Something Instead of Nothing

Okay, but however we attain our knowledge, how exactly do we wrap our heads [here and now] around a universe in which there are no conscious minds around [determined or otherwise] to acknowledge its very existence?

That’s one of the reasons mere mortals invent the Gods. To provide themselves with a frame of mind that is always around. A mind not only able to acknowledge the existence of the universe but to actually create it. That way we can always sweep the stuff we don’t know about it under the rug we call “God’s will”. His “mysterious ways”.

Then we are particularly in over our heads when we attempt to grapple with the origin of God’s knowledge.

It’s all this gigantic mystery. Not only do we seem unable to explain something rather than nothing at all, we don’t seem able to comprehend how on earth we would even go about explaining it.

Unless of course someone actually has and I am simply unable to grasp it.

I and you are the something to come of nothing through nature (objectivity) and the nothing has determined my consciousness a possibility, of which has granted me nature’s power of being something and bringing something from nothing or I may revert back to nothing from something through the remaining of staying in traps and the unknowing promotion of ignorance.

If nothing is better than something to an individual , then what value does their life have? One may return to nothing from something instead of building something from nothing, this is called suicide.

Welcome to the reality ladies and gents, fear and pain. Accept it and make it worth it through an everlasting manifestable plate of possibilities. (Evolution).

Creating something from nothing from individual consciousness is where subjectivity is born and manifestable.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

And immediately we come to the, uh, heart of the matter? In contemplating the existence of something rather than nothing, what on earth does it mean to think of something as being “perfectly possible”? In fact the only way we can encompass this fully is in already having an explanation for why there is something instead of nothing.

We have no capacity to yank ourselves up out of this particular something and examine it going all the way back to what may or may not have been the actual beginning of space and time.

We don’t even know for certain if in coming up with words like “simpler and easier” we are able to do that as anything other than just another necessary component of space-time itself.

Of course an explanation is not required at all. We come into existence, we live out our life and then we die. Billions and billions of us so far. Some having invented God as the explanation, others refusing to.

Only in jettisoning God as the explanation, the answer becomes all that more mindboggling. God basically is the simple solution. No God though and somehow existence itself was either always around or had “burst” into existence out of nothing at all.

And how miserably unsatisfying are “explanations” like that?

We cannot possibly understand the Universe in all its entirety - and there is no reason as to why we should - but we can acknowledge its existence
This can be done without the need to invent God which only brings with it more unanswerable questions - albeit ones that are actually superfluous

But: How can you possibly know this? It is certainly not likely that either you or I will understand it in its entirety before we die. But neither of us can know for certain if those who come after us will come to grasp it.

And we have no way of knowing for certain that a God, the God does not exist who is privy to this knowledge.

Imagine folks thousands of years ago imagining the things that they were all but certain that we would never know — things that many of us now just take for granted.

You speak of “superfluous” things as though you can in fact actually list them.

It seems that our brains are hard wired to resist the thought that things of this sort are beyond explanation.

But a few of us come to that conclusion anyway.

Scientific knowledge is acquired through evidence that is always incomplete
So omniscience is impossible as it comes up against the problem of induction

In my view you are making a prediction about a future that you will not be around to actually confirm.

You can’t possibly know how close the human race [or an intelligent species on another planet] might come to an extant God or an extant explanation for existence.

Again, what I construe from your argument here is, above all else, a need on your part to believe that what you think you know about all of this “in your head” here and now is grounded in the certainty to which you believe it.

Human psychology in a nut shell.

But we don’t even know if, beyond all doubt, this feeling of certainty is not in turn just hard-wired into our brains by nature in a wholly determined universe.

The bottom line [mine] is that beyond the argument/assessment/analysis itself, you have no capacity to actually demonstrate that what you believe is true here is in fact true. Such that others are [through experiments, predictions, replication etc.] able to either confirm or falsify this belief.

Understanding knowledge, pursuit of wisdom, which is the process of becoming omniscient in a sense, understanding is a staircase and there is a top of the staircase, we have already experienced the top and the bottom, the point is to climb it and understand each step and not merely experience or know the step is there. To refresh our memory and understand.

How can I not understand the universe in its entirety when I am the entire universe confined to a single present moment of continuity? a collection of integrated experiences and knowledge as the very foundation of what I am existing as and conscious of.

I am part of the Universe - albeit an infinitesimal and temporary part - but it does not mean I understand what I am part of - at least not totally
But it matters not because in the grand scheme of things I am no more significant than a grain of sand in a desert or a drop of water in an ocean

Understanding yourself is understanding what you’re apart of. The path of wisdom.

The string of change goes back a long time leading up to now, we are embedded with this like dna, as well as the future. Understanding yourself is like understanding past, present and future.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

Complicating things considerably. Unless you insist that an explanation for God’s existence is included here, God explains everything else.

If not necessarily your own God.

Or one might argue that by definition existence must exist. But how specious is that with respect to existence itself? It’s really just a way of saying that we have no capacity to definitively explain existence so we’ll agree to say that it’s always been there. Which is basically the same boat that the “before the Big Bang there was nothing at all” folks are in.

In other words, you reach the end of road in regards to what your own brain can fathom and just stop there. Yes, something. Yes, nothing at all.

Or maybe not either one. Then you are falling over the edge into the sort of “metaphysical” speculation that all but makes your head explode.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

Arguments like this are often the most exasperating for most of us. Why? Because we do not possess either the background, the experience or the education necessary to fully understand it. Let alone the sophistication needed to even make the attempt to either verify or falsify it.

On the other hand, given all that is yet to be known about the 95% of the universe containing dark matter and dark energy – cosmogonic “things” we have barely just begun to understand – what does it mean even for the “experts” to speak of somethingness arising “naturally and inevitably from the operation of gravity on the quantum vacuum, empty space teeming with virtual particles that spontaneously pop into existence before disappearing again.”

That’s the part that gets some of us to grinning smirking. Sure, employ your background and intelligence to take a truly educated guess at it. But to actually imagine that you have pinned it down with your every own TOE?

Call this [here] the James S. Saint syndrome.

On this level, something and/or nothing reduces to a level that is eithwr cosmic , e.i above that which can be understood, or the invisible, that which Leibnitz indicated of the continuum of relationships as not approximate at the level of the absolute. This point defeats the theme ofnthe forum, (something or nothing), because at this level they are not differentiable not integrable.
Consciousness , thought, ideas, etc. reduce to mere words, beneath which lays the great chasm, consisting of neither, or both, unless one is bold enough to declare a separate differentiable being from mere existence.

The thema defeats it’s own conclusion, converting to it’s antithesis and becoming an eternal circularity.

And this is precisely what positive nominalsts are saying.

Sorry, double posting.

“the continuum of relationships as not approximate at the level of the absolute.”

This is crucial.

At the level of the absolute the nature of relationship is a type of contrast that is incontemplatable.

This is war in principle but can be transmuted or reversed in a way to become all usurping love.
Which is war, as not all wants to be loved in the same way, by the same absolute.

Thus compromise is, precisely because it is not divine, a necessarily thing to endure the world outside of a White Lodge.

A classic example of something instead of nothing. Though it may well mean nothing at all. :wink:

You’d have to read it to find out… :wink:

Presumably then you have. What did you find out? :wink:

Thats not a presumption which follows form any evident logic!

I may or may not have.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

This is the point I always get back to. Sure, one can imagine any number of things that might explain the existence of something rather than nothing at all. But that doesn’t explain why those things are necessarily the explanation. We always get to the point where an assumption must be made that [so far] no one appears to have either completely verified or completely falsified.

Even the minds making the assumptions themselves have been imagined in all manner of surreal contexts: sim worlds, dreams, matrixes. The embodiment of solipsism or determinism.

Aside from the origin of somethingness, what makes something anything at all?

Of course going this route allows one to use anything as the brute fact. The existence of God for example. Or the “brute fact” can be said to be that something did in fact come into existence out of nothing at all.

But that sort of thing is never really satisfying is it? And precisely because there is almost nothing of which we can’t just shrug and say, “it is what it is, let’s move on”.