Why Does The World Exist Jim Holt

[Landerico Benson]

Philosopherand writer Jim Holt skips right past the dumb quibbling questions and right to the heart of the great existential mystery: Why something, instead of nothing? Why does the universe exist? And why are we in it? The super-ultimate why question.

The philosophers are more interesting than the philosophy. Most of them are eccentric characters who have risen to the top of their profession. They think their deep thoughts in places of unusual beauty such as Paris and Oxford. They are heirs to an ancient tradition of academic hierarchy, in which disciples sat at the feet of sages, and sages enlightened disciples with Delphic utterances. The universities of Paris and Oxford have maintained this tradition for eight hundred years. The great world religions have maintained it even longer. Universities and religions are the most durable of human institutions.

According to Holt, the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century were Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heidegger supreme in continental Europe, Wittgenstein in the English-speaking world. Heidegger was one of the founders of existentialism, a school of philosophy that was especially attractive to French intellectuals. Heidegger himself lost his credibility in 1933 when he accepted the position of rector of the University of Freiburg under the newly established Hitler government and became a member of the Nazi Party. Existentialism continued to flourish in France after it faded in Germany.

In 1996 Leslie published a book, The End of the World, taking a gloomy view of the human situation. He was calculating the probable future duration of the human species, basing his argument on the Copernican principle, which says that the situation of the human observer in the cosmos should be in no way exceptional. Copernicus gave his name to this principle when he moved the earth from its position at the center of the Aristotelian universe and put it into a more modest position as one of the planets orbiting around the sun.

Leslie argued that the Copernican principle should apply to our position in time as well as to our position in space. As observers of the passage of time, we should not put ourselves into a privileged position at the beginning of the history of our species. As Copernican observers, we should expect to be in an average position in our history, rather than close to the beginning. Therefore, we should expect the future duration of our species to be not much longer than its past. Since we know that our species originated about a hundred thousand years ago, we should expect it to become extinct about a hundred thousand years from now.

There are many other kinds of multiverse besides the Everett version. Multiverse models are fashionable in recent theories of cosmology. Holt went to see the Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University in Boston. Unlike Deutsch, Vilenkin has multiple universes disconnected and widely separated from each other. Each arises out of nothing by a process known as quantum tunneling, spontaneously crossing the barrier between nonexistence and existence with no expenditure of energy. Universes spring into existence with precisely zero total energy, the positive energy of matter being equal and opposite to the negative energy of gravitation. Mass comes free because energy is zero.

For most of the twenty-five centuries since written history began, philosophers were important. Two groups of philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tse in China, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, were dominant figures in the cultures of Asia and Europe for two thousand years. Confucius and Aristotle set the style of thinking for Eastern and Western civilizations. They not only spoke to scholars but also to rulers. They had a deep influence in the practical worlds of politics and morality as well as in the intellectual worlds of science and scholarship.

In more recent centuries, philosophers were still leaders of human destiny. Descartes and Montesquieu in France, Spinoza in Holland, Hobbes and Locke in England, Hegel and Nietzsche in Germany, set their stamp on the divergent styles of nations as nationalism became the driving force in the history of Europe. Through all the vicissitudes of history, from classical Greece and China until the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers were giants playing a dominant role in the kingdom of the mind.

After the three committees had made their selections, we had three lists of names of people to be invited. I looked at the lists of names and was immediately struck by their disconnection. With a few exceptions, I knew personally all the people on the science list. On the history list, I knew the names, but I did not know the people personally. On the philosophy list, I did not even know the names.

In earlier centuries, scientists and historians and philosophers would have known one another. Newton and Locke were friends and colleagues in the English parliament of 1689, helping to establish constitutional government in England after the bloodless revolution of 1688. The bloody passions of the English Civil War were finally quieted by establishing a constitutional monarchy with limited powers. Constitutional monarchy was a system of government invented by philosophers. But in the twentieth century, science and history and philosophy had become separate cultures. We were three groups of specialists, living in separate communities and rarely speaking to each other.

One might think, then, that a genuinely complete explanation of the world's existence would have to be infinite, since each explaining element would itself need to be explained by something else, something prior. The Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick suggested that the key to ending the regress was to find a principle that did double duty, one that explained the universe's existence and, at the same time, justified itself. His proposal was the so-called "principle of fecundity," which states that "all possible worlds are real." Since the principle of fecundity was itself possible, it would imply its own truth. (If all possible worlds are real, then the possible world or worlds in which the principle of fecundity holds is real.) So it wouldn't need anything else to justify it; it would justify itself. And it would explain why there was stuff in the universe, since stuff is possible, and all possibilities are (somewhere) actualized.

Nozick's proposal is clever, but as Holt observes, it doesn't work. After all, it is not logically possible that all possibilities obtain: some possibilities exclude others. If any possibility that includes the existence of some material object obtains, for instance, then the possibility that there are no material objects anywhere in the multiverse does not obtain. Nozick tried to finesse this by holding that different possibilities obtain "in independent noninteracting realms." But this won't work, because in order to justify itself the principle of fecundity needs to hold across all realms. "Even if all possible planets are realized," Holt explains, "there is no planet where all possibilities are realized. So fecundity is not self-subsuming after all. It's a cruel dilemma for Nozick: either his ultimate explanatory principle leads to contradiction, or it fails to be self-subsuming."

No one has yet succeeded, then, in explaining how something could literally come out of nothing: in every case some sort of prior condition needs to be presupposed. Perhaps, though, it is the very idea of "something coming out of nothing" that is at fault. Why not just say, as David Hume suggested, that the universe has always been around, and that the existence of the universe at each moment in time is explained by its existence in the previous moment? Accepting this as the final explanation, of course, involves giving up on the idea that the existence of the universe as a whole can be explained; rather, we would have to accept its existence as a kind of brute fact. But should this bother us?

The first thing to say is that Lovejoy is making at least one error of logic here, by confusing the question of how (and whether) the universe began with the question of what the universe is like. That the universe's existence is irrational (in the sense that it has no ultimate explanation) does not entail that the universe must behave irrationally. The idea that a logical and predictable universe has simply always existed is no more mystifying and no less probable than the idea that a chaotic and fundamentally unpredictable universe might simply always have existed. To think otherwise is to commit the error of thinking that we can use pure reason, unguided by empirical evidence, to determine what a universe is likely to be like.

"The question Why is there something rather than nothing?sometimes seems vacuous to me," Holt admits at one point. "But in other moods it seems very profound." The latter mood, one guesses, afflicts Holt more frequently. (Why else would "Why Does the World Exist?" exist?) Those who share this mood with Holt, at least from time to time, will almost certainly find this to be an entertaining and thought-provoking book. I must confess, though, that none of the proffered answers to the title question were quite as satisfying to me as the one Holt attributes to the late Sydney Morgenbesser, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. When a student asked him, "Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?" Morgenbesser responded, "Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"

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I am Catholic-raised university student, currently struggling to understand the physiological, psychological, social, and religious aspects of outercourse (oral and anal sex). Some studies in the past two decades have found a correlation between oral sex and fewer complications during pregnancy and fewer miscarriages.

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