Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,93

Leslie’s earlier writings, like his 1979 book, Value and Existence. What I was not prepared for was the great enlargement that his cosmic scheme had undergone in the intervening years.

“In my grand vision,” he told me, “what the cosmos consists of is an infinite number of infinite minds, each of which knows absolutely everything which is worth knowing. And one of the things which is worth knowing is the structure of a universe such as ours.”

So the physical universe itself, with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is just the contemplative product of one of those infinite minds. That was what Leslie was telling me. And the same goes for the inhabitants of the universe—us—and their conscious states. So my question remained, If an infinite mind was thinking the whole show up, why all the evil and suffering and disaster and sheer ugliness? Why do we inhabit such a darkling plain?

“But our universe is just one of the structures that an infinite mind would contemplate,” he said. “It would also know the structure of infinitely many other universes. And it would be very unlikely for ours to be the best of all of them. The best situation is the total situation, with all of these vastly many universes coexisting as contemplative patterns in an infinite mind. And the perfectly beautiful universe that you’d prefer? Well, maybe it’s one of those contemplative patterns. But there’s also our universe as well. I suspect that, of all the infinitely many worlds that are being thought of by an infinite mind, we’re pretty far down the list in terms of overall goodness. Still, I think you’d have to go quite far below us to have a world which was not worth having at all.”

Here Leslie chuckled audibly. Then, recovering his graver demeanor, he invited me to consider the Louvre museum as an analogy. Just as an infinite mind contains many universes, the Louvre contains many artworks. One of these artworks—say, the Mona Lisa—is the best. But if the Louvre contained nothing but perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa, it would be a less interesting museum than it actually is, with its vast number of inferior artworks adding to the variety. The best museum on the whole is one that contains, in addition to the very best works of art, all lesser works, as long as those lesser works have some redeeming aesthetic value—as long, that is, as they are not positively bad. Similarly, the best infinite mind is one that contemplates all cosmic patterns whose net value is positive, ranging from the very best possible world on down to worlds of indifferent quality, where the good barely outweighs the evil. Such a variety of worlds, each of which is, on the whole, better by some positive margin than sheer nothingness, is the most valuable reality overall—the one that might leap into existence out of a Platonic requirement for goodness.

Leslie had answered one obvious objection to his cosmic scheme: the problem of evil. Our own world is decidedly not the Mona Lisa. It is blemished by cruelty, suffering, arbitrariness, and waste. Yet, even with all its ethical and aesthetic defects, it manages to contribute a little net value to reality as a whole—just the way a mediocre painting by a second-rate artist might contribute a little net value to the collection in the Louvre. Our world is thus worthy to be part of that larger reality: worthy, that is, of contemplation by an infinite mind.

But there remained a still graver objection to Leslie’s axiarchic theory. Why should an infinite mind—or anything else, for that matter—be summoned into existence by a sheer need for goodness in the first place? Why, in other words, should “ought to exist” imply “does exist”? Such a principle certainly doesn’t seem to operate in the real world. If a poor child is starving to death, it would be good if a bowl of rice were to come into existence to save that child’s life. Yet we never see a bowl of rice materialize for the child out of nothingness. So why should we expect an entire cosmos to do the same?

When I put this objection to Leslie, he emitted a long sigh.

“People like me,” he said, “people who accept the Platonic view that the universe exists because it ought to exist, we aren’t saying that absolutely all ethical requirements are satisfied. We recognize that there are conflicts. If you’re going to have an orderly world that runs according to laws of