If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?"
In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four sides. In contrast, not every square you encounter will be blue or tiny. Those are contingent properties of a square. A square may be blue, or it may not be. A square may be tiny, or it may not be.
Now, would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or contingent? If its existence is necessary, it would mean that there is no possible way for our universe not to exist. If its existence is contingent, then our universe either could exist, or it could not.
I happen to think it's contingent. But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary. Regardless of whether you view that necessary thing as God or something else, if you agree that the universe is contingent, then the contingency doesn't stop at its creation; its continued existence is also contingent.
So, beyond needing a "first cause" to explain its existence (as with a picture on a painted canvas), our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
> But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary
You say that as if it was a obvious why, but to me that looks like a baseless assumption. The way I see it, if our universe is contingent, then that’s all we can know, the journey ends, there’s nothing else we can deduce. I simply can’t “assume” that there’s a “necessary substrate” just … because.
You probably have to assume there is a necessary substrate. What else can you possibly think? Contingency means being contingent on something else. You could suppose that the "something else" is itself contingent, but then you have another contingency. At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent and that the rest of the stuff downstream turns on it being the way it is.
Wait! Contingent was just defined as everything that's not necessary. Not contingent with its normal meaning of dependent on something else. Like, a square has 4 sides, that's necessary for it to be called a square, but it might or might not depend on something else for that quality. Or a square is blue, that's contingent (i.e., what's not necessary in this usage for it to be called a square), and it might or might not depend on something else.
If you are using "contingent" with its normal meaning, the idea is absurd. We can divide everything that exists into "necessary" and "contingent", one or the other? We might as well divide everything into edible and picturesque, for example. Words, but more like word salad than meaningful statements.
> You probably have to assume there is a necessary substrate. What else can you possibly think?
That there's no necessary substrate.
> Contingency means being contingent on something else
Can't it just be "luck", then? Chaos just happened to take this form.
> At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent
Sorry but I don't agree. I think it is perfectly conceivable that everything is contingent and there's no "necessary substrate". For example: it could be that several factors (things like the gravitational constant and the different fundamental forces) are contingent on isolation, but when they are put together the ensemble becomes necessary. Like in a tensegrity structure (not saying that I think that's what happens to our Universe, just pointing out that there's other options besides "One necessary substrate", and we don't know which one is ours).
Roger Penrose suggests patterns before the "big bang" are observable is my interpretation of what was said between him and Melvin Bragg on a Youtube clip.
I don't see what the infinite sequence of contingency buys you. Seems you might as well say there is fundamentally no reason why anything is (though I think that's untenable).
"What it buys you" suggests that we should assume reality is fundamentally organized for our convenience or comfort, or to avoid being too challenging to our intellectual powers and/or beliefs.
By introducing the concept of reasons into the discussion, you seem to be adding a new dimension of purpose to it (unless you are using 'reason' as a synonym for 'cause', but if so, it would have been clearer to stick with the latter.) Your belief that the universe has a purpose (if that is what you are saying here) does not logically compel anyone else to accept a first cause.
Update: In your view, there is a hierarchy of causes of something, the first of which is necessary and the rest of which are contingent. Therefore, the second cause was contingent. This implies that the first cause made a choice between which of the second-cause options obtained. But as the first cause had a choice, then it could have gone another way, so it was contingent...
The problem is that "the first cause is God" is not based on anything. It is perfectly fine to ask "If everything has a cause, then what caused God?".
Then there's two options. One is that it's "turtles all the way down" - God1 caused God. And God2 caused God1. And that goes on, forever.
The other option is "God caused himself". Which is similar to being "the first cause", but here's the difference: at that point, we have admitted an exception to the "everything has a cause" rule, which is that "some things can cause themselves". At which point one might as well make that decision earlier and conclude "The Universe Created Itself", not needing God at all.
The “god as first cause” argument feels like a stack overflow. It’s just what happens when you infinitely recurse a cause and effect chain. If you don’t want to spend rest of your life evaluating it, you eventually just give up and `throw new Exception(“a wizard did it”)`
It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The "sustainment" question is different from the "causal" question. Causal questions are typically temporal and past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now", always.
If the physical universe always existed, then it needed no creator. If it was created, then the question moves back a step: where'd the creator come from? And we wind up with the same mystery.
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
Diving further into this, there's a hot debate about whether the universe does require a sustaining cause (the Existential Expiration thesis), or whether it can just exist unless something stops it from existing (Existential Inertia Thesis)
Personally, I am inclined to think that things tend to keep existing unless something stops them from existing, and that the universe therefore needs no sustaining cause.
Here's how Mitta summarized that page: "The term 'nyat' is used in Early Buddhism to refer to the emptiness of all things. This emptiness is seen as a meditative state, an attribute of objects, and a type of awareness-release. The term is used to emphasize the deceptive nature of all things, and to show that they are all ultimately worthlessness and vacuous."
Now we ask it directly to compare it to a monitor (I'm pastel-mature-herring):
pastel-mature-herring~> Discuss this likening emptiness to a blank computer monitor.
victorious-capuchin*> One way to think of emptiness is to liken it to a blank computer monitor. Just as a blank monitor contains the potential for any image to be displayed on it, so too does emptiness contain the potential for any and all things to arise within it. Just as a monitor cannot display any image without the proper input, so too does emptiness require the right conditions in order to give rise to anything. And just as a monitor will eventually return to its blank state when the input is removed, so too will things eventually return to emptiness when the conditions that gave rise to them are no longer present.
pastel-mature-herring~> And if someone understands this, what does that say about them?
victorious-capuchin*> If someone understands that emptiness is like a blank computer monitor, it suggests that they understand that everything is ultimately emptiness and that everything is ultimately impermanent. This understanding can lead to a sense of detachment from the things of the world, and can ultimately lead to a state of liberation from suffering.
I personally think that time, and all dimensions (including the 3 that we typically thing of as "space") are simply caused by a few axioms: there is the concept of "something else" (that is, 1 != 0, there is at least 2 possibilities); there is "something" of which can we in at least 1 of those 2 possible states, but not both; there is something to a way in which the answer to the question of state can be known; there is cause -> effect. When taken to the infinite complexity, you end up with coalescing densities of state all of which cannot be simultaneously true and there fore
Maybe, but the capacity for "something" to "stop something else from existing" seems to depend on laws, and the laws themselves seem pretty contingent. Why are the laws sustained? If the laws changed and things themselves caused their own demise, things couldn't just go on existing. So what keeps the current laws on the books?
What about the law of conservation of matter? When have you seen anything cease to exist, and not merely transform?
Isn't the question about the universe existing really asking where energy/matter came from? How the energy and matter are configured is a different question entirely, it seems.
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
The movie doesn't cease to exist because you turned the television off, only the projection of it into those particular photons.
Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray of it into tiny pieces, crush those pieces to powder, and melt the result into a formless goo.
Movies are purely information, a sequence of bits. Those bits can have manifestations such as copies on a hard drive, blu ray, or whatever. The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation. A sequence of bits is just a very big number, and all numbers continue to exist whether we write them down or not. We can discover specific interesting numbers, such as the number 'T' that is the H.264 encoding of the Top Gun Blu Ray movie. It is 40 billion bits long, but it's still just a number. It has adjacent numbers, integer factors, and everything.
Here's the thing: the number 'T' existed before Tom Cruise was born. It existed before the evolution of humanity and will exist after the heat death of physical universe. It exists independent of time. It didn't come into existence at any point in time, or "before" time, or any nonsense like that.
Similarly, if[1] you believe that the universe follows strict, mathematical laws of physics[2], then you can imagine it as pure information, like a Mandelbrot set. Fractals in fact might be a very good analogy. They're actually very simple things, exist independent of time, and yet can produce intricate detail if you look closely. That detail may appear chaotic, but "seems" to follow oddly consistent rules, much like physics.
So this is my point of view: The Universe is "just" mathematics, and mathematics exists independent of time, making the Universe necessary. As in-universe observers, we're part of the mathematics, not any particular manifestation or representation of it. Even if there were some sort of God scribbling the bits down on a napkin that represent the state of the Universe, he's discovering the numbers, not creating them. If he destroys the napkin, the bits will not cease to exist. Inside the universe, we would never know anything had occurred.[3]
[1] Granted, this is a "if"!
[2] The more we know about the universe, the more this seems to be true.
[3] This entire point of view is the main theme of the book Diaspora by Greg Egan, which I highly recommend.
I have come to this conclusion as well. It came to be when I was looking at a fractal animation, and it appeared that things moved in it as if obeying some laws of physics.
I have expanded on this idea here, and have described a sort of thought expiriment where I try to "prove" this. You probably not want to read it. It is not very well written.
The h264 movie Top Gun is purely information, but it’s also derivative and with information loss, right?
From our perception at least, it seems like Tom and Val were a part of the earliest & highest fidelity information that makes up Top Gun when they were part of shooting it day to day. Or somewhere around there, the movie that the h264 derives from requires daily shots + editing/effects etc. If Tom & Val are in-universe observers, then wtf happened during those shooting days, and in their argument I’d imagine, the ideas & experiences they’d had on how they portrayed their parts?
- I don't think it can be taken for granted that math exists independent of consciousness to think of it.
- Even if math exists independent of time and consciousness, it need not have a physical manifestation (by your own logic). So why does a physical universe have to exist?
Why do you assume the physical universe is a manifestation?
The Mandelbrot set exists and contains self reference without any need for it to be graphed (a manifestation). Similarly the universe as we experience it may exist without any physical manifestation.
> The concept of Pi and the irrationality of sqrt(2) predates the universe itself. Think about it.
How? Get rid of the universe, and the concept of pi doesn't exist. Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter. Circles didn't exist before the universe, thus no pi. There could be another universe where circles are impossible due to whatever laws of physics exist, thus no pi.
> There could be another universe where circles are impossible due to whatever laws of physics exist, thus no pi.
Circles (perfect ones) are impossible in our universe, too. Circles are abstractions. If we have successfully deduced a conclusion from a set of axioms, wouldn't that deduction hold true in all possible universes?
The mathematical realist position is that these abstract math objects exist independent of an observer.
This. Circles are just the set of all the infinite points from any point covering any degree around you having the same distance. That's why Pi it's infinite on decimals.
Ditto with sqrt(2), you need to "sharpen" the triangle made from half an square forever in order to get all the decimals.
So you hold the Fictionalism view and reject Platonism. That's fine. This stuff has been debated ad nauseam and we're not going to break any new ground here.
> It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure)
I will mention that dogs are also a useful shared fiction. We assign the label dog to a perception of a configuration of atoms that we think satisfy the criteria for what a dog is. So I'd say that numbers are more like dogs than unicorns, in that they are an abstraction that is used by us in practice to map to perceptions of physical objects.
Top Gun still exists in the minds of everyone who has seen it. It is an idea as well as a performance. And you don't need to consume any particular encoding of the performance to continue to either enjoy or hate it. Art is weird like that.
Thank you for taking the time to write that and explain the concepts so clearly.
How do you know that concepts/categories like "necessary" and "contingent" apply to the universe? Specifically, if the universe is everythibg that there ever is or ever will be, how can it be contingent upon something external to itself?
Could it not be the case that there concepts come from a causality-based view of reality that may be far from universally applicable?
I think "universe" is an ambiguous word that is not helpful when we talk about this stuff. Like, for instance, you've probably heard of multiverse theory, where there is not just one universe, but many. In which case, "universe" means the subset of physical reality that we are a part of. Maybe there are other universes that truly exist, but there's no door between ours and theirs.
So maybe we can more precisely talk about all of physical reality, regardless of whether they exist in our universe or an alternative universe, or a realm that exists outside of the universe but influences or produces the material of the universe. Clearly, that includes all material things themselves, but might also encompass the non-material but very real and observable physical laws that govern how reality operates.
How can there be something outside of that physical reality? Well ... the Greeks had a word for that: meta-physics. And generally, when it is posited that something necessary exists (whether it be God or something else), that necessary thing exists metaphysically. So yes, as you are suggesting, a distinction does need to be made between physical reality and metaphysical reality for it to make sense that the universe (comprising only physical reality) is contingent.
Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question (e.g., "ok, why Y?").
but isn't the problem that you could get stuck in an infinite contingency loop? i.e if you pick God, what if God is contingent and so on. Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary.
It seems to me that you have created a one-time exception that gets yourself out of the infinite regress that this line of thought leads to. All it does, however, is to raise another question to replace the original one: why is God necessary?
I think it does exactly that, which is supposes a one-time exception to get out of infinite regress. But, I mean, if God exists, that's how it is. So the story doesn't seem incoherent. As for asking why is God necessary, I think that is a misplaced question. God's necessity wouldn't derive from something else, because then it wouldn't be necessity (just another derived contingency). The starting point is that something necessary has to be the basis of the rest of the stuff, that's it.
Not being obviously incoherent is not an argument for that belief being correct; it is merely the very minimum a belief has to achieve to avoid being summarily dismissed for being irrational.
I can understand why you would like the question of why God is necessary to be "misplaced" (which is a euphemism for what, exactly? It is no less coherent than the other questions being entertained here), but, with your 'that's it", you are simply refusing to look further than the answer you wanted.
Furthermore, as I am sure you are aware, 'God' is a loaded term, on which has been heaped a huge amount of conceptual baggage. Therefore, I assume you chose to write 'God', rather than some more neutral term such as 'necessary cause', for some purpose - but what? Your argument for there being a necessary cause would not offer any reason to justify any of that baggage.
I agree with this, but we don't really know if the universe is God using this infinite regress definition.
The cool part about this definition of God, is that it necessitates the existence by definition, and gives a falsifiable hypothesis.
Continuing with this definition, current cosmological theories would then imply that the Big Bang is God. Though this explanation of the beginning of everything leaves me unsatisfied. It just feels like something else kicked everything off.
We really need a way to peer behind the Event Horizon of the Big Bang, which we obviously can't do empirically, so we are stuck using logical deductions.
I personally think studying pure math and some of the more untested physics theories like String Theory, and Stephen Wolfram's physics project give a lot of food for thought.
Enumerating every possible pattern, while computationally infeasible, still paints an interesting landscape, even granting how little of it we can describe.
Defining God to be whatever is assumed to be necessary is the opposite of a falsifiable hypothesis.
You say we are stuck with logical deductions, but the thing about them is that they are no more true than are their premises, so analytical metaphysics grounds out in a personal and subjective choice of axioms (subjective in the sense that no-one else is logically compelled to accept them.)
I think if we found the beginning causal chain, then that would be falsifiable... theoretically.
Assuming God = Beginning of the causal chain,
Finding this prime mover becomes a tangible physical hypothesis.
I don't think most religious people would agree with this definition of God though.
Also, if the information needed to confirm the beginning of the causal chain is locked behind an Event Horizon, then I don't know what to conclude about this.
I think it's possible to build a model in our slice of the universe that can let us peer beyond such limitations. But I can't be sure.
My apologies; I misunderstood your previous post. Nevertheless, let's suppose there is a falsifiable prime mover, and we have somehow discovered it. Being falsifiable, however, means we can ask what made it true rather than false, so the regression does not stop.
Rather ironically, the "there must be a prime mover" argument for God can only avoid being blatantly arbitrary, tendentious and self-serving by saying God had no choice in anything, which is definitely not what most religious people want to believe.
To rephrase what you are saying for my own brain: An original causal event may still have dependencies that aren't necessarily bound to it in time or space. And these dependencies may have their own structure that are suspectable to infinite regress.
Perhaps an example of this is how all the fundamental constants have very specific values that are required aprori for anything to happen in the first place.
> The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us
As a Hindu I find this baffling. For the Hindu there is a consistency across science and religion, and sometimes the line between the two isn't clear. They work together harmoniously to form my worldview.
Based on the cursory information I have about the author's background, I am assuming he was exposed to Western Christianity growing up.
I find that this breeds a very narrow minded form of atheism, one that rejects a very specific idea of what God is.
I have a suspicion that if many of the atheists in the West were exposed to the full metaphysical understanding of the Eternal Dharma they may not be atheists, or at least be a different kind of atheist than simply a Not-Christian.
In Hinduism God is not a man or a woman, but instead the energy that is manifest in every atom of every universe. God is the universal wave function.
I suspect that that's disingenious, because calling it "God" implies that you think it is actually in some way more than what the universal wave function is in physics. Because otherwise why would you have a problem with an atheist physisist who believes the wave function describes the universe, and there is not more to it than that mathematical desciption?
How would “God” explain subjective experience? That just seems a stand-in for a non-explanation, a bit similar to how the terms “dark matter” and “dark energy” are used as stand-ins for as yet unexplained phenomena.
Personally, I see no problem with subjective experience. I believe what makes it difficult to grasp for a conscious subject is mostly the recursivity of it: You not only have an experience (perception), you also have an experience (perception) of having an experience. And those levels of experience each have a lot of texture/structure. This is probably evolutionary useful to have, and the (literally ;)) mind-boggling physical complexity of the brain certainly allows for it.
Well, it's not difficult for me to grasp that I have a subjective experience. It just is. And it's not that I'm self-aware about it; it seems extremely reasonable to empathize that animals without any self-consciousness or self-awareness also have a subjective experience. But it just doesn't follow from anything. We can talk all day about intelligence, computation, and sensory input, even recursive or internal sensory input (e.g. sensing thought). But it does not explain why I have an experience, and why a highly-predictive neural network does not. Or if it does, how the hell does it?
I'm not sure what exactly you think needs explaining. By "difficult to graps", I mean "difficult to graps that there is nothing magical going on". An AI neural network is quite dissimilar from the structures in our brain, so I wouldn't draw any conclusion from that. But I also don't see what would prevent a sufficiently large, multi-layered and recursively wired neural network to have perceptions comparable to what we experience as our consciousness.
When I instrospect my mind, everything there is, is a perception. A perception of a feeling, of an emotion, of a thought, of a recollection, of the texture of an experience ("qualia"), and of course of sensory perceptions. There is never anything that is not a perception. And a perception is just some set of information, the content of the perception.
For any given perception, it is easy to imagine that it can be represented in the brain, with its 100 billion neurons and 1000 trillion synapses, also since the carried signals and states aren't necessarily binary. It is not the case that our perceptions are more complex or more differentiatied that what could physically be represented in our brains. Our perceptory repertoire is rather finite, when you think about it. Furthermore, it is easy to imagine that our internal meta-perceptions of perceptions would arise from corresponding recursively superimposed structures and/or recursive processing in the brain.
The question is, what else, other than all those perceptions we have ("experiences"), is there in consciousness that would require explanation? I haven't been able come up with anything missing. I'd go even further and claim that there can't be anything else that we could notice or observe, since anything we observe would just be additional content of our perceptions.
I’m Hindu too but why come up with some random bullshit rather than try to figure out what is happening. If you want to call god the universe just say universe. The value of Hinduism is in cultural heritage and providing a pathway for life. It’s in tapping into the mysticism and indulging in the rituals to make life interesting.
Sorry but at you. What do you even mean by god is the universal wave function. That means nothing. What is a wave function? Like in the uncertainty principle?
The philosophy of Christianity is rooted deeply in Platonic ideas — where “God” as the ultimate ideal is embodied both in a human (“Jesus”) and in the happening of the world (“Holy Spirit”).
I can’t claim to be an expert in Hinduism — but to my limited understanding, it’s akin to saying that Brahman manifests both through avatars and the actions of deities, as forces of nature.
> In Hinduism God is not a man or a woman, but instead the energy that is manifest in every atom of every universe. God is the universal wave function.
Greg Egan called this the Church of the God that Makes No Difference.
Assigning a personification to a concept is a common theme among many religions throughout the world. To that end, Christianity and those based on it are more of an outlier than the norm.
I think it's interesting to see the ease with which a few commenters on this thread assume they either 1) know how to answer this question or 2) are comfortable hand-waving it away.
> For most of history, the question remained beyond the possibility of being answered. But we live in a most-exciting point in time: one where this question has fallen to the progress of human knowledge.
> [...]
> We now have viable answers to great questions of existence:
> [...]
> It required us to assume math, rather than matter, is fundamental.
For all the length of this exposition, the conclusion is pure Streetlight Effect. Despite the fact that our brains have allowed us to achieve quite a high level of abstract reasoning relative to other Earth fauna, we remain inextricably coupled to our meat sack nature. It doesn't matter how many logical theories and models you stack up that map to observable phenomena, the truth is that there is no basis to assume that math is fundamental. Math, is just a tool for building models, and to paraphrase George Box: despite being useful, all models are wrong.
The irony of attempting to answer the hardest philosophical questions in this way, reflects a very human emotional need to transcend our obvious physical and observational limitations. We can no more explain why the universe exists than an amoeba could explain why a skyscraper exists, and actually the gap is much much bigger, because whatever we observe and determine as causality can always elicit another "why". A three year old can master this trick, and yet here we have a grown and supposedly rational person who does not want to come to terms with the fact that "what" can never fully explain "why". This existential ambiguity is our birthright and is actually beautiful and inspiring if you unclench your bowels a bit.
An amoeba is not asking questions. We are asking questions and we get answers all time. We are on the way to understand everything. Maybe we need to evolve to a different entity like an AI or something, but we are most definitely going into that direction. There are so many great discoveries made every day. We are not sitting still.
This is a lot of ground to cover to get to what is, in my opinion, a very bizarre conclusion which is epistemologically extremely lugubrious: that all structures expressible mathematically also exist and we are (obviously) a subset of those structures.
Frankly, this doesn't even feel like any kind of knowledge to me. Its operationally meaningless! In any case, I think the author has the cart before the horse: numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
Mathematics is nothing but the observation of regularities in certain sorts of elaborate rituals involving making markings on paper. Many of those rituals are inspired by and correlated with regularities which exist in the world, but its difficult to me to see any reason to believe that they have an independent existence.
> numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppose to have the answer. I will say, the case for mathematics pre-existing is stronger than what you refute here.
You're right, of course, that this is an open question. But the posted article saunters about the fields of an incredibly deep question by glibly asserting idealism about mathematical structures. It is an awfully weak foundation upon which to build an answer to such a fundamental question.
It is _at least_ plausible that numbers supervene upon existence and not the other way around, which makes the entire exercise in the article seem suspect in its presentation, at the very least.
Would you _really_ say that the case for mathematical idealism is that strong? The Philpapers survey seems to suggest philosophers are approximately evenly split on this question (idealists at 39%, nominalists at 38%).
Yeah I had to skim through it as well. I think the author probably has written something that has passed peer review, but has either written so many such things that he has gotten sick of terseness and getting to the point, or so few things that he has not learned to value it in the first place? Like the writing is not god-awful like a lot of the crackpot takes, but it's definitely tortuous.
As a theory goes, I don't think this one is successful. It probably either implies that time is an illusion or that we are all Boltzmann brains, and I would take it as a baseline desideratum that our fundamental understanding of the universe does not come in either of these shapes. (Both essentially state “actions don't exist” in different ways, and if the universe is the place where activities occur, the place where things happen, then the idea that nothing is really happening in there appears to fail hard.)
Of course is a Christian and a mystic, my understanding of my own answer is that it is also carefully calculated nonsense, nonsense in service of some sort of artistic goal, so I'm not in a great place to really criticize. He can struggle with his mythos and I can struggle with mine, haha.
Nice that you can step out of the frame and see your motivations.
I write this because I think that your self knowledge is virtuous and like a moth to a flame I am drawn to the good. By identifying with the good or ingesting it like knowledge candy - I can come closer to this platonic concept that my nervous system so craves.
I can no more step outside of my own seeking than a wave can stand up from the ocean and make its way in land.
Why believe anything about this question at all? I feel quite strongly that the proper mental posture towards many questions is "I don't have a very compelling reason to hold a strong opinion on that." This feeling it buttressed by the fact that there are a great many tractable scientific and philosophical mysteries which are as yet unresolved. It seems premature to tackle this particular one, perhaps because I fundamentally disagree with the author that we are at a stage in history where it can be tackled "scientifically."
Sorry that I'm not seeing this until 8 days later, haha.
What I will say is that this particular question is a sort of meta-question. So the underlying question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the basic standpoints are:
- Theistic: This question is meaningful/answerable, but the answer strains our comprehension ability. Creatio ex nihilo, somehow the somethingness comes out of the nothingness, and our ability to understand is not altogether there.
- Scientistic: This question is meaningful and has an ordinarily-intelligible answer, "because of Something with a Capital S."
- Atheistic: This question is not meaningful and therefore cannot have an answer.
- Agnostic: I don't have enough data yet to judge whether this question would be meaningful, or whether it at least in principle has an answer.
Because we're not asking "what is the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?'" but rather asking "is that a meaningful/answerable question in the first place?" the agnostic is in an unusually difficult position that does not obtain in other sorts of agnosticism. The problem is that it does not seem prima facie like this is a more unusual question than any of the other ones we ask on a normal basis. It doesn't have any complicated words, it does not appear to be self-referential, no word is being used twice (and therefore not in a way that might set it into two different contexts so that it has two different meanings)... the only thing that is different is that this question has somewhat of a larger scope than we are conventionally used to.
So normally the agnostic is free of the "burden of proof" and can "cop out" but in this case the agnostic finds themselves needing to justify a bit why this particular usage of those words might be problematic for deciding whether the question is likely to be answerable.
Having listened to a dozen YT videos and podcasts on the subject, I am kind of an expert (just kidding). But I can relay one view a few brilliant people invested into the subject have about the issue: that reality is a set of all possible states. Of what states? Well literally anything.
Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states of anything imaginable. Some of the waves become more and more complex, until in very rare cases structure and rules form within the wave function itself. Akin to Conway’s Game of Life. So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
All the peculiarities like dimensions are illusions the same way a multidimensional array to a computer is ultimately just one-dimensional, with logic to treat it as multi-dimensional.
I also like the explanation that concept of nothingness is categorically invalid because there clearly is existence (or is there? Maybe this is the ultimate ”nothing”?), but the theory of all possible states sounds even better.
Definitely not claiming this is true but intuitively feels like the best explanation for this existence… that this universe with all its laws is a rare sub-tree of all possible states of a simple oscillator. Other universes with other laws exist further up the tree in its other branches. In between, voids and vacuums and undeterministic universes
> So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
Wow!
This is very similar to what I experienced when I accidentally ingested a large amount of psilocybin (and went to ER just in case, it was the most terrifying experience of my life).
This is what I wrote in my notes post the bad trip:
"I felt a disconnection from my self and could see the fabric of existence, that life is an inconceivably large tree of choices that forms the current state of the universe among an infinite amount of universes (for each infinitesimal choice)"
e.g. I "felt" that there is a sibling branch in this tree of choices in which the universe is a slight modification of the current one. But curiously even when my whole personality disassociated from my "self", there was a "foundation" of my consciousness always attached to the current existence, and to it all parts of my personality that form my consciousness (id/superego/whatever) eventually converged once I got back normal.
Stephen Wolfram actually wrote an article suggesting that that's basically it although he frames it as the set of all possible formal rules interacting with each other:
"So how does this help us understand why the universe exists? We’re starting from all possible rules. And basically we’re saying that having a universe that operates in the way we perceive ours to operate is an inevitable consequence of there being all these possible rules. Or, in other words, if these rules “exist” then it follows that so will our universe.
But what does it mean for rules to “exist”, and in particular for all possible rules to exist? The key point, I believe, is that it’s in a sense an abstract necessity. The set of all possible rules is something purely formal. It can be represented in an infinite number of ways. But it’s always there, existing as an abstract thing, completely independent of any particular instantiation.
It’s crucial that we’re talking about all possible rules. If we were talking about particular rules, then we’d need to specify which rules those are, and we’d need a whole language and structure for doing that. But that’s not our situation. We’re talking about all possible rules. We can construct some explicit symbolic representation for these rules, but the deductions we make ultimately won’t depend on this; they would work the same whatever representation we chose to construct.
We might have assumed that to get our universe we’d need some definite input, some specific information. But what we’re discovering is that our universe is in some sense like a tautology; it’s something that has to be the way it is just because of the definition of terms. In effect, it exists because it has to, or in a sense because everything about it is a “logical inevitability”, with no choice about anything."
The part positing the existence of a hypothetical set of all possible formal rules sounds a lot like the cosmological argument for the existence of God.
Looks like an appeal to the divine, in that it doesn't explain anything but does push the question up a level.
"Why does something exist?" "God did it." "Uh, ok, why does God exist?" "Dunno, just does." <- sure seems like you could have simply applied that last answer to the first question and it'd be exactly as useful and valid.
"Why does something exist?" "The set of all possible wave states exists and behaves such-and-such way" "OK, but why does that exist and why does it do that?" "Dunno, just does". <- Ditto.
There is something about this that at least partially satisfies the question, in that it simplifies as you go one level up.
With the "God did it" explanation, something vastly more complex and inscrutable is required (i.e. God) to make the explanation work. With this explanation, there is but a simple wave that splits on its possible oscillations. Our existence is on one of these.
No explanation will ever find the "bottom turtle." There will always be space for another "why?" question. The interesting part is probably more to do with the "asker" this question rather than the answer to it. That we have this capacity to think abstractly about this is, to me, more mind-blowing than the nature of existence itself.
The only thing problematic about “appeals to the divine” or other explanations that “push the question up a level” is if part of the explanation is the prohibition of “where did that thing come from?” or “why is it this way and not some other way?”
But pushing things up a level is actually the only option we have for good explanations. For any explanation about anything whatsoever, you should always be able to ask “why is it this way rather than some other way?” It’s not some paradox or contradiction that there will never be an end to this series of explanations and questions, and any claim that there is an end is the bad kind of “appeal to the divine”!!
True if the level you shift it up to has some further explanatory value and/or can be demonstrated or proven in some fashion. If it's just "well, it might be this thing that we can't prove" then, until you've turned that notion into something you can test or at least support with observations, it's just "god did it".
I think "there's something rather than nothing because the set of all possible waves exists... like, somewhere" is roughly identical to "god did it", as opposed to, say, a hypothesis that things fall and planets orbit due to a universal force that causes matter to attract other matter, even if both just prompt another "why?" You can go do stuff with the latter—not so much with the former, which is more of a dodge than even a partial explanation.
A good test might be whether you can apply the answer to any "why?" that lacks an existing answer, with exactly the same utility and validity in every case. Take the example of the question suggested by the explanation of universal gravitation:
"OK, why does gravity exist, then?"
"God did it / that's just what our little corner of the set of all possible waves happens to look like"
There's simply no specificity to them, and they amount to "just because".
From a mathematical/algorithmic point of view, you could define a good explanation as a sort of compression process: on one hand, you have observations, data to explain, totalling a certain number of bits. On the other hand, you have a process or algorithm that can generate these observations, and if that process can be described in less bits than the original observations, then you have a "good explanation". For example, our current theories for the laws of physics are excellent explanations, because they can explain a virtually infinite number of real observations from finite information.
On the other hand, if the observations are truly random, then in general no shorter process can produce them, so there can be no good explanation for them. And the interesting thing is that if every good explanation compresses the original observations at least one bit further (otherwise they would not be good), there must be a point where the result is as short as it could possibly be. At this point, the series of good explanations would have to end (although I believe that it is undecidable to know when the end is reached).
It is also always possible for something that has a good explanation to actually be a brute fact, like the idea that the Earth was created with the appearance of old age: the good explanation would be that it aged, but the truth would be that it didn't.
I don’t think the length of the explanation is very relevant, and finding shorter explanations doesn’t seem like a primary concern. Explanations should be judged on what problems they solve and how well they stand up to criticism and competing explanations. And since I don’t think any explanation can be “final” or “100% true” or “guaranteed” or anything like that, the notion of a shortest possible explanation doesn’t even make much sense.
This all-states model has a lot of impact in relevance to claims like "belief systems generally have a knob you can turn to point at (and accommodate) any desired outcome/belief".
It seems like a good idea to move away from such a reality model in that case. Ideally to replace it with either several good plugins or a new metamodel which can encompass its strengths and weaknesses.
I.e. reality can be a helpful term to describe "I found a new and helpful perspective for looking at a thing." That's a big strength and one commonly seen as people migrate between beliefs.
Ever since I read this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/505/ I've suspected something like this - once you abstract a simulation of the universe this far, if you can accept that a person inside this simulation would not be able to tell that they were in a simulation, then it kind of raises the question of whether actually performing the simulation is necessary. I can't see why it would be. If that's the case, then it follows that "reality" is merely an expression of one possible consistent set of rules. Which solves a lot of mysteries, I think.
I'm mostly down with the Mathematical Universe and might have independently reached that conclusion. I like to use the example of the Mandelbrot set - did that set/image/fractal exist prior to someone writing a program to create a map of it? I would argue that it did. So a mathematical object exists independently from our ever "discovering" it or its definition. That point of view quickly leads to "All things that have a mathematical definition exist in that same sense" which leads to "If there is a mathematical definition of our universe, that is sufficient cause for it to exist".
I do object to the talk of computability. Not all mathematically well-defined things are computable. I also don't like the following from the article:
>> Are we to take as serious the idea that we live inside an equation? And this equation somehow produces all computations by virtue of its solutions? And that the whole physical universe is just some kind of shared hallucination?
A mathematical definition is not limited to "an equation". What does he even mean by "produces all computations"? And then "shared hallucination" also seem nonsensical - we experience things however the definition allows/causes.
The only thing I grapple with is why we perceive the passage of time. If there is a mathematical definition of the entire span of the universe and time, that doesn't satisfy me in understanding why "I" am experiencing "now". Some might argue that a "simulation" is "running" but like the Mandelbrot set, the entire thing is defined at once by the definition, and any need to "run" it pushes the whole problem down one level (like where did god exist before he made the universe?) it's turtles all the way down. So while defining the universe over time might involve a definition that looks like a simulation, that still doesn't explain why we experience the simulation at a single point in time.
I had a mushroom trip that made this all make sense (at the time). The gist of it was, there was never nothing. Nothing is a made up concept. It's deeply valuable, but there is no instance of any kind of nothing that actually exists. There is only "exists". The most basic form of existence is change. Even if there had been nothing, and something came from it, in order for something to come from it, there would first need to have been some change. So regardless of how it could have started, change has to be the first thing. But in my opinion, recursive cycles is a more likely explanation than a linear universe with a start and end that are both in 'nothing'.
I'm posting this nonsense tongue in cheek but.. I don't think it's completely wrong.
My favorite cyclic theory so far is probably Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology. In essence the universe keeps expanding exponentially which in the end becomes equivalent to a new big bang since the universe at that point will loose all notions of scale due to their being no more particles to drive scale. A much better explanation is given here https://youtu.be/FVDJJVoTx7s
once upone a time I asked myself what the heck do we mean by 'nothing' when asking "why is there something rather than nothing?"?
from wondering that, I concluded the same thing you did. that nothing is a made up concept; and I agree, it's super useful and it's ideal instead of real.
later on, I started to ponder what the heck does 'everything' really mean, and for now I think that 'everything' is just as made up as 'nothing'. hence, 'everything' doesn't exist in the same way 'something' (anything) exist. it's also just a very valuable made up concept.
there is no instance of everything, it's also an assumption.
I think it's kind of silly to expect that a satisfactory answer to that question exists. Given that there is an infinite number of possible ways the universe could have been ("nothing" being just one of these possibilities), pretty much all of these possibilities are vanishingly improbable, including whichever one them eventually obtains. So I think that "it is what it is", or "it is arbitrary" is a perfectly reasonable answer to why our universe exists. To put it a different way, I don't see why existence couldn't be necessarily arbitrary, or what is repugnant about that notion.
I only skimmed the article, but from what I can see they advocate the mathematical universe theory. To me, that's just a metaphysical choice that does not really add any useful information: it is arbitrarily solving the issue by making every consistent universe exist with probability 1, which strikes me as little more than a parlor trick. If there are 100 balls in a box, I draw one, and it has the number 23 on it, I don't think "there are 100 parallel universes, one where I draw ball one, one where I draw ball two, and so on" is a more compelling explanation than "there is one universe and I happened to draw ball 23". I would still want to know why I am in universe 23. Maybe (probably) there is no answer, except that it is what it is.
I don't think that "existence" is an actual property of $whatever, an actual property in the sense that it could be either way (either exists or not) without logical contradiction. Because if that were the case, both a reality where $whatever exists or where it does not exist would be conceivable, or in other words, whether $whatever exists or does not exists would be arbitrary, without explanation of why it is one way and not the other. Because, if there would be an explanation why it is one way and not the other, then effectively it would be a necessary consequence and not a freely choosable property. So, if on the other hand it is arbitrary, then that means that effectively there cannot be an explanation. Another way to put this is that anything "existing" must either mean it is an (necessarily arbitrarry, in the sense of freely chosen) axiom, or that is a mere implication.
Now comes the subjective part: Necessarily arbitrary axioms are highly unattractive, because they cannot ever be explained, by definition. If we accept such a thing, then implicitly everything is arbitrary (within the realm of what is logically consistent) due to the arbitraryness of the axioms from which everything derives, and thus there cannot be an explanation of the specific "existing" reality. Therefore, by Occam's razor, it makes much more sense to me to not assume that reality is based on such inherent arbitraryness, and rather assume (which is really the absence of an assumption) that everything that is logically consistent "exists". However, labelling it as "existing" is meaningless, because in that view that is just a synonym for "logically consistent". So, that's why I don't think that "existing" is a property different from "logically consistent".
> I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default instance of nothing:
> Physics: No energy: the vacuum
And not being aware of the difference can lead one to dumbly misunderstand the question with confidence (e.g. some physicist explaining how the universe could have arisen out of "nothing," when they're really explaining how it could have arisen out of a vacuum, which metaphysically is definitely a something).
> Can you, metaphysically, define nothing? I ask because I wager you can't,
Are you saying that you can't define "absence"?
But asking me is silly and pointless: I'm no philosopher. And even if philosophers have trouble, that doesn't mean there's no merit to the concept: it just means its difficult.
> and I am highly suspect that metaphysics has philosophical value.
I'm pretty sure you meant the exact opposite of what you actually said, and I strongly suspect you're wrong.
There is a known old argument in St. Anslem, Leibnitz and Gödel for that in a pantheistic picture. Gödel adopted higher order modal logic, and factors the question via the axiom 'if possible then actual' (god/reality existence). I'm now pleased to discover that in 2017 someone has went through the pains of porting the thing to a proof verifier, Isabelle/HOL (they start from Melvin Fitting reconstruction of the idea in 1999).
If you like questions like this, you'll probably enjoy the Closer to Truth series. All of its episodes since 1999 are on YouTube.
With regards to "why something rather than nothing", here's an article on the "levels of nothing". Even if there were to be no universe, no laws, etc ... could mathematics still exist?
As a philosopher, I recommend that anyone read up on ontological anti-realism before they get too invested in the answer to questions like these.
Carnap and Quine (to say nothing of Kant) wrote extensively about the problems that arise when treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate.
There are strong reasons to adopt ontological anti-realism. I'm amused when folks muse extensively in the ontological mode without addressing the elephant in the room—most of it is likely nonsense.
I see how your response makes sense in terms of questions like "why does an electron exist", but what about the general notion of existence? It seems self-evident that there is something, even just experience. I interpreted the question as more "why something rather than nothing" which seems coherent.
I don't really follow. I interpret "there is" and "something" as quantifications, not predicates. What would be the predicate here?
The general notion of existence, at least in natural language, seems to be a shorthand for quantification or negation. I'm not sure what it would mean for "existence" to exist, short of adopting Platonism or some bizarre metaphysical system.
The "something rather than nothing" question, if stated coherently, would likely be beyond the scope of human knowledge. Although ultimately I don't think it can be stated in a way that makes sense.
Experience exists. Whether the contents of the experience are "real" or "not real", it is not coherent to claim that there is truly nothing at all -- what could even cause one to come to that conclusion if there's nothing at all? Platonism is one of the few (only?) games in town in terms of potential ability to furnish answers here (a Popperian scientific method has well-defined boundaries on the scope of explanatory power) -- and the more indications we get that physics can be derived from number theory and combinatorics, the more seriously I think it will be taken as a research topic. A more formally developed Platonism would also potentially be able to address the "something rather than nothing" question.
Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
Well, I can't engage "Experience exists" because I don't treat "exists" as a predicate, as I stated earlier. What you seem to be asserting as straightforwardly true looks to me more like a malformed sentence. Yes, words and concepts arise in our language and are metaphysically constrained by reality. However, it seems to be quite a departure from this milquetoast linguistic fact to assume that natural language would, could, or even should map to the structure of reality—especially with respect to heavyweight "existence" claims—in any meaningful way.
I adopt ontological anti-realism and do not stray into "existence" claims because they simply raise too many methodological issues. The quotes here are important because I don't have an intuitive understanding of what people mean when they say "exists" in the first place.
You could rephrase "Experience exists" as "Humans experience" or "I experience," which is analogous to Cogito in Cogito, ergo sum but without the ergo sum. There's a subject and a predicate already, and "exists" adds nothing.
If you want to make substantive claims about what does or doesn't exist, your views are subject to relatively straightforward reductio ad absurdums. This is demonstrated pretty clearly in On What There Is.
> Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
"Something" = quantifier, "nothing" = quantifier, existential "is" = quantifier. Again, I would insist on a predicate here.
"Metaphysical realism is the thesis that the objects, properties and relations the world contains, collectively: the structure of the world [Sider 2011], exists independently of our thoughts about it or our perceptions of it."
This is _necessarily_ true, to believe otherwise is to make an absurdist claim that humans are somehow special. It's "the earth is the center of the universe" all over again.
Of course, you could always take the truly absurd way out, and claim that _you_ are what is special, and everything else is mere simulacrum for you by you. By all means, admit to this.
Carnap and Quine both argue that treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate leads to a number of problems. In particular, they argue that it is not possible to know what exists independently of our own perceptions and experiences. This means that any claims about the existence of things beyond our own experience are necessarily speculative and cannot be known for certain.
On the similar theme of "things we don't have answers to yet":
When I was five years old I asked my dad what was beyond the "edge" of the Universe. He said "There is no edge, it goes on infinitely forever. Even if there was an edge, there would have to be something beyond that, even if it was a vacuum right?".
I literally cried myself to sleep trying to visualize this.
Cool to see someone articulate this specific point. My dad has some grad schooling in astrophysics so we used to chat about this kind of stuff when I was young (still now but less so).
I’d always ask “if the universe is expanding what is it expanding _in to_” and he’d kind of always change the subject to black holes or something.
Thinking back on that it’s amazing how easy it is to “question” or “push/poke” the boundaries of known (or even knowable) knowledge. But alas guess it just furthers the point of how all people ponder these things.
In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from
nothing - what’s to stop it?
I wonder if the first part of the statement is true actually. What if the laws of interaction between space, energy and matter were poured in along with the space, energy and matter itself?
In response to Leibniz's ontological query "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Morgenbesser answered "If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!" — Sidney Morgenbesser
Our minds can only interpret the universe through a binary model, but that doesn't mean that the universe conforms to our binary interpretation of it.
"Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no dualistic nature.
My problem with this attitude is what even are you talking about? Suppose we "abandon our rational mind" for a moment and sojourn into the irrational. How the heck are we supposed to take anything back from that experience and into the world of discourse? Presumably there is much more bullshit in the endless tracks of irrationality than truth and whatever mechanism by which we choose to carry ideas back clearly can't distinguish the two as it has abandoned anything like epistemology. So what is the point of even talking about it?
First, assuming that the universe is an absolute system doesn't mean we can't build models to interpret its nature through binary interpretations.
In the same way that a map is not the territory, a mental model for the universe isn't the universe.
So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong question, and we should reframe what we understand as absolute or relative.
You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the universe and the debates about its origins are often based on ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific truisms.
The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.
I still don't really get it. Not all ideas which disagree with or go beyond the current best scientific models of the universe are considered non-scientific or esoteric (if this were the case scientific progress would be impossible).
How about this: state explicitly what strategies beyond empiricism, model building, ontology refinement, and epistemological reasoning you think can provide genuine verifiable insight about the world?
I'm not stating that any of those strategies are the wrong approach to interpreting the world.
I'm saying that when those strategies are applied axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we know about the world because there's a general feeling that doing so will undo all scientific progress.
Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory of everything may emerge from a completely different interpretation of the world. One that is rationally contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell us.
And this brings me back to my original argument, which is that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.
there is much wrong with this post, I'm embarrassed to respond to it. Our minds don't interpret the world through a binary model. Abandoning your rational mind means what exactly?
Look at the rest of the debate below the original answer, and maybe you will get an idea of what I meant.
My choice of words shouldn’t be the basis for attacking my points, especially since there’s more context in this very same thread that expands on my ideas.
Maybe instead of coming against me with an incendiary comment, make an effort to gain more insight into my views and add some value to the discussion. Again, my choice of words might be the wrong articulation of my ideas, but you just need to ask politely, and I will gladly expand and try to find better words.
Don’t sweat it. Thanks for the reply. And if it helps at all I agree that “binary” was the wrong word. I couldn’t come up with anything else that articulated what I was thinking.
What I meant is that us humans have this tendency to describe the world through dualistic models: good and bad, light and dark, mind and body, reason and emotion, nurture and nature, etc.
Inarguably this model has helped us to rationalize a lot of insights about the universe. However there are probabably a lot of ideas about our universe that can only be described through a dialectic model.
In fact, it was this type of thinking what allowed Einstein to image the paradox that gave birth to the general theory of relativity.
Before asking why, can we even prove that anything does exist?
Three famous quotes that many people agree with: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" "I think therefore I exist" "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
We can interpret the first saying that it is questionable if something exists if it isn't perceived. It ties reality to perception. The second quote insists that a person exists because he is thinking, because he is exhibiting conscious activity. How can we interpret the last one. What does it mean that something "doesn't go away". I take it to mean that it keeps affecting you and impacting your life.
I think it's pretty interesting that it all seems to tie into the experience of a conscious entity. Maybe it's a self-centered view of the world, or maybe these two concepts really are intrinsically linked.
I have a better question: Why does everything move, forever? Newton's first law is bewildering when you stop to think about it.
From the smallest subatomic particle on up, matter and energy are always moving, both through the universe, as well as within matter itself. Gluons are constantly bopping back and forth among the quarks that make up nucleons, electrons zip around from atom to atom, photons fly off on infinite voyages. The Voyager space probes will never stop unless something stops it.
Why? Seems like a fundamental question. Imagine if we discovered the Ultimate Frame Of Reference and were able to lock an atom in 3D space, completely removing its momentum? The first discovery might blow a hole in the side of a mountain as a single stopped atom suddenly gets hit by the Earth at whatever insane speed it's moving through the universe. It'd be the ultimate kinetic energy weapon.
To me, the issue and flaw with this argument, as with most computation-based theories about existence and consciousness, is that we like to conceive of computation in purely abstract terms. But it's been known since the 1940s that the concept of computation is founded on information theory, which is simply a restatement of parts of the laws of thermodynamics, which are derived from classical physics and applicable only in the macro world.
But we know that the universe is not classical in nature. So it seems to me that trying to use a classical-only approximation to do all the backfilling to a theory of the nature of existence must necessarily come up short. It feels "like butter scraped over too much bread."
Information theory also establishes that any information state must correspond directly to a physical state, so it seems to me most likely that all our concepts of mathematics are not communions with the mind of God, but projections of some aspect of the physical functioning of our brains. And since our brains are products of a non-classical universe, the classical nature of our concepts of computation represents some sort of essential reduction of complexity; just like our brains reduce the complexity of our sensory inputs to produce a model of the world sensible enough for us to act on. Trying to employ that reduced-complexity model to account for the nature of existence itself is necessarily forced and futile in my view, like trying to explain the nature of a reflection in a mirror as an alternate dimension.
It reminds me of how Frank Tipler pointed out that Nietzsche's theories of physics and his concept of eternal return were in fact formally correct, or would be if the universe were classical in nature. But the universe is non-classical, and thus there were surprises in 20th century calculations of the nature and destiny of the universe.
Until there are full non-classical theories of physics and of computation, I think we as well will need to expect surprises in conceptions of how existence came about.
I suppose this kind of thing is fun to think about, but this kind of claim, which appears to be the main one, is metaphysical, not scientific, in that it appears to make no testable predictions, as far as I can see:
> "Mathematical truth implies the existence of all computations. The existence of all computations implies the existence of all observers. The existence of all observers leads to a quantum mechanical reality populated with all possibilities and ruled by simple laws."
Extra points to the author for including a link to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). For convenience:
This question always breaks my brain. It's the ultimate question. I physically jerk back after thinking about it. The initial conditions of this universe are perfect. Maybe there are others that weren't.
I didn't spend the hours reading the entire article, but after 10-15min I realized that the author has adopted a "caused" vs. "uncaused" taxonomy, without really defining what "caused" means.
Does causality exist or is it simply an observational phenomenon that is a side effect of our limited perception of space-time? Kind of like "centrifugal force" is an observational phenomenon.
Maybe there is no such thing as causality, and we can never know "why stuff exists" because we are incapable of perceiving the answer.
I like the question 'Does "cause" exist?' because it exposes the fact that basic terms haven't been defined and axioms haven't been made clear.
This kind of discussion can (and definitely has, in my opinion) devolved into meaningless rambling as a result of vague or missing definitions. I didn't read the whole article either, obviously (way too long), so I may have missed the author defining things.
Even the question "Why does anything exist?" is never really broken down and defined. What kind of answers are we looking for?
When dealing with philosophical stuff it's crucial to define terms very carefully. If you can't make clear definitions, you're in the realm of nonsense.
There is no single answer to this question as it is a matter of philosophical and religious debate. Some schools of thought, such as Buddhism, accept the existence of cause and effect, while others, such as some forms of skepticism, deny or question its existence.
> Because necessity requires logical laws; logical laws imply incontrovertible truth; such truth includes mathematical truth; mathematical truth defines numbers; numbers possess number relations; number relations imply equations; equations define computable relations; computable relations define all computations; all computations include algorithmically generated observers; and these observers experience apparent physical realities.
Often modern rational people are not aware they've surrendered their experience of meaning to the theory of evolution, where in the old days it was surrendered to religion.
Often you hear modern skeptics speak like, we do things to preserve the self, or to preserve the "race".
Theories of evolving are not the same as truths of meaning.
Even though in many senses religion was more restrictive, in the search for meaning it might have given more useful answers.
They are true because they work, the times they don't we keep adjusting it.
However they both don't explain all of reality, especially not human meaning seeking, so what I'm saying is we shouldnt be trying to solve the problem of meaning with a model for explaining a biological phenomenon.
Cool to see this. I'm interested in orthogonal models that provide different types of leverage in the same broad arena of thought. Replacements for "exist", "real", even "dream," "simulation," etc.
IOW words or phrases that skip the rather prominent liabilities of those same (tired?) words/models but also work well at such a global scope and scaffold nicely.
Is there a clear distinction in English between "why" and "what for" ? In french it's literally the same words ("pourquoi" vs "pour quoi")
My 5yo daughter asked me "why do we exist". I answered the why as in some events that happened that led to our existence, but finding a reason is a bit tougher :)
Not a completely clear one, but "what for" is more precise than "why", which can be asking "for what purpose" or "due to what cause".
"Why are you in my room" is obviously asking the former, "why are the cookies burnt" fairly obviously the latter (unless you really did deliberately burn them to achieve some particular further goal...).
I happen to believe it is because God willed the universe into existence. There are more esoteric explanations, something about him being lonely, but we're not supposed to even start worrying about them until the age of 40.
What interests me is that if there is only the point, there's no external system for reference. So the point has no coordinates, no observable properties... right?
To observe something, you need another reference frame.
Without an external reference frame, there's no extrinsic information about the point, and if the point is dimensionless, then there is no intrinsic information, either.
What you are left with, is the notion of a point, with no way to describe or observe it.
I had a shower thought the other day: clearly conservation of energy is just a guideline and not a fundamental law. Otherwise, how could anything exist?
Or, a prior universe collapsing in a "big crunch" and then re-exploding back into existence. Or two objects colliding. But those theories just push the moment of creation back farther in time and the question is still relevant where those objects came from.
A former physics professor of mine said that energy was not in fact conserved in the Universe because the expansion of the Universe consumed the energy. The total available mass-energy in the Universe is decreasing over time.
even funnier: If there are non zero odds for something to arise out of nothing the amount of nothing has disturbing consequences. It must happen infinity often, it always did and will continue forever.
Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
It's like asking what is P(A|A).
The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
[1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2]
[2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something". I.e. is "nothing" something?
It is still possible that nothing exists. For example, if physics rules are an algebra where you start with nothingness, and nothingness is then combined with nothingness in various ways. Then, from the inside it appears as if things exist, but from the outside it seems that nothing exists. Somewhat similar to a computer game which may look like an entire world from the inside, but you see only a bunch of computer chips from the outside.
Anything exists because of survivor bias? That's backwards logic / you've missed/evaded the question.
It's not like asking P(A|A), it's not even asking why P(A) > P(N). It's asking why P(A) > 0, which it evidently is.
Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.
> Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.
This reminds me of the classic joke that all probabilities are 50/50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't.
I see what you mean. But with biology, every organism has a different biology. I can take a plant or an animal and study its biology as an external and impartial observer.
With respect to the question of the existence of everything, I can't take the Universe or a Universe and study its properties as an external and impartial observer.
If I was the only organism in the Universe, I could still try to study my body and reach limited conclusions, like we do with physics, but I couldn't go further without dissecting myself or injecting myself with potentially hazardous substances, which would kill me. And I certainly would never be able to answer the question of where I came from if I didn't know about the concept of gender, sex, and reproduction, which I couldn't know about if I was the only organism to have ever existed from my point of view.
Is this really a dismissal? You say "it is like asking what is P(A|A)" but that is just another notation for the logical proposition A.
Saying something is like someone asking questions about logical propositions generally isn't considered bad form: logic actually has more to recommend it than probability theory - logic is when probability theory suggests certainty and probability theory is what you get due to logic applied to hidden information. Logic is therefore always more certain and stable than probabilistic claims: it is what you have when certainty exists.
I don't find the statement which translates to it being like reasoning perfectly to be particularly strong as a dismissal. It doesn't even seem to merit the rank of disagreement - the article does go into discussion of logical propositions and has it very near the fundamentals. So saying it is like it is effectively just a repetition of what the article states, but using different words.
You appear to me to be stating premises within the text and implying that the existence of logical reasoning means you disagree, but that doesn't quite make sense to me. To dismiss the argument would require that you first disagree with it at least once, which you haven't done, and probably ought to have a stronger foundation that the rejection of logical relationships. After all, if you reject those, then you've also rejected probability theory - with it your reject observation, which is related to both logic and probability via sampling. The rejection on the basis of being like logic has corollaries of claiming to be both blind and incapable of coherent reasoning. This isn't a very strong basis for dismissal.
I don't get what point you're trying to get across with this comment. The question at hand is essentially one of causality, but you seem to be avoiding it? Addressing your points one by one:
>Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
Survivor bias leading to the question is not the reason anything exists, in the same way you being alive to ask this question is not the reason you're alive. In both cases existence is simply a pre-requisite to asking the question, but it does not answer it.
>It's like asking what is P(A|A).
No, that is misinterpretation of the question. The question is not "What is the probability that anything exists, given that anything exists?", it's asking "Why does anything exist?", as per the title.
>The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
Haven't given much thought to this, and at face value, yes, you're right. But "seriously" is ambiguous and there are some interesting questions here regarding the possibility of an evil demon like entity, or, more interestingly, GPT-3 posing this question.
Isn't it the opposite of what you suggest? If there was nothing, there would be nothing to investigate; but now that we now the universe exists, it does make sense to ask why is that something exists rather than nothing.
I don't think so. There has to be a plausible survivor for survivorship bias. Living forever is advantageous to being a member of a survival cohort, and yet survivorship bias hasn't discovered any immortal people. Is there a plausible reason for things to exist that would explain why existence survived as an outcome?
Stephen Hawking famously confused gravity for "nothing" when he said “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."
He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is going to be a winner.
In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four sides. In contrast, not every square you encounter will be blue or tiny. Those are contingent properties of a square. A square may be blue, or it may not be. A square may be tiny, or it may not be.
Now, would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or contingent? If its existence is necessary, it would mean that there is no possible way for our universe not to exist. If its existence is contingent, then our universe either could exist, or it could not.
I happen to think it's contingent. But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary. Regardless of whether you view that necessary thing as God or something else, if you agree that the universe is contingent, then the contingency doesn't stop at its creation; its continued existence is also contingent.
So, beyond needing a "first cause" to explain its existence (as with a picture on a painted canvas), our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).