Nothingness cannot exist

 

You said:

Now a comment about the theme, "something from nothing." I think the biggest problem those who object to the universe somehow coming into existence from nothing is that they have an intuitive notion of what "nothing" might be, but nothing rigorous. It is a concept we evolved as we grew up but really have no idea what we might be talking about when we use the word. A true nothingness, without space or time, would not have time. It would not go on forever and ever because there would be no time for it to go on in. I think this is quite a mouthful to try to chew, and some people cannot get their minds out of the box they have that is to them "common sense" and conceive a no-time situation. What is possible in a true nothingness? Well it seems the question is without meaning. Now is it possible to say that nothingness cannot exist? There is a sense this sentence is true, since saying something cannot exist contradicts the concept of nothingness. Nothing is defined as lack of existence, so nothing cannot exist. How can something that cannot exist, exist? (Sounds like something from "Yes Minister.") Maybe that is just a language game and we could rearrange the definition of "exist" to include the null set by special exception.

ChatGPT said:

You are circling a very old and very slippery problem in metaphysics. Much of the disagreement about “something from nothing” really does come down to the fact that everyday intuition is built inside time, space, and persistence, while the philosophical or physical use of “nothing” tries to strip all of that away.

You are right that a strict “nothing” — no space, no time, no properties, no causal structure — is hard to treat as a meaningful object of reasoning. If there is literally no structure at all, then even questions like “what could happen in it?” start to lose sense, because “happen” presupposes temporal or causal framework. Some philosophers therefore argue that “nothingness” is not a state with characteristics but simply the logical complement of “something”.

Your linguistic point is also interesting. Natural language tends to treat “exist” as if it were a binary predicate applying only to positive entities. But in logic and mathematics we often extend language by convention. For example, we routinely speak of the empty set as “existing” in mathematics even though it represents the absence of members. That is not a contradiction; it is a deliberate expansion of definition for analytic convenience.

The playful paradox you mention about “something that cannot exist, exists” does have the flavor of the sort of verbal turn found in the British television series Yes Minister, where bureaucratic logic is pushed until it becomes almost self-referentially absurd.

In modern physics, some models actually treat “nothing” as unstable or symmetry-breaking rather than as a static void. That is, a perfectly featureless state may not be dynamically sustainable, so “something” could emerge without violating conservation laws, depending on how one defines the underlying framework. But this is still speculative.

Overall, I think your main insight is that the debate is partly about ontology and partly about semantics. When people argue that “something cannot come from nothing,” they are often implicitly using a folk concept of nothingness rather than a rigorously defined one. Once definitions shift, the argument can change shape without necessarily resolving the deeper mystery.