Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,21

maintained that sheer nothingness was unthinkable. He too concluded that it must therefore be impossible.

One of the more confused attempts to imagine nothingness was made by “S,” a patient of the distinguished Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria. S had such an extraordinary memory that Luria wrote an entire book about him, titled The Mind of a Mnemonist. Oddly though, his memory was almost purely visual. So when S tried to conceive of nothingness, the experiment went disastrously awry:

In order for me to grasp the meaning of a thing, I have to see it… . Take the word nothing … I see this nothing and it is something… . So I turned to my wife and asked her what nothing meant… . She simply said: “Nothing means there is nothing.” I understood it differently. I saw this nothing… . If nothing can appear to a person, that means it is something. That’s where the trouble comes in.

Perhaps any attempt to summon up an image of nothing is self-defeating. Even so, is thinkability a reliable test for possibility? Does the fact that we cannot imagine absolute nothingness—except, perhaps, in a state of dreamless sleep—mean that something or other must perforce exist?

One must beware here of falling into what has been called the philosopher’s fallacy: a tendency to mistake a failure of the imagination for an insight into the way reality has to be. “I can’t imagine it otherwise,” a thinker prone to this fallacy says to himself; “therefore it must be so.” There are many things that lie beyond the powers of our imagination that are not only possible but real. We can’t visualize colorless objects, for example, yet atoms are colorless. (They are not even gray.) Most of us, with the exception of a few preternaturally gifted mathematicians, cannot imagine curved space. Yet Einstein’s relativity theory tells us that we actually live in a curved four-dimensional spacetime manifold, one that violates Euclidean geometry—something that Immanuel Kant found unimaginable and thus ruled out on philosophical grounds.

Bergson and Bradley thought that absolute nothingness was self-contradictory, because the very possibility would entail the existence of an observer to think about it. Call this the “observer argument” against nothingness. The observer argument is not only dubious on general grounds, but also has some wild implications. It means that every possible world must contain at least one conscious observer. But surely a universe without consciousness is physically possible. If the constants of nature in our own universe—the strength of the weak nuclear force, the mass of the top quark, and so on—were even slightly different from their actual values, there would have been no evolution of life in the universe, just a lot of brute matter. But, by the logic of the observer argument, such a zombie universe would be impossible, since there would be no one to observe it.

Bergson’s version of the observer argument has a still more absurd implication. In his mind’s eye, he could not abolish his own self. On the principle that what is unimaginable is impossible, he ought to have concluded that his own nonexistence was impossible: that no matter how reality had turned out—empty, full, whatever—it was metaphysically guaranteed to include Monsieur Bergson; that he himself was a God-like necessary being. To call this solipsism would be charitable.

There is a second argument against nothingness that, though similar in its logic, runs along more objective lines. Like the observer argument, it too says that our effort to imagine absolute nothingness is doomed to be only partial, never complete. But instead of pointing to consciousness as the thing left over, it cites a residuum that is nonmental. Even when all the contents of the cosmos have been imaginatively banished, the argument goes, we are always left with the abstract setting that they inhabited. This setting may be empty, but it is not nothing. A container with no contents is still a container. Let’s call this the “container argument” against nothingness.

One venerable exponent of the container argument is Bede Rundle, a contemporary philosopher at Oxford. “Our attempt to think away everything amounts to envisaging a region of space which has been evacuated of its every occupant, an exercise which gives no more substance to the possibility of there being nothing than does envisaging an empty cupboard,” Rundle has written (in a book tellingly titled Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing). And just what is this “empty cupboard”? Rundle appears to be identifying it with space itself. Since one cannot “think away” the presence