Why does anything exist?
alwaysasking.com
alwaysasking.com
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).
It's only arbitrary if there aren't good reasons.
Dozens of reasons have been given in philosophy, it's up to you to decide if any of them work.
One of the big differences would be to point out that the universe is completely composite, whereas a foundation could be purely simple.
Josh Rasmussen is a great communicator about this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX79xXgi44o&ab_channel=TheUn...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Furthermore, why does a contingent thing have to depend on a necessary thing?
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.
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.
Some back and forth between Schmid (author of the paper) and Feser (whose arguments it is critiquing):
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/07/schmid-on-aristotel...
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/07/schmid-on-existenti...
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?
It would be contingent upon a necessary foundation within the universe.
So there is one specific part in the universe that is necessary, and everything else around that is contingent.
Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation.
What's the issue?
How do you know this?
At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.
> faith is orthogonal to the mind
Conflating the two is intellectually dishonest, in addition to commonplace.
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.
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 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?
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.
If you destroy every recording of Top Gun, it will cease to exist.
> The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation
Yes it does.
And Top Gun didn't exist before 1986.
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.
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.
Ditto with sqrt(2), you need to "sharpen" the triangle made from half an square forever in order to get all the decimals.
And memory is fallible. It changes over time. People will all remember the movie differently.
The memory of Top Gun != Top Gun.
I've noticed people in this thread are getting actual, physical things confused with concepts and mental representations of things.
Confusing the map for the territory.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/
> 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.
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 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.
https://sras.me/the-root-of-all-existence.html
Later I came across Max Tegmark's paper, which describes the same thing..
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
Neither. "Necessary" and "contingent" apply to properties, but existence is not a property. It's a quantifier.
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.
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.
If me, how do you mean that I am not figuring out what is happening? I have it figured out.
I agree that Hinduism has cultural value and guidance for life but I don't see how what I said is contrary to that.
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?
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.
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.
Greg Egan called this the Church of the God that Makes No Difference.
> [...]
> 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.
We are on a constant quest of meaning. Quiet tiring to be honest.
Somehow the question keeps arising in human mind, what does it all mean? (Especially if we have too much time to think)
Yet us modern folks keep trying to solve it outside of our mind in which it arises, biology, physics, whatever.
Maybe the answer is more straightforward?
The hard part is proving it one way or the other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pointless. All of it.
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.
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%).
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
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.
"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.
On that note though it definitely feels more logical and harmonious concept than ”God did it”. But I do get your point
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.
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”!!
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 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".
"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."
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...
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.
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.
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.
then again, maybe I got stuck in the trip
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".
Physics: No energy: the vacuum
Geometry: No dimensionality: a point
Set theory: No elements: the empty set
Arithmetic: No magnitude: zero
Information theory: No information: zero bits
Then they ask: "There is an unlimited number of possible theoretical systems. Does this mean there are also unlimited conceptions 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).
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.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317956529_Types_Tab...
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?
https://www.closertotruth.com/articles/levels-nothing-robert...
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.
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.
Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
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.
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.
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.
What is added by saying the laws of physics "exist"? Note that we already know they are true.
https://quotepark.com/quotes/1744434-sidney-morgenbesser-in-...
When I told this to a friend he answered, "Everywhere."
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Also, if you’re embarrassed to respond, then why did you? Please read the Hacker News guidelines if you forgot about them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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:
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.
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.
> Why does anything exist?
> 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.
I'm not convinced. Does anyone follow this?
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.
Useful in the sense of practical.
They are theoretical approximations of the truth.
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.
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.
Thanks for posting.
I wrote a bit about it (incidentally) here: https://superbowl.substack.com/i/65186479/metacognitive-trut...
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 :)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-physics-of-nothing-un...
"Why Does the World Exist? (An Existential Detective Story)
Ah yes, Phanes.
>This leaves us with a point.
That's still not nothing.
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.
But the creation of our universe definitely involved some process that dumped a shit ton of energy into a very small space about 14 billion years ago.
Similar to the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics. All possibilities exist. Both a something and a nothing.
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?
If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the question."
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.
So I am dismissing the original question.
He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is going to be a winner.
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.
This reminds me of the classic joke that all probabilities are 50/50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't.
>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.
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.