Response to a Question on Twitter Concerning Creatio Ex Nihilo

This is my response to a fundamentally important question from the Twitter handle Dr.D.

“The idea that no time, no information and no mathematic(s) exists outside of ST (spacetime) is an argument for creation ex nihilo, isn’t it?”

It would be easy for me to simply say no, not necessarily, but it wouldn’t be a valid answer until we first more closely examine the question.

The first and most difficult problem is the word “nihilo”. In Latin it means “small or insignificant thing”. We find similar ideas throughout Western Languages, such as English “nothing”; German “nichts” from Old German ni + wicht (“not a thing”, cognate of English “naught”); Spanish “nada” from Latin res nata (a thing of insignificant or trifling birth); Norwegian “ingenting”, again “no thing”. I could go on, but this should make the point that it has long been ingrained in our most basic thought of existence that reality consists of “things” and the absence of reality is dismissed as “no thing”. “Ex-nihilo” resides in that same understanding of existence as “something out of nothing”. Below I’ll explore the difficulty in that understanding that leaves us struggling to describe reality as revealed in the 20th Century revolutions of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

The second problem is the question of “argument”. That causation, entities, number, information, etc. don’t exist outside space time is in itself not an argument, although it can have implications. It simply is the observation that those things require succession and extension, which are solely modes of time and space. We cannot have number, or position, or event without spacetime. And with no event, there is no information. This is critically important, however, because it is becoming accepted among physicists through experiments and observations that spacetime does not exist in the most fundamental level of existence we know of – quantum coherence. That implies that these things only emerge after decoherence in our environment. Easily said, but this ultimately brings us to the ultimate mystery: The impenetrable wall of decoherence. But that is a much longer and fascinating story.

If we are to inhabit a world of thing and nothing, we need to take a moment (or millennia or two) to ponder the nature of a “thing”. There is an odd, although rarely noticed, confluence between Romance and Germanic Languages (and perhaps others) of the original sense of “thing”. In today’s everyday sense “thing” refers usually to a static object – a definable entity. It has lost its original sense of “gathering”, hints of which still reside in words such as Scandinavian “Allting”, which is the gathering of the parliament, or more infamously as the Italian Cosa Nostra – our gathering of our thing. The greatest poets, however, remember that “The play is the thing”.

A thing is the play of a gathering, which confronts us with a surprising confluence among the latest notion from quantum physics as emergence from an event of the self-organization (gathering) of quantum field energies; Heidegger’s thinking of thing as the gathering of elements of Being out of an event (Ereignis); and the originating notion of gathering. All describe the emergence of a thing as an originating event. We might be tempted to say: a thing from no thing, our own being confined to the reductive metaphysical prison of thing as existing object, and no-thing as unreal.

Hence arise the dilemma and present crisis of physics itself. Coherent quantum existence is real, but contains nothing of “thingness”. Our universe emerges from it as a thing, but not from another thing; and yet an existent reality. The first order problem, and source of all metaphysics as an error, is the complete unknowability of this quantum existence, making any speculations senseless. We are able to say no positive notions of this quantum existence, but only what it lacks. It lacks spacetime, but that gives us not even a glimpse of what that existence is. Similarly it has no causality, individuation, rationality. But what it actually is cannot be said because we cannot conceive it. Our conditions of thought evolved for practical survival through reduction of sense data to simplified and selective representations in space and time. We literally cannot conceive the absence of space and time, which becomes apparent in our sole reliance on spatial-temporal metaphors. Waves, fields, electron clouds, quantum foam, and even the word “quantum”. Our entire universe, of which we are a part, is but an extreme reduction of reality, a blurring out of everything not necessary to a perception of a subsystem. Subsystems are arbitrary in nature, determined for practicality and dependent on perspective and our conditions of thought. They are also all we can know. Physicists tell us we only know about 5% of what makes up our universe, the rest being non-sensible dark matter and energy. That is hardly even the tip of the iceberg, to use a temporal-spatial metaphor.

Origins beyond our our spatial/temporal bounds and conditions of thought will remain nonsensical to us, as will anything like an ultimate reality or origin. That might be bad news for physics and those who persist in the errors of metaphysics, but great news for those who live to experience the freedom and joy of our brief lives. Our lives at core are songs, dance, and love. Precise measurement emerges only as a practical means to sustain that experience. The joy comes from the eternal mystery.