What is existence? Do I exist?
These questions sound obvious. “Of course I exist! Who do you think is talking right now?”
But how can you prove to someone that you really exist? A victim of schizophrenia hears perfectly realistic voices that aren’t actually there. So much so, in fact, that they are at times completely convinced the voices are real. How can I know with certainty that I’m not actually schizophrenic? Or that you aren’t? And if I was, how can I tell the difference between the real and the unreal? Or that you truly exist?
What is “real,” anyway??
Think about the movies The Matrix and The Truman Show: How can we know with any certainty that we exist in the way we believe we exist? Theoretically, there’s nothing definitively ruling out the possibility that we’re all virtual persons inside a computer, right?
Minus the computer program, a 17th century philosopher by the name of René Descartes had similar thoughts. Descartes knew that our senses can be, and often are, deceived. He questioned the extent of the deceit. He knew he had to prove his existence in a way that was not subject to deception, and therefore not reliant on the senses.
Like all respectable philosophers, Descartes was seeking a bedrock of ironclad logic upon which to build his worldview.
Descartes ended up concluding that thought itself was the key to proving he exists. Quite famously, he wrote cogito ergo sum or “I think, therefore I am.” His reasoning was the conscious act of thinking itself was not reliant on the senses; a blind man can still think, a deaf woman can still think, etc. Thinking is existing, independent of all senses, which are the fundamental avenues by which we are deceived. This was the base Descartes used to put forth his philosophical views.
So do I exist? Well, am I thinking? Check. Then someone must be doing the thinking, ergo I exist. This logic is rather irrefutable – one cannot deny that they’re thinking because the act of denial requires thought.
Ok, but what about our first question? It’s one thing to assume we exist, but what is existence itself? This one’s not so easy to wrap your head around and requires some out of the box thinking…
During my early post-University years, I was afflicted with an irrational anxiety about losing my job. I had developed a worldview where my entire lifestyle and well-being somehow hinged on having a job. Losing it was unthinkable! That awful anxious feeling eventually led me to seek advice from others and I discovered I was experiencing something called “loss aversion,” whereby I was fearing loss significantly more than allowing myself to appreciate any gains. My mind had become consumed by defense mechanisms and threat responses where none were due. If anything, I was doing fantastic!
This gave me a good logical understanding as to the cause of my anxiety, but how could I stop it from happening altogether? Again, I asked for help. This time, I received incredibly valuable advice:
“Aaron, have you tried thinking about the opposite? Is not having a job really that bad? So what if you get fired? How many thousands of job openings are in your industry? If this company pays you this much, why wouldn’t another? Would it be so bad to take a vacation for a month or two?”
After hearing these questions and allowing myself to explore them, my anxiety gradually evaporated. By contrasting opposite outcomes, I had gained valuable perspective about reality.
So how can we apply this psychological magic to answering the question of existence, you ask?
By imagining the opposite!
What is the opposite of existence?
Well, existence is something, so what’s the opposite of a thing? “No-thing” of course! So let’s try to imagine what nothing is like. Really nothing. Like, nothing at all.
Can you?
Hmm… I can’t seem to do it.
Let’s put on our thinking caps and really think about this: If you’re like most people I’ve met, you probably think of “nothing” as an empty void. Maybe that void is dark or maybe it’s some kind of bright white empty space. Some might even consider nothing to be the speculated eventual “heat death” of our Universe, where entropy has completely maxed out (if you don’t know what entropy is, don’t worry, I’ll describe it in plain English later).
But these descriptions are… problematic.
Isn’t darkness something? Aren’t colors or the metric of space or entropy things? If nothing literally means “no things,” then how can we describe it without introducing a thing into that nothing, invalidating it’s, er, nothingness?
For example, can you even conceive of nothingness without the presence of three dimensional space in your conception? Have you tried?
Hmmm.
Well, let’s hypothetically assume we can somehow conceive of an empty void without any characteristics and thus no things being introduced into it. Is that void now truly nothing?
Well, our hypothetical void definitely doesn’t have any things inside of it, but it’s still a thing itself. It has a name, after all. And even if it didn’t have a name, the concept of it could be described by an external observer, assuming the observer knew it was there (or “not” there?).
So the question is then, can nothing be a thing itself?
Well no, because things require themselves to exist and thus not be no-thing, right?
Yikes!
It seems then that nothing can’t be a thing in any way without triggering an impossible paradox, so it must be fundamentally distinct from all things. After all, it’s obvious to anyone that the word “nothing” is the exact opposite of the word “thing.”
So, looking back at that perfect void we conceived of earlier, we can now conclude it’s a thing, right? A void can’t be a void without being a “void,” which is a thing! Or framed differently – because we know about it, it’s a thing and is thus not nothing.
Brain hurt yet? Trust me, mine too.
And it seems we can continue this thought experiment ad infinitum, but only one thing stays constant: It’s impossible to actually conceive of nothing because the very act of describing or comprehending it requires it to exist in some way – introducing a thing into it.
But what does this mean?
It means we exist!
It means that nothing or “non-existence” is so purely, incredibly, and perfectly impossible from the perspective of basic logic that it can’t be out there, else it would automatically and instantaneously invalidate itself simply by being, which is amazing because it’s proof of existence.
In fact, we exist so much that we can’t even conceive of non-existence. Literally! There is no significant logical difference in the impossibility of 3=4 vs. the impossibility of nothingness. The latter is simply obscured by a few layers of camouflaging complexity.
Isn’t it funny how a little perspective can change things?
Premise One: Nothingness is impossible, therefore only existence is. We exist.
Further Questions
What if we expanded the hypothetical void infinitely, overtaking reality as we know it so there is no outside. Would that result then be nothing?
No, because observing the new reality as a state of nothingness would make it exist (the act of observation means an observer exists and the observer has to perceive a thing to know it exists; one cannot perceive nothing, by definition of not having any things to observe). This is simply another way of framing the same paradox – you can’t experience nothingness in any way, else it isn’t nothingness. If we simply remove the observer, then the question you asked can’t be answered and we couldn’t know if the result is true nothingness.
It is fundamentally impossible to comprehend nothingness – when we take a peek, it becomes something. This is why nothingness is logically impossible.
Ok, but in the absence of the observer and all things, is nothingness possible?
Only to the extent that all things could be removed from existence. But the problem with this is defining the act of removing things. Where do they go? What happens to them? Sure, you could magically assume this is somehow possible and “simply beyond our understanding.” For example, you could make the infantile argument “God could do it.” But that doesn’t explain anything, isn’t logical, and certainly isn’t consistent with science. It simply isn’t useful to think in those terms.
Consistent with my thesis here, modern logic and science show that energy (things) can’t be truly destroyed; only transformed (the laws of conservation). So, logically, the best available answer to your question is that since things exist, nothingness is impossible due to it being an impossible violation of known physical laws to remove anything from existence.
This means as long as anything exists anywhere, nothingness can not be the state of existence.
Can there be a partial nothing within the Universe?
No, because space is something and it’s everywhere, by definition of a “space.” Again, nothingness is fundamentally different from existence and cannot be as long as anything exists anywhere.
Could everything have come from nothingness?
No, because something coming from nothing means the potential for something exists within nothing, which is another impossible paradox because having the potential for anything is a thing itself.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
This is a far more interesting question and I believe the answer is rooted in our psychology: The answer is actually a question – why should we expect the possibility of nothing? Why even conceive of nothing when we can clearly observe something right in front of us? To my earlier point, any observation of nothing would automatically prove the existence of the observer, eliminating the possibility of nothingness.
“I think, therefore I am.”
Further, let’s attack this question from the two angles “a priori and a posteriori.” These two phrases are useful Latin expressions popularized by German philosopher Immanuel Kant that define ways of thinking:
- A posteriori is reasoning that comes from observational evidence and experience. Saying “I hear frogs, there must be frogs in that pond” or “frogs tend to like ponds like this, there must be frogs in it” are a posteriori assertions.
- A priori is reasoning that comes from abstract theoretical deduction not directly reliant on experience. Saying “my mathematical models predict the existence of a type of matter we haven’t discovered yet” is an a priori assertion (in fact, this is how the famous Higgs boson was discovered).
Both a posteriori and a priori reasoning are useful ways of thinking that help us expand what we know about the Universe.
So, is there any a posteriori basis to expect nothingness? Well no, since we know nothingness cannot be observed or experienced. What about a priori? Again we hit a wall, since nothingness cannot truly exist even abstractly, as the one doing the abstractions is thinking and must conceive nothingness, which we know can’t be done. Additionally, existence already has things in it, which as we discussed can’t be removed from existence due to physical laws of conservation.