Manual Why: Why do I and the world exist

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There could have been nothing. It might have been easier. Instead there is something. The universe exists, and we are here to ask about it.
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The cosmogonies Holt presents are fascinating, illuminating—and, almost without exception, unsupported by evidence. This raises questions that have nothing to do with the nature of the universe. These answers, too, are up for grabs. With ease, eh? Contemporary cosmogony is so difficult to fathom that one starts to side, instead, with the biologist J.

Who knows which entity will ultimately win out in the capaciousness game? The pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve. In his epilogue, Holt is in Paris, watching French TV, where a Dominican priest, a Buddhist monk, and a theoretical physicist are debating the origins of the universe.

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt

Why does this book exist? Because its author went to a party in Paris, drank some wine, returned home, watched TV. Hey, thanks for the turtles! Where did Paris come from? How do you get a universe from nothing? How do you get a book from a brain?

Nobody knows. And Holt, to his credit, is comfortable with that. Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings—the absence of answers; the experience of awe—strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem. This is a book that ends, literally and figuratively, in opacity and incompleteness. Holt is halfway across a bridge, at night, smoking a cigarette—that tiny artifact of human ingenuity, addictive and glowing.

In an act of civic irresponsibility but intellectual bravura, he leans over and lets it drop into the darkness. It falls like one final question: How much will we illuminate, before we are extinguished? By Jim Holt. This story appeared in the July 16, issue of New York Magazine. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Photo: NASA. Tags: books jim holt why does the world exist? He's mad. I mean, you see stuff when you're dreaming don't you.

I quite often see giraffes going camping. Which is a nightmare because they can't find sleeping bags long enough to keep their necks warm and their heads keep busting through the roofs of the tents. So how are you seeing the things you're seeing? But I can feel things and all. How could a brain in a jar feel your mad, squashy face, mate? Or is your mind just telling you that you're feeling my mad, squashy face? I mean, I can feel things in my dreams as well, can't I? Maybe I am a brain in a jar. My jarhead, told you. Help, get me out of this jar. I'm not having you telling me that this is not real.

Right, I mean it's common sense. Davey, man, if all this was real why would there be a sound man recording us talking? Why would there be a camera and lights? Why would this football we're watching on telly just be a hollowed out prop TV with a wee stuffed fox inside it?

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How do we know that they Sorry, talking about you as if you aren't even in the room. How do we know that they aren't brains in jars as well? JIMMY: Aye, and you're the one that definitely is a brain in a jar because it was me who told that mad scientist where you live because I wanted rid of you for always eating the chocolate spread, Davey.

Which means all of this in here, except you inside that jar, must be Oh no, it's teeth time. Oh no! What did Hume think? JIMMY: 'Hume said, "We can't prove that the world really exists, we use our senses like our eyes and ears but we've got no proof that they tell us anything about the world. He agreed that you can't prove it but disagreed that you have to. It will help to distinguish two kinds of possibility. Cosmic possibilities cover everything that ever exists, and are the different ways that the whole of reality might be.

Only one such possibility can be actual, or the one that obtains. Local possibilities are the different ways that some part of reality, or local world, might be. If some local world exists, that leaves it open whether other worlds exist. One cosmic possibility is, roughly, that every possible local world exists. This we can call the All Worlds Hypothesis. Another possibility, which might have obtained, is that nothing ever exists. This we can call the Null Possibility. In each of the remaining possibilities, the number of worlds that exist is between none and all.

There are countless of these possibilities, since there are countless combinations of particular possible local worlds.

Why Life Does Not Really Exist

Of these different cosmic possibilities, one must obtain, and only one can obtain. So we have two questions: which obtains, and why? These questions are connected. If some possibility would be easier to explain, we have more reason to believe that this possibility obtains.

Why does anything exist? - The Economist

This is how, rather than believing in only one Big Bang, we have more reason to believe in many. Whether we believe in one or many, we have the question why any Big Bang has occurred. Though this question is hard, the occurrence of many Big Bangs is not more puzzling than the occurrence of only one. Most kinds of thing, or event, have many instances. We also have the question why, in the Big Bang that produced our world, the initial conditions allowed for complexity and life.

If there has been only one Big Bang, this fact is also hard to explain, since it is most unlikely that these conditions merely happened to be right. If, instead, there have been many Big Bangs, this fact is easy to explain, since it is like the fact that, among countless planets, there are some whose conditions allow for life. Since belief in many Big Bangs leaves less that is unexplained, it is the better view. If some cosmic possibilities would be less puzzling than others, because their obtaining would leave less to be explained, is there some possibility whose obtaining would be in no way puzzling?


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Consider first the Null Possibility, in which nothing ever exists. To imagine this possibility, it may help to suppose first, that all that ever existed was a single atom. We then imagine that even this atom never existed. But that is not so. When we imagine how things would have been if nothing had ever existed, what we should imagine away are such things as living beings, stars and atoms. There would still have been various truths, such as the truth that there were no stars or atoms, or that 9 is divisible by 3. We can ask why these things would have been true. And such questions may have answers.

Thus we can explain why, even if nothing had ever existed, 9 would still have been divisible by 3. There is no conceivable alternative. And we can explain why there would have been no such things as immaterial matter, or spherical cubes. Such things are logically impossible. But why would nothing have existed?