Is there something?
As Descartes would have said, "I think, therefore I am." We look around and we see mater and we measure energy.
Was there ever a time where there was nothing? If so, "something" would have had to come out of "nothing". Since this is not logically possible, we can assume that - since there is something today and it could not have come out of nothing - there has always been something.
So, we have two possibilities: Either, there has always been something, or there has never been anything. There could not have been a scenario where there was nothing because you and I, we, are here and we are something. Hence, there must have always been something.
Thus the question "Why" is irrelevant because something had always existed. Why has always something existed?, because you can't make something out of nothing. In fact, why comes from the fact that we exist and we can formulate "why." So, while we cannot make something out of nothing, we can take what is and has always been and make it better - for us and for each other.
- excerpt from a discussion with my nerdy husband on a lovely Friday night
You can't make something out of nothing… is it true?
ReplyDeleteActual entities come out from a nothingness Aristotle used to call potentiality. When you fill a glass of water, the “filled glass entity” comes into being from a nothingness, from a non-manifest potentiality. It wasn’t there before, and will not be existing anymore once you will have drunk the water, thus destroying the “filled glass entity” and creating the “empty glass entity”.
One may ask if there is some fundamental stuff from which everything comes out. A shapeless substance, or essence, that can be shaped in whatever entity, and to which every entity, once destroyed, would return. Is there something so fundamental that cannot be created, nor destroyed? Whose attribute would always remain eternally the same? Something that has always been present and will always remain such?
When we speak about “creatio ex-nihilo”, what is this nihilo made of? Religions usually answer this question by introducing the concept of God, i.e. of an infinite (a potentiality) that creates the finite (the actuality, the finite entities, like our bodies).
But what we have to consider is that the concept of creation, and destruction, are intimately related to the concept of time. So that one could ask, in return, if time really exist. Or, more generally, if change and evolution really exist. Because if this is not the case, then the observation that “something cannot be made out of nothing” would be trivially correct, as the process “nothing -> something” occurs in time, or, more exactly, is the very expression of time. But if time (i.e., change) doesn’t exist, then, obviously, at a very fundamental level of reality (the being-level) nothing would be truly creatable, destructible, or transformable.
This (hypothetical) fundamental level is exactly the one to which all ancient (perennial) philosophical traditions point to. A level that one can find only beyond the veil of our ignorance of the true essence of the world: a strictly a-temporal (and in fact also a-spatial) essence. It is interesting to observe that this seems to be also the view adopted by some modern physicists, like for instance Italian quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, who interestingly links the concept of time to the one of ignorance. To quote his own words:
“Contrary to what generally assumed, the physical world does not exist “in time”. At the basic microscopic level, the world is better described in terms of a a-temporal theory, where physical laws do not express time evolution of physical variables, but just relations between variables. Time emerges only thermodynamically when describing macroscopic variables. Therefore time is only a side effect of our ignorance of the microscopic state of the world. "Time is a side effect of ignorance."
So, according to Rovelli, time (and therefore change) would just be an illusion emerging from our ignorance of the true nature of the world. But also, following once more Rovelli, the same would be true for space:
“The physical world does not exist “in space”. The physical world is made by an ensemble of particles and fields, which do not live in an external space, but rather live "on each other", and which can be in a relation of contiguity with respect to one another. "Space" is the order implied by this relation.”
Happy Samadhi to everybody!
Massimiliano
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Max.
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