Can something create itself or be created from nothing?

by jmarkinman

First, consider that "Can something create itself?" and "Can something be created from nothing?" are two different questions. Next, realize that "something from nothing" does not presuppose that "that something created itself".

I should also mention that because getting something from nothing does not mean that that something created itself, the question of "is there something creating itself from nothing" becomes irrelevant. If you have nothing, and we presume that something created itself from nothing, there is an inherent semantical paradox in that question which tells us that the something itself must also be nothing, which is not necessarily true. Thus, the question of whether something comes from nothing should remain separate from whether or not that something "created itself". I hope this is clear.

Now that we have questions that might lead to an answer of value, we can explore them a bit further. The first question, "can something create itself?" is quite well established. We call them "Turing Machines" in an abstract sense. In a more concrete sense, we call them computers. Any mechanism that is "Turing Complete" can create other mechanisms that are themselves "turing complete" And yes, A Turing Machine can create something that is the same as itself. But this doesn't answer the second question.

To answer the second question, Jamotron is quite right in saying we must agree as to what "nothing" is. I believe, from your layman's perspective, "nothing" can be defined as the lack of matter and energy. And perhaps, by extension, the lack of space and time, as well. But we should ask ourselves if "conditions" are possible. Is a condition "something"? The interesting thing about conditions are that conditions are non-material (they don't necessarily require space, time, energy or matter) and they can happen spontaneously through the arrangement of information. Information is a physical phenomenon that is itself spontaneous (doesn't require a condition) and happens naturally through the fact of "difference"... that is, if there is an observer of the phenomenons, there is a difference between the phenomenons such that they could be distinguished from each other. Any difference will do. And again, difference is spontaneous and independent. Once difference is established and perpetuated, conditions can arise from the information provided by difference. We might see the standard model (quarks, gluons, bosons, etc.) as a way to see the types of differences involved in OUR universe when pertaining to matter and energy. There might be other universes which set up different differences and thus different conditions setting up even more different differences. We don't really know.

In "A New Kind of Science" Wolfram makes a case that very simple computer processes can make very complicated arrangements. For example, he has been able to model a universe where the conditions of general relativity hold true in a computer simulation.

By now, you should be able to understand that conditions can be independent of matter and that conditions arise spontaneously through spontaneous information processes. That our universe had a particular spontaneous information process that lead to the laws of nature as we know them.

ne of these laws of nature is called "The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" Which is a postulate of Quantum mechanics and tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle because every particle has a wavelength and wavelengths have a CONDITION that in order to know the amplitude of a wave and the frequency of that wave, it must be in motion and position cannot be fully determined (an over simplification, if you want to learn more here is the wikipedia link.)

The Uncertainty Principle leads us quite seamlessly to the idea of Zero Point Energy. Zero point energy tells us that "the lowest-energy state (the ground state) of the system must have a distribution in position and momentum that satisfies the uncertainty principle, which implies its energy must be greater than the minimum of the potential well."

Thus, in a certain sense, energy is itself a condition of other conditions already established. When a fluctuation happens in zero-point energy, something similar to a "virtual particle" is formed and we get real manifestations of matter and energy.

Given a universe with the condition of Zero Point Energy, we have a universe now where matter itself can arise spontaneously. From here, the existence of the entire universe can be explained as a result of fluctuations in zero-point energy.

The Casimir experiment is an actual experiment that verifies the existence of zero-point energy.

I think the important thing to understand is that the nature of information is that it is not "preserved" like matter and energy are, but can be generated spontaneously, without cause and that when a difference in information occurs, something like our universe becomes possible if the difference is "sequenced" such that the information necessary to carry out the conditions occurs naturally. And this sequence MUST occur, mostly because we can reduce it to the infinite monkey theorem.