Владислав Педдер – Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness (страница 9)

I will now try to show that the Universe has a direction and that this direction can, with some caution, be given the anthropocentric label “meaning” – though it is more accurate to call it a “process.” That the cosmos is, in fact, not quite so indifferent. And that in philosophy, especially in existential philosophy, it should be discussed not within the framework of nihilism, but strictly within the framework of cosmic pessimism.

To begin with, contemporary cosmology proposes several competing hypotheses about the origin of the Universe, yet in all of them the question inevitably arises concerning the source of the primary energy that gives rise to being. The most widespread hypotheses are those in which our Universe arises from the “remnants” of a preceding one – whether as a singularity of a pre-universe, a flare at the point of gravitational collapse, or a tunneling effect within a multiverse. There are even concepts linking the birth of new universes to the interiors of black holes; the very idea of “cosmological natural selection” has received some development through formal analogies with biology. Yet even here a “parent” Universe is required, within which a black hole capable of generating another Universe first appears. All of this stems from the fact that we have not yet succeeded in unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, nor resolved the fundamental questions concerning the nature of space, time, and energy. But even if we were to uncover all the secrets of the Universe – what then? Would that solve the fundamental problem of our situation?

Modern science is increasingly turning to bold hypotheses such as the multiverse, attempting to explain the emergence of being through the existence of countless worlds or prior cosmic entities. Progress demands a willingness to consider the most daring ideas, even when they initially appear speculative. Perhaps the many-worlds interpretation, or other multiverse hypotheses, will prove closer to the true nature of reality. Yet there also exists a more economical explanation, which will be discussed below. Whichever approach proves more accurate, for us this Universe remains the only reality accessible within the limits of our lives. And although we are confined to this reality, that very limitation does not nullify the fruitfulness of bold conjectures. We will most likely be unable to gain direct knowledge of any other reality.

We must return to the question of why anything exists at all – the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, posed since the time of the ancient Parmenides and taken up by Leibniz, Wittgenstein, and, of course, Heidegger, who called it “the fundamental question of metaphysics.” Among all cosmological hypotheses, one in particular is especially compelling to me – the most radical and, paradoxically, the most internally consistent. Contemporary cosmology allows for the possibility that the Universe could have arisen without any external cause. This is one of the working hypotheses in modern theoretical physics16, it describes the emergence of spacetime from absolute Nothingness. Of course, this is neither the only nor the final account of the origin of the Universe. Its appeal lies not in “solving” the metaphysical riddle of being, but in showing how stable, differentiable configurations can arise from physical non-structure without recourse to transcendental explanations.

This absence of structure is understood as a pre-cosmic state – absolute NOTHING, in which space and time themselves do not yet exist. These ideas were developed by the cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, who showed that, in the case of a closed universe with zero total energy, “nothing prevents such a universe from spontaneously arising from nothing.” Much later, the physicist Lawrence Krauss popularized this hypothesis in a popular-science form. In his book A Universe from Nothing, he describes the birth of the Universe while understanding Nothingness as a vacuum in which quantum fluctuations arise. Critics were right to note that Krauss’s “Nothing” is a conceptual substitution, and that it says nothing about the origin of the vacuum itself. Krauss sidestepped this question, but the implied answer could be formulated as follows: the vacuum, like the quantum fluctuations within it, emerged from absolute Nothingness. He maintains that observational evidence is consistent with “a universe that could have, and plausibly did, arise from a deeper nothing – including the absence of space itself…”. Both authors emphasize the impersonal, anti-anthropological character of such a scenario: the process of the world’s emergence from nothing presupposes no external design and no purpose of its creation.

But how can something arise from absolute nothing? The key lies in the property of Nothingness itself: it is paradoxically unstable. Contrary to the intuitive image of emptiness as something absolutely static and eternal, quantum physics shows that a state of complete absence is not rest but a tense indeterminacy. “Nothing” cannot remain nothing, because the very notion of “remaining” already presupposes time – and there is no time there. This follows mathematically from the fact that, in the absence of spacetime, there are no constraints capable of holding non-being in its “zero” state. And here a profound irony becomes apparent: the energetically most favorable state is not emptiness, but existence. A universe with a zero energy balance (where the positive energy of matter is offset by negative gravitational energy) is physically “simpler” than absolute Nothingness, because it resolves the fundamental contradiction of non-being.

Yet the Universe that comes into being is not in equilibrium. It is born in a state of extremely low entropy – ordered, non-equilibrium, saturated with free energy. From that moment on, its irreversible movement begins toward the very stable state that is physically more favorable than non-being: toward maximum entropy, toward heat death, toward absolute equilibrium. The Universe seems to be “completing” its transition out of nothingness by approaching the most stable configuration. It cannot return to non-being – thermodynamics forbids it. All that remains is to move forward, dissipating energy, increasing disorder, and drawing nearer to a state in which nothing further happens, everything is balanced, still, and inert..

Thus, to reiterate – “Absolute Nothing” is understood as a state of radical absence of space and time, not merely as a vacuum with quantum fluctuations within a given geometry, as in Krauss’s formulation. In such a state, there are no classical fields, particles, or “arrow of time,” yet quantum-cosmological methods allow one to define its wave function. Using the equations of quantum field theory, it can be shown that even from this “zero” configuration there exists a nonzero probability of transition to a state with a finite geometry. It is worth noting that you, as well as I, will likely wonder how physical laws can be applied to “Nothing” if there is nothing in “Nothing.” This is indeed intriguing, but Vilenkin himself addresses this question in his book Many Worlds in One. The Search for Other Universes, derived from his 1982 article “Creation of the Universes from Nothing,” in Chapter Seventeen:

“This means that there is simply no space and time, they are, in a precise sense, unreal – ‘immaterial’, they are pure ‘nothing’; they are simply a manifestation of the uncertainty principle, a foam of probabilities that space-time has one metric or another, topology, number of dimensions, etc. The concept of a universe materializing out of nothing boggles the mind… yet the state of ‘nothing’ cannot be identified with absolute nothingness. The tunneling is described by the laws of quantum mechanics, and thus ‘nothing’ should be subjected to these laws. The laws must have existed, even though there was no universe..”

The answer, of course, is not bad and refers us back to Plato, to the world of ideas and things in philosophy, but it explains nothing. And how are we to interpret the statements that “the state of ‘nothing’ cannot be defined as absolute nonexistence,” yet at the same time “it is pure ‘nothing’”? Further reading clarifies this somewhat. Vilenkin suggests that apparently, in complete “Nothing,” only the laws of physics exist, but he cannot give a definite answer to the question of where they come from, and he proposes that everything comes from God, as he mentions toward the end of the book. Presumably, the question of the existence of physical laws in nothing did not concern him greatly. There is no problem with the fact that Vilenkin saw a divine origin for “nothing,” since, as we will see later, he is not the only one who approached the hypothesis of a universe from “nothing.” But for now, let us return to the tunneling of geometry. It follows that, if Vilenkin’s conclusions are true or close to true, the geometry of spacetime itself can “tunnel”17 through a barrier of zero size, in a manner analogous to how a particle with nonzero amplitude penetrates a classical potential barrier.18 Alexander Vilenkin fully formalized and described how a closed universe could arise via quantum tunneling from literally “nothing” into de Sitter space19, after which inflationary expansion begins. From the perspective of the wave function, this corresponds to a condition of a wave-free state on a zero geometry (the so-called “tunneling wave function”). After tunneling, a finite-size “bubble” appears. If this bubble surpasses a critical scale, it does not collapse but inflates to large dimensions, entering an inflationary phase of expansion. Modern studies, including those incorporating quantum gravity (for example, in loop quantum cosmology), continue to develop this idea of universe tunneling at zero scale factor.