Are we being lied to about the world?

The universe itself is some kind of conscious mind.

What does it all mean?

You know, maybe we're in a computer simulation and our designer is just some random software engineer

in the next universe up.

Or maybe there's a designer a little bit more like the traditional guard but maybe not all powerful maybe you

just made the best universe they can and it's like no no it's going to be messy but

this is the best I could do is this or nothing. My favorite hypothesis though.

Hello and welcome to another episode of heretics. My voice has gone a bit funny

but luckily this episode was filmed a little while ago and so my voice was normal.

It's been four months of funny voice now, but a lot of you are saying you've got the same things.

Don't worry everyone. I had an x-ray and it's all

clear. I don't even appear to have lungs. No I think I've got those. So today is

Philip Gough and this is an attempt to try and diversify it a little bit.

The themes and topics of this podcast, which I know audio listeners very much enjoy,

and this is a bit of an intellectual one and Philip Goughs a fascinating academic.

He has just written, why the purpose of the universe.

Gough explores cosmology and cutting edge philosophical research on consciousness to argue for a cosmic purpose or the idea

that the universe is directed towards goals such as the emergence of life.

He says God is a bad explanation of cosmic purpose. So this is a really

interesting one. I know there's a big mix of atheists and believers among you and Gof sort of thinks

outside of that stuff. He's saying it's not necessarily God as such but there is something or some sort of well cosmic purpose

...