Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

[sigurdW]

is nothing existing distinguishable from a universe in complete equilibrium?

Im just a poor logician so I don't understand how you check that a universe IS in complete equilibrium!
Is it done from the inside? Then it seems to me your presence would disturb the equilibrium.

 

[apeiron]

I can be sure because the negation of the first premise is self contradictory!

Therefore the premise is true.

In what way is "nothing was" self-contradictory? And in what way is nothing the proper negation of something?

A lot more work has to be done here than can be achieved by your quick syllogism.

As has been discussed in this thread, nothingness should more properly be paired to some notion of everythingness (if not-nothing, then everything).

And the idea of nothingness is indeed self-contradictory if it requires any sense of a definite place where things are then definitely absent (because a definite place is not "nothing").

So for these reasons, we come back to the deeper - non-contradictory - notions of the potential and the actual. We get in behind arguments that depend on the law of the excluded middle to consider instead the development of crisp somethingness out of indeterminant vagueness.

A definite nothingness is self-contradictory, I agree, because to be definite requires at least the context that allows that judgement. So it can't exist before, during or after anything.

But an indefinite nothingness seems a different matter. And it also happens to be indistinguishable from an indefinite everythingness. Which has important implications. All is still possible when nothing has yet happened.

 

[sigurdW]

In what way is "nothing was" self-contradictory? And in what way is nothing the proper negation of something?

You can't be serious!

Do you deny that Nothing and Something negate each other?

Then how do you convince anyone that there is something?

 

[apeiron]

You can't be serious!

Do you deny that Nothing and Something negate each other?

Then how do you convince anyone that there is something?

The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.

So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.

 

[sigurdW]

The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.

So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.

By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things",

So "nothing" and "something" negates each other.

I think the concepts "nothing" and "something" are basic...
Deny that they negate each other and you cannot prove there is something...

 

[sigurdW]

The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.

So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.

What do you mean:the existence of no things.

Neither do I believe there exists a largest natural number,nor do I believe there are existing no things!

 

[apeiron]

By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things",

See how you tried to slide from all to any just there.

A lack of particular things is not necessarily a general lack of things. Any does not mean every.

Some-thing talks about particular thingness. So it's rightful negation would be a lack of such particularity. And so a most generalised notion of thingness. Ie: a vagueness rather than a nothingness.

 

[Pythagorean]

Im just a poor logician so I don't understand how you check that a universe IS in complete equilibrium!
Is it done from the inside? Then it seems to me your presence would disturb the equilibrium.

If there's an organism around to ask the question, then complete equilibrium does not exist.

 

[sigurdW]

By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things"

See how you tried to slide from all to any just there.

A lack of particular things is not necessarily a general lack of things. Any does not mean every.

Some-thing talks about particular thingness. So it's rightful negation would be a lack of such particularity. And so a most generalised notion of thingness. Ie: a vagueness rather than a nothingness.

I see nothing really wrong in the definitions:

1 By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
2 By "something" we mean "ANY things"

And there's no sliding: By "something" we don't mean "ALL things"...
we mean any things selected from the set of ALL things.

You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things,
but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.

I wonder where the vocabulary you use comes from? Heidegger?

 

[apeiron]

You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things,
but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.

Have you actually read the thread yet?

Nothingness cannot be defined in terms of the empty set because the set itself is a (general) kind of something. You can remove the contents one by one, but the very making of that claim then appeals to the something that exists - the context of the set which is becoming empty.

You don't seem to realize how you are jumping between generals and particulars here. The very fact that there seem to be "uncountably many" negations of the empty set shows that your point of view lacks sufficient generality to talk about the negation or logical complement of whatever it is you mean to talk about.

 

[chiro]

I can be sure because the negation of the first premise is self contradictory!

Therefore the premise is true.

In order to define nothing, you need to define its complement with respect to 'all that is'.

So in this regard, you need to know what nothing is to define what everything is which means that nothing in whatever form it is in needs to having some kind of interpretation in order to really and truly analyze what is being described and its implications.

 

[jambaugh]

I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.

Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.

 

[Pythagorean]

I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.

Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.

welcome to the philosophy forums...

 

[Nano-Passion]

I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.

Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.

Philosophy helps to answer what physics doesn't. Kind of like how language completes mathematics. You can't do mathematics without language to put it in context. And I'm not saying philosophy aims for absolute truth either,there will always be competing schools of thoughts when there is this much complexity.

 

[chiro]

I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.

Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.

It would be handy for us to know what specific comments you are talking about.

My comment is simply saying that everything has a complement in some universal set. Using this we can say exactly what something is by comparing it to what it is not in some context which depends on the universal set.

If you can't take something and describe what it is not, then you don't have any boundaries in your definition and it won't make sense.

As a general rule in language, we need to define this boundary in whatever way we can and that means enough relativity to say what something is and what something is not.

 

[alt]

Have you actually read the thread yet?

Nothingness cannot be defined in terms of the empty set because the set itself is a (general) kind of something. You can remove the contents one by one, but the very making of that claim then appeals to the something that exists - the context of the set which is becoming empty.

You don't seem to realize how you are jumping between generals and particulars here. The very fact that there seem to be "uncountably many" negations of the empty set shows that your point of view lacks sufficient generality to talk about the negation or logical complement of whatever it is you mean to talk about.

Earlier on in post #272 you said to sigurdW

A lot more work has to be done here than can be achieved by your quick syllogism.

But a lot more work has already been done - mainly by you. 285 posts, 18 pages ..

And where are we with it ?

OTOH, I found sigurdW's recent entry to this forum refreshing, and his quick syllogism quite appropriate. He said earlier;

You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things, but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.

I found this as clear and understandable a statement as any in this thread. Yet you responded with the post in quotes above, particularly that which I've underlined, which seems to be some length of sliding on your part. General or particular things, they are still something.

 

[Luigi Acerbi]

Another big one is that reality has crisp existence (I instead argue the Peircean view that it self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis).

This sentence - and other points you made in other posts - seem to summarize a lot of my thoughts on the subject.

I've been thinking for some time that reality might be better characterized as 'what remains after you set some constraints on everything [1] and then quotient everything else away'.
I am sloppily referring to a quotient operation in set theory (i.e. equivalence classes), but I could also be thinking in terms of probability distributions over states of the world given the constraints, from a Bayesian point of view.
This probability would represent not epistemic ignorance, but ontological indifference - I suppose quite similarly to the 'vagueness' you are referring to [2].

In this picture the focus shifts from 'things' to the constraints (which are relational, by the way), and I think it is not only a metaphysical issue but something to be taken into account when building a modern physical theory (some of these ideas are present in some works, but not so mainstream I'd say).
What the constraints are and where they come from deserves another discussion.

Anyhow, I am curious about 'the Peircean view that [reality] self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis', can you provide some specific references please? I was not aware of this at all.

Notes

[1] Everything is quite hard to pinpoint formally, so to imagine it you would define a pretty large universe of something-s (e.g. a space of operators) and work inside that. (There are many issues here though.)

[2] I appreciate that probability/set theory might not be the best frameworks since they are so intrinsically centered on things, but I do not know other ones at the moment...

 

[bohm2]

Philosophy helps to answer what physics doesn't. Kind of like how language completes mathematics. You can't do mathematics without language to put it in context. And I'm not saying philosophy aims for absolute truth either,there will always be competing schools of thoughts when there is this much complexity.

I'm not sure if philosophy can really do that. I like this quote by M. Friedman on philosophy:

the philosophers of the modern tradition from Descartes are not best understood as attempting to stand outside the new science so as to show, from some mysterious point outside of sciences itself that our scientific knowledge somehow mirrors an independently existing reality. Rather, they start from the fact of modern scientific knowledge as a fixed point, as it were. Their problem is not so much to justify this knowledge from some 'higher' standpoint so as to articulate the new philosophical conceptions that are forced upon us by the new science. In Kant's words, mathematics and the science of nature stand in no need of philosophical inquiry for themselves, but for the sake of another science: metaphysics.

 

[sigurdW]

Hi ALL! (pun intended)

I am a non academic non professional Philosopher of Logic willing to adress the topic of the thread!

The short answer is: Because something must be.

Proof:
Suppose nothing is
then nothing is something
and nothing is not!

The difficulty is in understanding that the proof won't get more valid by complicating it!

All we can do is to ensure that the logic used is not inconsistent.

Perhaps this is a huge and intricate task, but I deny that reading the whole thread will help

 

[sigurdW]

I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.

Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.

Let me point out that it is y o u r opinion!

 

[sigurdW]

In order to define nothing, you need to define its complement with respect to 'all that is'.

So in this regard, you need to know what nothing is to define what everything is which means that nothing in whatever form it is in needs to having some kind of interpretation in order to really and truly analyze what is being described and its implications.

My view is that the concepts "Nothing" and "Something" are primitive.

Explication consists in the statement that they Negate each other.

To this a definition of Truth should be added together with the basic Laws of Logic

And perhaps we are done!

(BTW "Everything" seems to be what is neither nothing nor someting.)

 

[Maui]

I have some good news for you - since nothing cannot be, it follows that non-existence cannot be as well. We are all eternal!

 

[Maui]

Proof:
Suppose non-existence
then nothing is something
and nothing is not!

Corrected for you

 

[sigurdW]

I have some good news for you - since nothing cannot be, it follows that non-existence cannot be as well. We are all eternal!

I didnt think you would notice

Death IS not: You will never notice you are dead.

to exist is but another word for to be..."exists" = "is"

 

[Maui]

I didnt think you would notice

Death IS not: You will never notice you are dead.

to exist is but another word for to be..."exists" = "is"

But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.

 

[sigurdW]

But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.

Well I admit death is a subject that needs careful treatment but is this the proper place?

I gave the only answer there is on the topic question...

But your question is proper since it may point to an inconsistency in the logic used.

Otherwise the normal procedure is to try deriving a paradox,say by: This is not as it is!

But honestly I think a logic thread for such matters should be used.

Let us use "How to solve the Liar paradox" in Philosophy in General discussions in PF lounge

 

[apeiron]

I've been thinking for some time that reality might be better characterized as 'what remains after you set some constraints on everything [1] and then quotient everything else away'.

Yes, the Peircean view in general is that reality self-organises. So you start with an infinite potential - unbounded dimensionality, unlimited degrees of freedom - and then this state evolves organising laws. At first, there might be many tentative species of constraint. But eventually things shake down to whatever most general state of constraint works over all. A sum over histories approach where most constraints will in fact cancel each other other, and what remains in the end is the "least mean path" set of laws.

So it is very like a Lie group/gauge symmetry approach in modern particle physics where particles are excitations in a quantum field and the properties of particles are the result of irreducible symmetries - localised constraints that exist/persist because they can't get canceled away.

In this picture the focus shifts from 'things' to the constraints (which are relational, by the way), and I think it is not only a metaphysical issue but something to be taken into account when building a modern physical theory (some of these ideas are present in some works, but not so mainstream I'd say).
What the constraints are and where they come from deserves another discussion.

Yes, this requires a shift in thinking from reductionist metaphysics which wants to think of reality in terms of collections of objects. The whole notion of "thing" is jettisoned in favour of a relational view, a process view - the excitations in a field view.

So all this talk about some-thing, no-thing and every-thing is rather missing the point. A systems ontology sees objects as emergent regularities. And that in turn demands the interaction between global contexts and local potentials. Or in other words, between constraints and degrees of freedom.

"Things" are not fundamental! And so set theory is not a good reasoning tool here.

The analogy of whorls in a stream is useful. You can't scoop up these turbulent features in a bucket and make a enumerable collection of them. It turns out that the context of the stream was necessary to their existence.

Anyhow, I am curious about 'the Peircean view that [reality] self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis', can you provide some specific references please? I was not aware of this at all.

I did start this thread of sources on vagueness...
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514

As to Peircean scholarship, there is a ton of it. But also it can be quite daunting as it is a way of thinking that is quite unfamiliar to most unless they have studied systems science or hierarchy theory. And Peirce creates a lot of his own jargon. Plus he was half crazy - like Goedel, probably an occupational hazard.

His basic triadic system is outlined on this Wiki page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce ) -

And for a taste of his own writing, here is a commentary on the structure of his cosmological argument...

Peirce's cosmology, or "mathematical metaphysics" (CP 6.213) aims to show "how law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy" (CP 1.407). The account, outlined in the accompanying chart, unfolds as follows.

“If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in order to account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in which the whole universe was non-existent, and therefore a state of absolute nothing.. . .But this is not the nothing of negation. . . . The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.”

Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily resulted.

“ . .I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom. That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness. (CP 6.215-219)”

Thus the principle that the logic of the universe is at least as sophisticated as our own -- that it therefore includes retroduction or abduction, the spontaneous form of inference that initiates a stream of inference -- leads us to an account of the first stirrings of determination in the utter indeterminacy of Nothing. This is the first appearance of a mode of positive possibility, different from the mere absence of determination that characterizes the initial zero-state.

“I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this or that sort -- that is, of some quality. Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality. (CP 6.220)”

The potentiality of a quality, in Peirce's metaphysics, is analogous to the Platonic Form or Idea, in that it is a timeless, self-subsisting possibility that serves as the metaphysical ground of the world of actual existence.

“The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed. (CP 6.194)”

http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/

 

[Luigi Acerbi]

Thanks Apeiron for the reply - I need some time to read everything, including your other thread about Vagueness.

I skimmed through it, and some parts are serendipitously close to a post about the emergence of the laws of physics and their co-evolution with the universe (linked to Davies, Wheeler, etc.) I had half-written and I wanted to submit to this forum - at this point I am not sure I need to post it any more.

 

[apeiron]

I skimmed through it, and some parts are serendipitously close to a post about the emergence of the laws of physics and their co-evolution with the universe (linked to Davies, Wheeler, etc.) I had half-written and I wanted to submit to this forum - at this point I am not sure I need to post it any more.

Sure, post! This is a hot topic as I think Davies is adding another dimension to the debate now because he is making a strong case that holographic limits on information point to a new materialistic conception of the laws of nature.

The universe is not "computing with infinite means" and so this greatly restricts the kinds of laws it can have.

By contrast, most cosmological modelling still presumes that existence is unlimited. As with Tegmark's multiverse, the string Landscape, or the Many Worlds interpretation of QM, anything seems possible because there are no material limits to constrain what exists in "lawful" fashion.

One face of the "why anything.." question is the corollary "...when there could have been nothing." But just as much of an issue is "why just something when there could have been everything?".

The shift Davies is making is from laws as creating cause - things need to be made to happen otherwise they just wouldn't - to laws as restrictions. That is, the problem is how to limit the apparent fecundity of reality to some rational sub-set. Why instead of potential primal chaos have we ended up with a rather orderly, law-bound, universe?

Either this is just an anthropic fluke (the prevailing religion of cosmology based on the belief that reality computes with infinite means). Or it might just be that only one stable, persisting and self-consistent outcome was possible.

The second view does not necessarily rule out multiverses of course. The "one solution" might be broad enough to include something like Linde's eternal inflation scenario or whatever. So our own existence in a branchlet does become anthropic luck.

But it would still be a new direction of thought (or rather, a return to older ones like Peirce, Hegel, and even Anaximander) to argue that the laws of nature are materially constrained and not free to be just anything.

At the other end of the scale, as with Wheeler pre-geometry or current loop approaches to extracting regular spacetime from quantum foams, the thinking is the same.

If we start with unlimited degrees of freedom and let constraints on those freedoms spontaneously emerge to create lawful order, then was there only ever just one solution possible?

 

[alt]

But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.

I think though, he was saying something to the effect that one never knows that onesself is dead. Which makes sense.