Every day awake is full of wonder and tedium. Rising in the morning is exciting but typically activities of daily living need attention immediately. For us, an object looms, getting Iris off to school. Once this is done one can decompress, look at the world, perhaps engage some exercise equipment, perhaps join some social media frenzy.
One thing I have been hearing lately is the question “Why is there anything at all?” this is sometimes stated as a wonder “It’s a miracle that anything is here at all.” However, I think that this statement of the question/proposition assumes too much. It assumes that we can readily, I would even say immediately and intuitively know what the state of affairs would be if there were nothing, or perhaps merely that there was not anything.
Let’s try to unpack what is at stake. What would it mean for there to be nothing at all? Clearly it cannot be the mere absence of things. The spacetime manifold is not an independent entity, it is related to the objects that populate it. Even if it were, why should it get privilege? It is not a nothing.
Apparently, there was a cosmic experiment in nothingness, but it resulted in the Big Bang and
the universe that we currently inhabit. We do not know at present what preceded the Big Bang,
but we know that it had to contain the conditions of the Big Bang, and that does not seem to be
nothing.
So what alternative conceptions of nothingness are available to us? More on this later…