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canvas of the void.” But when he attempted to strip this embroidery away, the canvas of his consciousness remained. Try as he might, he could not suppress it. “At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished,” he wrote, “another consciousness lights up—or rather, it was already alight; it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first.” He found it impossible to imagine absolute nothingness without some residuum of consciousness creeping into the darkness, like a little light under the door. Therefore, he concluded, nothingness must be an impossibility.
    Bergson was not the only philosopher to argue in this way. The British idealist F. H. Bradley, author of the dauntingly titled Appearance and Reality , similarly maintained that sheer nothingness was unthinkable. He too concluded that it must therefore be impossible.
    One of the more confused attempts to imagine nothingness was made by “S,” a patient of the distinguished Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria. S had such an extraordinary memory that Luria wrote an entire book about him, titled The Mind of a Mnemonist . Oddly though, his memory was almost purely visual. So when S tried to conceive of nothingness, the experiment went disastrously awry:
    In order for me to grasp the meaning of a thing, I have to see it… . Take the word nothing … I see this nothing and it is something… . So I turned to my wife and asked her what nothing meant… . She simply said: “ Nothing means there is nothing.” I understood it differently. I saw this nothing … . If nothing can appear to a person, that means it is something. That’s where the trouble comes in.
    Perhaps any attempt to summon up an image of nothing is self-defeating. Even so, is thinkability a reliable test for possibility ? Does the fact that we cannot imagine absolute nothingness—except, perhaps, in a state of dreamless sleep—mean that something or other must perforce exist?
    One must beware here of falling into what has been called the philosopher’s fallacy : a tendency to mistake a failure of the imagination for an insight into the way reality has to be. “I can’t imagine it otherwise,” a thinker prone to this fallacy says to himself; “therefore it must be so.” There are many things that lie beyond the powers of our imagination that are not only possible but real. We can’t visualize colorless objects, for example, yet atoms are colorless. (They are not even gray.) Most of us, with the exception of a few preternaturally gifted mathematicians, cannot imagine curved space. Yet Einstein’s relativity theory tells us that we actually live in a curved four-dimensional spacetime manifold, one that violates Euclidean geometry—something that Immanuel Kant found unimaginable and thus ruled out on philosophical grounds.
    Bergson and Bradley thought that absolute nothingness was self-contradictory, because the very possibility would entail the existence of an observer to think about it. Call this the “observer argument” against nothingness. The observer argument is not only dubious on general grounds, but also has some wild implications. It means that every possible world must contain at least one conscious observer. But surely a universe without consciousness is physically possible. If the constants of nature in our own universe—the strength of the weak nuclear force, the mass of the top quark, and so on—were even slightly different from their actual values, there would have been no evolution of life in the universe, just a lot of brute matter. But, by the logic of the observer argument, such a zombie universe would be impossible, since there would be no one to observe it.
    Bergson’s version of the observer argument has a still more absurd implication. In his mind’s eye, he could not abolish his own self. On the principle that what is unimaginable is impossible, he ought to have concluded that his own nonexistence was impossible: that no