A good question!
Or is it?
I’ve talked before about the issue of why the universe exists at all (1, 2), but now I’ve had the opportunity to do a relatively careful job with it, courtesy of Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson. They are editing an upcoming volume, the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics, and asked me to contribute a chapter on this topic. Final edits aren’t done yet, but I’ve decided to put the draft on the arxiv:
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
Sean M. CarrollIt seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.
As you can see, my basic tack hasn’t changed: this kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a sensible answer. In our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.
This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)
The other side are those scientists who think that modern physics explains why the universe exists. It doesn’t! One purported answer — “because Nothing is unstable” — was never even supposed to explain why the universe exists; it was suggested by Frank Wilczek as a way of explaining why there is more matter than antimatter. But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.” It’s up to us as a species to cultivate the intellectual maturity to accept that some questions don’t have the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.
@Robin
But something non-contingent wouldn’t necessarily be necessary.
Precisely. If, for entertainment reasons, we consider this world to be artificial, then it is more rational to propose an ancestor simulation, or an alien’s petri dish, than the handiwork of some super-natural agent. As someone said above, that’s a “massive violation of Occam’s razor.”
@Robin Yes I agree, but as I mentioned in a previous post if the fundamental substance is just random, then that has the curious consequence that it could be absolutely anything at all. Maybe, for instance, the cosmos is a chain of burger restaurants that is infinite and eternal, and our universe is just a part of a giant cosmic hamburger!? Ridiculous? Sure, but the point is that if you accept the “brute fact” idea you can have no basis to judge that any one scenario is any more or less likely than any other. And in science that would rather knock the confidence one might have that things are explainable in terms of their parts. And isn’t it curious that the deeper we look, the more justification we seem to find for following the parts approach to the extent that many people, I’m sure, just assume it must be true without even questioning it?
To Sean’s essay I just say, “duh, obviously!”, but Bunsen Burner makes an excellent point about ‘Nothing is unstable’. The person-on-the-street doesn’t ask “where did this all come from?” in the way philosophers do. They don’t problematize the laws of physics. They just want to avoid contradictions and wild improbabilities. Showing that it is reasonably probable, given the laws of physics, that a universe with galaxies and living organisms could arise, is sufficient. Lawrence Krauss was barking up the right tree; it’s the philosophical tradition that went wrong.
The February 15 comment citing entanglement as the relation that exists before relata (or anything else, as “First Cause”), noted only one of the two relata, “something”.
The other relata is “nothing”.
First, that demands something could come from nothing. Almost by default, the “something” in our daily life is classical reality. The implication is that classical reality could emerge from quantum reality, at measurement (entanglement), as some believe.
Second, that requires that quantum reality is the “nothing” in that philosophical construct. Is it?
By “nothing”, our classical reality-conditioned minds usually conjure up nothing physical (e.g. counterfactual definiteness). As such, “nothing” implies being nonphysical.
Third, is quantum reality nonphysical? A comment on October 21, 2017 in Sean’s “Mind-Blowing Quantum Mechanics” showed how that could be the case, using a thought experiment that is based on the standard double-slit experiment.
Lastly, needless to say, the emergence of classical from quantum requires that quantum reality be more fundamental. That was suggested in a January 20, 2018 comment in Sean’s “Beyond Falsifiability”.
Everything supporting “Entanglement is why there’s something rather than nothing” has now been summarized in this comment.
I just stumbled across this piece by Dr. Feser (http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/carroll-on-laws-and-causation.html), which takes aim at one particular thing you said in your 2014 debate with Craig: “our metaphysics must follow our physics.” It seems to me that Feser’s position is one that prioritises “pure metaphysics” ahead of anything that natural science might have to say with regard to cosmology. As a naturalist, I find this approach highly dubious and am pleased to see that most religious apologists have abandoned it, but I was wondering what your thoughts on his comments were? (He seems to accuse you of scientism, among other things).
Our minds, the discipline of philosophy, and the scientific enterprise, tie us up in causative reasoning. Maybe not timelines, but still causative in the sense of being outcomes of mathematucal modelling. This approach takes us to either the limit of present scientific knowledge (which I take to be SM/GR, acknowledged to be inconsistent and incomplete) or to postulated brute facts. (Actually the SM/GR stopping off point includes many brute facts already).
Where next? Endless circular meandering is all I’ve ever seen on this sort of thing. The options remain ‘absolutely everything reduces to absolutely nothing, but, hey, we’re trying to prove that mathematically! And math(s). Well, that just is. Reality in total as we experience it is just one big brute fact’. Or ‘some vastly greater agent made it’. Also a brute fact.
These are the possibilities if we use the rational mind and attempt to be rigorous. We must however concede that the rational mind has already shown us that that rational mind cannot be rigorous (Cantor, Godel, etc.). Rationally speaking, we must ultimately regress into uncertainty.
We need to open ourselves to more ‘everyday’ information to help us if we really want answers. The realm of relational, not analytical, consciousness. Someone has set it up so that is most important. He understands the other stuff way better than you or me, and you won’t outsmart Him. So try relationship. He made an initiative toward you.
Quoting Sean’s own summary but talking to atheists in general
‘It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all.’
Natural? Why? Why does a random, meaningless universe throw up these ‘natural’ dilemmas within the consciousness of beings within it? Spurious outcomes of Darwinism? Darwinism if true becomes one of your ‘brute facts’. Always check what brute facts you are sneaking in. Is there any reason to say that a concept or ‘meme’ is not a brute fact? Things like ‘Darwinism’ or ‘Entanglement’ or even ‘Math(s)’ are not ‘nothing’, they are the ‘mechanism’ sort of brute fact.
‘Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it.’
‘Suggests’ is a reasonable word to use. In the mathematical sense, maybe, but maybe not. Anyway, math(s) exists within conscious minds which are assumed here to be physical. That physics is underwritten by math(s). You are therefore hopelessly intertwined within the system you are seeking to analyse back to fundamentals. Why the atheist should experience conscious substantiation of a universe and of himself remains a mystery to him if he’s honest. Again why are we able to even think about it and talk about it? Ascribing rational authority to all this analysis is delusional. Scientific method gone way too far for reliability.
‘But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists.’
Sure, that is a very strong possibility using your approach!
‘I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.’
Ultimately you are right about needing brute facts. It’s just that within a Christian belief framework, you don’t need to be an analytical genius to reason out the relevant brute facts.. The God who already understands all you seek to analyse and lots more became a man, who appeared in Israel/Palestine 2000 years ago. Brute fact. Investigate. ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.’
(John 1v10-11)
I’ll take my personhood with humility. I’m certain science won’t get to the ‘bottom rung, last turtle’. I also don’t think I’ll manage to prove that Christianity is a more scientifically rigorous explanation than atheism. It’s certainly richer and more hopeful. So I’ll say what God the man said. ‘Repent and Believe’. They are His brute facts. You won’t get more relevant information for the moment. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.
@Paul Torek
In general philosophers don’t ask questions like this, that is a misconception. I went looking for philosophers who spent any time on this and found precious few. A philosopher I spoke to said that in 30 years lecturing in philosophy including 15 years as a professor the subject had never once came up.
There has probably been more interest in this by physicists and cosmologists in the past 10 years than there has by philoophers in the past two and a half millenia.
When I was first asked this question, it was by a religious person who asked in with tone of self-satisfaction that he shown my atheism to be nonsensical.
I resented him having imposed on me the burden of proof, especially for such a nonsensical question.
So, mimicking as best I could his tone of self-satisfaction, I replied, Why not?”.
@Simon Packer says: “Ultimately you are right about needing brute facts. It’s just that within a Christian belief framework, you don’t need to be an analytical genius to reason out the relevant brute facts”
1) The problem with this is that in the absence of any observations to support a particular position there is absolutely no justification in proposing any *particular* brute fact. Maybe it was universe creating pixies who were brute facts? Who knows. Whilst it might be pleasant to go to some heaven, there really isn’t any justification in starting out by presupposing that such a place should exist without any foundational justification. The universe is how it is, and is not necessarily (in both senses of the word) how we want it to be.
It just baffles me that the religious have this huge foundational chasm at the root of their belief system and don’t appear to see the problem. On the contrary they proceed to add highly implausible additional attributes upon an already implausible concept, without any justification in what we can observe.
2) We don’t *know* that brute facts are required. The other possibility is that whatever the fundamental substance is, is the only possibility of how it could be. Current science appears to point to a simple fundamental substance: Matter is made of atoms, which are made of nucleons, made of quarks, made of strings (maybe)… that appears to lead back to some simple “fundamental theory”. But, if we posit “brute facts” we have no reason to expect that kind of answer. So maybe there is a reason… who knows?
Mark Hunter
Looking at what Sean calls ’emergent phenomena’, i.e higher level ways of looking at happenings, and particularly the resurrection of Christ, there are clues. Have you seen the testimony of Francis S. Collins, geneticist, on youtube, for example? It worked for him. Me too.
Reductionism to quarks etc. and maybe beyond, when will you know you have arrived? When have you ‘reduced’? Then you have the SM/GR paradox which isn’t clearing up any time soon, I suspect. There’s a bundle of questions in the reductionist program which won’t come right in a final way.
If by “reductionism” you mean that all areas of science will have neat little logical linkages or bridge laws so that you can demonstrate the whole to be logically coherent, then no, you will never get that.
But it is not any challenge to Naturalism, rather it just arises from some commonplace facts about the nature of scientific models and how they relate to the reality they model.
Robin on ‘reductionism’
The links between different layers of abstraction; I agree you won’t get that. If you believe evolution is a valid paradigm, for example, you won’t be proving it conclusively using QM. Not now. Probably never.
However the problems of reductionism in just what is generally called Physics, going beyond GR and the SM as it stands are profound and stubborn. There are philosophical and mathematical issues in there which have resisted too much in the way of further insight.
“profound and stubborn” So what? Science has never been easy. How is the fact that science is difficult and doesn’t understand everything, support for inventing a disembodied mind of the gaps that also just happens to be the anthropomorphic entity described in the particular ancient book of one primitive tribe with no knowledge of modern science!? Really, as an argument, this beggars belief and is so full of holes and arbitrary that it is difficult to know where to start. And really it is just a faith position that has no place in a discussion such as this, since you can switch in any such faith position (universe creating pixies) without materially altering the argument.
Back in the real world the problem is a simple one (at least to express): We have no idea what happened “before” big bang. But what we do have is the one universe that we know does exist and the laws and facts (data) that we have so far deduced about it, based on observation. So the only way we have of coming up with *sensible* models is through the lens of those laws and facts. Currently, at least, those laws are pointing back to the idea that complexity arises bottom up from some substance that is fundamentally simple, not top down requiring a more complex cause or agent. So the real question is whether this is somehow uniquely necessitated or just a brute fact. Really noone can answer that right now, so it is best to say “I don’t know” and resist the temptation to invent some arbitrary solution with no foundational support.
Mark Hunter
I’m not sure about the ‘Disembodied’ bit myself. While God doesn’t appear in our physicality, I’m inclined to think He has physicality of another, more many-faceted and complex, kind. Just a physicality we don’t see by his design. I base this on the majority translation of Hebrews 11v3 and references to God having a bodily nature. So ‘Spirit’ means something with supernatural attributes and invisible to us.
I think the issue is that you and people who think like you (I’m not being derogatory, I did Physics) are arbitrarily assuming that Physics is the best, or else only, way to get you to an ultimate answer. I don’t think it is. Physics in my opinion is not in the place to be the best ‘truth datum’ with which to form a worldview. Its short-range robustness in solving simple problems on Planet Earth fades off into unreliability for the Big Picture for a whole variety of reasons. Even if it is essentially close to being on-track, there are big differences of opinion out there among experts. As you say, using Physics, we don’t know answers to the big questions.
You assume everything emerges out of Physics. I think Physics is just the backdrop of how we were made, the fabric for this age. I see the most profound realities as being spiritual, emotional and relational, because they will transcend this creation and live on in another.
On that basis, historical events assume great potential meaning. I recommended a youtube above by a rather greater scientist than me who explains how the resurrection of Christ became a keystone in his own worldview. It doesn’t stop him working in the field of genetics. He still believes in quarks-atoms-DNA molecules-planets-galaxies etc.
John Lennox the mathematician points out the difference between agency and mechanism. This is fairly foundational philosophically- speaking, of course.
What would inexistence entail? Dirac stressed the superposition principle was the fundamental principle of QM. Maybe the superposition principle is the key to explaining why anything exists at all. Everettian QM is the only theory consistent with the information content of reality being equal to zero: the quantum analogue of the Library of Babel. Naively, we might imagine countless alternative laws or principles by which reality could have been organised. All of them, overtly or covertly, involve the creation of information ex nihilo. By contrast, unitary-only QM tells us that whenever one naively supposes that information has been created, e.g. “Behold, a live cat”, then it’s really illusory (cf. Wigner’s friend). What critics of the Everettian multiverse view as a vice can instead be construed as a theoretical virtue: no-collapse QM is the only theory consistent with an informationless zero ontology. “A theory that explains everything, explains nothing”, said Karl Popper. Yes, precisely.
Of course, one wants to protest here that by “nothing”, I don’t have in mind a perfect complex sphere of Hilbert space. But maybe one’s pre-theoretic conception of “nothing” is both too rich (in virtue of its disguised information content) and also too impoverished, i.e. we don’t grasp what the default state of zero information entails. Unitary-only QM tells us that information can never be created or destroyed. Maybe timeless Everettian QM tells us information was never created in the first place. Max Tegmark once wrote a paper, “Does the universe in fact contain almost no information?” Should we drop the “almost”? I don’t know.
Either way, great paper. Thanks Sean.
Bit late to the party.
“Why” questions, when they aren’t “How” (etc.) questions in disguise, can only possibly make sense in the context of a story.
Why is the water in the kettle boiling? Is it because of the kinetic energy imparted by the electromagnetic force applied through the heating element causing the water molecules to overcome ambient air pressure? Or is it because your mother just stopped by for a cup of tea, and she only stopped by because it’s on her way to her art class? Both are valid answers. And, as the second example illustrates, there are infinite varieties of stories that are equally valid to provide contexts for the question (she’s taking the 10:00 art class because the 4:00 class had already filled up by the time she registered because the vacuum cleaner died the day of registration…). With infinite equally-valid answers, all answers are equally invalid.
Worse, outside of storytelling, “Why?” is a spectacularly unhelpful question, pretty much guaranteed to be counter-productive. Don’t ask, “Why?”; instead, ask, “What?”, or, “How?”, or the like.
Wondering why you didn’t get that promotion at work will only make you miserable. Pondering what you can do to further your career and how you’ll go about doing so is much more likely to be a fruitful use of your mental bandwidth, and much less likely to leave you depressed.
The same is true in any other context you might care to propose. “Why is the sky blue?” might make for good entertainment for poets and / or smartasses, but the real fun begins when you ponder what, exactly, “blue,” is (Light of a particular wavelength? A contextually-dependent psychological phenomenon?) and the conditions that cause blueness, whatever it is, to be a reasonable characteristic to use to describe the sky.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Theists love the question because all they have to sell are stories. Smartasses love the question for obvious reasons. But, if you want a meaningful answer, start with a meaningful question — and this one is as meaningless as they come.
Cheers,
b&
As finite created beings, we cannot directly experience either a final zero or a final infinity, nothing or everything. All we can do is start to conceive of them. We define zero by relative lack of structure or information, not in absolute terms.
We cannot conceive of no substance/energy/time/space, and we cannot conceive of no law/information/structure.
You said ““Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” ”
But that just begs the question as to where the laws of physics came from.
“But that just begs the question as to where the laws of physics came from.”
One more time. The laws come from the mathematical structure that reality is.
“The system unifies space, time, matter, energy and interaction, all in one coherent picture, so particles and the laws of nature governing them appear naturally”
https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2451
You said ““Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” ”
Maybe. Consistent with, quite possibly. They are still fractured at the QM/GR interface.
But that just begs the question as to where the laws of physics came from. I agree.
One more time. The laws come from the mathematical structure that reality is. Why? Look at the Penrose picture to see the dilemma explicitly. You are re-stating the assumptions normally made and in so doing reflecting the dilemmas Penrose points out in ‘The Road to Reality’. See the diagram in the intro regarding the relationship between mind, physics, and maths.
“‘The Road to Reality’. See the diagram in the intro regarding the relationship between mind, physics, and maths.”
I have the book and I have read it, and curiously that book has all the main mathematical tools and the gist of what we know about reality. I have almost all the “popular” physics books but I have ten times more actual physics texts.
It is really astonishing to me that people who follow Sean’s blog who suppose to be at least familiar with some physics, mathematics and their history to make these unbelievable comments ( I don’t mean any disrespect, just my point of view). It is clear that the science has come a very very long way, we are almost to the last mile, and it is clear that there is NOTHING MAGICAL about reality and we have done that without regard to consciousnesses and we will continue to do so. Reality follows a very strict set of rules and very predictive and like Einstein said “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” I think people have misinterpreted what Sean calls “brute force”, I don’t think he means it is not possible to know how/why reality comes about.
Now, my model shows strong possibility that reality is indeed a mathematical structure and it is unfair not to look into that possibility as long as the model has not been scrutinized by proper people. Anyway, I have given direct evidence, however, there are many people like Tegmark and many others who have reached similar conclusions with their own models or physics based philosophical arguments. So I am not the only one saying so.
“‘The Road to Reality’. See the diagram in the intro regarding the relationship between mind, physics, and maths.”
I have the book and I have read it, and curiously that book has all the main mathematical tools and the gist of what we know about reality. I have almost all the “popular” physics books but I have ten times more actual physics texts.
Sorry, page 18, chapter one, not the intro. We are not nearly there. There are major and fundamental dilemmas, the vacuum catastrophe and the hierarchy problem for example.
I don’t mean nearly like next year, the fifty years proposal seems reasonable to me. There are many problems which present day physics face , the good is that they are mostly a by product of the huge knowledge that has been accumulate it. This is very typical in science and engineering.. I spent ten years perfecting my patented project. Every time I solve a problem that solution causes a problem that I must solve, did that iteratively until all problems kept to absolute minimum. Physics works the same way , but once in a while in all situations you must do a rethink of the whole process and make it work on a more fundamental level, this is an ongoing process only visible if you take a wide and deep view of what is actually been done.
I can see that people are concerned with two things, is there free will and does consciousness tied to existence. The first one is related but completely separate technically of why /how reality. The second question imply that if you believe in it then reality is unknowable because it becomes chicken and egg, which are we suppose to know first. And my point was that we have done well already, so the question is irrelevant.
Hey Sean, have you looked into Jonathan Schaffer’s priority monism? I think there may be interesting points of consilience between what you are saying and his argument, as laid out in his 2010 paper on the issue. Also, you mention the PSR in your piece, which of course deserves mentioning as it’s so central to the Leibnizian argument for God’s existence. But there is also some interesting recent work (e.g. by Dasgupta, 2016), which seeks to formulate a version of the PSR in terms of metaphysical grounding. Since grounding seems to be a very interesting topic of discussion in contemporary metaphysics, it may well be worth looking into. 🙂