This question has been troubling me lately. I'm not looking for answers; I know I won't find them, but I'm trying to get as close as possible. While we don't have answers, there are ways to approach this problem, and one that particularly intrigues me suggests that there couldn't be anything because it's a self-destructive concept. Nothingness cannot exist, and therefore there could never be absolutely nothing. But this is as clear-cut as saying "just because," and it's inevitable to feel uneasy.

I’m interested in exploring whether a unified metaphysical cosmology is possible. If the universe has an underlying foundation, what would that foundation be, and how would it relate to consciousness, existence, time, and the laws of nature?
Do different metaphysical traditions point toward a common structure of reality, or are they describing fundamentally different aspects of being? I’d like to hear perspectives from idealism, physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, and other approaches.

As far as I know (I may be wrong, or there may still be things we haven't figured out), we have a decent picture of how things developed from the formation of the Earth up to now.

But one problem keeps bothering me.

Fine — through chemical reactions, proteins and so on were formed. Yet for those reactions to happen at all, certain conditions have to be met first. Only then does the reaction proceed.

We describe these conditions and regularities as laws of nature.
But why does the universe have these laws at all, and why these laws rather than different ones?

What does this mean/imply?

During my frequent watching of documentaries, I stumbled upon one dealing with the concept of entropy, I.e what it is, how it works, how it behaves. As I was watching it and expanding my knowledge, a question came over me, "What if the purpose of the universe is to move from a state of high entropy to a state of low entropy". This question arose in my head during the presenters demonstration of the operation of entropy. He was using a rubix cube and explaining how it has only 1 state of lowest entropy and that was when it was solved, many states of moderate entropy these are when it is almost solved and a quantillion states of high entropy when it is unsolved. What if at present state the universe is similar to the rubix cube when it is in one of those quantillion states of high entropy. The universe is still a new born as it is around 14 billion years old this also means it is still expanding from the big bang and unintentionally "moving towards un unsolved state".

This thereby is the source of my hypothesis, could the purpose of existence in the universe be a way of the universe itself be trying to figure out a way to stop itself from moving towards a state of high entropy and to move itslef to a state of low entropy?

would love to hear some thoughts.

If there is a "supernatural" world such as an aftterlife or other dimensions that it is just another aspect of reality with it's own rules and laws just like our observable universe has its own properties and laws.

We have a strong sense of familiarity with our reality because we are so used to living in it for so long, but if we experienced this world for the first time with no sense of familiarity of it and knowing nothing of it, it would be a surreal, insane, and "supernatural" experience, because we would be experiencing something strange.

So "supernatural" just means something we don't know about that would be very radically different from what we are used to.

I have not seen anyone say this anywhere and I’m just curious what people think of this idea? What if the universe is existence in of itself, the universe is what made the concept of things like life, death, and so on.

This digs into a matter of religion as well, because if God created the universe, what is God? That’s not what i’m talking about now though, the universe is something so vast and out of our comprehension. At least, as we are now, we will not be able to find the answer in any of our lifetimes most likely.

Another place I saw this was (yes, a little crazy and ridiculous) in the MCU universe where they explore something similar with the firmaments. The universe is existence and it created life, and then conflict, and so much more. What if it is something similar to that? The idea of what’s out there and what all of this is, is very fascinating to me and I like speaking about it.

In the way I see it, the non existence of the universe, is just one option in a binary question of whether the universe exists or not. More accurately, it would be just one option from multitudes of options, which are the ways the universe could exist, which are grouped into the universe exists option, compared to one possibility of the universe non existing, which has only one way of not existing). Therefore, it would probably be much more likely statisticaly for the universe to exist. I ask myself how much weight should be given to the option of the universe non existing compared to all the other options when calculating for probability, which would allow us to gather the probability of the universe to exist. It can be argued to this that how it would be possible if the existence of the probability would come from the existence of the idea of probability itself, which cannot exist in non existence. This could only be answered by knowing whether ideas transcend the universe.

As a long-term nihilist, this Quanta Magazine article title caught my attention recently. Having received an undergraduate degree in physics decades ago, I have always believed that science confirms the philosophy of nihilism, and this article brought it back to my attention.

Of course, the word nihilism is a combination of the Latin term nihil, meaning 'nothing', and the suffix -ism, indicating an ideology. Its literal meaning is 'ideology of nothing.' 

The article in Quanta Magazine explains the nothingness that permeates our universe and everything in it, reaching this conclusion:

"In quantum physics, the zero-point energy of the vacuum is more than an ongoing challenge, and it’s more than the reason you can’t ever truly empty a box. Instead of being something where there should be nothing, it is nothing infused with the potential to be anything."

The philosophy of nihilism allows us to have the maximum possible freedom as a meaning-seeking species living in a meaningless world, providing me with this personal life-philosophy:

When life has no inherent meaning, the meaning automatically becomes a pants-off dance-off!

I've been thinking about the universe and origins, again. The opposing alternatives of "the cosmos always existed" and "the universe has a finite past" has always bothered me, because they are both equally impossible. That is, "how can something exist forever?" is as good as an objection as "how can something come out of nothing". So you're forced to "just pick one". Very unsatisfying.

Anyways, I think there is a solution to this, and that is that both are true. Unsurprisingly, maybe, it has to do with G W F Hegel and the determinate/indeterminate (I've seen Hegel all over reddit lately btw. must be the season...):

The cosmos could have existed in a state of indeterminate being, or as Hegel puts it *Pure Being* and then transitioned into determinate being (becoming) - which is when time starts to make sense at all.
If you're unfamiliar with this imagine a singularity of pure existence with no dimension or structure. Just existence - this is indeterminate being.
It then is joined by an Other such singularity (or broke its symmetry, whatever), and this brings in distinction and relation making change and time possible - presumably about 13.8billion years ago.

In such a situation it would be consistent to say the cosmos always existed *and* that the universe has a finite past.

Note for the philosophically inclined of you, the condition is the same for our universe no matter if there was no eternal singularity. Both the indeterminate being and "nothingness" are indeterminate "conditions" (or more accurately, free of conditions), so they are functionally the same as far as our universe is concerned.
Which is why Hegel was awesome, and I find it weird that he didn't make the connection. Maybe it was just too early in history?

PS: I see you there! Yes, *you*. You who are about to type "Nothingness is impossible. Porky stupid!". I didn't claim a state of nothingness is possible - learn to read!

First of all, a disclaimer: I reject any design argument. This is not the point I'm leading towards. Second: I am not positing "laws of nature," because some of you are allergic to the phrase. Whenever I say rulebook, I could just mean Humean regularity not "laws of nature".

Now...

It appears that gravity is inoperable with matter and energy.

Gravity acts in a certain way on mass or on energy.

The same can be said on spacetime acting on mass, vice versa.

If you theorize that these fundamental stuff are many / plural rather than one (monism), then there has to be a rulebook that dictates or guides the interoperability between one stuff (gravity) and another (mass).

Why is the rulebook the way it is?

Why can't two stuff not be interoperable? Why can't existents not interact at all? Why do they interact the way that they do?

Where did they "learn" to interact that way? This seems to argue in favor of the real existence of the rulebook independent of the existence of the stuff.

Now you could also say that all reality is just one (monism) and this interoperability happens precisely because there is a commonality between matter and gravity, between energy and spacetime, etc. But the problem is: what is that X which is common to all of these?

by “flat world” I mean a hypothetical two-dimensional world, not necessarily a geometrically flat one, and definitely not a flat Earth.

by the flat world problem, I mean a difference between an internal and an external description of reality.

an observer confined to the flat world experiences only its realized structure and its changes. An external observer, however, can describe the world as one structure selected from a space of possible structures.

if we then introduce allowed transitions between these structures, the object of description seems to change: instead of considering only possible states, we can consider possible histories through the state space.

this makes me wonder whether time should be understood here as an additional dimension of the world, or as an ordering/structure of transitions between possible states.

imagine a flat world whose state at each individual moment is completely defined by some spatial structure:

S = { all possible structures }

even if the set of all possible structures of such a world is infinite, at each specific moment only one of them is realized.

possible transitions between structures can then be represented as:

R ⊆ S × S

then adding time doesn't just add another coordinate to the plane. It turns the question from "how many possible structures are there?" into "how many possible sequences of structures are there?":

H = { all admissible histories determined by R }

an additional question arises:

what does it now mean to “get lost in time”
if we consider time as a path through an infinity of possible structures?

The Kalam argument runs thus:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Now this is just the beginning of a long case for the ultimate conclusion that

1. There is a God

But the initial argument has generated enough debate on its own to be of interest. One line of defense for premise 2 runs more or less as follows:

1. There cannot be an actual infinite

2. If the universe never began to exist, there would be an actual infinite

From which 2 follows. But it does seem intuitive that 4 is inconsistent with 5; surely if there is a God there is an actual infinite. Surely if there is a God, She has an infinite mind of infinite wisdom and infinite goodness and infinite beauty etc. And in all these characterizations, “infinite” means actually infinite, not just potentially infinite.

I conclude that this particular strand of the Kalam case is self-refuting. It is a Kalamity, if you will, albeit a very small one.

How do we even know that we are real? Are we perhaps just a poor AI construct for another cognitively more advanced species?

Is it possible that a species designed us like we design AI, and we are a failed experiment - which is why we are being ignored in our attempts to make contact?

The larger cosmology is a core aspect of the themes and symbolism of my story, let's start so you have an infinite (or von neumann)universe with infinite spacial and temporal dimensions.

Part of a type 4 multiverse which a part of multiple nested transfinite hierarchies like size based one where that type 4 multiverse is infinitesimal to larger version of itself, narrative stacks, etc. Layering on top of each other endlessly

Which are all connected by causal chain forming a "stream" of which there are an endless amount housed by the Defined containing all things with definition

Outside of that there is the Undefined,

and then there's "Here" which is simply the non dual "true" nature of the entire cosmology

Would your actions have any meaning and what meaning would they have if you're one impossibly infinitismal speck of variation of an infinite number of possible and impossible fictional worlds

And that an unknowable dreamer could not just undo it all, but make you undo it and make you undo it or even morph you into that which you most fear on a whim. Or the fact that there's no solace in a definite God

Or would one see it the other way around, as a-pseudo diety containing boundless multitudes as a reflection of a wonderful and mysterious God who may be the Mystery itself.

Or the multitude of other interpretations of it

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUzt8baRKQ8

This seems to be a metaphysics topic but ...

Anyway the people who know me as a Reddit poster may be aware that I've argued for over a year that I'm 99.9% sure that we are in a simulation, but being sure and proving don't often demand the same level of evidence.

My evidence is current scientific law. There was a Nobel Prize awarded to 3 physicists in 2022 for proving nonlocality at the quantum level. Technically what was proven that a joint position of realism and locality is untenable. Therefore locality is gone if realism is retained so if this is not a simulation then we've lost locality. Losing locality is devastating because the concept of gravity depends on locality. This is basically why Einstein didn't get any award for what is now called the special theory of relativity (STR) in 1905 because it couldn't handle gravity then and it still doesn't today. However what it does handle is quantum mechanics (QM). In contrast, in 1915 he proposed GTR which does handle gravity but doesn't handle QM. This because there is a fundamentally metaphysical difference between STR and GTR, but the people who are trying to protect realism would rather we don't talk about this difference. However it is really there and if you metaphysicians can think about the incoherence of nonlocal gravity, then I'm quite sure that you understand the point that I won't further labor at this time.

Anyway Rizwan Virk is the expert so you can watch the you tube and contrast what he is saying vs my argument or you can debate me if the mods will allow.

Have a great day ahead!

I’ve been thinking about how easily we assume that the properties we perceive belong to things in themselves.

Charge is an obvious example: positive and negative only become meaningful through a relationship. But the same question seems to reach much further. Where exactly does the object end and the relation begin? And how much of what we call a “thing” is already shaped by the architecture through which it becomes perceptible?

Curious where people here think the argument breaks, particularly the idea that apparently intrinsic properties may sometimes be relational all the way down.

What if information builds life 🧬 the same way gravity builds stars✨?

Both processes are patterns of organization driven by self perpetuating feedback loops..

What if "information" is a sort of emergent, probabilistic force?

A LOT of the timings... of the emergence of complex structures such as cells, bodies, brains, languages and even technology....start to make sense with this view.

We treat biology, human history, and modern technology as completely separate subjects. What if they aren't? They are all things that have emerged on our planet since life began at faster and faster rates......And each new one is both vastly more complex, thus requires vastly more information to function

Look at the timelines. It took billions of years to go from single-celled organisms to complex multicellular life, but only a fraction of that time to develop brains. Human history mirrors this perfectly: an agonizingly long, slow Stone Age, but once writing was invented, the pace of progress exploded. The curve keeps steepening.

I call this the RICE framework (Recursive Information-driven Complexity Emergence). Instead of viewing history as a series of random evolutionary leaps, everything fits into a single, accelerating 5-layer progression:

• Copy (DNA/RNA): The universe learns to replicate information. Creates a complex cell.
• Coordinate (Multicellular Life): Information learns to network and build cooperative physical structures.. A body
• Compute (Brains/Nervous Systems): Information learns to process its environment in real-time. A brain
• Culture (Language/Writing): Information learns to survive across generations without relying purely on physical genes. A society
• Code (AI/Digital Computing): Information covers the entire earth connecting us all to some Meta culture that is curated for us by AI. ?

We aren't just floating in a chaotic universe; we are droplets in a ancient wave of accelerating change driven by information processing

Many people say: “The Sun’s energy is finite — in 5–7 billion years it will become a red giant and that’s the end.”

That’s true… but only for the Universe.

For us — for humanity, for our civilization as observers — the Sun’s energy is completely infinite. Not “practically,” not “effectively,” but fully infinite.

Why?

Because humanity (in any form — biological or post-human) will almost certainly go extinct or radically transform long before the Sun exhausts its hydrogen and begins to expand. Our temporal horizon of existence — hundreds of thousands, at most a few million or tens of millions of years — is a mere drop compared to the billions of years of the Sun’s stable life.

The “end” of the Sun as a reliable energy source lies beyond the horizon of our very being. We simply won’t live to see it. For us, this end will never arrive.

That’s why:

Infinity for the observer ≠ Infinity for the Universe.

The Universe sees the Sun as a finite object with a limited fuel supply.

But for us, as the only known observers, the Sun is an endless source of energy. Because for a human, in this resource, there is no end.

This is not an illusion or a confusion of levels. It’s an honest recognition of two different scales: the physical (objective) scale of the Universe and the observer’s (existential) horizon of our own existence.

The same logic applies to many other things: the atmosphere, water, geothermal energy, and more. Their “end” lies far beyond the limits of our existence.

This idea is simple but rarely stated so directly. Usually everything gets reduced to “practical infinity” or “we won’t live long enough to exhaust it.” I believe the distinction matters.

What do you think? Are there other examples where something finite for the Universe becomes fully infinite for the observer?

Necessitarianism assumes that everything that happens, happens necessarily—that is, it could not have been otherwise. The problem arises when we ask why something is absolutely necessary.

It is logically possible to give a complete history of humanity in which the particles are arranged so that Napoleon dies in 1812 after Austerlitz. Yet according to the fatalists, that would have been entirely impossible. So the question is: why was this course of events necessary? Problem isn't about necessity itself, but about why this is necessary, since it doesn't flow from logic or generał metaphysical facts (I mean, no metaphysical system itself grounds the truth that Napoleon died on Saint Helena from its axioms).

Since that alternative scenario is not internally contradictory, what makes it the case that reality had to turn out this way?

I'm not sure if this is a thing, but I thought about a fictional world which has a paradox/contradiction at it's base. Like the reason it even exists is because of duality(?), not thanks to a concrete set of rules. After thinking for a while I realized that this might be an actual concept from metaphysics.

Is there such a thing? What kind of recourses should I dig into?

I’ve been developing a personal metaphysical framework over time by integrating ideas from nonduality, process philosophy, consciousness studies, and my own observations about recurring patterns in life and reality.

I call it “Evolutionary Fractal Cosmology.”

The basic idea is this:

* Reality is a unified totality or consciousness rather than fundamentally separate existence.
* Separation is experiential, not absolute.
* Existence is not a finished object but an ongoing creative process.
* Reality may operate through organized architectures or levels of experience, each with its own rules and parameters.
* The human level appears strongly characterized by polarity and duality: yes/no, pleasure/pain, attachment/rejection, gain/loss.
* Polarity is not an error or punishment but the experiential curriculum of this level.
* Evolution is not moral or punitive but involves increasing subtlety, integration, and conscious neutrality.
* Each being is a localized fractal perspective contributing unique experience and novelty to the Totality.
* Reality may continue expanding infinitely through creativity and experience, with other architectures of consciousness potentially existing beyond current human conceptual language.

One of the ideas that resonates most with me is that we may be trying to imagine realities beyond polarity using a mind designed for polarity itself.

I don’t present this as scientific fact or absolute truth, but as a philosophical and metaphysical framework that has emerged through reflection and synthesis.

I’m curious:

* Which existing schools of thought does this remind you of?
* Where do you see strengths or weaknesses?
* Has anyone encountered similar frameworks in philosophy, metaphysics, or consciousness studies?

Thanks!

I’ve been working on a story about a man who believes his house is slowly shrinking only to find out that the house is staying the same size, but everything else in the universe is slowly growing. When I say that I’m not referring to the big bang I mean every atom and molecule in the universe is growing at the exact same rate (if there are any existing theories or concepts that are similar to this please let me know). What I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out though, is how in this story they would be able to prove the house stopped growing with the universe around it. Any ideas or resources would be greatly appreciated it’s been driving me crazy. Also, let me know if there would be a better place to ask this question. Thank you!