> "A Situation" nothing.com> wrote in message
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>> Lots and lots of good blogs and comments here at the site page.
>> This whole issue confuses me as I am constrained by my evolved brain.
>> I consider this question from my engineering background, and immediately
>> go critical and feel my limits. I refuse to personify the situation
>> (putative
>> "gods") as that is simply one of those evolved legacy methods. I then
>> request special treatment (ala the beautiful brain guy, or the putative
>> channelers), but so far, no go. The issues are always there, and I review
>> them
>> daily.
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>>http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/08/30/why-is-there-something-rather-th...
>> Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
>> Sean at 10:39 am, August 30th, 2007
>> The best talk I heard at the International Congress of Logic Methodology
>> and
>> Philosophy of Science in Beijing was, somewhat to my surprise, the
>> Presidential
>> Address by Adolf Grünbaum. I wasn't expecting much, as the genre of
>> Presidential
>> Addresses by Octogenarian Philosophers is not one noted for its moments of
>> soaring rhetoric. I recognized Grünbaum's name as a philosopher of
>> science, but
>> didn't really know anything about his work. Had I known that he has
>> recently
>> been specializing in critiques of theism from a scientific viewpoint (with
>> titles like "The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology"), I might have been more
>> optimistic.

>

>> Grünbaum addressed a famous and simple question: "Why is there something
>> rather
>> than nothing?" He called it the Primordial Existential Question, or PEQ
>> for
>> short. (Philosophers are up there with NASA officials when it comes to a
>> weakness for acronyms.) Stated in that form, the question can be traced at
>> least
>> back to Leibniz in his 1697 essay "On the Ultimate Origin of Things,"
>> although
>> it's been recently championed by Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne.

>

>> The correct answer to this question is stated right off the bat in the
>> Stanford
>> Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Well, why not?" But we have to dress it up to
>> make
>> it a bit more philosophical. First, we would only even consider this an
>> interesting question if there were some reasonable argument in favor of
>> nothingness over existence. As Grünbaum traces it out, Leibniz's original
>> claim
>> was that nothingness was "spontaneous," whereas an existing universe
>> required a
>> bit of work to achieve. Swinburne has sharpened this a bit, claiming that
>> nothingness is uniquely "natural," because it is necessarily simpler than
>> any
>> particular universe. Both of them use this sort of logic to undergird an
>> argument for the existence of God: if nothingness is somehow more natural
>> or
>> likely than existence, and yet here we are, it must be because God willed
>> it to
>> be so.

>

>> I can't do justice to Grünbaum's takedown of this position, which was
>> quite
>> careful and well-informed. But the basic idea is straightforward enough.
>> When we
>> talk about things being "natural" or "spontaneous," we do so on the basis
>> of our
>> experience in this world. This experience equips us with a certain notion
>> of
>> natural - theories are naturally if they are simple and not finely-tuned,
>> configurations are natural if they aren't inexplicably low-entropy.

>

>> But our experience with the world in which we actually live tells us
>> nothing
>> whatsoever about whether certain possible universes are "natural" or not.
>> In
>> particular, nothing in science, logic, or philosophy provides any evidence
>> for
>> the claim that simple universes are "preferred" (whatever that could
>> possibly
>> mean). We only have experience with one universe; there is no ensemble
>> from
>> which it is chosen, on which we could define a measure to quantify degrees
>> of
>> probability. Who is to say whether a universe described by the
>> non-perturbative
>> completion of superstring theory is likelier or less likely than, for
>> example, a
>> universe described by a Rule 110 cellular automaton?

>

>> It's easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow
>> preferable.
>> After all, Occam's Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But
>> that's
>> a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the
>> same
>> sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for
>> the
>> universe is a different kettle of fish entirely. And, to be honest, it's
>> true
>> that most working physicists have a hope (or a prejudice) that the
>> principles
>> underlying our universe are in fact pretty simple. But that's simply an
>> expression of our selfish desire, not a philosophical precondition on the
>> space
>> of possible universes. When it comes to the actual universe, ultimately
>> we'll
>> just have to take what we get.

>

>> Finally, we physicists sometimes muddy the waters by talking about
>> "multiple
>> universes" or "the multiverse." These days, the vast majority of such
>> mentions
>> refer not to actual other universes, but to different parts of our
>> universe,
>> causally inaccessible from ours and perhaps governed by different
>> low-energy
>> laws of physics (but the same deep-down ones). In that case there may
>> actually
>> be an ensemble of local regions, and perhaps even some sensibly-defined
>> measure
>> on them. But they're all part of one big happy universe. Comparing the
>> single
>> multiverse in which we live to a universe with completely different
>> deep-down
>> laws of physics, or with different values for such basic attributes as
>> "existence," is something on which string theory and cosmology are utterly
>> silent.

>

>> Ultimately, the problem is that the question - "Why is there something
>> rather
>> than nothing?" - doesn't make any sense. What kind of answer could
>> possibly
>> count as satisfying? What could a claim like "The most natural universe is
>> one
>> that doesn't exist" possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by
>> imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about
>> contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It
>> makes
>> sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there
>> is no
>> external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood
>> of
>> different modes of existence for the universe.

>

>> So the universe exists, and we know of no good reason to be surprised by
>> that
>> fact. I will hereby admit that, when I was a kid (maybe about ten or
>> twelve
>> years old? don't remember precisely) I actually used to worry about the
>> Primordial Existential Question. That was when I had first started reading
>> about
>> physics and cosmology, and knew enough about the Big Bang to contemplate
>> how
>> amazing it was that we knew anything about the early universe. But then I
>> would
>> eventually hit upon the question of "What if they universe didn't exist at
>> all?", and I would get legitimately frightened. (Some kids are scared by
>> clowns,
>> some by existential questions.) So in one sense, my entire career as a
>> physical
>> cosmologist has just been one giant defense mechanism.

>

>> Much more ...
>>http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/08/30/why-is-there-something-rather-th...
>> --
>> Frederick Martin McNeill
>> Poway, California, United States of America
>> mmcne...@fuzzysys.com
>> ******************************************
>> "The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a
>> person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger
>> social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively.
>> The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding
>> and social peace."
>> - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
>> "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
>> - Leibniz (1697 essay "On the Ultimate Origin of Things")
>> ******************************************

>
> Because 'nothing' can't exist.