“God is the name of the blanket we put over mystery to give it shape.” — attributed to the AC/DC road manager Barry Taylor, as the story is told by Pete Holmes in this comedy sketch
Anyone who’s ever played Chess (or better yet, Go) knows that from simple, elegant rules can emerge beautiful, terrifying complexity.
Science is a pursuit in the opposite direction: uncovering the elegant rules that explain the beautiful complexities of life, the universe, and everything.
I imagine many, many of the mysteries we face may one day be explained, if humanity survives long enough. Why do we sleep1? What is love? Do you see the same color blue that I do? Does P=NP, and if so, what’s the proof?
I have no idea which questions will prove to have verifiable answers and which will not. Out of all the questions I’ve ever asked, there’s only one question that I feel confident will never be explained. I think we could create superintelligent AI that harvest the energy of a thousand stars and study the universe for a billion years, and even they wouldn’t be able to answer the question:
Why does anything exist?
It’s a question that’s always mystified me, though that’s not true of everyone. I’ve known some folk who shrug their shoulders at the question, not seeing anything interesting about it—“Yeah, things exist. Why wouldn’t they?”
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who see the question as fundamentally important. They, like the aforementioned Pete Holmes (who I better know by his “Ex-men” sketches), see it as tantamount to proof of God’s existence.
If you agree that there is indeed a mystery to the question of why anything exists (whether or not you believe the reason is God), I think what makes the question mysterious is ultimately the concept of…
Parsimony
“No doubt, if our means of investigation became more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple beneath the complex, and then the complex from the simple, and then again the simple beneath the complex, and so on, without ever being able to predict what the last term will be.” — mathematician Henri Poincaré
One might say there exists a law that human bodies will always move towards the Earth’s center, except when something’s in the way. Another law states that balloons prefer to move the opposite direction. Basketballs behave like human bodies, except when they move too fast, get excited, and in their excitement temporarily adopt the behavior of balloons.
A fourth rule describes how the Moon likes to circle the Earth—for what reason? Maybe infatuation—and a fifth rule describes how the Earth likes to circle the sun.
You could come up with a giant list of such rules, and rules that are exceptions to those rules, and the entire set of these rules might technically be correct. Or at least, the rules might not be contradicted by any obvious observations. But such a system of rules would be and should be unsatisfying, because they would not be as parsimonious as the theory of gravity (and the theories of how forces interact, density, etc.).
It may have been David Hull who first said that “parsimony” is the property of explaining a lot by a little. A scientific theory attempts to explain a particular set of observations. The test of a theory is whether it can then successfully predict future observations. A simpler set of rules that spawns a larger set of possible worlds.
I think it’s worth noting how “simplicity” can be deceiving. Classical physics is elegant, but then humans made observations that could only be explained with the far more confusing quantum physics underneath. What might lie beneath quantum physics? Where does it end? For all I know, the universe could be infinitely, fractally complex.
But along every step of the way, parsimony pushes us in the direction of relative simplicity. The observations made at CERN would be far more confusing, and seem far more chaotic, without the theories of quantum physics.
And from my own limited perspective and intuitions, I feel that the universe should contain, ranked from most parsimonious to least:
Nothing
Everything
Some things
Again, that’s just my own intuition. Yours may differ. What it means for me is that, since the universe is not nothing, I’m left thinking: Does everything exist, then? “Everything” as in: all possibilities instantiated within an infinite multiverse. I’m not saying everything must exist. But I also don’t see any reason against us being inside an infinite multiverse.
Furthermore: It doesn’t make sense to me that the universe would have suddenly sprung out from nothing. It seems impossible to me that there could have been a specific starting point, which would imply an infinite past (though its history may be forever sealed off from us, behind the Big Bang).
But whether everything exists, or only some things exist, in either case: The fact that we’re not in a reality in which nothing exists comes to me as a surprise, because to me, it’s not a particularly parsimonious possibility. Indeed, for me it’s so un-parsimonious that I have no choice but to call it (the existence of anything and everything) a miracle.
Therefore…
Does that mean I believe in God now?
Nope.
A miracle is a miracle. I’m willing to ascribe the miracle of existence any degree of holy import: the sacred, the divine, the celestial. It is a thing that can and should inspire a feeling of awe and stirring spirituality.
But none of that necessarily implies the shape of a Christian-like god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and loves us all.
The miracle of existence:
May not care about humans.
May not even be cognizant of humans.
May not even be cognizant, full stop.
This miracle may be beautiful in the same way as the moon, or the dancing of a flame, or a volcano’s eruption when viewed at night from afar. Such beauty does not alone imply proof of Yahweh or Allah’s existence. But I can kind of understand why, for many folk, God strikes them as a more parsimonious explanation of this beauty and this mystery. Even if I don’t agree, I’ll always feel camaraderie with those that feel awed by this miracle the same way I do.
“Several prominent theories have explored the brain and attempt to identify a purpose for why we sleep, which includes the Inactivity theory, Energy conservation theory, Restoration theory, and the Brain plasticity theory.” (Source) I honestly doubt we’ll have a satisfactory answer to this one in my lifetime.
Nice post, but I think you left out what I think is the *most* parsimonious hypothesis, even more parsimonious than that the universe (or the multiverse) contains everything or nothing.
0. Objective physical existence isn't a thing.
This hypothesis collapses the distinction between hypothesis 1 and 2.
This is what I think is actually the case. I think what physically exists is observer-relative. Stuff that's in my universe exists from my POV. Stuff that exists in some other universe doesn't, but may physically exist from the POV of an observer in that universe if it has any observers at all.
The question about whether the whole shebang physically exists is not well-posed. There is no objective distinction to draw such that we can say that some possible worlds exist and others don't.
We can deem them all to physically exist if we want to, but we could also deem none of them to physically exist. But this is just a matter of convention. There is no stance-independent fact of the matter.
(All the above is a particular gloss I put on Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis)