The Mystery of Existence | John Leslie

John, in trying to understand existence, I'm told by various people, philosophers, physicists, that to think about non-existence is absurd. In other words, my worry, the thing that upsets me and I think about, is just a non-issue and totally dismissed. I feel like I'm stupid. Well, you'll find a lot of clever people saying precisely that, that there's some sort of contradiction in blankness, that if we knew enough logic, we could say that there had to be a universe. How do you actually refute them? Only by going in and looking at some very complicated arguments. Suppose you take the argument, which I like, that things could vanish one by one until the last one went. You'd have some people saying, well, they could vanish one by one, but with the last one going, then all the laws of mathematics would have to go because they depend on countable things. Even if you have a single thing, you can always split it up into bits and say, two and two make four about the bits, but if the last one goes, poof, mathematics goes and it's ridiculous to say that mathematical truths wouldn't keep on being true. Therefore, the last thing couldn't go and then some people think that there's a mind behind the universe. God or something. How does that work, that a blank is absurd? Well, some people would say that a blank is absurd because you can't imagine it. Others would try to give a bit more force to this by saying reality is essentially mental and there wouldn't be anything mental in a blank and therefore a blank can't exist. That was argued by the idealist philosophers who took after Hegel. Another way is to say that physics in some way makes a blank absurd. Why is that? Well, I would tend to react in the same way. How can you say that? But recent pronouncements by Stephen Hawking, he says that logic, or he seems to say that logic can explain the existence of the universe and if we are to take that seriously, that would mean that there's some sort of contradiction in a blank. A blank meaning absolutely nothing at all. Absolutely nothing existent. I wouldn't say that even if there was nothing existent, there could be all sorts of facts, truths and so on. And Stephen Hawking would seem to be saying that some of those facts, truths, are truths about quantum physics and they make a blank unstable, make it necessary that a universe exists. Again, some people would say that there's no essential difference between the mere possibility of something and something being real somewhere. Now how does that work? That sounds very strange. I mean, I can think of a possibility of a unicorn or a possibility of a universe where everyone looked like me. Those are possible universes. Well, there is one extremely clever philosopher who recently died off, David Lewis, who thinks that there are universes with unicorns and there are indeed universes where everybody looks exactly like you. I wouldn't want to live there myself. Lewis's view is that all possibles exist somewhere, it's just they don't exist in our world. And that's why a blank and utter nothing is absurd. It's absurd because you can't get rid of possibilities. I think that's correct. But he says he can't think of possibilities as real, as genuine possibilities, unless they genuinely exist somewhere. And Lewis is a very, very clever man. I think his system gets into problems, but he's clever and he thinks the problems go away. When Hawking talks about that a blank or nothing would be absurd because of the laws of physics, that's not nothing. The laws of physics are not nothing, even though the laws of physics would have nothing be an instability and therefore something would have to arise. So why is that an absurdity? Why does that mean that nothing would be an absurdity? Well, first, I'd like to say that there's nothing clear in this area at all. Somebody as clever as Einstein suggested that it might have been that God had no choice as to what to create. There could be just a single coherent cosmic possibility. And you might see Hawking as doing the sort of thing that Einstein wanted to do and adding a little more structure to it. This horrifies most philosophers. Most philosophers would say they can easily think of worlds which are completely different from our world, which obey laws of physics which are completely different from the ones we see or which are so quite chaotic that they obey no laws at all. This would be the standard philosophical view. And it's tempting to read Hawking as not meaning what he seems to say. He says in the book they recently put out, The Grand Design, that abstract considerations of logic could explain why the universe exists. Now, this might mean simply that the laws of physics are such that if you tried to bend them slightly, they would break completely. And therefore, that's the only way that it could work, so... The only way that laws even vaguely like this could work would be that the laws would be exactly like this. That could be what they are saying. But it could be that they are believing that ultimately the laws of physics are somehow in the end dictated by the laws of logic. And as a good philosopher, I say this is nonsense, but there are a lot of physicists who are taking it seriously. And Hawking's a very clever guy. So maybe there's something there. Or maybe there's something in the view that the laws of physics could exist even if the universe weren't there. That I take more seriously than the view that there'd be a contradiction in the universe not being there. I think the idea that the laws don't have to depend on the universe being there, that should be taken seriously, even though I myself don't believe it. All right, so looking at this at the whole, from the physical point of view, from the philosophical point of view, from this plentitude of worlds point of view, how do you analyze, what is your view of the answer to existence being that non-existence is absurd? Well, my view is that that doesn't work. That non-existence would have no absurdity in it. You can imagine things vanishing one by one, and then the last thing goes, and there you have non-existence. This is an argument which is being developed these days by some very good philosophers. Also, I myself think that there's a necessity behind the existence of the universe, but you wouldn't be absurd to deny this necessity. There'd be a conflict with the nature of necessity if the universe weren't here, but it's not a logical conflict. Talking about a blank isn't like talking about a round square or what philosophers always talk about a married bachelor. Married bachelors and round squares, they're absolutely impossible. We can see that there's a contradiction there. There's no contradiction which will ever be seen in the same way in blankness. That's my own take on it.