Nov 2, 2008

Why Is There Anything, Rather Than Nothing At All ?

In the last few years, algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics have given me a sort of half-baked intuition that we, as a civilization, have the concept of nothingness wrong. To me, nothingness means the lack of any specification, or description, or restriction, and therefore implies the plenitude of all possible forms of existence. A void, a vacuum, utter silence, a blank slate, is something that needs to be described, or specified. I can't put it any better than that currently, but somehow the question why the "universe" exists seems a bit like an un-question to me now; it's the result of the complete absence of restrictions to existence. This lack of restriction, or description, seems to me the most natural, intuitive, or simple state imaginable.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The simplest, least restricted state is that all consistent mathematical models exist as independent universes. A.K.A "everything exists".