Welcome, Dr. Goff. I've just been watching this lecture by you:
-- and have a number points to raise.
1. I notice that in neither the interview with Alex nor the video do you mention idealism. Is this because you haven't considered it, or because you have and have rejected it?
2. Have you read any of Bernardo Kastrup's work?
3. As you say yourself, you're not a physicist and so feel inclined to work within the consensus framework of the standard cosmological model. Hence you seem to accept (at least for purposes of discussion) big bang theory, inflation, and so on. That said, as I pointed out in a post recently:
...here's a
Scientific American article that expresses some of my own incredulity about modern cosmology and points to its "big problems". Here's a tidbit:
After spending many years researching the foundations of cosmological physics from a philosophy of science perspective, I have not been surprised to hear some scientists openly talking about a crisis in cosmology. In the big “inflation debate” in Scientific American a few years ago, a key piece of the big bang paradigm was criticized by one of the theory's original proponents for having become indefensible as a scientific theory.
Why? Because inflation theory relies on ad hoc contrivances to accommodate almost any data, and because its proposed physical field is not based on anything with empirical justification. This is probably because a crucial function of inflation is to bridge the transition from an unknowable big bang to a physics we can recognize today. So, is it science or a convenient invention?
I suppose one point is that the necessity for at least some of the fine tuning constants could arise out of the standard cosmological model. IOW, some of the fine tuning constants could be artifacts of the model rather than realities in and of themselves. And indeed, since the whole physicalist (not merely the standard cosmological) model of reality is open to doubt, perhaps most or even all of the constants are dubious, just constructed so as to fit in with current models.
Were such the case, then your arguments could be piling misconception on top of misconception. I'm not saying that is the case, necessarily, but could you comment on this?
Many thanks.