Here's another topic I've talked about a few times now. I'm bringing it up again because I had a conversation about it with somebody recently, and it got me to thinking. The conversation was about the intuition that something can't come out of nothing without a cause. The person I talked to had told me once before that he did not have this intuition. In the conversation I had with him recently, he said one resaon he lacked this intuition is because he cannot conceive of "nothingness."
That has had me thinking about what it means to conceive of nothingness. When I try to conceive of things, I usually try to form some kind of picture in my head about them. Or, if it's an abstract thing, I imagine charts, graphs, and illustrations. In the case of "nothingness," it is hard for me to conceive of it in this way. If I think of a totally empty box, for example, I'm still imaginging the box. And if the box has any dimensions, then the "nothingness" I'm trying to imagine inside the box isn't really nothing. It has spacial dimensions and a size. So I'm not really conceiving of nothingness.
But suppose I try to imagine a possible world in which nothing at all exists, including any boxes. Well, in that case, I'm still thinking about a world. Even if it's totally black because there isn't anything there, it's hard for me to really picture it. If I try to picture it as an endless void, I'm still picturing it as three dimensional space. But if I try to elminate the space by picturing it as a dimensionless point, well, that is hard to imagine without also imagining the point existing in a space. After all, if I picture a point, I can picture that point growing into something three dimensional. Just calling it "a world" seems to suggest existence of some sort. Maybe that means there is no possible world in which nothing exists. If that were the case, it would be hard to deny the existence of some sort of necessary being.
Suppose we live in a closed universe and that the universe has a finite size. If it has a finite size, there must be an edge somewhere. But what would happen if you were at the edge and looked out? There would literally be nothing outside to look at. That is hard to conceive. From what I understand, though, if we lived in a closed universe, there wouldn't actually be an edge that one could travel to. It's just that if you went in a straight line in any direction, you'd eventually end up at the same spot or close to it. This, too, is hard for me to conceive, yet supposedly it's how a closed finite universe would be. So whether there is an outter edge to space or not, I'd have a conceptual difficulty either way. Even if space is infinite, that is hard for me to conceive.
I can sympathize with not being able to conceive of nothingness in the sense of picturing it. But this doesn't hinder my intution that it's impossible for something to come into being out of nothing. This intuition doesn't depend on my ability to form a picture of nothingness in my head. It just depends on me having an understanding of the meaning of nothingness and what it would mean for something to come into being out of nothing. In my recent conversation, I asked my friend to imagine a bird popping into existence right now without being made of previously existing material. In this scenario, you don't have to picture a "void" or a "nothing" preceding the existence of the bird. The whole universe exists already. But the bird has no material cause, so the bird came out of nothing. Or, to put it another way, the bird came into being, but it didn't come into being out of anything that already existed. To say it came out of nothing doesn't mean there was a void that preceded the bird. It just means the bird isn't composed of pre-existing material. When the bird came into being, all the material the bird is made out of came into being with it. This sense of something coming into being from nothing isn't hard for me to picture in my head, but I don't think it's possible for it to actually happen.
This impossibility is even more acute if I imagine the bird having a beginning to its existence without a whole universe in which it emerges. This is why I do not think it's impossible for something to be caused to come into being out of nothing. If I imagine the bird coming into being out of nothing within a universe that already exists, I can at least imagine there's something in the physical universe that explains it. While there's nothing in the universe from which the bird was made, the universe may nevertheless have somehow provided the necessary and sufficient conditions to bring about the existence of the bird. (Some people don't think it's even possible for something to be caused to come into being out of nothing.) If there were a God, but nothing else, then God could be the explanation of how the universe came into being out of nothing. But if there was nothing at all, neither a God nor a universe, then it would be utterly impossible for anything at all to come into being. I am certain of that. (This was a hard paragraph for me to write, and I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself clearly.)
My intuition is based more on what "out of nothing" means than it is on a mental picture of "nothing." And it isn't hard for me to conceive of nothingness in this sense. What do rocks dream about? Nothing. They don't dream at all. "Nothing" just means "not anything," so to say something came out of nothing means that it came into being, but it didn't come into being from something. It came out of nowhere. It didn't involve a rearrangement of previously existing material. It just popped into being from nothing or not from anything. It seems intuitively obvious to me that it's impossible for something to just spontaneously come into being without coming into being from something else.
As I've explained in several other posts (like this one), there are different kinds of things we know by intuition.
- Knowledge of our own subjective experience (e.g. what we are thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc.).
- Knowledge of necessary truths (e.g. math, logic, geometry, etc.).
- Knowledge of synthetic a priori truths (e.g. the external world, the past, induction, other minds, an enduring self, morality, etc.).
It is hard for me to decide whether my intuition about ex nihilo, nihil fit goes in the second category or the third category. On the one hand, I have a rational intuition about what appears to be an impossibility. That would suggest that it's a necessary truth and therfore belongs in the second category. But on the other hand, it isn't quite as obvious that it's a logical impossibility. I can form a coherent picture in my head of a bird popping into being without being made of previously existing material, but I can't form a coherent picture of a square circle or a scenario in which Jim is taller than Dan, Dan is taller than Bob, and Bob is taller than Jim. This suggests that ex nihilo, nihil fit belongs in the third category.
To belong to the second or third category, that doesn't tell you how certain one is of it. Of course we can be certain of some necessary truths, but there are other necessary truths we might be in doubt about. The reason is because we can rationally grasp the necessity of some truths more clearly than we can others. Concerning the second category, for example, it's more clear to me that 2+2=4 than it is that 128+603=731 even though both are equally necessary. And concerning the third category, it's more clear to me that there's an external world than it is that there are other minds (though admittedly the difference is miniscule, and I may change my mind tomorrow). If ex nihilo, nihil fit belongs in the third category, then it belongs at the very top because it is the most certain item of knowledge I would have in the third category. Since no other item of knowledge in the third category is certain, this makes me doubt it belongs in the third category at all. With every other item in the third category, it's at least possible that each of them is false, but it does not seem to me that it's possible for something to come into being out of nothing without a cause.
Since ex nihilo, nihil fit strikes me as being necessary, but not logically necessary, I tend to say it is metaphysically necessary. Maybe I just need to come up with a fourth category for metaphysically necessary truths (or impossibilities). To be honest, though, I'm not sure I can give you a good definition of what it means to be metaphysically necessary (or impossible). I only say that because while ex nihilo, nihil fit appears necessary, it doesn't appear logically necessary, so it must be necessary in some other sense. It isn't physically necessary either since that would mean it was a mere property of physical things, and since physical things are contingent, so are the laws that describe them. Metaphysical necessity would apply whether there was a physical world or not. Maybe that is how I should define metaphysical necessity. It's a necessity that applies, not just to how physical things happen to be but to how they must be. It's a necessity that holds even in the absense of anything physical.
What I wish I had asked during my conversation is if his inability to conceive of nothingness meant that he had no opinion one way or the other about whether it was possible for something to come into being out of nothing. At the time, I took him to just be saying that since he had no intuition telling him it was not possible, that meant he must have thought it was possible. But to allow for the possibility for something to come into existence out of nothing, wouldn't he have to conceive of nothingness just as much as he would if he thought it was impossible? It would seem that if his lack of intuition was due to his inability to conceive of nothingness that he would have to be completely agnostic about whether it was possible for something to come out of nothing or not. Maybe if he reads this he can say something about it in the comment section. I didn't want to bring his name up since it was a private conversation, but he's free to chime in if he wants to.
Two other questions I might ask: Can you conceive of a universe of finite size in which it had an edge that one could reach? Or, can you conceive of a universe that has a finite duration with a beginning and/or and end? If so, does this help you conceive of "nothing," since there would be nothing beyond the universe, either in space or in time? If it's just as difficult to conceive, can you at least see that it's nevetheless the case that there can't be anything beyond the universe in space or time if the universe is finite in size or duration? If I asked you what was before the beginning of the universe or what was beyond the edge of the universe, wouldn't you say, "Nothing"? And wouldn't it be clear to you what you meant by that?
For more reading on this topic, check out this post: Battle of intuitions: ex nihilo nihil fit
5 comments:
Briefly, I agree that the bird analogy is not parallel, because the bird has a universe to emerge into. Further, by so doing, it would violate the physical laws of this universe.
I think your intuition does belong to the third category, although I might have to look again at whether the synthetic a priori designation is philosophically sound.
The antinomies of space and time do not help me with the concept of nothingness. The best I can do is use the analogy of a three dimensional globe for 4D spacetime. So there is nothing south of the South Pole, to use 'nothing' in one of its many senses!
I think I have a semantic notion of nothingness, no space, no time, an absence of nomological laws, no quantum fizz. To paraphrase you, abso-smurfly nothing at all. But I find no intuition as to how or why existence is now the state of affairs from that.
I think I might well be completely agnostic, I don't even know if 'something from nothing' makes more sense than 'something south of the South Pole'.
Thank for chiming in. As far as whether the third category is philosophical sound, I should say that I came up with these three categories myself. I didn't get it from another philosopher. It all started a long time ago when I first heard about the whole concept of knowledge by intuition. The person who was explaining it said that intuition was how we knew about morality and that our senses are giving us true information about an external world. But when he used examples of other things we know in the same way, the examples he used were of necessary truths like the laws of logic, and incorrigible truths like the knowledge that we are feeling pain. I remember his analogies did not sit well with me because there was something different about morality than there was about logic and math. I could conceive of there being no morality, but I could not conceive of there being no logic or math. It seemed like a mistake to lump morality in with logic and math. After thinking about it a lot, I eventually came up with these three categories. Tha made it easier for me to argue for morality by using analogy. Instead of comparing knowledge of morality to logic and math, I compared it to think that were more like morality. They were things that couldn't be proved but nevertheless seemed unreasonable to deny. They were things just about everybody had an intuition about, whether they affirmed its truth or denied its truth. For example, everybody perceives an external world that at least LOOKS real, even if they think it's an illusion. I started keeping a list of these "synthetic a priori truths" so that one day when I wrote my big thick book, I could go through each one of them individual and show how they fit all of the criteria for belonging in that third category. Then I'd show how morality fit into that category as well and therefore had the same epistemological warrant as the rest of the members in that category.
So far I haven't seen any good reason not to accept the legitimacy of this category, but I know there are some philosophers who disagree with it. Tim McGrew disagrees with me. But I don't fully understand his point of view. He seems to think the only things we can know a priori are necessary truths. I'm not sure how he would justify belief in the external world, the past, the uniformity of nature, other minds, object permanence, and enduring self, and morality, though I'm pretty sure he believes these things.
I am chewing through some articles on the synthetic a priori, for example see:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori/#ex10a
Meanwhile, you are still prolific whilst I am time poor, and you have posted many things I want to reply to. First I would like to wrap this one up, but in order to do that perhaps you could answer the following- do you have a symmetrical intuition that no thing can become nothing?
>do you have a symmetrical intuition that no thing can become nothing?
Yes, but it's not as strong of an intuition. There seems to be a lot of Christians who don't have this intuition. They think the only reason the universe doesn't immediately cease to exist is because God is continuously sustaining it in existence, and if he were to remove his sustaining power, the universe would vanish. That doesn't resonate with me in the slightest.
I probably won't be posting much in the next month or two, so maybe you can catch up. :-) I appreciate you taking such an interest in these subjects I've been bringing up.
That's interesting, because prima facie it seems they are logically symmetrical. Synthetic a priori are defeasible, for example we might discover that our intuition that every event has a cause is mistaken if we have good reasons to think that the non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct.
This is why I think our reasons for accepting the reality of things like other minds or the uniformity of nature are pragmatic. I agree with Hume on this.
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