Does the Fact that Something Exists mean that Nothing is Impossible?

[cmyk]

@ivan_astikov

It’s a trick question; there’s no such thing as either.

Or to put it another way; if the poles flipped, would “North” then be where “South” was, or would we just call the new alignment “North” and “South”… assuming there was anyone left to name them??

T’was a joke.

[begbert2]

Not to distract from the symbolic/semisymbolic argumentation or anything…

@Liberal

That is an excellent post. The tape is a good analogy. So is the metaphor of sticking a pin into a “point before time”. Obviously — and pardon the horseshit — the phrase “point before time” is meaningless. This is because time is tied irrevocably to two things in particular: (1) rate and distance; and (2) space.

Your observation about things changing (and therefore time existing) refers to number (1), where time is equal to distance divided by rate. General relativity refers to number (2), where Einstein says basically that there is no such thing as space or time, but that there is only spacetime.

Setting aside number (2) for now, the problem with the Big Bang starting the cosmic clock, so to speak, is that we don’t (and can’t) know what, if anything, was happening within the singularity. The singularity was smaller than an atom, but it was not infinitely small. There could have been activity of some kind within it, and if there was, then there was time — time in the sense of changes, or as yet undefined particles moving around at some rate (forcing there to be time).

Now, it is important to understand that at this point, this is an epistemic question, not a metaphysical question. In other words, it’s just a matter of our level of knowledge, and not a matter of something that must be a particular way and cannot be some other way.

This issue is important because, for all we know (again, an epistemic question) the singularity was around for a long time. Trillions of years, for all we know. Or perhaps it existed only a few nanoseconds. Who knows. (No one.)

It is also important to realize that the singularity had potential for change. That’s what the Big Bang was — a change in the state of the singularity. And that brings us to Einstein’s view. If the singularity were in a state without time, then it was also without space. In fairness, however, Einstein might have held that his first postulate (physical law is everywhere the same) did not apply to the singularity, in which case all bets are off.

The business about the singularity is interesting but, to my mind, largely irrelevent; as best I can tell the question is whether our universe ‘sprung from nothing’, to the degree that it might have been theoretically possible for (instead) no springing to appear and for no universe to have been created. Given that the question is thus whether there was ever Nothing prior to the universe, the precise steps the universe used to bootstrap its way up to the big bang are pretty much irrelevent, unless those prior stages are less likely to have sprung from Nothing than the big bang itself, which seems unlikely to me, since the argument for springing from nothing being possible is basically just “why not?”, without reference to anything about the big bang specifically.

@Liberal

So the question isn’t really “What was before the Big Bang?” That’s easy. The singularity was before the Big Bang. The question is “What was before the singularity?” If the answer is “nothing”, then it can mean one of two things: (1) there was no existence of any kind before the singularity existed, or (2) there was a void (which is not nothing). The only way it can mean number (2) is if there is equivocation afoot.

It is then easy to say simply that “The singularity always existed”. But “always” has no more meaning in that context than “nothing”. It isn’t only the theist who tries to load the deck with marked cards and tricks. My car has “always” run dependably, but only since it was built.

You said you liked my tape analogy but then completely ignored it, which I find odd. The point of the tape analogy is that it’s not just the terms “nothing” and “existence” that can be interpreted in multiple ways - the term “before” also can be as well. The one you argue against is the “what’s on the frames before the first frame of the tape?” question, which is very much a “what’s south of the south pole” question, and we are in agreement that the answer is “those frames don’t exist, so nothing, but not the sort of ‘Nothing’/‘nothingless void’ that we’re looking for”.

However there’s other way to read the question, which is not equivocation: “what existed before the tape existed, in external-context time (as opposed to frames-of-tape time)?” Epistemologically, the answer is “We don’t know - and are pretty sure we can’t know from in here.” And at this point we note that since we don’t know otherwise, there is a possibility that space-time sprung into existence from a true ‘Nothing’/‘nothingless void’ - at the least it’s an option. Alternatively the ‘tape’ could have been created all at once or in incremental steps by God or Zeus or Geeky Programmer Guy or the Machine empire; or perhaps there’s no external context in which the tape could have not-existed at all. There’s no way to tell.

It’s not about loading the deck - it’s about keeping in mind that space and time are connected, and so that when you want to talk about "before the genesis of spacetime, it’s almost necessary to read that ‘before’ as referring to a different timeflow than the one whose genesis you’re discussing, because within that spacetime, there’s clearly nothing souther than the south pole.

Oh, and by the way, why is a “void” not nothing? What definition of “void” are you using, and why must I be referring to one of them and not an actual “nothing” when I say “nothing”?