What if Nothing Actually Exists?

What if Literally Nothing Exists?

What if physical reality in its entirety was a lie, a dream, an illusion? What if there was nothing at all, nothing that could be experienced, nothing that could be known by us?

Nothingness is one of the most perplexing and mind-boggling concepts that the collection of human minds totalizing the vast expanse of history have ever dreamed up. At first, it seems quite simple, really: nothing. No thing. Absence, rather than presence. But how did we come to the concept of nothingness? Absence isn’t the same as a nothingness, because, with absence, there are still things, albeit with one thing that we presume should be there which is not.

Nothingness is, by definition, the cessation of all existence — literally, nothing exists, at least as we know it. That’s what this story seeks to discuss, and raise the question, “What if literally nothing exists?”

What if virtual reality was the only reality? And, what if there was no actual extension to reality into an objective physical reality? The fact is, this may very well be the ‘reality’ that is ‘existence.’

“O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?”

These closing lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem Dream Within a Dream ask the question, what if our entire lives were nothing more than a dream and someday our ‘real’ selves would wake to find that the entirety of what we thought was our lives, was nothing more than a fiction, a dream we had dreamed whilst we peacefully slept in some alternate reality?

Scientists are now beginning to ask the really deep questions about the universe, combing the nature of existence itself with a fine-tooth comb in attempts to tease out what may be a hidden reality behind the scenes. Some scientists have suggested that our entire lives may be nothing more than a computer simulation, existing for nothing more than the ‘real’ entities which exist elsewhere. We are the characters in someone’s version of The Sims.

But what if, reality itself didn’t even exist? Let me explain as we trace the history of non-reality from its inception until present, and then on into the future…

Non-Reality

According to quantum theory, reality is more or less flexible, and there may be a lot more to the story of matter and physical reality than we know. Non-reality is the idea that no objective reality exists, that we cannot ever actually come into contact with the world itself, we can only experience the subjective interpretations of it that our minds make up. This idea dates all the way back to Plato, with The Allegory of the Cave, and likely before that, in the 4th century B.C.E., in ancient Athens, Greece.

The Allegory of the Cave is quite familiar to most people, where Plato suggested that we put people inside of a cave allowing only the light from the entrance of the cave to penetrate onto the back wall of the cave; the people were shackled and blocking the entrance from view was a massive stone, so the only things the people inside could see was the light displayed onto the back wall of the cave, not unlike a modern projector screen plays a movie.

Then suppose we placed our hands in between the entrance of the cave and the back wall and began to make shadow puppets with our hands, puppets which would act out scenes on the wall of the back of the cave. Supposing the persons shackled to the cave had never been outside of this position, in this cave, they would believe that the whole of reality was, in fact, nothing more than the puppets on the stone screen.

2,200 years later, this idea experienced a massive injection of both substance and popularity with the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant who basically said just that, that we, as subjective entities, can never actually experience the chair we’re looking at, resting our hands on, and sitting in. We can experience the signals that our minds tell us is what the chair must look and feel like, but we can never actually experience the chair as it is, in itself.

According to Kant, the world exists ‘out there’ beyond reach, we can’t actually experience it as it is, we can only experience our mental representations of the world; this is called idealism (as opposed to realism). One thing that’s important to note in both Kant and Plato, is that there is a ‘real world’ that exists somewhere ‘out there,’ beyond our capabilities of experiencing it.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique

Kant would receive a major challenge pertaining to his realism/idealism dichotomy in the work of 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who basically said in his chief work, Being and Nothingness, that it’s obvious that the reality experienced is at least mostly congruent with the physical reality which surrounds us. Events happen, we experience them, and this is usually predictable and takes place with an uncanny degree of congruence.

Sartre basically states that consciousness itself is a nothingness, it’s nonexistent entirely, and that the world itself is, as he said, ‘full positivity.’ Taking his cue from the inventor of the phenomenological tradition that Sartre took up, Edmund Husserl, Sartre said, as Husserl did, that consciousness is composed entirely of things which are not it. Think about your consciousness for a minute, the ‘contents’ of your consciousness, what it’s currently made up of. What inhabits your mind? Things.

But of course, they actually exist, we’d be insane to question that much…

There are possibly walls surrounding you, a sky, all of these representations that your mind is interpreting from the ‘real’ world which we can safely say exist, but there is no ‘mind’ in your consciousness. There are only images, smells, sounds, processes of refraction by the way of light, vibrations of different frequencies which our brains interpret as colors. Unlike Kant, Sartre believed that there was no ‘us’ behind this process, there was no person in the middle of our brains assembling all of this data to create the cohesive experience that we know and love as consciousness. Nothingness in the world, Sartre says, could only come from a lack or absence, but that can only be imposed by a nothingness itself; ie, you need a mind that is nonexistent to decide that something is nonexistent. Sartre walks into a cafe and looks for his friend Pierre, in his work, to demonstrate, and notes that as we find ourselves in similar situations, we may scan a cafe or bar for a friend of ours, and we don’t actually experience nothingness — we experience employees and patrons, the smell of coffee, the decor — we experience reality as ‘full positivity.’ Pierre’s absence is made up in our own minds, Pierre is certainly somewhere else, just not in that particular cafe at that time.

But there is a concept of infinity in Sartre’s work which was augmented from the work of Husserl earlier, and the concept of infinity will be important as we proceed. We can experience a tree, though a slightly distorted version of it, but only from a finite perspective, the subjective perspective in time-space that our consciousness happens to inhabit. In truth, there’s an infinity of ways the tree could look because there’s an infinity of perspectives that could be taken in the combination of space and time. As Heraclitus said 2,500 years ago, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Tomorrow, the river won’t be the same as today, it’ll be different water, different sand, different photons of light hitting the different water, differently, shining a new, shimmering glare from the waves of the water as it passes. It’s not the same river. The river is an infinite flow because all is in flux. Sartre very much touches on this idea, resurrecting the rejection of the most basic concepts that we’ve come to understand since Aristotle, like the idea that A = A, an idea that Heraclitus disagreed with, and rightfully so.

But what if Sartre got it wrong? What if the error wasn’t that we expected Pierre to be where he was not, getting it wrong, but what if it was that we expected anything to exist, to begin with? Literally, anything at all…

The Beginning of the Universe

The two factions have staked their claims, with religious persons lobbing the question to atheists and agnostics proudly and boldly, “If there is no God, how is it that we have something instead of nothing?” How did the Universe itself come to exist from nothingness? As the old adage goes, “ex nihilo, nihil fit.”

From nothing, comes nothing…

Biologist Richard Dawkins retorts to the effect of, “This still doesn’t explain God, because if God must have created the Universe, who created God?” Supposing that God created The Big Bang, what created God? This is a bit of a paradox for scientists and philosophers alike and has been for virtually all of human existence.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss released a subsequent work titled A Universe From Nothing in which he sought to explain that it’s not only possible but likely, that our Universe burst into existence from absolute nothingness — not even three-dimensional space existed before our Universe was born. What’s important to note, here, is that Dawkins touched on something that Poe had in the 19th century, the idea that God cannot be explained this way because it leads to an infinite regress in the form of saying that if something exists as proof that something else had to exist before it, because no thing can come from nothing, what existed before the first thing in the series which created the second in order that it may create the first thing? Answer: nothing…

The idea of an infinite regress will be important as we go further. So where did the Universe come from, if not from nothing? What was before it?

What if We Live in a Virtual Reality?

Suppose we actually are living in a simulation, as science is now beginning to suggest, as we mentioned earlier, that our entire lives may just be a simulation in someone else’s fun idea of a computer game, at some point, we die and our entire subjective realities disappear, the ‘experiencing’ that is what our consciousness is, and the fact that we are experiencing and are conscious is the only thing that everyone mentioned thus far has agreed upon. Plato, Kant, Sartre, Dawkins, Krauss, and the computer scientists claiming to be getting the first fragments of evidence that we may be living in a simulation— all of them aren’t so bold as to deny that we’re experiencing something, the question is simply a matter of what.

Imagine your life was a virtual reality movie. Imagine you live your entire life, you exist all the way from birth until death and, when you die, you awaken to discover that a virtual reality machine had been placed upon your head and rendered you unconscious; the machine turned off your memories from the life you’re actually living so that, upon your birth in this life that you’re living, you’d be starting completely from scratch. When you hook up to this machine, not only does it display a completely virtual reality inside of your mind for you to experience as the totality of reality itself, it turns off your long-term memory in your brain so that it doesn’t interfere with the simulation. When you die, the real you wakes up, it was like a movie is to us today, the show is over, and some version of you wakes up in the year 2459, when VR technology has advanced to such a degree that it can actually turn on and off parts of the brain so that you’re fully immersed in the experience of VR. That, of course, would be the ‘real’ version of reality, right?

Is this the future of our virtual reality systems that are just now in their infancy? Like a Ray Bradbury book, society became so advanced in the future that we could, at least virtually, travel through time and experience the past as ourselves, as if we were born back then? Maybe that’s all our lives are.

But what if the you that lived in 2459 also died and, guess what, it turns out that they were also in a virtual existence in someone else’s computer simulation? A different version of you much further in the future, in the year 2937?…and then the year 6821? Ad infinitum. Now, my friends, we have ourselves an infinite regress. Under this infinite regress, what if there never turned out to be a ‘real world’ and there wasn’t actually a physical world anywhere, at all?

Plato’s cave supposed that there was a world outside of the cave that those shackled within simply couldn’t see, touch, or feel. Kant supposed that the real world outside of our bodies obviously exists, we just can’t ever actually experience it, experiencing nothing more than our distorted representations of it which aren’t it. Scientists are suggesting that the virtual reality theory presupposes that somewhere, at some point in time, a ‘real’ reality exists which has generated the simulation. But what if the entirety of multi-dimensional space and time didn’t exist, along with all of the constituent matter or the emptiness of the vacuum that is three-dimensional space itself?

From nothing, nothing comes, goes the saying…what if the totality of existence as we know it, in all realms, in all times, was pure illusion? The question wouldn’t be which reality was the real thing, there would only be an eternal recurrence, an infinite regress of non-reality. The nothingness that we are would return to nothingness — the veil of illusion of existence itself would be lifted. When we die, we might come to find out that we return to non-existence and the world that Sartre described as ‘pure positivity’ was the real illusion.

If finite exists infinitely, then infinity must exist, the great infinite regress, where everything is an illusion and nothing ever existed, to begin with. What would the implications of this concept be on your spiritual or religious views, supposing you have them — or the lack thereof? I sense that we’ll have some very interesting science coming to very interesting conclusions in the near future. Ill close with a fitting repeat of Edgar Allan Poe’s quote, and if it feels like you’ve read it before, you have, and you’ll likely read it again, and again, and again, and again…

“O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?”