Psychophysical Harmony

I wanted to write about the argument from psychophysical harmony against naturalism, even though it has no force for those like me who think that talk of qualia and phenomenality in general is confused. For the argument to make any sense at all, we will first have to assume that such considerations as the Knowledge Argument (i.e. the Mary's Room thought experiment from Frank Jackson) have persuaded us that physicalism is inadequate for the task of accounting for phenomenal experience. The argument from psychophysical harmony then goes farther, suggesting that there cannot be any sort of neutral natural explanation at all for the mysterious appropriateness of our experience in representing the physical world. Instead we might need to invoke God, or if not God then perhaps some other benevolent purposeful force or principle such as John Leslie's axiarchism.

Strong Emergence and Free Will

In this post I will discuss whether the idea of strong emergence can help us to make sense of free will and a few related issues. These ideas have been on my mind lately largely due to the above discussion, but I've been thinking about this for a while.

More on Fine-Tuning from Philip Goff

Philip Goff

To follow on from my previous post, Philip Goff has now released a preview of an academic paper in progress on this topic. Currently titled "Is the Fine-Tuning Evidence for a Multiverse?", this paper is a defence of the very same Roger White paper I had been critiquing, and the main argument it tackles relates to some points I made.

I thought I should give my take, but before I do I'll note that I'm not sure if the paper preview link may become stale at some future date or if the paper may be revised in ways that make my comments obsolete. In any case, if you're interested, you should read the paper and my previous post if you haven't already.

On Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse

The Fine-Tuning Problem

I've been thinking a lot lately about the problem of fine-tuning and how it may or may not be resolved by appeal to a multiverse. This has been prompted by recent correspondence with the philosopher Philip Goff and by the book I am currently reading, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I hope to get around to discussing Deutsch's ideas in future, but for now I'm focusing on an argument put forth by Roger White and endorsed by Goff.

The fine-tuning problem is just that the laws of physics describing the universe seem to be fine-tuned so as to allow life to exist. While trying not to be too parochial in our assumptions about what life requires to exist, at least in a universe even vaguely like ours, it seems reasonable to assume that it must at least have time and a stable environment in which to evolve, access to sources of energy and a varied assortment of building blocks from which to assemble itself.

But if the physical constants were slightly different, then perhaps stars, heavier elements or atoms could not have formed. Perhaps the universe would never have expanded from its initial hot, dense state, or would have recollapsed too quickly, or perhaps it would have expanded too quickly for particles to come together at all. When we say the universe appears to be fine-tuned, we are claiming that it appears to be delicately balanced so as to allow complex evolving self-replicators (i.e. life) to exist -- that almost any tweak we imagine to the constants or the laws of physics would result in a simpler, lifeless universe. This curious observation seems to demand an explanation.