From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 22:20:45 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> When people realized the air stopped a few hundred klicks up, they supposed
> for a while that planets and stars hung about in *nothingness*, but it
> didn't take long to grasp that this was incoherent and wrong. The vacuum
> itself is a seething network of *somethings* (or observables are the
> chunked outcome of vacuum seethings, which are in turn somethings in this
> metaphysical sense).
>
> There *is no nothing*. The question `why is there nothing rather than
> something' seems to me totally empty, as close to nothing as one can get. :)
Entity1: "The question of why is there 'something' rather than nothing
seems nonsensical to me. Even a vacuum contains somethings. Spacetime
itself can be said to count as a 'something'."
Entity2: "But why does spacetime exist in the first place? Why is there a
vacuum filled with fluctuations? Why is there even a universe, with
physical laws, in the first place? This is what we mean when we ask: 'Why
does anything exist at all?'"
Entity1: "Since there is no 'nothing' as you conceive of it, your question
is vacuous. There could not be a 'nothing'."
At this point the Simulators flip the switch and turn off the simulation
that is Entity1's entire universe. No more vacuum. No more fluctuations.
No more spacetime. Looks like Entity1 was wrong.
So let's ask again: Why does anything exist in the first place? If there
are vacuum fluctuations, why does there exist a spacetime and a set of
physical laws that cause vacuum fluctuations within it? Even perfectly
empty space would not be Nothing in the sense that is being discussed here.
Nothingness is the absence even of space; the absence of all process and
computation.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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