How do you know the premise is true, that there is something instead
of nothing? Maybe there could be both something and nothing. Or maybe
the existence of nothing is consistent with our own experiences.
I don't think all these terms are well enough defined for the question
to have meaning in
In the spirit of this list, one might instead phrase the question as:
Why is there everything instead of nothing?
As soon as we have that there is everything, then we have that some aspects
of everything will mold themselves into observable universes.
It is unsatisfying though true to observe
Hal Finney,
Thanks for the thought. I know that there is something instead of nothing
by using Descartes reasoning. (From
http://teachanimalobjectivity.homestead.com/files/return2.htm) The only
thing Descartes found certain was the fact he was thinking. He further felt
that thought was not a
Hi, George. I'm sorry for the lateness of my reply; thankfully I've
been very busy.
I find your thoughts interesting in that they seem distantly relative
to fractional charges we attribute to some things, such as quarks,
although one might argue that they are only fractional because they
were
This question seems unanswerable, but set theorists have tried (though
that might not be how they view their own endeavours): One interpretation of
the universe of constructible sets found in standard set theory textbooks is
that even if you start with nothing, you can say that's a thing, and
Norman Samish wrote:
...
I don't understand how there can be both something and nothing. Perhaps I
don't understand what you mean by nothing. By nothing I mean no thing,
not even empty space.
I think of it this way.
1. Information (a strange and inappropriately anthropocentric word - it
Does this question have an answer? I think the question shows there is a
limit to our understanding of things and is unanswerable. Does anybody
disagree?
Norman
The less anything is,
the less we know it:
how invisible,
how unintelligible a thing,
then, is this Nothing!
John Donne
The
Dear Norman,
Perhaps because Nothingness can not non-exist.
Stephen
- Original Message -
From: Eric Hawthorne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Norman Samish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: Why is there something instead of nothing?
The answer I prefer is to say that the Nothing and the Everything are
the same Thing. (or rather that they are complementary aspects of the
same thing). Its a bit mystical I know, but the inspiration comes from
the notion of duality in Category theory - for example in the theory
of Venn diagrams,
John Collins wrote:
One interpretation of
the universe of constructible sets found in standard set theory textbooks is
that even if you start with nothing, you can say that's a thing, and put
brackets around it and then you've got two things: nothing and {nothing}.
And then you also have
The set of everything U is ill defined.
Given set A, we expect to be able to define the subset { x is element of
A | p(x) } where p(x) is some predicate on x.
Therefore given U, we expect to be able to write S = { x an element of U
| x is not an element of x }
Now ask whether S is an element of
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