Again, epolo, the question is not why a particular universe (or set in your analogy exists) but rather why are there sets at all? What your analogy is doing is reaching into a set of ping pong balls pulling out 7 at random and saying that this universe is just what ping pong balls happened to come out and it’s not very likely that we picked 7 zeroes. My question is where did the ping pong balls come from and why are they being picked at all?
Well, according to the Big Bang Theory, our universe did not exist until a virtually infinite amount of energy exploded and spread out which, by definition, would mean that the universe was measurable early on and suggests that, somewhere WAY out there, the universe is growing as it is spreading. The only argument I can see to that is to declare that the universe existed as the singularity from which everything emerged.
This theory is explored in the Star Trek Next Generation episode, “Remember Me”, where Wesley Crusher creates a warp bubble in engineering that somehow traps his mother inside.
Theoretically, a “warp bubble” would be self-enclosed and thus pinched off from our universe. It would, in effect, be a universe of its own. Initially, the warp bubble seemed like a perfectly normal environment to Dr. Crusher but, as it began to collapse, people/places/things started to cease to exist.
So, if our universe ever starts to contract, it will cease to exist anywhere outside of the matter and energy that define what it is. Our universe, theoretically, will grow smaller and smaller until, finally, it collapses into a singularity the way a Black Hole collapses.
Aside from senoy’s more fundamental objection, epolo’s reasoning is flawed since there seems no a priori reason that the frequency distribution of universes should be uniform. Why must all there be just one of each “type” of universe, and why must all types exist? Even if there are infinitely many universes, why can’t half of them be identical and empty? Or indeed all of them?
I dunno. ISTM that that boils down to, “if we assume there’s something, then there can’t be nothing, because there’s something.”
ETA: Which reminds me of those immortal (ok, maybe not) words of Billy Preston:
Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’
You gotta have somethin’
if you want to be with me
Yep, that argument is more addressing the question of whether or not there is something, not particularly why(or how) there is something. I think that most of us already agree that there is something and that the fact that we are able to formulate an argument as to why is good evidence to that effect, but it doesn’t really tell me why there is something. As someone mentioned above, a lot of these arguments simply presuppose that something exists and then say ‘therefore it must exist.’
OK.
Let’s start by refuting your premise. you say there are fewer conditions for a universe of nothing than for a universe of something so therefore a universe of nothing should be more likely.
First, fewer conditions does not necessarily imply easier or more likely.
Second, and more importantly, a universe of nothing does not have fewer conditions than a universe of something. A universe of nothing has ZERO conditions, because even the single condition that it not contain anything is something, so an empty universe has zero conditions. Zero is not fewer than many, or even some, or even one. Zero does not exist in the subset of how many, so therefore cannot be compared to the others. Zero is not fewer.
So, a universe of nothing has zero conditions to exist. and zero conditions is not necessarily easier than some conditions. The best we can say is that a universe of nothing is equally as likely as a universe of something. But, I would argue further that since we know a universe of something does exist, that maybe it is more likely than a universe of nothing.
mc
Of course, this presupposes that “why” is a useful question to even ask. It implies that there is a reason or a purpose, when there is nothing that indicates that there is a reason or a purpose.
If you have two dissimilar fluids, and you put them into direct contact with each other, they don’t just diffuse evenly into each other, they create a rayleigh-taylor instability, with complex folds and whorls and vortices. You can ask how this occurs, and get a well defined answer. If you ask why this occurs, then you will get the same answer as “how”.
If you are interested in the answer to the question of “How is there something, rather than nothing”, well, there is debate among scientist to specifics, but that is a question that has meaning and can be answered.
If you are interested only in why there is something rather than nothing, then you will either get the how answer, or you will get philosophy. Science doesn’t answer “why”'s.
Phil Hartman explains.
That’s why I noted that a hardcore materialist recognizes that human cognition, with all its deliberate intents, is just another series of mechanisms. Realizing that, then the concept of ‘intent’ actually disintegrates - any entity’s perceived conscious/deliberate intention is merely a result of the cogs and gears whirring in the entity’s mind. Intent itself just becomes more dominos falling in a row, not materially different from, well, literal dominoes.
With a perspective like that, presupposing “intent” for the existence of the universe merely is saying that prior to the perceivable beginning to the universe there were more dominoes, more events preceding it. More events like any others. And since there’s no way to know what those events were - (shrug).
I’m not sure that I required the answer to be scientific, I’m not even a scientific realist, so I’m not sure that I would completely be satisfied with that answer anyway. Either way, I’ll allow you to change the adverb to how if that makes you more comfortable.
I’ll admit that fewer presuppositions really doesn’t do anything for us. It’s why Occam’s Razor is rather foolish. And I’m not really putting forward a logical argument that nothing is more likely. I’m saying that not existing seems to be more of a default than existing (and I’m definitely saying ‘seems’, I admit that it’s possible that I’m wrong, but I’d want some sort of proof to the contrary.) There are an infinite number of things that don’t exist, but only a finite number of things that do exist even though that number is very large. For every quark in existence, it is possible to imagine an infinite number of different quarks that don’t exist. Since there are so many more things that don’t exist than do exist, then why(or how) does anything exist?
Right. So, when your premise leads to an illogical conclusion (since we agree that something does in fact exist), examine your premise.
My contention is that an empty, null universe is vastly less likely than one in which there is something. Upthread, Riemann asked why there couldn’t be many empty universes. The answer is that I’m not trying to catalogue universes that exist (whatever that would mean). I’m asking how many possible states there are for a universe to be in. There is only one state for a completely empty, null universe. Like the null set in set theory, it’s unique. There are an infinite number of other possible configurations for a universe that include at least a little something in them. If I asked you to pick a set at random from the proper class of all possible sets, the chance that you would pick the null set is zero. Therefore I conclude that it is more likely for this universe to include something rather than nothing.
But now, senoy, it seems like you’re moving the goalposts a bit. If you ask why a particular quark exists rather than any of the hypothetical quarks that don’t exist then you’ve bound yourself to answers within the framework of the universe in which the quark exists. In order to answer that, we would need to know more about the universe.
Although, even then I’m not sure your question is well founded. From what we know about how quantum mechanics work in this universe, “this quark” doesn’t necessarily exist. There is a high probability that if we look here we will find a quark. Not exactly the same thing.
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I am so so tempted to ask for a cite right here…
The universe is here because it wants to be. It’s volitional.
You are simply restating your unfounded assumption that all if you enumerate all possible configurations, then pick one at random, all picks are equally likely. Why should that be so? We could only talk about probabilities if we had some model for how these “sets” came about. Something like your argument might hold for each universe within the multiverse, if we have some model for the probability distribution of possible parameters.
But at the deeper level of asking why is there something at all rather than nothing, the fact that there is only one way for there to be “nothing” and infinitely many configurations of “something” tells us nothing about their relative likelihoods.
I don’t see why that should be so. Assume that a universe exists. Its state must be found within the set of all possible universe configurations. There is only one null universe among those infinite choices. If you think that there is some bias towards a null universe that makes it more likely than all the other possible choices combined, that would be an extraordinary claim for which I would like some evidence.
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The evidence for that would be if we didn’t exist.
If there was nothing, then it would seem as though nothing was more likely than something.
As I said, that kind of thing is a recipe for picking one configuration of universe in the multiverse. In that situation, we may have some model for the probability distribution of configurations, if so we can talk about likelihoods, and reasoning along the lines you describe might make sense.
But the OP is not asking about how each universe is configured in a multiverse. It’s about why there is something at all rather than nothing. We have no inkling about how the “choice” between something or nothing is made, or even if that’s the right way to think about it.
I have made no claim here, extraordinary or otherwise. My position is that we have no basis to say anything at all about the a priori likelihood of “something” vs “nothing”.
You made a specific claim, that “nothing” is less likely than “something” simply because there is only one way for there to be nothing, but many ways for there to be something. You’re the one who needs to defend why that should be the case.
Nothing is impossible. If there was nothing, nothing couldn’t be, and nobody to know about it. The question alone is something.
IOW nothing can only be nothing if it is inside something. Otherwise there is simply no thing to not be.
All that’s saying is that we know the prevailing state of affairs is that there is something rather than nothing. That has never been in dispute. The question is why that state of affairs has arisen, when it seems that “nothing” is also a logical possibility (a feature of which hypothetical state of affairs would indeed be that nobody would be asking any questions).
I haven’t said anything about a multiverse either. I’m saying that we can assume there exists a universe because otherwise the question “why is there something [in the universe] rather than nothing” is meaningless. If we are stuck at this point then I would guess that we are talking past each other with different definitions of “universe”.
Next, I contend that if there is a universe then it’s either empty or non-empty. In the absence of any evidence that it’s biased one way or the other, it sounds like it should then be a coin flip - 50/50 - which one we get. But since there are infinitely many more ways to be non-empty than there are to be empty, it starts to seem more plausible and in fact likely that we should have something.
The OP’s contention was that nonexistence is a priori more likely than existence. That is to say, he points to all the infinite possible universes that observably don’t exist and asks why anything should exist. But I think that’s backwards: all but one of the universes that don’t exist have something in them. The null hypothesis should not be a null universe, but rather a universe with something in it (even if it’s undefined what that something is).
Furthermore, the fact that we find ourselves in a non-empty universe give support to the notion that it was likely for the universe to have something in it. If in fact our universe was empty, then that would be good evidence for some bias against the existence of anything or at least evidence that we were very lucky.
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