/lit/ - Literature

Why is there something rather than nothing?

>>11233340
prove there is something

God.

>>11233370
If God created something, who created God?

>>11233340
I wonder if that's even possible to know while living on a tiny rock in a place nearly infinitely times larger.

>>11233392
God always was and always will be.

>>11233392
Why does God need to be created to exist?

>>11233392
God is not a "thing" hence does not need a creator. He is the principle underlying the necessity of "things" which are by nature accidental.
Read Avicenna.

>>11233407
>>11233401
>>11233396
Does Occam's razor not suggest that its more plausible the Universe has always existed rather than God has always existed, and God created the universe?

>>11233433
But we know the universe had a start.
god is the cataclyst for existence.

>>11233445
The universe has always existed. It goes to negative and positive infinity.

God is more often not in the mind of man. God is.

Dostoevsky

>>11233392
>he thinks a transcendental being is bound by causality

God created himself, fuck you

>>11233502
>>>11233392
>God created himself, fuck you

see >>11233407

>>11233340
because of the will of power, of course! is in the structure of reality.
sort yourself, bucko
oh and wash your penis-the bloody thing about washing a penis- it's sad man! so sad, and that's that.

>>11233407
I can't believe unironically say "read Avicenna". How fucking philosophically illiterate do you have to do this? "Read Avicenna". Durrrrrrrrr. Any imbecile can do this. Look: Wrong! Read Heidegger and stop doing ontotheology

>>11233340
This is what a Mooselime asked me today as part of his Ramadan Dawah service. I told him I had no idea.

>>11233340
Because of the Big Bang. And if people can believe in a giant magic man in the sky that watches over you the idea of the universe just becoming is not that far fetched.

>>11233340
if there was nothing, you wouldn't be here to ask the question, so it has to be something

>>11233451
Only the bounds -- empty space -- are infinite. Matter is finite, and thus must have an origin. That origin is the eternal first Substance, God.

>>11233693
Is empty space empty?

It's funny how people who advocate for God as a prime mover can't even agree among themselves on how this God piece can or should be shoved into the puzzle.

You're free to denominate a prime mover or any catalyst for the start of entropy as God but never forget that 99.9% of the retards out there will think you're talking about swole bearded old man throwing plague at the infidel.

>>11233705
In terms of matter? Yes, but not absent. It's the same principle of a limit approaching infinity in calculus. The bounds that contain empty space are infinite and unreachable, but the emptiness of those bounds approaches infinity by degree.

Quantum fields have always existed and always will exist. What we call "the universe" is just an instantiation, at a certain point in time, of certain quantum fluctuations which produced a big bang.

>>11233340
Something something unmoved mover. Life's biggest mystery OP

>>11233705
It's empty but it's not nothing. I'm the same way a barren room is empty, yet is still a room.

>>11233340
>noted esoteric hitlerist Jordler B Peterheil

Space and Time are categories of your sense data processing faculties, they aren't mind-independent concepts.

Fucking Aquine is an obsolete philosopher nowadays you fucking brainlets, god I hate babby-tier internet philosophers who read Aquine's Wikipedia page once and believe they figured it out.

>>11233340
Well jeez, I don't know Mr. Peterson! Maybe it has something to do with chaos, and maybe bringing order to chaos, and that Christianity is true because it works, whatever that means, and that you need to carry your cross, because otherwise you're letting entropy into your life, and there are some real malevolent narcissists out there, so you'd better put a plant in your room, bucko, or else the Babylonian dragon myths are going to turn you into a communist

>>11233340
Because of my consciousness.

>>11233392
God is defined as the thing that was before this whole creating process. He is the only thing that was not created. Therefore also the first creator.

>>11233906
>>11233502
>>11233396

how fucking convenient.

>>11233930
>hurr i'm a retard

literally what you sound like. face it. god exists you retard.

>>11233936
By this logic you can prove anything outside the realm of immediate explanation. This shit was proven obsolete literally centuries ago you intellectual sphincter.

>>11233936
t. too dumb to tackle the Ethica ordine geometrico demontrata

>>11233392
Nothing. The whole purpose in God is that he is beyond anything of this universe. The nature of God is more difficult to discern, but in essence he is the supreme order and goodness for his will is what forged creation into all that is sane in this world.

>>11233392
The Speed Force

>>11233728
>It's funny how the police agree a man was murdered but not how he was murdered. 99.9% of people think cops solve crimes like they do on TV so why even bother?

>>11233796
>they aren't mind-independent concepts
Space is. If I die you still keep living. Btfo

>Me every time I see Jordan Peterson used as a thread thumbnail.

>>11234028
Read philosophy

There IS only Nothing.

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form"

>>11234020
I lost IQ just by reading such retarded non-analogy

>>11234044
Sorry I'm not a narcissist, the world doesn't revolve around my sense data. The world is real. If I die it doesn't dissolve and vanish.

>>11234076
Everything you mean by world is constituted through the make-up of your cognitive faculties, "space" and "time" is merely how you organize whatever data there might be (or might not be) outside of yourself.

Basically a blind man wouldn't believe colors exist. An alien might not believe space and time exist.

>>11233340
because God is trapped in a nightmare, Hegel and New Ageists/Hermeticists are sick fucks who revel in it. Wanting to kill God is the only divinely inspired impulse, hence Nietzsche is the only divine philosopher. We should try to commit deicide at all times in all acts. Slaughtering priests is one way, philosophers and ethicists too, eventually politicians and anyone who appeals to higher powers or the beyond, soon Physicists, eventually most of the public...probably most humans have to die

>>11233340
>Writing an essay on the question of 'why is there something rather than nothing?'
>get bored of reading heidegger so go to browse /lit/
>see this thread
Leibniz's idea of God as a necessary being isn't a good answer (what created God, something can't come from nothing, etc.)
'Brute facts' like Russell suggests are retarded and don't answer the question
Hume's infinite chain still begs the question 'but what created that?'
Krauss is clearly retarded and doesn't understand that quantum fields count as something.
John Leslie's moral truth as necessity for existence is even worse

There are two possible responses to the question:
A weak necessity (where the necessity can be seen, e.g 2+2=4) exists for the question
OR
The question is silly as 'nothing' is not a coherent concept. Even in a state of nothing there exists truth value in the statement "there is nothing". If it holds a truth value then clearly it has something which is not nothing, invalidating the entire concept of nothing.

>>11234082
You're clinically retarded mate. There is an argument for how choosing real data sets for categorisation isn't equivalent to those data sets forming 'real' objects on their own, but what you just said is undeniably retarded.

>>11233363
Cogito. I can't prove it to you, but I most certainly can prove it to me.

>>11234094
truth value isn’t a something pseud its an interpretation, Truth isn’t ontologically real, it doesn’t have existential status and its comes from human nervous systems and passes away with them. there is no truth, nothing is real, its just a signpost for what it is.

>>11233596
Explain to me the big bang, I do not understand it.
Where did the particles come from, where did the energy come from, what banged with what, where?

>>11234111
Wow nice irritable and illiterate anon says Kant is a retard just because.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

You remember that one part in Ocarina of Time where link goes into the past to teach a song he learned from himself? That's how I visualize it, it just exists because it exists, whether that through be God or not. I probably figure it out when I die.

>>11233596
>giant magic man in the sky
Is reductio ad absurdum the most reddit atheist argument?

>>11234160
Quantum fields have always existed. Quantum fluctuations (for all intents and purposes—particles popping "in and out" of existence) created the necessary conditions for a big bang. The universe has been accelerating ever since

>>11234180
Yeah ok but where did that come from

>>11234184
It could not have been otherwise. There is no such thing as "nothingness," it cannot be instantiated. The big bang created time, there was nothing before it.

>>11234116
No you can't. There's a split between cogito and existence. Descartes basically said "cuz I say so". What a cuck.

>>11234193
>big bang created time
Lol

>>11234197
You can't doubt your doubting brainlet

>>11234193
Shut the fuck up you science pseud fuck. No one knows what the hell time is and how it relates to quantum fields. Just go back to your pop-science hole and die there.

>>11234166
Your examples did not illustrate qualia fundamentalism or transcendental idealism though.

>>11234204
Who is Kant?

>>11234227
Qualia fundamentalism lol, I wasn't getting at that all.

My examples are common illustrations of idealism, "objects" aren't mind-independent entities, objects are objects for us, not in-themselves.

Who knows what the world looks like without the human mind perceiving it.

>>11234193
holy shit this post

Really productive thread today.

>>11234223
>>11234202
The prevailing, accepted, theory of General Relativity suggests that the big bang happened at T=0 and spacetime was created simultaneously. Before that was an infinite timeless quantum state

>>11234295
Probably wrong, time isn't an entity like objects are, it's a cognitive function. Matter has to fill the form of time but time is something that transcends matter.

>>11234295
>theory

>>11234180
>Quantum fields
Do they have energy? Where from? If not, what are they and how do they exist? If they exist, why do they? If not why do I think?

>>11234295
I'm always surprised whenever people say this like it answers a question. The only answer is that the universe probably began at some point. It still does not give any method for occurance, nor does it answer whether or not a beginning was intentional ie is there a god, and yet they pretend as if it means there is no god. You realize everyone is claiming this same thing, right? You are arguing both sides.

>>11234236
Okay what did he say then? It seems pretty hard to me to say there is nothing. Something is. Not necesserily because I think, but because I perceive, which can be seen as thinking. Even if everything is a dream, a illusion or something alike, something is, and if its only the thing I call 'I'.

>>11233433
>Does Occam's razor not suggest

>>11234307
>>11234309
>>11234312
>>11234316
Perhaps we are limited in our capacity to conceive of a timeless state, or something that has no "beginning." The quantum fields always have been as they are, this is THE brute fact. For it to have been otherwise is absurd, because then something would have had to come from nothing.

>>11234275
Oh dear. Having the world filtered through human empiricism is one thing, but it does not follow that objects are mind-dependent things. The fact that their nature might be obscure to us, does not imply that there is no nature.

Also, your argument with that anon revolved around being able to determine whether an object, as we perceive it, continues to exist after the observer ceases to exist, to which you both answered with a categorical 'no' and a 'yes', respectively. This is retarded. Even if your Kantian premise were true (your demonstration certainly isn't though), it still doesn't follow that if I die, you would cease to exist.

The ontological argument is lazy and full of cracks, or outdated if we're feeling charitable - especially used as a theistically, but you argument about 'time and space' has very little or nothing to do with it.

Because it is so ordained by God

>>11234236
lol Kant's philosophical endeavor wasn't to deny literal existence you fucking retard

>>11234331
Then wherefore do the quantum fields exist in the first place

>>11233433
>Occam's razor
Nice meme dude

>>11234347
they don’t know so they’ll try to say the question doesn’t make sense

stemfags are incurious, behind all the inquisitiveness is the desire to play DOTA all day

>>11233340
You can rephrase the question into a more valuable formation: are we but many modes of the One (something), or a field of differentiated oppositions, the chaos out of which things happen (nothing)?

The question is tangled up in a misunderstanding of the difference between systems of equivalency and systems of differentiation.

When taken to its logical extreme, the one begins to resemble greatly its other: A society based on principles of equivalency will ensure tolerance, civil rights and liberties for all sorts of minorities and vulnerable people. We are all equal with respect to our metaphysical outside: for all intents and purposes, we are "One". However, it also necessarily functions by process of exclusion, as anyone who refuses to participate in a tolerant society is not simply gagged, but denied citizenship and inclusion: "All humans are my siblings, but you do not recognise this so you are not even human." Thus, a system of equivalence in its aggressive opposition to non-equivalent (differentiated) systems, has begun to resemble that which it purports to reject.

A system of differentiation, by contrast, catalogues and condenses all elements under rigorous scrutiny to ensure every discrepancy is accounted for. It is the eye of Fascism, it scans the ground, everything is reduced to chemical compounds and subatomic structure, until we have quite literally nothing left but this diagrammatic remainder of the real, a hollow kernel of unreality or indeterminacy, the absent presence of "nothing" that exists in virtual space, awaiting its actualisation in material reality.

So asking why there is "something" rather than "nothing" fails to acknowledge that we would be unable to tell the difference between the two. What if reality is an artificial projection? Is a hologram, a simulation, a dream of a sleeping god's mind, etc. still "something"?

>>11234316
this reminds me of a theory my friend presented to me as 'the most likely truth of reality'; that we live in a computer simulation
he explained it by saying to think of how much computers have changed and how much they have become capable of in the last 50 years, and that 'millions of years from now' they will be capable of simulating an entire universe
when I asked him how you even define a universe and how would we even begin to comprehend simulating one, he was just all 'muh technological advancement'
I also pointed out how such a theory is pretty much parallel with saying that God created the universe, to which he was like 'n-nah that's just stupid!!'

I've really grown to hate theoretical physics and the like

>>11234356
We've come a long way from Bohr and Einstein

>>11234347
>Why does God exist in the first place?
>Why do quantum fields exist in the first place?

It could not have been otherwise. It is a brute fact.

The actual flows from potential. But in order for change to exist the potential and actual must be distinct. In other words, the potential can’t be described as potential and actual at the same time, unless its actuality was caused by a different source of potential. We exist in a state of actuality, as does all existence. But existence can exist in all forms of existence. All forms of existence are possible, and therefore actual. But if all actuality has the characteristic of being existent, and all forms of existence exhaust the characteristics of existence, the potential source of existence must be distinct from existence, and must, therefore, be Nothing.

>>11234331
You're just confused, it's entirely natural that our cogntiive faculties yield contradictions. We are beings that developed on a macro scale, obviously we aren't fit to understand what happens on the very large or on the very small.

Space and time don't exist outside of the human mind nigguhhhh

>>11234367
>It could not have been otherwise.

Why is that?

>>11234347
the void is absolute potentiality, Nothing is so absolutely itself it "nothings" itself.

>>11234375
I think he's saying that something had to exist, be it God, the fields, or both.

Obviously this does not answer the original question of WHY something exists, which I believe he was trying to point out.

>>11234379
>the void is absolute potentiality, Nothing is so absolutely itself it "nothings" itself.

Ok cool dude

>>11234380
So basically he's been saying nothing for no reason the entire time

>>11234381
lol dumb retard doesn't get it

>>11234388
There is nothing to get. A void by definition has zero potential not infinite potential

>>11234387
This whole thread has, and I think that was his point. The bottom line is that we simply don't know. We don't know the why behind the universe at all really. The only explaination we have that fully explains it is the multiverse theory, and even that would leave us with the question of why the multiverse instead of nothing?

"Something" and "nothing" doesn't exist, those are abstractions that exist within our heads, tied to the English language.

>>11234392
>Nothing
>by definition

then it's something retard

>>11234402
>a referrent is its object

>>11234329
>Here's one hand here's another xddddddd
Kys
>>11234345
But he did doubt his own doubting you fucking retard.

>>11234402

>>11234406
you're attributing properties to Nothing, stop doing that

>>11233392
That's not how it works, I thought like that once when I was younger but God exists outside the constraints of the universe, it is like an Eldritch being beyond all comprehension.

>>11234406
*reference

>>11234411
Please point to me where I attributed any properties to nothing, you'll find the entire time I was denying properties supposed by the original poster

>>11234398
>why the multiverse instead of Nothing
Because there are no natural constraints on Nothing. There is no pre-existent law that prevents laws from being created, so existence is also not forbidden. Everything happens because it can happen.

>>11234363
Modern science is just as much of a cult any other religion. You cannot question the dogma of the "scientific academics" without being treated as a blasphemer.

>>11234418
you're imposing constraints on Nothing, what it can or cannot do, making it a determinate Something

>The universe can be described as a cybernetic system in which freedom and constraint are counterbalanced. The constraints function as structure; thus, the laws of physics are constraints which define the structure of spacetime, whereas freedom is that which is bound or logically quantified by the constraints in question. Now, since there is no real time scale external to reality, there is no extrinsic point in time at which the moment of creation can be located, and this invalidates phrases like "before reality existed" and "when reality created itself". So rather than asking "when" the universe came to be, or what existed "before" the universe was born, we must instead ask "what would remain if the structural constraints defining the real universe were regressively suspended?" First, time would gradually disappear, eliminating the "when" question entirely. And once time disappears completely, what remains is the answer to the "what" question: a realm of boundless potential characterized by a total lack of real constraint. In other words, the real universe timelessly emerges from a background of logically unquantified potential to which the concepts of space and time simply do not apply.

keywords: logically unqualified potential

>>11234424
Where is this from? This is exactly what I was thinking >>11234419

>>11234424
An observation of the non-existence of a capacity is not a constraint you absolute fucking retard.
Just like how me calling you an idiot isn't the reason why you're dumb

>>11234413
If God exists outside of the constraints of our universe, so too can the potentiality of quantum fields exist outside our observable universe.

Simply saying God gets us no closer to the question of why anything and not nothing.

>>11234419
By default then there would be no laws for anything, thus the first law to allow it's own existence has full control over what other laws can exist. The problem is that, by this same defualt, there is no process defined for a new law emerging.

>>11234437
the non-existence of the capacity IS the constraint you absolute, absolute mongoloid

>>11234434
based bigbrain poster. http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Self-Creation