I’m still in the midst of very challenging personal circumstances. But a week or so ago, I managed to keep a date with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to discuss my ‘Why?’ book at Blackwells in Oxford (it recently came our in paperback). The event was sold out and hosted by panpsychist YouTube superstar Alex O’Connor. I didn’t want to miss out on the this unique opportunity to talk to both of these wonderful people about my work. However, in hindsight, I perhaps should have postponed. I felt incredibly emotional on stage (due to my more general situation) and felt the energy sapping out of me as the event went on. I think it was probably fine (the video will go on my channel at some point) but it was a bit substandard in terms of my contribution.

We ended getting into why I’m not a Hindu, something Alex was interested in when I was on his channel recently. I thought on the train home of a better way to articulate my spiritual faith (funny that these two words aren’t combined very often…) so thought I’d share it here:

1. The Experiential Component: I take mystical experiences very seriously (and have had one myself), not just as psychological episodes but as genuine insights into the ultimate nature of reality. Maybe if it was just this, I’d be a Buddhist or an Advaita Vedantist.

2. The Intellectual Component: I think there’s evidence that the universe has a purpose: fine-tuning and more complicated stuff to do with consciousness. This was essentially the argument of my Why? book. This doesn’t fit well with Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (I debated this with two excellent Advaita Vedantists on the Panpsycast and discuss related ideas in this post). The combination of the experiential and intellectual draws me to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, because I find in this religion a mystical view of the purpose of existence. For the Eastern church, the Jesus stuff is nothing to do with someone being punished for our sins; it’s to do with God and the universe becoming one.

3. The Ethical Component: If it were just the first two things, I’d probably join the Eastern Orthodox church. But I have a few slightly heretical views, e.g. I think God is limited in power, which explains why there is so much suffering, and I believe the resurrections experiences were visionary rather than consisting in seeing and touching a body. I also think the view think the view that gay sex is sinful is false and harmful, and I don’t want to be part of a church that doesn’t have women priests. Thus, I have found my spiritual home combining the mysticism of the Eastern church with the liberal flexibility of the Anglican church. I practice in the latter but with the theology of the former. It makes me happy.

I reckon there is a huge number of people out there with this combination of views: mysticism, theism, and liberal ethics. But this kind of position isn’t represented much in the public conversation. I hope in the future to spend a lot of time representing it and further developing my own version. Indeed, I have plans on my channel for a lecture series on how the mystical traditions of Christianity offers a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, involving a range of leading thinkers. This has been slightly delayed due to my life circumstances. However, if things improve, I’ll launch this early in the new year. (Kind financial support from paid subscribers to this Substack funds this kind of thing; not a penny goes to me, in spite of recent allegations to the contrary.)

I’ve almost completely paused work for the moment. But I think I’m going to try to write on this at least once a month, if only because I helps me to feel connected to a broader community.

Finally, thanks to those who’ve sent over prayers or good vibes in relation to my challenging circumstances. Much appreciated.

As I said on my channel this week, I need to take a pause from my weekly Substack posts/YouTube videos due to challenging personal circumstances. I was just planning to post something here saying the same. But I can’t resist a sentence or two of response to Joe Schmidt, in relation to his recent miracles-based argument for Catholicism. There’s much to be said, and I hope to say more when my circumstances are better. But let me just quickly say two things:

1. One alternative explanation Joe doesn’t consider is psychic phenomena. To be clear: I’m not saying that psychic phenomena are real or probable. But I think it’s more probable that there are psychic phenomena than that Catholicism is true. If we’re going to believe in something over and and above the conventional scientific story, best to go for something that doesn’t involve a massively disconfirmed hypothesis (i.e., an all-powerful, loving God), as well as highly implausible ethical claims (e.g gay sex is sinful, it’s permissible for of an all-powerful being to torture people for eternity). I don’t know what to make of the miracle of the sun that Joe discussed in his video, but the hypothesis that one or more of the children involved had exceptional telepathic powers through which they unintentionally orchestrated a mass hallucination seems to me more plausible than Catholicism being true. (Again, I’m not saying that hypothesis is plausible, just that it’s more plausible than Catholicism).

2. I think setting aside deep moral intuitions on the basis of the evidence of miracles, as Joe and Ethan Muse seem to be doing, sets a very dangerous precedent. I’m frankly scared about where that could end up.

More on this at a later date.

I hope to be back here on a weekly basis in the not too distant future. In the meantime, prayers or good vibes would be much appreciated.

A recent post on Substack accused me in particular of being ‘deeply unethical’ for asking people to support my public work financially on Substack. Everything on my Substack is freely available, but I do prioritise paid subscribers in terms of responding to comments on articles and selecting questions for my monthly ‘Ask Me Anything.’

The excellent Good Thoughts Substack wrote a good response to the ethics of this issue, which I agree with and don’t think I have much to add to. But seeing as an accusation of profiteering has been raised, I just wanted to share very clearly that every single penny that comes from paid subscribers goes into supporting my public work, as opposed to going on nice things for me. The main expense is paying someone to edit the videos on my YouTube channel, or filming the in-person interviews. I couldn’t do what I’m doing with the channel without this kind support.

Could I not fund this out of my university salary? The post in question speculated about my salary, implying that I should surely have enough money from this. There is a relevant factor that the author of the post in question is unaware of but it’s a bit personal. What I can share is that I have young children, and I don’t think of my university income as ‘my money’ but rather the family money. Of course, I take some of the family income for fun things for myself (sometimes I have a chocolate bar, for example). But I don’t think it’d be reasonable for me to take a sizeable chunk of the family to fund my public philosophy work.

Perhaps some Substack readers will be annoyed that the money is mainly going to my YouTube channel. But I think of the two as being closely related. Often, I use the Substack to give a ‘deeper dive’ into my YouTube video for that week. And I do my monthly ‘Ask Me Anything’ response to subscriber questions on my channel. Moreover, as I talked about in this video, I have ambitions to build a more interactive philosophy community, where people feel less passive and more involved. This could be either a more interactive online space (I’ve been talking to some tech people about this) or a physical gathering which is more interactive than the usual philosophy conference. I don’t enough funds yet to realise any of this, but I see that as the direction of travel.

I’m very grateful to all the paid subscribers who kindly support me with $8 a month. I haven’t announced this yet (stay tuned!) but I have plans after the summer to start filming a 9-part lecture series, incorporating lectures from leading thinkers, which could go live early 2027. This could perhaps even involve some kind of online seminars to discuss the lectures. The more support I get from subscribers, the more I can do with this. At the same time, I will try to continue making everything freely available.

In other news, check out this week’s video on my channel ‘Is Panpsychism Debunked?’

Whether it’s financial, or subscribing, liking, and commenting, thank you for your support. I’m very grateful.

I’m going to take the rest of August of to spend time with family. See you in September, starting with…

Live discussion! I’ll be in conversation with former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams about my book Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Monday September 7th in Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford. You can get tickets here.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism.

Check out the Beliefless Spirituality Project that is currently funding my research: https://www.belieflessspirituality.com/

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

The success of natural science over the last five hundred years has been truly mind-blowing. It doesn’t follow, however, that science is well-suited to answering all questions. Sam Harris has suggested that science can answer the questions of ethics as well as our questions about the nature of reality. But like many, it seems to me that there are many ethical questions which are just not suited to being answered scientifically. There’s no experiment that will tell us whether ethics is ultimately about maximizing good consequences or about fundamental rights and duties.

It is commonly assumed that the task of explaining consciousness is scientific rather than philosophical. I think that’s half right. It’s the job of neuroscience (among other things) to establish the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), that is, to work out which physical states of the brain are correlated with which subjective experiences. We have a robust and well-developed experimental approach for answering these questions.*

However, establishing the NCC is just one half of a theory of consciousness. We also want to explain those correlation, to work out why certain physical states are correlated with experiences. As things stand, I think this is a philosophical rather than a scientific question. Philosophers have offered a number of different answers to this question. Here are three of them:

• Naturalistic dualism – A subjective experience is a very different kind of thing from a physical brain state, but the two are bound together by natural law. In addition to the laws of physics, there are fundamental psycho-physical laws of nature which ensure that, in certain physical circumstances, certain experiences emerge.

• Physicalism – Each subjective experience has a purely physical nature. Having subjective experiences – feeling pain, seeing red – wholly consists in having certain complex patterns of neuronal firing.

• Panpsychism – Each physical state has a purely experiential nature. Physical science tells us what matter does whilst leaving us in the dark about what it is. Having physical states – being negatively charged, being a certain pattern of neural firing – wholly consists in having certain kinds of subjective experience.

All of these theories are empirically equivalent: there is no experiment that can decide between them. That’s not really a surprise, as this is not a purely empirical question. It’s rather a question of why something that is publicly observable (brain activity) always goes together with something that is not publicly observable (subjective experience). This is isn’t the kind of question an experiment can answer, just as questions about the fundamental character of ethics can’t be answered experimentally.

One option is agnosticism. If we can’t decide between these views experimentally, then maybe we should simply say that we don’t know which is true. Another option is to try to decide between them on the basis of non-experimental considerations. In other words, to do philosophy.

If I don’t think explaining the NCC is a scientific question, why is my book Galileo’s Error subtitled ‘Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness’? The task of explaining the NCC is currently in the domain of philosophy. But when a broad consensus arises as to how to address a question, philosophy turns into science. The aim of my book is precisely to develop such a methodology for that bit of the science of consciousness which is currently in the domain of philosophy.

So is it the job of science or philosophy to explain consciousness? As things stand, the task of accounting for consciousness is partly scientific (establishing NCCs) and partly philosophical (explaining the NCCs). If we one day achieve societal consensus on how to address the latter half of the puzzle, the task of accounting for consciousness will move entirely into the domain of science. I think this is starting to happen, but – just as at the start of the scientific revolution – there needs to be some serious engagement with philosophy before we get there.

In other news, this week’s video on my channel is a brief discussion of the possibility that consciousness is not what we think it is.

Live discussion! I’ll be in conversation with former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams about my book Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Monday September 7th in Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford. You can get tickets here.

I need your help! To help me expand my public work, please consider become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. I always try to respond to comments of paid subscribers, and their questions are prioritised in the monthly ‘Ask Me Anything’ video on my YouTube channel.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

*Although there is little sign of consensus being achieved here, and this may be due to inherent limitations with our current experimental approach. I’ll be writing more on this soon.

Four-dimensionalists believe that reality is stretched out over time as well as space. I was born in 1978. Let’s say I die in 2058. According to four-dimensionalism, there is a Philip Goff-shaped “spacetime worm” stretched out over those 80 years. If you are in a room with me, what you will see is only one “temporal part” of that spacetime worm.

Suppose four-dimensionalism is true. A question still remains: Is that spacetime worm me? I don’t think it can be. My argument is simple:

• I am the thing that has my conscious experience.

• No spacetime worm has my conscious experience.

• Therefore, I am not a spacetime worm.

There is at least one thing I know with certainty to exist, and that is my conscious mind as it is right now. That thing which I know with certainty to exist – my conscious mind – is currently having a visual experience of a table with a laptop on it, and an auditory experience of the sounds of children playing in the street outside. I am certainly not experiencing events of my childhood or of my life at the age of sixty four.

Now consider a Philip-shaped spacetime worm which is stretched across (let’s hope) eighty or so years of time. That Philip-shaped spacetime worm is certainly not having the experience I have just been describing. If it is conscious at all it is having some kind of weird consciousness involving all of the experiences of my life. But that is not my consciousness: it is not the consciousness of the “I” which right now I know with certainty exists.

This doesn’t mean four-dimensionalism is false. Some four-dimensionalists identify an individual not with the spacetime worm but rather with a particular temporal part of a spacetime worm. This is called the “stage theory.” The thing which has my conscious experience, the thing I know with certainty to exist, is just one tiny slice of the Philip-shaped spacetime worm stretched over eighty years of time.

This is a coherent view and it might be true. But I hope to God it isn’t. Because these temporal parts do not exist for very long at all. Human-shaped spacetime worms are stretched through fairly long periods of time, enveloping many temporal parts. But the temporal parts which could be plausibly thought to have human experience last no more than one or two seconds each.

Thus, if the stage theory is correct, I won’t be around in a couple of seconds. I will be replaced by some other conscious mind which will be very similar to me, which will share my memories, but which won’t be me: the thinking, feeling thing I know with certainty exists right now. This is precisely the content of the fear of imminent death: the fear that I won’t exist in the near future. In other words, if the stage theory is true, then there is a very real sense in which everybody is about to die.

As I always say, we should be aiming not for the view we’d like to be true, but for the view that’s most likely to be true. I think the jury is still out as to whether or not four-dimensionalism is true. But until matters become clearer, I reserve my right to hope it’s not.

(This is a brief version of an argument I made in the final chapter of my academic book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.)

I was prompted to think about this because it was the first question in this month’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ on my YouTube channel, where I answer 10 subscriber questions from my Substack. It’s worth tuning in to if only because my beautiful cat Kiara makes an appearance.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Galileos-Error-Foundations-Science-Consciousness/dp/1846046017

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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I’m on holiday this week, so I’m not supposed to be working or thinking about philosophy. However, whilst singing to my daughter I uncovered something that may be of monumental philosophical importance, so I think it’s crucial I share this.

Is a parent of a teddy bear also a teddy bear? If so I think I’ve found a logical contradiction in the Teddy Bears’ Picnic song:

It says that “every bear that ever there was” is present at the picnic. But at the end of the song “their mummies and daddies” pick them up, which would seem to entail that some bears, namely the parents of those present at the picnic, were not at the picnic.

Is there any way of resolving this? Please let me know your thoughts as this really needs to be addressed.

In other news, a recent talk I did at a consciousness conference just went up on my channel. The first 7 minutes outlines my “big picture” view on the problem of consciousness. The rest is a more developed form of my argument that it’s rational to trust psychedelic experiences, exploring different theories of rationality, and raising the question of whether someone who hasn’t had such an experience should trust the testimony of someone who has.

You might be getting the impression that I’m incapable of stopping work, but I am having a lovely time hanging out on my friend George’s farm and being silly with my kids.

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT MY PUBLIC WORK FINANCIALLY IF YOU’RE ABLE.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism:

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism.

Physical science is exclusively concerned with behaviour. Physics tells us, for example, that electrons have mass and charge, and these properties are exclusively defined in terms of behaviour, things like attraction, repulsion, and resistance to acceleration. It’s all about what stuff does. As I like to put it, doing physical science is like playing chess when you don’t care what the pieces are made of; you just care what they do, so you can play the game. At higher levels, atoms, molecules, and chemical elements of various forms and either defined in terms of behaviour or defined in terms of the more fundamental components, which are then ultimately cashed out in behavioural terms of fundamental physics.

If consciousness can be fitted into that picture, then it must be because consciousness is also all about behaviour. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean feelings and experiences cause behaviour – few would deny, for example, that pain causes avoidance behaviour. The physicalist must accept a more radical claim: that having feelings and experiences wholly consists in behaviour – for someone to feel pain is just for them to behave in a certain way, or to have their parts behave a certain way. This is not “behaviourism” in the old-school sense of defining mental states in terms of sensory inputs and behaviour outputs. But it is “behaviourism” in a broader sense that involves internal behaviour of bits of the brain as they form complex causal networks. Galen Strawson calls it “neo-behaviourism,” which I think captures it well.*

My favourite form of physicalism – illusionism – embraces this in a very honest way. In so far as we think consciousness is more than just patterns of behaviour, we are subject to an illusion. This week’s video on my channel is a 7-minute solo video of me explaining why I don’t think illusionism can be true, because it clashes with what we ordinarily mean when we talk about feelings and experience.

However, the more popular physicalist response involves a more subtle way of embracing neo-behaviourism. The mainstream physicalist doesn’t claim that we define consciousness in terms of behaviour – that’s too counterintuitive. Rather, their claim is that we define consciousness by, as it were, pointing inside ourselves. Mainstream physicalists think of introspection as an evolved capacity to track certain of our internal states. It’s then the job of science to find out what we’re tracking, and it turns out to be patterns of neural firings. By analogy, we define “water” or “lightening” by pointing at the phenomenon in question, and then scientists come along and tell us we’re pointing at H₂O and electric discharge.

The problem is that introspection gives me rich understanding of what my feelings and experiences are. When I attend to my pain, I’m not just pointing inside myself: “That thing, whatever the hell it is.” A pain is essentially defined by how it feels, just as a triangle is essentially defined by having three sides. To the extent that I know how my pain feels, I know what my pain essentially is. Mainstream physicalists try avoid the counterintuitive claim of illusionists that “pain” is defined in terms of behaviour, but their own claim that when I talk about “pain” I’m just blindly pointing within myself is, to my mind, even more counterintuitive.

I’m going to set you some homework. Take a few moments to attend to one of your feelings. Then ask yourself the following two questions:

1. Do I have any positive understanding of what this feeling is, or am I just pointing inside myself at “something I know not what”?

2. In so far as introspection does furnish me with some understanding of what the feeling is, is it just a pattern of behaviour?

If you conclude that introspection reveals to you that pain is more than just a pattern of behaviour, then you have ruled out physicalism and you must turn to other options. I have heard panpsychism has a lot going for it.

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT MY PUBLIC WORK FINANCIALLY IF YOU’RE ABLE.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism:

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism.

*The technical term is “functionalism”, but in my experience, this doesn’t convey to the public that it’s all about behaviour. I find people associated it with teleology, or that the relevant functions include “producing consciousness.”

Where does mathematical knowledge come from? Plato believed that our souls existed in the realm of the Forms before we were born. In this pre-birth existence, we enjoyed direct contact with mathematical entities (e.g. numbers), with the essences of things (e.g. the Form of Justice), and with the Form of the Good, which for Plato was Ultimate Reality and the source of mathematical and moral truth. When we grasp mathematical or moral truths, we recall our pre-birth acquaintance with mathematical and moral entities. In his dialogue The Meno, Plato conveys this with a beautiful story of an uneducated slave boy being led to mathematical knowledge.

Part of the reason Plato was led to belief in our pre-existence was that his metaphysical picture was very dualistic, with the imperfect physical world on the one hand, and the perfect world of the Forms on the other. If in our current existence we are separated from mathematical and moral entities, it’s hard to explain how we know about them. Positing a pre-existent state that we can recall is Plato’s attempt to solve this mystery.

But what if Plato had held the mystical view that the ultimate transcendent entity is somehow at the core of our being, plain to behold in the right state of consciousness, perhaps when the mind is calmed through prolonged meditation? If the Form of the Good – the source of mathematical and moral truth – were located at the core of our being, and as such were accessible to the conscious mind, then we perhaps wouldn’t need to posit pre-birth acquaintance with it to explain our mathematical and moral knowledge. More would need to be said, of course, but there is the beginnings here of an explanation of our capacity to discern eternal truths of mathematics and morality.

I believe this question is not just of historical interest. Platonism, about both mathematics and morality, is a popular position in contemporary academic philosophy. And yet its proponents, in my view, dodge the epistemological question of how we know these timeless truths of morality and mathematics. They don’t buy Plato’s story of pre-birth existence but they don’t tend to offer an alternative either. The average contemporary Platonist believes three things that, whilst not strictly logically inconsistent, are very hard to reconcile:

• There is a transcendent realm of mathematical and moral entities outside of space and time.

• These transcendent mathematical and moral entities do not causally impact anything in the physical world.

• We spatio-temporal creatures have knowledge of these transcendent mathematical and moral entities.

If there is no contact between Platonic entities and our brains, how do we know about them? In contrast, for mystics who believe we have direct contact with something like the Form of the Good, our knowledge of transcendent reality is much less surprising.

Perhaps it’d be too much of a leap to argue for mysticism on the basis of our need to explain mathematical and moral knowledge. But there are many who already take mystical claims seriously, usually on the basis of mystical experiences, and I have recently been arguing that these experience-based beliefs are rationally defensible. At the very least, it would be a point in favour of a mystical conception of reality if it turned out that our mathematical and moral knowledge is deeply mysterious on a naturalistic view of the physical world but utterly unmysterious on a mystical view of reality.

I recently had a wonderful chat with the distinguished philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng that’s just gone out on my YouTube channel. Mary has very different strategy for dealing with our mathematical knowledge – mathematical fictionalism – but, as we got to at the end of our discussion, problems still remain. I raised my alternative mystical solution towards the end of our discussion – check out the discussion if you want to see whether Mary was persuaded.

It’s hard to talk about this stuff, because there is a cultural assumption that mystical claims are “woo woo” fluffy thinking that’s not intellectually serious. I believe this results from the fragmentation of the intellectual space which occurred when Galileo took consciousness outside of the domain of science to create mathematical physics. This was a good move, as it focused “natural philosophers” on a very specific task of mathematically describing the behaviour of fundamental physical entities, and this project has made extraordinary progress in the last 400 years. But this rightly celebrated success has resulted in everything outside of this narrow project being deemed unserious.

It’s time we returned to a unified worldview able to incorporate not only the claims of physical science, but also phenomena we know about in other ways: the reality of conscious experience, and the timeless truths of mathematics and morality. Accounting for our moral and mathematical knowledge in terms of the claims of mystics may turn out to be an important step in this reunification.

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT MY PUBLIC WORK FINANCIALLY IF YOU’RE ABLE.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism:

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism.

75% of Swedes are “Somethingists”. Somethingists don’t believe in the God of traditional religion but they believe in “Something,” i.e., some greater spiritual reality about which little can be said.*

In my experience, Somethingists tend to have a lot of time for Eastern religions, such as Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, but think of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) as having too anthropomorphic an idea of the Divine — “the Old Guy in the Sky.”

The irony is that each of the Abrahamic faiths has a mainstream form that teaches something very close to, perhaps even identical to, Somethingism. I am thinking of apophatic understandings of God, on which nothing positive can be said about God. God’s nature is beyond what can be captured in human language. It may even be too much of positive statement to say that God is “Something.”

Apophatic theology is not fringe. The mainstream understanding of the Divine in the two oldest, large Christian churches is essentially a semi-apophatic view of God. In the Western church, we find Aquinas’ view that we can speak of God but only by analogy. In the Eastern church, there is a distinction between God’s essence — which is utterly unknowable — and God’s energies — which are imminent and accessible.

The problem is we are living in a moment when the idea that God is just a kind of “Super-Mind” — a view that historically was fringe — has come to dominate, at least in the public understanding of the Abrahamic faiths. Brian Davies calls the “Super-Mind” view of God “theistic personalism,” in contrast to classical theism on which God is utterly simple and can be spoken of only by analogy if at all.

Thus we have a mixed-up, topsy-turvy world in which those we think of conservative religious people are in fact defending a radically new idea, and those we think of as rejecting traditional religions – the Somethingists – are actually harking back to the traditional idea of God.

All of this was really driven home to me by the interview I put out in my channel (Philip Goff Philosophy) this week with Catholic philosopher Tyler McNabb. We talked about Tyler’s fascinating short book Eastern Philosophy and Classical Theism, in which he argues that many Eastern religions, including some forms of Buddhism, believe in the God of classical theism.

I am becoming passionate about finding ways of communicating to the Somethingists that what the believe in is just what traditional religious people have believed in throughout history. More to follow.

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT MY PUBLIC WORK FINANCIALLY IF YOU’RE ABLE.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism:

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism.

*I have adopted this term from the short book Semi-Secular Worldviews and the Belief in Something Beyond, by Carl-Johan Palmqvist and Francis Jonbäck. Both this book and McNabb’s book are Cambridge Elements, which is an excellent range of short academic books.

Image: Gusatave Doré - Paradiso, Canto 34 (1868)

The 18^th century Scottish philosopher David Hume put forward a theory of human motivation that remains highly influential to this day. On Hume’s view, motivation always bottoms out in desire. Reason is merely a tool for helping us to satisfy our desires. The desires themselves – at least our most basic desires – are not subject to rational criticism. As Hume put it, ‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’

One big problem I have with Hume’s view is that the word ‘desire’ is used in different ways, and philosophers sympathetic to Hume are often unclear which they mean. Here are three different meanings of ‘desire’:

• Yearning – A conscious craving for something. In a strong form, being driven by hunger or lust. In a weaker form, feeling enthusiastic about a trip to the cinema.

• Psychological aim – A long-term decision to do something. Perhaps I have a fixed decision to volunteer every Wednesday in my neighbourhood – it’s something I ‘want’ to do – even though I don’t feel any pleasure from it and would rather be at home watching Netflix.

• Preference – The fact that one enjoys something when one does it. Often this goes along with yearning for the thing but not always. Maybe I never feel like going for a long walk but I always enjoy it when I do.

Human motivation is a mix of all three of these things. The final category of preference is especially important, as once we take on board the role this plays in motivation, the Humean dogma that motivation always bottoms out in desire collapses. This is because, in the case of preference I am essentially motivated by a fact about the world, namely that I would enjoy (for example) a long walk. But if I can be motivated by the fact that I would enjoy something, I can also be motivated by the fact that somebody else would enjoy something. If I can be motivated by the fact that something will make me suffer less, I can be motivated by the fact that something will make someone else suffer less.

Humeans insist there’s always a desire in the background. Yes, I am motivated by the fact that I will enjoy walking in the country, but that’s only because I desire to feel good. But in what sense of ‘desire’? It can’t be the yearning sense because I don’t always yearn to feel good. The Humean could postulate a ‘desire’ in the psychological aim sense: I have made a long-term decision to feel good. But I don’t see the need for a deeper level of explanation here. The bottom-line is: I went for the walk because I knew it’d make me feel good. If someone says, ‘But why did the fact that you would feel good motivate you?’, I wouldn’t say, ‘Because I’m psychologically aimed at feeling good.’ I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? There’s nothing more to be said.’

If Hume were right, then we just happen to be psychologically aimed at feeling good, whereas we might have been psychologically aimed at feeling pain all the time, or psychologically aimed at counting as many blades of grass as possible (even though this brings us no pleasure). For Hume, all of these fundamental psychological aims are rationally on a par, and the job of reason is just to tell us how best to satisfy these fundamental aims.

To my mind, the Humean view of motivation makes no sense when you think it through in this level of detail. Yes, sometimes we do things because of our yearnings, or because we’re just psychologically directed at a certain goal. But a lot of the time we pursue things because they are worth pursuing. One’s own happiness is a worthwhile pursuit. So is the happiness of others, or scientific advancement, or creativity. We are motivated by these things not because we happen to ‘desire’ them but because they are worth doing. In contrast, pursuing one’s own pain for its own sake, or counting blades of grass for the sake of having blades of grass counted, are pointless activities, which is why we tend to avoid doing them.

Welcome to moral objectivism.

In case you’re not yet convinced, here’s a 2.5 hour debate I had on my podcast (Philip Goff Philosophy) with Humean philosophy YouTuber Alex O’Connor. If you ain’t got that long, here’s a 2 minute taster of our chat.

“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Galileos-Error-Foundations-Science-Consciousness/dp/1846046017

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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I have an imaginary friend called Inverted Ian. Ian lives in a strange parallel universe in which pleasure causes avoidance behaviour and pain causes attraction behaviour. When Ian eats, drinks, or has sex, he feels terrible pain; but his pain causes him to keep doing these things (not because he has some greater goal, just because in his world pain causes attraction behaviour). When Ian’s body is damaged, e.g. by being stabbed, he feels great pleasure; but this causes him to avoid getting his body damaged. The upshot is that he behaves just like a normal human being in our world.

When I talk about Inverted Ian, I often get the response that an organism like Ian is somehow ruled by evolution. But this makes no sense when you think about it for five minutes. If we lived in Ian’s world, where pleasure causes avoidance and pain causes attraction, we would have evolved like him.

Having said that, I think there is something absurd about Ian (although don’t tell him that, because he’s quite sensitive). But the crucial question is: What is the nature of the absurdity? I want to invite the reader join me in thinking very carefully about this.

There seem to me two possibilities:

• A logical absurdity – The idea of pairing together conscious experience and behaviour in the way I’ve just described involves a contradiction. It’s like talk of square circles or married bachelors.

• A rational absurdity – The way Ian behaves is rationally absurd, in the sense that he’s doing the polar opposite of what he objective reason to do. He feels pain, that gives him a reason to avoid, but he responds by pursuing the object of his pain. He feels pleasure, that gives him a reason to pursue, but he responds by avoiding the objective of his pleasure.

Why the hell are we talking about this? Because which way you explain the absurdity reveals your philosophical commitments.

If you think Inverted Ian is a logical absurdity, then you’re an analytic functionalist, Analytic functionalism is the controversial viewpoint that feelings and experiences are defined in purely behavioural terms. When we say Sara is “feeling pain,” we’re making a claim about her behaviour or the behaviour of her inner parts.

If you think Inverted Ian is a rational absurdity, then you’re a value objectivist. You believe that pain gives one an objective reason to avoid the thing that hurts, and pleasure gives one an objective reason to pursue the thing that feels good. Of course, these reasons might be counterbalanced by other considerations, e.g. if my pleasure is going to hurt somebody else, or if my pain is going to made me fitter, but by stipulation this is not what’s going on in the case of Inverted Ian.

It follows that if you reject both analytic functionalism and value objectivism, then you can’t explain what’s absurd about Inverted Ian in either of the two ways outlined above. And, whilst there certainly is something absurd about Inverted Ian, I can’t see another way to explain what that absurdity is.

In other words, the following three propositions form an inconsistent triad: they can’t all be true.

1. Analytic functionalism is false (which is another way of saying qualia realism is true).

2. Value objectivism is false.

3. Inverted Ian is absurd.

Assuming Inverted Ian is absurd, one cannot be both a value anti-realist and a qualia realist. You have to choose.

This was the basis of the long debate I had on my channel with my fellow YouTuber Alex O’Connor. I’m trying to push Alex to choose between his correct views of consciousness and his (in my humble opinion) incorrect views in meta-ethics. Of course, there’s a danger here…he may end up with incorrect views on both! Time will tell.

Or is there a third way of understanding what’s absurd about Inverted Ian?

Or maybe there’s nothing absurd about Inverted Ian?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

If you don’t have time to watch the full discussion, here’s a two minute summary.

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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I’ve been talking a lot recently about a recent experience I had, in very controlled circumstances, using a powerful psychedelic known as 5-MeO DMT. One thing I’ve been discussing is whether it’s rational to trust the experience, i.e. to believe that things really are as they they seem to be in the experience. But actually, I’m also struggling just to pin down the content of the experience. Perhaps the most salient feature is how radically different it is from ordinary conscious experience. Almost none of our normal categories apply.

However, I’ve come to think that a lot can be learnt about the content of the experience just from this negative feature. The experience lacks the subject-predicate structure of ordinary thought and perception. Our ordinary experience presents us with objects that have properties: the ball that is red and round, the table that is brown and square. Even when we attend to experience itself, there seems to be a subject-predicate structure: there are the experiences but also the thing that has the experiences — the “I” that sees colour and feels pain.

Thus, in both cases, we find a subject-predicate structure:

• In perceptual experience of the world around, we find a distinction between objects (balls, tables) and their properties (colours, shapes).

• When we attend to our conscious experience, we find a distinction between a particular individual (the “I” that has experiences) and its properties (its feelings and experiences).

In the 5-MeO experience, in contrast, there is no subject-predicate distinction. There is no “I” that has the experience. There is just experience. Many interpret this as showing that the self doesn’t really exist, and that the 5-MeO experience is breaking through the illusion of there seeming to be a self. For what it’s worth, it seemed to me more like something real — i.e. me —was being destroyed (fortunately only temporarily).

Thus far, there is nothing in the content of the experience that implies radical metaphysics. Many physicalists hold a “bundle theory” of the conscious mind, on which the conscious mind is nothing more than a bundle of experiences bound together in some way. Just because there’s no separate thing that has the experience, it doesn’t follow that the experience couldn’t be a localised brain process in a particular individual.

But we can dig deeper. There is a more subtle form of subject-predicate structure in ordinary thought and perception: the division between what something is and that it is. If someone asks you to tell them about Santa Claus, you could describe the outfit, the job description, the jovial personality. Once you’ve given a complete description of what Santa Claus is, a crucial question remains: Does this thing exist? (In case you don’t know the answer, I won’t give any spoilers).

Things are a bit trickier when it comes to conscious experience because, as Descartes observed, one has something close to certainty that one’s own feelings and experiences exist. But I’m not talking here about what we know, but about the content of our thought. In terms of the content of my thought about my own consciousness — we’re digging deep here! — there is a subtle distinction between what my pain is (how it feels) and that my pain is (that the pain is instantiated right here and now).

Note that this is not the same as the distinction between the pain and the “I” that has the pain. Even if there is no entity separate from the pain that feels the pain, there is still a distinction between the question of what pain is and the question of whether pain is (just as there’s a distinction between what Santa Claus is and whether Santa Claus is).

In the 5-MeO experience, there is not even this more subtle kind of subject-predicate distinction. There is no distinction between what the experience is and that the experience is. Strange as it sounds, this distinction does not apply to this experience. It just makes no sense.

We are now in the land of radical metaphysics. Without the distinction between what something is and that something is, we are no longer talking about a contingent entity, about something that might or might not have existed. This connects to a familiar theme of mystics throughout history, that what is known in the mystical experience is somehow beyond being and non-being.

Of course, there is still the option of saying the experience is a hallucination. I said something about his in the public lecture I recently gave at Liverpool University, and which you can view on my YouTube channel Philip Goff Philosophy (“Is it Rational to Trust Psychedelic Experiences.”). Last week I gave a similar talk at a consciousness conference in Lugano, but which explored more theories of rational justification. This will go up on my channel soon, so subscribe if you don’t miss it!

One thing I can say for certain is that this experience is making me think. Indeed, I can’t really think of anything else at the moment. Any help making sense of this would be much appreciated!

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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Do the laws of physics rule out free will? The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell has argued for the following theses:

• If the laws of physics are deterministic, then free will is ruled out

• If the laws of physics are indeterministic, then this makes room for the reality of free will.

It’s a really interesting paper but I have some disagreements, which I would like to outline here.

A quick preliminary remark: there is a huge debate in philosophy as to whether or not human freedom is compatible with determinism (we can define determinism as the thesis that the initial state of the universe, in conjunction with the laws of nature, determine everything that will happen subsequently). Compatibilists believe is that free will and determinism can happily co-exist. Mitchell is well aware of this debate, and briefly motivates his commitment to incompatibilism: that view that if the universe is determined, we’re not really free. For the purposes of this blog post I will assume incompatibilism.

Given the assumption of incompatibilism, Mitchell argues that the way to avoid the clash between freedom and indeterminism is to embrace the indeterminism entailed by many interpretations of quantum mechanics. Now, many have pointed out that mere randomness isn’t what we need to make sense of freedom, and Mitchell acknowledges this. But he thinks that the absence of total determinism in fundamental physics provides some “causal slack” that mental processes at the neurophysiological level can then take advantage of:

“The inherent indeterminacy of physical systems means that any given arrangement of atoms in your brain right at this second, will not lead, inevitably, to only one possible specific subsequent state of the brain. Instead, multiple future states are possible, meaning multiple future actions are possible. The outcome is not determined merely by the positions of all the atoms, their lower-order properties of energy, charge, mass, and momentum, and the fundamental forces of physics. What then does determine the next state? What settles the matter?”

Mitchell’s answer to this posed question is the agency of the organism: physics leaves certain options open, the organism then decides from among those options.

It sounds intuitive, but I don’t think this strategy ultimately works. Even among indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, although the physics doesn’t conclusively settle what will happen, it does determine the objective probability of what will result from any given physical circumstance. Although we can’t predict with certainty, say, where a given particle will be located when we make a measurement, the Born rule tells us, for any given location in the universe, precisely how likely we are to find the particle in that location. It’s not determinism, but it’s not a “free for all.”

Mitchell worries that if the physics determines what I’m going to do, then I’m not really free. But physics determining the objective probability of what I will do is no less constraining. If whether I water Susan (my Madagascan dragon tree) is really up to me – in the strong incompatibilist sense – then surely the physics can’t fix how likely it is that I will water Susan. If it’s just totally up to me, then it could go either way depending on my radically free choice.

Here’s a little thought experiment to make the point clear. Take the moment when I’m about to decide whether or not to water Susan. Let’s say the Born rule determines that there’s a 90% chance my particles will be located in the way they would be if I watered Susan and a 10% chance there’ll be located in the way that corresponds to not watering Susan (obviously this is a ludicrously over-simplistic example, but it serves to make the point). Now imagine someone duplicated me a million times and waited to see what those million physical duplicates would decide to do. The physics tells us that approximately 900,000 of the duplicates will water Susan and approximately 100,000 of them will not. If we ran the experiment many times, each time creating a million more duplicates and waiting for them to decide, the physics tells us we would get roughly the same frequencies each time. But if what happens is totally up to each duplicate – in the radical incompatibilist sense – then there ought to be no such predictable frequency. The number that do and don’t water the plant should change each time, as the radically free choices of each individual varies.

In other word, indeterministic quantum mechanics doesn’t provide the kind of causal slack Mitchell is seeking. The problem is that objective probabilities constrain our choices as much as deterministic laws. After all, a deterministic law is just a law that yields an objective probability of 1 that a given outcome will occur.

All is not lost, however. I think Mitchell is conflating two claims:

• The laws of physics are deterministic

• The universe as a whole is deterministic

How could these come apart? They come apart if the laws of physics are ceteris paribus laws, i.e. laws that tell us what will happen in the absence of other causal influences. On this interpretation of physical law (defended by my colleague the esteemed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright) the probabilities yielded by the Born rule are the objective probability of what will occur in the absence of some other causal influence. Such other causal influences might include the kind of irreducible causal powers Mitchell believes reside at the level of neurobiology. Mitchell seems to be concerned to avoid a violation of the laws of physics. But if the laws of physics are ceteris paribus laws, then higher-level causal powers should be thought of as complementing the laws of physics rather than contradicting them. If physics basically tells us “X will happen unless there are some higher-level causal forces,” and X doesn’t happen precisely because there are higher-level causal forces, then nothing occurs that is inconsistent with physics.

It does not follow that there are no empirical challenges for a proponent of incompatibilist free will. Some philosophers have argued that we have strong empirical grounds for thinking there are no irreducible causal influences of the kind Mitchell believes in, that everything that happens at higher levels can be reduced to the causation we find in physics. But this is an empirical question about neurobiology. My point here is just that the question of whether the laws of physics are deterministic has no bearing on the question of whether the universe as a whole is deterministic, and hence no bearing on the question of whether or not we have free will.

Photo by Bianca Ackermann on Unsplash

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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This talk means a lot to me, but that doesn’t mean I want people to hold back from telling me why they think I’m wrong. Ultimately, I want the truth.

You can find the talk at my YouTube Channel PhilipGoffPhilosophy

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SUPPORT MY PUBLIC WORK FINANCIALLY IF YOU’RE ABLE.

Panpsychists believe that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of physical reality. Physics tells us what matter does; consciousness is what matter is. For more details, check out my TEDx talk.

Panprotopsychists believe that the intrinsic nature of matter is some completely unknown property, which they call “proto-consciousness.”* Proto-consciousness is not consciousness, but it’s somehow intrinsically suited to produce consciousness when arranged in the right way.

My former PhD supervisor Galen Strawson would rule out panprotopsychism on the basis of his intuition that you can’t get consciousness from non-consciousness. I don’t share that intuition. I don’t see why there couldn’t be a property that isn’t consciousness but that makes consciousness. I don’t think we have any positive conception of what proto-consciousness would be, but we can’t rule it out on a priori grounds. As Joe pointed out at the start of our chat, my earliest publications involved arguing against Galen on these issues.

My case for panpsychism is rather on simplicity grounds: I think it’s the simplest way of bringing together what we know about consciousness from the inside and what we know about physical reality from experimental science. I’d rank the various theories of consciousness as follows, from the least probable to the most probable:

• Physicalism: 5% chance of being true - IMHO physicalism makes zero sense once we’re thinking of the problem of consciousness in the right way. The only reason I give it any chance of being true is that many intelligent and thoughtful philosophers think it’s true, and so that in itself gives me some reason to think I’m getting something wrong in my evaluation of it.

• Dualism: 15% chance of being true - Dualism is a coherent option. But dividing reality into two completely different kinds of thing is a huge cost in terms of Occam’s razor. Why believe in two kinds of thing if you can account for all the data with only one?

• Panprotopsychism: 25% chance of being true - Panprotopsychism shares the simplicity and elegance of panpsychism. There’s just one kind of stuff: physics tells us what it does, proto-consciousness is what it is. But we have no idea what that stuff is. Why go for mystery if you don’t need to?

• Panpsychism: 55% chance of being true - Panpsychism is simple, elegant, and avoids unnecessary mystery.

I spend so much time defending panpsychism because I believe it’s the most probable theory. But I wouldn’t say I believe panpsychism, because I think of “belief” in something as high confidence that it’s true (70-80%). If you want to know what I do feel confident enough to say I believe it, it’s the disjunction of panpsychism and panprotosychism, i.e., the theory that one or other of these theories is true. I usually overlook this nuance in YouTube interviews, because it’s getting a bit too into the weeds for what most channels are looking for, but I’m glad it came out in my more in depth chat with Joe.

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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*There is one form of panprotopsychism that makes a positive claim regarding the nature of proto-consciousness: panqualityism. For more on this view, see my interview with Sam Coleman on my channel PhilipGoffPhilosophy.

I’m starting to think most of the debates in philosophy bottom out in Mike Huemer’s theory of the basis of knowledge that he calls phenomenal conservatism. In the latest video on my YouTube channel (PhilipGoffPhilosophy), Mike and I discuss whether morality is objective. I bet that whether or not you agree with what we’re arguing depends on whether or not you accept phenomenal conservatism. To confirm/disconfirm this hypothesis, I’d be genuinely interested to know whether:

1. You’re sympathetic with phenomenal conservatism and you agree with our claims in this video about the objectivity of morality.

2. You’re sympathetic with phenomenal conservatism but you disagree with our claims in this video about the objectivity of morality.

3. You strongly disagree with phenomenal conservatism but you nonetheless agree with our claims in this video about the objectivity of morality.

4. You strongly disagree with phenomenal conservatism and you disagree with our claims in this video about the objectivity of morality.

Let me know in the comments which category you fit into and why!

My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765

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*Edit on May 12th, 2026 - We have added a bit to Sect. 3.2, where we consider Joe’s objection about reordering our evidence.

I recently had a lovely chat on Joe Folley’s channel (will be out May 10th). The final thing we focused on was my recent Substack article, ‘What if the Quran is Written into the Big Bang?’. I’d already seen Joe’s response on Substack and had a counter-response prepped. However, Joe pointed out that I’d misunderstood his point, which rendered my counter-response obsolete. Was Joe right?? In the heat of the moment, I was caught without a response!

Actually, I don’t mind being wrong. I do my best to follow the arguments where they lead. At the end of the day, I want the truth more than I want to be right. But after the interview, I had a little chat with my good friend Miles Donahue, who persuaded me Joe’s response doesn’t work after all. What follows is a post that is mainly written by Miles, with a bit of fiddling by me (Miles also wrote the subtitle to this post entirely by himself).1

Let me know what you think, but not before you subscribe to Miles’ excellent Substack and YouTube channel!

Your faithfully, Philip Goff.

Turns out God Exists After All

At the core of the fine-tuning argument (FTA) for theism lies two claims: first, that fine-tuning is vanishingly unlikely if naturalism is true, and second, that fine-tuning is far, far more likely if theism is true.

The first claim states that various features of physics are vanishingly improbable if we suppose that they have no deeper explanation, that they are brute facts.2 Various free parameters appearing in our best theories of physics are fine-tuned for life in that the range of life-permitting values for these parameters is extraordinarily small compared to the possible range of values. Those parameters take two forms: the initial conditions of the universe (basically, how the universe started out), and the physical constants featuring in various equations of physics (these typically determine particle masses and force strengths).

It is a (relatively) uncontroversial finding of science over the last fifty years that if any of these parameters differed slightly from their actual values, the universe would no longer permit the existence of life. Often, changes to the constants would destroy all complex structures whatsoever, not merely life. So, for instance, if we change the value of the cosmological constant too drastically, then either the universe expands too rapidly for planets, stars, and galaxies to form, or it collapses back in on itself shortly after the Big Bang. In neither case could life evolve. So, the first claim of the FTA is that, if we assume that these parameters values have no deeper explanation, it is vanishingly unlikely that they would have ‘landed’, so to speak, on life-permitting values. If the entire universe were a dartboard, and a single proton were the bull’s-eye, the claim that life-permitting physics happened by chance is even worse than the contention that a randomly thrown dart would land precisely on the proton-sized bull’s-eye.

The second claim is that if instead we suppose that theism is true, life-permitting values for the constants become far more likely. A perfectly good God would not be terribly unlikely to want a universe that allows for embodied conscious agents (to use a phrase from Robin Collins). But then, if we grant these two claims, it follows that fine-tuning is strong evidence for theism over naturalism. This follows in short order from the general principle that where some data point x is more likely or expected given hypothesis A than hypothesis B, then x is evidence for A over B.

Now, one common objection is that talk of ‘probability’ in this context makes no sense, because we only have one universe and one set of constant values and initial conditions. So, how can we claim that life-permitting values for these parameters are unlikely given naturalism? Only if we could survey lots of different universes and compare the ratio of life-permitting ones to the total number could we make any sort of probability claim. The naturalist should instead say that, given our ignorance about what processes might have led to the parameters taking their values and our lack of any sort of sample of universes, we cannot make any probability claims one way or the other.

There are, we maintain, three problems with this objection.

1. It misunderstands the kind of probability at play in the fine-tuning argument

There are different kinds of probability. Many interpretations of quantum mechanics ascribe objective chanciness to the world: it is genuinely open, say, where a particle will be when it is observed, and the Born rule assigns probabilities to a range of a different potential locations.

But not all legitimate talk of probabilities has to do with objective frequencies of outcomes, and the probabilities at play in Bayesian reasoning are epistemic. They represent the appropriate degree of confidence in a proposition relative to evidence or to certain hypothetical assumptions. Consider the following claims:

1. Our evidence makes the theory of evolution highly likely.

2. The general theory of relativity is almost certainly correct.

3. There is virtually no chance that quantum mechanics will turn out to be entirely incorrect.

In each case, one is making a probability claim, but not one grounded in frequencies or objective chances. To assert (1), for instance, is not to claim that in the majority of actual universes with our evidence, the theory of evolution is also true. Instead, we mean that, given our evidence, our degree of confidence in evolution’s truth is high - or, equivalently, that our evidence supports or entails evolutionary theory to a high degree. None of these probability ascriptions require frequencies of outcomes among multiple worlds or universes.

To illustrate: suppose you are given two possible answers to a math problem and asked to determine which is correct:

Even before you begin solving the relevant equation, the epistemic probability, for you, of either answer is 50%, despite the fact that you know that only one answer is mathematically possible. This provides a nice illustration, we think, of the way in which epistemic probabilities are measures of uncertainty about what is true.

So, when the fine-tuning advocate claims that naturalism makes the life-permitting parameter values highly unlikely, they mean: if all one knows is that naturalism is true but does not know the values of the constants, they ought to think it highly, highly unlikely that those values will turn out to be life-permitting ones, once they go to investigate. There are, after all, just such a huge range of non-life-permitting values by comparison, and one has no reason to expect any particular value over any other, given naturalism.3

2. Scientists make these kinds of claims all the time.

Our second response is that skepticism about probabilities for initial conditions undercuts many probabilistic claims that physicists themselves make. Should we really think, for example, that the problem of the universe’s initial low entropy is solved, or at least neutralized, by our inability to make probability ascriptions to initial conditions? Surely not. Or again, many physicists think that inflationary theory’s ability to explain the flatness of our universe is a huge reason in its favour. Why? Because, in pre-inflationary cosmological models, the flatness of space is enormously improbable, requiring exquisite fine-tuning of initial conditions to achieve.

Do we really want to say that all these physicists are involved in a senseless activity? We suspect opponents of the fine-tuning are slightly less skeptical of what these physicists are doing than they are of people trying to argue for God on the basis of fine-tuning. But if you think that we can’t assign probabilities to the fundamental constants having the values they do, and hence that it’s senseless to try to explain fine-tuning, then, to be consistent, you ought to think we can’t assign a probability to the initial state of the universe having low entropy, and so it’s also senseless to try to explain this.

3. π in the sky: A decisive counterexample

There is a way of pressing the objection Philip was getting at it in his ‘Qur’an written in the Big Bang’ thought experiment that avoids Joe’s objection altogether. We call it ‘π in the sky.’

Imagine that when scientists recorded the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and translated them to binary code, they found the first thousand digits of π inscribed within repeating again and again:

We do not need to think that this is evidence for theism, or for a designer.4 What we can say is that this particular initial condition has an enormously low probability given that it came about by chance (or, equivalently, that its existence is a brute fact). This would need explaining, and just saying, ‘Ah well, we cannot determine anything about this outcome because probabilities cannot possibly attach to initial conditions,’ would not cut it. (For what it’s worth, some cosmologists themselves have suggested this would be powerful evidence for a Supreme Being). Even if one thinks that this outcome is evidence for some deeper dynamical or physical theory that would generate this arrangement, that very contention just is the claim that the probability of this arrangement given ‘deeper physics’ is higher than that probability given ‘brute facts’. Joe’s objection would not allow one to make even those claims.

Consider again the query motivating this paper: we only have one universe, so in what sense can our cosmic initial conditions be deemed ‘improbable’? The answer: we can deem it epistemically improbable. The low probability reflects the huge range of possibilities left open against a background that includes knowledge of naturalism alone. Imagine that you are asked to guess what patterns might emerge in the CMBR, prior to investigation; you would, reasonably, have a very low degree of expectation that, whatever the ultimate fluctuations, they would form a mathematically significant outcome. There are just so many more conceptually possible arrangements of temperature fluctuations that yield nothing meaningful. We do not need more than one universe to make that claim because it is a claim about the degree of evidential support or rational expectation between two propositions:

1. The CMBR is a brute fact.

2. Temperature fluctuations in the CMBR encode the digits of π.

We do not need to observe more than one CMBR to see that the likelihood of (2) given (1) is extraordinarily low, such that we ought to prefer any non-chancy theory that renders (2) more probable: a dynamical law, design, or whatever.

Objection #1: π in nature

We want to address a possible misunderstanding, which Philip says came up in a recent chat in the pub he had with Joe and Alex O’Connor. Any time there is a circle in nature, π will, in a sense, appear; π is just the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The equations of motion for a simple pendulum, for instance, involve 2π because its motion is mathematically analogous to circular motion. Or waves in the sea. Or an object attached to an ideal spring. Periodic motions like these will often involve π in their mathematical representation. But none of that is analogous to a physical system encoding the first thousand digits of π. The difference is between (i) π showing up in the mathematical representation of a system’s motion, and (ii) the digit sequence of π showing up in the structure of a physical system distributed throughout space (or through time). Crucially, in the latter case we are dealing with a correlation between two completely independent facts. That’s why (ii), unlike (i), needs explaining.

A more interesting example comes from a phenomenon where certain idealized systems of colliding masses can reproduce the digits of π in the number of collisions between them. The critical point, however, is this: this is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It only happens for frictionless, perfectly elastic systems with masses of two colliding objects set on the exact right trajectory in the exact proportion of mass to one another. That is, for it to occur in the actual world and not merely on a computer program would require pristine design. It does not occur naturally. So, far from refuting our point - that upon observing π etched into the CMBR, we ought to infer that it was not merely a brute fact - this example supports it: if you ever observed a system of perfectly elastic colliding cubes spelling out π, you should infer that it was not naturally occurring, but instead, almost certainly designed.

Objection #2: Reorder the evidence

In a similar fashion to how Joe replies to Philip’s thought experiment about the Qur’an being written into the big bang, maybe Joe could contend that we ought to take the precise temperature fluctuations in the CMBR as background information (B), and then take as our evidence our discovery of π (A). Where ‘N‘ is naturalism and ‘T’ is theism, Joe could maintain the following:

In that case, he can recover the intuitive confirmation for theism that comes from discovering π in the CMBR (or at least, the low probability of that outcome given naturalism), without having to ascribe an epistemic probability to the initial cosmic state itself.

We have two replies. First, this revision does not reflect the actual order in which we receive our evidence in the thought-experiment. Per the scenario, we already know π’s value, and only then discover that the initial conditions feature this mathematically significant arrangement. The more faithful representation of our epistemic situation is then:

It is true that Joe can reason as if we discovered the evidence in a different order; but that re-ordering does not reflect our actual evidential circumstances. We already know π’s value, so for us, it is in the background. The relevant piece of evidence is then B, the structural properties of the CMBR, and that is the fact that is so surprising given naturalism. Joe’s reordering risks just changing the subject.5

Second, Joe’s reordering strategy fails to capture the relevant improbability in discovering π in the CMBR. Think of what P(A|B&N), Joe’s preferred probability, represents: the probability that humans would discover π, given naturalism and knowledge of the universe’s initial state. Why in the world would that probability be particularly low? Humans have displayed the requisite cognitive prowess to discover various mathematical constants and other mathematical structures, to develop the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and so on. It is not surprising at all that they should eventually discover π. And yet, if scientists discovered π etched into the CMBR, we would be shocked. And why? Because that precise initial state is just so improbable given naturalism.6

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