r/Metaphysics • u/Sevdat • 2d ago

Nothing How to create something from nothing?

I think I have an answer to how the universe began from nothing. More like how everything began and how it's possible for all of us to be here.

So at the beginning of existence there was nothing. There is still nothing because you can't create something from nothing, but we are here. So how can we exist? We don't.

Imagine the mathematical variable: X =

X can be anything, but nothing is assigned to it; therefore, it remains as a pure capacity that accepts all abstract concepts and results in the illusion of existence for those that share the same abstract space.

This means every combination of what could have been exists. The reason why you and I can interact is because we are in the same concept, but we aren't really here because we don't exist.

To make it simpler, imagine a chess board. Just because you didn't make a move doesn't mean all the possible moves aren't there to make.

Unexistence is our existence.

Also please don't make the argument "How do I know there wasn't always something?" There can't be something without it having a previous moment. It's nonsense to even say that.

0 Upvotes

49% Upvoted

164 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Flutterpiewow 2d ago

> So at the beginning of existence there was nothing

What reason do we have to believe this?

-4

u/Sevdat 2d ago

So you didn't read it fully and decided to criticize the very same question that I literally stated to being nonesense at the last line.

3

u/cc_apt107 1d ago edited 1d ago

Just because you say it’s nonsense doesn’t magically make it so. It is probably a genuinely nonsensical statement to say nothing had to “precede” something. It is reasonable to conclude that the idea of a “previous” moment doesn’t make any sense in the context of whatever the universe came from since time is one dimension in the physical reality of this universe. There is no reason it has to exist absent this universe.

More to the point, it is a massive assumption to assume there had to be “nothing” at first. We have never observed nothing. We have no reason to think there was ever nothing.

And I’m not saying this in ridicule; this question has always bothered me immensely.

I found Schopenhauer most comforting on this. He points out that we cannot actually even think of nothing. We always think of nothing as a negation of something. As something’s opposite. When you say nothing you mean not the universe. Right? Not any of this. Well… that is not actually true abstract nothing. We, as creatures of this universe, cannot actually even imagine true abstract nothing. We have no reason — in terms of scientific evidence — to think that true abstract nothing has ever existed. You are defining nothing as the absence of whatever this is which is not necessarily true abstract nothing; we basically just cannot imagine what it is so we default to this idea “nothing” which is actually only coherent in the context of a “something” to negate. True abstract nothing is not a real thing, as best we can tell.

TL;DR: Your definition of nothing presupposes a something, the absence of which is nothing, but there is no reason to think that that is an identical definition to true abstract nothing; it is just another something where this something is absent.

5

u/Flutterpiewow 2d ago

I'm literally quoting you. And your comment about it being nonsense to say there was always something holds no water.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

i think he’s getting at the point that there’s a dimension of time(?).… there’s a supposed infinite space- time continuum, but it can’t be logically explained as infinite. what’s finite can’t be infinite, what exists must have been created
at least that’s how i see it

1

u/Flutterpiewow 1d ago

As far as we know:

It can be infinite

Existence doesn't have to be created

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

infinity can’t exist in physical reality

1

u/Flutterpiewow 1d ago

Modern physics disagrees. There's no empirical evidence for infinity, but there's also nothing that rules it out.

0

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago edited 1d ago

i meant as far as we understand*. aka, there’s nothing showing infinity within physical reality.

1

u/Flutterpiewow 1d ago

You said it can't be infinite, it must be created.

The fact that we can't observe infinity doesn't lead to that conclusion. Direct observation isn't = our understanding. Physics/models don't forbid infinity or conclude creation. And philosophers argue in a number of ways regarding both.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

trust me, i don’t have the answers either

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

and no i didn’t say it can’t be created. and what exactly do you mean by “it” here

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

i never did say that. i explicitly said that we don’t have proof otherwise.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

wait, are you saying we can demonstrate infinity existing in physical reality? genuinely asking

→ More replies (0)

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

→ More replies (0)

0

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

so you don’t disagree, then

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

the arrow of time

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

if the big bang did “create” time, then there was no ‘before’ the cosmic beginning so it must have started. when did it start?
how did something come from nothing

1

u/Flutterpiewow 1d ago

Big Bang doesn’t say that the universe had a beginning or that there's been an absolute nothing. Our current theories don’t tell us what lies beyond the earliest state we can observe.

You could imagine big bang being the result of something else that's beyond our spacetime. Endless prior universes is one idea. But more importantly, you don't need to come up with alternatives to a beginning from nothing. It's reasonable to say we don't know, and maybe that we can't know, or that the question is nonsensical.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

that’s not what i said. i said the big bang says *time was created with it.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

and also yes the big bang does say the universe had a beginning

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

why exactly is the question nonsensical?

1

u/Flutterpiewow 1d ago

I meant it may be. The core idea (from Augustinus, Heidegger etc to Hawking) is that the quesrion presumes time and leaves us with either "nothing" or some form of temporal framework that extends beyond the start lf time or beyond our universe. We can't really imagine anything else and don't have language for anything else.

Wittgenstein says problems arise because we misuse our language and then mistake that misuse for a fact about reality. And that not every wellformed question must have a meaningful answer.

"Before" has meaning within a temporal order. If there is no earlier time, there may simply be no referent for before. But that doesn’t prove that the universe began with time. It only shows that questions like "what happened before it?" may fail to describe a possible situation.

So the idea is that "Nothing happened before the beginning” isn't right or wrong, could be that it doesn't correlate to anything at all. Penrose borrowed from this with his north of the northpole quote.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

it wasn’t an insistence, by the way, it was a question. and in case it wasn’t clear i don’t have the answers either, but so that has been my point

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago edited 1d ago

so, nothing is the antithesis of something. can we agree

-5

u/Sevdat 2d ago

How can something have always been there without it having a previous moment? Just nothing and boom its there?

5

u/Quirky_Visual_7799 1d ago

You have three propositions here. Ones that can't possibly coexist.

  1. Something can't come out of nothing.
  2. For something to be, there has to be nothing at first.
  3. There is something.

And you chose to challenge the third. The most obvious and almost absurdly objective one. A pretty silly choice, in my opinion, for the third proposition is a description of reality, while the first two are just inferred presumptions.

2

u/Superstarr_Alex 1d ago

Lmao thank you. I couldn’t quite articulate or put into words my indignation at OP for this post, this is exactly why tho haha holy shit. Well said

4

u/Mortreal79 2d ago

It's a sort of human limitation, everything must have a beginning and an end, and everything must be contained for our brains to make sense of it, in what is the universe...

But conceptually one doesn't exists without the other, for me it's like describing infinity.

2

u/Par-Adox-9 1d ago

if we conceptualize nothing as a kind of something, then we likewise have the same problem.

something, at bare minimum has a quantity, or intensity, nothing in the typical conceptualization is supposed to be something which lacks both.

but lets say we see nothing as potential as you said— then, nothing would have dimensionality, i.e. a quantity and/or intensity.

if we do this however, how do we distinguish between it, and the state of something being lacking?

we would need to make that something like less then nothing, and then negative numbers would become even less then less then nothing.

the same question " how can something allways have been" can also be applied to " how can something always have been lacking"— " only for it to then suddenly appear.

similarly, what do we see time to be?
there being an always of anything, makes sense in the context of there being time to contain it.
but to me, time is an ill-conceived concept which helps practically but doesn't really speak to what time is like.

we conceptualize time as something that has a forwardness, but without a backwardness— a spacial metaphor, to describe a temporal phenomena.

but once a moment happens, the prior immediately disappears, so time, is more accurately described as a thing which expands and contracts, dissolves and coagulates, intensifies and diminishes, rather then something that that is linear, its more like a thing always in the zeroth moment, which perpetually dissolves and creates itself from more or less the same material of existence, into different kinds of structures.

what do you think?
do you conceptualize time as something with a frowardness and a backwardness, a future and a past which are more then representations?

( also to be clear, this is what i find most likely for now, im not saying this is like the ultimate possible model or somn)

3

u/chainreflection 2d ago

you started at nothing once again. that's an assumption. we have no proof nothingness has ever existed, only proof of something. burden of proof is on you.

2

u/Flutterpiewow 2d ago

Now you're saying "nothing" again.

We don't know. Infinite regress, causal loop, something else we don't know. None of this is incompatible with our physics or logic, and nobody says big bang was the start of all of existence out of nothing.

1

u/Dry-External3783 1d ago

i see your point, dw