The Weirdness of Weirdness

I’ve been brooding over weirdness lately. To me, the world and everything in it is weird, and weirdest of all are the clumps of matter that can contemplate themselves and think, “Weird!” But the more I think about weirdness, the weirder it seems. What sort of quality is weirdness? Is it wholly subjective, like goodness and beauty? Or is it in some sense an objective property of the world, like temperature?

Weirdness is, ordinarily, a relative term. If you call something weird, you mean it seems improbable and inexplicable in comparison to other, non-weird things. The feeling of weirdness could be an adaptive trait, akin to curiosity, because it motivates us to figure out how, say, heredity or magnetism works.

But according to this practical point of view, weirdness should dissipate as we explain more and more things. Being mind-boggled by all things all the time doesn’t seem adaptive. And in fact psychiatrists have pathologized feelings of acute weirdness, or estrangement from reality. They call this condition derealization.

So let me try to explain what I mean when I say everything is weird. Since childhood I have had moments of jaw-dropping astonishment that I or anything else exists. Science has corroborated this youthful intuition by revealing that the origin of the universe, of life and of consciousness is each highly improbable. Multiply these improbabilities and they spike toward infinity.

Here is where emotions come into play. You might react to our improbability with joy, because you realize how lucky we are to be alive. We shouldn’t be here, and yet here we are. It’s a miracle! Or you might brood over how how perilous our existence is, because you realize that non-existence is infinitely more probable than existence. But the improbability that triggers these emotions isn’t just in your head, it is out there. And so is the weirdness.

The problem is, many people don’t think the universe, life and consciousness are especially weird. When I talk to my students about the weirdness of existence, they often look baffled. They think I’m weird for insisting that existence is weird. And in fact leading thinkers believe that science has already told us so much about the world and about ourselves that it has dissipated the mystery of things.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett, for example, has argued for decades that life and consciousness aren’t that weird. They are just results of physical processes. Science hasn’t pinned down all the details yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Consciousness will soon seem no weirder than digestion or metabolism. If you insist that things are fundamentally weird, Dennett implies, you must be some sort of flake.

Other philosophers disagree. In his 2013 book Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel argues that conventional, materialistic science cannot account for the emergence of life and consciousness. Paul Feyerabend, whom I interviewed in 1992, mocked scientists who think they have figured out reality. He said, “The reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’”

These disagreements give me pause, because they make weirdness seem subjective. And yet I cling to my conviction that the world is weird, and that its weirdness is more fundamental than other qualities we attribute to it, such as goodness, badness or oneness.

I rarely see the weirdness of the world now. I am so absorbed in my own little schemes and troubles that I usually take reality for granted. And someday, scientists might convince themselves, and the rest of us, that the world is no longer weird, because they have figured it out. They will exult in their triumph. But when we stop seeing the world as weird, we have lost something, not gained something. Whether or not we see it, the weirdness will still be out there.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”