[HN Gopher] Why does anything exist?
___________________________________________________________________
Why does anything exist?
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 101 points
Date : 2022-08-10 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| whoisjuan wrote:
| Our minds can only interpret the universe through a binary model,
| but that doesn't mean that the universe conforms to our binary
| interpretation of it.
|
| "Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're
| capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly
| accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no
| dualistic nature.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| My problem with this attitude is what even are you talking
| about? Suppose we "abandon our rational mind" for a moment and
| sojourn into the irrational. How the heck are we supposed to
| take anything back from that experience and into the world of
| discourse? Presumably there is much more bullshit in the
| endless tracks of irrationality than truth and whatever
| mechanism by which we choose to carry ideas back clearly can't
| distinguish the two as it has abandoned anything like
| epistemology. So what is the point of even talking about it?
| whoisjuan wrote:
| First, assuming that the universe is an absolute system
| doesn't mean we can't build models to interpret its nature
| through binary interpretations. In the same way that a map is
| not the territory, a mental model for the universe isn't the
| universe.
|
| So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical
| mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong
| question, and we should reframe what we understand as
| absolute or relative.
|
| You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for
| irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the
| universe and the debates about its origins are often based on
| ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific
| truisms.
|
| The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our
| standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed
| esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that
| could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I still don't really get it. Not all ideas which disagree
| with or go beyond the current best scientific models of the
| universe are considered non-scientific or esoteric (if this
| were the case scientific progress would be impossible).
|
| How about this: state explicitly what strategies beyond
| empiricism, model building, ontology refinement, and
| epistemological reasoning you think can provide genuine
| verifiable insight about the world?
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I'm not stating that any of those strategies are the
| wrong approach to interpreting the world.
|
| I'm saying that when those strategies are applied
| axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we
| know about the world because there's a general feeling
| that doing so will undo all scientific progress.
|
| Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics
| debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that
| the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people
| want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through
| some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether
| or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory
| of everything may emerge from a completely different
| interpretation of the world. One that is rationally
| contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell
| us.
|
| And this brings me back to my original argument, which is
| that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the
| world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| there is much wrong with this post, I'm embarrassed to respond
| to it. Our minds don't interpret the world through a binary
| model. Abandoning your rational mind means what exactly?
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Look at the rest of the debate below the original answer, and
| maybe you will get an idea of what I meant.
|
| My choice of words shouldn't be the basis for attacking my
| points, especially since there's more context in this very
| same thread that expands on my ideas.
|
| Maybe instead of coming against me with an incendiary
| comment, make an effort to gain more insight into my views
| and add some value to the discussion. Again, my choice of
| words might be the wrong articulation of my ideas, but you
| just need to ask politely, and I will gladly expand and try
| to find better words.
|
| Also, if you're embarrassed to respond, then why did you?
| Please read the Hacker News guidelines if you forgot about
| them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| humanistbot wrote:
| I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default instance of
| nothing:
|
| Physics: No energy: the vacuum
|
| Geometry: No dimensionality: a point
|
| Set theory: No elements: the empty set
|
| Arithmetic: No magnitude: zero
|
| Information theory: No information: zero bits
|
| Then they ask: "There is an unlimited number of possible
| theoretical systems. Does this mean there are also unlimited
| conceptions of nothing?"
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I would answer that there is surely a single supreme
| nothingness, such as Wuji[0], which would contain all sets of
| nothingness.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuji_%28philosophy%29
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default
| instance of nothing:
|
| > Physics: No energy: the vacuum
|
| And not being aware of the difference can lead one to dumbly
| misunderstand the question with confidence (e.g. some physicist
| explaining how the universe could have arisen out of "nothing,"
| when they're really explaining how it could have arisen out of
| a vacuum, which metaphysically is definitely a _something_ ).
| Pixelbrick wrote:
| A concise treatment of all of metaphysics... :)
| jesuslop wrote:
| There is a known old argument in St. Anslem, Leibnitz and Godel
| for that in a pantheistic picture. Godel adopted higher order
| modal logic, and factors the question via the axiom 'if possible
| then actual' (god/reality existence). I'm now pleased to discover
| that in 2017 someone has went through the pains of porting the
| thing to a proof verifier, Isabelle/HOL (they start from Melvin
| Fitting reconstruction of the idea in 1999).
|
| [1]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317956529_Types_Tab...
| funwie wrote:
| Because everything else exist
| superb-owl wrote:
| I love the "math, matter, mind" trinity. I think it originates
| with Penrose - I first came across it in The Road to Reality.
|
| I wrote a bit about it (incidentally) here:
| https://superbowl.substack.com/i/65186479/metacognitive-trut...
| vehemenz wrote:
| As a philosopher, I recommend that anyone read up on ontological
| anti-realism before they get too invested in the answer to
| questions like these.
|
| Carnap and Quine (to say nothing of Kant) wrote extensively about
| the problems that arise when treating metaphysical "existence" as
| a predicate.
|
| There are strong reasons to adopt ontological anti-realism. I'm
| amused when folks muse extensively in the ontological mode
| without addressing the elephant in the room--most of it is likely
| nonsense.
| tobrien6 wrote:
| I see how your response makes sense in terms of questions like
| "why does an electron exist", but what about the general notion
| of existence? It seems self-evident that there is something,
| even just experience. I interpreted the question as more "why
| something rather than nothing" which seems coherent.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I don't really follow. I interpret "there is" and "something"
| as quantifications, not predicates. What would be the
| predicate here?
|
| The general notion of existence, at least in natural
| language, seems to be a shorthand for quantification or
| negation. I'm not sure what it would mean for "existence" to
| exist, short of adopting Platonism or some bizarre
| metaphysical system.
|
| The "something rather than nothing" question, if stated
| coherently, would likely be beyond the scope of human
| knowledge. Although ultimately I don't think it can be stated
| in a way that makes sense.
| tobrien6 wrote:
| Experience exists. Whether the contents of the experience
| are "real" or "not real", it is not coherent to claim that
| there is truly nothing at all -- what could even cause one
| to come to that conclusion if there's nothing at all?
| Platonism is one of the few (only?) games in town in terms
| of potential ability to furnish answers here (a Popperian
| scientific method has well-defined boundaries on the scope
| of explanatory power) -- and the more indications we get
| that physics can be derived from number theory and
| combinatorics, the more seriously I think it will be taken
| as a research topic. A more formally developed Platonism
| would also potentially be able to address the "something
| rather than nothing" question.
|
| Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question
| doesn't make sense?
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Carnap and Quine both argue that treating metaphysical
| "existence" as a predicate leads to a number of problems. In
| particular, they argue that it is not possible to know what
| exists independently of our own perceptions and experiences.
| This means that any claims about the existence of things beyond
| our own experience are necessarily speculative and cannot be
| known for certain.
| 6510 wrote:
| even funnier: If there are non zero odds for something to arise
| out of nothing the amount of nothing has disturbing consequences.
| It must happen infinity often, it always did and will continue
| forever.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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 (and other sorts of
| mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions
| of regularities we see in nature.
|
| Mathematics is nothing but the observation of regularities in
| certain sorts of elaborate rituals involving making markings on
| paper. Many of those rituals are inspired by and correlated with
| regularities which exist in the world, but its difficult to me to
| see any reason to believe that they have an independent
| existence.
| kcl wrote:
| > 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| You're right, of course, that this is an open question. But
| the posted article saunters about the fields of an incredibly
| deep question by glibly asserting idealism about mathematical
| structures. It is an awfully weak foundation upon which to
| build an answer to such a fundamental question.
|
| It is _at least_ plausible that numbers supervene upon
| existence and not the other way around, which makes the
| entire exercise in the article seem suspect in its
| presentation, at the very least.
|
| Would you _really_ say that the case for mathematical
| idealism is that strong? The Philpapers survey seems to
| suggest philosophers are approximately evenly split on this
| question (idealists at 39%, nominalists at 38%).
| crdrost wrote:
| 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.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Nice that you can step out of the frame and see your
| motivations. I write this because I think that your self
| knowledge is virtuous and like a moth to a flame I am drawn
| to the good. By identifying with the good or ingesting it
| like knowledge candy - I can come closer to this platonic
| concept that my nervous system so craves.
|
| I can no more step outside of my own seeking than a wave can
| stand up from the ocean and make its way in land.
|
| Pointless. All of it.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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."
| tresqotheq wrote:
| define "existence"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I suppose this kind of thing is fun to think about, but this kind
| of claim, which appears to be the main one, is metaphysical, not
| scientific, in that it appears to make no testable predictions,
| as far as I can see:
|
| > "Mathematical truth implies the existence of all computations.
| The existence of all computations implies the existence of all
| observers. The existence of all observers leads to a quantum
| mechanical reality populated with all possibilities and ruled by
| simple laws."
|
| Extra points to the author for including a link to Eugene
| Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the
| Natural Sciences" (1960). For convenience:
|
| https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
| twanschik wrote:
| Quantamagazin actually has an article that seems to fit perfectly
| into the discussion:
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-physics-of-nothing-un...
| [deleted]
| forty wrote:
| 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 :)
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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...).
| triyambakam wrote:
| > The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less
| than the mystery with which science leaves us
|
| As a Hindu I find this baffling. For the Hindu there is a
| consistency across science and religion, and sometimes the line
| between the two isn't clear. They work together harmoniously to
| form my worldview.
|
| Based on the cursory information I have about the author's
| background, I am assuming he was exposed to Western Christianity
| growing up.
|
| I find that this breeds a very narrow minded form of atheism, one
| that rejects a very specific idea of what God is.
|
| I have a suspicion that if many of the atheists in the West were
| exposed to the full metaphysical understanding of the Eternal
| Dharma they may not be atheists, or at least be a different kind
| of atheist than simply a Not-Christian.
|
| In Hinduism God is not a man or a woman, but instead the energy
| that is manifest in every atom of every universe. God is the
| universal wave function.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's true of Christianity, as well:
|
| The philosophy of Christianity is rooted deeply in Platonic
| ideas -- where "God" as the ultimate ideal is embodied both in
| a human ("Jesus") and in the happening of the world ("Holy
| Spirit").
|
| I can't claim to be an expert in Hinduism -- but to my limited
| understanding, it's akin to saying that Brahman manifests both
| through avatars and the actions of deities, as forces of
| nature.
| uh_uh wrote:
| Same question remains: why does that energy exist?
| packetlost wrote:
| Assigning a personification to a _concept_ is a common theme
| among _many_ religions throughout the world. To that end,
| Christianity and those based on it are more of an outlier than
| the norm.
| atwood22 wrote:
| I had a shower thought the other day: clearly conservation of
| energy is just a guideline and not a fundamental law. Otherwise,
| how could anything exist?
| Victerius wrote:
| A former physics professor of mine said that energy was not in
| fact conserved in the Universe because the expansion of the
| Universe consumed the energy. The total available mass-energy
| in the Universe is decreasing over time.
| [deleted]
| ryandvm wrote:
| Well... conservation of energy is just a law within our
| universe. Everything in here is energy, e=mc^2 and all that.
|
| But the creation of our universe definitely involved some
| process that dumped a shit ton of energy into a very small
| space about 14 billion years ago.
| awb wrote:
| Or, a prior universe collapsing in a "big crunch" and then
| re-exploding back into existence. Or two objects colliding.
| But those theories just push the moment of creation back
| farther in time and the question is still relevant where
| those objects came from.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Good book on this topic by Jim Holt:
|
| "Why Does the World Exist? (An Existential Detective Story)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Does_the_World_Exist%3F
| efitz wrote:
| Does "cause" exist?
|
| I didn't spend the hours reading the entire article, but after
| 10-15min I realized that the author has adopted a "caused" vs.
| "uncaused" taxonomy, without really defining what "caused" means.
|
| Does causality exist or is it simply an observational phenomenon
| that is a side effect of our limited perception of space-time?
| Kind of like "centrifugal force" is an observational phenomenon.
|
| Maybe there is no such thing as causality, and we can never know
| "why stuff exists" because we are incapable of perceiving the
| answer.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| There is no single answer to this question as it is a matter of
| philosophical and religious debate. Some schools of thought,
| such as Buddhism, accept the existence of cause and effect,
| while others, such as some forms of skepticism, deny or
| question its existence.
| breuleux wrote:
| I think it's kind of silly to expect that a satisfactory answer
| to that question exists. Given that there is an infinite number
| of possible ways the universe could have been ("nothing" being
| just one of these possibilities), pretty much all of these
| possibilities are vanishingly improbable, including whichever one
| them eventually obtains. So I think that "it is what it is", or
| "it is arbitrary" is a perfectly reasonable answer to why our
| universe exists. To put it a different way, I don't see why
| existence couldn't be necessarily arbitrary, or what is repugnant
| about that notion.
|
| I only skimmed the article, but from what I can see they advocate
| the mathematical universe theory. To me, that's just a
| metaphysical choice that does not really add any useful
| information: it is arbitrarily solving the issue by making every
| consistent universe exist with probability 1, which strikes me as
| little more than a parlor trick. If there are 100 balls in a box,
| I draw one, and it has the number 23 on it, I don't think "there
| are 100 parallel universes, one where I draw ball one, one where
| I draw ball two, and so on" is a more compelling explanation than
| "there is one universe and I happened to draw ball 23". I would
| still want to know why I am in universe 23. Maybe (probably)
| there is no answer, except that it is what it is.
| ptmvp wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Tycho wrote:
| In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of
| physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever.
| As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws
| of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed
| come from nothing - what's to stop it?
| [deleted]
| vehemenz wrote:
| The laws of physics are true; why do they need to "exist"?
| themodelplumber wrote:
| They are internally true; why do ? need to physics laws?
| fluoridation wrote:
| Are the states of the laws of physics being true and them
| "existing", distinct?
| vehemenz wrote:
| Yes. One is a statement that describes the world, the other
| is an ontological claim about what "exists" (whatever that
| means).
|
| What is added by saying the laws of physics "exist"? Note
| that we already know they are true.
| victor- wrote:
| I wonder if the first part of the statement is true actually.
| What if the laws of interaction between space, energy and
| matter were poured in along with the space, energy and matter
| itself?
| Tycho wrote:
| I suppose that amounts to the same thing as what I'm saying.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I have a better question: Why does everything move, _forever_?
| Newton 's first law is bewildering when you stop to think about
| it.
|
| From the smallest subatomic particle on up, matter and energy are
| always moving, both through the universe, as well as within
| matter itself. Gluons are constantly bopping back and forth among
| the quarks that make up nucleons, electrons zip around from atom
| to atom, photons fly off on infinite voyages. The Voyager space
| probes will never stop unless something stops it.
|
| Why? Seems like a fundamental question. Imagine if we discovered
| the Ultimate Frame Of Reference and were able to lock an atom in
| 3D space, completely removing its momentum? The first discovery
| might blow a hole in the side of a mountain as a single stopped
| atom suddenly gets hit by the Earth at whatever insane speed it's
| moving through the universe. It'd be the ultimate kinetic energy
| weapon.
| jawns wrote:
| If 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 sides. In contrast, not
| every square you encounter will be blue or tiny. Those are
| contingent properties of a square. A square may be blue, or it
| may not be. A square may be tiny, or it may not be.
|
| Now, would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or
| contingent? If its existence is necessary, it would mean that
| there is no possible way for our universe not to exist. If its
| existence is contingent, then our universe either could exist, or
| it could not.
|
| I happen to think it's contingent. But if our universe is
| contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is
| necessary. Regardless of whether you view that necessary thing as
| God or something else, if you agree that the universe is
| contingent, then the contingency doesn't stop at its creation;
| its continued existence is also contingent.
|
| So, beyond needing a "first cause" to explain its existence (as
| with a picture on a painted canvas), our universe requires a
| "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).
| otikik wrote:
| > But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent
| upon something that is necessary
|
| You say that as if it was a obvious why, but to me that looks
| like a baseless assumption. The way I see it, if our universe
| is contingent, then _that's all we can know_ , the journey
| ends, there's nothing else we can deduce. I simply can't
| "assume" that there's a "necessary substrate" just ... because.
| eldenwrong wrote:
| Everything we can observe in this universe has a cause and
| effect. The first cause is God.
| tmountain wrote:
| Theology fits comfortably with our intuitive perception of
| time, but that doesn't make it the definitive answer.
| logicchop wrote:
| It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The
| "sustainment" question is different from the "causal"
| question. Causal questions are typically temporal and
| past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now",
| always.
| hydrolox wrote:
| 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.
| logicchop wrote:
| That is the whole point of God as an explanation. God is
| where the buck stops on contingency. God is necessary.
| caloriesdont wrote:
| >Sure you can say something is required but it's rather
| arbitrary.
|
| It's only arbitrary if there aren't good reasons.
|
| Dozens of reasons have been given in philosophy, it's up to
| you to decide if any of them work.
|
| One of the big differences would be to point out that the
| universe is completely composite, whereas a foundation could
| be purely simple.
|
| Josh Rasmussen is a great communicator about this!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX79xXgi44o&ab_channel=TheUn.
| ..
| teolandon wrote:
| 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?
| logicchop wrote:
| Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-
| dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent
| things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why
| X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question
| (e.g., "ok, why Y?").
| jawns wrote:
| The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents a brief
| overview that addresses some of the questions you raise:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
| teolandon wrote:
| No it does not.
| caloriesdont wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHEIA-20
| packetlost wrote:
| I personally think that time, and all dimensions (including
| the 3 that we typically thing of as "space") are simply
| caused by a few axioms: there is the concept of "something
| else" (that is, 1 != 0, there is at least 2 possibilities);
| there is "something" of which can we in at least 1 of those 2
| possible states, but not both; there is something to a way in
| which the answer to the question of state can be known; there
| is cause -> effect. When taken to the infinite complexity,
| you end up with coalescing densities of state all of which
| cannot be simultaneously true and there fore
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Check out Sunyata:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
|
| Here's how Mitta summarized that page: "The term 'nyat' is
| used in Early Buddhism to refer to the emptiness of all
| things. This emptiness is seen as a meditative state, an
| attribute of objects, and a type of awareness-release. The
| term is used to emphasize the deceptive nature of all things,
| and to show that they are all ultimately worthlessness and
| vacuous."
|
| Now we ask it directly to compare it to a monitor (I'm
| pastel-mature-herring):
|
| pastel-mature-herring~> Discuss this likening emptiness to a
| blank computer monitor.
|
| victorious-capuchin*> One way to think of emptiness is to
| liken it to a blank computer monitor. Just as a blank monitor
| contains the potential for any image to be displayed on it,
| so too does emptiness contain the potential for any and all
| things to arise within it. Just as a monitor cannot display
| any image without the proper input, so too does emptiness
| require the right conditions in order to give rise to
| anything. And just as a monitor will eventually return to its
| blank state when the input is removed, so too will things
| eventually return to emptiness when the conditions that gave
| rise to them are no longer present.
|
| pastel-mature-herring~> And if someone understands this, what
| does that say about them?
|
| victorious-capuchin*> If someone understands that emptiness
| is like a blank computer monitor, it suggests that they
| understand that everything is ultimately emptiness and that
| everything is ultimately impermanent. This understanding can
| lead to a sense of detachment from the things of the world,
| and can ultimately lead to a state of liberation from
| suffering.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> would you say that our universe 's existence is necessary or
| contingent?_
|
| Neither. "Necessary" and "contingent" apply to properties, but
| existence is not a property. It's a quantifier.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to write that and explain the
| concepts so clearly.
|
| How do you know that concepts/categories like "necessary" and
| "contingent" apply to the universe? Specifically, if the
| universe is everythibg that there ever is or ever will be, how
| can it be contingent upon something external to itself?
|
| Could it not be the case that there concepts come from a
| causality-based view of reality that may be far from
| universally applicable?
| caloriesdont wrote:
| > Specifically, if the universe is everything that there ever
| is or ever will be, how can it be contingent upon something
| external to itself?
|
| It would be contingent upon a necessary foundation within the
| universe.
|
| So there is one specific part in the universe that is
| necessary, and everything else around that is contingent.
| cpr wrote:
| It can't be contingent on something necessary within
| itself. Within means being part of the contingency.
| caloriesdont wrote:
| Hmm, I don't see the problem -
|
| Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one
| thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that
| necessary foundation.
|
| What's the issue?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Everything in the universe is contingent, except for
| one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that
| necessary foundation.
|
| How do you know this?
| smitty1e wrote:
| How do we know anything, and how do we deem the human
| mind a suitable tool for ascertaining the result?
|
| At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to
| the mind, and the tension was lowered.
| jawns wrote:
| I think "universe" is an ambiguous word that is not helpful
| when we talk about this stuff. Like, for instance, you've
| probably heard of multiverse theory, where there is not just
| one universe, but many. In which case, "universe" means the
| subset of physical reality that we are a part of. Maybe there
| are other universes that truly exist, but there's no door
| between ours and theirs.
|
| So maybe we can more precisely talk about all of physical
| reality, regardless of whether they exist in our universe or
| an alternative universe, or a realm that exists outside of
| the universe but influences or produces the material of the
| universe. Clearly, that includes all material things
| themselves, but might also encompass the non-material but
| very real and observable physical laws that govern how
| reality operates.
|
| How can there be something outside of that physical reality?
| Well ... the Greeks had a word for that: meta-physics. And
| generally, when it is posited that something necessary exists
| (whether it be God or something else), that necessary thing
| exists metaphysically. So yes, as you are suggesting, a
| distinction does need to be made between physical reality and
| metaphysical reality for it to make sense that the universe
| (comprising only physical reality) is contingent.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture
| on a TV set).
|
| The movie doesn't cease to exist because you turned the
| television off, only the _projection_ of it into those
| particular photons.
|
| Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray
| of it into tiny pieces, crush those pieces to powder, and melt
| the result into a formless goo.
|
| Movies are purely information, a sequence of bits. Those bits
| can have _manifestations_ such as copies on a hard drive, blu
| ray, or whatever. The bit sequence doesn 't stop existing just
| because we delete every manifestation. A sequence of bits is
| _just a very big number_ , and all numbers continue to exist
| whether we write them down or not. We can _discover_ specific
| interesting numbers, such as the number 'T' that is the H.264
| encoding of the Top Gun Blu Ray movie. It is 40 billion bits
| long, but it's still just a number. It has adjacent numbers,
| integer factors, and everything.
|
| Here's the thing: the number 'T' existed _before Tom Cruise was
| born_. It existed before the evolution of humanity and will
| exist after the heat death of physical universe. It exists
| _independent_ of time. It didn 't come into existence at any
| point in time, or "before" time, or any nonsense like that.
|
| Similarly, if[1] you believe that the universe follows strict,
| mathematical laws of physics[2], then you can imagine it as
| pure information, like a Mandelbrot set. Fractals in fact might
| be a very good analogy. They're actually very simple things,
| exist independent of time, and yet can produce intricate detail
| if you look closely. That detail may appear chaotic, but
| "seems" to follow oddly consistent rules, much like physics.
|
| So this is my point of view: The Universe is "just"
| mathematics, and mathematics exists independent of time, making
| the Universe necessary. As in-universe observers, we're part of
| the mathematics, not any particular manifestation or
| representation of it. Even if there were some sort of God
| scribbling the bits down on a napkin that represent the state
| of the Universe, he's _discovering_ the numbers, not creating
| them. If he destroys the napkin, the bits will not cease to
| exist. Inside the universe, we would never know anything had
| occurred.[3]
|
| [1] Granted, this is a "if"!
|
| [2] The more we know about the universe, the more this seems to
| be true.
|
| [3] This entire point of view is the main theme of the book
| _Diaspora_ by Greg Egan, which I highly recommend.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Diaspora is an extraordinary book and I second your
| recommendation, but I didn't think of that as one of its
| primary themes. Although it does fit.
| prmph wrote:
| Interesting point of view, but a few caveats:
|
| - I don't think it can be taken for granted that math exists
| independent of consciousness to think of it.
|
| - Even if math exists independent of time and consciousness,
| it need not have a physical manifestation (by your own
| logic). So why does a physical universe have to exist?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Physics _is_ the equation, not a scribble of one on a dead
| tree.
| thethirdone wrote:
| Why do you assume the physical universe is a manifestation?
|
| The Mandelbrot set exists and contains self reference
| without any need for it to be graphed (a manifestation).
| Similarly the universe as we experience it may exist
| without any physical manifestation.
| Animats wrote:
| Why does anything exist? Funding.
| kloch wrote:
| 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.
| weatherlite wrote:
| I still occasionally cry myself to sleep and I'm nearing 40...
| dieselgate wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| one of the only question i want an answer from smartest people
| on earth
| lordleft wrote:
| To generate value for the shareholders, silly.
| [deleted]
| frogpelt wrote:
| Steven Wright said, "You can't have everything. Where would you
| put it?"
|
| When I told this to a friend he answered, "Everywhere."
| EMM_386 wrote:
| If you like questions like this, you'll probably enjoy the Closer
| to Truth series. All of its episodes since 1999 are on YouTube.
|
| With regards to "why something rather than nothing", here's an
| article on the "levels of nothing". Even if there were to be no
| universe, no laws, etc ... could mathematics still exist?
|
| https://www.closertotruth.com/articles/levels-nothing-robert...
| abetusk wrote:
| Turing Machine Equivalence is the norm, not the exception.
| Pixeleen wrote:
| I 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I happen to believe it is because God willed the universe
| into existence._
|
| Ah yes, Phanes.
| 93po wrote:
| Hey, don't undersell Chronos and Ananke
| xylifyx wrote:
| Why does something exist? There is an easy answer: Because it
| can.
|
| Similar to the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics.
| All possibilities exist. Both a something and a nothing.
| 93po wrote:
| Why can something exist?
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Cool to see this. I'm interested in orthogonal models that
| provide different types of leverage in the same broad arena of
| thought. Replacements for "exist", "real", even "dream,"
| "simulation," etc.
|
| IOW words or phrases that skip the rather prominent liabilities
| of those same (tired?) words/models but also work well at such a
| global scope and scaffold nicely.
|
| Thanks for posting.
| [deleted]
| a-r-t wrote:
| Because even the concept of nothing is something.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| That discussion is among the largest cans of worms.
| yes_man wrote:
| 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 of anything imaginable. Some of the waves become more and
| more complex, until in very rare cases structure and rules form
| within the wave function itself. Akin to Conway's Game of Life.
| So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are
| just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of "every possible
| wavestate".
|
| All the peculiarities like dimensions are illusions the same way
| a multidimensional array to a computer is ultimately just one-
| dimensional, with logic to treat it as multi-dimensional.
|
| I also like the explanation that concept of nothingness is
| categorically invalid because there clearly is existence (or is
| there? Maybe this is the ultimate "nothing"?), but the theory of
| all possible states sounds even better.
|
| Definitely not claiming this is true but intuitively feels like
| the best explanation for this existence... that this universe
| with all its laws is a rare sub-tree of all possible states of a
| simple oscillator. Other universes with other laws exist further
| up the tree in its other branches. In between, voids and vacuums
| and undeterministic universes
| enw wrote:
| > So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind
| are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of "every
| possible wavestate".
|
| Wow!
|
| This is very similar to what I experienced when I accidentally
| ingested a large amount of psilocybin (and went to ER just in
| case, it was the most terrifying experience of my life).
|
| This is what I wrote in my notes post the bad trip:
|
| "I felt a disconnection from my self and could see the fabric
| of existence, that life is an inconceivably large tree of
| choices that forms the current state of the universe among an
| infinite amount of universes (for each infinitesimal choice)"
|
| e.g. I "felt" that there is a sibling branch in this tree of
| choices in which the universe is a slight modification of the
| current one. But curiously even when my whole personality
| disassociated from my "self", there was a "foundation" of my
| consciousness always attached to the current existence, and to
| it all parts of my personality that form my consciousness
| (id/superego/whatever) eventually converged once I got back
| normal.
| DantesKite wrote:
| 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 all these possible rules. Or, in other words, if these
| rules "exist" then it follows that so will our universe.
|
| But what does it mean for rules to "exist", and in particular
| for all possible rules to exist? The key point, I believe, is
| that it's in a sense an abstract necessity. The set of all
| possible rules is something purely formal. It can be
| represented in an infinite number of ways. But it's always
| there, existing as an abstract thing, completely independent of
| any particular instantiation.
|
| It's crucial that we're talking about all possible rules. If we
| were talking about particular rules, then we'd need to specify
| which rules those are, and we'd need a whole language and
| structure for doing that. But that's not our situation. We're
| talking about all possible rules. We can construct some
| explicit symbolic representation for these rules, but the
| deductions we make ultimately won't depend on this; they would
| work the same whatever representation we chose to construct.
|
| We might have assumed that to get our universe we'd need some
| definite input, some specific information. But what we're
| discovering is that our universe is in some sense like a
| tautology; it's something that has to be the way it is just
| because of the definition of terms. In effect, it exists
| because it has to, or in a sense because everything about it is
| a "logical inevitability", with no choice about anything."
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...
| humanistbot wrote:
| 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.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| How so?
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| This all-states model has a lot of impact in relevance to
| claims like "belief systems generally have a knob you can turn
| to point at (and accommodate) any desired outcome/belief".
|
| It seems like a good idea to move away from such a reality
| model in that case. Ideally to replace it with either several
| good plugins or a new metamodel which can encompass its
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| I.e. reality can be a helpful term to describe "I found a new
| and helpful perspective for looking at a thing." That's a big
| strength and one commonly seen as people migrate between
| beliefs.
| trebbble wrote:
| 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." <- sure seems like you could have
| simply applied that last answer to the first question and it'd
| be exactly as useful and valid.
|
| "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.
| yes_man wrote:
| I guess you are right. Maybe it's more of a way to get in
| sane terms with the question.
|
| On that note though it definitely feels more logical and
| harmonious concept than "God did it". But I do get your point
| function_seven wrote:
| There is something about this that at least partially
| satisfies the question, in that it simplifies as you go one
| level up.
|
| With the "God did it" explanation, something vastly _more_
| complex and inscrutable is required (i.e. God) to make the
| explanation work. With this explanation, there is but a
| simple wave that splits on its possible oscillations. Our
| existence is on one of these.
|
| No explanation will ever find the "bottom turtle." There will
| always be space for another "why?" question. The interesting
| part is probably more to do with the "asker" this question
| rather than the answer to it. That we have this capacity to
| think abstractly about this is, to me, more mind-blowing than
| the nature of existence itself.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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 "why
| is it this way rather than some other way?" It's not some
| paradox or contradiction that there will never be an end to
| this series of explanations and questions, and any claim that
| there _is_ an end is the bad kind of "appeal to the divine"!!
| breuleux wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't think the length of the explanation is very
| relevant, and finding shorter explanations doesn't seem
| like a primary concern. Explanations should be judged on
| what problems they solve and how well they stand up to
| criticism and competing explanations. And since I don't
| think any explanation can be "final" or "100% true" or
| "guaranteed" or anything like that, the notion of a
| shortest possible explanation doesn't even make much
| sense.
| trebbble wrote:
| True if the level you shift it up to has some further
| explanatory value and/or can be demonstrated or proven in
| some fashion. If it's just "well, it _might_ be this thing
| that we can 't prove" then, until you've turned that notion
| into something you can test or at least support with
| observations, it's just "god did it".
|
| I think "there's something rather than nothing because the
| set of all possible waves exists... like, somewhere" is
| roughly identical to "god did it", as opposed to, say, a
| hypothesis that things fall and planets orbit due to a
| universal force that causes matter to attract other matter,
| even if both just prompt another "why?" You can go _do
| stuff_ with the latter--not so much with the former, which
| is more of a dodge than even a partial explanation.
|
| A good test might be whether you can apply the answer to
| _any_ "why?" that lacks an existing answer, with exactly
| the same utility and validity in every case. Take the
| example of the question suggested by the explanation of
| universal gravitation:
|
| "OK, why does _gravity_ exist, then? "
|
| "God did it / that's just what our little corner of the set
| of all possible waves happens to look like"
|
| There's simply no specificity to them, and they amount to
| "just because".
| jpeter wrote:
| Does somebody now what the author is up to now. I have been
| waiting for a new article for over a year
| 93po wrote:
| Assuming his LinkedIn isn't full of hot air, he's probably
| retired. I don't see any online presence in the past year
| though.
| skeltoac wrote:
| Logged in to say something about how the question is based on a
| false dichotomy, but now I think it better just to say nothing.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Tl;DR
|
| > Why does anything exist?
|
| > Because necessity requires logical laws; logical laws imply
| incontrovertible truth; such truth includes mathematical truth;
| mathematical truth defines numbers; numbers possess number
| relations; number relations imply equations; equations define
| computable relations; computable relations define all
| computations; all computations include algorithmically generated
| observers; and these observers experience apparent physical
| realities.
|
| I'm not convinced. Does anyone follow this?
| jorjordandan wrote:
| I had a mushroom trip that made this all make sense (at the
| time). The gist of it was, there was never nothing. Nothing is a
| made up concept. It's deeply valuable, but there is no instance
| of any kind of nothing that actually exists. There is only
| "exists". The most basic form of existence is change. Even if
| there had been nothing, and something came from it, in order for
| something to come from it, there would first need to have been
| some change. So regardless of how it could have started, change
| has to be the first thing. But in my opinion, recursive cycles is
| a more likely explanation than a linear universe with a start and
| end that are both in 'nothing'. I'm posting this nonsense tongue
| in cheek but.. I don't think it's completely wrong.
| 93po wrote:
| A big chunk the posted article addresses this exact topic:
| https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#A_Self-Exi...
| emerged wrote:
| greenonions wrote:
| Mushroom origins or no, I completely agree.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| My favorite cyclic theory so far is probably Roger Penrose's
| conformal cyclic cosmology. In essence the universe keeps
| expanding exponentially which in the end becomes equivalent to
| a new big bang since the universe at that point will loose all
| notions of scale due to their being no more particles to drive
| scale. A much better explanation is given here
| https://youtu.be/FVDJJVoTx7s
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _For most of history, the question remained beyond the
| possibility of being answered. But we live in a most-exciting
| point in time: one where this question has fallen to the progress
| of human knowledge._
|
| > _[...]_
|
| > _We now have viable answers to great questions of existence:_
|
| > _[...]_
|
| > _It required us to assume math, rather than matter, is
| fundamental._
|
| For all the length of this exposition, the conclusion is pure
| Streetlight Effect. Despite the fact that our brains have allowed
| us to achieve quite a high level of abstract reasoning relative
| to other Earth fauna, we main inextricably coupled to our meat
| sack nature. It doesn't matter how many logical theories and
| models you stack up that map to observable phenomena, the truth
| is that there is no basis to assume that math is fundamental.
| Math, is just a tool for building models, and to paraphrase
| George Box: despite being useful, all models are wrong.
|
| The irony of attempting to answer the hardest philosophical
| questions in this way, reflects a very human emotional need to
| transcend our obvious physical and observational limitations. We
| can no more explain why the universe exists than an amoeba could
| explain why a skyscraper exists, and actually the gap is much
| much bigger, because whatever we observe and determine as
| causality can always elicit another "why". A three year old can
| master this trick, and yet here we have grown and supposedly
| rational person who does not want to come to terms with the fact
| that "what" can never fully explain "why". This existential
| ambiguity is our birthright and is actually beautiful and
| inspiring if you unclench your bowels a bit.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This question _always_ breaks my brain. It 's the ultimate
| question. I physically jerk back after thinking about it. The
| initial conditions of this universe are perfect. Maybe there are
| others that weren't.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| silent_cal wrote:
| >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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 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?
| silent_cal wrote:
| You said "there is only the point", which means there is
| something. That's not nothing.
| Victerius wrote:
| 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.e. is "nothing" something?
| ptmvp wrote:
| 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.
| captainclam wrote:
| Doesn't this just completely dodge/dismiss the original
| question?
|
| If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship
| bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the
| question."
| Victerius wrote:
| I see what you mean. But with biology, every organism has a
| different biology. I can take a plant or an animal and study
| its biology as an external and impartial observer.
|
| With respect to the question of the existence of everything,
| I can't take the Universe or a Universe and study its
| properties as an external and impartial observer.
|
| If I was the only organism in the Universe, I could still try
| to study my body and reach limited conclusions, like we do
| with physics, but I couldn't go further without dissecting
| myself or injecting myself with potentially hazardous
| substances, which would kill me. And I certainly would never
| be able to answer the question of where I came from if I
| didn't know about the concept of gender, sex, and
| reproduction, which I couldn't know about if I was the only
| organism to have ever existed from my point of view.
|
| So I am dismissing the original question.
| xnoreq wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This reminds me of the classic joke that all probabilities
| are 50/50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't.
| amelius wrote:
| It is still possible that nothing exists. For example, if
| physics rules are an algebra where you start with nothingness,
| and nothingness is then combined with nothingness in various
| ways. Then, from the inside it appears as if things exist, but
| from the outside it seems that nothing exists. Somewhat similar
| to a computer game which may look like an entire world from the
| inside, but you see only a bunch of computer chips from the
| outside.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you talking about the mathematical universe hypothesis
| where everything is just mathematics?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Stephen Hawking famously confused gravity for "nothing" when he
| said "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can
| and will create itself from nothing."
|
| He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is
| going to be a winner.
| mecsred wrote:
| You say this like it's a solved issue, but you're still
| debating with yourself in the footnotes.
| dibujante wrote:
| I don't think so. There has to be a plausible survivor for
| survivorship bias. Living forever is advantageous to being a
| member of a survival cohort, and yet survivorship bias hasn't
| discovered any immortal people. Is there a plausible reason for
| things to exist that would explain why existence survived as an
| outcome?
| gnulinux wrote:
| Isn't it the opposite of what you suggest? If there was
| nothing, there would be nothing to investigate; but now that we
| now the universe exists, it does make sense to ask why is that
| something exists rather than nothing.
| markkat wrote:
| Existence is interaction.
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