As QI reported it:
http://qi.com/infocloud/nothing
The less concise but actual funny explanation in the show:
See my other post.
It’s a mis-parse to say “nothing existing” means there is some thing we’re labelling “nothing”, and it’s in the state of existing.
It means logical-NOT-exist. !p (or ~p). We’re fine with using this kind of logical-NOT with individual entities, and I don’t see any reason we can’t do the same with the whole shebang…since as I say the argument mentioned in the OP is a mis-parse / red herring.
When it comes to “why” questions, “God did it” is really a non-answer, even if it’s true. Why’d He do it then? Did He have a reason? Was it arbitrary?
But just because this question is used as a set-up for that non-answer, it doesn’t mean it’s not a question worth considering. The question “Where’d all these animals come from?” might have received similarly uninteresting responses, until Darwin came along.
That said, it’s a fair point that there may not be any reason to give special status to “nothing”. But then, why does this exist, as opposed to anything else that might have existed? Could anything else have existed? Were some possible existences more probable than others? Is it even possible to define a coherent notion of “probability” that applies to all of existence?
Maybe it’s easy to say “no”, this is the only thing that could exist, by virtue of the fact that it’s the thing that does exist. But we don’t tend to accept that reasoning in other cases. If I flip a coin and it lands heads, we don’t deny that there was a 50% chance it could have landed tails. Of course we can flip a coin many times, whereas we can’t re-flip the universe. Or can we? For all we know there are infinitely many universes.
At any rate, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to find the question interesting. It might be incoherent, it might be unanswerable, it might have an answer that will remain forever unknowable to us - but I don’t think we can say any of those with certainty. Even asking “Is this a meaningful question to ask, and if not, why not?” can be an interesting question in and of itself. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone would find such a question interesting, or worth their time to think about. I don’t find synchronized swimming particularly interesting, but de gustibus non disputandum est.
What I do find unreasonable is when someone thinks they have a pat answer to the question, which just so happens to “prove” that their particular religious preference is objectively correct.
Because it’s entirely possible that individual entities do or do not exist. I did not exist 50 years ago, and 100 years from now, I will not exist. Given how we describe individual entities, it’s entirely reasonable to assert that an entity could or could not exist, depending on how the universe is going. We know this, empirically and demonstrably. The same cannot be said of the whole of the universe.
Sure but we’re talking about a philosophical question.
Obviously in a hypothetical nothing exists scenario there are no people to verify anything but I don’t see that as having any relevance at all.
I think you are focussing too much on the “nothing”. The question is really, “Why is there reality?”. To say that “nothing” is not a valid reality is missing the point.
I think also that the anthropic principle is often unhelpful and/or used incorrectly.
“Why is there existence?”
“Because if there wasn’t we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.”
Well, no, existence isn’t caused by us being around to ask the question, the opposite is true, we are here because of existence. There could also be existence without us or anything else to ask any questions.
The question of “why is existence?” is one that is impossible to answer in any meaningful way but is still interesting to contemplate, IMHO, if only because it leads your brain in directions it just can’t handle.
Time really isn’t that simple. Unless you want to say that you only exist in a sphere with a radius of 50 light years centred on you.
You want this book: Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt.
He traces the history and approaches used to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” From religious, philosophical and scientific standpoints. He’s both a journalist and philosopher so it is lucid and entertaining. Can’t recommend highly enough.
Sure. Consider one second before the Big Bang - although that’s sort of a nonsensical phrase, since there was no time before the Big Bang. But the Big Bang was that moment everything that constitutes the universe (matter, energy, dimensions, time) exploded out of a singular point - a point in the mathematical sense of the word, the most infinitesimal spatial construct. The space to explode *into *must have existed at least one infinitesimal fraction of time prior to the Big Bang (and possibly for an eternity).
I suppose that’s not absolute nothingness, but that still a **lot **of empty stillness to go around - without *anything *in it. No radiation, no force, no matter, no energy, no heat, no time. I’d say that’s close enough to nothing, because it has no measurable properties AND it would be impossible to measure anyway (on account of if somebody is there to measure it, then ipso facto matter and time must exist too). Yet it must have something we can dub “reality”, since, well, we’re here now, after a bit of sound and fury :).
[QUOTE=Budget Player Cader]
Do we know that? I don’t think we know that.
[/QUOTE]
We can imagine it, therefore we must consider it possible (without accounting for its actual probability). There could have been no Big Bang and everything could have remained trapped within that singular point at least.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Why would our puny ape-brains be capable of understanding such an issue? Really, there is no reason to think that we are capable of understanding the universe in its entirety. I’m actually amazed we understand as much we do!
[/QUOTE]
As the late great Pratchett would say, “perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another where the next banana is.”
Except that the Big Bang didn’t explode into anything.
This is, if I remember my philosophy correctly, a standard argument against the argument from contingency put forth by Aquinas as a proof of the existence of god.
I think your argument is excellent when it comes to arguing against the existence of a god like Yahweh, which is probably the god most people have in mind when they say god exists. I don’t think that that Yahweh (or Buddha, Vishnu, FSM, Cthulu, etc.) is the only type of deity to be argued against. I don’t see it as unreasonable to define god as an entity with properties that contradict the laws of physics as they exist in our universe. Sure, that’s not how most religious people would define god, but I think it’s a reasonable definition.
I’m a deist, and I’ve argued in other threads why I think this is a rational position. I’ll summarize my arguments like this. I’ll start with the premise that I think is the least refutable and go from there.
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The universe does exist, and it exists in a state where entropy is increasing.
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The universe, and time itself, is about 13.7 billion years old. In other words, if I ask what were things like 2 billion years ago, and how were they different from how things were 3 billion years ago, that question makes sense. If I ask what things were like 20 billion years ago, and how were they different from how things were 30 billion years ago, that is a nonsensical question.
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1st law of thermodynamics. The conservation of energy i.e. energy cannot be created or destroyed.
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2nd law of thermodynamics. Entropy in a system always increases.
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Quantum physics. I’m putting this one at the end since I understand it less than the others. Basically, one of the theories is that particle antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop into existence out of a vacuum and then pop back out of existence. The theory, however, seems to state that the overall particle balance remains, i.e the vacuum isn’t a 0, but could be a -1+1 =0, or maybe -2+2=0 or -3+3=0, but not -2+1=-1 or -1+3=2.
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None the less, a universe in which there is more matter than antimatter exists.
My conclusion that I draw from these premises is that some kind of property, which is not presently operating in our universe, seems to be able to defy the first two laws of thermodynamics and led to the creation of our universe. I see no reason not to call such a property god, even though it is obviously not what most people mean by the word. I’m sure my understanding of the physics if probably flawed, most likely the part about quantum physics and what the theory has to say about spontaneous creation. I’m just not sure what the exact flaw is, which is why I remain a deist and haven’t moved over to the atheist column.
Excellent recommendation. I am going to read that one. 
It seems to me that the question appears profound because it’s probing around the philosophical concepts of purpose “why are we here?” or “what’s the meaning of life?” However, the way the question is actually posed, it seems to miss the actual point I think people are attempting to get at. Ultimately, it’s tautological because the question can only be asked if existence…exists. It’s sort of like asking a question like “Are you awake?” wherein, obviously it’s a yes or no question, but one will never actually get an honest No as an answer. So, in that same sense, the only real answer we can give is that it exists because it does.
Unfortunately, people will jump off from there and either assume that because it’s tautlogical, that means one’s preferred answer to those(eg, God/gods did it, it has no first cause, etc.). But that’s similarly along the same lines as there being no evidence for the existence of God, therefore no God and also no evidence for no God, therefore God… but they’re both ultimately silly arguments that don’t prove or disprove anything or serve to convince anyone with a differing opinion.
Really, it seems to me that it’s ultimately a poor extrapolation of one’s own search for purpose in assuming that it must continue all the way to the largest scale. That is, it seems that many (most?) people reach, at some point in their lives, an existential crisis in defining one’s place in the world, where we want to attach meaning to our lives. Some people answer it through work or family and friends or religion or art or take a nihilist or hedonistic or whatever other philosophical approach. Therefore, I think it seems logical to people who have experienced this to some degree will relate this to all sorts of things, whether it’s their friend, child, various other people and relationships, a nation, all of humanity, or even existence itself. But it’s ultimately skipping over the entire question of whether this is even a relevant question to ask at other levels.
For example, if one has a pet, no matter how dearly one loves him, I don’t think any of us really have any grand illusions that he spends any time–much less a significant amount of it–pondering his own existence and purpose in any way that is remotely comparable to the same sort of existential crisis that many people do. Thus, I’d argue it’s ultimately meaningless to ask that question, because the one assigning purpose isn’t him, it’s us. So, I’d argue the real question worth asking isn’t “What is the purpose of the universe?” or “Why are we here?” or whatever other variation, but rather “How far outside of the human experience does this concept translate?” Obviously, I think people who take one extreme or the other, like nihilists have an obvious answer, that none of it matters, but for the rest of us, it may be a more interesting approach.
I have one other somewhat unrelated thought on the matter. As many have mentioned, humans are not optimally equipped to figure out this kind of problem. One of the reasons I hope that true AI is developed is so we can pose this question to the AI and see what it thinks about it.
I think the best response to the question was said by Tracie Harris:
How do you know? We’ve never had a “nothing” to inspect to see what its capabilities are. By even assigning the property that it can’t generate “something,” you’ve given it a property, which means it’s not “nothing.” There’s no way you can honestly say that something can’t come from nothing.
I think this is a similar type question philosophically, but one which the underlying science is able to better answer. Even though it’s not an answer a lot of people like, the answer is that our thoughts all come from complex reactions that occur in our brains, and when the brain is gone so are we. What happens after we die? The same thing that happened before we were born, however you might choose to describe that. Of course maybe I’m more comfortable answering that question since I have a much better understanding of physiology and neurology than I do quantum physics and cosmology :p.
Haha. That’s why I love Tracie. I’ve used exactly that argument before,
“So you mean no space?”
“Yes.”
“No time?”
“Yes.”
“No Laws?”
“Yes.”
“No law that something can’t come from nothing?”
“No, there’s that obviously.”
The theist then go on to explain how the nothingness contains a magic man, who not only doesn’t violate it’s claim to be nothing, but is the only possible explanation for how it could be nothing. When pressed to explicitly state their reasoning, they invoke the philosophical principle of “because I said so, so ner.”
This is undoubtedly their strongest argument.
Well, it must have. You can’t explode into nothing, and the somewhere it exploded into is a) here and b) still expanding. The expansion precedes the explosion if only by the smallest possible amount of time there can be, because it can’t go the other way around else you would have matter and energy expanding without space to expand into.
Maybe the bang also created the space to fill up, but then that only means that around that singularity/tiny bubble of space was nothing, and around that expanding bubble is still more nothing to this day.
I agree that’s the error, but I think it’s in the original question. “There is nothing in my hand” makes sense because there are a finite number of things which might be in my hand, we are saying none of them are present. “There is absolutely nothing” doesn’t make sense because there is no possible exception to the concept of “thing”. No matter how hard you try to empty a region of space or time, it will always be describable as a thing or as containing things. If you succeed in creating nothing, it immediately disappears. You might as well say “there is absolutely nothing in Narnia”. It’s true, but it’s no different from saying Narnia doesn’t exist.
By extension, the phrase “there is something” is a tautology.
In all; my life I have never, not once, heard or read that sequence of questions. Never.
I have heard B as a specific answer to “what came before the Big Bang?” What that’s not remotely the same question as your A.
No, it’s not.
An explanation of the fact the universe has a finite age is an explanation of facts, one that has (as best as we can determine) a definable answer that, to be honest, is a bit counterintuitive but isn’t really THAT hard to get a basic grasp of.
“Why does anything exist” is a rather different question. It’s a question that, frankly, could be interpreted any number of different ways, one of which is a semantic argument.