The Fundament: A Definitive Attempt to Answer Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?

Part I: Nothing

“Why is there something instead of nothing?” They call it “The Question”. Many if not most philosophers consider The Question unanswerable if it’s even accepted as a coherent/meaningful question at all. I believe there is a good answer to the question:

 

There actually is nothing—this world is precisely what a world constructed out of nothingness would look like. And there are no things in it. Now course there is consciousness and there is a swirling mess of phenomena for it to experience, but these phenomena have no ultimate identity underpinning them—and this is exactly how you would expect things to be in a world born of logical necessity from nothing. I will explain just how this happened, how everything came to be from void, without a “first mover” god.

 

The fundament is nothing. It is the one thing[1] that exists absolutely/necessarily, and all else evolves naturally out of it according to its metaphysical journey of becoming itself (true nothing).[2]

 

There are two primary reasons to believe this. The first is a metaphysical story of creation via logical necessity. The second deals with empirical evidence in every scientific field. A third peripheral reason is that accepting the theory allows one to resolve many other issues in philosophy.

1. Nothing is the only thing that can create itself (and as we shall see, must create itself) at the most fundamental level. Any other entity we posit to be fundamental always has some unexplainable axiom.

 

2. The more we learn about the physical world the more we find it to be structured around nothingness and inconsistency, from the very large scale to the quantum. We don’t just discover more “complexity”. We discover indeterminacy.

 

3. Some questions about consciousness that are currently mysteries can be answered once you've grasped fundamental nothing, as well as questions about God and free will. Additionally, accepting a system of logic that is structured around an ultimate lack of consistency/grounding allows what were previously considered problems for logic, to dissolve.

 

Part II: Previous Attempts to Answer the Existential Question

One strategy to deal with the Question, has been to claim that it is “not clear” what exactly it’s asking, and that it therefore does not merit an answer. Andrew Brenner for instance believes that “such controversy persists because there just isn’t one unique correct interpretation of the Question. Rather, we should endorse a contextualist approach toward the Question”(Brenner) He is right when he says that in order to answer why x exists, the one answering will need to believe in the existence of x for the question to be sensible. That’s not an issue, as we have stated that there is obviously consciousness, stuff, and a realm where consciousness experiences the stuff.

But then Brenner argues that any question about the existence of a particular thing or group of things can equally be considered “the Question”. So he thinks there’s no difference between the questions “Why is there x thing?” and “Why is there anything at all?”. I think he’s being willfully ignorant here in order to tidily dispose of the The Question. It seems apparent that most forms of The Question revolve around the very same idea to the extent that most people have the language to express it: “It seems as if there could be nothing at all, so why there is anything?”:
Why is there a place and a possibility for anything to occur at all?
Why is there a region of existence where we can ask questions? A place for phenomena, even if the phenomena are only illusions, to take place?
Why should there be a substrate for things to exist in and according to, like physical constants and geometry and logic and consciousness?

Why are there any of these things instead of a non-space of no geometry, no physical constants, no stuff, no consciousness?

Contrary to Brenner, there are numerous ways to express the very same question, all of which can successfully access the same idea.
All that matters is that we’re in some sort of world. There’s truly nothing contextual about it so far as I can tell, and you can express it with whatever words you like.

 

Indeed even if the Question were unanswerable for some reason, it is at the very least sensible. And I will argue that it is answerable as well. Any other arguments about presuming The Question to be unaskable are absurd to me for the same reason.

 

Lawrence Krauss[3], on the other hand, is a useful example of someone who thinks himself to be asking The Question, and is using similar language, but is not in fact asking it. When he uses the word “Nothing” he refers not to true Nothing, but simply to empty spacetime (i.e. having no matter). The Question concerns not just empty spacetime, but a total lack of spacetime and other physical/mathematical structure.

 

This limitation placed on the scope of the Question comes from an assumption that all we can know about the world is what we can know through physical sciences. The substrate allowing for the existence of physical reality is something that isn’t observable in any way right now and may never be observable, so it’s outside the realm of what Lawrence Krauss considers. I believe he’s wrong to limit the discussion of Nothing in this way. It’s outside the scope of this paper to show that philosophy works in tandem with science to provide us with knowledge[4].

 

As mentioned, when Krauss asks (to paraphrase) “Why is there a physical universe that underwent inflation, instead of a quantum void world that still existed in some physical sense, but didn’t undergo inflation?”, he is asking a question that science can answer satisfactorily. I am asking the more fundamental question which requires metaphysical speculation.

 

Below are my general responses to the types of answers that have been given to The Question, by those who genuinely ask it:

 

The most appealing answer to most askers of the Question in history has been “God” or “gods”, where some conscious force wills existence into existence. This explanation has been given more precision in a variety of increasingly complex “Cosmological” arguments by monotheistic philosophers. But most philosophers now see the central problem with this argument in its various forms. The fact is that using God as an explanation—“the universe was created so it must have a creator, and that creator must be God”— creates an infinite regress where we can always ask unanswerable followup questions:
“Who created that creator?”
“Why does this first creator exist in the first place?”
“Where did he exist before he created places?”

Their answer must then be “He wasn't created. He simply always has been.”. This should be an obviously unsatisfactory answer because the ultimate answer of creation cannot rely on a brute unexplainable fact. Because then, presumably things could have been different, and we would need an explanation for why things are this way and not another instead.

 

Others have attempted to avoid answering The Question by denying creation; something like:
“There is no creator, or beginning to the creation, it simply always has been. So it doesn’t need to be explained. Because there was no time before it, we don’t need to explain where it came from. Indeed it never came at all.”

 

This is a way of effectively synthesizing the brute fact “always has been” nature of Cosmological arguments with the Question-unanswerability of more frequently atheist philosophers.

 

This is another argument that is totally invalidated if there is a satisfying answer to the Question. We can respond:

“Ok you say it’s not worth asking and yet I am asking it, it is a sensible Question, and there appears to be a sensible answer.” I do just that in this paper.

 

Another method of dodging the need to answer The Question follows something like “this question is a misguided parochial one because you can't actually imagine/conceive of a world that's a true void because it would not *exist* in a meaningful sense. Therefore, talk of this unimaginable alternative Nothing World is meaningless, and there’s no way to meaningfully ask why our world isn’t the Nothing World. And so we should not attempt to ask it.”

 

We can imagine other formulations of what is the same argument: because the nothing world isn’t a thing, we shouldn’t ask why it doesn’t exist. In other words, we shouldn’t ask why a thing that inherently doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist. It’s tempting to agree just based on the cleverness of them. But I argue that they fail to recognize that the lack of something is a thing in itself. A lack can be pondered and discussed. Even a total lack of anything at all.

 

These arguments can also be attractive because they dispense with the responsibility to worry about an idea that is overwhelming important while also seemingly terrifyingly irreconcilable. But I encourage the reader to resist the temptation to neglect the Question. There can insight into the natural world beyond what physics tells us.

 
Indeed picture that in some future, we adequately explain the Big Bang, the inflationary material that the Big Bang came out of, and we develop a fully unified theory of physics answering all questions about physics, predicting everything that physics can predict. It still doesn’t explain why there are physics at all, or an existence for physics to occur in. That will always require some kind of rational inference.

 

Now I want to bring attention to the idea that the void-world really is impossible to discuss just because it is not anything. We can begin conceiving of the void-world by negating all the features of our world. We can negate matter, space, time, pre-spacetime quantum structure, and any mathematical structure, but we cannot negate logical structure without losing what it means for the void-world to exist or not exist. After all, how could there be a void-world without there being a fact of the matter as to whether there was a void-world? How could you have there be truly nothing at all, if there was no division between existence and non-existence.[5]

It is impossible to negate every structure in the void world and have it still be a void world which would be empty of all structure. It must maintain a logical structure in order to be *a thing without structure*, thereby failing to be what it is. The true Nothing World, completely devoid of any structure is indeed impossible to imagine, because it cannot exist. This is where I think the Question-deniers discussed above were absolutely correct. What they fail to conceive however was the impossibility of the void-world isn’t a theoretical failing, but is in fact the mechanism by which the primordial void-world actually sprouted structure with no other input.

 

Far from being a theoretical dead end for The Question, this actually points precisely to the essence and behavior of nothingness and its struggle with existence/nonexistence which is the source of the fundamental movement of the existential substratum. This necessarily paradoxical deadlock of definition is the generator of creation, of structures and particular things. In other words the impossibility of the true void world should be interpreted as evidence for my theory. But we’ll return to that.

 

Max Tegmark’s idea that mathematical structure is what’s fundamental is the most metaphysically-minded answer to The Question to see come from a scientist in recent time[6], but still can’t account for existence in general, because the fundamental world he posits (where every particular mathematical structure really exists, and we live in one that happened to be livable) doesn’t account for its own existence. Like Cosmological theories, it must be taken as a brute fact. It is not self-creating. One must simply accept that “all mathematical structures are real” without giving us a self-contained, self-explaining necessary reason for why mathematical structures are real, for why there is a realm in which mathematical structures all exist. It seems to me that another layer of reality has to exist in order for mathematical structures to exist in. It must also be explained why mathematical structures become physical. It is still an answer on the right track however.

 

Attempts to answer the Question by ethical or moral arguments, about how we live in the “best possible world” or “most good world” are ridiculous. Clearly what is “best” is largely subjective and arbitrary. Best for all conscious beings? Best for some God? Best for a specific individual human?
Also, a different world exactly like ours but where today had a bit less suffering and a bit more happiness is not difficult to imagine.
Furthermore I would ask what kind of “best possible world” has quantum physics injecting randomness into it at all times? Certainly this introduction of indeterminacy makes it a different world than a moment before? Is it still the same (best) world at that point? I don't even find it interesting to answer these questions. This is an argument driven purely by wishful thinking.

 

Another area of research I’ve seen on the topic of The Question Derek Parfit’s talk of things like “different possible worlds” and different “selectors” of these different possible worlds.[7] So we could be in a situation where there’s “all worlds” or in a situation where there’s “null world” (aka nothing at all), a world that’s most “good”, etc. And then there are possible selectors which decide which of these worlds comes to exist based on which selector is should take precedence over another selector. And this all amounts to the Parfit saying that one world seems to be more likely to him to come about than another. This is interesting and novel, but it amounts to the same irreconcilable issue that every other previously discussed concrete answer to the Question has. It presupposes a realm where these different choices between actually possible worlds can either be deliberately or randomly chosen between.

 

This is completely absurd in my view--as if the fundamental nature and structure of reality had anything to do with chance or what is most “probable” based on a set of expectations, or that it involves a multitude different worlds that “could have been”. This talk completely neglects to explain why there would be possibilities or ways of choosing between worlds--why there would be a realm of choosing in which possible states are chosen between. There simply is no reason to believe a realm like this exists at the fundamental level, because it exhibits too much (and too bizarre) of an already-present structure. Who is rolling these fundamental-reason-for-existence-dice, and on what metaphysical table? It seems straightforward to me that the ultimate nature of reality must be what it is out of necessity. There isn't any other way for it to be, because as I will show nothingness is the only thing that can create itself, and it must do this, and always will do this, by nature of what it is. The dance of nothingness and creation continues to this day, and will always continue.

 

All these explanations have failed because they “bottom out at brute facts” as Sean Carroll puts it. Indeed any answer that doesn’t have nothingness as the fundament will necessarily fail because-

 

Part III: Nothing Part II

-Nothing is the only thing that can create itself.

 

Nothing as fundament naturally and necessarily creates itself. The ultimate existential logic goes like this: true nothing, the void-world, the one most refer to when they pose the Question, doesn’t exist because there can’t be “nothing” as such without there being something in relation to which nothing gains its identity. Nothing is a complete lack. There must be something that nothing can lack, lest it have no ontological identity and therefore no existence/nonexistence. So here it is forced by itself, in order for it to become what it already is, to create difference by which to define itself. It creates the difference between non-existence and existence by building logical/ontological structure atop itself. But it has still at this point failed to achieve a fundamental existence for itself, because it has failed to achieve the fundamental existence-in-itself for any particular thing which it can stand in opposition to. For this reason, it continues to build layers of reality of to the physical where each layer supports the existence of things more and more substantial. Everything that exists is just the result of process of Nothing negating itself at higher and higher levels of structure and complexity. This process has an endpoint in the creation of consciousness.

 

Indeed, there is no other structure on which to build reality than Nothing, and there is (almost) nothing that can truly be built on this structure. We simultaneously live in a world in which there is nothing at all (I will fully explain this point in later sections), and in which Nothing finally achieves an opposite in consciousness, and a homeostasis emerges (though Nothing’s pursuit will still ultimately fail as we’ll see).

 

If one wonders here “why is there an essential logic to how Nothing behaves?”, they must understand that Nothing (always already) IS the logic which splits and defines itself. Nothing is the perfect lack and this lack is the source of structure. Nothing acts according to the logical structure that arises from within it, that must arise from it for it to be what it is. And we know that this logical[8] structure must come from Nothing because we will always find that the distinction between something and nothing is impossible, it is Nothing. Also the structure can’t come first because it requires Nothing to exist, in order for the logical structure to have something to refer to, giving it its content (ie. making a distinction between nonexistence and existence, truth or falsity).

 

The section above describes the movement of Nothing at the fundamental level of reality. I will now go on to describe how the level of reality in which we exist, the physical world, is structured by and built atop the very same substrate of Nothing. The result is that, despite achieving a kind of faux existence at this higher level of reality, everything is ultimately still Nothing at its core, still void of fundamental existence. And this fact should be taken as evidence that the story at the fundamental level is indeed true. The argument at each level supports the argument at the other, and then at the final highest level (consciousness, which we haven’t yet discussed) we will have a full picture of the movement and journey of Nothing, from failed non-existence to actually achieved non-existence.

 

The way that Nothing structures our level of existence, is as a gaping hole in all being.

At this higher level, Nothing takes on new forms, new aspects. Here it becomes not just a lack and a creator of false difference, but also an inconsistency of things/concepts, and a physical randomness (quantum mechanics). It becomes the failure of any particular thing to truly be what it is. That is because a particular object (be it physical or mental) can never be perfectly defined. It always requires a level of inconsistency and vagueness in order to be defined and not fall apart. This kernel of vagueness is just Nothing persisting.

When we define something it is in difference and opposition to another thing. But once again we always find the difference itself to be impossible to perfectly locate (Nothing). And then even a consistent whole which excludes nothing also cannot have an identity, is a form of nothing in itself. That is to say if you try to form a consistent something by negating (getting rid of) difference itself, you will say everything falls under A, therefore A must exist absolutely. This must obviously fail as well. (Example: if everyone is ____ then no one is. That is, a set/group which excludes nothing, fails to make a meaningful distinction, and so does not exist, not even pragmatically.) This is how a perfectly consistent whole represents a perfect lack of being. Being fails at every turn.

 

Ok so nothing exists. But the reader probably isn’t convinced. So far I’ve only shown how Nothing operates at the fundamental level. I will show how no particular things can be said to truly exist in our world. Although things at the level of physical reality appear to have substance, I will show how they lack a fully determinate existence, and therefore how Nothingness has still failed to create anything that truly exists. I will also discuss what it would even mean for something to “truly exist” in our world.

 

Part IV: The Nothingness of Physical Objects and References to Them

Reality is vague--vague in that no part of reality, no macro scale object, no particle, can be defined or described in an absolute determinate way.

 

A physical object, like a coffee mug has indeterminate extension in space. That is, you can’t know where it begins and ends. If one was asked “What do we refer to in reality when we talk about coffee mug A?”, the most straightforward way to define an object would seem at first to be to define it as a collection of all the particles that make it up, and then once we have the collection of particles we can talk about the mug as the “set of particles a,b,c,d which together are in this structure in relation to one another, and together take on the following properties:…”

But in actuality we cannot even begin by defining this set of particles because “Even in the case of my coffee mug, it is plausible that its size is indeterminate at sufficiently high resolution, since for atoms at its boundary it is indeterminate whether they are part of the mug or part of its environment”(Quantum Ontology page 73).

Beyond that issue, even if we could perfectly define the boundary of an object, objects are constantly shedding particles all the time. At one moment you would know all the particles in the object, and by the next moment it would be a funamentally different object, because it would be composed of a different set of particles.

So merely defining it as a set of particles, even if you had the perfect list, would fail.

To make matters even worse, even if you had all the object’s particles identified, and they never changed. How would you define them?
“Here we have particle 1 of coffee mug A.”
“Which one is particle 1?”

“It’s the one that’s right here.”

“And where is that?”

“At this point.”

“There are no absolute points in space. So where is that point?”

Etc.

 

At best you’d have to define it as the particle in the point relative to all the other particles in this perfect unchanging object. But of course particles aren’t ever actually stationary. So even this wouldn’t be possible.

Everything is in movement all the time, and every physical or positional statement is approximate. No physical thing or system is perfectly definable--not absolutely (in relation to absolute points in space or time), or relatively (in relation to other physical systems). And of course not just the statements about them are approximate. The things themselves are approximate.

 

This “at sufficiently high resolution” in the passage above, turns out to apply not just to physical systems but to ideas as well.

 

Ideas share the same property of breaking down at higher resolution. The closer you look at any definition, the more exact you try to get, the more it breaks down. Take the idea of a chair. Suppose we were able to perfectly define the microscopic physical boundaries of a chair and its particles, and it never shed a single particle, and the particles were perfectly still. You would declare “this is chair A, absolutely”.

 

For the word “chair” then to have any content besides a placeholder word like “Michael” (where the name has no descriptive content and is merely a placeholder for a physical thing), it has to then refer to an idea. But this perfect physical object “chair A” can’t perfectly be a chair because ideas are themselves imperfect. There would would be no way to say for certain that this absolute physical object is indeed “a chair”, because “chair” is itself approximate.

 

After all, what is a chair, besides whatever we would pragmatically call a chair?

A concept is not a perfectly established set of properties: “chair: exactly 2 feet off the ground, created by humans for sitting, must be made of wood” etc.

 

No matter the properties you could ascribe to “chair” which would have to be satisfied for any object to truly be an instance of “chair”, it would totally fail to capture how ideas actually function, and we would still call something a chair despite failing to meet those criteria.

Not only is it theoretically impossible for any physical object to perfectly meet a criteria (because physical characteristics of an object are ultimately vague), but that’s not even how ideas function for us.

We might still call two rocks sitting on top of each other a chair, or a purely decorative chair a chair even if it’s not actually meant to be sat on. That is to say there would always be objects which fit the set of properties for “chair”, but we wouldn’t call them chairs, and then there would be objects that didn’t fit the set of properties, yet we would still call them chair.

 

There is nothing in the object itself that makes it a chair. A chair is whatever we would call a chair. There is no set of determinate properties that you could reduce the idea to. And this may seem like a convenient example, but this is how every idea functions. They are all ultimately arbitrary, and will all breakdown at a sufficiently high resolution.

Let’s examine one of the hallmark examples of a valid and sound argument used in every introductory logic textbook.

“John is a bachelor. All bachelors are unmarried. Therefore John is not married.” It is necessarily true that he is not married if he is a bachelor, given that all bachelors are unmarried. But it’s only really the perfect logical sentence if we ignore that “John” can’t possibly refer to any truly existing physical person/object (for reasons already discussed), and neither can marriage. After all, who determines what makes a marriage legitimate? Is it to sign a document? Is it an intention of spending one’s life with another person? Once again the idea of marriage can’t possibly be perfectly defined in any of these flimsy ways.

We can only hold the bachelor argument up as sound by positing the untrue premise that all the things referred to in the argument are real determinate things, which they aren’t. There’s no consistent John, and there’s nothing that it is to be unmarried / a bachelor.

 

It is especially ironic that the bachelor argument is the standard logically sound argument because it nods to the primary method we have developed to deal with the trauma of the ultimate indeterminacy of ideas: by reference to God as the fixer of ideas.

Nothing else can perfectly define “marriage” so it is up to the empty placeholder of God. In other words, the only way to retain the ideological presupposition of determinacy of ideas is to believe in God, because God, being absolute himself (and this absoluteness being one of his only truly necessary traits), would be able to set the definition for what “marriage” really is.

That is, he can anchor ideas in a determinate way because he is absolute himself. John may be constantly changing, but God does not change.

In doing so, the previously untethered web of meaning can be anchored relative to Him.

Of course this process is obviously fictitious wishful thinking and will always fail to actually tether meaning in an absolute way. This exact notion of God is precisely what Zizek/Lacan refer to as “the Big Other”. The Big Other is a kind of psychological figure that we as subjects presuppose in order to tether all meanings, to maintain the consistency of the symbolic sphere, the web of meaning. We do it because the alternative is psychologically traumatic.

 

For the record, I don't believe that all of the notions that Zizek inherited from Lacan are important, or even real, but the concept of the Big Other is important and informative. The existence of a Big Other, even in non-religious contexts where the state can function as the Big Other[9], is evidence of the trauma left behind when humans encounter the ultimate lack of being in the world.

We can see the allure of wanting to believe in absolute things. The existence of determinate truths would make questions of how to go about life far easier. And even once consciously recognized, it is difficult (if not impossible) to conceive of reality in its true sense (total chaos and nothingness).[10]

 

I think one should take the foundations of analytic philosophy as a whole to be shaky for these reasons. The one goal uniting all analytic philosophers is to define things perfectly before discussion surrounding them is had. Pragmatically speaking, I think that’s mostly fine. But it certainly shouldn’t be performed while actually believing in the absoluteness of definitions. The logical statements and propositions they use  only have meaning if we can perfectly define their predicates, which of course we can’t.

 

It is inherently indeterminate what a proposition is ever claiming. In rejecting that a true singular understanding of a proposition is possible, I find that in fact a statement can be true and false in equally real and meaningful ways (although never exactly equal, as this would violate what we could call the “law of inconsistency”[11]). For instance, a statement like “My consciousness carries on through a timeline and it is the same entity at each point in time.”

For one, it turns out there is no absolute timeline made up of discrete moments. There so many vague words in a sentence like this that one can consider each interpretation to be false, and therefore in a sense equally correct. There’s no good reason to believe that the particular conscious observer of one moment is the same observer experiencing the next conscious state.

But there’s also no conceivable way to show or prove that it is a different observer carrying on through the timeline. Therefore both interpretations are simultaneously incorrect. But if you take one of these perspectives you can rightly believe yourself to be correct. And I think this fact is deeper than it appears at first because it gets at the ultimate sense in which we are not simply lacking “true” knowledge in any situation, but in fact the truth of a seemingly understandable proposition doesn’t exist.

But the truth also does exist here, if you interpret the proposition in another equally real sense.

 

For this reason “the soul” is another concept invented by humans which underpins our way of dealing with reality. We must suppose it to exist, because it would grant an absolute answer to the above question. If we suppose the empty placeholder concept of the soul, we can dispense with the psychological trauma of true being, true emptiness.

With souls, we could say for certain “I am the same observer from moment to moment, because it is in each instance the same soul doing the observing”. But also if you were to assume the ultimate reality of the soul, no one could prove that such a thing doesn’t exist. After all, what is the difference between a world where souls exist, and ours? Possibly nothing.

 

Finally I invite the reader, who may be wondering about mathematics as a candidate for a source of absolute knowledge, to research Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. What you’ll find is that incompleteness pervades math as well. But others can explain that far better than I.

 

Part V: Imagining the Converse

So logic, math, physical objects, ideas. None can be absolutely defined or given an absolute independent existence. And it’s not due to lack of information. It’s that reality and therefore these things are fundamentally structured around nothing. Reality has holes in it. There’s no other way for any of these systems to be.

 

I would like the reader to reflect on the fact that while things couldn’t actually have been different (nothingness proceeds absolutely and necessarily), we can (vaguely) conceive of the attributes of a reality in which existing things were perfectly consistent. The big bang could have occurred at absolute point 0. There could be objects with absolute physical boundaries down to a discrete absolute smallest unit of space with their absolute point in space defined in relation to the direction and distance from point 0. There could be uniform slices of time that stretch for all of space that could be discretely measured and pass an at absolute rate of 1 second per 1 second at anywhere in space, at any speed, at any mass. The speed of light wouldn’t be relative. We can picture a world with no randomness built in by quantum mechanics. Everything is determinate and moves along an absolute timeline perfectly according to the motions of determinate physical objects. Many of these things were believed in at some point. The old paradigm for the world was Newtonian, and it was one with absolute time and absolute points in space. Evidence has pointed away from this however. But this model is only vaguely conceivable and not actually possible because there has to be something which sets things in motion. And that thing has to be inconsistency. In our universe, all macro objects are the result of quantum inconsistencies in the previously consistent pre-inflationary material. The only other option is to posit God which then fails as we’ve seen.

 

I have so far mostly detailed how ideas, statements, and physical objects are impossible, a discussion which is centered on humans and how we interact with the world. But in the last hundred years we have done nothing but discover that indeterminacy structures the smallest and largest scales of physical reality even more than we had thought.

Part VI: Nothingness in the World Everywhere

Quantum physics, a relatively recent discovery, is pure indeterminacy. In a sense it’s the fundamental seed of indeterminacy in physical reality. For this reason it was extremely resistant to understanding by the community of scientists who previously thought small-scale interactions to be perfectly determinate.

Here is how Peter Lewis describes what it has done to physics: “This makes quantum mechanics unusual, perhaps unique, in the history of science. It is a theory in which we have no idea what we are talking about, because we have no idea what (if anything) the basic mathematical structures of the theory represent”[12].

This may come as a surprise to readers who assume that scientists know the answer to questions like “what is a particle, really?” But when it comes to quantum mechanics this is not even remotely the case. There is no agreement about what the mathematics (confirmed by experiments though they may be) are actually saying about reality and what sorts of objects exist in reality.

One thing remains clear however. Quantum mechanics bakes indeterminacy into physical reality. There are experiments showing that there is no possible way to know in advance what the the determinate value of a property of a quantum system will be after being measured. That means there is nothing we could possibly know about the particle and its history beforehand, which would tell us what the determinate value will be when we measure it. In order for the quantum system to gain a determinate value at all, there is required an intrusion of absolute indeterminacy. Quantum mechanics would seem to be the only way in which “probability” actually exists.[13]

 

On top of this, we don’t even know if there are particles at all, or if everything is simply waves which at times appear to be particles. Even with the Everettian “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics--where there is no determinate value randomly chosen, because each “possible” value is equally real and these worlds split off from one another to become real separate worlds--there is no explanation for why any individual conscious subject finds themself in the specific world branch that they do instead of another.[14]

 

Relativity, the other major physical theory of our time (that flipped our assumptions of absolutely reality) follows a similar story. What we previously thought was a unified whole of a reality going through time at the same rate, is in fact a multitude of frames of reference experiencing time differently to other objects relative to their speed and mass. The same event can rightly be said to occur before or after another depending on who is reporting it. With this it became clear that there are no absolute slices of time which one could divide time into. There are in fact equally true different statements that can be made about the same physical situation. This is like what I wrote about above with conscious states and souls.[15]

 

Here empirical facts about physical systems are dependent on a chosen frame in the same way that statements can be simultaneously true and false depending on the frame of interpretation. The answer is always “both are true, neither are true, and also one is absolutely more true than the other, and this is usually pragmatically obvious (though not always, and it’s impossible to prove even when obvious)”. In the case of frames of reference in relativity, one option is in a sense more true for the subject in that frame.

 

It should be noted that “doing physics” involves applying models to physical systems, and that this application is no different from the application of a word to a physical object, insofar as both are done imperfectly. Large imperfections in the application of a model to a physical system (based on very incorrect experimental results) is why new theories are necessitated. But application of a model to a physical system will always be imperfect to some degree, being that physical systems are not absolutely definable. Sometimes the inconsistency between the model and the result is so great and one has done so many tests that they must conclude that the model is wrong and a new model is needed. And they would be right to do this.

In reality, it’s technically possible to just get really unlikely results in an experiment over and over leading you to confirm what should have been found to be the wrong model. So no model can ever be confirmed absolutely, nor applied absolutely, because the physical system you’re applying it to is indeterminate. And yet curiously, the very models (quantum mechanics and relativity) that provide support for my theory of the nothingness of reality themselves could be wrong under what my theory claims, and therefore the supports for my argument are unavoiably unprovable. So my theory purports that its own evidence is unprovable. But it is exactly this kind of paradox that I am claiming is the most fundamental truth to encounter in metaphysics.

 

There are yet more compelling physical examples of nothingness being at the heart of things. The net energy of our universe is exactly zero. That is, the positive energy in the universe (matter/dark matter/energy) is exactly cancelled by the negative energy (gravity). So it takes zero energy to create the universe. The universe is a net nothing taking the form of something momentarily. We can imagine the universe, and existence in general, as this vibrating nothingness.

 

In another instance of being arising out of consistency/inconsistency, consider that before there was the Universe there was just a consistently distributed volume of inflationary material. But within that inflationary material there was always a potential for it to be disturbed by a quantum fluctuation. This is what set off the pre-inflationary material to explode into rapid inflation (the Big Bang). We can see here the interplay between the consistency of the pre-inflationary material and the negative force of inconsistency  in the randomness of quantum fluctuations. The universe arose out of this interaction.

 

Following this, a uniform and consistent pattern of matter would have created absolutely nothing in the universe. But tiny inconsistencies in the concentration of matter and energy created bigger inconsistencies as the universe progressed and things spread out and came together through gravity. If the distribution of matter was perfectly even, nothing like stars would have come about in the universe.

 

But matter collected into very particular areas. And because of that, there are a lot more “things”. There are now planets, cars, consciousness. We’re around the peak of the wave of creation right now. As time goes on, energy will spread out again. The universe will become cold and uniform. Inconsistency will go back down, and consistency will reign again.

This is incidentally why I find the word vibration as used by new age spiritualists to be very fitting. The logic of existence is truly a back-and-forth movement at every stage. A universe rises and falls. A conscious being lives and then dies. Nothingness is always moving against itself. Particle and antiparticle pairs are constantly popping into existence everywhere, and immediately annihilating one another. Existence is achieved but only inconsistently--only for a time. The natural state of all things is to be in motion.

 

Indeed they’ve have found that it requires spending a massive amount of energy to create a situation where a physical system has no temperature, in which there is no movement, no vibration.

 

Possibly Stephen Hawking’s greatest contribution to physics was the discovery that black holes give off radiation and so are actually impermanent. Previously we didn’t think energy could escape a black hole. Just as we discover everything else to be inconsistent, empirical evidence has confirmed that black holes are not permanent. Particle/antiparticle pairs that materialize at the event horizon of a black hole can be split by being on either side of the event horizon and resultantly pull photons (energy) out of the black hole. It’s almost as though these pairs are Nothing’s solution to what would otherwise be the problematic permanence of black holes.

 

I’ve already stated that there is absolutely nothing. Which is true. But there’s actually one thing which does exist, absolutely, undeniably, in itself. It is the perfect antithesis to nothingness. And that is consciousness.

 

Part VII: Consciousness: the Full Realization of Nothing

Generally, it is not known why we have consciousness. One might think as I did that we evolved to have it because it is beneficial. For instance the experience of the taste of fruit would be so pleasurable that it would make you want to have more, thus making you more likely to survive and pass on your genes, and therefore consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation.

But new evidence has come about that casts doubt on this. For instance, we actually make decisions before we are conscious of having made a decision. It is only after the fact that we feel like we have chosen X, even if it involves blurting out an answer as randomly and quickly as one can. So consciousness might not play any pragmatic role at all in decision-making, which is presumably the only way it would be evolutionarily useful. Or it might act on decision-making in other ways that wouldn’t be detected by the sorts of tests that have been done. Maybe it is still evolutionarily beneficial. Maybe it’s not.

But even if consciousness were beneficial to us, it still wouldn’t be explained how we can have it (this is called the “hard problem of consciousness” in philosophy). How do extra-physical facts of conscious experience come to exist in an otherwise completely physical world. There is no accepted answer for this currently. Daniel Dennett says “there is no consciousness as such, it just seems like there is” which is bizarre and I don’t think anyone should listen to him (especially when he believes on the other hand in “free will”. I think he’s just a contrarian.). Others argue that it’s a natural result of information processing. But these answers don’t really explain why we’re in a world where consciousness can be brought about by information processing or quantum mechanics.

 

But my theory does explain it. Consciousness is a thing whose existence is logically necessitated by the existence of nothingness.

 

We have consciousness because it is the absolute negation of nothing itself. The law that there are no particular things that exist fundamentally and in themselves, has to be negated because nothing always negates itself.

Consciousness is the perfect form of in itself existence and exists undeniably. The only thing that can exist in itself is consciousness. Even Nothing fails to be itself. Consciousness is full realization of Nothingness.

 

This is why consciousness is the only thing that can actually be separated from anything else. One conscious state is utterly and perfectly separated from another conscious state. I am having my conscious experiences and you are having yours. They are totally distinct. There is nothing else at all like this in the world. Everything else is separated arbitrarily according to conscious subjects.

 

Therefore consciousness is not a contingent thing, it is necessary. And the universe exists for consciousness. Nothingness creates all that is, in order to achieve consciousness to negate itself and thereby define itself. Raw experiential pure existence is the inevitable result of there being really nothing at all. When you ask yourself “Why do I, a conscious being exist, when there could have been nothing at all?”. The answer is that you exist because there is Nothing at all.

 

The existential logic of nothingness doesn’t end here, because even perfect existence must be negated.

 

Admittedly I’m not entirely sure how consciousness is negated, besides conscious states perhaps not being unified in a true determinate conscious being, and then more obviously by conscious beings dying. My suspicion is that the ultimate negation of particular consciousnesses involves a universal consciousness like new age types and and Hindus posit. In this scenario there is a universal consciousness which particularizes itself forever in the form of particular conscious beings in particular universes. In this way it moves back and forth because it must. So while retaining its universality, never really losing anything, it also simultaneously completely loses itself in a particular being. The universal consciousness is both negated and not negated by its particularization. Something is lost but nothing is lost. And similarly in this scenario there would be no difference between dying and being reincarnated, or dying and rejoining the universal consciousness, or dying and being dead permanently. These different senses of dying would be experienced as indistinguishable and therefore should be considered all true. If there is a universal consciousness then every statement is true in some sense, although some more true than others in certain frames of reference. In some sense there would be a Hell (as the universal consciousness would currently be living out an infinite number of particular lives involving horrible suffering), a Heaven (reunification with the universal consciousness), reincarnation, etc.

If there isn’t a universal consciousness and we are the highest form of Nothing as particular conscious beings, then so be it, but I suspect that if particular consciousness can be negated by the creation of universal consciousness then it is. The two can then successfully negate one another as the highest opposition to Nothing, which sensibly follows the logic of Nothing.

 

Part VIII: The Universalizability of This Theory

Suki Finn[16], in Metametametaphysics and Dialetheism (Australasian Journal of Logic (14:1) 2017, Article no. 5) argues that whatever our ultimate metaphysical framework is, it must embrace dialetheism and paraconsistent logic.

*For example, global relativism: If everything is relative, then the sentence ‘everything is relative’ will be relative too. And global scepticism. If we cannot know anything, then we cannot know ‘we cannot know anything’. And likewise for global quietism: If we should be quiet about X, then we should be quiet about being quiet about X. A theory that references itself may also refute itself, as if what the theory says is correct then the theory turns out to be false, or is undermined in some way.*

Here she undermines even those who would dodge metaphysical debate claiming that they in fact are doing metaphysics to dodge metaphysical debate. It’s the same issue one runs into with attempting to ground a mathematical theory.

 

Once again, there is only one option here, and it is my theory. My theory embraces paraconsistent logic perfectly and absolutely. Nothingness as fundament IS contradiction. The ultimate fact that *everything is inconsistent*/*there is nothing* (the same statement) does apply to itself. *nothing exists* is both true and false simultaneously and undeniably. True because all the somethings are nothing, and false because there are somethings but they are doomed to negation and inconsistency (and lacking a consistent being is to be nothing). So the contradiction inherent to the fundamental existential question, is itself the source of creation. Nothingness is impossibility is inconsistency is contradiction is negation is creation, in that metaphysical order.

 

And this process is eternal. It has been going on forever (in whatever way forever can be understood) and will continue, never resolving. Nothingness will never achieve itself, and we as somethings will never be able to destroy it and achieve non-existence (void world). Perhaps in a negation of temporality, conscious beings in this area of the spatial multiverse can, through science, achieve a state of permanence someday. And this state will be allowed by nothingness, because that permanence definitionally gives existence to other impermanent universes. These are questions which I’m not sure my theory can accurately predict, but which ironically would retroactively confirm my theory.

Part IX: Final Thoughts, Anxiety about Indeterminacy

The reason I’ve been researching and thinking about this topic since I was a child is because I knew I would never be rest peacefully until I discovered a satisfying answer. More times than I can count, I’ve jolted upright in the middle of the night, hyperventilating because the simultaneous options I’d been presented regarding continued existence--i.e. Either 1. You die and that’s it. Or 2. You live forever-- both frightened me into a state of panic. And the not knowing which of these options was in fact the case, brought me even less peace. The only thing that has brought me peace was getting to the bottom of the existential deadlock in which all answers are true and meaningless. That is to say I’ve discovered there’s something more comforting about knowing that it is both true that you will live forever and that you will die. I hope that this writing finds anyone else experiencing this same dread and allows them to find some peace with it.

 

More generally, I hope every reader has begun to get a sense of the ultimate dance, to picture the back and forth, the movement, the squirming, the discomfort of existence with itself. Things maintain a harmony momentarily, and then they explode. The most fundamental concept of Buddhism is impermanence. I think the Buddha understood most of this even if he didn’t conceive of it in the same terms, or for the same purpose. He was absolutely right. It’s also no wonder that the number zero (a nothing with an important existence in its own right) was developed in India. Westerners were too invested in consistency and the absolute. Western academic philosophy is still caught up in this conception of reality.

 

I remember trying to figure out exactly what it is that Buddhists believe happens when you die. And I could never find an explicit answer. And I think now I know why that is. They must have known that there is no true answer to the question because there are multiple true answers which are in reality indistinguishable. There is no difference between believing in karma/reincarnation, and atheism as I have shown above. It’s all true and false. I suppose here nirvana would simply be full surrender of to this nature of reality.

 

I would like for the reader to have an opportunity at that nirvana. At first this information is traumatizing when you open yourself up to it, but like the movement of everything else towards its opposite, that trauma can turn into peace and contentment. I myself never knew any peace while I was still clinging to religious beliefs in the absolute and the intuition that I would find the ultimate answers to existence would be revealed by a careful enough reading of a religious text, or from a complex series of arguments in philosophy, or by a scientist who figures out the real answer so that a religious source doesn’t have to provide it. All these sources of knowledge (representing the psychological Big Other), I tacitly assumed would together give me a determinate picture of ultimate reality, and perhaps some insight into whether there was a God watching over us, who himself would at least know what’s going on. The terrifying realization I’ve come to is that there’s nothing more to know about the ultimate nature of reality (even if we discover more about the natural world).

 

So when we ask why there is this world with something instead of a void world, you should know that the version of reality where there is absolutely nothing, where nothing ever came to be, with no structure and no content, is literally indistinguishable from our reality. And that no other kind of reality could have ever come about. And true void can never exist.

 

In fact the difference between our reality and the void reality, is the very last false something to negate and collapse. This difference between void world and false void world is itself nothing. You really have to now picture it. The final negation. We are in the void world. And we’ll never leave it. And it is nowhere, and it’s headed nowhere. Once you’ve grasped it there’s nothing more to be gleaned.

Close your eyes. Surrender to the movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix: Definitions

 

 

Clarifying and justifying how I define existence: I agree with Jonathan Schaffer[17] that questions of existence must be about fundamentality if they’re going to be about anything at all. I’m sure that’s all we would agree on, but it’s incredibly important. Ordering things by their fundamentality is the only way to give questions about existence a deep ontological meaning beyond Quinean “whatever science says”. This “whatever science says exists, exists”, if true, would make speaking about the absolute origin of existence impossible, because science will never be able to find direct evidence for why there is anything at all. But that isn’t to say that the findings of science don’t matter for what exists. As I’ve shown, science does give indirect formal evidence for my theory. It’s just that we can’t reduce all that exists to whatever science says. As Chalmers says in Metametaphysics, it’s not clear what the “exists” quantifier could mean in a deep ontological sense if existence is not linked to fundamentality.

Additionally I don’t think one can take Schaffer’s “Neo-Aristotelian” view on grounding (in which things are ordered based on fundamentality, aka what grounds what) and have it make sense, without accepting my theory. This is because something like “numbers” could not really be ordered in its fundamentality without a good theory of why numbers are more fundamental than chairs despite knowing that numbers can’t be the absolute grounding thing (due to what I’ve said before, that numbers can’t create or explain themselves).

 

We can say that both unicorns and Barack Obama don’t exist in any deep fundamental sense. Pragmatism however makes it useful to consider Barack Obama as existing, whereas there is no good reason to treat a fictional creature as existing. And indeed it’s pragmatically harmful to do so as that amounts to delusion. So clearly we can still talk about things existing in a weak sense. Accepting this theory doesn’t mean losing touch with everyday reality.

 

On the issue of basing metaphysics in talk of fundamentality, Thomas Hofweber has the following to say: “There are many things that are prior or more fundamental than other ones, but they are so in many senses of these words. What is disputed and controversial is whether there is a special metaphysical sense of priority or fundamentality. This I deny.⁷ “ (Metametaphysics 271) So he doesn’t think there is a special metaphysical concept of fundamentality. I completely disagree. What is fundamental for our metaphysical purposes is that B completely relies on A for its existence and for its capacity to exist, and A is ultimately fundamental if it relies on nothing for its existence. Of course the real picture is slightly more complicated because there is a symbiotic relationship of fundamentality where nothingness relies on consciousness to stand in opposition to in order to achieve existence. And consciousness relies on nothingness just the same. This is why these are the two things that fundamentally exist.

 

So “existence” in the deep metaphysical sense, is existence undeniable and perfectly existing in itself, not for anything else, which is found in unison with fundamentality, because only fundamental things exist perfectly in themselves. And nothing is simultaneously prior to consciousness but also the source of consciousness, as well as the source of itself. And this special sense of metaphysical fundamentality is simultaneously a logical relationship of and a physical one. I’m sure Hofweber would say these are two different senses, but I think that my theory explains how they are one unified sense of fundamentality, albeit two aspects of this fundamentality we can speak of. It simply takes the form of physical fundamentality in this realm of existence, whereas in the logical realm it takes the form of logical fundamentality. And the physical aspect may seem to be asymmetrically reliant on the logical, but the logical can’t achieve itself without the physical realm.

 

I’ve considered whether logic itself should be considered the fundamental thing. Logic being the truth or falsehood of a fact. After all whether there is nothing (the first step of everything) should seem reliant on ability for it to be the case that there is something or nothing. But then facts about there being something or nothing, are also completely reliant on there being a nothing or something to categorize. The categories are worthless if they reference nothing. I prefer to think that the logic is unified with nothingness. That both are once again two aspects of the same.

 

 

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Also, I’d argue that this situation is similar to that of free will and God. That is: if free will turns out to be a metaphysically incoherent notion, and God turns out to exist, then it’s not very likely that God could have free will. So if there’s is no determinacy in this universe, no particular things, nor did the universe take anything to create, then what makes us think that the super-universal realm is any different besides being the source of this logic?

 

Aristotle’s notion of substance, developed in the Categories, is multifaceted. But perhaps the core notion is that of a basic, ultimate, fundamental unit of being. This emerges in the passage that Wedin refers to as ‘‘the grand finale of the Categories’’ (2000: 81), namely: ‘‘So if the primary substances did not exist it would be impossible for any of the other things to exist’’ (1984: 5; Cat.2b6–7; c.f. 1984: 1609; Meta.1019a2–4) In the Categories the main criterion [for selecting the primary substances] is ontological priority. An entity is ontologically primary if other things depend for its existence on it, while it does not depend in a comparable way on them.

Aristotelian task: The task of metaphysics is to say what grounds what.

Aristotelian method: The method of metaphysics is to deploy diagnostics for what is fundamental, together with diagnostics for grounding.

 

[W]hatever supervenes or, as we can also say, is entailed or necessitated, ... is not something ontologically additional to the subvenient, or necessitating, entity or entities. What supervenes is no addition to being. (1997: 12)

 

“Quinean task: The task of metaphysics to say what exists” (Schaffer 348).

 

“Never mind the historical views of Quine or Aristotle. Just ask: which is the best conception of the target of metaphysical inquiry?”

 

“I conclude that contemporary metaphysics, insofar as it has been inspired by the Quinean task, has confused itself with trivialities.”

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[1]Apart from the other thing, which is consciousness, which will be discussed later. But that comes about as the logical opposite of nothing which gives nothing its identity.

[2]I am fully aware that the ideas in this essay will on first reading sound like a mixture of word salad, improperly conflating analogies with physical processes, and downright crackpottery. I will do my best to show that they are not. It took me some time of reading Zizek, decades of existential terror, and not a small amount of adderall for the necessary truth of these ideas to *click* for me with a kind of religious revelation. As I just alluded to, these ideas I hold are mostly owed to Slavoj Zizek and his interpretations of Hegel. I'd like to think I'm representing his ideas, or at least the logical extensions of his ideas, more clearly than he has to date (not a tough job many would say) for the purposes of metaphysics relating to The Question. Additionally I try to square the very abstract talk of nothingness in continental philosophy with more grounded analytic philosophy and accepted science. So.

[3]In “A Universe from Nothing” 2012.

[4]Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” is enough evidence of rationally acquired knowledge for me.

[5] This point is absolutely critical and too easy to overlook.

[6]Tegmark “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality” 2014.

[7]In “Why Anything? Why This?” 1998.  https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n02/derek-parfit/why-anything-why-this

[8]One must note that when I say “logic”, I don’t here mean the study of reasoning through which we speak of truth and falsity of statements, but instead a metaphysical structure which grants fundamental truth to ontological facts.

[9] For example, the state, or “Donald Trump” can function as the figurehead that preserves meaning for all things. Here Donald Trump can serve, psychologically, as God, and all knowledge and meaning is through him. I don’t think I have to convince anyone that there are people who actually conceive of reality this way. That it is possible for meaning to be tethered to absoluteness is obviously a fantasy when pointed out about Donald Trump, but not as obviously a fantasy to famous philosophers like Kant when the Big Other is God.

[10]God is also necessitated by the rejection of nothingness/inconsistency in the case of a cosmological argument like this made by Duns Scotus:

1.    Something can be produced.

2.    It is produced by itself, something or another.

3.    Not by nothing, because nothing causes nothing.

4.    Not by itself, because an effect never causes itself.

5.    Therefore, by another A.

6.    If A is first then we have reached the conclusion.

7.    If A is not first, then we return to 2).

8.    From 3) and 4), we produce another- B. The ascending series is either infinite or finite.

9.    An infinite series is not possible.

10.  Therefore, God exists.

11.  It is because he makes the mistake in 2. of thinking that nothing can’t cause anything that he ends up with the conclusion that God exists.

http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Duns_Scotus/Ordinatio/Ordinatio_I/D2/Q1

 

[11] I.e. that inconsistency will thwart any attempt to make a fully consistent statement. Everything will always fail to be what it is. So both the statements “nothing exists”, and “things exist” are true and false in different senses.

[12]Peter Lewis in Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics. 2016.  page 23

[13]Rolling dice, for example, is not actually random or an instance of probability. Nor can slot machines or computers generate a truly random number without basing that randomness in the measurement of a quantum system. That’s why the best random number generator that exists works off of measuring particles coming from space.

[14]Read Quantum Ontology by Lewis for an explanation of the current metaphysical understanding of the subject.

[15]Once again if you’d like to learn more about Relativity, I implore you to read more about it to gain a general understanding of just how radically it changed our previous physical worldview. Tim Maudlin’s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (2012) will give you a rather thorough understanding.

[16]in Metametametaphysics and Dialetheism (Australasian Journal of Logic (14:1) 2017, Article no. 5)

[17]In Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. 2009. Johnathan Schaffer “On What Grounds What”