Why something instead of nothing?
- Thread starter Saint
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Existance is based upon preception which only happens when intelligent life live to understand it.
It's of whatever is the default condition. 'Deciding' would not be involved, since the necessary prime mover itself has no condition other than the default.
Also, 'something', as 'sum-things', could be a distribution of nothing, since there are no apparent sources for 'something' other than nothing, and it's tough to get around this conclusion, so we are bound to give it some attention. Having stuff to have been around forever has many problems, such as that eternities are just short-cut words meaning that in actuality they can never be attained, plus why the total amount and nature of the same exact stuff having been around forever, with no cause, making it sound like it is not from anything, which sounds as if it were from nothing, too. So,now, the only two options both indicate From Nothing, and so we have to consider it all the more. No true paradoxes exist, so, then, we know for sure that we are missing something, making those forced avenues those which we want to go down, regardless of their apparent strangeness.
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
That's the ultimate fundamental question of ontology, in my opinion.
It certainly doesn't seem to be a scientific question, so it must be philosophical.
('Ontology' can be defined as the philosophical investigation of being. Most fundamentally, what account can we give for the brute fact of existence existing at all?)
I don't see how they can.
A proposed answer would either have to discover some hypothetical 'external' cause-for-the-existence-of-everything outside everything, which appears to be fatally self-contradictory, or else it would have to discover an 'internal' explanation for being within being itself, which threatens to be fatally circular.
In other words, I don't think that we logically know how to address the question at this point. (My guess is that we never will.)
The familiar idea that faith in God provides an answer doesn't seem to work. Either God exists or else he doesn't. If he doesn't exist, then he isn't going to explain anything. If he does exist, then his existence would be part of 'everything-that-exists', part of the sum total of being in general. So God would just be another part of what needs to be explained.
Who is supposed to answer it? I don't know that anyone is supposed to... I don't know that anyone can, even if we can't help but ask it.Why something instead of nothing?
Is this a philosophy or science's question?
Scientists or philosophers are supposed to answer it?
Because, to the best of our knowledge *nothing* isn't real.
Both, neither, ... whatever you want it to be.
Scientists or philosophers are supposed to answer it?
Until someone finds the remotest of evidence that *nothing* is real, the question doesn't appear to be valid. Both scientists and philosophers have the capacity to look at a question and respond "that's an invalid question".
A thought that I've come across from time to time, also in my own thinking, is that everything exists because nothing can't exist. There was never any "nothing" that precedes existence, but existence is a natural consequence that nothing can't exist.
But...this doesn't sit well with us conscious beings though, cause we are the only things with inherent existence that we know of, yet it is said that we once didn't exist and that we in the future won't exist.
But...this doesn't sit well with us conscious beings though, cause we are the only things with inherent existence that we know of, yet it is said that we once didn't exist and that we in the future won't exist.
Such a Who or What would be, thus making its proposed role redundant or a mere figurehead. A general concept like existence specifies no particular manner or kind of be-ing, so that an instance of anything (or its potency) will support the the concept's validity, necessity, usefulness, etc. Of course, "just anything" that pops-up isn't going to be inventing or inferring ideas that deal with be-ing, so as to classify the presence of other things under. Much less introducing further constructs for justifying those constructs (poorly organized energy/matter isn't noted for perception and intelligence). So by the time conscious agents are around for existence to engage in storytelling (trying to describe and understand itself -- as if the abstract were concrete!), the set is already well-populated with members.
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I don't believe that absolute nothingness is a possible state of affairs. Rather, I think that the idea is simply an abstraction that's been taken too far. Just because you can keep removing apples from a bucket until you have absolutely no apples left in that bucket doesn't mean that the same principle applies to the very fabric of reality itself. Especially when you consider that it is impossible for the fundamental constituent elements of an apple to ever disappear, no matter what you do to it, or how far out of sight or mind it may be.
I never did either, until I looked into the problems of the same exact stuff/fields having been around forever, no more, no less, in their total exact amount, with specific properties, everything a done deal, of no deal ever made, in a first place that never was, as an actual eternity that is past-complete. This whole notion seems incomplete, and thus not an answer, in need of some reduction.
While it's hard to conceive of 26-dimensional string-lands, it is relatively easy to conceive of a lack of anything, as we know about things. There's nothing there, and there isn't even a 'there'.
Existence seems to need a source and a cause, yet the only candidate is nonexistence, making for a very tough spot to get out of, either way.
It is indeed a tough spot. You've highlighted some problems with the idea of some sort of eternal existence, and I admit that they are there. But personally, I just can't see a way past the "something from nothing" conundrum, which is an equally real issue.
No matter on which side of this one may tentatively sit, it seems necessary to accept that there may be certain realities that we are unable to properly comprehend which might somehow resolve things if only our understanding was more complete.
I don't know.
Not sure about that either.
Just to exist temporarily and die forever?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I think someone would need to demonstrate that I am here for a reason and have a purpose before I worry much about the specifics of exactly what that reason and purpose are.
The topic is Ancient! A fellow named Parmenides
gave around three thousand years ago
a satisfactory treatment of the problem.
He claimed that the statement:" Nothing is." is self contradictory and therefore not true!
Not much of his texts have survived only the claim but not the proof so lets try ourselves:
We begin by firmly claiming that: Nothing is!
Eh... we are saying that it indeed is so that nothing is!
Oh! Arent we saying that it IS so that it is SO that nothing is?
We are actually saying that something IS when we are saying that nothing is!
But if something is... then nothing is not...
So it is really so that we have proved that something is and nothing is not.
If we change the tense used in the proof
we can likewise prove that nothing was not
and that nothing will never be.
This is Logic as Ancient as we can trace it.
gave around three thousand years ago
a satisfactory treatment of the problem.
He claimed that the statement:" Nothing is." is self contradictory and therefore not true!
Not much of his texts have survived only the claim but not the proof so lets try ourselves:
We begin by firmly claiming that: Nothing is!
Eh... we are saying that it indeed is so that nothing is!
Oh! Arent we saying that it IS so that it is SO that nothing is?
We are actually saying that something IS when we are saying that nothing is!
But if something is... then nothing is not...
So it is really so that we have proved that something is and nothing is not.
If we change the tense used in the proof
we can likewise prove that nothing was not
and that nothing will never be.
This is Logic as Ancient as we can trace it.
So your "proof" only works if you redefine "nothing" to mean "something"? That's pretty stupid.
Besides, what if instead of claiming "Nothing is," I instead claim "The number of things that exist is zero"? Your linguistic trickery fails to work on that phrasing, unless you are ready to claim that zero is not a number...