Tag Archives: existence

Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

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Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

Dworkin-Nagel

A Universe from Nothing

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Gottfried Leibniz

“Nothing is, for example, popularly held to be better than a dry martini but worse than sand in the bedsheets. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. Nothing is impossible for God yet a breeze for the rankest incompetent. In fact, no matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would simply mean that everything is obvious–including, presumably, nothing. That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about–call them nullophiles–who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.

The philosophers of antiquity were inclined to agree. Ex nihilo nihil, they unanimously declared: ‘Nothing comes from nothing.’ Not only does this maxim attribute to nothing the divine quality of being self-generating; it also impiously denies God the power to prevail against nothingness, to bring about a world ex nihilo…

To say God created the world ‘out of nothing’ is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.

And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixty-eight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in Candide—that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I…

It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled ‘Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.’ In this essay, he put forth what he called the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason,’ which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. ‘This principle having been stated,’ Leibniz wrote, ‘the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.

But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a necessary being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.

Thus, no sooner was the question Why is there something rather than nothing? raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.

But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of ‘necessary being’ as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically impossible—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. ‘Whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,’ Hume wrote. ‘There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction’—including God.”

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From Jim Holt’s compendious, mind-bending book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The man pictured above is Mister Leibniz.

Read related excerpts from Holt’s book below:

Baruch Spinoza

Could the World Cause Itself?

Constellation PerseusThe Cosmos as a Concept

John Updike

This Planet and the Stars were Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period

Henri Bergson

Try to Wish into Nonbeing the Entire Contents of the World

Raindrops on a Car

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

The Cosmos as a Concept

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Science

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Constellation Crux

Talk about the recent changes in our understanding of physics.

Well we’ve discovered that the atom is almost entirely empty space. If you took a baseball and put it in the middle of Madison Square Garden, that would be like the nucleus, and the first level of electrons are as far away as the exterior of the Garden. So you can think of this baseball, this nucleus, as a tiny dot all alone.

So the atom is almost entirely empty space. But why don’t I fall through the floor here, because the floor is mostly empty space and I’m mostly empty space? If you look at it on the micro level, this apparent solidity is the product of a pair of purely mathematical relations: the Pauli Exclusion Principle and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

And if you study quantum field theory, which is what all physics graduate students now begin with in graduate school, you discover that even particles are unreal. They are just temporary properties of what are called fields, and fields are just distributions of mathematical quantities through spacetime. So particles don’t seem to be grounded in anything tangible. And the pervading theory in quantum mechanics says that a field is like a stream of numbers — pure information — numbers that tell you where an electron might be. But you can’t observe it, only its effect on other things.

And if something is in principle unobservable, you may as well say it doesn’t exist.

So what is a rock? A rock looks like a good, solid, persisting object. But it really, in our perception of it, is energy transitions — changes in the distribution of energy from one state to another. And when that happens, energy is radiated. It goes through my pupil, and strikes my retina, and I perceive the rock.

So I don’t know, Jim, if you would call a rock — like Bishop Barkley did — a thought in the mind of God. But he might say that deep down, what a rock is is an expression of rules, or math, it’s just here like the shadow of an idea.

I’ve heard one physicist say that the cosmos is ultimately a concept. Maybe, a hundred years from now when String theory is worked out, we might have a very different conception of it. But it looks like the universe is mathematics and structure all the way down.

You’re okay with this?

Well I’m a sort of mathematical romantic. I love the idea that the essence of reality is not stuff — stuff is kind of ugly, you want to get rid of stuff, there’s too much stuff in your apartment —

I like stuff.

Well this is a temperamental difference between us. I like the idea that reality consists of a flux of pure information with no further substance.

I don’t know why this makes you so happy. I would love if I’m clapping or hitting someone in the face, that the billiard ball of me is hitting the billiard ball of them. 

But we’re living in an almost spiritual realm, you want to live in this gross material realm…

And if you go back to the 19th century view, that we’re all these hard particle atoms just bumping around, is that any more plausible? Is it any more plausible that you and I are just dumb, hard particles in a certain configuration? And if that’s true, how are certain configurations of these particles tantamount to the horrible feeling of pain?

Whether it’s a mathematical object, or whether its little billiard balls knocking around, it’s still miraculous and improbable that it should produce subjective experience, that it should produce pleasure and pain. I find it to be exhilarating to worry about the metaphysics of physics and the nature of reality even though it doesn’t lead you to any sort of comfortable intellectual closure. It’s a good way of idling away an otherwise boring afternoon.

Constellation Perseus

__________

Selections from Jim Holt in conversation with Robert Krulwich discussing physics and the material universe.

I’ve just discovered Radiolab, the nationally syndicated radio show and podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. I’d bet that you, the voluntary reader of this blog, will enjoy the stuff done at Radiolab. The program devotes entire episodes to a particular scientific or philosophical idea — like “time” or “free will” or “morality” — and approaches it in a highly accesible and absorbing, though still informative, way. The hosts are clever without coming off as obtuse, and the show features incredibly rich sound design. Check out an archive of all of their episodes here.

Read excerpts relating to these same subjects taken from Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?:

Baruch Spinoza

Could the World Cause Itself?

John Updike

This Planet and the Stars were Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period

Henri Bergson

Try to Wish into Nonbeing the Entire Contents of the World

Raindrops on a Car

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

Could the World Cause Itself?

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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Baruch Spinoza

“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence, perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself. This possibility was first raised by Spinoza, who boldly (if a little obscurely) reasoned that all reality consists of a single infinite substance. Individual things, both physical and mental, are merely temporary modifications of this substance, like waves on the surface of the sea. Spinoza referred to this infinite substance as Deus sive Natura: ‘God or Nature.’ God could not possibly stand apart from nature, he reasoned, because then each would limit the other’s being. So the world itself is divine: eternal, infinite, and the cause of its own existence. Hence, it is worthy of our awe and reverence. Metaphysical understanding thus leads to ‘intellectual love’ of reality—the highest end for humans, according to Spinoza, and the closest we can come to immortality.

Spinoza’s picture of the world as causa sui captivated Albert Einstein. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God,’ he answered, ‘who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’ The idea that the world somehow holds the key to its own existence—and hence that it exists necessarily, not as an accident—jibes with the thinking of some metaphysically inclined physicists, such as Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term black hole). It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the ‘participatory universe,’ reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world. It’s a bit like Proust’s great work, which records the progress and the sufferings of its hero through thousands of pages until, at the end, he resolves to write the very novel we have been reading.

Such a Promethean fantasy—we are the world’s author as well as its plaything!—may seem too good to be true. Yet pursuing the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is bound to leave our feelings about the world and our own place within it transformed. The astonishment we feel at its sheer existence may evolve into a new kind of awe as we begin to descry, if only in the faintest outlines, the reason behind that existence. Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both. We may feel like the mathematician Georg Cantor did when he made a profound new discovery about infinity. ‘I see it,’ Cantor exclaimed, ‘but I don’t believe it.'”

__________

From the book I’m most enjoying nowadays (in the 4 and a half minutes of free time that I have to read each night): Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The picture is of one of the greatest Western philosophers who ever breathed, Baruch Spinoza, of whom Einstein wrote, in “Zu Spinoza Ethik”:

How much do I love that noble man
More than I could tell with words
I fear though he’ll remain alone
With a holy halo of his own.

And Borges memorialized in his poem “Baruch Spinoza”:

Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.

The man of whom Hegel claimed, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all;” the figure Gilles Deleuze referred to as, “the Prince of Philosophers… the other greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.”

…not a bad list of recommendations for a résumé.

Try to Wish the World into Nonexistence

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Henri Bergson

“Close your eyes, if you will, and stop up your ears. Now picture yourself in an absolute void. Try to wish into nonbeing the entire contents of the world. You might begin, as Coleridge’s little boy did, by imagining away all the men and women and trees and grass and birds and beasts and earth and sky. And not just the sky, but everything in it. Think of the lights going out all over the cosmos: the sun disappearing, the stars extinguished, the galaxies winking into nonexistence one by one, or billion by billion. In your mind’s eye, the entire cosmos is sliding into silence, cold, and darkness — with nothing to be silent or cold or dark. You have succeeded in imaging absolute nothingness.

Or have you?

When the French philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine universal annihilation, he found that there was inevitably something left over at the end of the experiment: his inner self. Bergson thought of the world as being as “an embroidery on the canvas of the void.” But when he attempted to strip this embroidery away, the canvas of his consciousness remained. Try as he might, he could not suppress it. “At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished,” he wrote, “another consciousness lights up — or rather, it was already alight; it has arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first.” He found it impossible to imagine absolute nothingness without some residuum of consciousness creeping into the darkness, like a little light under the door. Therefore, he concluded, nothingness must be an impossibility.”

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From Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The picture is of Henri Bergson.