Does this question keep anyone else up at night? Even God doesn't answer it because you can just ask "Why does God exist rather than no God?".
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Why is there something rather than nothing?
Finally, a religion thread.
It's not though.
Religions come with baggage and shit.
This is a straight philosophical question.
>Does this question keep anyone else up at night?
It did, until I read On Nature
http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm
Can you summarize it?
Parmenides inquires, through the path of intellect, about what all beings have in common. And what they all have in common, undeniably, is the quality of being: beings are, they exist. Beings that are not cannot be considered beings. For example: noise and light are beings; silence and darkness do not exist, they are the absence of noise and light. From this consideration, his famous principle could have arisen: being is, and non-being is not.
Parmenides says that this was revealed to him by a godess. Remember that we're talking about a homeric style poem.
Based on this principle, Parmenides derives the properties of being or reality, extracted from the logical analysis of the concept itself. Thus, being or reality is ungenerated, imperishable, and eternal: it cannot come from non-being, since non-being does not exist, nor can it dissolve into it for the same reason. Being is one, continuous, and solid: it cannot be divided into several beings, for that would require it to be separated by something different from itself, which would again imply non-being. Being or reality is identical to itself everywhere, as only non-being, which does not exist, could create discontinuities within it. Being or reality, finally, is motionless and immutable: there is nothing outside of it in which it can move, nor can it change and become something different from what it is, that is, non-being.
Because of this, Parmenides has been seen as opposed to Heraclitus. For the latter, who stated that reality is a perpetual process of change, summarized in his famous sentence: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man". This is not a polemic between them, because, although they were contemporaries, we have no evidence of contact between them, and we don't know who wrote first.
Both philosophers have only one surviving work each. Both called On Nature, and both survive incomplete, only in quotations.
There are four basic options:
-brute fact
-ex nihilo
-necessary self-existent
-modal realism
Parmenides's argument is a mere sophism, and trick of language. Pure being is contentless, and cannot whatsoever be identified with the phenomenal world.
There isn't you're just biased because the local concentration of things is high when across the universe there is a lot more nothing
nothing in the universe is nothing
Yes it is it's called a vacuum
If you were nothing you wouldn't be having this thought
So you had to be something in a place with a lot of *things
In my understanding it is basically a logical impossibility not to have a necessary being and there's reason to believe there is a will too so it's not simply some cosmic automaton/initial state Graham Oppy explanation. And besides I have independent reasons to trust my faith above all else meaning I don't even need arguments such as these. However if I was in an atheist's position I'd find no comfort whatsoever using a multiverse/cyclic universe/two infinite branes colliding/simulation/etc explanation even if they were demonstrated to be necessary that's for sure.
The vacuum in our universe has physical properties that a metaphysical nothing will not have, for example zero point energy/virtual particles, its ability to be affected by gravity, etc. Don't be fooled by Lawrence Krauss redefinition
>In my understanding it is basically a logical impossibility not to have a necessary being
Why does that logical impossibility even exist though? Why are there any rules of logic at all?
>Why are there any rules of logic at all?
As you can imagine you can't use logical rules to justify logic, that's just circular reasoning. You can go two routes with this the way I see it though, it exists independently of everything or it's built into the universe. I don't find the latter very useful to describe anything "beyond" the universe. But the previous one seems to be the case because everything we know through empiricism indicates that reality is not absolute chaos. Also we have an almost instinctual innate predisposition to identify it, it's built within ourselves. I believe that exists so we can recognize our maker. However yes if you want to reduce everything down you can even discredit the self as an illusion of a brain in a vat somewhere. Besides abandoning logic means no discussion can be had really.
>that a metaphysical nothing will not have
Anon metaphysics don't exist
is that a metaphysical claim?
Do you believe a virgin gave birth to a magical flying rabbi in the first century?
>nothing
>yes it's something
Atheists everybody. This ain't even bad jut bad philosophy as per usual you guys get more embarrassing every day
We conceptualize it as something but in reality it is nothing
Why
>According to present-day understanding of what is called the vacuum state or the quantum vacuum, it is "by no means a simple empty space".[1][2] According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of the quantum field.[3][4][5]
That's just cope
It's true tho
>reality is cope
even if you ignore quantum stuff space itself has properties such as the number of spatial dimensions, geometry/curvature, etc. it's far from nothingness
Light from the cosmos is passing through every inch of empty space in every instant. Not even close to empty.
Yep exactly there are even relic neutrinos from the time of the big bang only those who are dishonest will say vacuum is actually empty despite all these things being there.
What's outside of the universe morons that's right nothing
what do you mean by outside? space is within the universe
>what do you mean by outside?
Exactly it doesn't exist that is nothingness
Nothing exists though. Otherwise we couldn't be talking about it.
nothing exists in the universe too, along side something
go ahead, test it out
take a glass and fill it up, now it's filled with something
now pour it all out, suddenly it's filled with nothing
this is not rocket science, emptiness and fullness complete one another
you can't have one without the other
whatever you pour out of that cup is gonna be replaced with air, have you never used a cup before in your life?
How did air fill the cup, unless there was nothing in there? You can't fill something unless it's empty.
You really seem confused as to how these categories rely entirely on one another.
Emptiness is a prerequisite for being filled. Nothing is real, it's necessary for anything to exist in the first place.
>You can't fill something unless it's empty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(fluid)
You're still thinking about this as if the problem is a physical one.
It's actually metaphysical. The cup is just a metaphor meant to help you understand in terms you are familiar with.
If there is something, there *has* to be nothing. It's just how these things work.
A better question than OP. Why is there something and nothing rather than neither?
>You're still thinking about this as if the problem is a physical one.
It is a physical one, metaphors are irrelevant when they fail by themselves.
>It's just how these things work.
What law of nature is this?
>a physical one
It only appears to be physical. Your senses are imperfect, and don't present these phenomena as they really are in themselves.
That's why I specifically said you can't detect nothing with your senses. You have to use your rational faculties to understand, that's why it's a metaphysical problem.
You can't even begin to talk about concepts like "something" and "nothing" if you aren't grounding them in a metaphysical framework.
The question literally can't be addressed by physics or empiricism. You need to take a deductive approach.
>It only appears to be physical
It's literally about physical objects or lack thereof what are you on about dude? And anyway if you want metaphysics tell me what about pure nothingness (which has never been observed!) makes it so that it spawns universes.
>physical object
This is a mental category that you apply to certain sensory phenomena that enter your perceptual field.
Not a sufficient description of the thing in itself.
> pure nothingness (which has never been observed!
see
Pure "everythingness" has never been observed either. And yet still, everything exists. Including nothing.
>it spawns universes
It doesn't "spawn" universes. It's part of reality.
>This is a mental category that you apply to certain sensory phenomena that enter your perceptual field.
It's as if you want me to absorb physical objects into my mind's eye, only then you will be satisfied. I don't see why that is necessary but perhaps you can justify it
>Pure "everythingness" has never been observed either.
There is no such thing because not all mental constructs correspond to reality. What we have observed is things but never "no thing" even when we do our best to reduce the number of them.
>It doesn't "spawn" universes
That's what this whole discussion is about.
>don't see why that is necessary
"physical object" is a label you apply to your discrete sensory perceptions of reality, your brain takes a huge mass of raw sensory data and breaks it down into parcels that are more easily processed, then it basically just forgets the rest because there' just too much data
it's an idea that's useful because your brain isn't capable of processing everything all at once
but utilitarian value isn't equal to truth, physicality is a convenient delusion born of a specifically adapted sensory system
specifically adapted for just a few certain kinds of input, not every possible kind just a few
that's why you can't perceive everything, but everything is still real
if your brain was capable of parsing everything, you might have different ideas about reality
>all mental constructs correspond to reality
One of the mental constructs that doesn't entirely correspond to reality is that of "physicality". That doesn't mean mental constructs aren't real in themselves, if they weren't real you couldn't have them.
>That's what this whole discussion is about.
That's why I keep saying you're confused. Everything and nothing are both part of reality, or the "universe" as you call it.
>if your brain was capable of parsing everything, you might have different ideas about reality
Yeah I am aware human beings don't have absolute insight into reality, only God is omniscient. However that does not mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We have mental faculties to reason about reality but they'd be ultimately misguided if it were not for our limited senses which really only serve to limit the possibilities a mind may construct from its latent space. I think you are taking the wrong approach here, if you think we don't have the right tools build new ones that are better don't just abandon the 0.0001% we perceive.
> That doesn't mean mental constructs aren't real in themselves
They are real absolutely but only in the mind. Me imagining a square circle or other contradictions won't make them logical or applicable to the world.
>Everything and nothing are both part of reality, or the "universe" as you call it.
No because one is practically the universe and the other has never been observed.
I'm using "brain" kind of like I used "cup". Metaphorically.
I am aware that "brain" is just a mental construct produced by my mind as it wrestles with explaining itself while being constantly bombarded by qualia. It's not a great explanation just like "cup" isn't, but it helps to have a reference point to try and make sense of things.
>real absolutely but only in the mind
Which mind? Ideas spread between minds, yes? Or maybe the separation between minds is another delusion, and there is but one great universal mind that is reiterated. Hard to tell from this angle tbh.
>they'd be ultimately misguided if it were not for our limited senses
I think most people are limited by their senses, mentally speaking. They fall into the trap of thinking that only the things they are capable of perceiving are real, it's called materialism.
>the other has never been observed
Neither have been observed. But both exist necessarily, because as categories they inform particular instances of "something".
Realistically, dividing "everything" into "something and something else" is probably dumb. Reality is contiguous, undivided. Division happens because of the weird way we perceive realness.
>nothing is something
Yeah by definition no
Everything is nothing
>We conceptualize it as something but in reality it is nothing
That's just philosophically naïve and misleading
It's a meaningless question; why would it bother you is beyond me
There can't be an answer. If you take the totality of existence and ask "why is this?" the answer has to either be something outside existence or something inside. If it's inside, you're going to hit circularity, which provides no real answer; if it's outside then it's not real and therefore can't cause anything.
Things require explanations because of whatever larger framework they exist in. For example you have to explain why the Pythagorean Theorem is true within the framework of mathematics, why World War I happened within the framework of human history. Note that in these two cases, the appropriate types of explanation are very different; you can't give a deductive argument that explains why World War I happened, you have to give a historical explanation. Since existence itself doesn't exist in a larger framework, it doesn't require any explanation, nor is there any type of explanation that would be sufficient for it.
There is an outside framework though. If this universe operates on causality then the higher framework is non-causality. So the universe exists for non-causal reasons, which is to say, without a cause at all. Order emerges from chaos
Causality is irrelevant to existence he is right, why? Because that is a property of things that exist and not existence itself. You can have a thing that exists for non-causal reasons or one with a causal reason.
Causality is an illusion. There are no causes so your question makes a false assumption. Feel free to ask questions.
There shouldn't be, but there is no capacity in which we could evaluate that something is or is not unless something was. Thus, whatever improbabilities were required to make something instead of nothing must have occurred.
I don't know.
All I know with any real certainty that there is than not is and that we are here with it.
>IQfytard discovers 0/0=1
a vacuum is not nothing
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/ thread
You have it mixed up, OP.
Something and nothing aren't mutually exclusive. Both nothing and something exist as real things.
Even if you can't see, touch, taste, hear, or smell nothing, it's still real. It has to be.
Asking why there is something *rather than* nothing is to frame the problem incorrectly. There is *both* something and nothing.
Your senses are adapted to detecting a very limited set of certain things that exist, not everything. And not nothing.
Nothing is just as real as everything, the fact that your senses can't detect everything doesn't mean everything isn't real. Same deal with nothing.
Everything and nothing are metaphysical categories, intelligible by our rational mind. But not our senses.
Perhaps something and nothing are just very remedial ways that we interpret existence. That we can't actually fathom what true existence is, so asking questions about it is like an ant attempting to ponder general relativity.
I found reading the Dao de Jing once really helped me get my head around how nothing is essential to how the universe operates.
Just a recommendation.
Think about it this way.
All the excess sensory data that your brain doesn't store and use, where does it go? Does it just filter out through your skull? That would be weird.
Instead, maybe consider the possibility that nothing is real and permeates ubiquitously through all of reality. And that all the sensory data that your brain doesn't turn into a perceptual field just empties itself naturally into that nothingness.
Good luck measuring that.
Here's what keeps me up at night.
Why do we perceive anything at all in the first place? It seems completely superfluous to me, not serving any real purpose.
We don't need to *feel* pain in order for our nervous system to function normally and reactions to occur, for learning avoidance to happen. These things happen automatically, but we perceive pain in a way that's completely disconnected from that deterministic process.
Does a car need to perceive things to run, or a clock to tick? No, of course not. So why do we need to perceive things to preform human functions?
Couldn't all of this just happen without feeling it, without consciousness?
>It seems completely superfluous to me, not serving any real purpose.
>Couldn't all of this just happen without feeling it, without consciousness?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Of course it could, and if anything it's very weird that such a wasteful process running on meatware would ever be selected for naturally. I mean the brain is like the most power hungry organ in the body so going for efficiency here should be selected for. Certainly other bodily processes usually strive for peak efficiency
It is so weird bro, I get actual anxiety thinking about this shit sometimes.
>Why is there something rather than nothing?
I don't know. Science doesn't yet know. It's like asking "what is the scientific theory of everything, given that our current theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics are not compatible with each other?". As I say, the answer is "we don't know yet". This is why it's important to carry out more scientific research, so that we can learn more.