On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > The question in my mind as a wondering child was never 'How did the > nothing that must have come before the universe produce the universe?' It > was my mind chasing the chain of causation of things and realizing that, > whatever that chain looked like, I could never trace it all the way back to > absolute nothing -
There is an interesting point here, although probably not what you intended. What you say is true, you cannot trace it all the way back to absolute nothing, because there is no reverse physical process that transforms something into "nothing" (at least, not into absolute nothing). Or equivalently, there is no physical process that transforms "absolute nothing" into something. But if that is the case, why are you so sure that "nothing" must have come before? As for the remark about nothingness having only one way of being and there > being a lot more ways of existing, it's cute, but it's sophistry. Non-being > is not a countable way of being. It's the absence of being - obviously - so > can't be presented as one among a myriad of possible configurations of the > universe. I agree "nothing" is not a configuration of things, but I think it could be considered as one element belonging to an abstract space. Let's consider this universe and the abstract operation of removing things. We can remove the Sun, Andromeda, etc. "Nothing" is what is left after removing all things (including space, time, ...). It's one among many. It's not that different from 0 being a natural number or the empty set being a set. Ricardo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
