Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'm intrigued by commenter Roger's (attempted) answer of the question of whether there is something rather than nothing.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/puzzle-with-infinite-regress-...

If I understand this correctly, then "nothing" is in itself something, and you can create more structure by grouping the original "nothing" with itself, and you can similarly combine the groupings, so the entire universe is essentially built from sets with "nothing" as the leaves.

But this still leaves open a lot of questions, such as who is controlling this grouping, or do simply all possible groupings exist? Is grouping what makes time progress? And if so, can we estimate/determine how many groupings the current universe is from the leaves? And where does consciousness enter the picture?

> I'm intrigued by commenter Roger's (attempted) answer of the question of whether there is something rather than nothing.

Really? It's just playing semantic games with the definition of "nothing" and "something". It doesn't explain anything: neither why there is something instead of nothing, nor why that something is the way it is.

Thinking about Roger's comment some more, I believe the error he makes is that he treats "nothing" like the empty set {}, which can be used to form non-empty sets {{}}, {{}, {}}, {{{}}} ("something"), when really the term "nothing" denotes a concept closer to the non-existence of the empty set and the construction of sets from other sets.

From my quick reading, it sounds like he's proposing that there is no such thing as "nothing", that what we call "nothing" is in fact like an empty set. There's still something there.

I kind of see what he means - in his view, it is turtles all the way down, and the bottom turtle, what seems to us empty, is made of the same being/existence.

It takes 1-bit to store the state “nothing” vs “something” — so it’s a question of information content — whether or not it is perceivable information is what we traditionally use to delineate existence vs. non existence.

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