Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why does anything exist?

alwaysasking.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 233 posts

Re: Why does anything exist?

#61

Post by dieselgate »

kloch wrote: post #30

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.

Cool to see someone articulate this specific point. My dad has some grad schooling in astrophysics so we used to chat about this kind of stuff when I was young (still now but less so). I’d always ask “if the universe is expanding what is it expanding _in to_” and he’d kind of always change the subject to black holes or something. Thinking back on that it’s amazing how easy it is to “question” or “push/poke” the boundaries of known (or even knowable) knowledge. But alas guess it just furthers the point of how all people ponder these things.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#62

Post by xnoreq »

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"…

Anything exists because of survivor bias? That's backwards logic / you've missed/evaded the question.

It's not like asking P(A|A), it's not even asking why P(A) > P(N). It's asking why P(A) > 0, which it evidently is.

Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#65

Post by wizofaus »

forty wrote: post #52

Is there a clear distinction in English between "why" and "what for" ? In french it's literally the same words ("pourquoi" vs "pour quoi") My 5yo daughter asked me "why do we exist". I answered the why as in some events that happened that led to our existence, but finding a reason is a bit tougher :)

Not a completely clear one, but "what for" is more precise than "why", which can be asking "for what purpose" or "due to what cause". "Why are you in my room" is obviously asking the former, "why are the cookies burnt" fairly obviously the latter (unless you really did deliberately burn them to achieve some particular further goal...).

Re: Why does anything exist?

#66

Post by ashtonbaker »

yes_man wrote: post #36

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…

Ever since I read this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/505/ I've suspected something like this - once you abstract a simulation of the universe this far, if you can accept that a person inside this simulation would not be able to tell that they were in a simulation, then it kind of raises the question of whether actually performing the simulation is necessary. I can't see why it would be. If that's the case, then it follows that "reality" is merely an expression of one possible consistent set of rules. Which solves a lot of mysteries, I think.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#67

Post by phkahler »

I'm mostly down with the Mathematical Universe and might have independently reached that conclusion. I like to use the example of the Mandelbrot set - did that set/image/fractal exist prior to someone writing a program to create a map of it? I would argue that it did. So a mathematical object exists independently from our ever "discovering" it or its definition. That point of view quickly leads to "All things that have a mathematical definition exist in that same sense" which leads to "If there is a mathematical definition of our universe, that is sufficient cause for it to exist".

I do object to the talk of computability. Not all mathematically well-defined things are computable. I also don't like the following from the article:

>> Are we to take as serious the idea that we live inside an equation? And this equation somehow produces all computations by virtue of its solutions? And that the whole physical universe is just some kind of shared hallucination?

A mathematical definition is not limited to "an equation". What does he even mean by "produces all computations"? And then "shared hallucination" also seem nonsensical - we experience things however the definition allows/causes.

The only thing I grapple with is why we perceive the passage of time. If there is a mathematical definition of the entire span of the universe and time, that doesn't satisfy me in understanding why "I" am experiencing "now". Some might argue that a "simulation" is "running" but like the Mandelbrot set, the entire thing is defined at once by the definition, and any need to "run" it pushes the whole problem down one level (like where did god exist before he made the universe?) it's turtles all the way down. So while defining the universe over time might involve a definition that looks like a simulation, that still doesn't explain why we experience the simulation at a single point in time.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#68

Post by crdrost »

nathan_compton wrote: post #49

This is a lot of ground to cover to get to what is, in my opinion, a very bizarre conclusion which is epistemologically extremely lugubrious: that all structures expressible mathematically also exist and we are (obviously) a subset of those structures. 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…

Yeah I had to skim through it as well. I think the author probably has written something that has passed peer review, but has either written so many such things that he has gotten sick of terseness and getting to the point, or so few things that he has not learned to value it in the first place? Like the writing is not god-awful like a lot of the crackpot takes, but it's definitely tortuous.

As a theory goes, I don't think this one is successful. It probably either implies that time is an illusion or that we are all Boltzmann brains, and I would take it as a baseline desideratum that our fundamental understanding of the universe does not come in either of these shapes. (Both essentially state “actions don't exist” in different ways, and if the universe is the place where activities occur, the place where things happen, then the idea that nothing is really happening in there appears to fail hard.)

Of course is a Christian and a mystic, my understanding of my own answer is that it is also carefully calculated nonsense, nonsense in service of some sort of artistic goal, so I'm not in a great place to really criticize. He can struggle with his mythos and I can struggle with mine, haha.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#69

Post by ptmvp »

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"…

I don't get what point you're trying to get across with this comment. The question at hand is essentially one of causality, but you seem to be avoiding it? Addressing your points one by one:

>Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

Survivor bias leading to the question is not the reason anything exists, in the same way you being alive to ask this question is not the reason you're alive. In both cases existence is simply a pre-requisite to asking the question, but it does not answer it.

>It's like asking what is P(A|A).

No, that is misinterpretation of the question. The question is not "What is the probability that anything exists, given that anything exists?", it's asking "Why does anything exist?", as per the title.

>The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.

Haven't given much thought to this, and at face value, yes, you're right. But "seriously" is ambiguous and there are some interesting questions here regarding the possibility of an evil demon like entity, or, more interestingly, GPT-3 posing this question.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#70

Post by nathan_compton »

crdrost wrote: post #68
nathan_compton wrote: post #49

This is a lot of ground to cover to get to what is, in my opinion, a very bizarre conclusion which is epistemologically extremely lugubrious: that all structures expressible mathematically also exist and we are (obviously) a subset of those structures. 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…

Yeah I had to skim through it as well. I think the author probably has written something that has passed peer review, but has either written so many such things that he has gotten sick of terseness and getting to the point, or so few things that he has not learned to value it in the first place? Like the writing is not god-awful like a lot of the crackpot takes, but it's definitely tortuous. As a theory goes, I don't…

Why believe anything about this question at all? I feel quite strongly that the proper mental posture towards many questions is "I don't have a very compelling reason to hold a strong opinion on that." This feeling it buttressed by the fact that there are a great many tractable scientific and philosophical mysteries which are as yet unresolved. It seems premature to tackle this particular one, perhaps because I fundamentally disagree with the author that we are at a stage in history where it can be tackled "scientifically."
Post reply on HN