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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Rationality Outreach: A Parable - Less Wrong
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The question "Why does something exist instead of nothing?" is different from "What caused the Universe?". The former question is not asking about causation in time.
Suppose that your interlocutor grants that some event didn't need a cause, so that the Big Bang didn't violate causality. Well, the occurrence of no event also doesn't seem to need a cause. That is, causality would still have not been violated had nothing happened. So, it still seems reasonable to ask why something happened rather than nothing.
Although not a complete and satisfactory solution, my favorite answer is this one.
Yes, that's true; I tried to distinguish them in my reply, because the point about time and causality doesn't really apply to the something vs. nothing question.
"Everything not forbidden is compulsory." – Murray Gell-Mann (from T.H. White)
Suppose we grant this claim as an axiom. Then, from the fact that X happened, we may deduce that X was compulsory.
But that doesn't tell us why X was compulsory. It doesn't provide us with an argument showing how the happening of X was a compulsory (or even probable) consequence of self-evident premises. Gell-Mann's axiom doesn't tell us why X had to happen, or even just why X happened — never mind the "had to". So it doesn't answer the question "Why does something exist instead of nothing?".
As I posted below, I'm not planning on continuing this specific discussion. However, if you're interested in continuing to discuss the general topic, I recommend heading over to this discussion topic that I just started, which addresses some of the same issues in what I feel is a clearer way.
What's forbidden about there simply being... nothing? :)
No, the point is that there's nothing forbidden about there being something.
What I meant was, if there's neither anything forbidden about there simply being... nothing, and there being something, what leads to the "something" winning out over the nothing?
ie, even given "everything not forbidden is compulsory", there still seems to be stuff unexplained.