Why is there something rather than nothing? I think this question is problematic, and I want to explain with reasoning by analogy.

When I was around 10 years old, I remember one day being amazed by the chicken and the egg paradox. I think I was actually doing chicken coop related chores at the time. It seemed that no matter which answer was true, the answer could not be satisfying and would lead to only more questions.

Of course, I did not know of the theory of evolution at this time, and it has rendered this once profound question mundane. It shows that the question itself is infantile in its phrasing, and the true reality is far more complex.

It shows that before the egg, there was a chicken, and before the chicken, there was an egg, and so on and so forth until you reach some arbitrary point where the chicken is not in fact a chicken, but a chicken precursor with nearly identical characteristics to the modern day chicken. This is no different to looking at a sliding graph between black and white and saying when does black stop and grey begins or when does grey end and white begins? It's the problem of applying strict definitions to what is, in fact, a constant sliding-scale gradual process.

In addition, it reveals how mundane the question is, but opens up so many more interesting questions like which came first, plants or animals, sea or land dwellers, sight or hearing, and so on.

I suspect the question "why is there something rather than nothing" will one day be revealed to be as infantile as the chicken and the egg question turned out to be. That the question itself as posed pushes one's mind down incorrect paths of inquiry, and the reality will be far more nuanced and sophisticated than the simplicity that the question, as phrased, implies.

Just as I felt unsatisfied by the false dichotomy offered to me by the chicken and the egg paradox, so am I unsatisfied with the seemingly binary answers offered to Parmenides' question as being either (a) there has always been something (infinite universe), and (b) there was nothing, and then, one day, there was something (universe beginning at Big Bang).

Note also the empirical evidence needed to solve the chicken and the egg paradox. You can't be quitely pondering the chicken and egg paradox in the comfort of your study and come up with the theory of evolution. It required gathering data by observing reality and then drawing the conclusion from the facts. Again I suspect this is true for Parmenides' question as well.

But since I did make this post, I figure I should at least do you the courtesy of taking a crack at it.

My first thought would be one of definitions. "Something", "nothing", what do these words even mean, precisely? Nothing, for instance, what actually is nothing? One might be tempted to think of things like the void of space, the empty space between your body and a nearby object, but as science has proven, these empty spaces are anything but. We live in a universe of "somethings", so is "nothing" even a sensible concept? Perhaps there is no such thing as nothing?

Again, it goes back to my initial statement that I suspect the question itself is flawed, perhaps even nonsensical. Take of course the infamous example of the question "how many angels can fit on the head of the pin". Any atheist will tell you it's a nonsensical question, but theists have seriously debated this question. It's really no different to asking who is stronger, Bat Man or Iron Man. It's just fiction and the answers given will be based on fictional concepts, with no anchor in reality.

Just because a question CAN be asked doesn't mean that the question needs an answer or has an answer, or that the answer or question has any basis in reality. Another example to hopefully solidify my point that, yes, non-sensical questions do exist, would be something like "What shade of brown is the number 22?" There's an infinite number of bogus questions like this you can think up, and perhaps the ultimate metaphysical question is one of them.

If I'm really taking a crack at this question, even after all the issues I've raised it with, my spitball answer would be something like this, and bear in mind there's no empirical evidence going into this either I'm no astrologist and haven't read up on that ultra complex subject, just trying to go off pure logic.

It just seems logically unsatisfying for the universe to to have an infinite series of causes going back forever and ever.

But also it's unsatisfying for there to be a 'first cause', because you want to know what was before the first cause, or why did the first cause start causing away.

And if you think of it as like a snake eating its own tail situation, like the causes link around in a giant circle like the big crunch-big bang cyclical theory (apparently discredited now based on observations that universe is rapidly flying apart into a heat death situation) that's also unsatisfying because you look at that whole circle and just be like "but why is there a big circle?"

And so with all this not satisfying me, I wonder if it's something like casualty itself breaking down. Casualty is based on the linear nature of time, and it's so intrinsic to our thinking that if in some prior universe state time does not flow this way, and this casualty does not work this way, that our minds can barely comprehend that state. Logic itself is not equipped to understand that state. And thus it could be a situation where we are literally not mentally equipped to handle this.

It would be like trying to explain to a being that lives in 2D what the third dimension is (Check out Carl Sagan's video on this topic fyi). Even if you explained it to them precisely their 2D perspective would still limit their understanding, just how our own understanding is limited when trying to wrap our minds around the fourth dimension (at least it was for me ).

So that's my 'answer', that I think maybe the question of why there is something rather than nothing is because nothing doesn't exist, it's a nonsensical concept, and the something we do have, the origin of it, is currently beyond our understanding due to the constraints of the reality we live in. But maybe that won't always be the case? Maybe this question will get its own Charles Darwin, and the amazing and incredible truth will be revealed!

Who says there's not a whole lot of universes where there actually is nothing? If you were in one of those you couldn't ask this question. So logically there has to be something. So maybe the better question would be what happened that our something came to be. Nobody will ever be able to answer that though, because it's outside of the scope of what we can experience. We can't exist in nothing and watch something to come to be. Keep in mind that even vacuum is something. There always is at least space-time and all the other laws of nature.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 10 2024, 12:15 pm by NudeRaider.

Good question. I'll give my thoughts too:

My background way of thinking:

People usually observe that there seem to be 2 types of realms: the physical, real world, and then the realm of "thought and ideas." My view is that the non-physical realm can be thought of as an abstract space of just a bunch of "sentences." They are just statements. Like "The universe had a definite beginning" is one.

The typical way we consider things in this non-physical realm is by assigning a binary value to each sentence of "true" or "untrue." The set of things you view as true or untrue depends on which "theory" you use.

I define a theory to contain

1. Axioms - a set of sentences you take to be true.
2. Logic - a set of sentences (actually, technically this is a subset of your Axioms) which relate sentences to other sentences.
3. Predictions - The set of sentences which are necessarily implied by your Axioms.

These are tested against "Observations." Somehow, we have minds and senses attached to our bodies which allow us to perceive the world around us, and make observations, which basically give strong indication that some sentences are true. Kinda convoluted, but, for example, consider the sentence "I am 6 ft tall." You can make an observation by taking a measurement of me to see that I am 6 ft tall, and so you might want to conclude the sentence "Zoan is 6ft tall" is true. (However - there is always some dumb objection you could make "Maybe the universe is conspiring against everyone, and it just so happens that most measurements of Zoan indicate he is 6ft tall, but really your senses are messed up and you read the measurement wrong every single time." There is no logical way to refute that, so, you might rather take the sentence "I measure Zoan to be 6ft tall" as true. But then you could ask "do you really?" and so on. At some point you just have to cut it off somewhere and say "Somehow, we make observations which we take to imply some sentences as 'true'.")

In this view, we start with some sentences as true, and can worm our way through the space of sentences to get other sentences as true too.

Typically, it's rare to directly get things as true; rather, the most typical way we do things is by appending theories onto others and deducing the Axioms are true. Here's what I mean: Let's say I see you and say "The sky is very blue today." You would immediately make the following theory in your head:

Axioms:
1.The sky is very blue today.
2. Zoan likes to talk about the weather.
Prediction:
Zoan would tell me that the sky is very blue today.
Observation:
Zoan told me the sky is very blue today.

The observation matches with the prediction, so you can deduce that the axiom of this mini-theory is true. Actually, I think that actually every single insight into the abstract world can be broken down into a series of these types of testings of theories like these.

Of course, there are other theories which you could concoct which would have "Zoan would tell me the sky is very blue today" as a prediction.

Two more definitions I have are:

1. A theory is "self-consistent" if it doesn't simultaneously predict any sentence to be both true and false.
2. A theory is "false" if there is an observation which contradicts one of the predictions or axioms of the theory

So a theory being "false" means either there's something wrong with the observation or one of the axioms of the theory are false.

How this relates to your question:

The consequence of this is: to approach this question, you should come at it from the angle of cooking up theories, deducing their predictions, and testing these predictions against what we observe. Basically, that's the scientific method.

I personally believe the theory which has as its core axiom "The God described in the bible exists." It has as its predictions "there is something rather than nothing" among a lot of other things which I observe to be true. I won't argue that it's true, because that ultimately comes down to whether you want to believe the core axiom or not - but I would argue that it's self-consistent and there isn't any observation which contradicts anything said to be true under this theory.

Of course: There are loads of other theories out there which also predict the sentence "there is something rather than nothing," and which are also self-consistent and not immediately falsifiable. It really all comes down to examining the core axioms and the sequence of predictions which comes from them, and comparing these to observations. The last thing that sometimes people agree on is that 'generally, the less Axioms you have to assume in a theory, the better.' (However, I personally don't see any reason that sentence necessarily has to be true lol.)

I'll also mention, since (I think) you brought it up: I also think the sentence "The heat death of the universe leads to another big bang, causing a cyclic universe" is true. Afaik, it seems to reasonable prediction based on what we know of laws of physics. I'd also insert though, that this doesn't really answer the question of "why does something rather than nothing exist." I personally believe it exists, and simply God made it this way ;o Maybe in the future we move the goalpost back more and discover some series of cyclic universes which imply the existence of our cyclic universe, punctuated at a point along it's circle with a big bang, but again this doesn't really answer the question of why anything exists rather than nothing.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 10 2024, 3:28 pm by Zoan.

What about there being something sometimes but nothing other times, and then also something or maybe nothing some times after that? If there was truly nothing, wouldn't that still be something in its nothingness? There was clearly nothing in the beginning, because beginning is something and if there was something then the something wouldn't have begun so there must have been nothing if there was a beginning. But if there was nothing before the beginning isn't that something we can think about and therefore there couldn't have been nothing so there was always something with no beginning? And who's to say all this something won't be nothing in the end?

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? If all the atoms fall apart, and there's no consciousness to observe it, does the universe count?

How can that be your core axiom? If I asked you why you chose that as your core axiom you would give me a lot of reasons for why you did so, therefore it cannot be a fundamental bedrock belief if it's being propped up by other beliefs you have.

And you can of course understand how someone who chose a 'core axiom' of The God described in the Koran exists" or <insert thousands of other religions here> would now be permanently opposed to you with no hope of one side convincing the other.

Better to have something far more neutral as a core axiom.