Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (28 page)

But what, I wondered, if there is no Selector?

AFTER MY SOLITARY
weekend of reading, brooding, soaking, and dozing, it was good to come down to the commodious dining room of the Athenaeum Club on Monday morning and see a couple of dozen young City of London types, nicely turned out in Savile Row bespoke suits and Turnbull & Asser shirts, at breakfast. It reminded me that there are other things (if not necessarily more important things) beyond all this metaphysical fiddle. I picked up a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
, sat down at a table by myself, and ordered a big greasy English breakfast of eggs and kippers and stewed tomatoes. Delicious. A couple of hours later, feeling more sated than I usually did at that time of day, I was boarding an Oxford-bound train at Paddington Station.

En route to Oxford, I continued to think about what the Selector for our world could possibly be. Clearly, it was not simplicity. For, if it had been, the outcome of the reality contest would surely have been the Null Possibility. And whatever else the west London suburbs and commercial areas my train was passing through at the moment might be—drab, dingy, dispiriting—they were not nothing.

As for Platonic goodness being the Selector, as John Leslie believed, I had long ago put that rather too sanguine notion behind me. So, by the way, had Parfit. “We may doubt that our world could be even the least good part of the best possible Universe,” he dismissively observed.

But if this world fails to be ethically distinguished, it does seem to be special in other ways. It displays orderly causal patterns. Moreover, the laws that govern it appear to be, on the deepest level, remarkably simple—so simple that, if Steven Weinberg is right, human scientists are today on the verge of discovering them. Surely these two features—causal orderliness and nomological simplicity—mark off the actual world from the great ruck of messy and complicated cosmic possibilities.

This sort of thinking had led Parfit to the tentative conclusion that there might be at least two “partial Selectors” for reality: being governed by laws, and possessing simple laws. And could there be still others that we have not yet noticed? Possibly. “But observation can take us only part of the way,” he observed. “If we can get further, that will have to be by pure reasoning.” Such reasoning aims at the highest principle governing reality—the same principle that physicists are trying to discover. Thus, said Parfit, “there is no clear boundary here between philosophy and science.”

Hello! The train is pulling into Oxford already, right at the prick of noon.

FROM THE TRAIN
station it was just a short walk to the town center—a walk with which I was by now well familiar. “Come to All Souls College in the High Street at 1 p.m. and ask the Porter to call me from the lodge by the College gate,” Parfit had instructed me in his letter.

Since I had a little time to kill, I dropped into Blackwell’s on Broad Street, the best scholarly bookshop in the English-speaking world. I headed downstairs to the vast philosophy section, where, after browsing a bit, I found a wonderful book of photo-portraits of the greatest living philosophers, taken by a photographer named Steve Pyke. Parfit was among the subjects. His appearance was certainly striking: an elongated face, featured with thin lips, a granite nose, and wide pensive eyes, was surmounted by a luxuriant profusion of curly silver-white hair, which extended down the sides of his head almost to the level of his chin. Each photo was captioned with a personal statement by the philosopher who had posed for it. Parfit’s read, “
What interests me
most are the metaphysical questions whose answers can affect our emotions and have rational and moral significance. Why does the Universe exist? What makes us the same person throughout our lives? Do we have free will? Is time’s passage an illusion?”

A quarter of an hour later, I was peering through the rather forbidding gate of All Souls. THE COLLEGE IS CLOSED, announced one sign. QUIET PLEASE, said another. Beyond the gate, I could see a courtyard with two manicured rectangles of grass.

I made myself known to the college porter, who was dour of aspect, and waited as he rang up my host-to-be.

All Souls is a storied place. (“All Souls, no bodies,” says the wag.) One occasional visitor to All Souls when he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1960s was Christopher Hitchens, who described it as “
a florid antique shop
that admitted no students and guarded only the exalted privileges of its ‘fellows,’ a den of iniquity to every egalitarian and a place where silver candelabras and goblets adorned a nightly debauch of venison and port.” The fellows of All Souls, seventy-six in number, are selected from the most august ranks of the British academy and public life. Having no tutoring duties, they are free to pursue, amid sumptuous surroundings, a life of pure scholarship and speculative thought—relieved, perhaps, by internal politics and gossip. Parfit, somewhat unusually, had spent the whole of his career there, having been elected a “prize fellow” in 1967, fresh out of his undergraduate days at Balliol College.

And here he was, bounding toward me diagonally across the quadrangle—a tall, gangling, smiling fellow, whose unruly mop of argent tresses fulfilled the promise of the photo I had just seen. He was wearing a bright-red tie, which rhymed with his rather rubicund face. We shook hands and exchanged greetings. I offered to take him to one of the better restaurants out on the High Street for a long wine-soaked lunch.

“No,” he said, “I’m giving
you
lunch.”

He led me inside the college. “This is the best view in all of Oxford,” he said, gesturing out a large window toward Radcliffe Camera, the old library of Oxford. “The dome is by Hawksmoor!”

I remembered having heard that Parfit was a keen architectural photographer.

Lunch was being served to the fellows of All Souls in “the Buttery,” a Gothic dining room with a lofty coffered ceiling and highly resonant acoustics. Parfit invited me to help myself at the buffet, where I filled my plate with avocado salad and bread. We sat down to eat and talk.

Parfit told me about his life. He had been very pious as a young child, he said, but he gave up religion at the age of eight or nine. He remembered, when looking at pictures of the crucifixion, how he felt the most pity for the bad thief—“because, unlike Jesus and the good thief, he’s going to
hell
after he suffers and dies on the cross.”

Then he talked about mathematics, at which, he said, he was terrible. He expressed amazement that mathematics could be so complicated. A mathematician had told him that 80 percent of mathematics was about infinity. And he was horrified to learn that there was more than one infinity!

Even though his father wanted him to be a scientist, Parfit continued, he decided that he would become a philosopher. He hated the “scientizing” of philosophy, the main influences behind which, he felt, were Quine and Wittgenstein. He also hated the “naturalizing” of epistemology—the idea that the project of justifying our knowledge should be taken away from philosophers and given to cognitive scientists.

Then the talk turned to moral philosophy, which, he told me, was his main interest at the moment. Unlike many moral philosophers these days, he said, he believed that we have objective reasons to be moral, reasons that do not depend on our inclinations—adding that he would be “embarrassed even to have to defend that claim before a non-university audience.” He was appalled, he said, at some of the crazy views that contemporary philosophers had argued for, like the view that only desires can give rise to reasons.

Parfit winced, as if in pain, when mentioning such distasteful views, and often flung his arms toward the coffered ceiling in exasperation. He was equally animated when putting forth the views that he favored, leaning close to me, grinning, and vigorously nodding.

When lunch was finished, we retired into an adjoining parlor to have coffee by the fireplace and talk about why there is Something rather than Nothing.

PARFIT, AS I
mentioned earlier, had declined to be quoted at length on the matter. He did, however, say that he would answer my questions with a brief affirmative or negative reply. And I had two main questions, one easy and one hard.

The easy one had to do with nothingness. Parfit clearly believed that nothingness was a logically coherent idea. Indeed, he thought it was one of the ways reality could have turned out. “It might have been true,” he had written, “that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space, no time.” Nothingness was therefore included among his cosmic possibilities, in the form of the Null possibility.

But was nothingness also a
local
possibility? That is, could it coexist with a world of being?

The philosopher Robert Nozick, for one, had thought that it could. If reality was as full as possible, encompassing every conceivable world, then one of those worlds would perforce consist of absolutely nothing. That, at least, was what Nozick believed. So the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
on his way of thinking, might have a simple answer: There isn’t. There’s both.

Nozick’s reasoning has convinced some scientists, including his onetime Harvard student, the string theorist Brian Greene. “
In the Ultimate Multiverse
,” Greene has written, “a universe consisting of nothing
does
exist.” Again, reality embraces both something
and
nothing.

And, from a somewhat different angle, Jean-Paul Sartre agreed, declaring that “
Nothingness haunts Being
.”

But the notion that reality could embrace both being and nothingness struck me as wrong-headed, and I said so to Parfit. How could it make sense to talk of adjoining a “world of nothing” to an ensemble of something-worlds? It would not be like adding a barren planet, or a region of empty space. For a barren planet is something. And so, pretty much everyone agrees, is a region of empty space. Space has features. It can, for example, be either finite or infinite in extent. Nothingness is not like that.

I wanted to put the point in the form of an equation:

Something + Nothing = Something

But even that seemed too weak. To add “nothing” to a cosmic possibility was an empty gesture. It was to do nothing at all.

Parfit agreed. Nozick and the others were wrong, he believed. Nothingness is not a local possibility; it cannot be one world among many. The only reality consistent with Nothingness is the reality consisting of
no
worlds at all: the Null Possibility. You can have two different somethings, but you can’t have both something and nothing. It’s strictly an either/or deal.

My second question for Parfit was a deeper one. Suppose he was right in thinking that what he called a Selector might yield the explanation for why reality took the particular form that it did. Would that be the end of the matter? Does cosmic explanation stop at the Selector level? Or could there be a further explanation as to why some particular Selector, among all the other plausible rival Selectors, prevailed?

Think again of the analogy to the Miss Cosmos Pageant. The contestants are all the conceivable ways reality might have been—all the cosmic possibilities. One of these contestants has to be crowned the winner. Suppose the winner turns out to be the ethically best cosmic possibility: Miss Infinitely Good. Then we might suspect that the judges used goodness as the Selector: that, after all, would explain the choice of Miss Infinitely Good as the winner. But couldn’t we go on to ask
why
the judges used goodness as their Selector rather than, say, simplicity, elegance, or fullness?

On the other hand, suppose the winner of the Miss Cosmos Pageant turned out to have no special features. Suppose it was Miss Mediocre. Then we might conclude that the judges didn’t use any Selector at all. They didn’t care about what the contestants were like, what their special virtues might be. They simply drew straws. But couldn’t we go on to ask
why
the pageant’s judges didn’t bother to use a Selector to choose the winner?

Parfit acknowledged the need for further cosmic explanation. “Reality may happen to be as it is, or there may be some Selector,” he had written. “Whichever of these is true, it may happen to be true, or there may be some higher Selector. These are the different possibilities at the next explanatory level, so we are back with our two questions: which obtains, and why?”

So first you need a Selector to explain why reality is the way it is. Then you need a meta-Selector at the next explanatory level to account for why
that
Selector was the operative one in choosing how the world turned out. And then you need a meta-meta-Selector at a still higher explanatory level to account for why
that
meta-Selector was tapped. And so on. Could this explanatory regress ever come to an end? And, if so,
how
could it end? With some highest Selector? Then wouldn’t that be the ultimate brute fact?

When I put this question to Parfit, he conceded that the quest to explain reality would likely end with such a brute fact. How could this be avoided? You might try to avoid it by saying that a Selector could select itself. For instance, if goodness proved to be the highest Selector, one might try to say that this is true because it’s for the best. That is, goodness chose itself as the ruler of reality. But Parfit didn’t buy that. “Just as God could not make himself exist, no Selector could make itself the one that, at the highest level, rules,” he maintained. “No Selector could settle whether it rules, since it cannot settle anything unless it
does
rule.”

Nonetheless, Parfit insisted, an explanation that ends with a brute fact is better than no explanation at all. Indeed, he observed, scientific explanations invariably take this form. Such an explanation can still help us to discover what reality, on its grandest scale, might actually be like—say, by giving us a reason to believe that reality comprises worlds beyond our own.

As Parfit sipped his coffee, I brought out a little diagram that I had made over the weekend. It showed how the various Selectors might be related to one another, and to reality. At the bottom of the paper, I had sketched the reality level. There I had set out some of the cosmic possibilities that Parfit had talked about. At the level above that—the first explanatory level—I had jotted down some of the plausible Selectors. And at the level above that—the second explanatory level—I had indicated some of the meta-Selectors. Then I had drawn arrows between the different levels to indicate the various explanatory relationships that might obtain. The diagram looked like the one on the facing page.