Why Does The World Exist

WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? Jim Holt is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker—where he has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, truth, and bullshit, among other subjects—and the author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the London Review of Books. He lives in Greenwich Village.

2ALSO BY JIM HOLT

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

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WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
An Existential Detective Story JIM HOLT

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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH www.profilebooks.com First published in the United States of America by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. Copyright © Jim Holt,2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Excerpt from “Epistemology” from Ceremony and Other Poems, copyright 1950 and renewed 1978 by Richard Wilbur, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights undercopyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the BritishLibrary. ISBN 978 1 84668 244 5 eISBN 978 1 84765 410 6 The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

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Contents
PROLOGUE:

A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives 1. Confronting the MysteryINTERLUDE:

Could Our World Have Been Created by a

Hacker? 2. Philosophical Tour d’Horizon
INTERLUDE:

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

3. A Brief History of Nothing 4. The Great Rejectionist 5. Finite or Infinite?
INTERLUDE:

Night Thoughts at the Café de Flore

6. The Inductive Theist of North Oxford
INTERLUDE:

The Supreme Brute Fact

7. The Magus of the Multiverse
INTERLUDE:The End of Explanation

8. The Ultimate Free Lunch? 7

INTERLUDE:

Nausea

9. Waiting for the Final Theory
INTERLUDE:

A Word on Many Worlds

10. Platonic Reflections
INTERLUDE:

It from Bit

11. “The Ethical Requiredness of There Being Something”
INTERLUDE:

An Hegelian in Paris

12. The Last Word from All Souls
EPISTOLARY INTERLUDE:

The Proof

13. The World as a Bitof Light Verse 14. The Self: Do I Really Exist? 15. Return to Nothingness
EPILOGUE:

Over the Seine

Acknowledgments Notes Index

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WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?

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A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives
Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws,then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.

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Prologue

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CONFRONTING THE MYSTERY
And this grey spirit, yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Ulysses” I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything.… To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable. —QUEEN VICTORIA, in a letter to her granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse,...