alt Hacker NewsWhen I was 10 years old, I asked my maternal grandfather, "why does anything exist at all?"
My grandpa explained it in layman terms which even I could understand. He said, "If nothing should exist because it is simpler state to be in for everything, a sort of Primordial Law. Then what is the mechanism by which this law is enforced. Who or what is ensuring that Law is implemented everywhere for eternity. If we assume that such a mechanism must exist, then we have just proved that something must exist."
Replies
This is interesting, it reminds me of the chain of logic from this article:
https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/
> In a reality containing nothing, there are no things as such — at least no material things. But in such a nothing, there is an abstract thing: zero.
> Zero reflects the number of material things to count. But how many abstract things are there to count? There is at least one. The one number that exists to define the number of material things is zero.
> But if we have one number and it is one thing to count, now another number exists: one. We then have zero and one together as the only numbers. But now we have two numbers. Now two exists…
Your grandfather's explanation seems to echo this in terms appropriate for a 10-year-old - there is something inherently unstable about nothingness.
Here's a video lecture of Graham Priest
Graham Priest - "Everything and Nothing" (Robert Curtius Lecture of Excellence)
basically: "life, uh, finds a way"
That's a really bizarre and oddly Platonist take on things. Your grandfather was viewing laws of nature as rules imposed onto reality by some outside force, and which therefore need some "mechanism" to be in place to "enforce" them.
But I think a more reasonable understanding of natural laws is that they're our attempt to describe the cause-and-effect patterns observable within reality itself. They're not being enforced, they're simply manifest.
Construing "nothing can exist" as a rule that has to be enforced, and not just the absence of any patterns of causality that would produce something that exists, seems to be an error. It actually seems to be a more sophisticated version of reifying the concept of "nothing" such that "nothing exists" would be interpreted as describing the positive existence of an entity called "nothing" rather than merely describing the absence of any such entities within the context.