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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?
The laws of physics are true; why do they need to "exist"?
Having listened to a dozen YT videos and podcasts on the subject, I am kind of an expert (just kidding). But I can relay one view a few brilliant people invested into the subject have about the issue: that reality is a set of all possible states. Of what states? Well literally anything. Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states…
It seems like a good idea to move away from such a reality model in that case. Ideally to replace it with either several good plugins or a new metamodel which can encompass its strengths and weaknesses.
I.e. reality can be a helpful term to describe "I found a new and helpful perspective for looking at a thing." That's a big strength and one commonly seen as people migrate between beliefs.
Having listened to a dozen YT videos and podcasts on the subject, I am kind of an expert (just kidding). But I can relay one view a few brilliant people invested into the subject have about the issue: that reality is a set of all possible states. Of what states? Well literally anything. Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states…
"Why does something exist?" "God did it." "Uh, ok, why does God exist?" "Dunno, just does." "Why does something exist?" "The set of all possible wave states exists and behaves such-and-such way" "OK, but why does that exist and why does it do that?" "Dunno, just does". <- Ditto.
On 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.
"Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no dualistic nature.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317956529_Types_Tab...
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 withou…
Frankly, this doesn't even feel like any kind of knowledge to me. Its operationally meaningless! In any case, I think the author has the cart before the horse: numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
Mathematics is nothing but the observation of regularities in certain sorts of elaborate rituals involving making markings on paper. Many of those rituals are inspired by and correlated with regularities which exist in the world, but its difficult to me to see any reason to believe that they have an independent existence.
Having listened to a dozen YT videos and podcasts on the subject, I am kind of an expert (just kidding). But I can relay one view a few brilliant people invested into the subject have about the issue: that reality is a set of all possible states. Of what states? Well literally anything. Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states…
"So how does this help us understand why the universe exists? We’re starting from all possible rules. And basically we’re saying that having a universe that operates in the way we perceive ours to operate is an inevitable consequence of there being all these possible rules. Or, in other words, if these rules “exist” then it follows that so will our universe.
But what does it mean for rules to “exist”, and in particular for all possible rules to exist? The key point, I believe, is that it’s in a sense an abstract necessity. The set of all possible rules is something purely formal. It can be represented in an infinite number of ways. But it’s always there, existing as an abstract thing, completely independent of any particular instantiation.
It’s crucial that we’re talking about all possible rules. If we were talking about particular rules, then we’d need to specify which rules those are, and we’d need a whole language and structure for doing that. But that’s not our situation. We’re talking about all possible rules. We can construct some explicit symbolic representation for these rules, but the deductions we make ultimately won’t depend on this; they would work the same whatever representation we chose to construct.
We might have assumed that to get our universe we’d need some definite input, some specific information. But what we’re discovering is that our universe is in some sense like a tautology; it’s something that has to be the way it is just because of the definition of terms. In effect, it exists because it has to, or in a sense because everything about it is a “logical inevitability”, with no choice about anything."
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...