In
a paper entitled “Our Cosmic Insignificance”, published in Nous 48.4 (2014): 745-772, Guy Kahane attempts to clarify what
cosmic significance (and its opposite, cosmic insignificance) actually is and whether we really are as
“cosmically insignificant” as the immense vastness of the universe has often
been taken to suggest. Kahane argues that we often misunderstand the nature of
cosmic significance and insignificance and that, due to this misunderstanding,
we mistakenly believe ourselves to be cosmically insignificant, while in fact
we are anything but (assuming we are right about the facts on which we base the
belief in our alleged insignificance): “it turns out that we might be of
immense cosmic significance, even universally central, in the only sense that
matters.” (746-7) In view of this conclusion, the paper would have been more
aptly titled “Our Alleged Cosmic
Insignificance” or simply “Our Cosmic Significance”.
It
is not uncommon for us to feel cosmically insignificant. Kahane cites many
philosophers and writers who provide evidence of this. If you feel too
important and take yourself and your affairs too seriously, just think how
gigantic the universe is both in space and time and how miniscule we are in
comparison. The contemplation of all those billions of years during which we do
not exist and all those vast spaces that we are unable to fathom, let alone
traverse, should be more than sufficient to crush all our illusions of
grandeur. It makes us realize that in the grand scheme of things our lives do
not really matter. From the point of view of the universe, we are nothing.
As
Kahane correctly points out, this concern about our cosmic insignificance seems
to be different from metaethical concerns about the non-existence of objective
values. Even if we do have such metaethical concerns and believe that because
nothing matters objectively we don’t matter either and (perhaps erroneously) that
this makes our existence pointless, surely this has got nothing to do with the
size or age of the universe. If we lived in a tiny and very short-lived
universe, then values would not be any more objective than they are now. So it
seems that if we are worried about our cosmic insignificance, we are not
worried about there not being anything that really
matters, but about our own relative
insignificance. In other words, we do not seem to doubt that things can have
value. We simply have lost our confidence that we have much value, all things considered. Some things do matter.
We just happen to be not one of them. Yet once again it is not clear why we
should think we have less value in a big universe than we would have in a small
one. “If something possesses intrinsic value, value in virtue of its intrinsic
properties, then how could the size of the universe, or indeed anything about
the surrounding universe, affect its value in any way?” (748) Size is
irrelevant for (intrinsic) value. What I am and what I do either matters or
does not matter, but whether or not it does is independent of the size of the
universe. Kahane cites Bertrand Russell to emphasize this point: “there is no
reason to worship mere size”, Russell said, “Sir Isaac Newton was very much
smaller than a hippopotamus”.
That
size does not matter in itself is of course correct. However, it seems to me
that Kahane is perhaps missing the point here. Newton may be much smarter than
a hippopotamus and much more eminent, but if the two had a fight, the hippopotamus
would probably win it and there wouldn’t be much left of Newton. And while we
may conceivably win a fight against a hippopotamus, we have no chance at all to
win a fight against the universe, precisely because it is so much bigger. My point is that perhaps our concerns are not so
much about size as such as they are
about power. While what is bigger is
not necessarily more powerful than what is smaller, size is usually a good
indicator of power, and if the size of a thing is so immense that there is not
really a common measure between it and us, then it would be foolish to think we
might stand a chance to overpower it in a confrontation. In other words, we
don’t feel insignificant because the universe is big and we are small, but
because we correctly infer from its immensity that we are utterly powerless to
influence the course of (cosmic) events. Whatever we do, things will stay
pretty much the same, and in the end, once we are all gone (and gone we will
be), things will be exactly as they would have been if we had never existed at
all.
While
our ‘intrinsic value’ may not be affected by the size of the universe, our
power (the effect we may hope to have on the overall course of things)
certainly is. And ‘intrinsic value’ is a very abstract notion, by which I mean
that it does not have much, if any content. It is pragmatically empty. ‘Power’
on the other hand is concrete, steeped in the real world. Power and its absence
are very real for us; intrinsic value, on the other hand, not so much. The more
we are able to effect, the more powerful we are. The less we are able to
effect, the more powerless we are. In order to think that we can ‘change the
world’, as many of us aspire to do, we need to pretend that “the world” is
pretty much exhausted by the here and now, confined to Planet Earth and a few
hundred years (if we are very ambitious). If we then, in a lucid moment,
realize that the world is actually much bigger than that and that,
consequently, the effects of our actions are so infinitesimally small that they
are as good as non-existent, we are perfectly justified to feel utterly
insignificant.
That
Kahane does not consider the possibility that the cosmic insignificance concern
is about (lack of) power rather than size is a bit odd, especially since he
continues his argument by distinguishing between (intrinsic) value and
significance, defining the latter in terms of a thing’s ability “to make a
difference”, which is pretty much what I understand by ‘power’. Value, for
Kahane, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of significance. Only
something that has some value can be significant, but not everything that has
value is. In order to be significant, the valuable thing also needs to “make a
difference”, and if it does make a difference (and only then), it “merits our
attention and concern”. (749)
Kahane
uses the example of pain to illustrate the difference between value and
significance. Pain is bad. Its badness is its intrinsic (though in this case
negative) value.[1]
However, not each instance of pain is significant. In order to be significant,
i.e. to matter in the emphatic sense of meriting our attention and concern, it
needs to stick out, either by being much more intense or enduring than most
other instances or pain, or by being a relatively rare occurrence. What is
important here is that intrinsic value is thought to be independent of changes
in the environment, while significance is not. My pain is bad no matter how
many people are in pain and how bad their pain is. My pain does not get any
better if your pain increases. However, if that happens, then my pain becomes
less significant. It is no longer such a big deal if we adopt an objective (or
cosmic) point of view, because it is just one instance of pain among others,
and there are others that are worse. Similarly, if my existence is
intrinsically valuable, then it is valuable no matter what happens around me,
and no matter how big or small the universe is. Yet the significance of my
existence may increase or decrease, depending on certain changing features of
my environment. If that is correct, then our significance may possibly also be
affected by the size of the universe. And indeed it is. Just not the way we
thought it was. Far from making our lives insignificant, the sheer vastness of
the universe actually increases our significance. This is because although the
universe may be vast, there is not much of value in it: “When we are impressed
by our tiny size, by the vastness of the space that envelops us, and conclude
that we must be very unimportant, this may be because we forget to consider
just how empty this immensity is. An observer might take a very long time to
find us in this immensity, but besides us, he might find in it little or
nothing to care about.” (753)
We
cannot know whether there are other beings like us anywhere in the universe,
but so far we haven’t found any evidence of that. If there is nobody else out
there, that would make us very special indeed. The emptier the world is, the
more significant our comparative fullness (the fact that our lives have value)
becomes. We are then, from the point of view of the cosmos, the only thing that
matters in the world. “The argument is embarrassingly simple. We possess value,
and, if we are alone, nothing else in the universe does. Therefore we are the
only thing that has value, and, trivially, possess most value. We’re therefore
of immense cosmic significance.”
But
why do we matter in the first place? What exactly is it that is supposed to
give us intrinsic value? According to Kahane, we “possess value in virtue of
our capacity to think and love”. (754) The assumption that human lives possess
some intrinsic value is justified, he argues, because virtually everyone agrees
that we do. At least we will all agree that it is bad when people (and perhaps
also animals) suffer, which implies that it matters what happens to them. If
their lives had no value, their suffering should not concern us. But according
to Kahane our significance goes beyond that of sentient life. We are also
intelligent, and this intelligence and what it allows us to do gives us a
unique, distinctive, superior kind of value (757). Why? Because (almost)
everyone says so. And even if that were not so, we can very much affect what
happens to other life on earth and even the planet as a whole, which, if all
value is terrestrial, puts us in a very important position indeed. Given our
(probably) unique constitution, we are anything but insignificant. We do make a
huge difference.
The
problem I have with this argument is not so much that it is simply taken for
granted that humans lives are intrinsically valuable (on the rather shaky
grounds that most humans would agree with that), but that I’m having trouble
understanding what ‘making a difference’ means in this context. Those who have
bemoaned our cosmic insignificance have understood it in the sense of a lack of
causal power, for instance Nicholas Rescher or Susan Wolf, who are both quoted
by Kahane. Rescher states that “on the astronomical scale, we are no more than
obscure inhabitants of an obscure planet. Nothing we are or do in our tiny
sphere of action with the universe’s vast reaches of space and time makes any
substantial difference in the long run.” Wolf, similarly, stresses our
inability to “make a big and lasting splash”. Evidently, the feeling of cosmic
insignificance is, as I pointed out earlier, not about size, but about (the
relative lack of) power. But Kahane refuses to acknowledge that. He accepts
that we may very well disappear very soon without a trace, without having made
“any grand, lasting causal impact on the cosmic scale” (760), but insists that
we are still making “a vast
difference” and that it would be “a momentous loss” if we disappeared from the
cosmos. Unfortunately, however, it is not clear at all (at least not to me) in
what way we are ‘making a
difference’. What difference exactly does our existence make? And for whom and what does it make a difference? And who would suffer the loss if we
were no longer around? The universe? Would the universe care? If it could care,
then our disappearance would presumably not be such a great loss (because, as I
understand the claim, it is a great loss precisely because we are the only ones
who can care). And if it would not,
how can our disappearance be a loss for it? For Kahane, our significance is
ultimately a function of our supposed intrinsic value. We ‘make a difference’
not because we achieve anything lasting, but because we are ‘valuable’ while
nothing else is. In other words, we are supposed to make a difference despite
the fact that we are not really making
any difference at all.
I
am not a hostile critic. I am sympathetic to what Kahane is trying to do. I
want to believe that what we do and not do matters, that it is significant in
some way (and I kind of do believe
it). But Kahane’s argument has failed to convince me that we have no grounds to
feel cosmically insignificant. We try to reassure ourselves that we are
something special and something wonderful, and perhaps we are, but we also want
to believe that there is a (cosmic) point to our existence, and perhaps there
isn’t. To insist so much on our cosmic significance smacks of narcissism, of
megalomania. Kahane realizes that, but insists that it is not that at all.
Having such significance is, after all, “not a cause for elation, but a burden”
(764). It gives us a whole lot of responsibility, lends a “cosmic urgency” to
our existence and survival. Understanding our cosmic significance should prompt
us take our existence seriously.
Fair
enough. However, I still don’t see why it matters whether we exist or not. Why
is it important that beings exist who can think and love if, ultimately,
nothing comes off it? Even if we are markedly different from the rest of the
universe (as the only creators of values), why is this a difference that makes a difference?
[1] That this value is intrinsic I
take to mean that it is bad for there to be pain rather than merely bad for the
one who suffers it, but perhaps Kahane has a different view on that.
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