13.7 billion years later and here you are.
Your life just started not so long ago.
And to not have lived a gross entirety, then suddenly emerge into existence without any rhyme or reason.
Makes us all wonder why.
Some answers will remain hidden from us indefinitely. Speaking purely in a mathematical sense,
there is a whole area of problems that are by definition undecidable.
I was shocked the first time I found out about them, because to an extent it seems unfair, right?
Knowing the fact you can never possibly know some things.
So, "Why are we here?" and "Why is the universe the way it is?"
I hope to shed some light to one of these questions today.
And don't get me wrong. I believe religion, spirituality, faith or whatever you want to call it, has its rightful place.
There are no wrongs or rights to ultimate questions of life. Perhaps they too are undecidable.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Here is my take on it.
In order for anything to exist, existence itself has to exist.
If existence does not exist, nothing else can, because for something to exist or to have existed,
there has to be such a thing as existence in the first place for it to exist.
Whatever existence is; a word, an idea, an unbreakable law of sorts. It has to be there, everywhere,
to persist all matter, time, theoretical concepts, the world that we live in and even human thought.
But why does existence have to exist? Couldn't there have been nothing at all?
Image for a second that existence stops existing.
Then nothing exists in place for existence not to exist.
Therefore, in non-existence, existence begins to exist, solely from the fact that nothing prevents it from existing.
I'm calling it the existence paradox.
The paradox doesn't say anything about permanence & continuity of the world.
It might as well be possible for existence to stop existing at any point in time,
just to spawn in with a different version of reality less than a moment later.
But it sure doesn't seem the universe works that way. Something to think about.
In short, the absolute necessity of existence is why I believe there is something rather than nothing.
What use does any of this have?
Let's turn attention to ourselves for a moment. We are our consciousness.
We stop existing when we go to sleep and upon waking up we come back to the world of living as if the two events came one after the other.
Sure, we feel different in the morning and we are aware of the time that has passed.
We feel like we existed during those hours of sleep, because the physical world literally changed over night.
For the most part, though, we were gone. However from our perspective, we perceive it to have existed continuously.
We are our own existence. And existence is existence, there's no special kind of one.
In this way, I believe death is similar to the act of sleeping.
The world around us disappears for a moment and then we're back.
We either exist, or we do not. But when we stop, we begin to be.
Death is scary. When my day comes, I highly doubt that I will wake up the next morning resting in my own bed. I have no idea what is going to happen. As far as the existence paradox goes, it gives me some hope that I will continue my life after death, even if I will be born anew into an unfamiliar chaotic realm of obscurity.