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Why is there something when there could be nothing?

There is no reason why. We don't need a reason.

Something does exist. Not for any reason. It just does.
 
yer this is waht ive thought for ages. before the univers there was nothingness but what created nothingness. the only simple easy question for that is "god" not a christian god but some sort of higer power
i really cant get to drips with it. i think its just mind boggling. there are constant answers im trying to find but havent found anything exciting yet :(. good thread tho ill keep looking and adding
 
yer this is waht ive thought for ages. before the univers there was nothingness but what created nothingness. the only simple easy question for that is "god" not a christian god but some sort of higer power
i really cant get to drips with it. i think its just mind boggling. there are constant answers im trying to find but havent found anything exciting yet :(. good thread tho ill keep looking and adding

"If the general picture however of a bigbang followed by an expanding universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the universe devoid of all matter, an the matter suddenly somehow created? How did that happen? In many cultures the customary answer is that a god or gods created the universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously we must of-course ask the next question. Where did God come from? If we decide that this an unanswerable question, why not save a step an conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? There's no need for a creation it was always here. These are not easy questions. Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, with questions that once treated only by religion and myth."

- Carl Sagan

'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss <3
 
The rose is without why, she blooms because she blooms...

Angelus Silesius' mystic poem.

One can check The Principle of Reason from Martin Heidegger for a reflection on it.
 
Also, Heidegger devoted an essay What is called Metaphysics? (1928) solely on this question.
 
There is no reason why. We don't need a reason.

Something does exist. Not for any reason. It just does.
Isn't that point of view kind of intellectually stultifying? If man had first looked up at the heavens, and seen the raw glory of existence, and been perfectly content to just accept that everything was like this and didn't need a reason, we wouldn't have got very far.
 
There cannot be nothing without something, one is a framework for the other - I feel I've said this a thousand times - so obviously I must like saying it - who knows or cares why ?
 
everything is here for nothing to experience...


this is non-duality, enlightenment.. the realization that everything and nothing are one. and because its impossible for the mind to grasp, one can only realize this truth.
 
If that man stop bouncing on his head, stood on a corner and looked to the opposite corner, would it appear higher or lower than him?

Its as simple as duality.

Cant define "up" without "down"

Can't define existence without defining non-existence.
 
There cannot be nothing without something, one is a framework for the other - I feel I've said this a thousand times

Yet there cannot be something without nothing.

the realization that everything and nothing are one

Qft. I think they are the same thing, just two different sides of the same coin.


Nothing leads to everything, but everything leads right back to nothing.

Better way to put it, everything comes from nothing, but nothing comes from everything.
 
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If there is another thread like this, please direct me to it. There needs to be a Google search feature on BL search, some other forums have it, I'm not sure if it costs money though...


Why did anything ever exist in the first place? If your a big banger type, why were the materials (for lack of a better term) ever there for the universe to happen? Why is there something, when there could be nothing?

You know, as I questioned religion throughout my life I was told by the religious types that I was a, "seeker". Well my likewise seeker friend, I present to you Laurence Krauss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo&feature=search

There's actually a shit ton of evidence for why nothing came into something. Even more so something couldn't exist without nothing. The more we find out, the less we know. It's exciting. If you enjoyed that lecture, watch some more of his.
 
There was probably nothing for a while. But then, you know, like, something just happened.
 
How can something then happen if time doesn't exist? Without time, there is no potential for change, so if there is truly nothing, then something can never exist.
 
i assume that outside of this (4D) spacetime structure we percieve, there are different laws governing the behavior of whateverthefuck. if time has no meaning, i'm sure there are other "rational(?)" systems of behavior for "whateverthefuck's outthere/inhere (at the same time)"
 
Warning: I need sleep and to metabolize serum cannabinoids...

I don't think we can possibly answer this question. A key precondition of investigation of what is the case, how it came to be, and why it is is that something is (something must inquire, or at the very least, inquiry must occur). Unless an investigation were to capture entirely itself as its object, it could not possibly capture the sum conditions which allow such inquiry.

We can conclude with certainty that something is (or a process occurs), but we can never account for what stipulates that something emerges/persists/etc. However, existence of something (or a process's movement) entails that it asserts itself in terms of what it is not (and conditioned by the latter); what we can come to know remains ever-formed by what we never can.

hah....as I wrote this, I noticed that I'm no longer convinced by my own argument...but I'm not quite sure what I'm missing.

Peter van Inwagen has devised a probabilistic proof that the existence of something is infinitely more likely than nothingness. The argument rests on the concept of possible worlds, and on the principle of identity of indiscernables, which was formulated by Liebniz. The principle is that any two things that have all the same properties are, in fact, the same thing; if two things are completely identical qualitatively and relationally, then they are numerically identical.

Now, given that any two possible worlds that have identical properties are actually the same possible world, there is only one possible world in which nothing exists. However, there are a huge number, even an infinite number, of possible worlds in which something does exist. Thus, for any world, the chances of it containing nothing are infinitesimal, and the chance of it containing something almost certain.

My contention with Liebniz (and for similar reasons logical positivism) is that the notion of a constellation of possible worlds and objects which exists and holds characteristics a priori presents too many problems when used to anchor ontology. Sure, there must be some background (that shit aforementioned that we can't know) that structures possibility (or conditions some lack of structuring), but is this background a set of possible worlds and conditions outlining which worlds are impossible?

I instead see two possibilities: from the perspective of those temporally bound (ie, where there is investigation), the investigation itself alters the context which determines the inquiry itself. Thus, possible worlds are neither a priori givens nor logically primary in effecting actual worlds.

Or 'from'* the perspective of the unknowable which allows us to try to know, all context cradling investigation might stipulate what worlds are possible, but the 'conditions for possibility' themselves must be logically prior to the action of distinguishing possible from impossible (as they give rise to the set of possible worlds in the first place (and I think that this argument work s whether we speak of a set of possible worlds or set of possible phenomena).

Thus, Liebniz's reasoning cannot stand, as it confuses the full set of results with the process/entity/etc. that effects these results.

I need a break from this LCD badly, so I'll just say that an analogous argument holds for exploring the set of possible properties things can have (or set of things that can be delineated).

mmm...apologies if this belongs in the blog area. :p

*Of course, one can never actually describe this...so we have a rough pointer.

ebola
 
When most people think of nothing, they think of Empty Space. When people who know that Space is indeed not nothing, think of nothing they think of blankness, but generally people still imagine it following the same rules our universe does. To ask why there is something instead of nothing is to assume that the inherent properties of nothing stop something from coming into existence. If nothing exists, then none of the logical rules that govern our universe would govern nothing. The big one here is cause and effect. There doesn't necessarily have to be a cause for something to exist.
 
The only time i've been aware of 'nothing' is while simultaneously been aware of everything, nothingness is the rising awareness of everything.
 
fractals are made with an equation... if you change one of the variables from one value to another, you see a moving fractal. it looks as if patterns of energy are forming and dissipating, and since fractals don't have any "disconnections" (it's all connected to eachother, an outline) often it looks like something is growing sucking energy from things around it (which recede) and then it recedes back into nothing (remind you of something? like the universe)

plus, fractal math can be 3d or whatever-d. it doesn't have to be 2d

so... what if this universe is a moving fractal? or some sort of elaborate equation like that (in such a case, "time" would be the way the equation varies over all possible values for one or more variables... not at all like we subjectively percieve it, but i can see how we'd percieve it this way looking at it "from the inside")?

if fractals are infinitely complex, if we analyzed a trillion 3d fractals i'd bet we'd find a few that bear a lot of strange similarites to our universe
 
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