I've just completed viewing all 290 episodes of this long-running philosophical discussion series. It was a four-month undertaking - watching and absorbing nearly 130 hours of video. Having invested all that time, I now feel a need to react by way of offering a review of sorts, pointing out "the good, the bad, and the ugly", and also by way of injecting some commentary on selected elements of the content.
I started here by presenting the slick one-minute introductory and promotional video at the top of this post. Well done, but perhaps promising more than can be delivered. After all, the goal is no less than attempting to explore, in depth, the biggest questions of reality. Can't get much more ambitious than that. These are questions that the world's greatest thinkers have been pondering for nigh onto three thousand years without great concurrence (perhaps without real progress).
It's a good quality effort. The majority of the episodes, at least, are definitely worth the time. It's a pretty level-headed attempt, and a true passion of the series' host, who is also its executive producer, Robert Lawrence Kuhn. He summarized his 'mission' succinctly during the series' first season (2008). It appears at the end of the 13th and last episode of the season, an exploration of the idea or reality of God titled "Does God Make Sense?", and it was the summary statement at the end (see minute 25:15). Speaking about how the best arguments for and against the existence of God both contain "circularities, endless regressions, dead ends." He goes on to say:
“Many people seem certain of their beliefs. I wish I were certain. (Switching to a sing-song voice:) I may continue lurching and lapsing in my beliefs. (Changing to a firm assertive voice:) But I will never cease wondering, striving, searching. (Passionate voice) My search is what this entire series is all about—an exploration of Cosmos, Consciousness, and God. (Finally trailing into a workmanlike tone for the tag line) For me, for now, passionate uncertainty … is Closer to Truth.”
The tone and emphasis of that last sentence was of special interest to me. His passion is obvious and laudable. But he is no real fan of uncertainty as an intrinsic part of physical reality (e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) or as inherent logical, philosophical, and even mathematical attributes of the realm of the abstract.
Quite the contrary. He was using the term in a very different sense as he crafted the summary of the episode such that the title would come out as the very last words spoken—something that he makes a point of finding a way to do for each and every episode.
The structure of most episodes is designed to highlight philosophical friction points--a sort of humanized version of uncertainty. He loves to juxtapose these arguments - the more passionate the better. That is what he means by that last sentence in the quote.
I would hope to see him explore the far deeper philosophical concept of ‘big U’ uncertainty itself, the underlying fundamental physical superposition of contradicting descriptions of the world (like wave-particle duality), which I call 'big P Paradox'. But no. He always dismisses this intrinsic uncertainty - never delves into it. His bias is one that most scientists and philosophers share, and that human curiosity craves almost like a drug. He is still looking for the 'bedrock' underlying reality. He uses that word frequently. He seems blind to that alternative view of physical and abstract 'Truth' that insists that there is no such bedrock (implicitly, fundamentally, not even in principle).
So, the series sticks to the goal of pursuing ‘Truth’ through interviews and conversations with some of the best thinkers of the day. He moves back and forth across the gulf on both sides of an issue, contrasting a diverse array of seemingly competent and coherent arguments on each side, and leaves it at that. Think of a man standing on a bulkheaded shoreline before a raging chaotic sea, pondering its fury (that intractable gulf between the opposing positions), and yet never once appearing to consider actually jumping in to experience it - to seek to come to terms with it.
The strength of this series, and the reason I strongly recommend it to others, is the quality of the people he interviews. There are exceptions. He countenances a few crackpots, but I won't name names. The greatest weakness of the series comes out when Kuhn can’t help but inject his personal biases, which are most evident in the topics of Consciousness and God. I note that quite a few of the episodes are 'funded in part by' the John Templeton Foundation, which has a distinctly spiritual, even religious emphasis, though also an exemplary organization for pursuing critical thinking and embracing the role of the scientific process.
I was drawn to the series many years ago because of the Cosmos content. From my physicalist perspective, the other two foci (Consciousness and God) seem far inferior, of far less universal importance. For me, 'Cosmos' as a topic is Universal (more-or-less by default, actually), whereas I construe Consciousness and God as human-focused particulars that lie deep inside the Universal theme and, even then, as cherry-picked Western-culture-oriented members of a much larger set of such particulars.
To be sure, there is a perspective in which a metaphysical 'Consciousness' and/or a Supreme Creator Being stand on an equal footing with the scientific investigation of the Cosmos. One can argue, and Kuhn frequently does, that if either of these two concepts/entities is fundamental, then all else subsumes to them. Assuming one can define it adequately, consciousness could be viewed as fundamental using the old Descartes argument: "The only thing that is demonstrably real to me is my own thought". Everything else that I experience is filtered through that processor known as 'mind'. And, of course, a Creator God, if demonstrated to exist (think the Junior High School girl in a hyper-intelligent civilization in some higher universe who created our universe as a simulation for a School Science Fair Project), also trumps all other explanations of reality.
I highlighted the 'if' in the last paragraph. One must necessarily choose their 'axioms' - the precepts that they decide are 'given' rather than subject to question - in order to construct any coherent system that describes reality. To me, Consciousness, in particular, utterly fails as a foundational axiom. I could go with either of the other two - Our Cosmos being physical or being a hyper-advanced civilization's or mind's experimental test of some hypothesis or other (or even just a video game). But given that Consciousness has been shown to be the highly selective, error-prone, heavily processed internal narrative that the brain generates in order to cohesively direct its collective community of trillions of living cells toward best survival outcomes, it could hardly be considered fundamental. Many aspects of the idea of 'self' and first-person experience cannot be generalized or described objectively (e.g. what does 'red' actually look like?). Science takes great pains to remove the individual from the 'facts' through a process of reproducible experiment. Even the oldest eastern faith traditions recognize the problems of individual 'attachment' and 'desire' as hindrances to achieving 'Truth'. It seems to me that Western individualism is on the wrong track, and I would argue that only an ego-centrist, dare I say a Narcissist, would consider a specialized human mental function to have a fundamental role in reality.
Yes, there is that interesting 'Measurement Problem' in quantum mechanics, which posits that some as-yet-undefinable form of 'observer' is required to entangle itself with the system before an observable's 'wave function collapses' or its information is resolved within the observer's 'universe'. I worded that last sentence very carefully because I think the best interpretations of this process only get us closer to the primacy of 'Big P Paradox' rather than any fundamental role for Consciousness.
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