>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?
You must have misread me. I am anything but sure nothing must have come before. Indeed, my whole point is that something from nothing - genuine nothing - is a nonsense. You can't bridge the hgap between existence and non existence by any causal process. I think that's obvious, and we must accept that the universe simply 'is'. >>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. An empty set is not the absence of a set. But to take another angle on it: consider what you mean by removing these objects. It's merely something you're imagining, it does not correspond to any real process. In reality, energy and matter transform, they are not created or destroyed. You can't simply imagine subtracting one universe from the universe and getting nothing then say, "See, I can get nothing from a universe by subtracting it from itself, so I can get a universe from nothing by adding it back in"! You're just creating some imagined bridge between non-existence and existence when that is in fact the whole point of the dilemma. You say existence is more "likely" than nonexistence based on this imaginary subtraction/addition, but think about the meaning of "likely". What is the set you're sampling from? All possible states of existence including the absence of anything - the empty set. So you've already 'created' the universe of universes as it were. Why is there a set to sample from to allow there to be any likelihood of one or the other state of being? That is the crux of the issue. >Ricardo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/UNEgdFCZD-UJ. 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.
