The world is weird and wonderful

The world is weird and wonderful. These are ineliminable features of the world, at least as long as creatures like us are around to contemplate it. Let me be pretentious and introduce a completely superfluous acronym. Call this the WWW thesis. If WWW is true, then any attempts to explain these features of the world away (as artifacts of our finite understanding, incomplete science, or relics of superstition or stupidity) are futile.

I’ll make up for the obnoxious formalism with cheesiness. What a wonderful world! We wonder at its weirdness and try to explain it. But also embrace the weirdness as a source of wonder for its own sake. Maybe the weirdness of the world doesn’t need to be explained away; explaining the world need not eliminate its weirdness or wonderfulness. Isn’t it weird that the relations between twelve arbitrary (and historically unstable) frequencies, their associated pitches (the twelve-tone chromatic scale), and their conventional arrangements (major, minor, and pentatonic scales, and other modes) generate some of the most incredible aesthetic and spiritual experiences?And that’s just the most common, not a unique way to carve out the sonic world in beauty-generating units! I mean, even Hanon can sound great:

How many possible worlds can you imagine where human beings never figured that out, let alone excelled at it, or where our auditory perception simply didn’t allow for such experiences? I can imagine a few and they all suck. Isn’t it wonderful that we happen to live in a world where that plus all the other things happen? Maybe what we need to jettison are the expectations that lead us to be bothered, rather than amazed, by weirdness.

Wonder is instrumental in discovery; it prompts us to better understand nature by uncovering its laws (or compiling the patterns and structures that underlie the fact that the world can make sense to us if you’re a Humean about the laws of nature). Wonder and its cognates—awe, admiration, amazement, puzzlement, surprise, curiosity—are also intrinsically valuable. The emotions of wonder and awe contribute to a flourishing life. A life devoid of such attitudes is bereft of intellectual thrill, antithetical to the childlike approach that many of us want to hold onto.

In what I want to believe is a wonderful coincidence, two philosophy books recently published by what is becoming my favorite academic publisher, Princeton University Press, adopt the childlike approach that motivates ...