Free Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt Page B

resist bringing up Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was also obsessed with the mystery of existence. Many philosophers deem Wittgenstein the greatest philosophical figure of the twentieth century. But Grünbaum, I quickly learned, was not among them.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, rolling his eyes, “but the paper where Wittgenstein talks about that is just dreadful . It’s an unbelievably sick paper, semi-psychotic. He gets to the end of his lecture and says he’s in ‘awe’ of the question Why is there something rather than nothing? But he also claimed that the question had no sense! Then why is he still in awe of it if he’d debunked it? He needed to see a psychiatrist and not inflict his ‘awe’ on us.”
    I began to wonder whether Grünbaum might not be the most unflappable philosopher I had ever met. Clearly he did not suffer from any dread of Nothingness—what he derisively called the “ontopathological syndrome.” Clearly he was unastonished by a world of Being. Did anything astonish the man? Was there any philosophical problem he found awesome and bewildering? What about, for example, the problem of how consciousness arises from brute matter?
    “I’m amazed by the variety of consciousness and the kinds of things that the human mind can come up with,” he said. “It’s all very splendiferous! But I don’t find the existence of consciousness puzzling.”
    I noted how different his attitude was from that of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, one of my intellectual heroes. In his book The View from Nowhere , Nagel pondered at length the mystery of how the mind’s irreducibly subjective character could fit into the objective physical world.
    “I’ve never read that book,” Grünbaum said.
    But it’s such an important book! I stammered. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit declared Nagel’s book the greatest philosophical work of the postwar era.
    “Did he?” Grünbaum replied. “Well good for him! But as for me, why should I be puzzled that I’m put together the way I am? I know that many things have shaped my personal history. And there are many things about myself that I don’t understand—why I have certain habits and tendencies, for example. But these are biological or bio-psychological questions. With enough evolutionary theory and genetics and what-have-you, they become potentially interesting. But I don’t sit around wondering why I’m the way I am. I don’t live in a limbo of dubiety.”
    If, as Aristotle remarked, philosophy begins with wonder, then it ends with Grünbaum.
    Still, the scope of the man’s knowledge was breathtaking. The nature of time, the ontological status of scientific laws, the extravagances of quantum cosmology: all yielded before his precise and rigorous understanding. And the sheer pleasure it all gave him (“I’m having a ball!”) was contagious.
    I asked him whether it was possible that an entity in our universe’s distant future—an “omega point,” as some thinkers have called it—might have reached back in time and retroactively caused the very Big Bang that brought the whole show into being.
    “Ah,” he said, “you’re talking about retrocausation. Is such a thing possible?” He then launched into a learned disquisition on cause and effect whose virtuosity reminded me of a great diva delivering an opera aria. I listened with more awe than understanding as he wrapped it up: “Well, they got it wrong because they misextrapolated from second-order equations in Newtonian mechanics, where forces are causes of accelerations, to a third-order differential equation, Dirac’s equation, in which forces are not causes of accelerations. So even though when you integrate over all future time you have force quantities in the integral—called ‘pre-accelerations’—that doesn’t mean that this instantiates retrocausation of acceleration by forces. Say, would you like a little gin? I think I’ve got some here.”
    As he reached into a lower desk drawer for the