Article Fine-tuning points towards a cosmic purpose (Philip Goff interview)

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https://iai.tv/articles/fine-tuning-poin..._auid=2020

INTRO: Once ridiculed, panpsychism – the idea that all matter has some degree of consciousness – has gone mainstream. Philip Goff, one of the main defenders of panpsychism, now turns his attention towards another taboo question: does the universe as a whole have a purpose? In this interview, Ricky Williamson asks Goff how to make sense of fine-tuning, and what role psychedelics and mystical experience might have in coming to view the universe as a conscious mind.

EXCERPT: [...] In your upcoming book 'Why?: The Purpose of the Universe', you argue that the universe has a purpose, and it seems a lot rides on your ideas around cosmological fine-tuning. If the strength of gravity was slightly different, or the mass of an electron, life could not have arisen in our universe - it appears to us then the universe is fine-tuned for life. I think most people dismissed the problem of cosmological fine-tuning when they dismissed the idea of God. Why the focus on fine-tuning? And why is fine-tuning not explained by the idea of a multiverse, where you'd expect one of many (many) multiverses to be able to support life?

Humans always think they’re at the end of history. Before the scientific revolution in the 16th century, people thought Aristotle had basically got everything sorted, including that the Earth was in the centre of the universe. They thought they had it all figured out! And as the evidence against this Earth-centred model of the universe began to mount, people struggled to accept that this version of reality no longer explained the data.

Today, popular science programs regularly scoff at our ancestors’ foolish inability to follow the evidence where it leads. But every generation absorbs a worldview they struggle to see beyond. I believe we’re in the same situation now with respect to fine-tuning. People are ignoring the evidential implications because it doesn’t fit with the picture of the universe we’ve got used to.

I used to go for the multiverse explanation myself. But I became convinced by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse commits the ‘inverse gambler’s fallacy.’

Suppose you and I go to a casino tonight, and the first person we see is some guy having an incredible run of luck, winning time after time. I turn to you and say, ‘Wow, there must be lots of people playing in the casino tonight.’ Naturally you’re baffled by my comment and request clarification on how I reached that conclusion, to which I reply, ‘Well, if there were few people in the casino, it’d be highly improbable that someone in the casino would have an incredible run of luck. But if there are a huge number of people in the casino, it’s not so improbable that, by chance, someone would win big.’

Now, everyone agrees that this is a fallacious inference: We’ve only observed this one guy, and the number of people elsewhere in the casino has no bearing on whether the one guy we’ve observed will roll well. I think the multiverse theorist is making exactly the same flawed inference. All we’ve observed is this one universe. And whether or not there are other universes out there has no bearing on whether the one universe we’ve observed is fine-tuned... (MORE - missing details)

RELATED: Could the 'fine-tuned universe' itself be an illusion or bogus conclusion?

[Magical Realist]

Fine-tuning argument goes like this: what are the chances that conditions were eventually just right for the emergence of life and consciousness?

Answer: 100% since they have in fact emerged. If the conditions weren't right, we wouldn't be around to know it.

[confused2]

At the moment we don't know why (say) the mass of an electron is what it is or why the gravitational constant has a particular value so we assume these values could be different. If it turns out the physical constants have no alternative values then most of the lottery element is removed. There's no 'reason' for the numbers to be compatible with life but they are and that's it.

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Maybe the two aren't so much a coincidence, with a conference going on. Of course, just because the video release is hours recent doesn't mean the interview is. Latter could date back to June.
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(Sep 14, 2023) Geraint Lewis: Physics of Fine-Tuning
https://youtu.be/boR2N9Yfasg

INTRO: Geraint F. Lewis is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, part of the University of Sydney's School of Physics. He is best known for his work on dark energy, gravitational lensing, and galactic cannibalism, the study of galaxies which collide and absorb parts of each other.​

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Geraint, we're here at the Conference of Physics of Fine-Tuning, in Crete. It's a great place to be. I've followed fine-tuning for many decades and in the past. It's been a few physicists, but mainly philosophers, some theologians, interested in the topic. Why do we see now fine-tuning become an interest for mainstream physicists of a broad variety?

I think what's happened is there's been a bit of a change in asking the question "what is science?". What is physics, what is physics for? And a lot of the time people tell you physics is for describing the universe we see around us. But a lot of our current theories seem to have not a single description of the universe within them.

So it's not like you can write down your equations and out pops the universe in which we inhabit. There seems to be all these potential universes. So the question has evolved from can we describe the universe we have, to why do we have the universe we have, and why does it have the properties that it has. And this has become very mainstream, because this notion of these different kinds of universes are popping out of our latest theories that we're trying to use to unify gravity with particle physics, etc.

[...] What's coming out is the possibility of multiple universes from various ways. Through inflation theory to a string theory. With a very large number 10 to the 500 supposedly number of possibilities...

[...] Once you get inflation, it's very difficult to get it to stop. So the general idea now is that we have this eternally inflating universe. Inflation starts, inflates forever, but every so often a patch has inflation come to an end and you produce a universe. And the question is what kind of properties does that universe have, and if you talk to the particle physicists, and those working in M Theory, it's a whole range of different kinds of properties. In terms of the fundamental constants that guide that universe. And when we look at these universes in detail, we find that the vast majority of them should be dead and sterile. There should be no complexity, no sort of potential to form life...

[...] There definitely has been a shift over the last decade or two, with regards to this. It was a few mavericks at the start, who've thought about these ideas, but the fact that the overall scientific question has gone towards M Theory and multiverses (cosmological inflation), and all this kind of stuff... then fine-tuning just naturally appears in that. It wasn't anticipated, but it seems to be the solution to the problems...

Closer To Truth ... https://youtu.be/boR2N9Yfasg

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/boR2N9Yfasg