Anthony A.C. Grayling - Why Not Nothing?

Why isn't there nothing at all? Why is it not the case that there is no cosmos, no laws of nature, no consciousness, literally nothing at all? Scientists claim that the universe came from nothing. But what's the nature of that kind of nothing? That's where the confusion lies. We know, obviously, that there is not nothing. The big question is why?

[rustycalvera]

this discussion of nothing is really something

[prismaticsignal]

I really like Robert Kuhn.
The thing that amazes me the most about this man is his deep sense of curiosity.

[friendlybanjoatheist]

"What gives questions their meaning is the capacity we have for answering them." Graying's final comment. I have not really heard that theory of meaning before. Interesting.

[thetruthoutside]

The interviewer is very well read and very smart in asking these questions and digging in deeper in the core of the problem.

[dreyestud]

When he says he can imagine there being nothing. His imagination of nothing is something. Therefore he can not truly say he can imagine there is nothing.

[TheBookofBeasts]

We always ask the question before we have the answer. Some are never answered, this doesn’t leave them without meaning in the greater since of the word.

The greatest questions take the longest to answer. However long it takes them to be answered, or however hard they are to answer, has nothing to to do with their meaning; the meaning can be as simple as having the ability to ask the question in the first place.

[anonsurfer]

As I understand it, A.C. Grayling is saying that the only meaningful or relevant questions are ones that available technology can help answer. If the math or technology doesn't exist to validate an assertion then that assertion is not worth pursuing. There is an inherent flaw with this thought process, IMHO.

[springinfialta]

The statement "I am here" is a tautology. So the question "Can I ever be wrong when I say 'I am here'?" always has the answer 'No'. That question is completely different from the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

[DeusExAstra]

I basically agree with him, I just dont see what it even means for there to be nothing. As much as I try to think about it, I cant conceive of it... even though it's easy to think that "nothing" is a concept we can conceive of and reason about. Like the interviewer says, he can conceive of "nothing", but I think ultimately that's probably not a real conception of it. People mostly think of nothing as empty space, which is not actually nothing. Even the question "what does it mean for there to be nothing" shows how unanswerable this is, because the question implies that "nothing" is something that can exist.

[audiodead]

This whole discussion got lost in semantics. It would make more sense to ask "did something ever come from nothing?" or "is it possible to start from initial conditions of nothingness and end with something?". We still don't know the answer, but the question is logical.

[SuperBooboohaha]

The concept of ' nothing ' emerges from logical continuity i.e ''if there is something there must have been nothing at some point in time''. This logical continuity or necessity is a creation of our own mind.There is/was no 'nothing'.Things just evolve or change.Something is the brute and the only reality.If I am not wrong, Plato, was the first person who said that the universe is eternal, today we can say that energy is eternal.We can obviously think about 'nothing ', like the absence of all matter, energy and dimensions, but this 'nothing' is a mere cognitive artwork.

[brud]

It's the "why" part of the question that's the problem. It assumes that there can be an answer, and in fact a correct and of course a provable answer. But, as Richard Feynman pointed out, there can be no demonstrably true answer to any why question. Any possible answer prompts another "why" question and on and on.

[scrumpymanjack]

The question is not “why” is there something rather than nothing, but “how”. The “why” is unanswerable; the “how” explains the process of how the something came into being.

[orver]

Imagining nothing is the equivalent of imaging everything. Both are infinite.

[djacob]

No thing can exist unless it exists "surrounded" by nothing. Nothing defines the boundary of a thing.
And the only thing in existence is everything. All subdivisions of everything are conceptual (like half a Quark).
As vjnt1star implied below, it's not either something or nothing, but both. Nothing exists just as much as everything exists.

[alanbird]

I would say “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is meaningless question because whatever answer you give to the question immediately becomes “something” and then you are back to where you started “Why is there that something rather than nothing?”

[StevenTorrey]

The question –“Why is there something instead of nothing”– turns existence into a metaphysical question. In Planck time, matter & antimatter clashed and annihilated each element; but when done, there must have been one more particle of “matter” remaning. Stephen Hawkins asserts that given science, life would be inevitalbe; that is nonsense. One need only look at sister planets Mars or Venus and find that life is not inevitable. One may resist the urge to cite the “Divinity that shapes our ends”–but there it is. A miracle of life is just that.

Another part of the answer is that “nothingness” becomes a force just as death becomes a force–the state of being dead, or the state of being nothing. And remember, in due time the universe will eventually revert to “nothingness”.

Like so many questions that cannot be readily anwered, it is no less real a question. “Why God?” one might ask in the face of onerous tragedy falls into that same cateqory of apparently meaningless qustions.

[yarngod]

-Egg or a chick first?
-Egg!
-But where did it come from?
-From dinosour! 😠thats ENOUGH!!!

[CopelandMeister]

What gives a question meaning is its capacity to be answered? A perfect formula for exaggerating the scope of human cognition depriving your life of wonder!

[larrycarter]

because if there was nothing we wouldn't be here to ask the question.