Asking why is meaningless, it’s an artifact of how our brains are wired.
Our brains are evolved to try to understand the world around us in terms of reason; if this happens then that happens. It makes sense when looking at the chain of results that cascade out of the fireworks of creation; chemistry, biology and physics. The arrow of time points one way and we have evolved around that premise.
It doesn’t mean that our intuitions are correct or even vaguely headed down the right path. We’re a victim of that arrow of time, the path of the world we live in.
It’s been many years since I read it but the ‘explanation’ in Lee Smolin’s ‘The Life of the Cosmos’ sounds the most convincing to me.
I’m the book, as far as I understood it, he suggests that theory of evolution applies on the biggest scales too. New universes form when a black hole collapses. Our Universe is just one of the universes that all have slightly changed values of the universal constants, like the way evolution works. There are many universal or physical constants in science, some of the most widely recognized being the speed of light in vacuum c, the gravitational constant G, the Planck constant h, the electric constant ε0, and the elementary charge e.
There is a very narrow range of these constants where ‘normal stuff’ of the universe like formation of matter can happen and heat death of the universe can be avoided. We just happen to be in the right universe with the perfectly balanced constants, in the right corner of it, at optimal distance to an optimally sized star, tilted at an optimal angle, with a moon at the right distance to help evolve life capable of developing a fediverse where we can mull this over.
The best I can ever do is learn more about the universe we live in. I don’t think we may ever have concrete answers for any of those questions. We may not even be asking the right questions to begin with. Science youtube channels scratch that inch for me though. PBS Space Time, Astrum, SEA and Arvin Ash’s channel are some of my favorites. Content a bit more in depth than the most basic but presented in a way a smooth brain like myself can mentally digest.
There was nothing. And immediately as consequence the negation of nothing, a thing, emerged. Nothing and a thing cannot occupy the same locus. Thus a place apart came into being. The first thing fell apart. Thus two nothings were. But this couldn’t be so two things emerged. And so it went until there was a universe with increasing entropy and chaos for all.
The totality of manifestation, and everything therein, is consciousness itself, the Unicity. All there is is consciousness, not aware of Itself in it’s noumenal subjectivity, but perceived by Itself as phenomenal manifestation in It’s objective expression. … such understanding must comport the realization that there is no individual entity as such. What we think we are is merely an appearance, an insubstantial shadow, whereas what we really and truly are, is consciousness itself, the formless Brahman.
I’m in the “we’re living in a simulation” camp. I just think it’s mostly unattended. Every once in a while the being running the simulation comes back and pokes at the console or upgrades their computer and we have some innovation. The invention of fire, agriculture, the Renaissance, space race, etc.
It explains why we keep thinking we find the building blocks of the universe, then discover something smaller (gpu upgrade). Or why there’s a universal constant speed (cpu clock).
I just hope the Bering doesn’t get bored and end the program for the last time like I eventually did to my sim city.
It’s a long lasting, constantly evolving, multi-versal fluke.
We can’t see, experience, or detect most of the universe — read: existence — let alone measure it. That pretty much means, to me anyway, we can’t explain it.
Explaining existence, then, is limited to explaining my own perception of existence. To be brief: The things that exist got here the same way we did and use the same materials and rules. Conscious beings stay in the universe by maintaining consciousness; for us, that generally means being alive, awake, and alert — in that order. Upon death, consciousness ends, or departs, or continues (no one knows) and our corporeal form goes back to existing as atoms in other states within the environment. Present existence, then, pregnant by the ghosts of all existences that has gone before and is carrying to term all existences that will exist after. It’s an endless, cyclical flow of atoms, energies, and absences. A crossroads of Space and Time culminating in experiential states and chains of causality. Billions of years in a blink.
Other conscious beings may operate or perceive differently. We can’t individuall confirm or know. That’s another of those rules.
That said, we only get to ride this existence thing for a short time. Build up your XP and use your one and only life doing good. Not necessarily well, but good.
Imagine standing outside of Time and Space and making a divine survey of the grand tapestry of the possible. It would look like math painted onto bubbles that glow from within, I think. That’s what Existence may be.
Where (or when) there is no causality, everything (every universe) can appear out of nothing.
Maybe we are both saying the same thing here with different phrasing ?
It’s not the answer, it’s how the answer is presented. You cannot give an objective answer to a subjective question and present it as if it is the only clear and logical fact that could have existed in the first place.
“1” created the universe with every beings inside it. Then, “1” taught to themselves how every being would blame “1” for every minute problems. So, to wash their hands out of it, “1” created Godesses (aka Gods).
After a bit of light reading and asking people who know more about philosophy than me, it seems I lean to absurdism. My take is that there is no reason for the existence of the universe or the evolution of humans. It was merely a series of random events that happened to end up the way it is. So it is what is is, I don’t let myself be bothered by it.
But that doesn’t mean life has no meaning per se. I’m already here, so I might as well make the most of it and live my life to the fullest. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that puts me in the category of absurdism, rather than existential nihilism.
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