I've got a fondness for weirdness. I won't try to explain why this is, since any explanation would go against a central tenet of weirdness: not making logical sense.
I will though, offer as evidence this photo of a tangible commitment to weirdness: a book by Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World, that is sitting next to my laptop at this moment. The book cost $27.09 from Amazon, a pleasingly weird price. I would have been disappointed if it was $27.00, $27.10, or $27.99.
Here's the Amazon description.
How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing
Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say.
In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird.
Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens.
According to Schwitzgebel’s “Universal Bizarreness” thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary “Universal Dubiety” thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief.
Might the United States be a conscious organism—a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail?
Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities.
For a somewhat lengthier peek into what the book is all about, read the article in the March 23, 2024 issue of New Scientist that clued me in to Schwitzgebel's book, since he wrote the article, "Strange...but true?" (That's the title in the print edition.) I've shared it as a PDF file.
Download How to wrap your head around the most mind-bending theories of reality | New Scientist
I would have bought the book anyway, since the title is so appealing to me, but The Weirdness of the World came to my attention when I'd just written my previous post for this blog, "Mission (almost) Impossible: embrace the reality of no self and no free will."
In that post I spoke about how these subjects boggle my mind, in much the same way as pondering the fact that there is something rather than nothing does. I said:
When I contemplate the undeniable fact that there is something rather than nothing -- an unimaginably vast universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, and likely hugely more, instead of a void that lacks even voidness -- my mind boggles.
Not a great word, but an apt one. By boggle, I mean that when I try to contemplate the seemingly fundamental fact that something always has existed, or existence as we know it wouldn't exist now, my mind/brain short-circuits.
Sure, boggling isn't the same of weirdness. But they're in the same Strange Ballpark of things that exist, yet can't be fathomed. As Schwitzgebel says in the first few pages of his book, which is all that I've read so far, "If the 'normal' is the conventional, ordinary, and readily understood, the weird is what defies that."
I like how Schwitzgebel ends his initial short introductory chapter, "In Praise of Weirdness."
For me, the greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I'd long taken for granted might not be true, that some "obvious" apparent truth is in fact doubtable -- not just abstractly and hypothetically doubtable, but really, seriously, in-my-gut doubtable.
The ground shifts beneath me. Where I'd thought there would be floor, there is instead open space I hadn't previously seen. My mind spins in new, unfamiliar directions.
I wonder, and the world itself seems to glow with a new wondrousness. The cosmos expands, bigger with possibility, more complex, more unfathomable. I feel small and confused, but in a good way.
Let's test the boundaries of the best current work in science and philosophy. Let's launch ourselves at questions monstrously large and formidable. Let's contemplate those questions carefully, with serious scholarly rigor, pushing against the edge of human knowledge.
That is an intrinsically worthwhile activity, worth some of our time in a society generous enough to permit us such time, even if the answers elude us.
My middle-school self who used dice and thrift-shop costumes to imagine astronauts and wizards is now a middle-aged philosopher who uses twenty-first-century science and philosophy to imagine the shape of the cosmos and the magic of consciousness. Join me! If doughty our valor, mayhap the weird saveth us.
[reference to a quote from Beowulf:]
Weird often saveth
The undimmed hero if doughty his valor!
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