Jim Holt

#8 2nd installment:

I was amused to find Jim Holt on a Ted Talk talking about the existence of the universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORUUqJd81M

I thought it was really nice to put a face on the man whose book I’ve read and hear him talk about things that I’ve wanted to ask him, like what he thought of the Ontological Argument (which apparently isn’t much). I have to say, I was surprised to find out halfway through the video that he was a relatively fluid speaker, considering the magnitude of his topic. Just the way he puts God and the world into a mathematical formula (God plus nothing = the world) really put our existence, science, and religion into a different light.



Not only Holt a really good speaker, but I like the wide variety of perspectives that he’s accumulated for his book and this presentation. He can talk about how Buddhists believe the world is a giant piece of nothing, and then discuss the Plato concept Plenitude, or the concept that the universe is as full as possible. The fact that he’s a Western philosopher but knows about Eastern philosophy and metaphysics make his works feel more reliable to me. He’s not arguing for a certain point, but rather trying to grasp the best pieces of wisdom from the smartest people he can and put them together to make something new.




And then of course Professor Holt just has to go and talk about multiple realities and/or universes. Now of course I’ve theory before, but Holt kind of breezes through the fundamental underlying physics and mechanics of this theory, and that’s the part where he loses me a bit. Other than that, I’m understanding his theory of various qualities of realities, such as a perfectly elegant realities, or full reality, or simple reality.

Now, when he discusses the importance of our existence in relation to the importance of our reality, I feel he starts talking in a more abstract fashion. For the majority of his presentation thus far, his statements have been pretty concrete and fact-based. Now he’s discussing how much of an impact our choices would have in a world that’s full of all possibilities versus one that has a limited number, and that kind of threw me off. He proposes that we live in a reality that’s very mediocre, being full of both bad and good situations, which we could magnify or minimize through some unexplained fashion. I couldn’t really get along with that last statement, but whatever, he’s only discussing the existence of the universe in the span of 17 minutes, so I guess he deserves a bit of leeway.

As a conclusion for his presentation, he admits he never owned a cell phone, which I found kind of off topic at first. Thinking back, he did mention how most of us probably didn’t care much for the existence of the universe, or our own for that matter. I suppose he thought his nonconformity to modern communication would surprise us more than the idea that multiple universes exist, or that our individual births equate to a mathematical possibility. It might just be me, but I took that as a passive-aggressive form of narcissism as opposed to a clever ending. So, I’ll admit, the ending was a bit of a letdown compared to the beginning of his presentation, which was really just stuff he already covered in his book in the first place. I know the titles of his book and his presentation are the same, but I was hoping that he would have something extra in his Ted Talk, especially since the book had already covered so much information, but really it just felt like a bad sequel for a movie franchise. I don’t mean to rip into him too much, he's a brilliant guy who’s covering a huge topic, but it just felt like something was missing. Not to mention he never covered the fact that science couldn’t explain the beginning of the universe more than religion could. All I hope is that his next book doesn’t conclude on his lack of WIFI.

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