by Jim Holt
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.
11
“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 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 mer
e 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.
That much, at least, I had gleaned from 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 nature—which is a very elegant and interesting way for a world to be—you can’t have bowls of rice suddenly appearing miraculously. Moreover, the fact that the child doesn’t have a bowl of rice may very well be the result of a misuse of human freedom, and you can’t have the goodness of a world where agents are free to make decisions unless you also have the possibility that those agents will make bad decisions.”
I understood that the requirements of goodness could conflict, that some could be overruled by others. But why should goodness have any tendency to fulfill itself at all? Why should it be different from, say, redness? Redness clearly doesn’t have a tendency to fulfill itself. If it did, everything would be red.
“Richard Dawkins once made the same point. He asked me, ‘How could so piffling a concept as goodness explain the world’s existence? You might as well appeal to Chanel Number Fiveness.’ Well, I don’t think of goodness as just another quality that is slapped on things like perfume or a coat of paint. Goodness is required existence, in a nontrivial sense. Anyone who doesn’t grasp that hasn’t reached square one in understanding what ethics is all about.”
Imagine some good possibility—like that of a beautiful and harmonious cosmos just spilling over with happiness. If that possibility were made real, it would have an existence that was ethically needful. This was essentially Plato’s idea: that a thing could exist because its existence was required by goodness. The connection between goodness and required existence isn’t a logical one. Yet it is a necessary connection—that, at least, is what Platonically inclined thinkers like Leslie believe. We may simply lack the conceptual resources to appreciate why this is so. We tend to think that value can bring something into existence only with the aid of some mechanism—as Leslie put it, “some combination, perhaps, of pistons pushing, electromagnetic fields tugging, or persons exerting willpower.” But such a mechanism could never explain the existence of a world. It could never explain why there is Something rather than Nothing, because it would be part of the Something to be explained. Given the limitations of our understanding, we have to content ourselves with the bare insight that an ethical need and a creative force both point in the same direction: toward Being. The Platonic idea that there is a necessary connection between the two is not an inescapable truth of logic. But neither is it a conceptual absurdity. So, at any rate, Leslie was maintaining.
Perhaps, I suggested to him, it might help to think of the matter the other way around. Even if an abstract need for goodness did not in itself provide a very compelling reason for a cosmos to exist, it at least provided some reason. And in the absence of a countervailing reason—a reason that would oppose the existence of the world—goodness alone might be enough to secure the victory of Being over Nothingness. From a physical point of view, after all, the universe doesn’t seem to cost anything: its total energy, when the negative gravitational energy is balanced against the positive energy locked up in matter, is zero.
Leslie welcomed this reasoning. “In the absence of a nihilistic force fighting the existence of things,” he said, “any valid reason for their existence would tend to bring about their realization. You might dream up a sort of demon that was opposing the existence of things. But then, I ask, where did that demon come from?”
What about Heidegger, though? Didn’t he believe in an abstract annihilating force? The Nothing that “noths”?
“Maybe he did, but I don’t,” Leslie replied. “If you actually read Heidegger, he’s very obscure on the question of explaining existence. But he’s been interpreted
by the theologian Hans Küng as holding that the word ‘God’ is just a label for a creative ethical principle that’s producing the world. So Heidegger may well be in the Plato-Leslie camp!”
Leslie himself, for all his theologically flavored talk of “divine minds,” had little sympathy for the traditional concept of God. “If my view is true,” he said, “what you are stuck with is an infinite number of infinite minds, each of which knows absolutely everything worth knowing. You can call each one of them ‘God’ if you want, or you could say that God was the entire infinite collection. Or you could even say that God was simply the abstract principle behind them all.”
I recalled an observation that the orthodox Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne had made when I talked to him in Oxford. God can’t be an abstract principle, Swinburne had insisted, because an abstract principle cannot suffer. And, when we suffer in a good cause, our creator has an obligation to suffer along with us, the way a parent has an obligation to suffer along with a child. The world would be a less good place if it weren’t created by a God who shared our suffering—so Swinburne had claimed. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.
“Hmm,” said Leslie very slowly. “That sounds like an argument for the existence of a Supreme Masochist. I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it’s all better.”
Perhaps Leslie was more a pantheist then, in the style of Spinoza. Spinoza’s God was not a personal agent, like the traditional deity of Judeo-Christianity. Rather, Spinoza equated God to an infinite and self-subsistent substance that encompassed all of nature.