Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? A Logical Investigation [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? A Logical Investigation [pdf]

philpapers.org

4 pointslainon7 comments

> The meta-question, viz. ‘Should we not stop asking the Question’, is accordingly tentatively answered affirmatively.

Well at least the author got the correct answer but unfortunately via an entirely confusing and unnecessarily complex (and incomprehensible) method. It is much simpler and more direct to see that it is an invalid question.

It is invalid because "nothing" is a relative term regarding something that was or could have been present but now is gone. E.g., there is nothing in my pocket. Nothing is not a thing it is a relationship. As with all concepts, "nothing" presupposes that something exists so it is invalid to apply it to all of existence which is how it is used in this question.

Dunno - "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" seems a fairly strait forward question - it's just the answer is tricky. If you don't like the term "nothing" you can put it as "why is the universe here?" but it's still a puzzle how the big bang and all that got here.

All you have done is made the comparison implicit instead of explicit. The full form of your question would be "Why is the Universe here (instead of not here)" in which "not here" is just a euphemism or a form of "nothing". You cannot escape the axioms that existence exists and that we know it. This is the starting point of any claim to knowledge even claims that deny existence or our awareness of it. That is what makes such questions invalid.

Further, to ask any "why" question depends on the axiomatic acceptance that there is something, something acting according to its nature, of which one is aware, and about which one can reason.

As Parmenides beautifully instructed, all one can hold of nothingness is ... nothing (it can neither be apprehended nor indicated).

All deductive arguments are "question begging" in the sense that the conclusion is already implicit in the premises. It's because the conclusion is implicit in the premises that it's possible to deduce the conclusion from the premises. I would have appreciated some more discussion of what exactly it is for a deductive argument to beg the question. Otherwise, all we have is the unremarkable observation that arguments to the effect that something exists usually have a premise or set of premises that entail a sentence of the form "x exists".

One of my favorite responses to this question is from Philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. As it is put on a wikiquote page (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser):

In response to Leibniz's ontological query "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Morgenbesser answered "If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!"

I'm not sure that style of "logical investigation" is going to get very far. I've got my own theory that it's because necessary truths have to be, eg. five being prime, these correspond pretty much to maths and reality is maths. Now just to prove it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com