Why anything exists…?

The question: “why is there something rather than nothing?”, posed by Leibniz in 1714 in his “Principles of Nature and Grace”, later central to Heidegger’s metaphysics, is THE most fundamental and baffling of them all. The mother-of-all-questions…

Until now all attempts to find a consensus have failed. The approaches range from denying that the question is even valid to escaping into mysticism. Bertrand Russell (radio debate, BBC, 1948): “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.” Sean Carroll argues that any attempt to explain the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately result in a set of ‘brute facts’. The universe simply is — without ultimate cause or explanation. Richard Dawkins has dismissed the question as either wrongly posed or beyond scientific usefulness. On the other hand, Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 6.44) says: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is”…

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Sorensen, R. (2020). Nothingness. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/nothingness/)) has a more middle-ground (and more logic-based) approach. Introducing any being as the primordial one, immediately invokes the question — “what was before?”, “where it came from?” — creating an Escherian, never-ending ladder of entities. Stalemate.

My view of the problem is that the Leibniz question is valid, that the answer does exist — but it is currently beyond our conceptual and technological reach, yet. We will come back to that ‘futuristic’ element later.

Why so? Let’s take a closer look at ourselves, the humans, and the evolutionary path which took us from the primordial soup to the stage of self-aware beings who have created a highly sophisticated technological society.

The power of our understanding is mind-boggling. However, are we able to say that we know all the facts pertaining even to our current Universe? Doubtful for at least a few reasons. Firstly, we know that we observe only a fraction of the Universe (due to the limited speed of light) and that there are sections of it with which we will never be able to communicate. We will never know what questions and answers are hidden there. More — there is a (minor) body of respected physicists and philosophers who do not exclude the possibility that the very laws of physics evolve with time (e.g. Lee Smolin, Time Reborn, 2013). This further restricts our understanding and predictive capacity…

Secondly, our main tool — mathematics. Clearly, one of the major components of that science and technology explosion is the human-invented language, mathematics, which allows us to compress our observations of the patterns around us and gives us substantial predictive power (see e.g. my essay: Mathematics — an independent reality or a tool? https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18991465)..) However, mathematics itself has a serious boundary problem: the Gödel incompleteness theorems (On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I, 1931). They boil down to stating that in any formal, closed, axiomatic system questions exist which cannot be proved or disproved. True, language used to eventually answer THE question does not have to be mathematics per se. But it can be safely expected that it would have to be precise enough (even if, like all natural languages, open) to handle it, and that means some axiomatic foundations. Gödel’s intuition might apply here, too…

So, what if the Leibniz problem falls exactly into that pit…?

Both arguments can be amalgamated into an analogy I borrow from the Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. The existence problem might be lying beyond our ‘epistemic capability cone’. The answer is there, but we cannot grasp it because it is beyond the reach of our mental and physical tools. Just like the relativistic light cone defines which events can interact with us…

Now, let’s come back to that futuristic angle, mentioned above. The described state of play depicts the situation ‘now’. But we evolve — slowly, the biological way; but also, with the ever-increasing speed, we already evolve ourselves… Take examples like genetic modifications or human augmentations. These are facts. True, these are just first, wobbly steps, loaded with scientific, technological, ethical and legal conundrums. But the trend is clear, and the past shows that such progress cannot be stopped. We will expand the boundaries of our knowledge, understanding and capabilities. Inevitably. And it does not restrict us to staying Homo sapiens sapiens… If we seriously take our genetics and human-machine interfacing into our hands, we might re-build ourselves into a new species, with not simply broader, but fundamentally different intellectual horizons…

Who knows, maybe someday an answer to the Leibniz question will fall within our, or our successors, epistemic capability cone…?

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the assistance of AI Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI’s GPT-5 systems in improving the manuscript.

Further readings:

• Carroll, S. (2016). The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. Dutton
• Carroll, S. (2018, August 13). Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? (№9) [Audio podcast episode]. In Sean Carroll’s Mindscape https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/08/13/episode-9-solo-why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/
• Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press
• Kołakowski, L. (2007). Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers. Basic Books
• Krauss, L. M. (2012). A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. Free Press
• Leslie, J., & Kuhn, R. L. (Eds.). (2013). The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? Wiley-Blackwell
• Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press

Originally published on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19037044