Under Construction

Nothing, and the Beginning

Why is there something rather than nothing? - Leibniz - Principles of Nature and Grace Based on Reason

Every account of the world has to begin somewhere, and wherever it begins the same awkward question is waiting: why is there anything here to begin with? Virtualism takes that question seriously enough to answer it - not by naming a first thing, but by showing that nothing, looked at squarely, could never have stayed nothing.

Index

The Free Lunches

Turning the Question Round

What Nothing Cannot Shake Off

One, and Therefore Two

The Free Lunches

There are three usual answers, and none of them pays its way. The first says there is something because God made it - which only moves the question along a seat: where, then, did God come from? If God may be its own reason, why not Existence itself? The second says there is something because the Big Bang happened - but a Big Bang is a something, and a loud one, so where did it come from? A fluctuation, a prior universe, a field? Each answer buys one step and borrows the fare for the next. The third answer simply refuses the question: there has always been something, the past runs back forever, and there is nothing to explain. That is not an answer; it is a turning away.

Any explanation has to be one that bootstraps existence.

Turning the Question Round

The difficulty is that we always ask from the inside, as people who plainly do exist, and to whom nothingness therefore looks like the strange and unlikely option. So turn the question round. Instead of asking why there is something, ask what absolute nothing would actually have to be.

And it must be absolute. Not the physicist's vacuum, which still hums with fields and carries a shape; not the philosopher's empty space, which still has room in it; not a bare stage with God waiting in the wings. Nothing whatever: no universe and no other universe, no god, no time, no space, no law, no mathematics, no cause - not even a single number to count what is not there.

Nothingness more absolute than no thing. No place for there to be a thing, no law to dictate what kind of thing. No number to count or name a thing. No division to separate a thing.

What Nothing Cannot Shake Off

Now the catch. Strip away every last thing, and one stubborn property refuses to leave: wholeness. To be all there is - even when all there is is nothing - is to be entire, complete, the whole of the case. And completeness is not itself nothing. It is a fact, and a fact is a something. So absolute nothing, taken right to the limit, turns out to be whole, and a whole is exactly what nothing was supposed not to be.

That is a paradox in the strict sense this theory runs on: two things both granted, that cannot both sit still. There is nothing; and there is its wholeness. They cannot both be left as they are.

Nothing actually is factually wholeness.

One, and Therefore Two

A paradox like that cannot be talked away. It can only be settled by opening a direction that was not there before - and the new direction, this first time, is being itself. The nothing and its wholeness, held together, make a relationship, and that relationship is the first existent. It is unity: one. Yet because it is the holding-together of two things - the nothing, and its being-whole - it is, in the very same breath, also two. One, looked at honestly, already carries two inside it.

One divided is two.

There is a second road to the same place, and it is plain arithmetic. Nothing, operated upon by nothing - zero raised to the zero power - comes out as one: 0⁰ = 1. Mathematicians have long treated that as an awkward convention to be waved through. Virtualism reads it instead as the arithmetical face of the very same fact: take nothing, apply nothing to it, and what you are left holding is unity.

Nothing not multiplied by nothing is something.

One word of caution, because the telling makes it sound like a tale in time - first there was nothing, then came one. There was no 'then'. Time is a far later floor in this building, many storeys up from here; the order on this page is the order of what rests on what, not of what happened when. With unity in hand - and, folded inside it, two - the next thing to build is number itself.