Thread: Start with Nothing

Thats what I said!

Nu-unh!!

(Lol, ok, so I was simplifying your wall of text.. )

Ya I need to add brevity to my vocabulary. I just wanted to be rigorous so there was no room for confusion.

Try again buddy - brevity is not a state, it's simply defined entirely by the absence of its opposite...

Ok wait - I'm trying too hard now!

No, it's cool though - it's a sort of good cop / bad cop approach. You lay down the smart stuff, and I'll make the tl;dr version.

Originally Posted by stormcrow

Can the law of non-contradiction justify itself? It is the basic axiom of arithmetic (well one of them is a+0=a which is pretty similar) and logic but can it justify itself without resulting in a contradiction or having to create more axioms?

I agree that problems arise when you try to justify logic with logic. That might pose a problem to my argument, but no more than it does to any other argument.

Originally Posted by stormcrow

P2 is a logical fact? The proposition “everything has a cause” can only be inferred by empirical observation not pure reason, remember the Hume discussion? However experience cannot justify causality either. If the proposition “Anything that exists has some first cause” is valid, then that cause would be something that existed to cause “anything” and would therefore be included in the set of “things that exist and are therefore caused”. The argument is subject to a regress.

I'll further explain P2. The premise isn't that "everything has a cause". In fact what I'm saying is in some sense the opposite. I am saying that you can trace every cause back to something that was uncaused. That has to be true. The only other conceivable option is an infinite regression of causes. But even then, that infinite sequence of causes would be something that exists and is uncaused.

I don't think it's so difficult to conceptualize that we can't meaningfully talk about it. If I can think about it, we should be able to talk about it. But I agree that we have to be careful.

I've been getting frustrated in the last page or so and am playing my part in arguing, but I'm not "mad at you" or anything. I was getting 'irritated' in the context of the argument at Wayfaerer, tommo and Darkmatters too, and I think you four happen to be my favourite people on this site... which now that I think about it is kind of an odd coincidence.

Well, I'll be the first to admit, I'm way over my head in this discussion - I know nothing about formal logic. I just thought it was an interesting discussion. I guess I'm providing the 'man in the street' viewpoint. But the last thing I want to do is piss you off, especially over a subject where I hardly know what I'm talking about!! I should leave this one to those who are well-versed in formal logic. Besides, I gotta get to bed!! Nighty-nite!!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Yes, they don't exist - but does their lack of existence exist, as a quantifiable thing?

The point is that darkness is not an existence, it is simply the lack of existence of light.

This sort of what I was driving at earlier with my point. What we term existence and non-existence actually comes with a lot of excess baggage, and this baggage simply isn't there without a universe.

Imagine what the world would look like with no light. To our eyes, it would appear black. Now try to imagine what it would look like if there were no such thing as colour (what we call black is in fact a colour!) Tricky.

No you don't. You stated it yourself. Everything has a cause.

Circles are neat, because they don't really start or end.

Originally Posted by Dianeva

There is no assumption that time had something before it. If I used the word 'before', what I meant was the cause. The cause and effect might happen simultaneously. The effect might even be eternal. That doesn't defeat my argument.

That's entirely distorting the concept of cause and effect. Cause and effect cannot happen simultaneously by definition. Einstein even assumed that causation could not be violated in his special relativity - causes must come before effects in all cases.

Yes existence is arbitrary and it must be arbitrary because it cannot be logically caused, but is that really something people didn't already know? The argument might fall down when it comes to the second point: 'anything has a cause'. You can't say that and then go onto say it can be traced back to something which doesn't have a cause/to something which doesn't exist. If it is the case that everything has a cause, then there is no 'first' cause, there can only be infinite regression. The very assertion that nothingness/non-existence can exist is a clear contradiction.

My point is that assuming things exist and those things require causes, there must be infinite regression - no first, no before. To talk about what comes last or after we have to assume everything has an effect which is another argument for another day I guess.

It is similar to the idea that stuff can't come out of nothing. People say that because stuff can not be created or destoryed, the universe must have always existed. However, there are theories that the net energy of the universe is 0. So that the universe is basically made of nothing, that was split apart into positive and negative energies. So if you follow that, all the universe can come from nothing, but doesn't violate any rules of physics. Nothing was created or destoryed in the creation of the universe, it only changed forms.

It could be that the first cause is that nothing is fundmentally unstable, because absolute nothing shouldn't exist. And because of that events took place that eventually created the universe. You could say that there must be a reason 'nothing' is unstable and thus a cause for it, but since you are talking about something that can't exist from our view point you might never get an answer.

Ok, I started out basically agreeing with Dianeva, then Wayfarer convinced me to switch sides. But now I'm not sure again.

Running through it again and again, I see that our language is completely incapable of expressing the concepts needed. But is it just the language, or are we completely incapable of really understanding no universe? If you think of blackness, that still implies there's space to be black. There wouldn't even be space, or time - so there would be nothing to see. That is basically impossible to conceive of. The closest I can get is to imagine the big bang running in fast revers until everything collapses into a single point and then that disappears, but then I'm left, a point of awareness, looking at the space where it just disappeared. So that's no good - it still implies empty space. I could not exist to witness anything - I'd have to get sucked in and disappear with everything else, so what then is there for me to imagine?

So I'll simply admit that I at least am incapable of comprehending it sufficiently to make any kind of remotely meaningful statement about it.

Oh, and:

If you could see it, it probably would be blackness because there would be no visible light to see. Though like you said you couldn't ever actually be alive to see it. So for simplicty sake, picturing it as complete blackness works just fine.

People express problems with my argument, I explain why they're wrong, and then someone else (sometimes the same person) comes back with the exactly same problem, and I have to explain it again. If you get my explanation and tell me what's wrong with it, that's one thing, but it's like my explanation is completely ignored. So I don't know why I'm bothering explaining now, when it's probably just going to happen again a few posts later.

Originally Posted by JesterKK

That's entirely distorting the concept of cause and effect. Cause and effect cannot happen simultaneously by definition.

What about "as a logical consequence of"? An effect can't come before a cause while dealing outside of time.

Originally Posted by JesterKK

Yes existence is arbitrary and it must be arbitrary because it cannot be logically caused, but is that really something people didn't already know?

As I said in the OP, I did suspect it was pretty obvious. It was just something I'd never consciously realised before, so I thought it might be worth bringing up.

Originally Posted by JesterKK

The argument might fall down when it comes to the second point: 'anything has a cause'. You can't say that and then go onto say it can be traced back to something which doesn't have a cause/to something which doesn't exist. If it is the case that everything has a cause, then there is no 'first' cause, there can only be infinite regression.

Show me exactly where I said that everything has a cause. Can't find it? Didn't think so...

Originally Posted by JesterKK

The very assertion that nothingness/non-existence can exist is a clear contradiction.

No, it isn't. As I brought up before, it only seems to be because of our language. Actual non-existence is entirely possible.

Originally Posted by Alric

It is similar to the idea that stuff can't come out of nothing. People say that because stuff can not be created or destoryed, the universe must have always existed. However, there are theories that the net energy of the universe is 0. So that the universe is basically made of nothing, that was split apart into positive and negative energies. So if you follow that, all the universe can come from nothing, but doesn't violate any rules of physics. Nothing was created or destoryed in the creation of the universe, it only changed forms.

It could be that the first cause is that nothing is fundmentally unstable, because absolute nothing shouldn't exist. And because of that events took place that eventually created the universe. You could say that there must be a reason 'nothing' is unstable and thus a cause for it, but since you are talking about something that can't exist from our view point you might never get an answer.

The problem I have with this post is that you seem to be assuming that the laws of physics and other 'rules' already apply 'before' (bad term to use) any existence happened.

Originally Posted by Dianeva

Show me exactly where I said that everything has a cause. Can't find it? Didn't think so...

That isn't true. The rules we have may or may not have have existed then, or it might not even matter because there was nothing. The important thing is that is is possible, because at the moment the universe, time, and the laws of the universe was created everything followed them.

It is pretty safe to say the laws of physics, and things like time exist and always had to exist within our universe. Though when you speak about stuff outside of our universe there is no current way to know if that is true or not. And there are theories stating that their could be other universes, and they might follow different rules of physics.

It is possible there could be places that exist outside time, or places where time is going backwards or something crazy like that. If time runs backwards then it is possible that time could be infinite in that place. However in our universe things point to a beginning and time flowing forward in one direction. So at least in our universe there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe time is infinite going backwards.

The dream theory explains this very well, basically with the world being a dream, when you arrive at nothing, you dont necessarily get nothing but that the dream is in "off" mode, when we get creation, that is its "on" mode, in this theory, the world could have turned "on" instantly without any evolution.

Dianeva, by asserting "2) Anything that exists has some first cause," you are asserting that everything that exists has a cause. Anything could literally be any single thing, but in order for it to be a thing in the first place it has to exist. And, because everything that exists... exists, everything has a cause (according to you).

I also have trouble with this statement in regards to your conclusions,

Originally Posted by Dianeva

What do you mean? I don't understand. Using 'always' might be a bad idea since it implies the existence of time, which is something.

Time does indicate the presence of something, so it would be impossible in a non-existent universe in which nothing exists. In order for something to have sprung from this nothing and to follow your rule that anything (and everything) has a cause, a cause would have to have come about. This predicates the existence of time which, then predicates existence itself. Therefore, the "concept" of nothingness (in your head) can exist (P3 should be clarified, btw), but if nothing exists it's as simple as that. This hypothetical universe in which some how nothing exists breaks down as soon as you assert that somehow it can. P4 breaks down as well the moment you treat the concept of nothingness as the proof that the absence of existence somehow exists or can exist. Stormcrow, I feel, should have been more assertive with his point. Language isn't the issue here. The labeling of nothing as something was intentional because you cannot discuss true non-existence because of the very nature of its concept. There is no thing that can be discussed. You could try, but you would be discussing nothing.

Your last paragraph in the OP,

Originally Posted by Dianeva

So here's what I've concluded. Since you have to start with nothing, and only nothing comes from nothing, anything that does exist came about arbitrarily. I mean, everything that exists right now might have a cause, and that might have a cause, and that might have a cause, but eventually you arrive at something which just exists for no particular reason and has no cause. Whatever that first cause is, it was completely arbitrary.

basically states what is already taught in high school science class: something cannot arise out of nothing. I agree with you there, although not with the part about having to start with nothing. There is no effect without a cause, and no cause without an effect. Your second to last and very last sentences do not make sense either. If it exists, according to you, it has a cause. Therefore you would never run into anything that didn't have a cause. Assuming you somehow did, this lack of preceding action or acting forces in no way indicates to me how arbitrary the cause of something is, they don't seem related. Whether or not it was random depends entirely on your interpretation of the events and whether or not you believe everything happens by chance or even if chance is an illusion.

@Alric
Again, you're assuming that rules exist when you shouldn't be. I have the same response to this as I did to your other post.

Originally Posted by elucid

The dream theory explains this very well, basically with the world being a dream, when you arrive at nothing, you dont necessarily get nothing but that the dream is in "off" mode, when we get creation, that is its "on" mode, in this theory, the world could have turned "on" instantly without any evolution.

I don't understand. If you want to explain what you're trying to say, please define your terms (evolution, dream, 'on mode', 'off mode') and use better punctuation.

Originally Posted by snoop

Dianeva, by asserting "2) Anything that exists has some first cause," you are asserting that everything that exists has a cause.
...
In order for something to have sprung from this nothing and to follow your rule that anything (and everything) has a cause, a cause would have to have come about.

By 'first cause', I mean something that was uncaused. The first cause is something that exists but doesn't have a cause.

Originally Posted by snoop

Therefore, the "concept" of nothingness (in your head) can exist (P3 should be clarified, btw), but if nothing exists it's as simple as that. This hypothetical universe in which some how nothing exists breaks down as soon as you assert that somehow it can.

Why does it break down? I might just not be understanding. Asserting that 'nothingness' somehow can exist doesn't break down the fact that the 'nothingness' is hypothetically possible. It only shows that it's merely hypothetical and not actually the case.

Originally Posted by snoop

P4 breaks down as well the moment you treat the concept of nothingness as the proof that the absence of existence somehow exists or can exist. Stormcrow, I feel, should have been more assertive with his point. Language isn't the issue here. The labeling of nothing as something was intentional because you cannot discuss true non-existence because of the very nature of its concept. There is no thing that can be discussed. You could try, but you would be discussing nothing.

P4 is really a conclusion. Perhaps I should have labeled it differently. If P1, P2 or P3 break down, then yes, P4 breaks down. If the premises are true though, P4 must be true, since it's a logical consequence of P1-3.

Do you think that there's a logical problem with the concept of nothingness? I get the idea that you do, but don't understand why. I'm not using the concept of nothingness as proof that the absence of existence can exist. I'm merely saying that there are no logical problems with nothingness. It seems the argument that keeps coming up is that the idea of 'nothingness' still involves something, and as a result, actual 'nothingness' is impossible. But I think this is only a result of the language used. It still seems to me that people are arguing that a dark room isn't dark because you need some light to compare to the darkness. That just isn't true.

Originally Posted by snoop

Your last paragraph in the OP, basically states what is already taught in high school science class: something cannot arise out of nothing. I agree with you there, although not with the part about having to start with nothing.

What I meant was that something cannot arise as an effect of nothing. But it can just be, and not have any cause, and in this sense something can arise out of nothing. In our universe, where we witness cause and effect, it seems to be the case that causes always have effects. But there isn't actually any logical problem with considering that something has always just existed, and is uncaused.

I'll clarify what I mean by 'start with nothing'. I do not mean that, at any time, there was really 'nothing'. Time is something, so that wouldn't make sense. Since we're dealing outside of time, that state of 'nothingness' never actually was. I'm only using the term as a sort of back-drop. Everything that isn't 'nothing' seems to require an explanation - why isn't it nothingness instead? How did it come about? It seems that nothingness should be the natural state of things, since everything else seems to require a cause. So I'm just saying that, all that stuff that seems to require explanation, actually doesn't require any, because it just came about arbitrarily.

Originally Posted by snoop

Assuming you somehow did, this lack of preceding action or acting forces in no way indicates to me how arbitrary the cause of something is, they don't seem related. Whether or not it was random depends entirely on your interpretation of the events and whether or not you believe everything happens by chance or even if chance is an illusion.

What else could it be but arbitrary? If there is absolutely no reason for something to come about, not even any reason it should likely come about, yet it comes about, doesn't that mean it was arbitrary? That something else, with the same probability of happening, could have come about instead?

This used to be a big question for me too, but since then I think I answered it in a satisfactory way. I haven't explained it, but I have understood why we have no reason to think it's strange and why there's no reason we should be able to explain it.

As far as I can tell most of this thread has essentially been meaningless nonsense, based on a misunderstanding (loosely an overestimation) of what words and knowledge are. Word games, in every sense.

Knowledge is in fact just the recognition of a local pattern, and that is all it can ever be.

Time and again, knowledge that was thought to be universal and 'a priori' has been shown to be wrong; even extremely fundamental knowledge. Take space, for example. Every time we, in our daily lives, look at a scene, it is rectilinear, as far as our senses can tell; we can conceptualise a regular kind of rectangular grid permeating everything. This conceptual scheme (of the pattern) thus becomes ingrained in our brains, and for most of human history, this idea of space has been professed to be indubitable, and 'intuitively obvious'. But it turns out to not even be true; not anywhere. It's a very good approximation for small scales, but on large scales space is curved, and our idea of a rectilinear grid makes no sense.

Other major examples include absolute space and time, our entire conception of solid objects (read about how electrons behave around atomic nuclei, for instance), and even (importantly to this thread) our idea of causality. Exploration of the subatomic world has shown us that reality is completely detached from the way we think it works. Particles do not behave as billiard balls flying around; they behave as waves of probability, spreading out until they are observed, at which point they appear in a given region with the probability that the wave assigns to that region. If you think this is amenable to any conception of causality, you are just wrong. Only on a scale above atoms do all these probabilities merge into something that resembles determinism.

Everything we know is just a local pattern. Your brain is just a pattern recognising machine. You think 'something can't come from nothing'? Why not? We don't have any access to 'general principles'; the entire idea of a general principle is flawed. Maybe it can, maybe it can't. We know that, on the scale that we observe, things do not happen without cause. But we have no right to say that this can't happen to something so vastly outside of human experience as the entire universe or its exotic origin, any more than we can say the universe is rectilinear, or indeed that we can say that objects smaller than we can see will appear here rather than there as a result of some 'cause'.

You are looking for some a priori explanation based on general principles, but there is no such thing. The case of the origin of the universe is no different a question in this sense than any other question you ask. All an explanation ever does is reduce a pattern into more common patterns. No matter how far you take this process, your explanation will always rest on an assertion, and the source of this assertion will be observation. Try to explain why it rains. It rains because water moisture condenses into clouds. Why? Because water molecules have regions of negative and positive charge which attract each other. Why? The laws of electromagnetism. Why?

At every stage all you have is an assertion. You're expecting this process to somehow end up with something that explains itself, but it is obvious that this will never occur.

That's true in many cases of trying to explain things. But, as far as I can tell, my argument doesn't assume any knowledge gained a posteriori. What assumption am I making that I shouldn't be?

It's just a word game. You think you have a handle on gigantic universal a priori concepts like 'logic', 'arbitrary', and 'nothing', but nobody does. These are just semantics to me; I don't even see what your conclusion is supposed to mean, really. You say that 'only nothing can come from nothing', and then you say that 'the first cause was arbitrary'. So you're saying the first cause did come from nothing..? Or what? What does arbitrary mean?

We don't even know if the concept of 'nothing' makes sense. How do you define it; or if it's an atomic word, how did you learn what it meant? Certainly we don't have any intuitive grasp on its behaviour, and we can't make assertions like 'nothing begets nothing', if that even means anything.

I think maybe you are missing my main message... I was trying in general to form a picture of knowledge and why discussions like these don't even have any meaning, or at least validity.

I actually do think I have a handle on the concepts. None of those definitions are difficult to grasp. I don't know why you think I or anyone else shouldn't have a handle on them.

Logic - deductive reasoning.
Arbitrary - it happened for no reason.
Nothing - the absence of anything including space, time, or any rules.

What I'm concluding is simple really. I'll try to explain it more concisely, in a different way.

P1) For anything that exists, there are two options: either it has a cause, or it doesn't. (You agree with that, right? "A or not A" is a tautology.)
P2) If something doesn't have a cause, then it happened for no reason (arbitrarily).
P3) If there were an infinite series of causes, then that infinite series would be a thing that exists and is uncaused.
C1) Therefore, the causes of everything that exists now can be traced back to something that doesn't have a cause. I'm calling that thing that you can trace it back to the 'first cause'. So the final conclusion is basically there there is a first cause.

You need to be careful; 'cause' is a homonym meaning two things: a temporal reason, and any general reason.

It makes no sense to say cause (in the sense of the temporal cause) of an infinite series of (temporal) causes.

I do not mean temporal. Just a general reason.