NON PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY #1: “WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING”. This

NON PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY #1: “WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING”.

This is an illogical question – another pseudo-rational word game. A conflation of the ideal and the real. In order to ask this question, something must exist – namely the person asking the question – and we must be able to identify some ‘nothing’ to refer to. The word nothing, as far as I know, can only mean ‘nothing exists of consequence’ not the absence of existence. So, as far as I know, ‘nothing’ is impossible. In other words, nothing still requires existence (persistence) of whatever you call ‘nothing’ in contrast to ‘something’. I can’t imagine any ‘nothing’ that isn’t ‘something’ or a category of something within something. I can imagine various combinations of ignorance, error and falsehood. But I can’t imagine something that both exists (a referent of nothing) and does not exist at the same time. In other words, this is another problem of nonsense language. If operationally stated we find: “If I can perceive persistence, then why does that which I perceive persist? And so far we are at least close enough to an answer that we can say something always persists, the question is reducible to (a) what is its lifecycle? And (b) is that lifecycle unique, iterative, or a subset of a larger lifecycle?

I keep a catalog of the kinds of bias and error man man suffers from in each era of his evolution of his knowledge. And if we subtract the theories reliant upon the errors and biases man suffers from, and leave only those theories that reflect constant simple observable laws of the universe, then the universe is merely constructed from a portfolio of positive and negative forces that act upon one another, and is constructed of a regular geometry of those forces little different from the ordinary universe we perceive at human scale, with the remote possibility that some of those forces propagate at speeds different from (both faster and slower) than the electromagnetic spectrum that we are currently able to react to and act upon.

The error (evil) of platonism (Idealism) exists everywhere, just like the other forms of fictionalism. But just as categories must be tested by logic, and logic tested by correspondence, and correspondence tested by operations, and operations tested by full accounting, fictionalism cannot survive tests of operational construction. Whether that fictionalism be the supernatural(pseudo mythical), the ideal (pseudo-real), the pseudo-rational, or the pseudo-scientific. The reason all those forms of fictionalism exist, is simply the failure to fully test the available dimensions against ignorance, error, bias and deceit.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine