This May Hurt Your Brain

Back once again into the breach. The, um, blog breach, I guess? I have no idea. What shall we talk about tonight, my dear readers? I know that there are a few out there, given that comments have shown up here and there (!) along with profile views, so clearly somebody is out there listening to me ramble. At the very least, there's a crawler robot that comb the nascent Interwebs for search engine, or something.

I think that tonight, we're going to return to some philosophy for a moment, because a question was posed to me today that really froze my thoughts for a while as I pondered it out.

Let me outline a scenario for you: Things exist. I'm a thing. I exist. I was caused by my parents; the "reason" I exist is because they created me (I'm not going to think about that too closely, though.) But do all things have to have a reason for existing? Could something exist for no reason at all?

If you give this question some thought, you'll find that it's both simple and also absolutely devilish in how tricky it is.

On the surface, it seems that the answer is yes, absolutely, things that exist have a reason for existing, even if we don't know what that reason is. And logically, it seems like an existing thing needs a reason for existing, because if it didn't have a reason to exist, why would it? We can imagine non-existence; it's not hard to imagine a reality in which nothing exists, because there was never a reason for existence to occur. That's just an inherent truth in the definition of non-existence, which you'll either accept or deny based on whether you think that "nothing" can occur in reality. Some people don't buy that, or so I've heard.

So, let's try to imagine a world in which things exist for no reason. What does that mean? A guy named Richard Taylor has a scenario in which you imagine finding, in a perfectly normal forest, a large sphere that's as tall as you, translucent; clearly not something that would occur naturally. Your immediate reaction is to ask yourself how such a ball could come to be here. Perhaps it was man-made? Space aliens, perhaps? Some new kind of crystalline formation, previously unknown to science?

You most likely wouldn't automatically assume that the ball has no reason for being there. Surely someone or something caused it to be there; to say that the ball has no reason for being in that forest causes one to ask why there would be such a ball at all? Why wouldn't there just be a normal forest instead? That just doesn't seem logical, and yet, it's very tough to explain exactly why that is the case.

What's become particularly troublesome for me is when I've tried to wrap my mind around the idea of something coming into existence for no reason. Let's say, for instance, that the singularity that existed prior to the Big Bang, since the Big Bang defined all the known laws of the Universe (so far as we can tell) just popped into reality for no reason. Although would there even be a reality at that point, since there was no time or space? Okay, bad example. Let's go back to the ball in the forest.

Let's say the ball just popped into existence one day. Immediately, I have to ask myself: how would that have occurred? The matter that composes it would have had to come from something; it's one of the laws of thermodynamics that matter cannot be created or destroyed (at least in a closed system, as far as I can tell.) Even if the ball spontaneously appeared, something would have had to cause that spontaneously event. The really crazy thing is that shit like this actually does happen all the way down at the quantum level.

The quantum level, if you're not a huge nerd like me who spends his time thinking about this stuff, is basically the closest science has ever come to proven that magic exists. Things at the quantum level do weird things like appear for what's apparently no reason at all, or else exist in two places at once, or become altered by the very fact that they're being observed (Schrodinger's Cat.) Can you imagine that? Imagine changing something not because you poked it, or pushed it, or even spoke to it, or interacted with it in any way other than by merely looking at it. Doesn't make sense.

Back to my point.

So, we've got the quantum level, where things seem to happen for what is (apparently) no reason, or at least, no reason that we can figure out yet. It's entirely possible that people do have theories for the behavior for quantum particles, but those theories probably involve a lot of math, and well, there's a reason I'm a goddamn Creative Writing major even though I think this science stuff is cool: I just do not freaking understand how any of it is calculated.

Maybe quantum existence proves that things can happen for no reason! But then why do they only happen at the quantum level? Why don't people just spontaneously pop into existence? Or it is possible that there is an explanation for the quantum state, we just haven't figured it out yet. And even without that being the case, how exactly does something start existing without having a reason to do so?

If you're still reading along at home at this point, you're either extremely interested in this type of philosophical pondering, or you skimmed all the way to the end. Either way, thank you, although I don't have any answers to offer. Only more questions.

But that's part of the fun, I think. Asking questions, wondering why things are. It's why this philosophy stuff fascinates me so much, especially since it fascinates me in a way that probably won't affect the outcome of my life. It's not wondering for the sake of a better job, or to make life better; it's wondering for its own sake. To me, that's awesome.