John Leslie - Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Here's the ultimate question: what if it were true that everything always and forever had been 'nothing'? Imagine that not a single thing ever existed--not emptiness, not blankness, not even the existence of emptiness, or the meaning of blankness. If you can image that, now ask yourself: why is there anything at all?



John Andrew Leslie is a Canadian philosopher who focuses on explaining existence and Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[jayrob]

It's a mind bending question, smoke comes out of my ears even contemplating it for a few seconds.

[taterflaps]

When I ask my girlfriend what's wrong and she says nothing, I know its bullshit. Case closed.

[jamesferrell]

To quote Billy Preston " nothing from nothing leaves nothing".

[Garghamellal]

"It obtains that nothingness is the case" does NOT mean that nothingness has to exist, because of course nothingness, not being a thing, it cannot exist. Complete and utter nothingness can obtain in the same way that unicorns don't exist and in fact we don't see unicorns around. Yes, it is a mistery that there is something rather than nothing.

[ronalds.]

This was also one of my questions as a kid along with why am I me and not you.
One thing I came around to is when I die I'll know everything or I'll know nothing at all.
Either way is okay with me. Besides what value is the answer? What are we going to do with it?
Now I have been wrestling with the idea is whether I exist at all. Hmm. If I don't exist then a lot of time has been wasted. By the way, what is time?
One question in the conversation was the concept of nothing. Simple. Where or what was I before I was born? I don't know. That is the answer. A few cynics will believe " I don't know" is not an answer. Well, then maybe it's a start.

[SRAVALM]

The magnitude of this question is great.

I dunno, but I am here to make this point known, we all are, that those who have the breath of life, like God, bring about the definition of what it means to be alive, to live and to be a man, so that something is justifiably plausible than nothing.

Don't know where we're going, and we are going somewhere, rather than nowhere's, hopefully we can bring forth the Utopia that this planet is, being true to ourselves in spirit, honoring the life force(sun), revering the planet, who sustains us, and continue this on to something greater.

[NameRequiredSoHere]

In the US today, there's religious controversy surrounding creationism, yet the Greeks had no problem thinking of the universe as something eternal. Because we are born and die, we are unable to think of something with no beginning and no end.

[alcohalic]

Once you understand time is just a construct of the "mind", then you would realize there never was a real "before", therefor there never was "nothing".

[thomasridley]

As far as the structure of our reality. The only honest answer is 'i don't know'.

[alpharomeo]

If this question does not drive you nuts then you haven’t understood the question yet.

[TupacMakaveli]

I’m always upsetten by the fact that there is something rather than nothing

[Thudden]

The Miracle of Being is unassailable :)

[opqrst]

I love Jean-Luc Nancy's "The existence is neither contingent nor necessary" better along with its elegance.

[Perseus]

I think that there can be not nothing in the usual sense, as soon as you have" a nothing" everything is the same, because everything is the nothing. So nothing is not different from "one thing" that is everything. only if you have two things that differ do you have something. One thing, that is all the same and nothing, meaning "everything is the same, because it is nothing" is the same. And i think that you have to have two things for there to be anything is very deeply ingrained in this universe, you can see it emerge over and over again, with electron and positron, day and night, man and women, ying and yang, there is only an electron because it is not a positron, when both meet they annihilate.

[mismass]

Just because matter isn’t present in the 3rd dimension, doesn’t mean it’s not present at a higher dimension or elsewhere in a different form, for matter there’s no difference between existence and non existence, it’s a human perspective.

[foreground]

Between nothing and something, may be one beautiful truth.

[DrZedDrZedDrZed]

I think there's a more important question hidden within this one... Why is there something rather than EVERYthing? Why is the mass-energy content of the universe CONSTRAINED into certain channels? There's an entropic reasoning to this... In the big bang, when the entropy of the universe was extremely low, at it's lowest point in, which ironically was a state of maximum homogeneity, but within space, was at its most special microstate, which overlapped entirely with its macrostate. Everything in a point. And so it blew up! Energy was allowed to FLOW. But a critical point here is that space blew up far more than everything within it (and also happened everywhere). The realised change in entropy at the very beginning of our universe was far less than the maximum entropy value of a universe the size of ours. It is no coincidence that both entropy and space have been expanding since the dawn of time. But not at the same rates. This hints at something profound; that even though things are on their way towards disorder, order has room to be created on the way there, precisely because the universe progresses with some minimum entropy value towards its maximum. Which leaves SPACE for dissipative structures (like information poor stars but also information RICH bacteria and plants and us) to form, under the premise that they pay out entropy (as EM radiation, stellar wind or fusion products in the case of stars, or EM radiation, waste, and informational complexity in the case of life). I really do think Einstein had almost hit the nail on the head with his idealisation of a cosmological constant that would find perfect balance between the volume of the universe and its vacuum energy and the gravitational pull of the mass-energy of the contents within it. But I think there is a truly important relationship between gravitation and expansion, precisely because they're asymmetrically matched. If the universe's forces, if those ratios were different, I don't think we'd be here at all.

We're riding the crest of the wave of minimum entropy production in a universe with a much higher entropy maximum. We are, quite simply, statistically permissible.

[skrieni]

I thought this video is going to be about Leibniz Contigency argument but since is not i'll write it here

Leibniz asked the question "Why is there something rather than nothing"? He wanted to argue that there is god.

Premise 1. Everything that exists has its an explanation about its own existance, either in the necessity of its own nature or in a external explanation.
Premise 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existance, that explanation is god.
Premise 3. The universe exists.
Premise 4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existance. (From 1, 3)
Premise 5. Therefore, the explanation of the existance of the universe is grounded in a necessary being (From 2, 4)
Conclusion: Therefore, God (a necessary being) exists.

[treborsenaj]

Why is it not acceptable that the universe is both nothing and something simultaneously - since all energy sums to zero. Its like digging a hole in the sand and making a mound next to it - wherby we created a hole and a hill from flatness. Not a perfect analogy, but the principle remains.

[odiupickusclone-]

Why are we here? -Plastic! - George Carlin