Vide Rationale

Every philosophy question seeks to understand a feature of reality – how does the brain produce consciousness? where does knowledge come from? are moral truths objective? – these are all questions that aim to light up a portion of the map of our reality.

But only one question seeks an explanation for existence as a whole, and it’s the deepest question one can ever ask.

Why is there something rather than Nothing?

Why is there any stuff at all, instead of no stuff, why not a complete and utter void? Why not a total absence of everything, of all definitions, without space, without time, without even a primordial soup of quantum fluctuations that’s thought to have given birth to our universe?

We have all woken up into this world of something. And it seems that no matter how much we understand its governing laws, the question of why this whole enterprise exists at all completely eludes us.

Even a God cannot save us here, for he also is something. Why a God? Why not Nothing instead?

We can always give reasons for why particular things exist. We know why there are frogs, why there is rain, and why there are black holes at the center of some galaxies. And we can explain a million such phenomena by describing what we don’t know in terms of concepts or processes more fundamental than the phenomenon itself.

Frogs emerged through hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection. Raindrops fall when they get too heavy to be suspended in the sky as clouds. And the intense gravitational forces towards the center of galaxies probably pull in stars, gases, and other matter to produce a supermassive black hole.

But to the question of why anything at all, however, this mode of explaining complex wholes using simpler parts is unavailable to us. Because the task is to explain why a structureless, formless void couldn’t have replaced our reality. There is nothing to be described here in terms of simpler constituents, there is no story to be told about its emergence. If such things could be said about Nothing, it would cease to be this Nothing.

So is Nothing a completely incoherent idea? One way in which we dismiss theories is to find inconsistencies in them. But Nothing appears to have no such logical contradiction. After all, It has no features to contradict. It’s a mere absence of everything, a lacking of any and all properties.

This seems to convince at least some people that a reality of Nothing is indeed possible.

But remember that this Nothing is still only a concept, an idea, an abstraction. Not all abstractions have correspondence in reality. The conceivability of an idea by itself does not grant it physical realizability.

Consider the square root of -1, for instance. Unlike natural numbers or even fractions, you can’t make sense of what that would mean in the real world. How can any value be the square root of -1? Yet it’s a building block of higher mathematics even when it does not map onto anything tangible. Nothing could be a similar thing; simply a conceivable idea, but not a possible reality.

But is that all? Can we not go farther? Can we not confidently dismiss this reality of Nothing as meaningless?

One way to do this is to start our analysis from the point of view of this world of Nothing and see where that gets us. But here we’re unsure of which of our thinking tools are still at our disposal. Can we still use logic? Can we still use reason? After all, in a reality of Nothing, there is no notion of logic with which to assert its existence, and there is no hypothetical place to stand from where you can talk about it.

So instead, let’s start from where we are. From our own reality. When you look out from here, this reality of Nothing is simply a possible alternate world, a counterfactual if you will, something that “could have been”.

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

Starting from our world, we may grant that this Nothing is a counterfactual on the grounds that it poses no logical problems. Sure, fair enough.

But can we do the opposite? From Nothing, can we say that our world is its counterfactual?

The answer is no, there can be no basis to say this precisely because there is no information in Nothing to assert this. There’s no evidence in Nothing which suggests that we are its counterfactual.

But we already know our world exists, and thus has to be its counterfactual. How do we resolve this? By simply acknowledging that this reality of nothingness that we talk isn’t actually real. It cannot be.

And there it is, folks, the proof that absolute Nothingness is impossible. It cannot exist because it isn’t our counterfactual. It is not a possible reality. It is only an idea in our mind that we got captured and confused by, and nothing more.

And now we can put this age-old question to rest. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because Nothing makes no sense.