I think it's interesting to see the ease with which a few commenters on this thread assume they either 1) know how to answer this question or 2) are comfortable hand-waving it away.
Why does anything exist?
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Re: Why does anything exist?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like an appeal to the divine, in that it doesn't explain anything but does push the question up a level. "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.
The only thing problematic about “appeals to the divine” or other explanations that “push the question up a level” is if part of the explanation is the prohibition of “where did that thing come from?” or “why is it this way and not some other way?” But pushing things up a level is actually the only option we have for good explanations. For any explanation about anything whatsoever, you should always be able to ask “w…
From a mathematical/algorithmic point of view, you could define a good explanation as a sort of compression process: on one hand, you have observations, data to explain, totalling a certain number of bits. On the other hand, you have a process or algorithm that can generate these observations, and if that process can be described in less bits than the original observations, then you have a "good explanation". For example, our current theories for the laws of physics are excellent explanations, because they can explain a virtually infinite number of real observations from finite information.
On the other hand, if the observations are truly random, then in general no shorter process can produce them, so there can be no good explanation for them. And the interesting thing is that if every good explanation compresses the original observations at least one bit further (otherwise they would not be good), there must be a point where the result is as short as it could possibly be. At this point, the series of good explanations would have to end (although I believe that it is undecidable to know when the end is reached).
It is also always possible for something that has a good explanation to actually be a brute fact, like the idea that the Earth was created with the appearance of old age: the good explanation would be that it aged, but the truth would be that it didn't.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#73If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four s…
but isn't the problem that you could get stuck in an infinite contingency loop? i.e if you pick God, what if God is contingent and so on. Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#74I happen to believe it is because God willed the universe into existence. There are more esoteric explanations, something about him being lonely, but we're not supposed to even start worrying about them until the age of 40.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#75I think it's interesting to see the ease with which a few commenters on this thread assume they either 1) know how to answer this question or 2) are comfortable hand-waving it away.
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Re: Why does anything exist?
#76This 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…
> numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppose to have the answer. I will say, the case for mathematics pre-existing is stronger than what you refute here.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#77If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four s…
Can you give an example of a "necessary" thing? You brought up the square having four sides thing, but that's not about existence.
Furthermore, why does a contingent thing have to depend on a necessary thing?
Re: Why does anything exist?
#78If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four s…
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
Diving further into this, there's a hot debate about whether the universe does require a sustaining cause (the Existential Expiration thesis), or whether it can just exist unless something stops it from existing (Existential Inertia Thesis)
Personally, I am inclined to think that things tend to keep existing unless something stops them from existing, and that the universe therefore needs no sustaining cause.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#79>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?
You said "there is only the point", which means there is something. That's not nothing.
Re: Why does anything exist?
#80Having 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…
Stephen Wolfram actually wrote an article suggesting that that's basically it although he frames it as the set of all possible formal rules interacting with each other: "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 al…
The part positing the existence of a hypothetical set of all possible formal rules sounds a lot like the cosmological argument for the existence of God.