donheff
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story, is an entertaining and irreverent tour through current and historical thinking about the nature of being. If you like pondering the deep question of why is there something rather than nothing from the perspectives of priests and philosophers, quantum physicists and great novelists, you will enjoy this book. It is fun and serious at the same time. Holt even posits his own ontological proof that an infinite, mediocre world must exist, an epiphany he gets after visiting Derek Parfit, a great thinker ensconced in All Souls College, Oxford. Holt's "proof" echoes a statistical thought I had early in the book when I read of several deep thinkers' conclusion that by all lights there should be nothingness since that is the simplest solution. My immediate thought was, but there is only one possible version of nothing and an infinite variety of possible substantive universes so isn't it infinitely more likely that one of those universes would exist rather than nothing? The proof goes into a bit more detail but you will have to read it for yourself. And after it all I still wonder why...