John Leslie on Infinite Minds
Does reality consist of an infinite collection of infinitely knowledgeable minds?
My book Infinite Minds develops a creation story first told by Plato
and nowadays fairly influential. A divine mind, or the entire cosmos,
exists simply because that's good, i.e., ethically demanded or required.
Plato saw that you can never get rid of facts about logical possibilities.
It is necessarily and eternally real, for instance, that turnips aren't
contradictions like married bachelors, and that twice five turnips would
be ten. Similarly, it may be necessarily and eternally real that the
absence of an evil cosmos, a cosmos of pure torment, is ethically
required, and that the presence of a supremely good cosmos is required as
well. Now, although logic could never prove it, a supremely important
ethical requirement might itself have creative success.
What would give it this success? Nothing. Compare how no cogwheels or
acts of will "give" to various afterimages of bright lights, red
afterimages for example, their power to be similar in colour. They just
are similar, and that's that. Either supreme ethical requiredness can
ensure the existence of the ethically required reality, or else it cannot
— and that's that. Neither alternative would be simpler than the other.
Neither would involve creative machinery puffing and whirring, or deities
and demons engaging in struggles of creative and annihilatory willpower.
If Plato was right, then why does there exist anything but infinite
divine thinking, knowledge of everything worth knowing? Well, perhaps
there in fact exists nothing else. As Spinoza and other pantheists
realised, we and all the intricately structured things in our universe
could simply be elements in the intricately structured thought of a mind
worth calling "divine". Knowing everything worth knowing, that mind would
contemplate all the details of our universe, and its contemplation of them
could be what our universe actually is. Physicists investigate only the
world's structure. Why not believe that the stuff which is structured is
infinite divine thinking?
The parts of a divine mind would be fully unified. That's to say, they
would have the kind of unity-despite-complexity that physicists now hope
to exploit in so-called "quantum computers". [My book has some discussion
of that, and of the unity found in our own complex conscious states.] Yet
although in this way unified, any such mind could contain countless other
universes as well as ours. The idea that there exists more than one
universe is common in today's journal of physics and cosmology. Also,
while Einstein could be correct in thinking that the dead "are still in
existence back there along the fourth dimension", people might in addition
have experiences that continued onwards "miraculously" after their bodies
had died, experiences in which they came to share more and more of the
wonders of infinite thought. To a pantheist, after all, a miracle would be
just a divine mind's thinking about events not obeying the laws familiar
to us. Now, why ever shouldn't it think about them? Mightn't it even have
a duty to think about them? A divine mind wouldn't automatically have a
right to let somebody's life come to an end, simply because the life in
question was just part of the mind's own thinking.
On the principle that you can never have too much of a good things,
reality could very well consist not just of a single infinite mind, but of
infinitely many. Even so, this situation wouldn't be "perfect" in such a
way that the ethical need for one thing never overruled the ethical need
for another. Pantheism, the belief that nothing exists except divine
thinking, doesn't deny the facts recognized by science and by common
sense, such as that our efforts can affect the world well or badly. If our
universe is an ingredient in divine thoughts that are infinitely worth
having, then why does it contain toothaches? Answer: because divine
knowledge is better through not having gaping holes in it, holes
corresponding to such things as knowing just how it feels to be a human
with a toothache. Yet this doesn't deny that there are good reasons for
visiting dentists. Even inside an infinitely good reality, local benefits
would be worthwhile.
Isn't all this too much like a belief in Father Christmas? Not if you
see problems in such matters as why any world exists, why our world obeys
the laws of physics, and why our cosmic environment seems "fine tuned" for
the evolution of intelligent life. [My book Universes, and my edited
volume Modern Cosmology And Philosophy, were largely concerned with the
third of these problems.] Well, a platonic approach can provide answers to
them—and it's hard to see what else can. And if such an approach is
right, then reality presumably consists of an infinite collection of
infinitely knowledgeable minds.
John Leslie
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