[extropy-chat] something rather than nothing

[scerir]

citta437:
> The question remains in our universe of thoughts,
> why is there something rather than nothing?

Avantguardian:
> OM.

Odyssey of the Mind?
Oh Man?

Anders:
> I often ponder why there is something 
> rather than everything.

Making that question a bit more physical,
there are papers, like 'Computational complexity
of the landscape' [1], in which people try to solve
general toy problems, like 'how to get the minimal
(or zero) vacuum energy, given a collection
of fields at choice', etc.

But it turns out that computational complexity
theory cannot say anything about (the hardness of)
individual instances, and these toy problems
seem to be intractable in general [1]. 

How did the universe do this or that? 
We usually say that the 'multiverse' did
it. But some problems are too difficult 
even for the multiverse to solve in polynomial 
time. (See also 'anthropic computing' [2][3]). 

[1] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0602072
[2] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412187 page 1
[3] http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=181

(Reading these papers I did not understand
'everything', I only understood 'something').