Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,92
believe he was right about that.”
Existing possibilities?
“Well,” Leslie said, “even if nothing at all existed, there would still be all sorts of logical possibilities. For instance, it would be true that apples—unlike married bachelors—were logically possible, even though they did not actually exist. It would also be true that if two sets of two apples were to exist, then there would exist four apples. Even if there had been nothing at all, such conditional truths, truths of an if-y then-y sort, would still have held.”
Fine, I said, but how do you get from such possibilities—from “if-y then-y truths,” as he called them—to actual existence?
“Well,” Leslie resumed, “Plato looked among these truths and recognized that some of them were more than just if-y then-y. Suppose you had an empty universe—nothing at all. It would be a fact that this empty universe was a lot better than a universe full of people who were in immense misery. And this would mean that there was an ethical need for the emptiness to continue rather than being replaced by a universe of infinite suffering. But there might also be another ethical need in the opposite direction—a need for this emptiness to be replaced with a good universe, one full of happiness and beauty. And Plato thought that the ethical requirement that a good universe exist was itself enough to create the universe.”
Leslie called my attention to Plato’s Republic, in which we are told that the Form of the Good is “what bestows existence upon things.” Leslie’s own answer to the puzzle of existence, he said, was essentially an updating of that Platonic claim.
“So,” I said, trying to sound less incredulous than I felt, “you’re actually suggesting that the universe somehow exploded into being out of an abstract need for goodness?”
Leslie was coolly unflappable. “Provided you accept the view that this world is, on balance, a good world, the idea that it was created by the need for the existence of a good world can at least get off the ground,” he said. “This has persuaded a lot of people over the ages since Plato. For those who believe in God, it has even provided an explanation for God’s own existence: he exists because of the ethical need for a perfect being. The idea that goodness can be responsible for existence has had quite a long history—which, as I’ve said, was a great disappointment for me to discover, because I’d have liked it to have been all my own.”
Something in Leslie’s soft, precise diction, which always betrayed just a hint of mirth, made me suspect there might be an undercurrent of irony in his Platonic creation story. And if he was seriously claiming that the universe sprang into being in answer to an ethical need for goodness, then could he explain why it has turned out to be such a disappointment, ethically and aesthetically speaking—howlingly mediocre when not downright evil?
It was then that I learned that reality according to Leslie far outstrips reality as the rest of us know it.
To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness. The reason, according to Leslie, is simple. For something to be valuable in itself, as opposed to being valuable as a means to an end, that thing must have unity. It must be more than just an assemblage of separately existing parts. Granted, you can make something that is instrumentally valuable by putting together valueless parts—a TV set, for example. A TV set has instrumental value because it can produce enjoyment in someone watching it. But the experience of enjoyment is a state of consciousness. It has a unity that goes beyond any merely mechanical organization of parts. And that is why such a conscious experience can be intrinsically valuable. It was G. E. Moore—the founder, along with Bertrand Russell, of modern analytic philosophy—who first laid stress on the crucial role of what he called “organic unity” in the existence of intrinsic value. And genuine organic unity—as opposed to mere structural unity, the unity of an automobile engine or a heap of sand—is realized only in consciousness. (As William James observed, “However complex the object may be, the thought of it is one undivided state of consciousness.”) So if the world was indeed ushered into being by a need for goodness, then it must be fundamentally made out of consciousness.