A work of philosophy by Patrick Hunter
How the Universe Comes to Know Itself
It begins with a single question: can nothing exist? Follow the answer honestly and it leads, one necessary step at a time, through stars, life and memory, to the most familiar words you know.
The question that changes everything
Not an empty roomNot darknessNot silence
The total absence of anything at all: no space, no time, no possibility of anything ever being otherwise.
Most books about existence choose a side first and argue for it afterwards. I AM begins with this question instead, and follows its answer wherever it leads.
Where it leads is the book.
About the book
I AM: How the Universe Comes to Know Itself makes an unusual claim: that reality can be reasoned to, step by step, the way a proof is reasoned to, with nothing admitted that the argument has not earned.
From one starting point, Patrick Hunter builds outwards through structure, gravity, time and light; through the first living things, memory and the boundary of the self; to consciousness, freedom, God and death. It is philosophy written for the general reader, and it asks only that you follow it, and check it, at every step.
A journey beyond the ordinary
Every chapter rests on the one before it. Nothing is assumed along the way, and nothing is skipped, from the impossibility of nothing to the moment you recognise yourself in the argument.
Part One
Why something must exist, what it must be like in order to exist at all, and why it can never stand still. A path that runs through gravity, time and the speed of light, and reaches back before the Big Bang.
Chapters 1 to 11
Part Two
From the death of a star to the first living things in the deep ocean, and on to memory, the boundary of the self, and the brief pause in which a mind first begins to look.
Chapters 12 to 20
Part Three
One and many. How separate minds still meet. What time is when it is lived rather than measured, and why you cannot step outside any of it.
Chapters 21 to 28
Part Four
Freedom and determination, the great traditions of philosophy, what has always been meant by God, and the question most readers have been waiting for.
Chapters 29 to 36
Reality is not only something that is. Through you, it is something that is known.
Glimpses inside
Six of the chapters, and the questions they set out to answer. The answers are in the book.
Chapter 1
Not empty space, not darkness: the total absence of anything. Could it ever have been?
Chapter 6
Why does everything that exists lean towards everything else?
Chapter 9
Why does time only ever move one way, and what is it made of?
Chapter 13
How does chemistry cross the threshold into something that keeps itself alive?
Chapter 20
At what point does a living thing begin to undergo its own life?
Chapter 35
The question beneath every other question: what happens when I die?
Why read I AM?
This is a book for the curious, the sceptical and the quietly searching: readers who would rather follow an argument than be handed a conclusion.
Every claim is earned from the one before it. Where the book meets established science or philosophy it says so plainly. Where it parts company, it says that too.
From the Higgs field and colliding black holes to grief, love and compassion: one unbroken line of reasoning, from the deepest structure of the cosmos to the feeling of being you.
Parmenides, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Husserl, Parfit and many more: what each one saw clearly, and where each one stopped short.
Are your choices truly yours? What has the word God always been reaching for? What happens when you die? Each is faced head on, with no comforting shortcuts.
Written by someone with no allegiance to any faith, it nonetheless arrives at the question of God, and treats every tradition it meets with respect.
The question at its heart grew slowly over close to forty-five years of reading, travel and attention to how people everywhere make sense of existence.
This is not an easy book, and it does not try to be.
Order your copy
How the Universe Comes to Know Itself
by Patrick Hunter
A single chain of reasoning, from the impossibility of nothing to the moment reality becomes present to itself, written to be followed, tested and lived with.
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“It begins with something so familiar that it is almost never questioned.”From I AM · Introduction
