WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Today, I am hosting the British philosopher Philip Goff, a professor at Durham University in England. He is a strong proponent of panpsychism, which the New Oxford American Dictionary defines as, "The doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness." [...]

At some point in the book, you address the issue of fine-tuning, that the constants that determine the strength of the fundamental forces of nature and other physical properties of matter appear to be selected to ultimately allow for life to emerge in the Universe. Tweak the strong force coupling constants and you won't have stars. Without stars there is no life -- no us, no purpose. Physicists try to get around this by assuming the existence of unified theories that preselect those values, for example, the multiverse in string theory. (In fact, one colleague even claimed that if you don't want God, you had better have the multiverse!) How do you respond to this? Another possibility is that the whole fine-tuning debate is a straw man argument. Who says physics should be able to derive the values of the fundamental constants of nature? (See my book A Tear at the Edge of Creation for an expanded critique of unification and fine-tuning.) It may very well be that these values are simply part of the alphabet of physics, measured quantities we use to build our descriptions of natural phenomena. In other words, maybe we are asking physics to do something it's not cut out to do. And when we do that, we end up needing to add purpose to physics, which is not a necessary part of it.

This isn't controversial physics. But I think as a society, we are in denial about its evidential implications, because it doesn't fit with the picture of the Universe we have gotten used to. It's a bit like in the 16th century when we started to get evidence that we weren't in the center of the universe, and people struggled with it because it didn't fit with the picture of reality they had gotten used to.

Ultimately, we face a choice. Either it's just an incredible fluke that the numbers in our physics are right for life -- an option too improbable to take seriously -- or the relevant numbers in our physics are as they are because they are the right numbers for life; in other words, that there is some kind of directedness toward life at the fundamental level. That's weird, and not how we expected science to turn out. But we should follow the evidence where it leads, without being influenced by our cultural prejudices.

For many, there is a third option: the multiverse. And for a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of fine-tuning. But over a long period of time, I was persuaded by philosophers of probability that the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse commits the inverse gambler's fallacy.

Imagine we walk into a casino and in the first small room we see someone having an incredible run of luck. I turn to you and say, "Wow, there must be lots of people playing in the casino tonight." You're baffled, so I explain, "Well, if there are thousands of people in the casino tonight, it's not so surprising that someone will have an incredible run of luck, and that's just what we've observed." Everyone agrees that's a fallacy -- the inverse gambler's fallacy -- as our observational evidence concerns the good fortune of a particular individual, and the number of people elsewhere in the casino has no bearing on how likely it is that this particular person will play well.

This flawed reasoning is indiscernible from that of the multiverse theorist. Our observational evidence is that this universe is fine-tuned, and the number of other universes that are out there has no bearing on how likely it is that this universe is fine-tuned.

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