purpose kind of encompassing everything and then I chose that one in particular and then the design team with the publisher did this incredible job so yeah that's wonderful in terms of the title originally I was calling it the the purpose of the universe or the purpose of existence

and then maybe that sounds a bit academicy a few people including my grandmother in law now through my wife i have grandparents in law and she was one of the people who suggested why not just call it why and so we're thinking for them you know maybe just why would be wonderfully enigmatic and intriguing but i think together with the subtitle which sums it up it really encapsulates it it's really as i say it's audacious it's it's wonderful and we have a lot of a lot of questions and comments uh from my audience who i pinged earlier this morning um but i guess the, you know, the big question that I still have trouble reconciling. And I've talked to one of the men who gave you, and my audience hates when I name drop, so I'm going to name drop

in, you know, just throughout the conversation. But Donald Hoffman, one of my most popular guest in addition to your appearances. And Don says, you know, he calls this book, Lucid and Riveting with rare audacity, Goff blazes new trails. It's fascinating terrain to explore. Gough provides, proves an expert and genial guide. And I have to agree, having read it. But But Phil, the problem I still have is I've talked to you and Don and David Chalmers and many, many other people. And I still don't understand what panpsychism is. And that's still a hot topic in what we cover.

And I had a lot of questions from my audience on YouTube and you can always ask me questions and you should follow Phil on Twitter on YouTube. He's a thriving YouTube channel. I'll have a link to it. But Phil, people don't get panpsychism. You're one of its foremost cheerleaders. It makes an appearance here. Can you give us a definition?

and maybe it'll get through my thick skull. What is panpsychism? And why is it relevant to the purpose of the universe, if at all? Panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes right down to the fundamental building blocks of reality. So maybe, I mean, it's a question for physics, right? What the fundamental building blocks of reality are, maybe the particles, maybe the universe-wide fields. But whatever they are, the idea is that they have increasingly. incredibly simple, rudimentary forms of experience. So nothing like the kind of experience a human being has after millions of years of evolution, but consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes. So what it's like to be a human being is a very rich and complex, what it's like to be a sheep significantly simpler, what it's like to be a snail, simpler still. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of subjective.

experience. For the panpsychist, that keeps going right down to the fundamental building blocks of reality that have incredibly simple forms of experience. At least if the particles, I guess if they're universe-wide fields, they might have incredibly complex forms of experience, but still conceptually very simple. It's not like they're sort of contemplating their own existence or something. In the form of, you know, kind of this word experience, and I'm not making a comparison. But I had Deepak Chopra on, you know, my podcast several years ago. He is a friend and he lives in San Diego, so we get to hang out on occasion. You know, he also spoke in certain terms about experience and, and sort of nebulous terms to a physics audience. And remember, you're talking to the world's

most brilliant podcast audience and they can go deep into, you know, advanced relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. By what way? Let's just focus on electrons. I think they're probably the most simple thing we could talk about. I don't think we can really contemplate, you know, in detail, you know, the top quark or something like that and how it might expect. Let's just focus on electron. How does an electron experience anything? And what, if anything, would it experience? And so what does experience mean in the context of a quantum mechanical particle who can, which can be described, I don't say who, and now I'm lapsing into true anthropomorphism and so forth. What does it mean to experience something? I mean, it's important to be clear what we're meaning by consciousness.

We're not meaning self-consciousness, awareness of your own existence. That's something rabbits probably don't have, never mind, electrons. We're just meaning any kind of subjective experience. Thomas Nagel famously captured it by saying something is conscious if there's something that it's like to be it. And as I say, you know, we can imagine simpler and simpler forms of consciousness to bedbugs have experience. It's going to be almost incredibly simple.

And there doesn't seem to be any conceptual limit to how simple experience could be. And in that way, there doesn't seem to be any incoherence in something incredibly rudimentary without any conceptual understanding of the world around it, just having some very kind of simple experience corresponding to its incredibly simple physical structure. Now, of course, just because it's coherent doesn't mean it's true. We've got to look to the, you know, the reasons to take this view seriously. But maybe in the way shape is a very flexible concept. You know, it's like all sorts of conceivable different geometries.

Maybe if you'd lived in a world where you'd only accounted very complicated geometry, very complicated shapes, the idea of a very, very simple triangle or something might be, how could shape be so simple? But, of course, it is a very flexible concept. Likewise with subjective experience, we're used to. thinking of experience in terms of human beings, these very highly evolved creatures or complex animals. But I think panpsychism is in a way very Copernican. I've done a few public discussions with the writer Philip Pullman, who draws inspiration from panpsychism.

And he put this to me that it's very Copernican. So we're not thinking of consciousness modeled on the very, in a panpsychist perspective, the very weird kind of consciousness that a human being has because it's so highly evolved and molded by those forces of evolution. But it's very, very flexible notion, very, very different to the human case, but still being just some kind of inner life or experience. I thought you're going to pull out when you mentioned Thomas Nagel, you know, what is it like to be a bat? And my follow-up book is, what is it like to be Thomas Nagel by A, Arthur Bat, but the conclusion of that monograph is basically we can't know. And And that's with a mammal, right? So all the more so with with a particle. And I guess, I guess how, how entwined is the

notion of panpsychism with your current book? Obviously, that was a big thrust. I mean, how do you view it in terms of purpose? I mean, obviously something cannot have a purpose or, you know, teleology, as you philosophers might say, if it's not conscious or if it, or it could participate in the theological purpose. But how does it, how does it instantiate it? I guess that's what I'm looking for. We're in the wave equation or in, you know, Einstein's field equation. We're, you know, where do we need consciousness? And then if you can say that we don't need it, you know, to kind of paraphrase Sean Carl who makes appearances throughout your work, how does it, how does it matter?

If it doesn't interact with the standard models, more or less, and I don't agree with Sean on most things, by the way, but here I think there's some notion of applicability. If it doesn't, if we can't put it into Hilbert space or we can't put it into a wave equation, does it matter? Good. So let me say a little bit about the case for panpsychism and then maybe connected to cosmic purpose, which is the focus of this book. And yeah, well, Sean and I recently did a public debate in, in the States, which people can get on YouTube. Maybe we can link to it, which was a lot of fun. A very spirited, but good spirited debate. It was, there were some gasps from the audience at some of the strong comments, but it was all in good, good fun. Yeah, so what we have at the

core of the issues with consciousness is, I mean, I don't think this is a purely scientific problem when it comes to consciousness. I think we have here at root, as well as the scientific issues of consciousness, which are hugely important, an ancient problem that philosophers have traditionally referred to as the mind-body problem, which is the difficulty of how we fit together the physical world and consciousness, how they fit together. We know they both exist. We know about consciousness just because we're conscious and we're immediately aware of our feelings and experiences. We know about the physical world in a very different way through our senses, through doing science. So we've got these two portals on reality, two things we know about in

quite different ways. How do they fit together? And there are a few different options. You know, maybe it's the physical world that's fundamental and constant. Consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain. That's the physicalist approach. Someone like Sean would adopt and many others. But the panpsychist says, well, it could be the other way around. It could be that consciousness is fundamental and physical reality arises from more fundamental facts about mind or consciousness. There's a third option, the due list option, that they're both fundamental but radically different.

And crucially, right, why is this not a scientific question? because you can't find out which of these views is right with an experiment. For any experimental data, each theory will just interpret it on their own terms. So how can we decide? I mean, people find that annoying. It's like, okay, well, what can we do if we can't do an experiment? But what we can do is try and look at the explanatory aspirations of these two viewpoints and which does better. So what's the explanatory aspiration of the physicalist?

they try to explain the emergence of consciousness in terms of physical brain processes. How well has that gone? I would argue after decades of our greatest minds putting serious effort into this, I would argue it's gone absolutely nowhere. We've never managed to explain a single experience in terms of underlying neural activity. And also, I think, pretty good philosophical arguments that it's just not really a coherent project. Whereas when it comes to panpsychism, it's explanatory aspirational. is the other way around.

Try to explain the emergence of physical reality from underlying facts about consciousness. And I would argue there, the mysteries are already solved. We've already worked out how to do that. And this is the inspiration of certain really important work Bertrand Russell did in the 1920s, thinking about consciousness and how physical reality might be constructed from underlying facts about consciousness. Well, maybe we could go into this.

and in particular his book, The Analysis of Matter in 1927. I think we should think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he really solved all the mysteries here. Okay, so we've got, you know, physicalism never got anywhere. Of dubious coherence, I would argue. Panpsychism feels weird, doesn't fit with our current culture, but it delivers the goods. We know how to make sense of it.

We know it works. So that's why I think it's the more plausible view. I could go on to cosmic purpose, but I've talked a bit too long. already. Did you want to raise anything there or should I go? I often lapse into, you know, longer monologues as the host. And I'm shooting, you know, my listeners tell me I should shoot for a 30 to 70 ratio of speaking to listening. But I do want to hear about that because I think a core thesis of the book is, is that you kind of give, you upgrade, you know,

traditional religious views and secular views as both of them kind of being wholly inadequate for the situation of determining meaning. Now, I'm a practicing Jew and, and, you know, I go to a temple, you know, I can get around a prayer book. I'm very well versed in Jewish philosophy, et cetera. And it's one of the oldest religions on earth, right? It's a precursor to, you know, three or four billion people's faith choices. So I think it's pretty shocking, right, that people will say, wait a second, this is inadequate. So make your case with, and we're going to turn to cosmology, believe me, because that's how my bread is buttered around the Keating household. But tell me, Phil, why do you say that traditional religions?

I agree that atheism is inadequate. I think we might agree very much to agree about that. Why is traditional religion? Are 3.8 billion people wrong? That's really fascinating because, yeah, I've done a hell of a lot of interviews on this in the last few weeks and almost all of them have said, oh, yeah, of course God doesn't exist. But atheism, what's wrong with that? And, but, you know, it's funny. It's like, so that's really refreshing. It's really refreshing that you're pushing back from the other side. I mean, yeah, I always hate the dichotomies in my work, you know.

You know, it's particularly with this one, so many people feel they have to fit into this binary, you know. Do you believe in the God of traditional religion or are you a secular atheist? As I've said a number of times, you know, it's like, which team are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope or the chief rabbi or, you know, you've got to pick your team. And I feel when you're talking to people, they're trying to put you into one of those categories. But I've just slowly over a long period of time, just come to think that they're both inadequate. And we're just, I suppose, what I'm meaning by atheism, to be clear is the idea of a meaningless, purposeless universe. One of the deep challenges there, I think, is the emergence of the fine-tuning in physics for life,

which does suggest on the face of it some kind of purpose or goal-directedness in reality. So that's the bit I focus on there, as well as certain facts to do with the evolution of consciousness. But coming to your question, what's wrong with the traditional God? Well, here it's the familiar issue for me of reconciling and all-knowing, all-powerful God, all-loving God, with the horrific suffering we find in the world, in the human world, but also what's perhaps less focused on in much the odyssey, the natural world. You know, why would a loving God who could do anything choose to create us through just a long-winded, horrific process like natural selection? Why would a loving God create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyzes its prey

and then eats it alive over several days before it eventually dies from its wounds? This just kind of makes no sense to me, why a lot of? loving God would do that. So it's a familiar problem that I hope I give some new takes on. And well, I might just like to say briefly before you come back on this. So my first book was an academic book over here that it might be a little impenetrable if you don't have a PhD in philosophy. My next book was aimed at general audience. This book's trying to do both. So each book, each chapter has a more accessible bit and then a digging deeper bit where I try to get more into the cutting edge of the field or the technical details or consider all the objection.

but yeah, so that's, so it's the old problem of evil, I guess. I've always found out one of the most compelling philosophical arguments. What do you think, Brian? Hi there, so sorry to interrupt this meaningful and purpose-filled episode, but I have to get something important to share it to you right now. Learning is a lifelong process, so obviously you need all the materials to learn from somewhere, and that's why you really need to join my mailing list at brinekeetting.com slash list.

By joining, you'll also get the freshest science news from the farthest reaches of the known universe, delivered straight to your inbox, and you'll automatically be entered to win a piece of an authentic chunk of space schmutz, a meteorite, a real fragment of the early solar system. All you've got to do is join my mailing list at briankeating.com slash list, and you'll be entered to join immediately. Now, back to the episode. Oh, I agree.

And, of course, you know, there are all these tropes, Phil, that we could go into. You know, the classic one is that, you know, the believer has but one question. you know, why do bad things happen to good people? Or why do good things happen to bad people? Let me just ask you yes or no. Or which do you think is more painful for you? When a good thing happens to your enemy or when something bad happens to a friend, which is worse?

Well, it ought to be the latter. And I hope it's the latter. I suppose that's what we aspire to. I suppose I'm quite lucky that I've never had somebody. wrong me very, very deeply. And maybe I would incline more to the former in those circumstances. I don't know. I hope not.

There are these wonderful stories, aren't there? Of people who manage to forgive in incredible circumstances. And, you know, that's the aspiration. But is it the name of the book you gave then? Who was it a Jewish philosopher or theologian who had this idea of a deity? of limited abilities? I actually don't call myself a classic, you know, theist in the sense of, I call myself a practicing Jew earlier.

And what that means is I think scientifically a very moderate way to be is to be what I call a practicing agnostic. And this goes back to my first ever conversation on this podcast with your fellow countrymen, and I'm sure great inspiration to you, the late great Freeman Dyson. And so Freeman was my first guest on this podcast. And I asked them in that conversation and in many conversations, subsequent to that, you know, what he meant when he said he was agnostic. And he would say, you know, well, I think God is a mystery and physics is a mystery and I love solving puzzles and mystery. I said, that's great. But what do you do? What if an alien version of Richard Dawkins was observing you on a Sunday, he would see you and Richard Dawkins doing the same thing, you know, maybe watching, I don't know what you guys do, cricket match or attending a royal opera or doing it. whatever over there in the beautiful UK. In other words, there's no functional distinguishing characteristics

of his flavor of agnosticism from Dawkins' flavor of atheism. So for me, as I said, I eat kosher food. I don't work on the Sabbath, which for me is a Saturday. I can attend a temple. I can read Hebrew. I read the portion of the Torah every week that's associated with that week's reading in the temple. I can muddle my way through it. I was just in Israel. I did my bar mitzvah age 52. I never had it as a kid for reasons I don't get into. So for all these reasons, I said, you know, Freeman, I love you, but there's no difference.

I mean, you're functionally the same as Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krause, who I spoke to recently on stage here in San Diego. So I guess my feeling is the odyssey is one of the oldest challenges. I didn't finish the trope. The trope is, you know, a believer has but one quote. question. How do you explain the existence of evil in a world created by God, good God, you know, a good God, right? So that is a question. It's your number one question. But then they say an atheist has an infinite number of questions. And I think, you know, some of them are addressed in this book, the simulation hypothesis, the multiverse, fine-tuning, anthropic principle. And we're going to get

into as many of those as we can. But I guess the question of theodicy has been answered for 1100 years in Judaism, at least to the extent of interactions between people. I don't think the shrew is evil. Like, I don't, whatever that shrew is, and I have to make a reminder not to get that for my daughter for Hanukkah. She always wants these exotic pets, right? She wanted actually a Komoto dragon recently, but that's not going to happen. So, Phil, I don't consider that evil. I consider it, you know, it's part of nature. What I do consider evil, you know, terrorism, you know, torturing human beings and man on man, you know, type of violence. crimes against, you know, things that don't have purpose like cancer or earthquakes or a pandemic,

those I don't view as evil. I view those as awful, but they're not directed. And so in Maimonides, Rambam and Judaism in the foremost medieval scholars, you know, he answered it in the classic tense that was later picked up by the Catholics and Christians. And that is that, you know, God had to have to allow free will, there had to be evil committed by man against man. Now, you may not believe in free will the way I do. I want to ask you, just in a short answer form, do you believe we have free will? I mean, is that possible to answer? And I know that many people, Sabina Hossensfelder and Dunn Hoffman,

many others don't, right? So can you just say very briefly because we have so much to cover in the remaining time? Do you believe in free will or no? I know it's an impossible thing. I'm somewhat agnostic. I don't think the reality of free will is as certain as the reality of consciousness. It could turn out to be an illusion and it's partly an empirical question. However, I am very, and I go into this in the book, I am very unconvinced by either the philosophical or the scientific arguments against free will. I think people deny, people like Sabina, who I've been rowing with on Twitter this week, a nice way, maybe. You're a classy guy. It's more of a zeitgeist. It's just people feel.

that's how science ought to be. But, you know, we know, the more I've talked to neuroscientists, the more I've found out how little we know about the brain. You know, I think we know a lot about sort of the basic chemistry of the brain, how neurons fire, how chemical signals are sent and so on. And we know a fair bit about big bits of the brain, their function in the overall economy. What we're almost clueless on is how those big functions are realized at the cellular level.

And I'd want to know a lot more about that before I'm convinced that we can reduce everything that's going on to underlying chemistry and physics and therefore there's no free will. So I think it's an open question and I would say it seems like we have free will. And so in the absence of any empirical argument one way or the other, I think we can tentatively believe in free will. And you're right, that's an important part of addressing the problem of evil. But, well, actually, you're completely right that, you know, cancer isn't evil. It's maybe a little bit of a misnomer because the way the word is used in this context, it is often used to mean just a bad thing. It should really be the problem of evil and suffering.

But still, so I think free will can go a long way with human evil, perhaps. But really, it's naturally, natural suffering that gets me. And what I focus on in the book, actually. And so I engage a lot with the work of the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, who is reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, actually, and giving his responses. And then we're going to have a little debate on it on the unbelievable podcast. He tries to argue that there are certain good things in a universe with natural suffering, cancer, earthquakes, hurricane, that we wouldn't have in a universe without what we call natural evil. I agree with you. That's a bad word for it.

like he thinks we wouldn't have significant moral choices, like the decision whether to show courage, whether to show compassion, whether to choose to hurt or to harm. We'd just be in some kind of Disneyland with no serious moral choices. We'd be like the idle rich. So my response is this is even if he's right about that, I don't think a creator has the right to kill and maim in order to bring about these goods by.

creating hurricanes and earthquakes and so on. You know, just as, I mean, there's a classic example to very crude forms of utilitarian moral philosophy. You know, imagine we have a doctor who could kill one healthy patient to save five. You know, it gives the lungs to one, the heart to another. Well, that doctor would increase well-being by, you know, saving five lives at the cost of one. And let's pretend, you know, no one's ever going to find out about it or something. But most of us think still, the doctor is.

does not have the right to take that person's life. Similarly, I think a creator, even if they could bring about great goods by creating hurricanes and earthquakes, I don't think it would be acceptable morally for a creator to infringe our rights to life and health and security by creating natural disasters.

So, yeah, so it's an interesting take on that, I think. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling, fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, I just want to exercise the beneficence of my audience.

beseech their free will. So last time you were on, Phil, we got tens of thousands of views, but very troublingly, for me at least, only about 50%, I don't know if you can see this, only about 50% of the viewers of this wonderful life-changing podcast with you and me last time changed my life for the better, are subscribed to the channel. And so I'm asking everybody out there, if you're listening, if you're enjoying this, please do consider subscribing and leaving a comment because that really helps me get these wonderful guests like Phil and his contemporaries and colleagues like David Chalmers and Nick Bostrom and Brian Green is is coming up on the podcast, as well as David Z. Albert, philosopher of physics at Columbia is coming on. So we want to get great

episodes and this will help help me help you out there. So please do consider subscribing. So Phil, we talked about, you know, kind of this notion of free will in a universe of, you know, with a God or not. And I should say I also don't believe in, you know, many of the kind of childish conceptions of God or the white beard. You know, Yuri Gargaran, when he orbited the earth for the first time in 1961, he came back and he said, they asked him, what did you see? And he said, well, I didn't see a guy in a white beard. I'm like, well, nobody thought you'd see a guy in a white beard unless you're an idiot. But, you know, this kind of simplest, you know, I also don't believe in some of the gods that Lawrence Krause doesn't believe in. But I ask you, you know, because one of the extrapolations of what you just said, this doctor that

can save five. So let's say we've had on many, many people, including your countrymen and a fellow brilliant scientist and thinker, Tim Palmer, and we talked about the existential nature of global warming and human-induced climate change. And we'll get around to fine-tuning and climate change denialism in just a bit. But there's a strong contingent that you mentioned in the opening chapter of the book. It's called antinatalism. And Antinatalism is the movement to reduce the population of Earth in order to prevent, primarily to prevent induced climate change effects, leading to the uninhabitability of the planet and many people have proposes. I always say, well, you know, the natural conclusion of that is if it's good not to have kids, that it's better to kill everybody else, including the antinatalists. So I'm always like, you first.

how do you react to a world where that in Judaism and Christianity in Islam, I assume, is forbidden, you know, suicide and so forth. But even the notion of decreasing human population, you know, humans are inherently infinite in value in Judaism as being Batsalam and al-Akeem in the image of God, in a spark of God. So tell me, isn't there a danger of the slippery slope that you get on the antinatalism route and then it leads to, well, we shouldn't be here at all? And in fact, many people have said that. We should not be here at all. It's really interesting. Just going back to, I'll come to that in a second, but just going back to what you're saying about the old man in the sky and so on.

I mean, maybe in a sense we're not so far apart because, well, one thing, one thing I'm trying to do in this book is, you know, consider things that aren't the familiar options and just get people to think about them. And you're not going to agree with all it. But one thing I consider is religious fictionalism, the possibility of engaging a tradition, a religious practice. even without necessarily having the beliefs. And you know, religion isn't just about the beliefy bits. You know, it's about rights of passage that bring the community together, you know, and mark the seasons and the big moments of life, birth, marriage, death, coming of age, tradition, spiritual practice. And so I was raised Catholic. But the Catholicism, I suppose, of my parents, was more about community and rather than dogma. And although I didn't get confirmed, like you didn't get your bar mitzvah when you were a child um you still still though i did get confirmed

in the catholic church oh really oh okay okay okay okay i was i was a terrible i was a terrible i was a terrible i was always ringing the bell at the wrong time i still find deep meaning in in in the symbolism of christianity the the centralized inversion of worldly values that you know were identifying God, not with the king in his castle, but with the naked, executed peasant, you know, the guy who hung out with sinners and outcasts and loved his enemies and so on. So I still find great meaning in that. And I'm, you know, I'm sure similar in the Hebrew Bible, lots of these powerful symbolic meanings. But anyway, coming directly to your question. Well, that sounds almost like a more moderate form of antinatalism you were discussing there. So what I, what I

discuss in the book is even more radical the view of the anti-natalist philosopher who thinks life is not entirely meaningless, but is so meaningless that actually it's immoral to have offspring because you're bringing people into this incredibly meaningless universe. And the moral thing to do is to let the human race pass out of existence. So he's not, I don't think he's concerned with climate change, he's not just reducing the population to save the planet. He thinks this is the ethical thing. This has become a small religion in its own right, actually. There's an guy in India who tried to sue his parents for bringing him to existence without his consent. So yeah, I mean, well, what I considered like this one extreme, so you get the anti-natalist atheist view,

the view of William Lane Craig, that if there's no purpose to the universe, we might as well just rape and murder each other. He actually says, you know, do what the hell we want if there's no, it's all pointless. And then at the other extreme, again, it's all about the dichotomies for me. The other extreme, you've got the familiar secular atheist position that, you know, probably there's no point to the universe. But even if there is, it's irrelevant. You know, I make my own meaning, I make my own purpose. So the middle ground option I kind of more inclined towards is, yes, you can have a perfectly meaningful, happy life. independently of whether there's a purpose to the universe.

But if there is some kind of, as I'd argue in the book, I think there's a reason to take seriously, there is some kind of purpose or goal directedness at the fundamental level. There's maybe the possibility of having a more meaningful life. You know, we want our lives to make a difference if you could in some small way contribute to the purposes of the whole of reality. That's huge.

That's about as bigger difference as you can imagine making. So this cosmic purposivist position, as we might call it, is one way of approaching the meaning of life, conceiving of the good you do in a broader ethical project that encompasses the whole of reality. And again, you know, I'm never into dogmatically laying down the law. This is the one true way of living a life. But it's at least interesting to consider,

to enter, I'd like people to sort of entertain these alternatives to both traditional religion and the familiar secular atheist option. So, you said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. How much to talk about?

We could do many, many hours. I want to make sure to get in some questions from my audience that ask me on Twitter, where you can follow Phil as well at Philip underscore Goff with 1L and Philip. So there's a question that really kind of resonated with me based on some of the conversations I heard you with my friend Robert Cune on Closer to Truth recently. I'm talking about fine-tuning. And there's a tweet, I guess it was last week from you, that said there are many scientific papers presenting the case for fine-tuning.

This is no different to climate change denial. That's a shocking revelation. I mean, to hear you say that, really shocked me. And it's a screenshot. So I don't know if you really said that. So tell me, is there, can you explain what did you mean by the statement that it's no different than climate change denial. Well, right.

So it's important to realize what we mean by fine-tuning, or what I mean, which I think is fairly standard, is just that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain narrow range. That's the empirical datum that I'm focusing on. Now, there are other things that are more, you know, are rightly debated. For example, coming back to Sabine Hosenfelder,

she doubts that we can get a probability claim out of that. So it's a further step to say fine-tuning is improbable. Oh, how improbable that are universal allow for life. That's a further step. Now, I think you can make that step, and I get heavily into the probability theory. But that is rightly debated, and that's a perfectly legitimate debate. But if you just get a lot of people on Twitter just flatly denying any, scientifically credibility and you know and it just seems to be that there's a fairly solid empirical case.

For example, the cosmological constant, you know, that if it had been significantly bigger, no two particles would have would have ever met. Everything would have been pushed apart so quickly. So the cosmological constant measures the force that pushes apart the universe, whereas if it had been less than zero, So it's my understanding is it's very, very close to zero, very small, but not zero. If it had been negative, if it had surpassed zero and become negative, well, then it would, it wouldn't have counteracted gravity. And so the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the Big Bang. So, so there's all sorts of things you can say here.

You could say like Roger Penrose does. Well, I think, I think it's going to change. I think the physics will change and the fine tuning will disappear. I mean, that's an option, but to my mind, it's almost like artificially ramping up the standards of evidence in a way we wouldn't do in other places. Like, oh, we can't draw conclusions from fine-tuning until we've completed physics. You know, I mean, it could be we'll complete physics and the fine-tuning will go away. Or it could be there's more fine-tuning. Anyway, I've digressed there slightly.

But so there's lots of things to debate here. People who say on Twitter, I don't find scientists saying this. There was this one guy, Stenger, who used to say this, but generally, I don't find Fisda saying this, but people on social media say, no, it's all nonsense. There's no scientific case for this basic empirical datum that for life to be possible, for any kind of structural complexity is possible, these numbers, the values of the constants had to fall in a certain quite narrow range. I think that's sort of just equivalent to just denying the empirical data for ideological reasons, I think. Right. It's to think about fine-tuning. I guess some of the comments and questions that I've had have to do with the definition of fine-tuning. So depending on how you look at fine-tuning, when you go back in time, the certain problems get inextricably difficult. And there's completely intractable. I mean, if you change the density of the universe by one atom or one proton at the equivalent of, you know, one attosecond after the big bang, and you add one proton, the universe collapses. But if you add one proton today, nothing happens, right? So there's time-dependent, you know, fine-tuning, and then there's, you know, material-dependent fine-tuning.

In other words, we don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what the infloton is, or if it exists. That's actually what pays my rent around here because I'm searching for the aftershocks of inflation or its alternatives. And I guess the, you know, kind of competing theme that I keep hearing from my brilliant audience is, you know, how would you know, that your supposition is wrong. In other words, Steelman kind of the opposition to your thesis about fine-tuning. And I wonder if you could do that simultaneously with this inverse gambler's

fallacy paradox. So first, define what the gambler's paradox is, fallacy is, then define the inverse of that that you use so skillfully in a lot of your thinking and writing. And then how would you know that the supposition about fine-tuning might be wrong? Your supposition about fine-tuning. tuning would be right. So the inverse gambler stuff relates to is an important objection to the multiverse. I mean, I for a long time, I thought the multiverse was the most plausible account here. I've always thought fine tuning needed explaining, but I thought, you know, I don't, I don't want to believe in cosmic purpose. It feels as peculiar to me as, as it does to anyone else. And I used to think, oh, it's probably the multiverse. But I was just,

persuaded over a long period of time that there's that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse and and basically then that you know that there's some dodgy reason going on in huge proportion of theoretical physics potentially and you know what I'm quite excited about this book actually this is not original to me it's this has been in the the academic literature on probability for decades but in a classic case of academics talking to themselves nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy of probability, you know, despite huge interest

in fine-tuning among, you know, religious people arguing for God or certain scientists arguing for the multibers. Anyway, right, so we, people might be familiar with the gambler's fallacy that you've had bad run of luck all night and you think, well, I'm bound to have a good look this time. I'm bound to roll a double six this time because I've rolled badly all night. Everyone knows that's a fallacy because the odds of getting a double six, one in 36, the same every time it's irrelevant whether you've just started or you've been playing all night. The inverse gambler's fallacy kind of does that in reverse. So, well, the example I like to give, suppose, Brian, I, I come and visit you and we go to a, because you take me to a wonderful casino and we walk in and we see, we're in this, we walk into this small room with just one person playing roulette, and they're just having an incredible run of luck. They're just winning and winning and winning and winning.

And I say, wow, the casino must be busy tonight. And you say, what are you talking about? We just seen this one guy. What's that got to do with other rooms in the casino? And I say, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing roulette in the casino, then it's not so surprising that someone in the casino is going to have an incredible run of luck at roulette. And that's just what we've observed, someone having an incredible run of look at roulette. Now, everyone agrees that's a fallacy.

That's the inverse gambler's fallacy. Our observational evidence is this particular individual has played well. People in other rooms in the casino, it's irrelevant. That's a fallacy, everyone agrees, but it looks indiscernible from the reasoning of the multiverse theorist. You know, they observe, oh my God, the numbers in physics are just right for life. There must be lots of other universes with terrible numbers. But that is, just as our observational evidence concerns this one universe we've observed, and just as other rooms in the casino are irrelevant to the success of this one person in front of us,

so other universes are irrelevant to explaining the fine-tuning we see. That's the basic idea, but I'm sure there's lots to debate here. The multiverse, of course, you know, many of the, I recently sat down just for an informal conversation with David Albert and Columbia. And we talked about, you know, the philosophy of cosmology and how the multiverse is kind of this, this, you know, almost, you know, too good to be true solution to so many different problems in cosmology. And yet it's not necessarily mandated by any one physical theory.

it's a consequence of string theory, of M theory in some cases. But, you know, let's say we fast forward and we get a letter from God. I don't want to say God. But, you know, we get a letter and it says, you know, inflation is undetectable. And it may have happened or it may not have happened. If it happened, it may have happened in an energy scale too insufficient to create the reverberations in space time that my colleagues and I are trying to detect with the Simon's Observatory. it's so-called B mode polarization of the C&B.

But in that case, you know, where do we go? What conclusions in a universe that's potentially in a multiverse but can never be, can never be falsified to not be in a multiverse? And there are many competing theories that don't predict gravitational waves at all. Those can be falsified. Sir Roger Penrose, you know, in nearby you is a proponent of one of them. So how do you react to that, that it may never be provable? or falsifiable that the multiverse is, or let's just say inflation took place, let alone the multiverse.

Well, yeah, I mean, this is kind of outside of my prey grade, to be honest, assessing the, but one thing I do do in the book, which is extraordinarily, again, something that's never been done before, connecting up this specific objection to the multiverse, the inverse gamblers fallacy, to the scientific discussions of the multiverse. I mean, I don't know, academics just get, I'm not saying this is my brilliant. It's just how academics just get focused in such a narrow thing that they do. It's unbelievable. But anyway, I try to link it up and I try to argue that, yeah, look, I'm not a physicist.

I can't assess the inflationary case for the multiverse or not. But what I try to argue with the book, and maybe it'd take too long to go into this, people can look it up. But I try to say that even if, even if you go for the inflationary multiverse, the only way to avoid the inverse gambler's fallacy is to think all of the all or most of the universes are fine-tuned, so the problem doesn't go away. And anyway, that's what I try to show. And of course, there's issues about anthropic selection effect and so on. I mean, I go into this in great detail, but, I mean, just briefly, with the analogy we gave, you could add a little artificial selection effect, right?

Imagine as we walk into the casino, there's a hidden sniper at the back who's going to blow our brains out if the person in playing roulette doesn't have an incredible run of luck well then there's a selection effect we own we the only thing we could have observed is someone having an incredible run of luck but it's still a fallacy likewise whilst it's true that we couldn't have observed a non-fine tuned universe i don't think that makes a difference to the fallacy but anyway you know so the book goes into more more depth or less depth depending on how you want to take it and then i'm going to take one question from YouTube or Dr. Brian Keating. Also, if you're listening on the podcast app, be sure to tune in to the subscribe to the channel as well because there are many different fun things

that you get over there that you don't necessarily get on audio only. This is from Malachai Marvin. He asked, we're the ones who assign purposes to things. So I guess the real question is, do we have a use for it? How do you react to that? We, as humans, I say, are what is describing purpose. So it shouldn't the question be, do we have the right or use, or is it evolutionary or in any way contingent that we have a purpose or we can ascribe purpose? I know that's the way we tend to think of things that purpose has just come from human beings, but I suppose I'd want to ask Malachi, well, what's your argument for that? There seem coherent possibilities, or I try to lay out in great detail in the book,

coherent possibilities where there is purpose in the universe independently of human beings. I consider, for example, the cosmocycist view that the universe is itself a conscious mind with its own goals. Or if panpsychism is too wacky for you, I discuss Thomas Nagel's view in his book, Mine and Cosmos, that there are teleological laws, laws of nature with purposes built into them. and some philosophers have really spelt out a very rigorous account of this. So it seems to be coherent, and I think fine-tuning and certain facts that we haven't got into about the evolution of consciousness, I would argue give us strong reason to take it seriously. And I sort of think we're in a little bit of a bit in denial about this at the moment.

It's maybe like in the 16th century when we first started getting evidence that we're not in the center of the universe, and people struggled to accept that because it didn't fit with the picture of reality they'd got used to. And nowadays, we scoff at those people, those stupid religious people. Why couldn't they just follow the evidence? But every generation absorbs a worldview they can't see beyond. I think that's what's going on with fine-tuning now. I think future historians will look back and think, why did they just ignore this fine-tuning?

Why didn't they see? It's obviously evidence for cosmic purpose. And, you know, the wonderful thing about the time we're living in is we've got this little thing called Bayes theorem, this little bit of mathematics, which tells us how evidential support works. To my mind, a pretty straightforward application of Bayes theorem to fine-tuning spits out evidence for cosmic purpose. I just think we're in denial about it because for cultural reasons. You know, we're very well trained in the West, I think, to be alert to religious biases, maybe from a religious upbringing. And that's good. and that's good. What is not talked about very often is secular biases. Maybe there's, in a secular

worldview, certain, you know, I feel silly talking about these things. We have a word for religious, you know, intolerance. It's a religious fundamentalism. And I think that's true. And I think there is a evolutionary or maybe culturally, you know, high utility function for being very skeptical about religion because it's the best, it may be a good form of morality and ethos, but it's a horrible form of government, right? And so we interact with the government where animus politicus, as your friend Aristotle would say, right? We're political animals. But, Phil, so we should be very, very suspicious of theocracies, right? Those are really bad. But we should also have a word for the equivalent, you know, atheist, militant atheists should be atheist fundamentalism.

Yeah. I mean, we'll have to talk again about this because this is so fascinating. I would love to come on your podcast. I've had you on twice now. I've been very welcome. I've even done a trailer episode. I am throwing down the gauntlet. I would love to come on your podcast. Let's do it. Hours, maybe debate with love and comedy and a little comedy. But today we're talking. We've got to wrap up with my friend. And truly, Phil, you're such a mention. I love talking to you. I love your podcast, mine chat with,

how do you say your co-host name? I always have trouble with Keith. Keith Frankish. It's Keith Frankish. The podcast, I always say, with the lowest production values and the best best philosophy. We're too busy with kids and work to. edit videos, have we just hit broadcast and do some silly stuff and talk about philosophy. We're going to put a much to your debate with Sean Carroll, who I've often debated, and I'd love to, as I say, I'm a shameless plug for myself. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I just say very briefly, because I didn't quite explain. I talked about how physicalism can't explain stuff, but panpsychism can't. We didn't really get into that. But the debate with Sean Carroll starts off with a statement of explaining all that. So if people want to hear more about that, you can check out, which is on my mind chat channel. Well, I love that episode. And Phil, I love this book beautifully written.

And of course, academically, there's chock full of citations and some of our friends and past guests like Your Aunt Lewis and many other. Phil, thank you so much. I'm sorry it was short. We'll do a part two or I'll do a part one in your show. Have a wonderful day and night, really for you. Thanks for staying up so late and being such a wonderful guest as usual. Oh, thanks so much, Brian. It's been wonderful. Thanks having me on again.

All right, take care. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com. Only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21. enter.