You are right that “universe” and “reality” are not the same thing. But the mind treats both like objects it can measure. Presence does not. The problem in Wolfgang’s claim isn’t the conclusion. It is the assumption that not finding an edge proves infinity. Mind logic. Not reality logic.
Saying the universe must be eternal because we cannot find its edge is mind arguing with itself. Absence of evidence is not proof of infinity. Presence doesn’t make those logical leaps. Universe and reality are not automatic synonyms. One is measurable. The other is the ground everything arises from.
You wrote: "What this seems to entail then, is there must be some unexplained reality that can account for all other facts."
Yes, the Ultimate Explanation of Everything (UEE) cannot require its own explanation, for then it would be at best the penultimate explanation of everything. The UEE must be accepted as a brute fact.
You suggested: [We] "should narrow our search for a 'good' brute fact."
I propose a brute fact far simpler and more intuitive than theism. The Principle of Plenitude (PoP): everything that can exist, does exist. The name was coined by Arthur Lovejoy, who traces the intellectual history of this idea is his terrific book, The Great Chain of Being. Lovejoy finds hints of the principle in Plato's Timaeus and identifies Aristotle as an early opponent (in his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote "it is not necessary that everything that is possible should exist in actuality.”
The PoP answers every question of the form "Why is the universe X rather than not-X?"
If not-X is possible, then the answer is: "There are X universes and not-X universes. We just happen to be in one of the X ones."
If not-X is impossible, then the answer is : "All universes are X."
But if you then ask "But, why are WE in this universe and not a different one?", the answer is: "Accident of birth. No different than being born in the US rather than Bolivia, or in the 20th century rather than the 3rd, or an planet orbiting Proxima Centauri rather than one orbiting Sol."
The PoP makes a great UEE for atheists, but theists have sometimes embraced it, arguing that God, being omnipotent, would not stop at creating one measly possible world when he could just as easily create them all.
Philosopher David Lewis revived the PoP under the name Modal Realism in his 1986 book, On the Plurality of Worlds.
My favorite sacred book is the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu. I find the PoP expressed in these verses (translation by Stephen Mitchell):
Your insight into why something can’t arise from nothing is correct, but we need not conclude that for something to exist, there must exist something independently (i.e., uncaused, which you call God). Rather, the same logic that refutes creation ex nihilo also refutes independent existence. The only logical answer that remains then is emptiness - that everything exists dependently.
I think I take issue with the idea that EVERYTHING exists dependently. If that's the case, it seems we cannot account for anything in particular? How you you (or the Buddhist tradition) account for this problem?
The claim that “everything exists dependently” does not entail that “nothing in particular can be accounted for.” That inference only follows if one assumes that to “account for” something requires positing an independently existing substrate or first cause, but that is precisely the assumption under dispute.
What dependent existence denies is independent existence, not distinct existence. Things are distinct because their patterns of dependence differ, not because they must possess some independent ontological foundation.
The point I’m making is that the same logic used to reject absolute nothingness also rejects independent existence. We rightly say “nothing cannot give rise to something” because what lacks all relations cannot ground or condition anything.
The same is equally true of any posited independent reality. If something is truly independent (i.e., uncaused, unrelated, unaffected), then nothing can follow from it and it cannot account for anything in particular. Independence collapses explanatory power just as nothingness does.
The only coherent alternative is dependent origination. Things exist as distinct, particular patterns of relations. Dependence does not erase identity. It’s precisely what makes identity possible.
I follow your reasoning, I'm just not sure I agree with the intuition that stuff can exist without a first cause or fundamental substrate. Is there anything you'd suggest I read on this topic to better get my head around it?
A helpful way to explore this is to look at thinkers who rigorously analyze how explanation works without a first cause or underlying substrate. In my own process, I have found three different traditions converge on the same insight. I recommend looking into:
1. Madhyamaka Buddhism, specifically Nāgārjuna’s “Mūlamadhyamakakārikā”. This is the classical analysis of why a first cause or independent substrate is impossible. Nāgārjuna shows that anything posited as independent becomes unintelligible, precisely because independence disconnects it from the conditions required for it to function or even be identifiable. Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary is very accessible.
2. Eugene Gendlin’s “A Process Model”. Gendlin develops a full metaphysics of “occurring through implying” where every event is an instance of relational completion. He explicitly rejects the idea of a fundamental substrate, arguing that any such substrate would freeze process and make further occurrence impossible.
3. Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process and Reality”, (especially Part I). Whitehead rejects both creation ex nihilo and independent substance. Actual entities arise only through relations to other actual entities. Nothing is self-subsistent. His critique of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” addresses exactly why the intuition for a substrate is mistaken.
These three come at the problem from different angles, but they all converge on the understanding that an independent grounding entity is what makes explanation impossible. A ground that is causally closed or unrelated cannot give rise to anything.
If you want one short entry point, I’d recommend Nāgārjuna first. The structure of the argument is very clear and directly addresses the intuition you’re wrestling with.
It is possible to go back a step and ask 'Is there something rather than nothing?
Your observation that it is not as easy to decide what we mean by 'something; and 'nothing' as philosophers often assume seems a vital one to me. It was exactly this thought that set me off on the road to mysticism and the idea that neither something nor nothing is a possible state of .reality.
Good article and well written, but I have to make objections….
When we talk about explaining things in this context, we’re talking about causes. So this logical bedrock, this thing that has no extrinsic explanation is something that has no external cause. It’s not a necessary fact in any theoretical sense, it’s a necessary existent. A concrete fact.
So while I can agree the ontological bedrock is necessary by definition, I can’t agree that we can slap the necessary first cause label on whatever makes us comfortable.
We can’t, for example, say my cat is the necessary bedrock.
And one cat, one contingent object, is all we need to get the cosmological argument off the ground. Once we’ve admitted not everything is a candidate to be called the ontological bedrock, it’s just a matter of tracing the causation back to something that is a candidate for a necessary cause, something that is self-caused, or as you say, has no extrinsic cause. Another way to say this is, we’re looking for something that is omnipotent. Power being another word for cause.
The other objection I have is the idea the concept of nothing is problematic. It just means non-existent. The confusions about nothing are an artefact of language, we can use the word nothing as a noun. But we can reword the question to avoid this by asking, Why does my cat exist? This is a sensible question and I’m expecting an answer about the causes that combined to produce a physical object. We can trace a linear causation of ancestor cats, or we can talk about oxygen and environmental conditions that all need to exist for my cat to continue existing.
"Of course, it could be the case that the entire “system” is itself necessary, as Spinoza thought, but this would seem to rub against our intuitions."
But many of our intuitions are culturally contingent and change with the surrounding context, so rubbing against current intuitions doesn't by itself seem like a good reason to dismiss Spinoza
"This is exactly the same way in which I believe it is impossible for consciousness to arise out of unconscious matter, or for life to arise out of a dead universe." So if someone else can believe in emergence and evolution, maybe you have a problem of belief; you are trusting an idea that seems to have arisen ex nihilo. Emergence and evolution seem to be credible phenomena in this universe.
Why do you believe that consciousness cannot arise out of unconscious matter? I arose from a fertilized egg 84 years ago. The zygote was unconscious. Took some time, but I became conscious through a process of emergence as atoms aggregated forming cells, tissues, a neural network. I don't understand the process, but I believe it happened. Belief means trusting an idea. Doesn't mean it's actually the way things work. You might argue that some proto consciousness is present in the zygote or in its progenitors back through 4 billion years to the origin of life from nonliving matter. then you might imagine that the elements are a form of protolife, and that is also a property of the subatomic particles before their accretion into the heavy atoms in the stars. In other words, the singularity was conscious and alive. I don't find those ideas very useful. Maybe this is just semantics. You and I mean different things when we speak of consciousness and life. Back to your "something from nothing". It is reasonable to think that reason has boundaries. I can trust that idea. Reminds me of the Godel incompleteness theorem.
I put this axiom in the footnotes to specify the principle behind my thoughts: Y cannot arise out of X if X does not contain that which constitutes Y in some way, either in potential or actuality.
I'm an idealist and I don't buy physicalist explanations of consciousness. I'm not sure why I would trust an idea that doesn't make any intellectual sense to me. If you disagree, that's fine, but I don't see any virtue in what you are proposing.
As I understand it, idealism is physicalism with most of the complexity ignored to make things thinkable. Ideals exist only in mind. There is, for example, no democracy. To start with we aren't sure what we mean.
If we were sure, it would be an unattainable aspiration. But it's good to have an aspiration so we can approximate it through effort. As for "something from nothing", Since the singularity, there is no such thing as nothing. The cosmologists can argue about nothing. I don't see any virtue in going there. However, I am an idealist and a physicalist. Ideally I will spend time thinking about what is physically real and potentially real. I'm guessing there will be a whole lot of something before nothing.
Personally I find emergence a coherent idea. This allows me to think of consciousness as an attribute of my mind without insisting that it is an attribute of the atoms of which I am composed. Of course the potential is there, retrospectively. But "potential" is an idea, a product of a neural network, not of atoms. In the absence of mind, there is only what is, not what may be. Concepts are emergent phenomena that have evolved because they have advantage in the competition to survive. I intuit that emergence and evolution are productive ideas. I also intuit that technologies based on such ideas have the potential to end us by destroying the system that spawned and sustains us. So understanding the limits of understanding may be the most important idea. Your consideration of "something from nothing" is at those limits.
You think beautifully, but the whole essay reads like it was written from the mind alone, without the part of you that has ever sat still long enough for presence to interrupt the loop. When someone has spent real time in presence, their metaphysics thin out. The puzzles stop flexing. The “why is there something rather than nothing” question loses its shine because the asker stops standing outside existence trying to interrogate it.
Well, I'm answering the question using propositional truths, not participatory ones. Generally, the former is the realm of philosophy, the latter is the realm of spirituality (though we shouldn't push this too far).
That is fair. The lines do blur. Philosophy can point toward the mystery, but presence is what lets you stand inside it. At some point the question itself becomes participatory whether we intend it or not.
I think you are misunderstanding what a brute fact is. Something can have a reason or function within one's system and still be brute. A brute fact is just something that has no extrinsic explanation. Simply because one assigns it a role within one's metaphysical theory, does not therefore make it explained.
"It is certainly conceivable that some particular fact about reality, like my existence for example, could have been otherwise."
No I cant imagine a universe without you Ben :(
Ahaha I definitely can 😅
"definitely"?
It seems impossible to me.
Any universe that you imagine is entirely comprised of you.
This is true 😅
As long as we cannot identify nothingness or an end of the universe, we should expect that the universe is eternal and infinite.
Such a statement assumes that "universe" and "reality" are synonymous 😁
You are right that “universe” and “reality” are not the same thing. But the mind treats both like objects it can measure. Presence does not. The problem in Wolfgang’s claim isn’t the conclusion. It is the assumption that not finding an edge proves infinity. Mind logic. Not reality logic.
Saying the universe must be eternal because we cannot find its edge is mind arguing with itself. Absence of evidence is not proof of infinity. Presence doesn’t make those logical leaps. Universe and reality are not automatic synonyms. One is measurable. The other is the ground everything arises from.
I did not say anything about a proof. I am talking about my ontological world view. We are not able to get proof about the end of the universe.
You wrote: "What this seems to entail then, is there must be some unexplained reality that can account for all other facts."
Yes, the Ultimate Explanation of Everything (UEE) cannot require its own explanation, for then it would be at best the penultimate explanation of everything. The UEE must be accepted as a brute fact.
You suggested: [We] "should narrow our search for a 'good' brute fact."
I propose a brute fact far simpler and more intuitive than theism. The Principle of Plenitude (PoP): everything that can exist, does exist. The name was coined by Arthur Lovejoy, who traces the intellectual history of this idea is his terrific book, The Great Chain of Being. Lovejoy finds hints of the principle in Plato's Timaeus and identifies Aristotle as an early opponent (in his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote "it is not necessary that everything that is possible should exist in actuality.”
The PoP answers every question of the form "Why is the universe X rather than not-X?"
If not-X is possible, then the answer is: "There are X universes and not-X universes. We just happen to be in one of the X ones."
If not-X is impossible, then the answer is : "All universes are X."
But if you then ask "But, why are WE in this universe and not a different one?", the answer is: "Accident of birth. No different than being born in the US rather than Bolivia, or in the 20th century rather than the 3rd, or an planet orbiting Proxima Centauri rather than one orbiting Sol."
The PoP makes a great UEE for atheists, but theists have sometimes embraced it, arguing that God, being omnipotent, would not stop at creating one measly possible world when he could just as easily create them all.
Philosopher David Lewis revived the PoP under the name Modal Realism in his 1986 book, On the Plurality of Worlds.
My favorite sacred book is the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu. I find the PoP expressed in these verses (translation by Stephen Mitchell):
4
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
6
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
Hmmmmm interesting I'll have to think about that more!
Your insight into why something can’t arise from nothing is correct, but we need not conclude that for something to exist, there must exist something independently (i.e., uncaused, which you call God). Rather, the same logic that refutes creation ex nihilo also refutes independent existence. The only logical answer that remains then is emptiness - that everything exists dependently.
I think I take issue with the idea that EVERYTHING exists dependently. If that's the case, it seems we cannot account for anything in particular? How you you (or the Buddhist tradition) account for this problem?
The claim that “everything exists dependently” does not entail that “nothing in particular can be accounted for.” That inference only follows if one assumes that to “account for” something requires positing an independently existing substrate or first cause, but that is precisely the assumption under dispute.
What dependent existence denies is independent existence, not distinct existence. Things are distinct because their patterns of dependence differ, not because they must possess some independent ontological foundation.
The point I’m making is that the same logic used to reject absolute nothingness also rejects independent existence. We rightly say “nothing cannot give rise to something” because what lacks all relations cannot ground or condition anything.
The same is equally true of any posited independent reality. If something is truly independent (i.e., uncaused, unrelated, unaffected), then nothing can follow from it and it cannot account for anything in particular. Independence collapses explanatory power just as nothingness does.
The only coherent alternative is dependent origination. Things exist as distinct, particular patterns of relations. Dependence does not erase identity. It’s precisely what makes identity possible.
I follow your reasoning, I'm just not sure I agree with the intuition that stuff can exist without a first cause or fundamental substrate. Is there anything you'd suggest I read on this topic to better get my head around it?
A helpful way to explore this is to look at thinkers who rigorously analyze how explanation works without a first cause or underlying substrate. In my own process, I have found three different traditions converge on the same insight. I recommend looking into:
1. Madhyamaka Buddhism, specifically Nāgārjuna’s “Mūlamadhyamakakārikā”. This is the classical analysis of why a first cause or independent substrate is impossible. Nāgārjuna shows that anything posited as independent becomes unintelligible, precisely because independence disconnects it from the conditions required for it to function or even be identifiable. Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary is very accessible.
2. Eugene Gendlin’s “A Process Model”. Gendlin develops a full metaphysics of “occurring through implying” where every event is an instance of relational completion. He explicitly rejects the idea of a fundamental substrate, arguing that any such substrate would freeze process and make further occurrence impossible.
3. Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process and Reality”, (especially Part I). Whitehead rejects both creation ex nihilo and independent substance. Actual entities arise only through relations to other actual entities. Nothing is self-subsistent. His critique of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” addresses exactly why the intuition for a substrate is mistaken.
These three come at the problem from different angles, but they all converge on the understanding that an independent grounding entity is what makes explanation impossible. A ground that is causally closed or unrelated cannot give rise to anything.
If you want one short entry point, I’d recommend Nāgārjuna first. The structure of the argument is very clear and directly addresses the intuition you’re wrestling with.
I shall check them out, thanks Aaron 😁
It is possible to go back a step and ask 'Is there something rather than nothing?
Your observation that it is not as easy to decide what we mean by 'something; and 'nothing' as philosophers often assume seems a vital one to me. It was exactly this thought that set me off on the road to mysticism and the idea that neither something nor nothing is a possible state of .reality.
It is possible, just not sure what the answer would be 😅
Good article and well written, but I have to make objections….
When we talk about explaining things in this context, we’re talking about causes. So this logical bedrock, this thing that has no extrinsic explanation is something that has no external cause. It’s not a necessary fact in any theoretical sense, it’s a necessary existent. A concrete fact.
So while I can agree the ontological bedrock is necessary by definition, I can’t agree that we can slap the necessary first cause label on whatever makes us comfortable.
We can’t, for example, say my cat is the necessary bedrock.
And one cat, one contingent object, is all we need to get the cosmological argument off the ground. Once we’ve admitted not everything is a candidate to be called the ontological bedrock, it’s just a matter of tracing the causation back to something that is a candidate for a necessary cause, something that is self-caused, or as you say, has no extrinsic cause. Another way to say this is, we’re looking for something that is omnipotent. Power being another word for cause.
The other objection I have is the idea the concept of nothing is problematic. It just means non-existent. The confusions about nothing are an artefact of language, we can use the word nothing as a noun. But we can reword the question to avoid this by asking, Why does my cat exist? This is a sensible question and I’m expecting an answer about the causes that combined to produce a physical object. We can trace a linear causation of ancestor cats, or we can talk about oxygen and environmental conditions that all need to exist for my cat to continue existing.
I completely agree with all of this xD
(t)here is something AND nothing
Come on, chaps!
Maybe!
"Of course, it could be the case that the entire “system” is itself necessary, as Spinoza thought, but this would seem to rub against our intuitions."
But many of our intuitions are culturally contingent and change with the surrounding context, so rubbing against current intuitions doesn't by itself seem like a good reason to dismiss Spinoza
Why not?
"This is exactly the same way in which I believe it is impossible for consciousness to arise out of unconscious matter, or for life to arise out of a dead universe." So if someone else can believe in emergence and evolution, maybe you have a problem of belief; you are trusting an idea that seems to have arisen ex nihilo. Emergence and evolution seem to be credible phenomena in this universe.
What do you mean by "problem of belief" and "trusting an idea that has arisen ex nihilio"?
Why do you believe that consciousness cannot arise out of unconscious matter? I arose from a fertilized egg 84 years ago. The zygote was unconscious. Took some time, but I became conscious through a process of emergence as atoms aggregated forming cells, tissues, a neural network. I don't understand the process, but I believe it happened. Belief means trusting an idea. Doesn't mean it's actually the way things work. You might argue that some proto consciousness is present in the zygote or in its progenitors back through 4 billion years to the origin of life from nonliving matter. then you might imagine that the elements are a form of protolife, and that is also a property of the subatomic particles before their accretion into the heavy atoms in the stars. In other words, the singularity was conscious and alive. I don't find those ideas very useful. Maybe this is just semantics. You and I mean different things when we speak of consciousness and life. Back to your "something from nothing". It is reasonable to think that reason has boundaries. I can trust that idea. Reminds me of the Godel incompleteness theorem.
I put this axiom in the footnotes to specify the principle behind my thoughts: Y cannot arise out of X if X does not contain that which constitutes Y in some way, either in potential or actuality.
I'm an idealist and I don't buy physicalist explanations of consciousness. I'm not sure why I would trust an idea that doesn't make any intellectual sense to me. If you disagree, that's fine, but I don't see any virtue in what you are proposing.
As I understand it, idealism is physicalism with most of the complexity ignored to make things thinkable. Ideals exist only in mind. There is, for example, no democracy. To start with we aren't sure what we mean.
If we were sure, it would be an unattainable aspiration. But it's good to have an aspiration so we can approximate it through effort. As for "something from nothing", Since the singularity, there is no such thing as nothing. The cosmologists can argue about nothing. I don't see any virtue in going there. However, I am an idealist and a physicalist. Ideally I will spend time thinking about what is physically real and potentially real. I'm guessing there will be a whole lot of something before nothing.
Personally I find emergence a coherent idea. This allows me to think of consciousness as an attribute of my mind without insisting that it is an attribute of the atoms of which I am composed. Of course the potential is there, retrospectively. But "potential" is an idea, a product of a neural network, not of atoms. In the absence of mind, there is only what is, not what may be. Concepts are emergent phenomena that have evolved because they have advantage in the competition to survive. I intuit that emergence and evolution are productive ideas. I also intuit that technologies based on such ideas have the potential to end us by destroying the system that spawned and sustains us. So understanding the limits of understanding may be the most important idea. Your consideration of "something from nothing" is at those limits.
You think beautifully, but the whole essay reads like it was written from the mind alone, without the part of you that has ever sat still long enough for presence to interrupt the loop. When someone has spent real time in presence, their metaphysics thin out. The puzzles stop flexing. The “why is there something rather than nothing” question loses its shine because the asker stops standing outside existence trying to interrogate it.
Well, I'm answering the question using propositional truths, not participatory ones. Generally, the former is the realm of philosophy, the latter is the realm of spirituality (though we shouldn't push this too far).
That is fair. The lines do blur. Philosophy can point toward the mystery, but presence is what lets you stand inside it. At some point the question itself becomes participatory whether we intend it or not.
I agree! I am just doing the groundwork 😁
Presence is the groundwork.
The concepts are the scaffolding we build around it 😉
I only reject PSR in its absolute form (i.e. everything must have an explanation). I think fundamental explanations are brute by definition.
It will depend on what metaphysics one holds, but whatever lies at the bottom of your metaphysics will be brute. For me, that is God.
I think you are misunderstanding what a brute fact is. Something can have a reason or function within one's system and still be brute. A brute fact is just something that has no extrinsic explanation. Simply because one assigns it a role within one's metaphysical theory, does not therefore make it explained.