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

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The Washington Post Notable Non-Fiction of 2013“I can imagine few more enjoyable ways of thinking than to read this book.”—Sarah Bakewell, New York Times Book Review, front-page reviewTackling the “darkest question in all of philosophy” with “raffish erudition” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), author Jim Holt explores the greatest metaphysical mystery of all: why is there something rather than nothing? This runaway bestseller, which has captured the imagination of critics and the public alike, traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. Holt adopts the role of cosmological detective, traveling the globe to interview a host of celebrated scientists, philosophers, and writers, “testing the contentions of one against the theories of the other” (Jeremy Bernstein, Wall Street Journal). As he interrogates his list of ontological culprits, the brilliant yet slyly humorous Holt contends that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God versus the Big Bang. This “deft and consuming” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) narrative humanizes the profound questions of meaning and existence it confronts.

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⭐As the book’s title suggests, the question that animates Holt is, “Why does the world exist?” By “the world,” Holt means everything that exists, not just the Earth. Of course, Holt’s question only makes sense if there are other possible ways things could have been, and Holt thinks that there are. In fact, there are infinitely many other alternative possibilities. The simplest is that nothing at all exists, and but there also are infinite variations on how an existing world could be, with different features and/or histories. So, given all of those possibilities, why do we have the world we have? Holt also is curious about why the world we live in has its many improbable features that have permitted intelligent life to emerge–does the unlikelihood of such a world provide evidence of a benign God who designed this world to support human life?The subtitle of the book is “An Existential Detective Story,” and Holt is cast as the p.i. and leading scientists and philosophers are cast as the experts he consults to untangle the mystery. Holt got access to top-flight thinkers, so the conversations take place at a high level, but Holt does a masterful job explaining the background material so that an attentive reader can follow the twists and turns of the conversations. Holt generally doesn’t go deeply into the science, so if you want a book that thoroughly explains, say, quantum physics or the big bang, you should look elsewhere, but Holt provides enough background so that the reader can assess the pros and cons of the scientists’ ideas about why the world exists. Holt generally provides more thorough explanations of philosophical theories that arise in the book. I am a professional philosopher, so I am better equipped to analyze how well he handles the philosophical parts of the book, and I’d say he acquits himself very well, showing a masterful ability to make these abstract and difficult philosophical ideas come alive.Like when tackling a detective novel, the reader spends much of our time inside the head of the p.i. (Holt) as he thinks through the mystery at the heart of the book, but Holt is not cogitating alone: Many chapters involve Holt interviewing prominent philosophers or scientists. Although Holt lets the other person drive the conversation, Holt is not just passively taking notes–he asks insightful and interesting questions and raises important objections. Holt is a generous conversationalist who is open to exploring ideas, however counter-intuitive and surprising they may be. At the end of the conversation, Holt tells the reader what he took away of value from the conversation, as more pieces of the puzzle of existence come into place. Near the end of the book, Holt offers his own answer to the question of why the world exists, an answer heavily influenced by the work of the English philosopher Derek Parfit, whom Holt talked to in the previous chapter. Has Holt unlocked the mystery of existence? That is for each reader to decide, but I found Holt’s answer to be fascinating.Holt’s book differs from most “academic” works of philosophy in that he personalizes the issues and thinkers. He ties our interest in nothingness to our fear of death, which is our own inevitable plunge into nothingness, and he probes the personalities and biographies of the scientists and philosophers he interviews for a window into why they gravitate to different types of answers about why the world exists. His “investigation” is as much about human hopes and fears as it is about the mysteries of existence, as we see when he copes with the death of his mother and of his pet and thinks about what it means for a conscious being to no longer exist, to return to the void.The only criticism I have of the book–a criticism that would make me drop the book’s rating to 4.5 stars–is that its organization can be haphazard. This may be an inevitable byproduct of the author’s method of talking with so many different people, but certain ideas, such as the physicists’ concept of a “multi-verse,” come up in different chapters where they get different partial explanations; the book would be clearer with a single, more comprehensive explanation earlier in the book. Indeed, I sometimes found myself thinking, “Didn’t I read about this in an earlier chapter?” but not remembering exactly where. It can be hard to find those passages in earlier chapters because the chapter titles usually don’t announce clearly whom Holt is talking to in that chapter. Because I had the Kindle edition of the book, the book’s index, which references page numbers in the printed volume, was useless. (Of course, the Kindle edition has a search function.)The copy of the Kindle edition looked clean to me. I noticed no typos, except for a possible mistake on the chart that Holt uses to explain Parfit’s theory in chapter 12. I would like to look at the hardback copy of Holt’s book to see whether the chart there matches the one in the Kindle. Although this point will only be of interest to people who have read through chapter 12 of the book, I’m wondering whether it is an error that the arrow that goes from “Goodness” to “Axiarchic” is x’d out as circular. If anyone has any comments on that issue, please leave them here for me.So, if you’re the least bit inclined to ask “the big questions” and want a readable, state-of-the-art introduction to where scientists and philosophers stand on trying to explain the most mind-boggling question of all, namely, why the world exists, you are fortunate to have Jim Holt as your tour guide through the intellectual wilderness. Beginners to science and philosophy and more experienced hands should all enjoy the trip.

⭐The question “Why Does the World Exist” and its variants in “Why is there something rather than nothing?” seems both incredibly profound and incredibly shallow all at once. Why? Because it reveals a deep, ancient bias that we human primates possess that not only do all events need a precedent but that such events ultimately entail an ultimate, core “first precedent” or cause. Most of the human race has stopped blaming gods on lightning or schizophrenia on demonic possession, yet the urge to reduce everything down to a root cause that is supposed to be final and absolute, not to mention one of agency as ours, has never faded; it’s become bolstered instead, by those intellectually curious enough to even research any of this stuff, by the discovery of the CMBR, the expansion of the universe and the big bang. Yet the big bang was not something that Descartes or Leibnitz or Kant ever deduced via any acts of “pure reason,” sitting behind their desks and their lit candles; it was discovered by physical research, by modern science, by vast resources of money and time poured into technology and hardware and humans working painstakingly in unison in marrying theory to observation. Moreover, it is not final. Theories abound now for multiverses, different dimensions, quantum fluctuations spontaneously giving rise to universes like our own, big bangs leading to other big bangs and so on. We can elaborately speculate on what we see, but nothing moves until we gain more data.Which brings me to why this book infuriated the hell out of me, particularly (but not solely) at the point where I reached the 100th page with the interview with Richard Swinbourne. I actually was about to throw this book into the trash at around page 50 with all of the silly word games and puzzles, but the interview with Adolf Gruenbalm (or the “Great Rejectionist” as he calls him because he rejects Jim Holt’s biases) mulled me on for a while longer, as it was at least amusing and funny. The problem is in the tendency of this author to put his very specifically western, monotheistic cultural dogmatic beliefs higher on the scale than the data, the facts. But not only that… (the theistic bias is a dime-a-dozen these days as it has been for the last 2000 years…) it’s the very tone of this book. I’ll try to wrap it up in a few points below…1) Holt is biased from the onset toward scholastic (in the academic sense) explanations, imparting importance to Platonic ideals (I suppose they are called “neo-Platonists” these days?) where principles and ideas have their own separate existence outside of objects and facts. This is all very interesting but where is the connection to reality? In a separate interview (catch it on youtube) he states that the “best” book on this subject is one from an author who thinks the universe came about because of a Platonic principle of “goodness”, which is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my life, but Holt finds it extremely compelling. Together with his outright admission at the beginning of the book that he believes a malevolent entity created the universe, one has to expect that this is the vantage point from where his analysis is coming from, from page one and up, and decide from there whether this is worth reading.2) Holt is in love with asinine word games and formal logic as some grand indicator of truth. His definition of nothing goes through a myriad of changes depending on the context, while he tries to impute some kind of bold and dramatic consequences for the existence of nothing in propositions like “for every x, it is not the case that x = x”. I’ve never been less impressed by formal logic as in his defense of Anselm’s argument which have such champions behind them these days as the Christian apologist, Alvin Plantinga. Holt never says so but probably thinks Plantinga is a genius.3) The asides he makes about drinking wine in restaurants or sleeping in hotels on his way to meet his interlocutors are irrelevant and only lengthen what is already a verbose text unnecessarily. Perhaps I am not the right audience for the book but I found these sections only distracting.4) The language is fluid and Holt definitely has a talent in writing, but this doesn’t minimize the fact that his prose is extraordinarily pretentious. He injects words in his sentences that are completely unnecessary only to make himself look like more of an academic and learned person, i.e. the trick of writing “proffered” rather than “offered” (not something that Holt did necessarily in these pages, but his way of writing perfectly fits the pattern). Additionally, outside of his abuse of the word “ontological” as other critics here have pointed out, he namedrops on almost every page, as if searching desperately for his own identity, or (more likely) just trying to make the case that he is clever and well-read. I don’t doubt for a moment that he is well-read, but for a person of integrity there is simply no need to jump scattershot across these planes as he does. I came to this book directly after reading Human Errors by Nathan Lents and the distinction could not be any more profound. Human Errors is clean, linear, beautifully written and full of facts; Why Does the Word Exists is scattershot, cluttered, rambling, ostentatious and rife with theistically-biased speculation. Is that what an unbiased reader looking for truth wants to read?Just one last thing to add: the late Vic Stenger once asked if perhaps “something” is actually the natural state of being rather than “nothing.” That question has resonated with me for years and seems to make far more sense than it does to put one’s head into knots to try to wind down to the opposite. It also is conveniently counterintuitive to deep human biases that we have evolved to accept as natural, which I suspect to be the case. Together with the discovery that there actually is no such thing as a perfect vacuum (see Krauss’s “A Universe From Nothing”), the real challenge seems to me to propose a theory that argues the inverse notion, and it is exactly what Holt engages in, almost 300 pages looking for the answer to a question that may just be fundamentally incoherent.

⭐Easy read and thought provoking

⭐In a Nutshell Jim Holt takes us on a refreshingly bold and frank expose of the limits of scientific and philiosophical understanding via a series of interviews and reflections. The interviews are balanced in such a way as to include eminent scientists, theologians and philosophers. As perhaps guessed, there are no firm answers to the entitled question per se, but as the old adage goes; it’s the journey that counts.What is most refereshing is the author’s understanding of the nature of science and scientific understanding: science is a wonderful house built on sand. Science is always “true” but the truths are relative truths; descriptions that explain behaviours in terms of other behaviours but nothing about the essential nature of things. Observation and description (via models, theorems and mathematics) are one thing but what does it really tell us about the essential “nous”, the tangible fabric of life?Be prepared for frontier (yet accessible) jaunts around quantum mechanics, relativity and string theory. Can we have a unified theorem of everything? At the frontiers of science, at the bedrock of this house of sand, do scientists defend their institutions out of blind faith as much as theologians? (ultimately, yes).What this leads to is a discussion about the ultimate nature of things and if we are even capable of understanding them. Is the observed cartesian, noumenal world really separate from our phenomenal consciousness? It’s interesting from the interviews that some of the brightest minds on the planet do not have the same “Blind Watchmaker” cosmo-conceptions that we might presume. In fact at the very frontier of human understanding we are asymptotic to mysticism and metaphysics, the difference perhaps being vocabulary.Any final consolations to a seemingly intractible subject? I have only one: The map is not the place (Korzybski).

⭐Wow, what a wonderful mental work-out! I’ve now read this book twice and can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in the really big questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “Where did the universe come from?”. Jim Holt has an easy-to-read, journalistic style but, be warned, the questions he grapples with are very tough and it helps if you have at least some knowledge of cosmology and quantum physics. In the course of his investigations he talks to a wide selection of leading scientists, philosophers and theologians and while not coming up with a definitive answer to the book’s title (How could he?!) he leaves you with the feeling that he’s on the right track. By the way, don’t expect the easy answer that “God made it”!

⭐This is an absolutely incredible book. I genuinely felt i loved every passage when reading it. Jim Holt writes with personal passion for a question that has gripped him for many years. This book provides a wonderfully comprehensive look into just about every significant theory on one of the ultimate questions: why is there something and not nothing. Holt’s vivid account and unique intellegent interviews are entertaining as well as educational, especially for a layperson like myself. I would certainly recommend to anyone who is interested in one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

⭐300 pages on why there is something rather than nothing is heavy going even for me. Holt betrays his prejudices and shows too much deference to the wishful teleology of John Leslie and not enough to the platonic ideas of Roger Penrose and the clear insights of Adolph Grunbaum. All in all though, well worth a read. Perhaps he should have skipped the chapter on personal identity to shorten the book.

⭐Fascinating and accessible philosophical journey on why the world exists, or why there is something rather than nothing. This really was a page turner. I was mesmerised by the fact that the majority of mathematicians believe in a platonic realm of mathematical objects. Really!!?? Holt injects some of his personality and everyday life into the book which makes the whole thing feel very real. To read this some knowledge of philosophy would probably help.

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