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Tag Archives: Jim Holt

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 jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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

Tags

birth, consciousness, Crime and Punishment, Epicureans, Epicurus, existence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, General Philosophy, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?, Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, Life, literature, Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sam Harris, Saul Frampton, science, To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die, When I Am Playing with My Cat

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.

__________

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:

  • Does the beauty of the Gospels attest to their truth?: Einstein, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thomas Cahill, and Julian Barnes share a surprising conclusion
  • Science as child’s play: Einstein, Newton, Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson embrace the wonder of the natural world
  • The sovereign subject: Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Krauthammer agree that government is the most important subject
  • Can we just assume god exists?: Updike, C.S. Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Anthony Flew see eye to eye on whether faith can trump reason
  • We don’t march: Orwell, Steinbeck, and Einstein rage against militarism 
  • Is your life valuable? If so, why?: Ronald Dworkin, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Campbell, Michio Kaku, and Vonnegut give a counterintuitive answer

Dworkin-Nagel

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Updike, C. S. Lewis, and Wittgenstein: Can We Just Assume God Exists?

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Alvin Plantinga, Anthony Flew, Atheism, belief, C.S. Lewis, Cambridge, Faith, General Philosophy, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Metropolitan, Oxford, Philosophical Investigations, religion, science, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, theism, There Is a God, Whit Stillman

John Updike, Massachusetts, 1984; photographs by Dominique Nabokov

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible. Tenacious of this terror, this adamant essence as crucial to us as our sexuality, we resist those kindly stoic consolers who assure us that we will outwear the fright, that we will grow numb and accepting and, as it were, religiously impotent. As Unamuno says, with the rhythms of a stubborn child, ‘I do not want to die – no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live forever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.’

The objections of material science and liberal ethics to this desperate wanting to belong to the outer, sunlit world, of sense and the senses; our wanting and its soothing belong to the elusive dark world within. Emerson, in Nature, points out ‘the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.’ Evidence of God’s being lies with that of our own; it is on our side of the total disparity that God lives. In the light, we disown Him, embarrassedly; in the dark, He is our only guarantor, our only shield against death. The impalpable self cries out to Him and wonders if it detects an answer. Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses. The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the out rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side. The sensation of silence cannot be helped: a loud and evident God would be a bully, an insecure tyrant, an all-crushing datum instead of, as He is, a bottomless encouragement to our faltering and frightened being. His answers come in the long run, as the large facts of our lives, strung on that thread running through all things. Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.

The thermostat image needs adjusting: God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves, an adamant bubble enclosing us, protecting us, enabling us to let go, to ride the waves of what is.”

__________

From John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. No one writes with such self-assurance and style about the metaphysical headaches that plague anyone who honestly tries to find answers to The Big Questions. Updike brings to this task the same eye for detail and consummate precision that make his novels so distinct and so engrossing.

Still, there are some additional voices which may be worth bringing into this discussion about whether belief in the existence of God may be rightfully called ‘properly basic’ — that’s to say, whether it may be reflexively assumed by “the elusive dark world within”.

In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan (1990), a scene at a posh Manhattan cocktail party kicks off with the following heady exchange between two of the film’s young protagonists:

Charlie Black: Of course there is a God. We all basically know there is.

Cynthia McLean: I know no such thing.

Charlie Black: Of course you do. When you think to yourself — and most of our waking life is taken up thinking to ourselves — you must have that feeling that your thoughts aren’t entirely wasted, that in some sense they are being heard. Rationally, they aren’t. You’re entirely alone. Even the people to whom we are closest can have no real idea of what is going on in our minds. We aren’t devastated by loneliness because, at a hardly conscious level, we don’t accept that we’re entirely alone. I think this sensation of being silently listened to with total comprehension — something you never find in real life — represents our innate belief in a supreme being, some all-comprehending intelligence.

When he was eighty-four, the renowned Oxford philosopher and lifelong atheist Anthony Flew wrote There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a short treatise that justified his controversial late-life turn to theism. In it, he writes about a challenge made to one of his arguments for atheism:

By far, the headiest challenge to the argument [Flew’s ‘presumption of atheism’: the argument that the burden of proof is on the theist] came from America. The modal logician Alvin Plantinga introduced the idea that theism is a properly basic belief. He asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past). In al these instances, you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question. Similarly, people take on certain propositions (e.g., the existence of the world) as basic and others as derivative from these basic propositions. Believers, it is argued, take the existence of God as a basic proposition.

Another great Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, provided a foundation for Plantinga’s theory in his 1945 lecture “Is Theology Poetry?”. This talk contains the following excerpt, which is widely acclaimed but often ignored or distorted by those who merely quote its final sentence:

This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience.

The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dream world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

While Lewis was making this speech at Oxford, Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself as resolute a skeptic as Flew and Lewis and Updike had once been, was at Cambridge compiling the text of his famed Philosophical Investigations, which contain the following affirmation of god as a properly basic belief:

A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

I have posted more from this work as well as some further reflections on in on it: Wittgenstein on God and Belief.

If you want to read more about Updike’s cosmology, check out his discussion of it in Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist?:

John Updike

 The Universe Was Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period.

If you want some heavier and headier stuff, wade through a challenging section from Plantinga’s essay “Game Scientists Play”:

Alvin Plantinga Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Evolutionary Psychology and Christian Belief

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A Universe from Nothing

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Candide, David Hume, existence, General Philosophy, God, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jim Holt, Kant, King George I, Leibniz, meaning, science, Voltaire, Why Does the World Exist?, Writing

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.”

__________

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

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The Cosmos as a Concept

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

atoms, existence, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Jim Holt, particle physics, Pauli Exclusion Principle, physics, quantum theory, Radiolab, string theory, universe, Wolfgang Pauli

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

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Could the World Cause Itself?

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza, existence, Georg Cantor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, God, Jim Holt, John Archibald Wheeler, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, mystery, nature, Sir Roger Penrose, Why Does the World Exist?

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.

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Try to Wish the World into Nonexistence

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

existence, Henri Bergson, Jim Holt, nothingness, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Why Does the World Exist?

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.”

__________

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

The picture is of Henri Bergson.

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The Arithmetic of Nothingness

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arithmetic, Jim Holt, mathematics, numbers, Why Does the World Exist?, zero

Raindrops on a Car

“As for the origin of the numeral ‘0,’ that has eluded historians of antiquity. On one theory, now discredited by scholars, the numeral comes from the first letter of the Greek word for ‘nothing,’ ouden. On another theory, admittedly fanciful, its form derives from the circular impression left by a counting chip in the sand–the presence of an absence.

Suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy version of the mystery of existence: How can you get from 0 to 1?

In higher mathematics, there is a simple sense in which the transition from 0 to 1 is impossible. Mathematicians say that a number is ‘regular’ if it can’t be reached via the numerical resources lying below it. More precisely, the number n is regular if it cannot be reached by adding up fewer than n numbers that are themselves smaller than n.

It is easy to see that 1 is a regular number. It cannot be reached from below, where all there is to work with is 0. The sum of zero 0’s is 0, and that’s that. So you can’t get from Nothing to Something.

Curiously, 1 is not the only number that is unreachable in this way. The number 2 also turns out to be regular, since it can’t be reached by adding up fewer than two numbers that are less than 2. (Try it and see.) So you can’t get from Unity to Plurality.

The rest of the finite numbers lack this interesting property of regularity. They can be reached from below. (The number 3, for example, can be reached by adding up two numbers, 1 and 2, each of which is itself less than 3.) But the first infinite number, denoted by the Greek letter omega, does turn out to be regular. It can’t be reached by summing up any finite collection of finite numbers. So you can’t get from Finite to Infinite.”

__________

From the chapter “The Arithmetic of Nothingness” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The photograph: Rain on the hood of a car. Houston, Texas.

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

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Aristotle, belief, Freeman Dyson, G.K. Chesterton, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Karl Barth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, natural theology, Oscar Wilde, Rabbit Run, Roger's Version, Søren Kierkegaard, the big bang, the universe, Thomas Aquinas, Why Does the World Exist?, William James

John Updike

I began by asking [John] Updike whether the theology of Karl Barth had really sustained him through a difficult time in his life.

“I’ve certainly said that and it did seem to be true,” he said. “I fell upon Barth having exhausted Kierkegaard as a consoler, and having previously resorted to Chesterton. I discovered Barth through a series of addresses and lectures called The Word of God and the Word of Man. He didn’t attempt to play anybody’s game as far as looking at the Gospels as historic documents or anything. He just said, essentially, that this is a faith—take it or leave it. So yes, I did find Barth comforting, and a couple of my early novels—not so early, actually—are sort of Barthian. Rabbit Run certainly presents a Barthian point of view, from the standpoint of a Lutheran minister. And in Roger’s Version, Barthianism is about the only refuge for Roger from all the besieging elements that would deprive one of one’s faith—both science, which Dale tries to use on behalf of the theist point of view, and the watering down of theology with liberal values.”

“It’s interesting,” I said, “that some philosophers are so astonished and awed that anything at all should exist—like Wittgenstein, who said in the Tractatus that it’s not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is. And Heidegger, of course, made heavy weather of this too. He claimed that even people who never thought about why there is something rather than nothing were still ‘grazed’ by the question whether they realized it or not—say, in moments of boredom, when they’d just as soon that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”

“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing?”

I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in Roger’s Version explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?

“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from nearly nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”

Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

Some things that are impossible to imagine, I pointed out, are quite easy to describe mathematically.

“Still,” Updike said, warming to the argument, “there have been other intricate systems in the history of mankind. The scholastics in the Middle Ages had a lot of intricacy in their intellectual constructions, and even the Ptolemaic epicycles or whatever were … Well, all of this showed a lot of intelligence, and theoretical consistency even, but in the end they collapsed. But, as you say, the evidence piles up. It’s been decades and decades since the standard model of physics was proposed, and it checks out to the twelfth decimal point. But this whole string theory business … There’s never any evidence, just mathematical formulas, right? There are men spending their whole careers working on a theory of something that might not even exist.”

Even so, I said, they’re doing some beautiful pure mathematics in the process.

“Beautiful in a vacuum!” Updike exclaimed. “What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”

I asked Updike if his own attitude toward natural theology was as contemptuous as Barth’s was. Some people think there’s a God because they have a religious experience. Some think there’s a God because they believe the priest. But others want evidence, evidence that will appeal to reason. And those are the people that natural theology, by showing how observations of the world around us might support the conclusion that there is a God, has the power to reach. Is Updike really willing to leave those people out in the cold just because he doesn’t like the idea of a God who lets himself be “intellectually trapped”?

Updike paused for a moment or two, then said, “I was once asked to be on a radio program called This I Believe. As a fiction writer, I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly. On this radio program I conceded that ruling out natural theology does leave too much of humanity and human experience behind. I suppose even a hardened Barthian might cling to at least one piece of natural theology, Christ’s saying, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’—that so much of what we construe as virtue and heroism seems to come from faith. But to make faith into an abstract scientific proposition is to please no one, least of all the believers. There’s no intellectual exertion in accepting it. Faith is like being in love. As Barth put it, God is reached by the shortest ladder, not by the longest ladder. Barth’s constant point was that it is God’s movement that bridges the distance, not human effort.”

And why should God make that movement? Why should he have created a universe at all? I remembered Updike saying somewhere that God may have brought the world into being out of spiritual fatigue—that reality was a product of “divine acedia.” What, I asked him, could this possibly mean?

“Did I say that? God created the world out of boredom? Well, Aquinas said that God made the world ‘in play.’ In play. In a playful spirit he made the world. That, to me, seems closer to the truth.”

He was silent again for a moment, then continued. “Some scientists who are believers, like Freeman Dyson, have actually tackled the ultimate end of the universe. They’ve tried to describe a universe where entropy is almost total and individual particles are separated by distances that are greater than the dimensions of the present observable universe … an unthinkably dreary and pointless vacuum. I admire their scientific imagination, but I just can’t make myself go there. And a space like that is the space in which God existed and nothing else. Could God then have suffered boredom to the point that he made the universe? That makes reality seem almost a piece of light verse.”

What a lovely conceit! Reality is not a “blot on nothingness,” as Updike’s character Henry Bech had once, in a bilious moment, decided. It is a piece of light verse.

__________

From the chapter “The World as a Bit of Light Verse” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

To anyone with an interest in this stuff, I’d urge you go pick up a copy of Holt’s book. As a complete scientific and philosophic diletente, I found it to be as readable and as luminous as any comparable text I’ve encountered.

In the book, Holt talks with philosophers, cosmologists, physicists, novelists, and other thinkers, confronting each with the question of Why? and receiving a slew of compelling conjectures in return. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn, however, is that there is no discrete answer to that question; rational inquiry can run the gambit of inquiring words — Who, What, When, Where, How — but can do very little to demystify that monolithic query Why. We can lower our scientific and philosophical shoulders into that word all we want, but the universe doesn’t even bother to whisper back to us Why not?

Yet this fact is a great intellectual equalizer and the reason a book like this is intelligible to people like me. It’s also the reason why the conjectures of laymen like us are not that far off from the suppositions of esteemed intellectuals. As Holt says in one chapter:

“When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, ‘All of us are beggars here.’”

To James’s observation I’d add the one enshrined as Oscar Wilde’s epitaph, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” a favorite quote of mine and an uncharacteristically tentative utterance from a man so noted for his florid, grandiose phrase-making.

Furthermore, to Updike’s analogy of the dog, I would add the more elegant image proposed by Einstein:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

This metaphor is at once superior and inferior to that of Updike. It’s superior because a dog — like everything else we know of in the universe — does not possess reflexive self-awareness, at least not in any robust sense.

However, as Holt’s book lays out, the universe is not arranged like a library wherein we effortlessly extract particular quantities to isolate and examine. Instead, the scientific method approaches the universe at its corners and wrinkles, gleaning what limited information we can from a cosmos shrouded in shady Higgs bosons, almost-invisible neutrinos, and inconsistent classes of elementary particles.

In this sense, we are more like canines ogling at an internal combustion engine, given that the object we are investigating (the universe) is not laid out to be reverse-engineered. It is not designed, as a book is, to easily reveal its secrets to us.

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