Tag: Metaphysics

Proof that everything that can possibly exist does exist

This is an adaptation of the sixth bullet point under https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/notes-on-existence-and-the-multiverse/.

  1. Whether something exists or not is a function of the contents of its greater physical and metaphysical context and history.
    1. For example, if a tree exists, it’s because another tree, which is or was likely in the same vicinity, dropped a seed sometime in the past, that was sufficiently nurtured as to grow into that tree. If a house exists, it’s because of the confluence of the desires and actions of many people in the context of a culture and civilization.
    2. All of the above things are dependent on the principles of physics, which ultimately exist for metaphysical reasons: you can’t empirically measure why all the laws of physics are as they are. For anything you can empirically measure, you can always ask why nature rendered that particular measurement for you as opposed to some other measurement.
    3. We can conclude by extrapolation/induction that whether the universe itself exists or not depends on some greater metaphysical context.
    4. We can also conclude this from the reasoning that, if it weren’t for some particular metaphysical context to determine the specific nature and contents of the universe, there would be nothing to make it exist in the particular way it does/with the particular contents it does as opposed to in any other particular way. In other words, there’s nothing to select from all the conceivable possibilities.
  2. Therefore, if there were the lack of any greater metaphysical context/history, either everything/every universe that can possibly exist would necessarily exist, or nothing would exist.
  3. If there is an absence of a greater metaphysical context to the universe, then neither is there something to determine which is the case between whether all conceivable possibilities are manifest or nothing at all is anywhere.
  4. The greater metaphysical context that determines that the universe exists, and which particular universe is the case, or alternatively, that all possible universes are manifest or nothing is, must itself have an even greater metaphysical context, or else there would be nothing to determine that that metaphysical context is the the way it is as opposed to any or all other possible ways.
  5. If that greater metaphysical context doesn’t itself have an even greater metaphysical context, or if this isn’t the case on any level of consideration/regress, then, in turn, there’s nothing to determine that only that metaphysical context exists as opposed to any and all metaphysical contexts existing and thus giving rise to all conceivable possibilities, or any reason that metaphysical context is the way it is as opposed to any other way, or any reason it would even exist.
  6. In the absence of a metaphysics to determine whether every possibility or no possibility is made manifest, either both possibilities come true (i.e., that every possibility is made manifest and nothing is made manifest), or neither possibility comes true (which would seem to to identical to nothing coming into existence, only on the next higher level of metaphysics/consideration).
  7. In such a case, it is not determined whether the first of the two above possibilities comes true (i.e., that every possibility is made manifest and nothing is made manifest), or the second of the above possibilities comes true (i.e., that comes into existence, only on the next higher level of metaphysics/consideration).
  8. This conundrum reaches backward into infinite regression; i.e., there would be the lack of a metaphysical context to determine if every possibility is manifest or nothing is manifest, and a lack of a metaphysical context to determine the nature of said metaphysical context, etc. ad infinitum.
  9. So, there would ultimately be nothing, no first cause or ultimately overarching state, to determine whether all possibilities are manifest or nothing is; it’s both both both and neither to infinite regression.
  10. It seems that, therefore, out of the infinite depths of metaphysical possibility, would spring both every conceivable possibility and nothing at all, where the “every possibility” is always one more level of consideration up from the “nothing” possibility. The metaphysical nature/foundation of what seems to exist would therefore be infinitely deep, as would the truth of whether it really exists or not, so it’s as if reality is a daydream within a daydream.
  11. If that’s the case, you may ask, why is it that we observe the “something” possibility rather than the “nothing” possibility? The answer is the same reason you observe the North Star but not the space between here and the North Star. Both exist simultaneously—everything an nothing—but of course the only one of the two you can ever notice is the everything.
  12. You may ask, why is it that we only observe a limited universe, instead of every conceivable possibility? The answer would be that every conceivable possibility includes those possibilities where perceivers can’t observe every possibility at once/from every vantage point. This universe, or biological life on Earth, is one of those possibilities.
  13. To be fair, so far we haven’t actually proven the lack of a greater and greater metaphysical contexts that would necessarily give rise to both all and no possibilities. It could be that there is an infinite or unlimited regress of greater and greater metaphysical contexts/histories, and that at the top, it’s ultimately determined that only one or a few possible universes/things/experiences are made manifest. But then, that consideration contains a contradiction: if there is an infinite/unlimited regress of metaphysical contexts, then there is no absolute top. And if there is no absolute top, what is there possibly to ultimately determine which conceivable possibility is made manifest as the universe we observe? Thus, that idea seems impossible.

One possible argument against this relates to my careful choice of the word “consideration” in the above steps. The argument would be that this entire argument exists in our consideration only, and as such as purely epistemological as opposed to ontological/metaphysical. (And, you could say, the concept of possibility isn’t a metaphysical or ontological one, but epistemological: that, in reality, there was only ever one possibility, which was that which happens.) But that argument would rely on the assumption that you can’t conclude anything about metaphysics based on purely epistemological deduction. And as I mentioned in the essay linked to at the top of this essay, due to both the absolute primacy and non-empirical nature of both metaphysics and epistemology, at some point metaphysics and epistemology are inextricable from each other.

Note bene: This argument does not exactly stipulate an infinite regress of physical and metaphysical contexts, which would beg the question, since that would be claiming existence of something. Note the words “in the absence of” above…it’s about an infinite regress of a lack of outer contexts. (This is again why the argument is primarily an epistemological one.) What really matters is that there’s nothing determining that the outermost context that actually exists, exists. But not even that really matters, because the argument does not actually depend on anything already observably extant to work; it just uses what we do know exists as a sort of trampoline or starting point/reference point for reasoning.

My Answer to the Quora Question, “Can we rationalize everything?”

The mind has many faculties of perception, intuition, and so on that are beyond the faculty of rationalization or reason. Reasoning is very limited; it only relies on facts that are obvious enough to be known to the analytical mind, as opposed to facets of a situation that are known only liminally, and it cannot “process” or work in a holistic manner. Consider the fact that artificial neural networks, a type of computer artificial intelligence, don’t work via a process of rationalization at all and yet are able to identify patterns with amazing success, and they are modeled after biological brains. And that’s to say nothing of the possibility that mind and its intuition and such come from more sources than just the neurological! (That’s a whole other subject, though. See Richard A. Nichols III’s answer to Is there a relationship between heart transplantation and recipient*s emotions and personality?)

Either way, just try completely rationalizing your emotional interactions with other humans.. you’ll come to a dead end fast!

The other factor to consider is that the universe is not necessarily completely mechanistic or otherwise straightforwardly comprehensible as rationalization would require. Nature is probably way too amazing, mysterious, enigmatic, magical and ineffable to fit into the box that analytical reasoning would like to put it in.

Why? Because for any frame of mechanism or causality you can put it in, that frame is probably open-ended and connected to higher, more meta frames (or potentially imaginable frames/models) because there’s no principle that would limit it. The universe is like an onion with unlimited layers to peel away to get to the center, just like the answering question of why some facet of physics operates the way it does can only lead to more questions, and asking why the universe even came into existence requires answering within the context of some larger field of existence.

To illustrate the part about answering a question only leading to more questions, say you want to know why things fall to the ground instead of rise into space. You may figure out that masses attract other masses with a force proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of their distance. Then the question is, why does it do that? Say you answer that with relativity, combining gravitational attraction with the concept of inertia and postulating that mass-energy bends space-time around it, thus changing the “world line” or quickest inertial route from one place to another. Why does it do that? Nobody knows. Some people have attempted to reduce gravity to a side-effect of the electromagnetic force. Why does the electromagnetic force exist? Nobody knows. If somebody did know what causes it to exist, the next step could only be to ask why those things that cause it to exist are as they are.

Or let’s say we figure out why two substances when mixed together create a third, completely different substance after releasing some smoke. We may explain that with the idea of atoms and chemistry. Why are atoms made the way they are and why do they behave as they do? We could explain that with the Standard Model, but why is the standard model the way it is? Nobody knows. If somebody did know why the Standard Model is as it is, the next step could only be to ask why those things that cause it to be the way it is are as they are.

Say you want to know where the universe came from or why it exists. Well, now we have the Big Bang to explain it. But why did the Big Bang happen? We could postulate, for example, the Eternal Inflation model, or some other model of a multiverse, or maybe just some kind of proto-time and “random” quantum fluctuations that happened before the Big Bang, but why did those things exist? The questions never end.

This is all just to point out that the universe is necessarily a never-ending field of Russian dolls, and the mechanics each doll (inasmuch as they even are mechanical) contains hints or implications of the nature of its containing doll and the doll(s) it contains, etc. (Of course, even the separation of the universe into discrete layers of dolls may itself be merely arbitrary, but the principle holds either way.)

To get back to the problem of whether the universe is even mechanistic or not (which the process of rationalizing it would desperately want it to be), science (as in, popular thinking among scientists) currently assumes that it is fully mechanistic, but there is no proof of this. We assume that it is because of the extreme efficacy of mechanical models in predicting and manipulating the world; however, these predictions are only effective in limited domains.

For example, we can very little predict specifically how someone will behave (even if you can, more or less, in some circumstances), how the weather will turn out, or which way a butterfly will fly in…you can assume that this is all just the result of atoms bouncing around in a billiard-ball sense and its unpredictability is merely 100% the result of its immeasurable and incomputable complexity, but that would be begging the question: how do you know there are not non-mechanistic aspects to their behavior?

Also, if quantum mechanics has taught us anything it’s that events are fundamentally unpredictable, things just behave with relative predictability on the macroscopic scale when particles move in aggregate. We call quantum events “truly random,” but how do we know there is not a rhyme or reason to them that simply goes beyond our ability to model it, perhaps even our ability to rationalize about it?

Also, even if the universe is ultimately modellable with rationality, we’d be unlikely to have the proper rationality, or to use rationality in the proper way, to ultimately model it. That’s because rationalization carries with it many assumptions; it carries with it a certain worldview. For example, what if Berkeley’s idealism is correct and everything is ultimately mental, i.e., all there is is conscious beings interacting with each other? (See Entangling Conscious Agents, Donald Hoffman.) What if that means there are many principles of nature that thus work more like psychology, with all its inconsistency, its open-endedness, its free will, and its regular contingency upon interpretation, than clockwork? Common rationality would abhor this.

And not to mention that the human mind was ultimately evolved to hunt, eat, drink, sh*t, gather, build huts, raise children, etc.; not to adequately comprehend the mysteries of the cosmos.

I say a lot of “what if”s and “probably”s, but I actually have no doubt that the universe is magical and not completely mechanistic; I just wanted to help lead others’ rationalities easily to my point of view by not confronting them with positive, likely objectionable claims, and the idea that the universe may be non-mechanistic, magical, psychological, or otherwise non-modellable to some degree is sufficient to raise doubt that we may not be able to rationalize everything.

“The man who listens to reason alone is lost; reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.” -George Bernard Shaw

“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” -Rabindranath Tagore

Notes on Existence and the Multiverse

  • The weak anthropic principle does not automatically answer every profound question about why the universe is the way it is, and it does not defeat the whole enterprise of cosmology as some scientists lament, because it requires a “selection principle” determining which universes come into existence. This selection principle itself begs to be explained, and its existence must be justified to assume that the weak anthropic principle explains, e.g., the fine tuning of the universe.
  • Multiverse theories such as the string theory multiverse or the quantum field theory multiverse may not cover all universes that exist. They could be a very small, perhaps infinitesimally small, fraction of all the universes that exist. There could be layers and layers of multiverses, perhaps in a tree pattern, where sibling multiverses share similar metaphysics/physics principles and subsets or more general levels of those principles are shared with parent layers and smaller subsets or even more general layers of principles are shared with parents of parent layers, etc. etc. It may also be less like a tree of different multiverses than a network or maybe just some unstructured plethora of them, possibly situated in different places within a much larger, non-mechanistic spiritual reality.
  • Our physical reality could be a paradigm of interaction based on a mathematical principle, instated for unknown purposes by a (probably enormous) spiritual entity. Of course, if the spiritual (or otherwise non-physical) realm or realms are infinite, then there is probably an infinite number of physical realms just by virtue of the fact that the creation a physical realm is something that sometimes occasionally happens here and there.
  • Even in a multiverse of an infinite number of universes, its metaphysics could make some possibility-bins’ (where the bin sizes and delineations are arbitrary) possibilities more frequent, and hence more likely, than others. This provides a basis for inference and extrapolation about states of things at one place or time based on states of things at another (i.e., prediction and memory), because if every possible universe exists with equal probability, then there’s nothing to select for order in the next second or across any distance from here and now (just like a song has order because its creation selected from all possible sounds, the vast majority of which are simply white noise). It could also be interpreted as an explanation for probabilistic causality as revealed by quantum physics. (As far as I know, the mathematics of infinity allows for some infinite areas in an infinite continuum to be more dense than others. The reason I mention possibility bins is because how else would you compare such densities?)
  • Some, maybe even most, universes may not be physical at all, though it’s possible that the containment and separation required for the concept of multitude of universes only applies to physical realms, and that though the non-physical realm may be unlimited and may involve an unlimited number of more and less stark disjunctions or parts that are just fairly separated, there aren’t boundaries of the type that would justify the use of the term “multiverse.”
  • Why does anything exist, as opposed to nothing? I have a pet theory. It’s always the context of a possible thing or situation that determines whether that thing/situation is made manifest or not. This context includes all relevant factors, including local information, the physics of the universe, and even metaphysical principles. But there can be no greater/deeper context/metaphysics than existence itself to determine whether anything/everything exists or not. So, in the absence of any more-overarching metaphysics than the totality of existence to determine whether something is manifest or not, on that level, every possibility is manifest.

    You may ask, “why isn’t the possibility of nothingness the one that’s selected instead?”, and the answer is that it is. Both the possibilities of nothing existing and everything existing are manifest, because in the absence of a greater context to determine eligibility, all possibilities are manifest, but of course, you can’t and don’t notice the nothingness. All you can notice is the somethingness.

    You could argue that possibilities are a mental thing, the product of speculation, and that supposing ontological possibilities is supposing an existing thing/situation/metaphysics that can give rise to possible states, thus contradicting the idea of every possibility being made manifests in the absence of any deeper context, but to ask why anything exists as opposed to nothing presupposes that there are possibilities and that nothing and existence are two of them. So, my answer is not supposing anything not presupposed by the question. We cannot escape our own episteme while exploring ontology. Due to both the absolute primacy and non-empirical nature of both metaphysics and epistemology, at some point metaphysics and epistemology are inextricable from each other.

    I suppose you could argue that, in the absence of an overarching metaphysics beyond existence and non-existence, there’s nothing to determine that “every possibility would be manifest” (including the possibility of nothing) instead of “no possibility would manifest,” but maybe in the lack of an overarching metaphysics beyond existence and non-existence to determine if “every possibility would be manifest” (including the possibility of nothing) and “no possibility would manifest,” both manifest, and then you could then make the same argument again recursively, ad infinitum. What would be the end result in the case of an infinite regress?

    I wrote a step-by-step proof version of this argument here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/proof-that-everything-that-can-possibly-exist-does-exist/.
  • In order for two things to interact with each other at all, they must share some common substrate or metaphysical design so that they have a basis/a set of rules/a protocol by which to interact. There must be agreement on how an action of one thing affects the other and vice versa. As the dynamics of a thing’s actions are presumably based in the laws of physics, and all things in our universe supposedly behave and even compose according to the same laws of physics, you’d think that as a general rule it’s probably underlying mechanics or composition of two things that they have in common that engenders said agreement.

    If there were many different types of things—that is, different types on the level of being fundamentally incompatible—in the same “space” (besides the fact that spatial relationships probably don’t apply to things that are incompatible enough not to have a basis for interaction), you’d only know of those things that have a composition that’s fundamentally compatible with yours, because to know of something is for it to affect you. (See https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/06/17/on-the-meaning-of-exists/.) So, it’s possible that everything possible or some subset of everything possible exists “in the same space” and what we call the universe is only the set of those things that operate according to a specific modus operandi, that is, the laws of physics or perhaps the laws of physics as we know them.

    It kinda follows that what universe you’re in is a function of the organization principle of your being, or perhaps the mode of your perception.

    I say “in the same space” even though spatial relationship wouldn’t necessarily apply across different modalities of being, but the principle of space itself probably arises from a mode of perception or, equivalently, a common mode of being among objects in the same spatiotemporal universe anyway. So, “objectively,” they’re in the same space in a sense or might as well be, with respect to the idea that our mode of perception or modality of being selects for them.
  • Although the above reasoning was done with physical universes in mind, it could also possibly explain what’s often termed the “law of attraction.”

    If everything that can possibly happen happens, then there is some reality somewhere where any given person expects or desires for any given thing to happen. A principle that what you expect or desire on the deepest level tends to happen in the world would not be contradicted by the fact that everyone probably desires or expects different things, if there is some kind of organizing principle in effect where people on similar paths of desire or expectation share the same reality-state out of all reality-states. Thus major world events and developments can be more-or-less products of personal will or belief.

    I suppose if all possibilities are manifest, then that includes possibilities where many people strongly believe or desire different things, which would contradict personal will influencing world events and development, but then such possibilities could be only a relatively small/rare subset of all conceivable realities that exist, or that exist according to the organization principle that allows for belief or desire to inform reality. (That last possibility goes back to the idea of layers of multiverses and metaphysical principles mentioned earlier.)

    Of course, it’s obvious that there are many different beliefs and expectations among people in the world about everything, including world events and development, but that is also known to those who already espouse the idea of the law of attraction. This implies that it is not “absolute” for lack of a better word; it may be in effect but may only apply in certain ways or circumstances. Also, people tend to believe and desire different things on different levels of their beings and at different times, producing mixed results.

    Another thing that could bring people/spirits together into the same quantum reality is parallel choices or actions they’ve all made, resulting in the same consequences.
  • It’s also possible that, for some reason, in order for one’s path through the multiverse to remain appropriate to their choices, beliefs and desires, sometimes a person must end up in a reality whose past physical timeline differs from that of the reality they were previously in, hence giving rise to the Mandela Effect. (I’ve had personal experiences with the Mandela Effect I’ve described here: https://www.quora.com/Have-you-personally-experienced-a-Mandela-Effect-change-Will-you-share-your-experience-with-us/answer/Richard-A-Nichols-III.)

    One possible contention with this theory of the Mandela Effect is that, if presumably memories are stored in the brain, why doesn’t switching into another timeline also change the state of the brain’s memories (along with the rest of that timelines history), hence making it so that nobody ever knows they switched?

    Possible answers are that not all of memory is brain state and it’s only the physical aspect of the timeline that switches, or that some of the brain state remains the same when everything else shifts, in accordance to how closely intimate the brain state is to the person’s being; i.e., maybe the mechanics of this timeline switching are “organic” in a spiritual sense or up to open-ended interpretation by consciousness, as reality is ultimately made up of consciousness, and the lines between what’s changed and what’s not changed are drawn in convenient/graceful places rather than things being more strict and absolute like what we normally observe on the gross plane.
  • If our consciousness can transition to, or otherwise just find itself in, any extant reality just as long as it accords with their path, beliefs, desires, expectations, karma, choices/actions or whatever, then it’s possible that we could find ourselves in a reality having any possible past, except there would apparently be selecting principles in place, such that the reality must conform to your memory about it, and that the past must be more-or-less consistent according to some principle of causality. I say more-or-less because you never know, miracles (or the Mandela effect) could happen. I’ve personally had many experiences confirming the notion that reality, including the past, is created in the moment and is only constrained by what you know of the past what’s affected you. (See the above point about reality self-organizing such that everyone gets their wishes to see how this possibility can be consistent with many people remembering or having been affected by different aspects of the past.)
  • It may seem contradictory to think that desire generally influences reality, because in your experience it doesn’t. But there are different levels and kinds of desire. In fact, what you want is repelled from you, because wanting something entails a belief that you do not now have it, which is then reflected in your experience. But there are other levels of what one truly desires, which one may not even be aware of. Also, in my experience, desires are often realized when they’re just preferences without need attached. Usually, I’ll get what I want as soon as I totally, genuinely accept not having it as being “okay” and then forget about it, ironically.
  • “At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminable place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.” —Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
  • Conversations with God Book 1 by Neale Donald Walsch has a lot of interesting info on how and why God created the universe, what came before it, and what our purpose here is. So does Conversations with God Book 3.

Cascades of Flux (Brief Version)

All matter/energy is constantly in flux. What appears to be solid, such as a desk, is actually made of trillions of tiny atoms, each one vibrating in place, and each one made up of waves of electron fields around nuclei that are made of vibrating protons and neutrons which are in turn made of moving quarks. Force fields are in flux because they emanate from matter which is in flux, and force fields aren’t matter or energy anyway—they’re just mathematically defined causal relationships between physical things.

The laws of physics appear to be static, but they all boil down to two aspects: 1. the aspect of it that is necessarily true just because it’s logically consistent with the rest of physics (this aspect is why we’re able to do derivations in physics), and 2. the aspect of it that comes purely from observations. The first aspect is necessarily static just because logic itself can’t logically be any different, but there’s no justification to assume the other is static just because the observations seem consistent over time.

Since everything else we observe is in flux, chances are that those things are in flux as well—they just change too slowly to be noticed. Add to this the fact that there’s no ultimate way to distinguish between the physics of matter and energy and the physicality of it. The so-called “laws” of physics are not a separate thing “acting on” matter and energy. The closer you look, the more these two things blend together. One way of saying this is that form is function. How can you know the form of something other than through how it interacts with the observer? And how it interacts with the observer is its function. And the functionality of matter and energy is the physics of it. I wrote more about why form is necessarily function here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/form-is-core-function-identity-is-core-properties/.

All of physicality boils down to matter, energy and fields. Matter is in turn a pattern of seething energy, and fields can’t, even in principle, be defined or observed in any way other than as causal relationships between matter (or likelihoods of observing matter, in the case of probability fields), so it’s safe to say that fields are merely an aspect of physics rather than of physicality per se. And what is energy other than an aspect of matter’s behavior, and what determines its behavior if not the internal logic and mechanics of it which is what physics reveals?

Also, as I mentioned in this essay, Emmy Noether proved that the conservation of energy logically follows from the consistency through time of the laws of physics. And what is the concept of energy other than an invariant? What sense would energy make if it weren’t conserved?

So, everything physically observed is in flux, and there’s no ultimate way of distinguishing between physics and the physical. And physics is derived from only from a combination of observations and pure logic, while we can only observe the physical, and most of what we observe seems to change constantly. So, all of this would seem to suggest that the constants in physics, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant for example, aren’t actually constants but are only assumed to be because they’re so slow to change.

This essay is the third installment of essays of mine conveying basically the same idea, for some strange reason. One can be found at the link above, the other can be found here.