Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (24 page)

One could, of course, simply deny that reality
has
such a subjective part. And there are philosophers who do deny it—Daniel Dennett, for one. Dennett refuses to concede that consciousness contains any intrinsically qualitative elements. As far as he is concerned, “qualia” are a philosophical myth. If something cannot be described in purely quantitative and relational terms, it is simply not a part of reality. “
Postulating special inner qualities
that are not only private and intrinsically valuable, but also unconfirmable and uninvestigatable is just obscurantism,” he declares.

Such denialism leaves philosophers like Searle and Nagel incredulous. It seems willfully blind to the very essence of what it means to be conscious. Nagel has written, “
The world just
isn’t
the world as it appears to one highly abstracted point of view”—that is, to the scientific point of view.

The inner nature of consciousness yields one reason for thinking that there is more to the world than pure structure. But apart from the issue of consciousness, there are more general grounds for suspecting that cosmic structuralism is inadequate as a picture of reality. Structure by itself just doesn’t seem
enough
for genuine being. As the British idealist philosopher T. L. S. Sprigge put it, “
What has structure
must have something more to it than structure.” Perhaps Aristotle was right: you need stuff too. Stuff is what gives existence to structure, what
realizes
it.

But if that is true, how can we come to have knowledge of the ultimate stuff of reality? Science, as we have seen, reveals only how the stuff is structured. It does not tell us how the quantitative differences it describes are grounded in differences in any underlying qualitative stuff. Our scientific knowledge of reality is thus, in Sprigge’s words, “
rather like the kind
of knowledge of a piece of music which someone born deaf might have from a musical education based entirely on the study of musical scores.”

Yet there is one part of reality that we do know without the mediation of science: our own consciousness. We experience the intrinsic qualities of our conscious states directly, from the inside. We have what philosophers call “privileged access” to them. There is nothing whose existence we are more certain of.

Now, this raises an interesting possibility. Maybe the part of reality we know indirectly through science, the physical part, has the same inner nature as the part we know directly through introspection, the conscious part. In other words, maybe all of reality—subjective and objective—is made out of the same basic stuff. That is a pleasingly simple hypothesis. But isn’t it a bit crazy? Well, it didn’t strike Bertrand Russell that way. In fact, it was essentially the conclusion Russell reached in
The Analysis of Matter
. Nor did it strike the great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington as crazy. In
The Nature of the Physical World
(1928), Eddington ringingly declared that “
the stuff of the world
is mind-stuff.” (The term “mind-stuff,” by the way, was coined by William James in the first volume of his 1890 work,
Principles of Psychology
.)

Crazy or not, the idea that the fundamental stuff of reality is mind-stuff has one very odd implication. If it is true, then consciousness must pervade all of physical nature. Subjective experience would not be confined to the brains of beings like us; it would be present in every bit of matter: in big things like galaxies and black holes, in little things like quarks and neutrinos, and in medium-sized things like flowers and rocks.

The doctrine that consciousness pervades reality is called “panpsychism.” It seems to harken back to primitive superstitions like animism—the belief that trees and brooks harbor spirits. Yet it has attracted quite a bit of interest among contemporary philosophers. A few decades ago, Thomas Nagel showed that panpsychism, for all its apparent daftness, is an inescapable consequence of some quite reasonable premises. Our brains consist of material particles. These particles, in certain arrangements, produce subjective thoughts and feelings. Physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?) Now, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves—features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons, and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.

Another contemporary thinker who takes panpsychism seriously is the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. What attracts Chalmers to panpsychism is that it promises to solve two metaphysical problems for the price of one: the problem of stuff and the problem of consciousness. Not only does panpsychism furnish the basic stuff—mind-stuff—that might flesh out the purely structural world described by physics. It also explains why that otherwise gray physical world is bursting with Technicolor consciousness. Consciousness didn’t mysteriously “emerge” in the universe when certain particles of matter chanced to come into the right arrangement; rather, it’s been around from the very beginning, because those particles themselves are bits of consciousness. A single ontology thus underlies the subjective-information states in our minds and the objective-information states of the physical world—whence Chalmers’s slogan: “
Experience is information
from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”

If this metaphysical deal seems too good to be true, I should point out that panpsychism comes with problems of its own. Foremost among them is what might be called the Combination Problem: how can many little bits of mind-stuff combine to form a bigger mind? Your brain, for instance, is made up of lots of elementary particles. According to the panpsychist, each of these elementary particles is a tiny center of proto-consciousness, with its own (presumably very simple) mental states. Just what is it that makes all these micro-minds cohere into the macro-mind that is your own?

The Combination Problem proved a stumbling block for William James, who was otherwise friendly to panpsychism. “
How can many consciousnesses
be at the same time one consciousness?” James asked in bewilderment. He made the point vivid with an example. “
Take a sentence
of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence… . The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher mind.”

James’s point is echoed by many contemporary opponents of panpsychism. What sense does it make, they say, to conjecture that things like electrons and protons are inwardly mental if you have no clue as to how their micro-mentality gets unified into full-blown human consciousness?

But there are a few intrepid thinkers who claim they do have a clue. And it is supplied, perhaps surprisingly, by quantum theory. One of the striking novelties of quantum theory is the notion of
entanglement
. When two distinct particles enter into a state of quantum entanglement, they lose their individual identities and act as a unified system. Any change to one of them will immediately be felt by the other, even if they are light-years apart. There is nothing analogous to this in classical physics. When quantum entanglement occurs, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. This is so radically at odds with our everyday way of viewing the world that Einstein himself pronounced it “spooky.”

Now, even though quantum theory is customarily applied to a physical ontology, one consisting of particles and fields, there is no obvious reason why it can’t also be applied to an ontology consisting of mind-stuff. Indeed, such a “quantum psychology” could hold the key to understanding the
unity
of consciousness—considered by Descartes and Kant to be a distinctive mark of the mental. If physical entities can lose their individual identity and merge into a single whole, then it is at least conceivable that proto-mental entities could do likewise and—as William James put it—“agglomerate into a higher mind.” Thus does quantum entanglement offer at least a hint of a solution to the Combination Problem.

Roger Penrose himself has invoked such quantum principles to explain how the physical activities in our brains generate consciousness. In
Shadows of the Mind
, he wrote that “
the unity of a single mind
can arise … only if there is some form of quantum coherence extending across an appreciable part of the brain.” And he has since gone further, endorsing the panpsychist notion that the atomic constituents of the brain, along with the rest of the physical universe, are structured out of mind-stuff. “
I think that something of this nature
is indeed necessary,” Penrose announced in a public lecture when the issue came up.

Panpsychism is not for everyone. John Searle, for one, dismisses it without argument as simply “
absurd
.” But it has one undeniable virtue: that of ontological parsimony. It says that the cosmos is ultimately made of a single kind of stuff. It is thus a
monistic
view of reality. And if you are trying to solve the mystery of existence, monism is a convenient metaphysical position, since it obliges you to explain how only one substance came into being. The dualist has a seemingly harder job: he has to explain both why matter exists
and
why mind exists.

So does reality ultimately consist of mind-stuff? Is it no more (or no less) than an enormous, infinitely convoluted thought, or even dream? Seeking additional authority for this rather wild-sounding conclusion, I turned to what had hitherto proved an unimpeachable source:
The Devil’s Dictionary
. There I found the following apt definition:

Reality
, n. The dream of a mad philosopher.

11

“THE ETHICAL REQUIREDNESS OF THERE BEING SOMETHING”

“
W
ell, I have my pet answer, and I was very proud of it. But then, to my horror and disgust, I found that Plato had got the same answer about twenty-five hundred years ago!”

The man with the answer—one he believed to be utterly original when he first hit on it as a teenager—was a mild-mannered and soft-spoken speculative cosmologist by the name of John Leslie.

The community of speculative cosmologists is geographically scattered but not large. It consists of a hundred or so philosophically inclined scientists and scientifically adept philosophers—figures like Baron Rees of Ludlow, Britain’s current Astronomer Royal; Andrei Linde, the Stanford physicist who created the theory of chaotic inflation; Jack Smart, the dean of Australian realist philosophy; and the Reverend Sir John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge particle physicist turned Anglican priest. In this far-flung and variegated community, John Leslie commands considerable respect— for both the boldness of his cosmic conjectures and the ingenuity with which he defends them. A native Englishman, Leslie took his graduate degree at Oxford in the early 1960s. He then moved to Canada, where he taught philosophy at the University of Guelph for three decades and was ultimately elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Over his career, he has produced a steady output of books and articles that blend technical rigor with conjectural fancy. His 1989 book,
Universes
, meticulously teased out the implications of the cosmic “fine-tuning” hypothesis for the existence of a multiverse. His 1996 book,
The End of the World
, showed how purely probabilistic reasoning pointed to a “doomsday” scenario in which humanity would be imminently extinguished. His 2007 book,
Immortality Defended
, drew on notions from contemporary physics—notably Einsteinian relativity and quantum entanglement—to argue that, biological death notwithstanding, there is a very real sense in which each of us will exist eternally. As a recreational sideline, Leslie invented a new board game called “Hostage Chess.” A blend of Western chess and the Japanese game of Shogi, Leslie’s Hostage Chess has been called by one grandmaster “
the most interesting
, exciting variant that can be played with a standard chess set.”

For all that, the achievement for which Leslie says he wishes to be remembered is his proposed solution to the mystery of why there is Something rather than Nothing—even if, as he concedes, Plato beat him to it. (Well, didn’t Alfred North Whitehead say that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato?) He calls his solution “extreme axiarchism,” since it holds that reality is ruled by abstract value—
axia
being the Greek word for “value” and
archein
for “to rule.”

“You’re the world’s foremost authority on why there is Something rather than Nothing,” I said to Leslie at the outset of our conversation. He was sitting in the living room of his house on the west coast of Canada, comfortably attired in a wool crewneck against the late-fall chill, while I hovered about in the noosphere.

“I doubt that there’s any sort of
authority
on why the world exists,” he replied, waving a hand and blinking behind his spectacles. “I’m an authority on the range of guesses which have been given. But I do have my own ideas, which, as I said, go back to Plato. Plato thought that there was a necessarily existing realm of possibilities, and I believe he was right about that.”

Existing
possibilities?

“Well,” Leslie said, “even if nothing at all existed, there would still be all sorts of logical possibilities. For instance, it would be true that apples—unlike married bachelors—were logically possible, even though they did not actually exist. It would also be true that
if
two sets of two apples were to exist,
then
there would exist four apples. Even if there had been nothing at all, such conditional truths, truths of an
if
-y
then
-y sort, would still have held.”

Fine, I said, but how do you get from such possibilities—from “
if
-y
then
-y truths,” as he called them—to actual existence?

“Well,” Leslie resumed, “Plato looked among these truths and recognized that some of them were more than just
if
-y
then
-y. Suppose you had an empty universe—nothing at all. It would be a fact that this empty universe was a lot better than a universe full of people who were in immense misery. And this would mean that there was an ethical
need
for the emptiness to continue rather than being replaced by a universe of infinite suffering. But there might also be another ethical need in the opposite direction—a need for this emptiness to be replaced with a
good
universe, one full of happiness and beauty. And Plato thought that the ethical requirement that a good universe exist was itself enough to
create
the universe.”

Leslie called my attention to Plato’s
Republic
, in which we are told that the Form of the Good is “what bestows existence upon things.” Leslie’s own answer to the puzzle of existence, he said, was essentially an updating of that Platonic claim.

“So,” I said, trying to sound less incredulous than I felt, “you’re actually suggesting that the universe somehow exploded into being out of an abstract need for goodness?”

Leslie was coolly unflappable. “Provided you accept the view that this world is, on balance, a good world, the idea that it was created by the
need
for the existence of a good world can at least get off the ground,” he said. “This has persuaded a lot of people over the ages since Plato. For those who believe in God, it has even provided an explanation for God’s
own
existence: he exists because of the ethical need for a
perfect being
. The idea that goodness can be responsible for existence has had quite a long history—which, as I’ve said, was a great disappointment for me to discover, because I’d have liked it to have been all my own.”

Something in Leslie’s soft, precise diction, which always betrayed just a hint of mirth, made me suspect there might be an undercurrent of irony in his Platonic creation story. And if he was seriously claiming that the universe sprang into being in answer to an ethical need for goodness, then could he explain why it has turned out to be such a disappointment, ethically and aesthetically speaking—howlingly mediocre when not downright evil?

It was then that I learned that reality according to Leslie far outstrips reality as the rest of us know it.

To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially
mental
. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness. The reason, according to Leslie, is simple. For something to be valuable
in itself
, as opposed to being valuable as a means to an end, that thing must have unity. It must be more than just an assemblage of separately existing parts. Granted, you can make something that is instrumentally valuable by putting together valueless parts—a TV set, for example. A TV set has instrumental value because it can produce enjoyment in someone watching it. But the experience of enjoyment is a state of consciousness. It has a unity that goes beyond any merely mechanical organization of parts. And that is why such a conscious experience can be
intrinsically
valuable. It was G. E. Moore—the founder, along with Bertrand Russell, of modern analytic philosophy—who first laid stress on the crucial role of what he called “organic unity” in the existence of intrinsic value. And genuine organic unity—as opposed to mere structural unity, the unity of an automobile engine or a heap of sand—is realized only in consciousness. (As William James observed, “
However complex the object
may be, the thought of it is one undivided state of consciousness.”) So if the world was indeed ushered into being by a need for goodness, then it must be fundamentally
made
out of consciousness.

That much, at least, I had gleaned from Leslie’s earlier writings, like his 1979 book,
Value and Existence
. What I was not prepared for was the great enlargement that his cosmic scheme had undergone in the intervening years.

“In my grand vision,” he told me, “what the cosmos consists of is an
infinite
number of
infinite
minds, each of which knows
absolutely everything
which is worth knowing. And one of the things which is worth knowing is the structure of a universe such as ours.”

So the physical universe itself, with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is just the contemplative product of one of those infinite minds. That was what Leslie was telling me. And the same goes for the inhabitants of the universe—us—and their conscious states. So my question remained, If an infinite mind was thinking the whole show up, why all the evil and suffering and disaster and sheer ugliness? Why do we inhabit such a darkling plain?

“But our universe is just
one
of the structures that an infinite mind would contemplate,” he said. “It would also know the structure of infinitely many
other
universes. And it would be very unlikely for ours to be the
best
of all of them. The best situation is the
total
situation, with all of these vastly many universes coexisting as contemplative patterns in an infinite mind. And the perfectly beautiful universe that you’d prefer? Well, maybe it’s one of those contemplative patterns. But there’s also
our
universe as well. I suspect that, of all the infinitely many worlds that are being thought of by an infinite mind, we’re pretty far down the list in terms of overall goodness. Still, I think you’d have to go quite far below us to have a world which was not worth having
at all
.”

Here Leslie chuckled audibly. Then, recovering his graver demeanor, he invited me to consider the Louvre museum as an analogy. Just as an infinite mind contains many universes, the Louvre contains many artworks. One of these artworks—say, the
Mona Lisa
—is the best. But if the Louvre contained nothing but perfect replicas of the
Mona Lisa
, it would be a less interesting museum than it actually is, with its vast number of inferior artworks adding to the variety. The best museum on the whole is one that contains, in addition to the very best works of art, all lesser works, as long as those lesser works have some redeeming aesthetic value—as long, that is, as they are not positively bad. Similarly, the best infinite mind is one that contemplates all cosmic patterns whose net value is positive, ranging from the very best possible world on down to worlds of indifferent quality, where the good barely outweighs the evil. Such a variety of worlds, each of which is, on the whole, better by some positive margin than sheer nothingness, is the most valuable reality overall—the one that might leap into existence out of a Platonic requirement for goodness.

Leslie had answered one obvious objection to his cosmic scheme: the problem of evil. Our own world is decidedly not the
Mona Lisa
. It is blemished by cruelty, suffering, arbitrariness, and waste. Yet, even with all its ethical and aesthetic defects, it manages to contribute a little net value to reality as a whole—just the way a mediocre painting by a second-rate artist might contribute a little net value to the collection in the Louvre. Our world is thus worthy to be part of that larger reality: worthy, that is, of contemplation by an infinite mind.

But there remained a still graver objection to Leslie’s axiarchic theory. Why should an infinite mind—or anything else, for that matter—be summoned into existence by a sheer need for goodness in the first place? Why, in other words, should “ought to exist” imply “does exist”? Such a principle certainly doesn’t seem to operate in the real world. If a poor child is starving to death, it would be good if a bowl of rice were to come into existence to save that child’s life. Yet we never see a bowl of rice materialize for the child out of nothingness. So why should we expect an entire cosmos to do the same?

When I put this objection to Leslie, he emitted a long sigh.

“People like me,” he said, “people who accept the Platonic view that the universe exists because it ought to exist, we aren’t saying that absolutely
all
ethical requirements are satisfied. We recognize that there are conflicts. If you’re going to have an orderly world that runs according to laws of nature—which is a very elegant and interesting way for a world to be—you can’t have bowls of rice suddenly appearing miraculously. Moreover, the fact that the child doesn’t have a bowl of rice may very well be the result of a misuse of human freedom, and you can’t have the goodness of a world where agents are free to make decisions unless you also have the possibility that those agents will make
bad
decisions.”

I understood that the requirements of goodness could conflict, that some could be overruled by others. But why should goodness have any tendency to fulfill itself at all? Why should it be different from, say, redness? Redness clearly doesn’t have a tendency to fulfill itself. If it did, everything would be red.

“Richard Dawkins once made the same point. He asked me, ‘How could so piffling a concept as goodness explain the world’s existence? You might as well appeal to Chanel Number Fiveness.’ Well, I don’t think of goodness as just another quality that is slapped on things like perfume or a coat of paint. Goodness is
required existence
, in a nontrivial sense. Anyone who doesn’t grasp that hasn’t reached square one in understanding what ethics is all about.”

Imagine some good possibility—like that of a beautiful and harmonious cosmos just spilling over with happiness. If that possibility were made real, it would have an existence that was ethically needful. This was essentially Plato’s idea: that a thing could exist
because
its existence was required by goodness. The connection between goodness and required existence isn’t a logical one. Yet it
is
a necessary connection—that, at least, is what Platonically inclined thinkers like Leslie believe. We may simply lack the conceptual resources to appreciate why this is so. We tend to think that value can bring something into existence only with the aid of some
mechanism
—as Leslie put it, “some combination, perhaps, of pistons pushing, electromagnetic fields tugging, or persons exerting willpower.” But such a mechanism could never explain the existence of a world. It could never explain why there is Something rather than Nothing, because it would be part of the Something to be explained. Given the limitations of our understanding, we have to content ourselves with the bare insight that an ethical need and a creative force both point in the same direction: toward Being. The Platonic idea that there is a necessary connection between the two is not an inescapable truth of logic. But neither is it a conceptual absurdity. So, at any rate, Leslie was maintaining.