Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

[apeiron]

But, Nothing is by definition has no cause so it is missing what can make it true.

But wouldn't the absence of causes be part of the definition of true nothingness? Causality would have to be one of the things "not there".

 

[qsa]

But wouldn't the absence of causes be part of the definition of true nothingness? Causality would have to be one of the things "not there".

I would say causality would be only concerned with " it is here".

 

[apeiron]

"How is one to account for the protolaws themselves?". It seems like that approach is just passing the buck elsewhere and the problem remains?

This is where Rescher would benefit from a more Peircean approach. If you are taking a developmental perspective, it is no problem for "laws" - globally general constraints - to emerge from vague and tentative beginnings.

Both laws and what they regulate develop jointly. Ultimately they are cut from the same cloth - the kind of absolute state of possibility that Peirce called vagueness.

One author who takes a very Platonic approach in trying to answer this question is Rickles:

Interesting paper, but Rickles kind of kills his own argument by citing Connes on the view that there is "primordial mathematical reality" out there which is separate from the "deductive tools" which exist in our heads.

So reality looks mathematical, rather than reality is mathematical. There may be a correspondence between the two, but it is epistemic, not ontic. And thus the way that the world takes on mathematical-looking form (ie: develops some set of laws, regularities or constraints) might be entirely different to the way humans reconstruct those forms (via a logico-deductive process).

And then the core of Rickles' argument is that he can imagine subtracting away all material objects so as to create an empty reality - a nothingness - but he can't imagine how to subtract away the existence of mathematical truths. They are always going to be there (well, somewhere) even in the absence of any thing. So a state of no-thing is impossible as an actuality.

But this has holes. If, as I argue, maths describes forms, and thus constraints, you don't subtract them away, you get rid of them by relaxing them. You remove by generalising (such as going from a geometric to a topological level of description).

An empty world - in the sense of one with all its possible local degrees of freedom definitely removed, all its contingent facts erased - is in fact in a highly constrained state. Indeed, infinitely constrained. We would be talking about everything being completely limited and so nothing actually occurring. But that would leave this "empty" world now also completely full of contraint.

Rickles' view is that it is trivial to subtract away local degrees of freedom, but impossible to subtract away mathematical forms. My argument is instead that the two aspects of existence are a yo-yo balance, and any effort to remove one gives you more of the other. It is for this reason that there is always something rather than nothing.

Relaxing constraints give you more degrees of freedom. Tightening constraints gives you less degrees of freedom.

So again, it is not that subtracting one is trivial and the other impossible which forbids the existence of nothingness, but the reciprocal causal relationship that constraints and degrees of freedom have with each other.

 

[bohm2]

Interesting paper, but Rickles kind of kills his own argument by citing Connes on the view that there is "primordial mathematical reality" out there which is separate from the "deductive tools" which exist in our heads.

So reality looks mathematical, rather than reality is mathematical. There may be a correspondence between the two, but it is epistemic, not ontic. And thus the way that the world takes on mathematical-looking form (ie: develops some set of laws, regularities or constraints) might be entirely different to the way humans reconstruct those forms (via a logico-deductive process).

I'm lost here also. As I see it, I think the major problem with Rickle's argument is the following statement:

"so long as we are willing to accept that reality is mathematical".

That’s a major problem especially for those who view mathematics as mental objects or believe that reality transcends mathematics (MarcoD). I always assumed that qualia/consciousness defies mathematical/formal description so the existence of such stuff seems to seriously raise doubts about whether mathematics can fully describe reality. There are some, however, who argue that this isn’t a major stumbling block because we have no way of knowing "what is like to be a mathematical structure", so maybe certain mathematical structures could have the intrinsic properties we associate with qualia/consciousness? I’m not sure I buy this argument.

Furthermore, maybe I’m misunderstanding but is Rickle’s point that there is no problem concerning Godel’s theorem, with respect to his position, valid? He seems to suggest all of the following:

1. Godel’s theorem does not tell us that there is any problem with mathematical truths per se; only that there is no algorithmic way of generating all such truths. We must distinguish truth and provability.
2. Furthermore, there’s a distinction between the tools (i.e. theories) we use to represent reality and the reality itself.
3. Godel’s incompleteness theorem applies to the former alone (theories). Indeed, this does impose a limitation on physics’ theoretical prowess in that if reality is a certain way (related to properties of arithmetic) then a complete account using any logico-mathematical representation will prove to be impossible. This is an epistemic limitation rather than a limitation imposed on reality.

But then he also suggests that for his argument to be valid one has to accept the view that:

4. Reality is mathematical.

Wouldn’t that imply that there is no difference between the tools (i.e. theories) and reality so that Godel’s incompleteness theorem would apply? Maybe I'm mistaken. I have trouble with these types of arguments.

 

[Maui]

How about this take. Something implies that there was a chain of causes that resulted in that something and that means there is a reason for it to be true. But, Nothing is by definition has no cause so it is missing what can make it true.

But what was the initial cause is a question for physicists and not philosophers.

That is a non-question... like most others. It's been known for a while now that everything is out of our immediate reach - consciouness, matter, time, space, spacetime... even causality which is the BASIS for ALL our knowledge has been shaken by modern theories like quantum mechanics. Then neuroscientists keep pressing that being conscious is an automatic and autonomous process, much like being asleep and dreaming and perceiving your decisions after the fact. Push hard enough and you cannot but see that we don't really understand anything, anything at all. Nothing "has really changed since Socrates and his famous "I know that i know nothing" unless you want to fool yourself into the common delusion(which falls down on its face upon closer examination)

 

[epenguin]

I will now give the explanation I thought of the last but one time this question was asked here, I think this happens roughly every three months, which is that if there were nothing there would be nothing to prevent there being something whereas if there is something there is something to prevent there being nothing.

 

[bohm2]

"I know that i know nothing"

Wouldn't that lead to some type of regression? I still think Descarte's argument is pretty strong: "I think, I exist". That was a pretty simple argument and yet very profound. Unfortunately, beyond that, certainty in our knowledge seems pretty questionable. Unless, you are a Platonist, I guess?

 

[Maui]

Wouldn't that lead to some type of regression?

Sure that's an oximoron but science isn't a scroll of truths. It's an endevor to help us get along.

I still think Descarte's argument is pretty strong: "I think, I exist". That was a pretty simple argument and yet very profound. Unfortunately, beyond that, certainty in our knowledge seems pretty questionable.

"There is an experience of being" - that would be less questionable by the neuroscientists' lot than the "I" implied by Decartes which would seem a too loaded term to the current trend of approaching the consciousness topic.

I have a different opinion than the general stance of neurology, but on the other hand, i don't disagree with their stance entirely. I just don't think it's all there is to consciousness at all.

 

[latter]

bohm2 wrote
So he is arguing that if you have a lottery with an infinite number of combinations , there is only 1 number that corresponds to nothingness (the empty set). The chances of picking that number among all the others is essentially 0, so that isn't going to happen. I guess he's trying to say that the universe exists because existence is far more probable than non-existence.

yes but there is still the problem of there is something doing something before the universe.?

bohm2 wrote
The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question

you are saying why is the system chosen over enough.but this is not the ultimate question because whatever it is that picks one over the other will itself be under scrutiny
infact what ever anyone trys to say is the start to everything it will inturn be asked why and where.you can never get to a start without this problem occurring.
take god where did he come from this goes asking well where did that god that created that god come from .

 

[Sefrez]

yes but there is still the problem of there is something doing something before the universe.?

you are saying why is the system chosen over enough.but this is not the ultimate question because whatever it is that picks one over the other will itself be under scrutiny
infact what ever anyone trys to say is the start to everything it will inturn be asked why and where.you can never get to a start without this problem occurring.
take god where did he come from this goes asking well where did that god that created that god come from .

I agree. It is as if our logic is simply just limited and things begin to fall apart at this level. There may be no way to answer this question (in our minds with our logic.) It seems to be able to be discussed and abstractly "answered" in some way, but it still never makes "real sense". At least it seems someone always has a new question - as it goes here.

Another place that logic falls apart, what did I absolutely just say? What does this mean? What are words when one just connects to another few - which intern connects to memories and understandings in my mind. What is my mind? See? It just continues.

 

[Maui]

Another place that logic falls apart, what did I absolutely just say? What does this mean? What are words when one just connects to another few - which intern connects to memories and understandings in my mind. What is my mind? See? It just continues.

Causality is still our number one foundation of knowledge, despite some recent questions about its universal validity. For some reason, nature has "chosen" to interact via virtual photons as mediators of the EM interaction(as far as we/i know) and there appears to be a something that initiates these interactions(something that has and acquires mass in relativistic settings and is thus different from light and photons). This is almost touching the subject of existence and the nature of existence and it seems obvious that if we lose causality, we'll lose the ability to say anything that seems meaningful about anything at all.

Edit: So perhaps we can reduce the "Ultimate question: Why anything at all?" to "Why charge?" Why do particle-like systems have the property called charge out of which the familiar casality arises? Would non-interacting "particles" be existing or would that be another form of existence(sounds a bit MWI-ish and we couldn't know either way). I guess the point is that it's not a settled question what the "anything" in the title really is and a solipsist might argue that the question is "Why me?".

 

[qsa]

That is a non-question... like most others. It's been known for a while now that everything is out of our immediate reach - consciouness, matter, time, space, spacetime... even causality which is the BASIS for ALL our knowledge has been shaken by modern theories like quantum mechanics. Then neuroscientists keep pressing that being conscious is an automatic and autonomous process, much like being asleep and dreaming and perceiving your decisions after the fact. Push hard enough and you cannot but see that we don't really understand anything, anything at all. Nothing "has really changed since Socrates and his famous "I know that i know nothing" unless you want to fool yourself into the common delusion(which falls down on its face upon closer examination)

I did not reply earlier b/c I did not get the notification. first, I will top you on the charge question. here is a post I made in reponse to Garret

Lets say you manage the three generations, would your theory answer these questions anytime soon.


1. all couplings values and their relations and origin. That includes computing the behavior at all energies (and distances-up to edge of the universe if there is one(CC)). and if there is a physical cut-off or not.

2. the theory must predict particles with their masses explained.Inculding light and its clear interaction picture with matter.

3. What is charge exactly and how does the value come about.

4. the origin of Spin and entanglment.

5. how do particles behave in flight, like the double slit experiment.

6. The real source of the effect of relativity. That is of course includes what is Space and time. and what is vacuum made of.

7. the relation between all of the above.

8. the origin and the fate of the universe or(universes)

But Most of all what is existence made of, if not a mathematical imperative.

But it is unfair to say we know nothing b/c we have models that do a good job as you know, but I do think as we make progress our models will become more exact and will reach an ontic stage. and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on Earth are deluding themselves. and the fact that you participate in PF atests to that.

Now, I will send you some material via PM, which is not suitable for disclosure here(rules), in the hope that it will give you a different prespective.

 

[Galteeth]

On a basic level the question "Why is there something rather then nothing?" ontologically entails the existence of something, as only if there is something is the question possible.

To me, this is the most satisfying answer.

 

[bohm2]

Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”. Other disagree using this argument:

Metaphysical nihilism (MN)

1. There is a world with a finite number n of concrete objects (accessible from our own: i.e. possible relative to ours). Call this world w_n.
2. The existence of any object o in w_n is contingent.
3. The non-existence of o does not imply the existence of another object o^'.
4. There is a world, w_n-1, accessible from w_n containing exactly one less object than w_n. There is a world accessible from w_n-1, w_(n-1)-1, containing exactly one less object than w_n-1.
5. By iterating the above procedure (i.e. by repeated ‘subtractions’) we arrive at a world w_n-m = w_min, accessible from w_n, that contains exactly one object.
6. Therefore, by steps 2, 3, 4, from w_min there is an accessible world, w_nil = w_n-m-1, containing no objects at all (= MN).

http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rickles_Rickles_fqxi_2.pdf

 

[Sefrez]

On a basic level the question "Why is there something rather then nothing?" ontologically entails the existence of something, as only if there is something is the question possible.

To me, this is the most satisfying answer.

That is kind of where I was headed in an earlier post of mine:

You would think that you could not differentiate the two, something and nothing. But it does seem, here, that I can by simply saying that this question wouldn't be asked if there were nothing. But that is implying that nothing is of what we think nothing is to be. Or in other words, is this question even something? I'm unsure.

Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but even if you were to take that stand, it still does not say that nothing is impossible. It just says that with our logic, nothing is impossible. Though, can that statement be made sense of?

 

[Maui]

But it is unfair to say we know nothing b/c we have models that do a good job as you know, but I do think as we make progress our models will become more exact and will reach an ontic stage. and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on Earth are deluding themselves. and the fact that you participate in PF atests to that.

How does my participation on PF attest that i have learned anything philosophically substantial about reality and the world? If anything, most people who come here realize that the world they recognize is either utterly incomprehensible or so bizarre that they may just go ahead and say - "Hey look, i am a flying elephant" instead. Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.

and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on Earth are deluding themselves.

They are not, but you are. They are perfectly aware of what they don't know, hence why they don't come here too often to give lessons. What is there to discuss except a handful of utterly ridiculous propositions about the world we think we know?

As for the PM's - thank you, i'll have a look tonight, it's always good to have other viewpoints. The most aesthetically pleasing "model" as far as i can see is that of the hologram, as it retains locality and causality(i don't see a better way out of the Bell's theorem while retaining some sort of reality and keeping the the theory of evolution, and all the other knowledge, etc...), whereas giving us a strong sense of comprehension and a good deal of visualization and a possibility to have a world-view expressible in human language. It almost clicks for me, but there is likely an infinity of things i don't know and am not currently aware of, so this is only relevant as a philosophical consideration.

 

[Galteeth]

Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.

lol wut

 

[Maui]

Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.

lol wut

Sorry, not you. I was talking about physicists(PhD's, Nobel Prize winners, etc.). Most lay people seem to intuitively understand how the world works
I guess you guys are smarter

I am not sure if netspeak is allowed here, but you could have a look at the respones it gets:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=netspeak

 

[apeiron]

Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”. Other disagree using this argument:

http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rickles_Rickles_fqxi_2.pdf

As I replied in post #103, and as Rickles himself argues, MN can subtract away everything from a world, but that still leaves a world. So this approach is a dead-end.

Rickles says an empty world still contains mathematical truth. I don't think you have to get all Platonic to see this. If you cannot subtract away the spacetime points that make up this empty world, you are left with some kind of logical geometric structure. Enough to make concrete the notion of a manifold, of a topology.

Mathematics itself is just the model, the descriptive idea. But MN is left with the reality that would have to inspire that idea.

You can still ask what "nothing" would look like (my answer, a vagueness). And therefore can it logically exist. But you would have to create a mental image of it by some other means than subtracting away a set of local objects to leave an empty stage.

 

[bohm2]

As I replied in post #103, and as Rickles himself argues, MN can subtract away everything from a world, but that still leaves a world. So this approach is a dead-end.

So what you're saying here is even the empty set is, in the final analysis, a set? Kind of like even if we were to take all the stuff out from the bucket, the bucket remains? If that is what you are arguing, would this still hold in a Machian-type universe?

 

[apeiron]

So what you're saying here is even the empty set is, in the final analysis, a set? Kind of like even if we were to take all the stuff out from the bucket, the bucket remains?

Yep. And wasn't that the whole problem with set theory as a foundational idea?

If that is what you are arguing, would this still hold in a Machian-type universe?

It might help to define your view of a Machian universe. But I agree it has the right kind of contextual self-organisation. The parts anchor the whole, which in turn anchors the parts.

But I don't think the Machian approach is expressed in a way that allows you to dissolve its structure in the way needed.

The MN argument is de-constructive - based on subtraction to zero. But then that "zero" still clearly exists as a something.

So what you want instead is "de-mergence" - some way to dissolve or fade away both the contents and the container, the set along with its elements. To do that, you obviously need an emergent theory of both contents and container in the first place.

 

[bohm2]

It might help to define your view of a Machian universe. But I agree it has the right kind of contextual self-organisation. The parts anchor the whole, which in turn anchors the parts...But I don't think the Machian approach is expressed in a way that allows you to dissolve its structure in the way needed.

I'm not sure either but as I understand Mach's relationist position: without parts, there is no whole. So without the stuff in the bucket, the bucket could not exist. I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of Mach but that's how I interpreted his view because according to Mach's principle, in absence of matter, space should not be able to exist. But I'm not sure if the latter implies the former?

 

[apeiron]

I'm not sure either but as I understand Mach's relationist position: without parts, there is no whole. So without the stuff in the bucket, the bucket could not exist. I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of Mach but that's how I interpreted his view because according to Mach's principle, in absence of matter, space should not be able to exist. But I'm not sure if the latter implies the former?

Mach's bucket was more the claim that without some kind of reference frame context, how would the water in a spinning bucket know that it should have a centrifugal dip in its surface? Local inertia seemed a global contextual deal rather than a locally inherent property.

But it still left the mechanism of downward causation a msytery, as Davies notes in a reference you are familiar with too...

There are a few examples of clear-cut attempts at explicit whole-part causation theories in physics. One of these is Mach’s principle, according to which the force of inertia, experienced locally by a particle, derives from the particle’s gravitational interaction with all the matter in the universe. There is currently no very satisfactory formulation of Mach’s principle within accepted physical theory, although the attempt to construct one is by no means considered worthless, and once occupied the attention of Einstein himself.

http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/The%20physics%20of%20downward%20causation.pdf

So, as far as the OP goes, Mach is not much of a help, although he was leaning towards the kind of ontology I like.

As I said at the start, a comprehensive paper on the options regarding "why anything" is...

Apostel, L. 1999. Why not Nothing? In World Views and the Problem of
Synthesis, ed. D. Aerts, H. Van Belle, and J. Van der Veken, 17-49.
The Yellow Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte". Kluwer Academic
Publishers.

It's not online, but if you are particularly interested in the literature, PM me an email and I can send you a scanned copy.

 

[bohm2]

As I said at the start, a comprehensive paper on the options regarding "why anything" is...

Apostel, L. 1999. Why not Nothing? In World Views and the Problem of

Thanks I read it last night even though I should be studying. It was a pretty extensive review of most of the positions on here but man, does he go way out there in Section 15: "Why not nothing? And Heidegger". I just don't see how taking any of these positions has any socio-political repersussions. For instance,

On the other hand, if the reason for existence is found in the organic unity of those possible worlds that are realized, its meaning and value will also lie in the consensus, the communication, the solidarity of mankind, culture and ethical system.

Where the heck did that come from?

 

[apeiron]

I just don't see how taking any of these positions has any socio-political repersussions.

I don't read Apostel as arguing that the "why anything" question must have ethical import, just that how it is framed/answered inevitably is going to reflect people's prior ethical concerns.

So some like to believe everything is essentially random, chance, meaningless, etc. Others that existence is purposeful, rational, etc. Our emotional baggage is going to get caught up in such an ultimate question. Apostel says this is why being willing to address the question is important - it serves to bring out our deepest beliefs into the open. The philosophers happy to tackle it are usually ones with an axiological agenda.

I don't particularly agree that is a good thing - unless we then manage to get beyond wishing for some certain kind of answer.

 

[PatrickPowers]

“Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.” In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics—[because] the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space where fields are zero and unchanging.” But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “[Quantum mechanics] doesn’t answer the question, ‘Why do we live in a world governed by these laws?’… And we will never have an answer to that.” “Does that bother you?” I ask. “Yes,” Weinberg says wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.” Here’s how I see it: The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question.

Why there is something rather than nothing?

Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. There are infinitely many such possible ways. All these ways seem to be equally probable—which means that the probability of anyone of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened. “Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of anyone of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.” Because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probabilily of Nothing existing is zero.

http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2009/06/05/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/

So he is arguing that if you have a lottery with an infinite number of combinations , there is only 1 number that corresponds to nothingness (the empty set). The chances of picking that number among all the others is essentially 0, so that isn't going to happen. I guess he's trying to say that the universe exists because existence is far more probable than non-existence.

"We can use the axiom of extensionality to show that there is only one empty set. Since it is unique we can name it. It is called the empty set (denoted by { } or ∅)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_the_empty_set

Does the argument sound persuasive?

The argument is arbitrary. He would have to work much harder than that to get me to accept a specific probability for Nothing. As far as we know the probability of nothing is one and we lucked out bigtime.

The concept of probability in an infinite set is unintuitive for most people. All I can say is that I studied it in graduate school and it makes very good sense. Probability zero does not mean impossible and probability one does not mean certainty. There is no other reasonable way to do it. The fact that something exists does not imply that its probability is greater than zero. Get used to it.

As to why anything at all exists, I have no idea. But I think it is quite possible someone someday will develop a persuasive argument.

 

[PatrickPowers]

So some like to believe everything is essentially random, chance, meaningless, etc. Others that existence is purposeful, rational, etc.

"Random" simply means "unpredicatable." I see no dichotomy here.

 

[apeiron]

Probability zero does not mean impossible and probability one does not mean certainty. There is no other reasonable way to do it. The fact that something exists does not imply that its probability is greater than zero. Get used to it.

Do you understand the argument? If nothingness is deemed to be an ultimately simple state, then there is only one way it can be. Whereas somethingness would have an apparent infinity of ways of being. There is no obvious limit on its variety.

So the probablity of nothing is such that it almost surely does not exist, while the probability of something is such that it almost surely exists.

One may find all sorts of reasons to dispute the probabilities being assumed (is nothingness in fact infinitely varied? Is somethingness indeed somehow inherently limited). But this handwaving probability argument seems a good enough place to start a metaphysical discussion on the issue.

For your point to have any meaning here, you would have to show us first why somethingness must be limited to just one way of being.

 

[Albuquerque]

Nothingness it is not empty space it is not infinite or boundless variety whatever that means, and not even the potential of what is yet to come...
There´s nothing to nothingness...no thing to talk about.
The only valid use of nothingness as a concept intends to refer to the relative absence on something which exists and that it is not present in X space time frame.

 

[PatrickPowers]

Do you understand the argument? If nothingness is deemed to be an ultimately simple state, then there is only one way it can be. Whereas somethingness would have an apparent infinity of ways of being. There is no obvious limit on its variety.

So the probablity of nothing is such that it almost surely does not exist, while the probability of something is such that it almost surely exists.

One may find all sorts of reasons to dispute the probabilities being assumed (is nothingness in fact infinitely varied? Is somethingness indeed somehow inherently limited). But this handwaving probability argument seems a good enough place to start a metaphysical discussion on the issue.

For your point to have any meaning here, you would have to show us first why somethingness must be limited to just one way of being.

As best I can understand it, your argument is that each way of being is equally likely. Nothingness is one way of being. Somethingness includes virtually infinite ways of being. Therefore Somethingness is much more likely than nothingness.

The part I don't accept is that idea that each way of being is equally likely.

 

[Albuquerque]

The comparison of likelihood of probability in between nothingness and something is absurd !
Nothingness or shall we clarify, NO-THING, does not qualify as an object with property´s such as "being"/existing...and thus it is a false question !
It simply if it is the case that Something does exist then Nothingness cannot be conceptualized as an absolute any more...the assertion of the first immediately excludes the second...
By the same token not everything that exists necessarily had a beginning !
Thus if its is the case, as it seams, that the Universe had a beginning, to prevent an infinite regression in the causal chain, its final cause, must necessarily to not have had a beginning...from where it follows, and granting that the best known rational mechanical explanation in so far asserts a Multiverse as the cause of our Universe, a place where all possible worlds do exist, seams rather natural to conclude, that the Multiverse has no cause nor it did begun to exist...

 

[PatrickPowers]

The comparison of likelihood of probability in between nothingness and something is absurd !
Nothingness or shall we clarify, NO-THING, does not qualify as an object with property´s such as "being"/existing...and thus it is a false question !
It simply if it is the case that Something does exist then Nothingness cannot be conceptualized as an absolute any more...the assertion of the first immediately excludes the second...
By the same token not everything that exists necessarily had a beginning !
Thus if its is the case, as it seams, that the Universe had a beginning, to prevent an infinite regression in the causal chain, its final cause, must necessarily to not have had a beginning...from where it follows, and granting that the best known rational mechanical explanation in so far asserts a Multiverse as the cause of our Universe, a place where all possible worlds do exist, seams rather natural to conclude, that the Multiverse has no cause nor it did begun to exist...

You are absolutely correct. The probability that nothing exists, given that something exists, is zero.

 

[Albuquerque]

...Someone should had explained to William Lane Craig that his second premiss on the Cosmological Argument for God is plain wrong...not everything that exists begins to exist !

 

[apeiron]

As best I can understand it, your argument is that each way of being is equally likely. Nothingness is one way of being. Somethingness includes virtually infinite ways of being. Therefore Somethingness is much more likely than nothingness.

The part I don't accept is that idea that each way of being is equally likely.

It's the OP rather than my argument. I don't personally believe a probability argument is going to offer any safe conclusions here.

That's why we discuss these things. To discover their weaknesses.

And you still seem to have it wrong. If nothingness did have one way of being, and somethingness an unlimited number of ways, then they are not equally likely. That is the basis of the OP. So at least you are right if you also don't view one vs infinity as equivalent.

And even if you were to take an a priori position that nothingness and somethingness should be treated initially as a simple 50/50 probability, there is still an argument against that. Here is Apostel's view, for instance.

In section 8 we applied the principle of sufficient reason. Its negative
counterpart is the principle of insufficient reason. We are familiar with
this from the fundamentals of the probability theory. "If n possibilities
are given and there is no sufficient reason to choose one of these in
preference to another, then they are all equally probable". If "el or e2
... or en" has a probability factor of 1 (or is even necessary), and if there
is no SR to make el preferable to e2, all e, will have a probability of l/n.

We shall apply this to the set of possible worlds. In the most unfavourable
case for the refutation of "Nothing exists", we place the empty worlds
(which we shall call L) on one side and the not empty worlds (which
we shall call B) on the other side. We consider the two sets as a unity
and assume there is no reason to choose empty in preference to not
empty, or not empty in preference to empty. Assuming that there have
to be "worlds", then L has a probability of 1/2 and B too.

This is an extreme case, however. There is only one way of being "empty" , whereas
there are many ways of being not empty. We can therefore assume that
there are 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n, infinity, different non-empty worlds. In each of these
assumptions, assuming that we have no reason to suppose that one of
these worlds is more probable than another, the principle of insufficient
reason determines that the probability of L always decreases (from 1/2 to
l/n) and that the probability of B always increases (from 1/2 to 1/3+1/3
to 1/4+ 1/ 4+ 1/4 etc.).

If an infinite number of possible worlds exist, the
probability of L will approach the limit zero. We shall now apply the
principle of insufficient reason to the totality of all these distributions of
probabilities over possible worlds. In one distribution L has a probability
of 1/2. In all the other distributions L has a lower probability, and in an
infinite number of distributions the probability of L is arbitrarily close
to the limit zero.

All this follows if we can apply the principle of insufficient reason
both to the individual 2, 3, ... n possible worlds and to the assumptions
about the number of possible worlds, and if our ignorance or ontological
indifference (or both) are so great that there is no known and/or existing
reason to choose one world in preference to another. In concrete terms,
all the foregoing follows from the fact that being can offer more variety
than nothingness.

 

[Albuquerque]

...you seam to have misunderstood my argument...my point was that there is no likelihood on anything in the first place, less alone a value for it...probability does not even apply to the problem once the first premiss, something, excludes the second, nothingness ...

 

[Albuquerque]

My position on this regard is that the idea that nothingness precedes something is absurd ! The very qualification of no-thing only makes sense by referring to the absence of something...the term excludes an absolute value in its very own definition...

 

[apeiron]

My position on this regard is that the idea that nothingness precedes something is absurd ! The very qualification of no-thing only makes sense by referring to the absence of something...the term excludes an absolute value in its very own definition...

I agree - for quite different reasons most probably - that the idea of something arising from nothing is absurd. But that is a subtly different question from the OP.

The question here is about the possibility of there being just nothing - period. Now we know that isn't in fact the case. But was it ever even an honest possibility?

How can logic rule that out? Logic may rule out the kind of nothingness that spawns a somethingness, but it does not appear to rule out a nothingness of the kind that spawns...nothing.

This seems a rather coherent and self-consistent concept of nothingness - more so than the fecund kind. And the OP is about why we actually do have something rather than that kind of nothingness.

 

[Albuquerque]

I agree - for quite different reasons most probably - that the idea of something arising from nothing is absurd. But that is a subtly different question from the OP.

The question here is about the possibility of there being just nothing - period. Now we know that isn't in fact the case. But was it ever even an honest possibility?

How can logic rule that out? Logic may rule out the kind of nothingness that spawns a somethingness, but it does not appear to rule out a nothingness of the kind that spawns...nothing.

This seems a rather coherent and self-consistent concept of nothingness - more so than the fecund kind. And the OP is about why we actually do have something rather than that kind of nothingness.

It seams to me that we must assume such kind of nothingness is possible in the first place and yet we don´t have any good reason to believe so...on its own premiss nothingness cannot be time dependent thus it does not follow a moment from where it can transit to something without contradicting its own conceptual terms...

(I apologise for my far from bright English which is not my first language)

 

[apeiron]

It seams to me that we must assume such kind of nothingness is possible in the first place and yet we don´t have any good reason to believe so...on its own premiss nothingness cannot be time dependent thus it does not follow a moment from where it can transit to something without contradicting its own conceptual terms...

(I apologise for my far from bright English which is not my first language)

They are still two separate arguments. In one, the debate is whether nothingness is itself a true possibility. In the other, the debate is whether nothingness actually existed (for a while, until something arose).

So in considering nothingness as a possibility, we can agree it must have no properties at all - no time, no space. It is not even an empty world.

And there is where the probability argument in fact slips up. It depends on some firm notion of countable worlds to get off the ground. And true nothingness could have nothing that smacks of a worldliness, such as change or development - any kind of temporal progression.

True nothingness, by its definition could never spawn an actual world. So the existence of something proves that there was never "a time of nothing". And yet is still seems an active possibility. There could still have been a nothing (as an alternative to our existence and how it came about).

To finally eliminate nothingness as even a possibility, further work is needed. We have to have an argument which says our world came about through this process, and logically this is the only kind of origin it could have had. And look, as the "complementary other" to existence, it exhausts all other possibilities. There is now no room for nothingness even as a logical possibility.

In other words, we employ the usual logic of metaphysical dichotomies.

Nothing vs something is a very weak kind of dichotomy. For the reasons discussed, it does not really work as the terms are not mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. No-thing is a simple negation, based on trying to subtract away all things (or actually, just the "some" that are taken to exist). And as you point out, we cannot finally subtract away time or space, or at least the potential for change, the potential for stability too, in any intelligible way. We can subtract to create an empty world, but not a non-world.

What we need is the kind of complex negation that is a strong dichotomy. In which the two polar alternatives cover every possibility and are definitely related by their very lack of relation - it is the total metaphysical exclusivity that exhausts the need for any further consideration of other possibilities.

As I said earlier in the thread, this leads us to some form of the arguments of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce. Where what are opposed are vagueness and crispness, replacing the weaker thesis and antithesis of nothing and something.

The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.

Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).

With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".

All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.

Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.

So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).

 

[Maui]

They are still two separate arguments. In one, the debate is whether nothingness is itself a true possibility. In the other, the debate is whether nothingness actually existed (for a while, until something arose).

So in considering nothingness as a possibility, we can agree it must have no properties at all - no time, no space. It is not even an empty world.

And there is where the probability argument in fact slips up. It depends on some firm notion of countable worlds to get off the ground. And true nothingness could have nothing that smacks of a worldliness, such as change or development - any kind of temporal progression.

True nothingness, by its definition could never spawn an actual world. So the existence of something proves that there was never "a time of nothing". And yet is still seems an active possibility. There could still have been a nothing (as an alternative to our existence and how it came about).

To finally eliminate nothingness as even a possibility, further work is needed. We have to have an argument which says our world came about through this process, and logically this is the only kind of origin it could have had. And look, as the "complementary other" to existence, it exhausts all other possibilities. There is now no room for nothingness even as a logical possibility.

In other words, we employ the usual logic of metaphysical dichotomies.

Nothing vs something is a very weak kind of dichotomy. For the reasons discussed, it does not really work as the terms are not mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. No-thing is a simple negation, based on trying to subtract away all things (or actually, just the "some" that are taken to exist). And as you point out, we cannot finally subtract away time or space, or at least the potential for change, the potential for stability too, in any intelligible way. We can subtract to create an empty world, but not a non-world.

What we need is the kind of complex negation that is a strong dichotomy. In which the two polar alternatives cover every possibility and are definitely related by their very lack of relation - it is the total metaphysical exclusivity that exhausts the need for any further consideration of other possibilities.

As I said earlier in the thread, this leads us to some form of the arguments of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce. Where what are opposed are vagueness and crispness, replacing the weaker thesis and antithesis of nothing and something.

The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.

Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).

With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".

All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.

Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.

So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).

Great post!

This is a murky area and probably a very difficult question but have you thought on ways to introduce time in this model, especially after SR and its blockworld view(the blockworld view seems to nullify all attempts at understanding).

 

[bohm2]

With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".

But isn't a relational or antisubstantivalist interpretation of spacetime capable of doing just that? I thought Mach favoured this approach but that's not important:

According to the relational theory…what we call “space” is simply the totality of actual (and perhaps possible) spatial relations between material objects and/or concrete material events. If there were no material objects and concrete material events, space would not exist, for the relata of the relations constitutive of space would not exist, just as a family tree cannot exist without there being people to bear the family relations to each other that are constitutive of the tree.

de Broglie waves as the “Bridge of Becoming” between quantum theory and relativity
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1107/1107.1678.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Great post!

This is a murky area and probably a very difficult question but have you thought on how to introduce time in this model, especially after SR and its blockworld view(the blockworld view seems to nullify all attempts at understanding).

Yes, indeed that is something I've put a lot of effort into. But it would have to have its own thread.

Suffice to say, I think a thermodynamic approach to time is the key - seeing it as a gradient of change which gets dissipated. So a phase transition model in which we go from one kind of equilbrium (the instability of vagueness) to the more stable one (of a heat death universe).

There is a lot of thinking in this direction. For example, Prigogine's The End of Certainty is a stimulating read here. As the Nobellist father of dissipative structure theory, that should be no surprise.

But you also have loop quantum gravity theorists going in the same direction, because they must also make time (and space) emerge from vagueness (their quantum foam). And people like Rovelli are coming out with thermal time models.

So there is certainly a literature to ground speculation here.

SR leads to a blockworld in the same way that QM leads to MWI. They are models that have no constraints to break their internal symmetries. Yet clearly, the world as we experience it is not like these models. Those claimed symmetries are in fact broken.

This does not falsify SR or QM - so long as the models do not make a claim to be complete. The something missing (the further contraints) may get put in by hand, but it is not that difficult in practice to do that. So the models don't get us into trouble. SR and QM are fine in themselves.

However, when doing metaphysics, that is when we have to talk about what the models omit, as well as what they include, and so what kinds of further deductions would be valid.

Blockworld is one of the false pathways of thought that arise if you "believe" some particular model too religiously. At least, IMO.

 

[apeiron]

But isn't a relational or antisubstantivalist interpretation of spacetime capable of doing just that? I thought Mach favoured this approach but that's not important:

Yes it should. That is what I said about loop approaches - they presume some kind of vagueness as their ground. The unoriented roil of a spin-foam, or whatever. Then space and time emerge from this via the evolution of constraints - a network of concrete relationships that solidify the generality of possibility into something specific and actual, with a definite history, and so a definite future.

This is also Peircean. It is all about self-creation via relationships. Contraints must arise as the "sum over histories" or least mean path. The least action principle is also the basis of dissipative structure theory and so a thermodynamic approach.

So Mach, Peirce, Rovelli, Chew. Many see the essential story. But science picks the low hanging fruit first (a further example of the least action principle, hey? ).

 

[Maui]

SR leads to a blockworld in the same way that QM leads to MWI. They are models that have no constraints to break their internal symmetries. Yet clearly, the world as we experience it is not like these models. Those claimed symmetries are in fact broken.

Philosophically, I agree somewhat with your point, that it's always good to keep an open-mind and be aware that we are discussing models, yet, when discussing reality we only have our models to rest upon(it's been a tradition to regard everything else as empty talk). Yet, if we don't believe what they strongly suggest, it would seem that absolutely everyone on PF is talking mumbo-jumbo when they refer to reality. There is some truth, as far as it's attainable, that reality is relative to a frame of reference, as evidenced by clocks on the satellites orbiting the Earth and the experiments run at CERN which rely on the veracity of SR. So even if truths don't exist, it's more of a fact that reality is relative(and time is relative which lead to a blockworld), than it's a fact that reality is split at every quantum interaction(this is more of phantasy than a fact). I am far from dogmatic on it, but i'd put my money on the blockworld than on MWI any day of the week(even if it doesn't tell the whole story because no model is complete).

Time holds the key to most troubles in fundamental physics(that's Smolin's opinion in "The trouble with physics", as my own opinion is hardly worth much)

 

[Albuquerque]

The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.

Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).

With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".

All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.

Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.

So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).

As a layman I confess to be strongly stuck with the hard deterministic approach and with the concept of a block Universe as far as what I do understand these concepts intend to refer to which in itself is formally vague...
It follows I have trouble in conceptualising vagueness in any other way then the one who merely reports to the epistemological problem...thus vague for me refers to the temporary lack of awareness on the decision making constrains or good reasons that I might have towards some goal or some form of inquiry and not so much as reporting to a state in itself...in that sense I see it more as an "illusory effect" upon consciousness then an actual thing with its own "property´s"...I have trouble in imagining a true random process in motion without any sort of precise constrains as I understand motion itself as a form of means to ends, functions to systems and can´t conceive on any form of "behaviour" as being truly loose, although I wilfully admit complexity might strongly build that impression...
In the face of an interacting "indecision effect" from a system to another which is "alien" to its nature I am conceptually grounded with imagining lack of process/motion rather then an open ended form of process with no guidance...I don´t even know what it means motion with no guidance...as I am left wondering, what propels it ("its beingness") ? what vector goes nowhere in particular, or aims no goal ?
...again I hope the language barrier and the layman approach on the problem are not strong enough to prevent a fruitful exchange of ideas on such a hard problem...

Regards>Albuquerque

 

[Albuquerque]

Post Scriptum -
...a block multiverse where all possibility´s of being are deterministically covered does not require any kind of intelligent designer with a volitional intention to justify the process of change...in fact "intention" and "volition" as I understand them, rather refer to the search for completion (first person perspective) then being the result of completion (holistic perspective, Being with no mind)...thus as I see it the need for "minds" is more the product of incomplete beings unfolding their process of completion then a final process where awareness is required...hope that settles the problem raised above !

 

[Albuquerque]

...one interesting exercise is to relate what has been said with Godel´s incompleteness as an argument against the mind of all minds (and any kind of mind for that purpose) who cannot justify its own volition or wilful intentional process from within itself, thus ending up being more then an argument just against computation or mathematics but also against free will, against conscience and against Gods at large...

 

[bohm2]

I am far from dogmatic on it, but i'd put my money on the blockworld than on MWI any day of the week(even if it doesn't tell the whole story because no model is complete).

I wouldn’t put my money on either model. Until we can answer such questions as below:

Russell held that there are “three grades of certainty. The highest grade belongs to my own percepts; the second grade to the percepts of other people; the third to events which are not percepts of anybody, “constructions of the mind established in the course of efforts to make sense of what we perceive.” “A piece of matter is a logical structure composed of [such] events,” he therefore concluded. We know nothing of the “intrinsic character” of such mentally constructed entities, so there is “no ground for the view that percepts cannot be physical events.” For science to be informative, it cannot be restricted to structural knowledge of such logical properties. Rather, “the world of physics [that we construct] must be, in some sense, continuous with the world of our perceptions, since it is the latter which supplies the evidence for the laws of physics.” The percepts that are required for this task—perhaps just meter-readings, Eddington had argued shortly before—“are not known to have any intrinsic character which physical events cannot have, since we do not know of any intrinsic character which could be incompatible with the logical properties that physics assigns to physical events.” Accordingly, “What are called ‘mental’ events…are part of the material of the physical world.” Physics itself seeks only to discover “the causal skeleton of the world, [while studying] percepts only in their cognitive aspect; their other aspects lie outside its purview”—though we recognize their existence, at the highest grade of certainty in fact. The basic conundrum recalls a classical dialogue between the intellect and the senses, in which the intellect says that color, sweetness, and the like are only convention while in reality there are only atoms and the void, and the senses reply: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall."

THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN?
The journal of Philosophy, April 2009. P.181.

Unfortunately we will likely never have the answers to such questions. One can’t expect much from a cognitively-limited, arrogant, linguistic ground chimp like ourselves.

Edit: I'm starting to hate reading/writing my posts. They're too pessimistic/negative/misanthropic. I need to change my attitude.

 

[Albuquerque]

...if anything my case is not against what has been labelled as naive realism but against minds as independent self justified willing systems...if minds cannot justify their own circumstances by which they would came to be what they are and thus through it the product of their will, then it reasons their so said free willing comes as an illusion from the process by which they circumstance is brought to existence in the specific way it is brought up...I decompose mind as an independent volitional entity and reduce it to a reactive deterministic necessary interacting process from reality with reality itself, whatever is reality..."subjectivity" in here translates to local perspectivism, and "observer" to am interacting system within the System who acknowledges and processes information accordingly with the conditions that such System provides, and which itself could not chose...a World without a mind, which cannot reason itself, or to repeat itself within itself...

 

[apeiron]

Unfortunately we will likely never have the answers to such questions. One can’t expect much from a cognitively-limited, arrogant, linguistic ground chimp like ourselves.

Edit: I'm starting to hate reading/writing my posts. They're too pessimistic/negative/misanthropic. I need to change my attitude.

LOL, yes, be a glass half full guy instead.

The complaint in your extract is that we are just modellers of reality. Even our perceptions, our impressions, our measurements, are shaped by our ideas, our theories. We are cut off from the source of our impressions~ideas in some radical way.

But you can flip this around and see it as the crucial fact. It is because we are epistemically separated from reality that we can model it! You have to have mental distance to be able to imagine that reality could be other than what it appears, and thus see it more truly for what it is.

All this "ground chimp" stuff misses the glorious fact that our language ability does create a completely new realm of modelling for us. A chimp has to take its reality as brute fact. We get to stand back and wonder at it. Consider the other possibilities that put our actuality in its full context.

Our separation from reality is not an error to be deplored but a fortunate development that we should exploit to the full.