Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,91

he has since gone further, endorsing the panpsychist notion that the atomic constituents of the brain, along with the rest of the physical universe, are structured out of mind-stuff. “I think that something of this nature is indeed necessary,” Penrose announced in a public lecture when the issue came up.

Panpsychism is not for everyone. John Searle, for one, dismisses it without argument as simply “absurd.” But it has one undeniable virtue: that of ontological parsimony. It says that the cosmos is ultimately made of a single kind of stuff. It is thus a monistic view of reality. And if you are trying to solve the mystery of existence, monism is a convenient metaphysical position, since it obliges you to explain how only one substance came into being. The dualist has a seemingly harder job: he has to explain both why matter exists and why mind exists.

So does reality ultimately consist of mind-stuff? Is it no more (or no less) than an enormous, infinitely convoluted thought, or even dream? Seeking additional authority for this rather wild-sounding conclusion, I turned to what had hitherto proved an unimpeachable source: The Devil’s Dictionary. There I found the following apt definition:

Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher.

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“THE ETHICAL REQUIREDNESS OF THERE BEING SOMETHING”

“Well, I have my pet answer, and I was very proud of it. But then, to my horror and disgust, I found that Plato had got the same answer about twenty-five hundred years ago!”

The man with the answer—one he believed to be utterly original when he first hit on it as a teenager—was a mild-mannered and soft-spoken speculative cosmologist by the name of John Leslie.

The community of speculative cosmologists is geographically scattered but not large. It consists of a hundred or so philosophically inclined scientists and scientifically adept philosophers—figures like Baron Rees of Ludlow, Britain’s current Astronomer Royal; Andrei Linde, the Stanford physicist who created the theory of chaotic inflation; Jack Smart, the dean of Australian realist philosophy; and the Reverend Sir John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge particle physicist turned Anglican priest. In this far-flung and variegated community, John Leslie commands considerable respect— for both the boldness of his cosmic conjectures and the ingenuity with which he defends them. A native Englishman, Leslie took his graduate degree at Oxford in the early 1960s. He then moved to Canada, where he taught philosophy at the University of Guelph for three decades and was ultimately elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Over his career, he has produced a steady output of books and articles that blend technical rigor with conjectural fancy. His 1989 book, Universes, meticulously teased out the implications of the cosmic “fine-tuning” hypothesis for the existence of a multiverse. His 1996 book, The End of the World, showed how purely probabilistic reasoning pointed to a “doomsday” scenario in which humanity would be imminently extinguished. His 2007 book, Immortality Defended, drew on notions from contemporary physics—notably Einsteinian relativity and quantum entanglement—to argue that, biological death notwithstanding, there is a very real sense in which each of us will exist eternally. As a recreational sideline, Leslie invented a new board game called “Hostage Chess.” A blend of Western chess and the Japanese game of Shogi, Leslie’s Hostage Chess has been called by one grandmaster “the most interesting, exciting variant that can be played with a standard chess set.”

For all that, the achievement for which Leslie says he wishes to be remembered is his proposed solution to the mystery of why there is Something rather than Nothing—even if, as he concedes, Plato beat him to it. (Well, didn’t Alfred North Whitehead say that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato?) He calls his solution “extreme axiarchism,” since it holds that reality is ruled by abstract value—axia being the Greek word for “value” and archein for “to rule.”

“You’re the world’s foremost authority on why there is Something rather than Nothing,” I said to Leslie at the outset of our conversation. He was sitting in the living room of his house on the west coast of Canada, comfortably attired in a wool crewneck against the late-fall chill, while I hovered about in the noosphere.

“I doubt that there’s any sort of authority on why the world exists,” he replied, waving a hand and blinking behind his spectacles. “I’m an authority on the range of guesses which have been given. But I do have my own ideas, which, as I said, go back to Plato. Plato thought that there was a necessarily existing realm of possibilities, and I