Every once in awhile I'll have a moment of thought which sends my head reeling. One such thought I had yesterday while doing physics was this: Why does anything at all exist? Not a religious / spiritual / philosophical 'why', but a physical 'why'. Why is energy? Why is matter? (Which are, as near as I understand, different manifestations of the some common substance). Even a religiously vague answer is insufficient, for we say that Christ, under God's direction, organized something which already existed. Why did that substance already exist? Why does God exist for that manner? (Again, in a strictly physical meaning.) I'm assuming there is much more to existence than my painfully insufficient, mortal mind can comprehend. Else, I quickly fall into an existentialist view, of there is no reason behind the physical existence of things, therefore what possible meaning is there behind our metaphysical existence?
When I was younger I used to lie in bed and attempt to comprehend nothingness. The problem is that when we think of nothing, it is most likely that we will eventually come to think of darkness as nothingness. But darkness is something, it is our eyes' perception of the lack of light. What would it be like to be blind from birth? I would assume you could not experience darkness, as you could not experience light. I would also assume that one attempting to comprehend nothing would imagine silence. But we have the same problem here, silence is just our ears' perception of no sound. And we could continue through all the senses, arriving at no further insight about nothingness. For even our thinking assumes somethingness, for as Descartes said, "Cogito ergo sum". So what is nothing? I cannot say what nothing is, but I am sure what nothing is not: Nothing is not something.
Is your mind sufficiently boggled? I'm sure mine is...
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Perhaps I am too simple, but these things don't disturb my thoughts. To me there does not have to be a reason for everything. Why does matter exists? It just does. It needs no explanation. It would only need an explanation if someone brought it into existence. Then we could ask why he did it. Why are the laws of the universe what they are? The question presupposes that an entity created the laws. Absent a creator, absent a meaning to the question of why. If something had no beginning then there can be no explanation of why it is here.
For me, nothingness is simply the absence of something physical. Darkness is not a physical something, but it is the mental concept that describes the situation where you lack the ability to detect light, either because there is no radiation in the proper waveband, or because you lack the physical ability to detect the radiation present. A blind person is in darkness, because he lacks the ability to detect the light, whether or not he fully realizes what he is missing.
Similarly silence is not our ears' perception of no sound, it is the lack of a physical thing which can vibrate our eardrums, or the lack of the physical ability of the ear to detect a vibration.
True, "nothing" is not a physical something, but it is a useful concept about the lack of a physical something.
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