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Comment by mmazing | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, it's hard to get past the first section.

The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all.

The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it?

Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?

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It's not likely that the author of the article on nothingness in the most important academic encyclopedia of philosophy is missing the point of the 'something rather than nothing' question.

That's a fallacious argument, you're just appealing to authority.

One needs to trade off whatever risk there is of fallacious reasoning based on authority with the epistemic dangers of not having the appropriate awareness of, and respect for expertise.

It may be useful to do this, but it is not necessary.

Two downfalls of this approach that I see:

1. It increases the likelihood of believing things to be true, that are not actually known to be true

2. Since these things are not known to be true, it can increase societal polarization, because some others are able to see and elaborate that it is actually not known, and this can lead to "warring" tribes, who seem to often let isolated disagreements bleed into their behavior on unrelated matters, such as how they perceive others, or how they vote at the ballot box.

A lot of people seem concerned about the results of #2, but very few people seem to be interested (to put it nicely) in the underlying cause(s).

Conclusions like "It is not conclusively known one way or the other...but all things considered, <x> seems like the most reasonable estimate until we receive more data" are not only possible, but superior, in my opinion.

Throw everything else away.

There are two possibilities -

1. There is something, and it has always existed. 2. There is something, and it once did not exist.

Either one is weird.

The author doesn't address this, and I feel, despite their sparkling credentials, that they should have.

It's actually just 1., because 2. just rerolls the question, what caused that something to begin existing?

but why should it be a matter of causing something to begin exising? maybe it's also about not preventing anything from existing?

Because it violates the principal of causality ( it also violates common sense, ex nihilo nihil fit).

Perhaps you'd be interested in the entry on the philosophy of cosmology, section 3 in particular: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology/#OrigUniv

> The author TOTALLY misses the point [...]

OTOH, you're failing to comprehend what the key word - nothing - means :-) Look here:

> how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?

See, you're imagining two points in time. Some stuff exists in the second moment, but not the first. However, since you're saying "one point" and "now" you are assuming that time exists in both instants. But if time exists then this is already something and not nothing. The true nothing excludes time, space and all the junk in it. Nothing is really just

I've always thought of space-time as a convenience for modern thought about how the world works.

We can think about the fact that while we look at a distant galaxy 2 million light years away, that galaxy is in fact at this current moment, doing its own thing and we won't know about it until that light arrives here.

Since we can't observe that galaxy's current state until another 2 million years, it's not very useful to think about it in those terms.

Similarly, we can imagine a time when there was absolutely nothing. It doesn't make sense, but we can imagine it.

We can then imagine what it would take to go from that state into a state where there is matter and other laws of physics and wonder how we went from one state to another.

Then you might suppose that there was never a state of nothingness, and then you might wonder how that could be.

I feel that the author fails to address these basic points of the question "why is there something rather than nothing", so it's hard to move on from that, personally.

Considering the first section compresses 1600 years of thoughts it would be surprising if it weren't difficult to digest.

Is nothing really qualitatively different from something? Some greeks held that numbering started at 2, because 1 of something is not a "number of things". It took much longer after 1 was generally accepted as a whole number for 0 to be. These days we often look askance at formal systems which don't have an identity.

(going further back, many old languages have a plural that applies to 3 or more, because 2 of something gets the dual, with its own marking)

A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9urEFoaI1iY

Great book :D sitting in my bathroom right now as I re-read it!

This is what Krauss is often mocked for, because he sneakily redefines "nothing" to include quantum fields, which is not nothing. Even the first comment under the YT video you posted puts it quite well: "Literally " nothing " by definition, should be one devoid of " quantum fields ". And, the question should be where did " quantum fields " come from?"

Which is answered in the video - which is we don't know.

What we know is that there is no "nothing" as we understand or define it.

At the end of the video he says "We can't prove that we came from nothing, But it's plausible." from our limited understanding of whats going on in empty space. I don't know why you think "Krauss is often mocked for" this - because this is not unique to Krauss personal interpretation but there is scientific consensus within the community.

We can't tell where quantum fields came from the same way we can't tell for sure what happened before the big bang - other than the fact that we know it happened.

First there was zero.

Then there was 1 and -1, and within each was an entire universe. But the sum total of both of these universes was not more or less than that which came before.

And then the universes of 1 and -1 combined their power and reformed, as zero.

It's like the monthly accounts, all the T diagrams must end up balancing each other out or you've missed something. Accountants are black holes, bringing the universe back into the perfect balance of eventual, and inevitable, nothingness.

But then what caused the 0 to become a 1 and a -1? And where did the larger system that allows such an action to happen come from?

Maybe the nature of actual nothingness is to split into various somethings. It may be inherent; axiomatic.

The most fundamental rule: There can not be nothing, but all the things that are not nothing cannot add up to more than nothing.

but 1 and -1 are integers, they contain nothing. the interval between any pair of different integers on the other hand...

> Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?

That's easy. "All of this" came from what came before it, and all of that came from what before it, and so on, and so on. Your first question, "If there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?" is far more vexing.

It's actually the same question in a sense, because of the principal of causation and the impossibility of infinite regress, one naturally ponders about the first cause. Before the steady state theory was proved wrong, some would just say that there was no first cause and that the universe had no beginning and no end, but science knows that to be false now.

but science knows that to be false now.

That's absolutely not true. Science is not certain at all about the origins of the universe. We don't understand the big bang, we don't understand how time and space can seemingly spring from nothing, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a physicist who would claim to know very much at all about the big bang.

>>but science knows that to be false now.

>That's absolutely not true.

It absolutely is true, I was specifically talking about the steady state theory: "While the steady-state model enjoyed some minority support in the scientific mainstream until the mid-20th century, it is now rejected by the vast majority of cosmologists, astrophysicists and astronomers, as the observational evidence points to a hot Big Bang cosmology with a finite age of the universe, which the steady-state model does not predict" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model

It was renamed Dark Energy. (j/k)

And the observational evidence is interpreted as pointing to a Big Bang. There are other interpretations which don't require a finite age or an initial singularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

"It receded from serious consideration in the early 1980s after inflation theory emerged as a solution to the horizon problem, which had arisen from advances in observations revealing the large-scale structure of the universe. In the early 2000s, inflation was found by some theorists to be problematic and unfalsifiable in that its various parameters could be adjusted to fit any observations..."

Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Before the steady state theory was proved wrong, some would just say that there was no first cause and that the universe had no beginning and no end, but science knows that to be false now.

it's the steady state model that science knows not to be true, but not the fact that the universe has no beginning and no end, and not the fact that there was no first cause. Science doesn't know anything of the sort.

Time and space originate from singularity, but singularity doesn't really have time and space, maybe only trivial ones, but trivial space isn't much different from none.

I think it's also worthwhile to wonder how can we even ask such a question...

how can you even imagine that there's nothing? what are you really imagining when you think of "nothing"?

clearly anything which you imagine is something being imagined by you, how is that "nothingness"?

Well, clearly mind would need a nontrivial idea about nothingness. But you seemingly don't see a difference between nothingness and an idea of nothingness?

You imply you can differentiate between nothing and singularity. But how?

On the other hand nothingness itself can be a cause. Is it different from any other cause?

The assumption that perpetual nothingness is the expected state of thing seems wrong, there is no evidence of such thing, everything we know about is never truly created, every process we know is a transformation, from "creating" computers to "creating" children, therefore what we are really asking is what were the first transformations if we could look into the past.

No evidence? Says an entity from within the universe bound by its laws. The question transcends those limits. You talk about transformations, how is there even a law that defines what a transformation is. How does a law come into being, how does it enforce or is enforced, how do X laws work together in harmony, why do laws remain constant...

Who said there must be a law determining what a transformation is? It's an abstract concept helpful for dialogue.

Transformation in the mathematical/physical sense. Every entity in the observable universe that interacts and potentially transforms in consequence,does so according to laws, which I was referring to.

This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The only nothingness here is your understanding.

This is hackernews not reddit, contribute something of value instead of resorting to ad hominems and appeal to authority fallacies.

Why shouldn't there be something when once there was nothing?

Because our everyday experience and intuition dictates it?

Our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to the quantum world. Hell, our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to our macro world and to our human everyday affairs.

Why should I concern myself with an open question first asked thousands of years ago?

It is just a grim reminder about thought and knowledge and its limitations, our abstract thoughts helped us become the most successful species of our planets, but being too caught and too serious about our logic and thought is just so silly.

I mean, I get it, it is just an itch that we love to scratch because the thknking itch sensation helped us so much before, but there are just itches we cannot scratch away, by scratching we just make the itching worse.

So, I think I should just enjoy life, embrace and trust my functional humanity.

If some great insight comes from science, great, but I highly doutb it would ever come, and even if it did, how would that change human condition?

Perhaps some great computer in the future will be able to "answer", but I think the answer will most likely be so unspeakable and not a coherent answer, sort of like Alpha Go's way of playing GO, probably cannot be summed in a coherent GO strategy book.

Exactly, there is a good chance we don't have (and never will have) the neural power or processing power needed to figure out how things "started" because our frame of reference of how things should work ("things must have come from somewhere!") is very likely insufficient.

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