[extropy-chat] Nothingness and that Infinite Chain of Causesthingy.

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:09 AM 7/11/2006 +0200, Serafino wrote:

>it seems
>to me that question should be: 'why is nothing
>unstable and therefore becomes something?'.
>If this is the behavior of nothingness, it
>means that the information content of such a
>nothingness is not zero (Chaitin etc.). And this,
>in turn, means that the unstable nothingness
>is not perfect nothingness.

This is almost certainly one of those realms where words are not much 
use, compared with operations on mathematical formalisms. However:

To speak of instability is to posit change over time, and yet the 
postulate of nothingness forbids time and change.

On the other hand, one must assume that the "experience" of a photon 
is of utter timelessness, and yet an energetic gamma ray will 
transition into an electron and a positron, for example, at some 
arbitrary point and time (as witnessed from our frame of reference) 
in its trajectory. How does it know when to do this, when it knows no 
"when"? Granted, the event is to be regarded as stochastic, but 
somehow a temporal tick becomes associated with this timeless 
happening. On the other hand, the particle pair *is* created into a 
pre-existing spacetime, so perhaps the salience of this comparison 
with pure Ur-nothingness is moot. Ho hum.

Damien Broderick