Reflections on ‘Why the world does not exist’ TEDx Talk by Markus Gabriel.

This talk in essence posits that the notion of ‘the world’ does not exist, that it is an illusion. One of the interesting parts of the talk is Gabriel’s theoretical breakdown of ‘the world’; ‘the world’ is most commonly considered the totality of all spatially temporal things (planets, trees, grass, you, me etc) but within this there are also facts or concepts. Facts/concepts are things that are true of things, these are not spatially temporal and are not tangible objects, they have no physical location. Broken down as followed:

• Things – have certain properties
• Other things – have other properties and are distinguishable from ‘things’

• Concepts – characterise things

Therefore ‘the world’ cannot be a totality of all spatially temporal things as it cannot encompass facts, it is impossible to produce a list of all truths as we are constantly negotiating the limits of concepts and as such the world does not exist.

This then leads of to questions of existence, Gabriel throws up an interesting descriptor of what it means to exist: to exist is to be in a context. This opens up lines of thought in questioning what it is to be ‘human’, of the concepts of ‘I’/ ‘we’. If in this sense unicorns exist when they are in the context of a film where this is a fact, can other objects exist as humans and humans exist as other objects when placed in a certain context where those are facts? If witches can exist in Macbeth but not in Spain, can a chair exist as a human in an altered version of reality?

Following on from this, in my previous readings into philosophy the basis notion is of existing in an entangled mesh of relations where everything interconnects. Gabriel here states that we need to give up on the idea all things are connected, some things are and some are not. If we give up this idea of an entangled mesh we face the possibility that we are autonomous beings not determined by an overall structure, that we are alone but alone with infinite possibilities worth exploring.