Was Nothing ever an Option?

The Problem of Nothingness

I would like to, very briefly, discuss an idea I had regarding the metaphysical possibilities of nothingness. It stems from a conversation I had with a friend the other week, where we were talking about why it is the case that something exists, rather than nothing. He had asked me how I thought matter/being/whatever else you want to call the universe had started to exist.

I told him I don't know, but that I don't think that the non-existence of anything (which is to say, true nothingness) was ever a possibility.

A significant amount of western philosophy has been centered around the nature of Being. Specifically, it has looked for a justification for Being. What caused our universe? What is the ultimate reason that anything, let alone everything, exists? Put another way, why is there something rather than nothing? This is the problem of nothingness. Just as we would tend to ask of a large building in the middle of a plain field "Why is this here? How did it come to be here?", we seem inclined to ask of all reality "Why did this all have to happen?"

One of the most common areas of philosophy wherein this becomes a central question is in the debates between atheists and theists. In brief, many theistic philosophers point out that the many cosmological theories explain only what happened after existence already began. For instance, the "big bang" theory only shows us what happened several fractions of a milliseconds after the initial singularity of existence began its rapid expansion. However, it does not indicate what caused that singularity, or what caused that singularity to expand. Inflation theory shows the how/why after the universe got kick-started. The theists will push the question back a space, then, and ask how/why that singularity itself got started. What is required in an ultimate metaphysical description of reality is not just what happened sense the start of Being, but why there was Being in the first place. Why all of this messy, chaotic somethingness, instead of pure, simply nothingness.

However, I think it is worth wondering why we automatically assume that the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is itself even justified or necessary. It presupposes that the existence of existence requires an explanation. Put another way, it assumes that nothing is somehow, for some reason, the default option. It assumes that something-in-general (as opposed to this-or-that particular thing and its history) requires a reason for itself, a justification.

But of course, why should we think that nothing is the default? Or that it is somehow more "natural" or "easier" to have eternal nothing rather than eternal something? It makes sense in the given context of a universe already existing. The question "why is there something here rather than nothing?" within the context of an already existing universe is a question about logistics, matter, time, and cause. But to ask of all Being why it is here rather than some endless nothing does not seem to be an automatically, self-evidently justified question.

Not only do I find the assumption here to be questionable, but I also find the notion of nothingness itself to be potentially problematic. This is what my friend and I discussed, and it first has to do with the other old metaphysical question: "What are properties?"

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What are Properties?

So, let us say that being (that is, just existing in any way) involves having at least one sort of property. Maybe that property is energy frequency, or maybe it is having an interaction with the gravitational field, or the electromagnetic field. Regardless of how being manifests, it has to have at least one property for it to register with us as something we'd call "real". We'll call that having-of-at-least-one-property "P" for short.

Now, what is nothing? True nothing would be the absolute, complete, and total lack of any and all properties. Letting the tilde (~) represent "not" or "negation", nothing could then be shown in shorthand as ~P

So far so good.

However, there's a problem. The moment we stipulate that true nothingness is the absolute, complete, and total lack of any properties then we have stipulated a property. Namely, the property of being devoid of all other properties.

Now, can it be the case that a lack of properties is a property? The immediate inclination is to say no, but I do not think that this does the concept of 'property' justice. To see why, we must digress a little and as ourselves what a property really is.

We are use to thinking of properties as being something like the impact that one object has on another. I do not mean "impact" here to indicate kinetic energy, like something striking something else, but instead I mean a general tendency to interact with, influence, or affect other things. This is, after all, part of how we tell that something is real. If I see a cup sitting on a table, I see two objects interacting with each other; they are informing one another on how to move in space/time. Ditto for the light that enters my eyes and relays that information to me; that light is interacting with me, informing me on how to understand the world around me (and where to find my cup).

There is (to use these terms metaphorically and loosely) an informational exchange between objects. This is the manifestation of an interaction, an impact, a way-of-being. An object can be considered "something real" if it has at least one impact on the rest of the world, because in so doing it engages in the sort of informational exchange that allows us to encounter it.

Take, for instance, dark matter. All we know about dark matter is that it interacts with gravity, forming concentrations of mass in the universe. We do not see dark matter, nor do we find it interacting with anything else that we are aware of. All it seems to do is interact with gravity.

Still, that interaction with gravity is enough for us to sense, however indirectly, the being of dark matter. We notice it, or encounter it. Thus, we can say that it has at least one property and counts as being among the things we should consider "real".

To distill it down, think of it this way:

1. All objects manifest to us as having at least some amount of interaction with the world at large. 2. The logical nature of this interacting-with is what I'd call an object's "way of being". 3. For any object to appear to us as a real thing in the world, it needs to have at least one identifiable way of being.

4. There is no other way to tell when we are encountering something real. Encountering a way of being is the way in which we know something exists, and wherever we encounter a way of being we are best served by assuming that we're encountering something real (whatever its nature turns out to be).

This (to put it awkwardly) "having-of-a-way-of-being" is exactly what we are talking about when we use the word "property". It's just that, thankfully, saying "property" is far less clunky and awkward than having to say "the-having-of-a-way-of-being" all the time.

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Nothingness and Properties

So, how does the above impact our saying that nothingness is the lack of any and every thing?

Because, when we say this about nothingness, we cannot help but give it a property; a way of being. Specifically, its way of being would be to have no way of being. This is a logical contradiction, and so it is simply beyond the bounds of anything we can rationally think.

We are turning the ~P of before into a property by saying of it that it is nothingness. If accurate, it would then make ~P itself a property: P = {~P}, or the property of having no other properties. An empty category that refers back only to itself, but still technically to something.

Some might say that this is an epistemic problem, not a metaphysical one. They could argue that we simply lack the ability to think of real nothing because such a not-thing lies beyond the bounds of our conceptual capacity. And they may be right. Who knows? Perhaps genuine nothingness really did "precede" our universe. But if so, it is simply not the kind of thing our mind can grapple with since the moment we try to do so we predicate certain properties of it and thus make nothing a something. And, I would argue, that if we cannot conceive of something in the slightest, then it ought not be taken seriously as an aspect of Being.

Or, perhaps, we are perfectly clear in our perceiving here and it is simply the case that we are perceiving (via logical necessity) that nothing isn't possible. If true, then we really are dealing with a metaphysical problem, and not merely an epistemic one. If we are correct in seeing that the lack of all properties is itself a sort of meta-property, then we are "catching a glimpse", so to speak, of one of the fundamental structural truths of reality. Namely, we're "seeing" that nothingness simply isn't possible. It was never a logically possible option for there to be true nothingness.

And if that's the case, then our whole Western metaphysical tradition of trying to grapple with the question of why anything exists at all becomes, as Wittgenstein would have put it, a pseudo-problem. It vanishes once we see that nothing was simply never an option; that whatever existence is, it simple always is the case that there is something that exists. This seems, I admit, highly strange. But it is no less strange, I think, than the assumption that at one point there was truly nothing.