Surely anything we can imagine is a concept, so ’nothing’ is a concept… like zero, as zero denotes the ‘lack of’ something, yet we believe in and acknowledge zero.
We are able to fathom 'nothing’ with our mind… an ability that animals most likely/probably lack, but we do not… we are special in that respect.
I’m sure that most thinkers have imagined/wondered what the world/their life would be like without certain ‘elements’ not existing in it, at all. We have the ability to do that… I bet prey wished that hungry predators didn’t exist.
I don’t know that you are fully capable of imagining or fathoming nothing. When you think you’re imagining nothing, you’re usually imagining blackness and silence - blackness isn’t nothing, blackness is a visual experience. Imagining anything at all is an experience. Even when you try hardest to imagine nothingness, your imagination is including your own subjective experience in it.
In other words, when you imagine nothingness, what you’re probably doing is imagining “what would it be like if I was inside of nothingness?” But if you were inside of it, it wouldn’t be nothing
I didn’t say that it feels like anything… that’s where 'imagination’ comes in, in removing the Self from the equation of existence completely… or actually experiencing a removal from the equation of existence completely, like that guy.
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
Sean Carroll
Yes, the objectivists within the scientific community. As though because they engage the “scientific method” in exploring questions all the way out at the very end of the metaphysical limb this enables them to come up with the optimal [empirical] answers. The scientific equivalent of philosophers here who employ logic in order to accomplish the same thing: resolve it.
Meanwhile, the ontological relationship between something and nothing would seem to remain as elusive as ever. And, in the absence of God, how can there even be a teleological component?
Then those who insist, “that’s just the way things are…but this is the way things ought to be instead.” And not just in regard to the is/ought world!
But “feeling satisfied” is what I always come back to myself. The part where what we believe is intimately – and existentially – intertwined in what comforts and consoles us. And that’s the part that gets entangled further in the subconscious and unconscious components of the human mind. And who is to say where the brain ends and the mind begins there. Even assuming human autonomy.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
That has to be it, right? Even for those who plug a God, the God, their God, they can’t really get around pondering if there might have been nothing before God. Other than through yet another leap of faith.
And “mind-boggling” indeed. Especially when you consider that [presumably] whatever our something is, it had been around for billions of years before minds here on planet Earth could juxtapose it to nothing at all. We don’t even know for sure [in a free will world] if human minds are capable of grasping “all there is”. Before it was nothing at all?
Of course, to ask “why things are” introduces the element of teleology. Okay, we figure out that everything there is came into existence out of nothing at all. Or we figure out that everything there is has always been around. But why? Is there someone or something in nature that can provide us with a meaning for existence…or a purpose?
And even if the author finds that column what are the odds that his answer to the question is the right one?
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Now this is a truly crucial observation. Aside from the objectivists among us who actually do believe that how they think about nothing, something and everything that there now is reflects the whole truth, the more sophisticated minds can’t help but grasp just how mind-boggling existence qua existence itself is.
How do you wrap your head around it? In other words, if you don’t just take the shortcut to God.
Everything that we note around us once did not exist. Then it did. Then over time it will not again. It might take billions of years before planet Earth is gone but it is predicted that the Sun on the way to its own demise will swallow the Earth whole. At best we can reduce everything down to atoms and to subatomic particulars that do their thing…forever?
But existence itself? In a No God universe? How can it either always have existed or come into existence out of nothing at all? Which rendition seems the most preposterous?
And we too are all along for the ride, aren’t we? Is it an unanswerable question? Hell, we don’t even know whether any answer we do come up with isn’t the only answer we were ever able to come up with. Why? Because all the matter that encompasses “everything there is” [whether from nothing or always around] is inherently, necessarily subsumed in the immutable laws of matter itself.
Then back to those here who insist their pole is anything but greased. They’ve climbed all the way to the top. How? By constructing a “world of words” “in their head” allowing them to “think up” the solution.
Then when you ask them to demonstrate it, all they have available for you are yet more “arguments”.
Glad to see MagsJ recognizes not all thoughts are thoughts the mind claims as itself, though possibly from itself.
Kinda like the universe materializing as thought from God’s mind, but not all of it (our willful evil and its consequences) claimed as his—though sustained regardless, in the name of love.
Obsrvr was on the right ex nihilo track but spun MagsJ ‘round instead after this. Weird.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Still, think about that. How can any definitions that we mere mortals here on planet Earth come up with to encompass “nothing” not start with the fact that we are in a “something” going all the way back to all that we do not know about existence itself?
It would be like those in Flatland defining the third dimension in order to grasp it as we do. Defining it into existence. And the novella Flatland was a satirical account of the rigid class morality that was Victorian England. So, let’s define morality into existence in order to determine which actual behaviors we choose are right or wrong.
Then the part where whatever we define “nothing” to be, it’s then definitions all the way down…
All the way back to, “okay, but what came before nothing at all?”
Define that into existence please.
How about this then from Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Only we really have no idea “here and now” if the human brain itself, as but one component of a mind-numbingly vast multiverse is even capable of pinning something like that down. We don’t even know whether, if it does, it was never able not to in a wholly determined Reality.
We can’t leave Him out, right?
He just does. Presto! God and His “mysterious ways” account for everything.
Biggy, did you pop into existence ex nihilo? Do you deny you have parents/guardians?
The universe has a bellybutton. It’s low entropy at the beginning, and ever increasing entropy, and (by contrast) irreducible complexity wherever it is found uninitiated by human/contingent intelligence.
Obv the Creator of all bellybuttons (beginnings, singularities) is going to have no bellybutton (is going to be necessary rather than contingent, and have intelligence to spark the beginning and the nonhuman/AI irreducible complexity).
Even if there was no identifiable beginning because it began all at once complete (fractal)… that can’t happen without a mind to sustain it, especially when you factor in information exchanged between previously unentangled (physically, anyway) moments.
Nothing has no power to enforce itself. Thats why it doesn’t exist and why there is something.
(my own resolution, seems simple but it appears Im the first one to come up with it)
Leibniz was not the worst of em but its boring how he repeats the trick of postulating “God” to replace the, or any, question. Why? Because God. See my post in the “When I say Philosophy” thread.
And going back to your own definitive understanding of existence itself, how would you go about demonstrating this to us? In say, one of your videos?
That’s why such assessments as this are always contained in “intellectual” or “philosophical” or “metaphysical” assessments. Or, for you, astrologically?
And then, for the faithful, trust them: it’s a God, the God, their God all the way down. On the backs of the turtles perhaps?
Note to others:
25 words or less please.
The Christian God.
And if you want a laugh, ask her to bring the Christian God here:
Note to the Christian God:
Why this something…
“…an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages”
…and, if not nothing, something a little more in sync with the belief that the Christian God is “loving, just and merciful”.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Right. Mere mortals on this third rock circling this hum drum star in this hum drum galaxy in what may or may not be this hum drum universe can say with confidence that our own something embedded in everything there is has always existed.
Now all we need is the Nova documentary or the YouTube video substantiating it with ample evidence. Or, as is often the case in forums like this one, a “world of words” assessment…the logic of which invariably going around and around in “metaphysical” circles.
Or, as he encompasses it:
Okay, admittedly, this certainly seems to be the must reasonable set of assumptions to me as well. You know, for what that’s worth. The existence of nothing? Then – poof! – the Big Bang bringing into existence everything that revolves around this:
And this:
But…
Really, how can anything just always exists? Do you know anything that has? How is that not equally way, way, way beyond actually being demonstrated. We’re just partial to it because something is what we are a part of now.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
This is perhaps the optimal answer. It really comes down to whether any of us here are [realistically] able to confront the gap between what they think they know as this “infinitesimally tiny speck of existence” and all that would need to be known about existence itself…and still convince themselves that the answer is within reach.
With or without God. With God the answer is already known. Without God and it almost certainly never will be. By us. Or, at any rate, not in our lifetimes.
For example, Frank Drake, the man “who led search for life on other planets” just died. Is there life on other planets? And, if so, how does that factor into an understanding of existence itself? There may be civilizations out there with brains actually able to solve it. But that’s now all moot for Frank. Just as exchanges like this will one day be moot for all of us.
Unless, of course, there is a God.
Please. Time is easily one of most boggling aspects of reality itself. Is there really a, what, set of mathematical equations and/or scientific experiments that can leave no doubt that it came into existence with the Big Bang?
If so, by all means, link me to them.
On the other hand, who is kidding whom, here. How many or us are able even to grasp the conjectures of those like Hawking? Instead, it just seems entirely implausible that there could be nothing – no time, no space, no matter – and then it all just “popped” into existence, “inflated”, and over 13 billion years became the universe as we know it today…about “93 billion light-years across”.
One light year alone being 6 trillion miles. That’s the equivalent of going around the Earth about 40,160 times.
Come on, the only thing more unfathomable still, perhaps, is that all of this was simply always around forever and ever.
Have you ever read Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos?
Entropy starts out ordered with the Big Bang, or first cycle. That’s a problem science can’t touch.
Likewise, if the universe were infinite, we would have already achieved heat death.
The vacuum energy & branes & stuff… something had to light the fuse, so to speak, or this never would’ve kicked off.
The other thing not many mention is what a beginning even means if the whole thing began complete (so every now is the beginning, and end, really, and the beginning & end, & every now, exist in Being/Time).
The only philosopher I have read that seems to understand Time (God’s Being) is Kant… but I have barely scratched the tip of the philosophy iceberg.
