Vide Rationale

Every philosophical question seeks to understand some particular feature of reality – how does brain produce consciousness? where does knowledge come from? are there moral truths? – but only one of them seeks explanation for reality as a whole, and it’s the deepest question one can ever ask.

Indeed, why not nothing instead of this something, instead of whatever we see and feel, instead of this rich experience of life and cosmos – why any of it? Why couldn’t it be a lack of all things, a complete and utter void, without definitions, without space, without time, without any remaining quantum fluctuations, without boundaries, and without an outside from where you can stand and appreciate it?

Why not a total absence? I ask because the something, with which we’re acquainted, poses a mystery.

While there may be reasons for why particular things exists, like why there are frogs, and why there is rain, and why there are black holes at the centre of some galaxies, there is no explanation for the sum totality of this whole enterprise.

When trying to answer questions we always rely on principles that are more fundamental than the thing about which we’re talking about. At some point this bottoms-out, and we can no longer construct an answer. And so even if we can successfully answer all the question up until then, this lack of even a conceivable foundation casts a shadow of inexplicability across all of reality.

That is, unless, the alternative is somehow shown to be meaningless. Unless there’s no other way things could have been. Unless this Nothing is impossible.

At a glance Nothing appears to have no logical problems. It’s just the absence of everything. Something about which no positive statements can be made. You could say, Nothing lacks any and all properties.

But remember that this Nothing is still only a concept, an idea, an abstraction. Not all abstractions have correspondence in reality so it’s not the case that just by virtue of being conceivable that it’s a possible reality. For instance, the square root of -1 is essential for a lot of mathematics, but it’s just conjured up from our imagination and does not represent anything in the world. Nothing could be a similar.

Still, can a stronger be made against it? Can we be sure of Nothing’s impossibility?

Delving into such foundational questions are difficult partly because we don’t quite know which of our tools are still at our disposal – can we still use logic to investigate it’s incoherence or contradiction, and supposing we find them, dismiss Nothing as a possibility? After all, in a reality of Nothing, there would be no notion of logic with which to assert its existence, and no hypothetical place to stand from where to analyse it.

But if we go down that road we have to stop this essay right now as there is not much left to be said. So let’s proceed anyway.

Where do we start from? This reality of Nothing does not lend us any pieces to work with, so what’s left is to start at where we find ourselves at present – our own reality. From here, Nothing is a possible alternate world, a counterfactual, something that “could have been”.

Lot of physicists think counterfactuals aren’t a meaningful concept. In a deterministic world, there’s only the thing that happens, and really nothing else that could have happened. Even if you bring up quantum indeterminacy, that resolves into (I believe) a multiverse of parallel universes, all stepping forward in time deterministically. No counterfactuals there either.

In this view, the question of “why not Nothing” becomes moot – there was no other way it could have been, and our mystery ends here.

But suppose we grant counterfactuals as legitimate, what then? Here also there is a problem.

You see, counterfactuals have a bi-directional property, that if A is a counterfactual of B, then B is also a counterfactual of A. If Nothing is a counterfactual of our reality, then so is our reality a counterfactual of Nothing.

To check if a particular world is a counterfactual of our world, we should be able derive it from within our world. We may grant that this Nothing is our counterfactual on the grounds that it poses no logical problems.

But this has to reciprocate. From Nothing, we should also be able to say that our world is a counterfactual, but alas this is impossible, for Nothing has no properties whatsoever, it contains no informations, and consequently no way of asserting that our world – which we know for a fact to exist – is its counterfactual.

In which case, the only option left is to say that Nothing is indeed not a possible reality. Which answers the question we started with – why not Nothing? because Nothing makes no sense.