From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jun 15 2002 - 21:19:15 MDT
At 07:20 PM 6/15/02 +1000, Colin wrote (as so many people will):
>or perhaps _the_ biggee - why there is anything at all
>.ie. not Nothing.
This recurrent topic drives me nuts, because it looks like a pseudo-issue
to me.
All we know and can know is *something*. The best understanding we have of
the something we are composed out of and live within tells us that
something-1 can be transformed into something-2 or lots of smaller
somethings-n or congeal into a larger something. At no point is there any
question of *nothing* (except perhaps in the mathematical device of zero).
I think this is a delusional pseudo-nothingness generated by early
ignorance of the world (both in the child's mental maps, and those first
compiled by pre-scientific humans). If you didn't know the air was
*something*, burning a chair or a human body down to ash looked like
turning it into *almost nothing*.
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. :)
Damien Broderick
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