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Why does anything exist?

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Re: Why does anything exist?

#21

Post by awb »

ryandvm wrote: post #11
atwood22 wrote: post #5

I had a shower thought the other day: clearly conservation of energy is just a guideline and not a fundamental law. Otherwise, how could anything exist?

Well... conservation of energy is just a law within our universe. Everything in here is energy, e=mc^2 and all that. But the creation of our universe definitely involved some process that dumped a shit ton of energy into a very small space about 14 billion years ago.

Or, a prior universe collapsing in a "big crunch" and then re-exploding back into existence. Or two objects colliding. But those theories just push the moment of creation back farther in time and the question is still relevant where those objects came from.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#22

Post by soulofmischief »

humanistbot wrote: post #3

I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default instance of nothing: Physics: No energy: the vacuum Geometry: No dimensionality: a point Set theory: No elements: the empty set Arithmetic: No magnitude: zero Information theory: No information: zero bits Then they ask: "There is an unlimited number of possible theoretical systems. Does this mean there are also unlimited conceptions of nothing?"

I would answer that there is surely a single supreme nothingness, such as Wuji[0], which would contain all sets of nothingness.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuji_%28philosophy%29

Re: Why does anything exist?

#23

Post by vehemenz »

As a philosopher, I recommend that anyone read up on ontological anti-realism before they get too invested in the answer to questions like these.

Carnap and Quine (to say nothing of Kant) wrote extensively about the problems that arise when treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate.

There are strong reasons to adopt ontological anti-realism. I'm amused when folks muse extensively in the ontological mode without addressing the elephant in the room—most of it is likely nonsense.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#24

Post by soulofmischief »

silent_cal wrote: post #18

>So long as we operate from a theory of geometry, we can’t define nothingness as anything less than a space of zero-dimensionality. >This leaves us with a point. That's still not nothing.

What interests me is that if there is only the point, there's no external system for reference. So the point has no coordinates, no observable properties... right?

Re: Why does anything exist?

#25

Post by photochemsyn »

I suppose this kind of thing is fun to think about, but this kind of claim, which appears to be the main one, is metaphysical, not scientific, in that it appears to make no testable predictions, as far as I can see:

> "Mathematical truth implies the existence of all computations. The existence of all computations implies the existence of all observers. The existence of all observers leads to a quantum mechanical reality populated with all possibilities and ruled by simple laws."

Extra points to the author for including a link to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). For convenience:

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

Re: Why does anything exist?

#27

Post by captainclam »

Victerius wrote: post #2

Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's like asking what is P(A|A). The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked. [1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2] [2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something"…

Doesn't this just completely dodge/dismiss the original question?

If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the question."

Re: Why does anything exist?

#29

Post by Tycho »

In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from nothing - what’s to stop it?

Re: Why does anything exist?

#30

Post by kloch »

On the similar theme of "things we don't have answers to yet":

When I was five years old I asked my dad what was beyond the "edge" of the Universe. He said "There is no edge, it goes on infinitely forever. Even if there was an edge, there would have to be something beyond that, even if it was a vacuum right?".

I literally cried myself to sleep trying to visualize this.

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