Leibniz’s famous question — why is there something rather than nothing? — is often called the deepest question in all of philosophy and physics. It sits at the exact boundary where physics, metaphysics, and logic converge, and no amount of empirical data seems like it could fully resolve it. But the question may not need an answer. It may need to be dissolved.
The Infinite Regress
Every physical explanation for existence pushes the question back a level. The universe emerged from a quantum vacuum? Then why does the quantum vacuum exist and obey those laws? The laws arise from a deeper mathematical structure? Then why that structure? You cannot bootstrap existence from within existence. No causal chain, no matter how elegant, can serve as its own foundation.
This infinite regress has kept the question alive for centuries. But perhaps the problem isn’t that we lack a sufficiently deep answer — it’s that the question itself is structurally flawed.
The Anthropic Dissolution
The first crack in the question is straightforward: it can only be asked from within existence. If there were nothing, there would be no one to notice, no one to ask, no absence to be puzzled by. “Nothing” is not a state that could ever be observed, experienced, or lamented. It was never a competing option in any meaningful sense.
The question creates the illusion of a fork in the road — as though existence and nonexistence were two possibilities laid out before some cosmic adjudicator, and one was chosen. But that fork never existed. The question can only arise inside the answer. It is self-referentially guaranteed to be asked, which means the apparent mystery of “why this outcome?” evaporates. There was no other outcome available to anyone capable of evaluating outcomes.
The Temporal Smuggling
The subtler flaw is that the question smuggles in a temporal framework where none applies. “Why something rather thannothing?” implies a moment of decision, a “before” in which the contest between something and nothing was adjudicated. It treats existence as an event — something that happened at a particular juncture.
But if time is not fundamental — if temporality itself is emergent, arising from entropy dynamics on a more primitive substrate — then there is no “before” existence. There is no temporal vantage point from which nonexistence was the default and existence arrived as a surprise. Asking “why not nothing?” is structurally identical to asking “what happened before time began?” Both are grammatically valid sentences that correspond to no coherent physical situation.
The question inherits, without examination, the idea of an eternal “before.” Strip that assumption away and the question loses its force entirely.
Existence Without Event
What remains when the question is dissolved is not an answer but a reframing. Existence is not something that “happened instead of” nothing. It is not the result of a selection process. It simply is — and the capacity to question it is part of what it is.
This is not a retreat into mysticism. It is a recognition that certain questions fail not because they are too hard, but because they are malformed. They import assumptions — temporal precedence, contrastive alternatives, an observer outside the system — that do not apply to the situation they describe.
A Broader Pattern
This raises a provocative possibility: that many of the classic “deepest questions” in physics suffer from the same structural disease. Questions about what caused the Big Bang, what exists outside the universe, or what selected the laws of physics may all be importing frameworks — causation, spatial containment, choice — that are features of the emergent world, not of whatever underlies it.
The deepest move in physics may not be finding answers to these questions. It may be learning to recognize when a question, despite its emotional and intellectual grip, was never coherent enough to have an answer in the first place.
The Better Question
Once we dissolve the malformed question, a far more productive one takes its place: why this something, and not a different something?
This question doesn’t suffer from the same structural flaws. It accepts existence as given and asks about its specific character. There is no smuggled temporality, no impossible vantage point outside reality. “Why these laws, these constants, this structure?” is a question that physics can genuinely engage with — empirically and theoretically.
Frameworks that ground physics in information-theoretic principles offer a potentially powerful response here. If the underlying substrate is maximally simple, then the emergent structures we observe may not be arbitrary. They may be constrained — even fully determined — by the dynamics of that substrate. The specificity of our physics would then be explained the way thermodynamic behavior is explained: not by selection from alternatives, but by the mathematics of the underlying dynamics. The apparent contingency of the laws of physics would turn out to be necessity in disguise.
This is the real frontier. Not “why existence?” but “why this existence?”
The Inescapable Circle
But here we must confront an uncomfortable limit. Every conceptual tool we bring to this question — entropy, information, gradients, even mathematics itself — is a product of this something. When we describe a fundamental substrate using those tools, we are projecting the emergent back onto the ground from which it supposedly emerges.
It is like trying to describe what exists outside language using language. The medium constrains the message. Our physics, our logic, our mathematics — these might be local features of this particular emergent reality, not universal truths that apply at the substrate level. We assume concepts like entropy are fundamental enough to do the explanatory work, but entropy is a concept we extracted from observing this world. The substrate might operate on principles we literally cannot conceive of, because our cognition is itself a product of the emergence.
This is not a reason to stop theorizing. A framework that generates novel, non-obvious predictions which turn out to be correct is clearly tracking something real, even if the description is imperfect. Falsifiable predictions remain the way to test whether our projection onto the substrate captures genuine structure or merely tells a self-consistent story.
But the deeper philosophical point stands. We can only form opinions, build models, and ask questions from within our something. We will only ever see the substrate through the lens of what it produced. The map is drawn using ink that only exists inside the territory.
Learning to accept this — not as defeat, but as the honest boundary condition of all inquiry — may be the most important epistemic move available to us. It does not diminish the enterprise. It grounds it in the kind of humility that real understanding requires.
Ironically nothing is attached to this blog! It is the only one without a paper.