Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (31 page)

Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.

“The whole idea of inflationary expansion,” he continued, “seems sort of put forward on a smile and a shoeshine. Granted, it solves a number of cosmological problems that were embarrassing …”

Wait—a smile and a
what
?

“A smile and a shoeshine …”

I’d never heard that expression, I said. It’s charming.

“Oh, that’s what Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman
was out on. He was out there, as they say at his funeral service, ‘on a smile and a shoeshine.’ You’ve never heard that?”

I confessed that I was a theater philistine.

“It’s a phrase I can’t shake, because, in a way, a writer too is out there on a smile and a shoeshine. Although people maybe don’t shine their shoes as much now. It’s hard to shine a running shoe.”

I always feel virtuous, I told Updike, when I shine my shoes.

“So anyway,” he continued, “when you think about it, 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. So … ah … wait, my wife is just showing me a big thermometer … numbers everywhere … now what was I saying? Oh yes, 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
.

I told Updike how much I had enjoyed the chat. He said he had been almost out of breath at the beginning because he had just come in from playing kickball with his grandchildren. “I find when I play kickball, which I did with ease most of my life, that at seventy-five it’s a definite strain,” he said, laughing. “You listen to your heart beating and hear your own rasping lungs. It’s a good way to keep in touch with what stage of life you’re at.”

A few months later, Updike was diagnosed with lung cancer. Within a year he was dead.

14

THE SELF: DO I REALLY EXIST?

I am, however, a real thing and really exist. But what thing?
I have answered: a thing that thinks.

—DESCARTES,
Meditations

W
hy is there Something rather than Nothing? I thought I finally had the answer. It had come in the shape of a proof, almost geometrical in style, one that Spinoza might have found congenial. And Sherlock Holmes might have found my proof congenial too, for it proceeded in precisely the way that, as Holmes insisted to his faithful but less quick-witted companion, Dr. Watson, good detective work ought to proceed: “
How often have I said
to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth?”

And the last line of my proof not only assured the existence of a nonempty reality. It also dictated the general form that this reality is bound to take: that of infinite mediocrity. If the principles underlying my reasoning were correct, the world must be as far removed from encompassing absolutely everything as it is from encompassing absolutely nothing. But that conclusion raised a new perplexity. If the world falls infinitely short of ontological completeness, then why am
I
a part of it? How did I happen to make the existential cut? And why do I find myself somewhat giddy at the thought that I did?

The brute fact of my existence might not have been so mysterious if this world, among all rival realities, had been marked out for actuality by some special feature. In that case, I might have explained my personal existence by appeal to that special cosmic feature. Suppose, for example, that the cosmos existed because it satisfied an abstract need for goodness, the way John Leslie believed. On that axiarchic/Platonic view, I must be here because my own existence contributes a little jot of goodness to the cosmic total. Or suppose more fancifully that the cosmos is, as John Updike had suggested, like a “bit of light verse.” Then the rationale for my own life might be the role that I played in the cosmic metrical scheme, or even in the cosmic joke. Any such special feature, one that marked this particular world out for existence, would lend meaning to my own existence as an element of that world. It would endow my life with a cosmic purpose: to be as ethically good as possible, or to be as lightly poetical as possible, or whatever.

But reality has no such special feature. So, at least, my quest for complete ontic understanding had led me to conclude. The existence of this cosmos can be fully explained only on the assumption that it is middling in every way—a vast Walpurgisnacht of mediocrity. Even its infinity is a middling one, since the infinite cosmos still falls infinitely short of achieving utter plenitude. It is like a randomly chosen subset of the natural numbers, a subset that includes infinitely many numbers but also leaves infinitely many numbers out.

And if reality has no special feature, then my own presence in it cannot be explained by the hypothesis that I somehow enhance that feature, add something to it. Thus there can be no cosmic point to my existence—or rather, the only point to my existence is
that I exist
. Sartre was on to something like this when he said, “
Existence precedes essence
.” And the purpose of my life? As eponymous antihero of Ivan Goncharov’s great novel
Oblomov
is wisely told by his friend Stolz, “
The purpose is to live
.” That is a tautology worth remembering.

So my existence, from the perspective of the cosmos, has neither meaning nor purpose nor necessity. (And that is nothing to be ashamed of. For the same would be true of God, if God existed.) I am an accidental, contingent thing. I might easily not have existed at all.

How easily? Let’s do a little calculation. As a member of the human species, I have a particular genetic identity. There are about 30,000 active genes in the human genome. Each of these genes has at least two variants, or “alleles.” So the number of genetically distinct identities the genome can encode is at least 2 raised to the thirty-thousandth power—which roughly equals the number 1 followed by 10,000 zeros. That’s the number of potential people allowed by the structure of our DNA. And how many of those potential people have actually existed? It is estimated that about 40 billion humans have been born since the emergence of our species. Let’s round the number up to 100 billion, just to be on the conservative side. This means that the fraction of genetically possible humans who have been born is less than 0.00000 … 000001 (insert about 9,979 extra zeroes in the gap). The overwhelming majority of these genetically possible humans are unborn specters. Such is the fantastic lottery that I—and you—had to win in order to shimmer on to the scene. This is contingency with a vengeance.

The fact that we prevailed against these stupefyingly long odds makes us “
the lucky ones
”—so says Richard Dawkins. Sophocles evidently disagreed. “Never to be born is best of all,” the chorus in
Oedipus at Colonus
declares. Bertrand Russell took a more agnostic position on this matter, writing, “
There is a general belief
(which I have never understood) that it is better to exist than not to exist; on this ground children are exhorted to be grateful to their parents.” If your parents had never met, of course, you would not exist. But much more than the mere meeting of your parents, or even their sexual congress at a particular moment in history, had to go improbably right in order for you to see the world. Perhaps the entity that really deserves your gratitude is not your mother or your father, but rather the plucky little sperm that, carrying half of your genetic identity as its cargo, gamely made its way through the amniotic sea, past millions of its ejaculate-rivals, to unite with the egg.

The coming-into-being of my genetic identity was indeed a long shot. But was even
that
enough to ensure the coming-into-being of
me
? Could this genetic identity not just as easily produced not me, but, as it were, my identical twin? (If you happen to be one of a pair of identical twins, try this thought experiment. Imagine that the zygote that split apart shortly after fertilization to produce you and your twin had instead remained a single clump of cells. Would the unique baby born to your parents nine months later have been you? Your twin? Neither?)

And am I really nothing more than an instance of the genetically defined species
Homo sapiens
? I certainly seem to be able to imagine my self migrating into some nonhuman form—a penguin, perhaps, or a robot, or an immaterial being like an angel. So maybe I am not essentially a biological organism after all. Maybe I am essentially something else.

Although I am not sure about what I ultimately am, there is one thing I do know:
I exist
. This proposition may be a contingent truth, but it is also an
a priori
one. I cannot deny it without contradicting myself. (I might deny it jocularly, but that would only be to say that I am economically or socially negligible, not that I am a metaphysical zero.) Even in the extremity of doubt about the world, the fact of my existence is a beacon of certitude. So, at least, Descartes insisted.
Cogito ergo sum
, he put it in his famous phrase: “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” And from the claim that his existence was self-evident from the mere fact that he was thinking, Descartes moved directly to the stronger claim that he was, in essence, a
thinking being
—that is, a pure subject of consciousness. As such, the “I” in “I am thinking” had to refer to something that was distinct from his physical body—something immaterial.

Did Descartes here infer more than he was entitled to? As many commentators have pointed out (beginning with Georg Lichtenberg in the eighteenth century), the “I” in his ultimate premise is not quite legitimate. All Descartes could assert with certainty was “There are thoughts.” He never proved that thoughts require a thinker. Perhaps the pronoun “I” in his proof was just a misleading artifact of grammar, not a name for a genuinely existing thing.

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this
I
. You may encounter nothing more than an ever-changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered. That, at least, was what David Hume, a century after Descartes, found when he conducted his own introspective experiment. In his
Treatise of Human Nature
, Hume wrote, “
When I enter
most intimately into what I call
myself
, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch
myself
at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception… . If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of
himself
, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.”

So who is right, Descartes or Hume? Is there an
I
or not? And if there is not, just what am I wondering about when I wonder why I exist?

Even today, the nature of the self is an issue that divides and perplexes philosophers. Perhaps a slight majority lean toward Hume’s view that the enduring self is something of a fiction, a shadow cast by the pronoun “I.” Derek Parfit, for example, likens the self to a club, one that might change its membership over time, disband altogether, and then reconvene under the same name in a different form. Daniel Dennett says that “
selves are not
independently existing soul-pearls, but artifacts of the social processes that create us.” Galen Strawson thinks that, within each person’s stream of consciousness, little transient selves constantly wink in and out of existence, none of them lasting for more than an hour or so. “
There simply isn’t any ‘I’
or self that goes on through (let alone beyond) the waking day,” Strawson claims, “even though there’s obviously an ‘I’ or self at any given time.” Moreover, whatever pop-up self happens to be hanging around at the end of each day is soon, according to Strawson, annihilated by the oblivion of sleep. Each morning awakes a new Cartesian “I.”

Even Thomas Nagel, who tends to take a robustly realist view of the self, thinks its true nature could be partly hidden from us. “
I may understand
and be able to apply the term ‘I’ to myself without knowing what I really am,” Nagel has written.

If the inner
I
is elusive, perhaps there’s a reason for that. What, after all, is the self supposed to be? In modern—that is, post-Cartesian—thought, philosophers have laid down two broad conceptual requirements that the self must meet. First, whatever else it is, the self is the
subject of consciousness
. The various experiences I am having at a particular moment—seeing a patch of blue sky through the window, hearing a distant siren, feeling a slight headache, thinking about lunch—are part of the same consciousness because they belong to the same self. I can identify the headache-y feeling as my own without any chance of being mistaken. (Hence the absurdity, in Charles Dickens’s
Hard Times
, of the sick-bed statement made by Mrs. Gradgrind: “
I think there is a pain
somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”) And the second requirement is that the self be capable of
self-consciousness
—of being aware of itself, of having “me-ish” experiences.

But isn’t there a fatal tension between these two requirements? How can one and the same thing be simultaneously both the
subject
and the
object
of consciousness? The very idea struck Schopenhauer as “
the most monstrous contradiction
ever thought of.” Wittgenstein agreed. “
The I is not an object
,” he declared. “I objectively confront every object. But not the I.” Like Schopenhauer before him, Wittgenstein compared the
I
to the eye. Just as the
I
is the source of consciousness, the eye is the source of the visual field. But the eye is not
in
the visual field. It cannot see itself.

That may be why Hume was unable to find his own self. It may also be why (as Nagel thought) I can’t really know what I am.

Still, I do seem to be asserting something when I say, “I exist.” And the content of my assertion must be different from the content of yours when you utter the same sentence. But how? What makes one subject of consciousness different from another?

One view is that the contents of consciousness are what constitute the self. This is the
psychological
criterion of self-identity. On this view, to say “I exist” is just to assert the existence of a certain more or less continuous bundle of memories, perceptions, thoughts, and intentions. What makes me
me
and you
you
is our distinctive bundles.

But what happens if I undergo amnesia and lose all my memories? Or what if a fiendish neurosurgeon manages to erase all my memories and replace them with your memories? And what if he performed the reverse operation on you? Would we find ourselves waking up in each other’s body?

If you think that the answer to the last question is “yes,” consider the following scenario. You are informed that you are going to be tortured tomorrow. Understandably, this makes you fearful. But prior to the torture, you are told, your memories will be wiped out by the fiendish neurosurgeon and replaced with my memories. Would you still have reason to fear the torture? If you did, it would mean that, despite your complete psychological makeover as me, it would still be
you
who endured the pain.

Such a thought experiment was proposed in 1970 by the philosopher Bernard Williams to show that the psychological criterion of personal identity must be mistaken. But if psychological factors don’t determine my self-identity, what could? The obvious alternative—endorsed by Williams and later, more tentatively, by Thomas Nagel—is the
physical
criterion. My identity as a self is determined by my body; or, more specifically, by my brain, the physical object that is causally responsible for the existence and continuity of my consciousness. On the “I am my brain” view, the actual contents of your stream of consciousness don’t matter to your identity. What is all-important is the particular blob of gray meat that is lodged in your skull. You cannot survive the destruction of this blob. Your self could not be “uploaded” into a computer, nor could it be resurrected in some ethereal form. Nagel has gone so far as to suggest that even if an
exact physical replica
of your brain were created, and then stocked with your memories and lodged in a clone of your body, the result would still not be
you
. (Although it would certainly
think
it was you.)