WHY does anything exist?

There is also the possibility that only the things you are aware of actually exist, that some subconscious force creates and destroys extra bits so that you will believe you are not alone. Given this, you would probably never be able to prove otherwise, and when you die everything will just wink out of existence. You are feeling well, aren't you?

 

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exactly. whether it exists or is a dream does not change the fact. red is blue, i don't have a problem with that. someone tell me why this is an important question unless you are trying to prove God or something like this.

 

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Wut? Elaborate?

 

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Because it does and you can only ask why in those places it not only does, but does so in a way to support the asking of such questions.

Luckily it doesn't require any gods or we'd really be in trouble.

 

Interesting. I have had this experience. I am not saying it is the way things are. In fact I tend not to. But sometimes it has felt this way. In fact sometimes it almost seems like the set guys, you know the gaffers and key grips, etc., have just managed to get out of the room when I walk in.

 

Because of God of course.

 

Because we think they exist... or something...

 

The God Particle is the reason anything exists. Now one may ask, why does the God particle exist? The LHC may help provide some further insite on why and how we exist...including the Higgs Bosson which is the God Particle.

 

Pew pew! :xctd:

 

Anything exists becasue there is no nothing.

 

This is a good question which has a good answer. I don't know the answer myself, but I do know a math trick. What do you get when you add every number in existence, all infinity of them, both negative and positive? Zero of course. This applies to all the energy of the universe as well. By bringing into existence everything imaginable, nothing will simultaneously exist, the corollary is also true. Yin and Yang. It's all about balancing infinity.

 

The problem with that statement of course is that it is impossible for nothing to exist. You can't contend that "nothing" is the yin to "somethings" yang because nothing isn't anything.

The biggest pitfall here is the word itself. The nature of the question asked by the original poster implies that the definition of nothing we are working with here is the absence of absolutely anything and everything. "Nothing" is not a "thing" yet we almost invariable use the word as if it does indeed describe a "thing". Within the proper context of this thread nothing is not zero, it is not an empty set, it is not a vacuum, or an unphysical state or some "place" that is devoid of everything. In fact it is not even the absence of absolutely anything and everything like I said it was. The truth is that outside of any discipline that has a working definition of "nothing" that is useful within that discipline, you can't actually use the word without error. It only describes itself yet by definition there are no attributes to describe.

The answer to the original posters question is simple, and has already been given by more than one person in this thread. Something exists because there is no other possibility. And as I've joked more than once before on these forums, there isn't a time or a place where I could ever possibly be wrong about it

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For me, maybe it's the idea that not only is each individual being contingent, but so is the sum (whether finite or infinite) of all individual beings taken together.

I agree. If a particular thing ceases to exist, everything else that exists is left. But if everything that exists ceases to exist, then there wouldn't be any void or state of emptiness left.

I think of it in terms of the contingency of being. And maybe I'm influenced a little bit in conceptualizing it by thinking about the subjective experience of death and of how my experienced world will presumably cease to exist at that time.

This doesn't seem to be about technical usages within disciplines. It's more immediate and common-sensical than that. Or alternatively, maybe it is technical, with the displine being philosophical ontology.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that.

Not only do I sense that this is a real question (and not just a positivistic-style linguistic pseudo-problem), I'm inclined to say that it's the fundamental question of ontology.

That's one of my strongest philosophical intuitions and probably kind of unshakeable, but it's perfectly fine with me if others want to disagree with it.

I've commented on this issue more fully on another more recent thread addressing the same question. See this page.

 

Why is there no other possibility?

 

According to Hawking, empty space cannot exist because of the principle of quantum indeterminacy. Empty space would be a known quantity (zero) with respect to both position and velocity.

 

Interesting. I couldn't disagree more.
I'm inclined to say that the act of describing something as 'fundamentally ontological' (to paraphrase) is question-begging.


But then again, I'm one of those 'Positivistic/linguistic' types...

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Because we are temporal observers that must perceive*
" biases" comprehended as "things"*
** *If you were a creator of things nothing existed before you created it. Before you created it," it "had no reference to time so to an observer it did not or does not exist until it is "created" giving coordinates in time and space. So nothing is just the reference point beyond time and space it is equal to one *(1=0). The transforming reference points for temporal observers I will describe as this. The up direction is towards the middle "centroid" the*backwards direction is actually the forward direction still the centroid *for this is the -1 existence defined by the valence electron.*
** So why does something exist instead of nothing? because we are not creators of time and space we cannot see the empty canvas*of infinite creative possibilities equivalent to one 1= infinity. *So then we are temporal observers perceiving things rather than creating*

" we simply cannot perceive nothing if that was so we would not be perceiving at all, we would be creating infinitely faster than the speed of light"

- atemporal mind point of view

So the simple answer is observers can only perceive " things"
with form "biases" for nothing is a thing void of all form or bias
- infinity*

 

I think you've probably misinterpreted some of my comments. The question "Why is there something instead of nothing" is in my opinion one of the most fundamental philosophical considerations of all, and one that has caused me to expend a significant amount of intellectual energy exploring. Parts of my post necessarily pointed out some linguistic traps that people often fall into as well as some varied definitions of the word "nothing" that are used in different disciplines that can also lead one seeking a more real and correct answer wildly astray.

 

It's all about the fundamental nature of nothingness, which is that it has no nature. There is no "it". So tell me, how can it be here instead of something?

The reason people have trouble accepting this is because they don't understand everything that nothing is not.

And yes, that last sentence does make sense

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You still haven't explained why, you have merely provided something like a truism.
If anything, you have provided an answer to the question "How is there no other possibility?" (namely, by there being no other possibility).


"Why" is a teleological question (and this is what the OP is asking), it is asking about the purpose of something.