Good news: it's all still a complete mystery

No one knows more than you do about our origins.

No one knows where the universe comes from.¹

This easily accessible fact seems to me weirdly under-appreciated. You are here, right now, alive on the physical Earth, and neither you nor any of your fellow humans has any idea where any of this comes from, not in the least: there are no currently observable facts at hand to tell us, certainly, and there aren’t even really any substantiated scientific theories or speculations. I think it’s almost impossible to give this adequate attention. It’s a bit like your own mortality: you can surround yourself with memento mori, but for many understandable reasons it’s difficult to keep your inevitable doom in mind. This, however, seems different, happier, more appealing: you are in the middle of an utter mystery; you are part of that mystery; you are a mystery. Why don’t people like to think about this?

Perhaps it’s because when people —even very smart people— try, it’s a little bit humiliating. We just have no idea. For example, a physicist I enjoy very much named Sean Carrol thinks it all sprang into existence from a vacuum that maybe wasn’t quite a vacuum:

The simplest way to make this work is if we are a baby universe. Like real-life babies [sic], giving birth to universes is a painful and mysterious process. There was some early work on the idea by Farhi, Guth and Guven, as well as Fischler, Morgan and Polchinski, which has been followed up more recently by Aguirre and Johnson. The basic idea is that you have a background spacetime with small (or zero) vacuum energy, and a little sphere of high-density false vacuum… Your false-vacuum bubble can expand from a really tiny sphere to a huge inflating universe, eventually reheating and leading to something very much like the local universe we see around us today. From the outside, the walls of the bubble appear to collapse, leaving behind a black hole that will eventually evaporate away. So the baby universe, like so many callous children, is completely cut off from communication with its parent.²

The problem with this probably excellent explanation is immediate and obvious: where the fuck did the parent universe come from? The “high density false vacuum,” the background spacetime: what is their origin? This “quantum fluctuation”: what was fluctuating? Where did that come from? Where did it get the energy to fluctuate, to change? There’s a vast field of near-nothingness, but the tiny amount of stuff it has periodically explodes into entire universes? If we go back in time, where does this all begin? Are we the first such “baby” universe? How does any of this help us understand where we come from or what this all is?

None of this is new terrain, of course. Many philosophers have discussed the dilemma over the years, sometimes formulating this problem as that of the “prime mover”: if we trace back the chain of effects and causes, we must encounter one of two possibilities:

1. At some point, we reach something that had no cause. That is the prime mover, the unmoved mover. Whatever this is, it catalyzed the existence of all matter, energy, and time, but itself had no catalyst or cause and itself exists outside of time. This is, of course, a supernatural concept. (Note: it’s sometimes claimed that our investigations into cosmology will reach past the regime of cause and effect; that is, that we’ll arrive at some point beyond which time doesn’t exist or things have no causes, ideas both supernatural and which still sum to a prime mover, namely: whatever the hell that first element or phenomenon is).

2. We never reach a prime mover because time is infinite, and the chain of effects and causes simply never stops. If one knows a little about infinity, it should be obvious that this is no less supernatural. To start, we have good reason to think that infinities do not exist in nature. Second, if time is infinite, it means that every possible combination of e.g. atoms will reoccur an infinite number of times. Yes, this means literally that everything happens again and again forever, including this precise moment. (Infinity is very, very large). It also creates paradoxical problems: there are moments in the past that are infinitely far away from us in the present. But if they’re infinitely far away, we’d never have made it from “then” to “now.” What the hell?!

That we confront two supernatural possibilities from the most ancient and basic and essential question one can ask —Why is there something rather than nothing?— is a bit of a scandal. Some meet this line of inquiry primarily by suspiciously noting that it seems like a prelude to a “god of the gaps” argument. This critique observes that we tend to situate god wherever our scientific knowledge is inadequate. Since many prior gaps in our scientific knowledge have been filled, it continues, these will be too, and we’ll have to evict god once more. But the issue of the prime mover problem is not simply a knowledge problem; it’s a structural, fundamental problem. I have no doubt that someday we’ll figure out what happened before the Planck Epoch, but that amounts to kicking the can further down the road. What happened before that? And before that? Either you’re chasing causes until you reach an unmoved mover, or you’re traipsing through an infinity that will include every permutation of possibilities imaginable and a few paradoxes. So far as we know, it’s one or the other.³

For people not familiar with the concept of the “god of the gaps” or any of these ideas, there’s something else that thwarts awe or interest in this question: we have an expectation that science reduces. That is: at a vibe level, we associate inevitable scientific explanation with the reduction of possibility spaces and the collapsing of meanings. For several centuries, the pattern has been that science desacralizes the world and makes it smaller and less meaningful to human beings. This pattern is real and I am sure it will continue, but it’s important to recognize that it’s not, in fact, “part of science.”⁴ That scientists have had special impact e.g. rebutting various myths does not tell us anything about the nature of reality or the origin of the universe, only about the happenstance configuration of human knowledge and institutions during the period following the Enlightenment. It so happened that we had a lot of myths that required rebuttal!

Having vanquished those myths, however, we still know nothing about the nature of reality or the origin of the universe, and we remain so ignorant about many essential questions that I think it’s fair to consider us at the absolute beginning of our learning. To pretend that recent centuries tell us “what kinds of things we’re likely to discover” is wholly invalid inductivism. We have few reasons to assume anything about potential cosmological explanations, in any direction. Our best scientific theories are often so strange that none blink at J.B.S. Haldane’s famous quip that the universe “is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.”⁵ But I worry that too many of us feel almost exactly the opposite, and without good reason.

Our situation is like that of someone who wakes up one morning and discovers that across the street, where there was a vacant lot, there is now a vast, snow-capped mountain range, in whose valleys live countless species of wildlife, around whose peaks there are glittering cities of an advanced civilization, all full of busy inhabitants, and who shrugs: “Whatever. Most stuff turns out to be just a bunch of bullshit.”

We may literally not have clue where anything comes from; we may not know how the mind works or what consciousness is; we may never have observed life emerge from the inorganic⁶; but the one thing we all seem to know is: there’s no cause for wonder or speculation. To borrow a formerly popular online phrase: “Probably nothing.”

It’s certainly possible that this attitude is correct. But it feels to me like an affectation. With the bare facts we have —that is, based on what observably exists— I’m not sure why we’d assume anything at all. And while I begrudge no one their priors, I do fear that too many people have profoundly misunderstood the state of our science and constrain their imaginations excessively. In this very real epistemic vacuum, don’t forget that you know as much about the origin of existence as anyone else alive or dead.

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Recently, there’s been a surge in the popularity of the so-called “simulation hypothesis,” which asserts that we’re living inside of a computer simulation being operated for purposes unknown by beings unknown. There’s no evidence for this, and there probably cannot be, nor is there evidence against it, as there probably cannot be.

Such speculations on the origin of existence are often met with invocations of Occam’s Razor. This is a rule-of-thumb that advises that we not multiply entities in explanations. That is: between the competing theories that

• your missing socks have fallen behind the washing machine during transfers from hampers and so on; and

• your missing socks were taken from the washing machine by a small gnome who lives invisibly in your house and removes socks and puts them behind the machine just to mess with you but does nothing else and cannot be discovered,

we should naturally prefer the first explanation because it has fewer unnecessary “entities” or elements or parts. The gnome is not needed; the story can be told without the gnome, and should be. The justification for this economical attitude is that as we increase the number of entities, we increase the risk of error (especially since it’s possible some parts are wholly unneeded and irrelevant); extreme parsimony will lead to truer explanations.

This is all reasonable, but I think it’s well worth emphasizing that the existence of the universe is a violation of Occam’s Razor. You and I are multiplied entities. The razor essentially says that “nothing is likelier than something,” and as useful as that is, we cannot take it as a law given that we are the something that exists rather than nothing. Things are not always parsimonious; for example, there’s our own spendthrift fucking universe, overflowing with matter and energy and who-knows-what-else, including life, which itself is constantly growing and expanding and multiplying. None of this was needed, and if reality multiplies entities “unnecessarily,” so too occasionally will complete explanations.

The other reason ideas like the simulation hypothesis are mocked is because of the long history of humans using the technology of their day as a catch-all metaphorical basis for understanding everything. In industrializing times, all phenomena were metaphorized as machines, engines, pumps. Now, in the time of software, “it’s all a computer.” But the interchangeability of the answers only highlights the permanence of the question. Every generation attacks it with their newest means of sense-making, and every generation fails, as ours has and will.

Because while I don’t hate the simulation hypothesis, it has the same fatal flaw as any other explanation I’ve heard: where did the universe in which the simulation is occurring come from? Some believe there’s been an extremely long chain of simulated universes, a nesting fractal of worlds. One of the first times I suspected Elon Musk was foolish was when he said that just given the possibility that universes evolve to simulate other universes, it was highly unlikely we were in the “base” or original universe: there must be billions of universes, so we have a billions-to-one shot. But an idea does not create a possibility space! It’s impossible to assess the likelihood of us being the original universe before we know whether any of this is true. Regardless of what we think of this idea, though, where the original universe came from remains an unanswered question. This story doesn’t merely multiply entities; it almost only multiplies entities, leaving the main problem unaddressed and otherwise providing very little explanatory light.⁷

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To return to the earlier example:

Our situation is like that of someone who wakes up one morning and discovers that across the street, where there was a vacant lot, there is now a vast, snow-capped mountain range, in whose valleys live countless species of wildlife, around whose peaks there are glittering cities of an advanced civilization, all full of busy inhabitants…

This is our situation, in fact. The mountain ranges, the cities, life; the planets, the solar systems, the galaxies; the universe, the multiverse, their causes: it’s all just here, and we don’t know how or why. We live in a reality in which the best scientific minds propose things like the many-worlds-interpretation, which is both as strange as any myth and still cannot answer the prime mover question or account for time's origins.⁸ I worry that people do not understand that scientists sincerely ponder the possibilities like these: that our universe may be a created simulation; that there may be uncountably infinite universes whose only (and very weak) interrelation may be through photons, and in which you —yes, you— really do exist multiply and in endless variations; that consciousness may be a special phenomenon that exceeds biological materialism and cannot be accounted for by it; and so on. That many scientists are mystics is not an argument for mysticism, let alone any particular mysticism; but it is an argument, in my opinion, against drab, assumed nihilism. Where the most serious investigators into the nature of reality operate, there is only possibility.

And we’ve really only been working on this problem for a few millennia. If humanity survives for billions of years, what will we come to understand? How far back will our knowledge go? What will we be able to do or experience through its application? Will these hard edges to our comprehension remain? What would it mean if everything happens infinitely many times? What would it mean if we’re contained within some other order, are part of some other story? When will we know, if ever? Will we have enough time to learn to “an end” of our curiosities, if there is one?

Even if the origin of existence and all that we know is of little interest to us, perhaps seeming too remote —although I emphasize that we cannot know anything about it, not even how relevant to us it is or isn’t, in advance— it’s still the case that the same processes that lead to the scientific discovery of phenomena tend to lead to the technological mastery of those phenomena. There’s really no reason to assume we can imagine anything about what future humans will and won’t be able to do, on long timelines and with unimaginable amounts of energy and technology.

In any event, I don’t mean to persuade anyone of anything, least of all one of the hopeful fantasies I indulge in. In my internal world, I’m an openly and contentedly mystical person. I find it easy not only to entertain basically religious thoughts but to rationalize them either literally or in variously metaphorical ways, many of which are adequately persuasive to me. I’m rarely at an epistemological loss, even when I probably should be. This may be one of the handful of perks of being mentally ill; I won’t argue with anyone who suggests as much. The foundations of beliefs achieved through an especially generous refusal to self-scrutinize are, of course, weak, and collapse when my mood is black; but I also have stronger beliefs which are unvarying. That the prime mover problem is real, interesting, and important is perhaps chief among them⁹. Our originlessness and the problem of time together suggest to me that we really don’t understand much about all this. When I look at the world with

• the Occam’s razor point of view that there “should” be nothing, yet there’s everything;

• few priors about what is likely or unlikely in a world which might in fact be uncountably infinite universes with uncountably infinite instances of all of us;

• a confidence that over billions of years, our knowledge and technologies and ability to manipulate the physical world will grow in unimaginable ways; and

• a general sense that there are through-lines in nature, as structure begets structure, process begets process, etc.

it’s hard for me not to feel, at worst, neutrally awe-struck at the vastness and mysteriousness of existence, at how beautiful it all must be if understood as a whole, and at best, cheerfully optimistic that the fact that there’s something rather than nothing is a good sign for us, as is much else besides. But again: I don’t suggest you should believe in anything at all. I only note that you and I have literally no idea —none— and not even the outline or sense of the nature of one.

For my part: I just woke up, and all around me is existence. If allowing myself to daydream about why that might be risks a bit of social embarrassment, I don’t mind. On balance, some egg on my face seems like nothing compared to the costs of carrying on like you know what’s happening, like you’re not a constituent element of a vast, ancient mystery no one has a clue about. Everything remains unknown. Why pretend otherwise?

Everything I post is about Tree of Life.

Sincere thanks to Kellyn Loehr and Ben Murphy for helpful feedback. And thanks to Linda Lebrun and Chris Mueller for the conversation at the bar that reminded me I’d been meaning to post about this. I don’t know why I can’t let go of it. I think it’s something like: I don’t want anyone ceding their freedom to wonder, their intellectual and spiritual agency, to a misunderstood “scientistic” memeplex that is nearly wholly attitudinal. It’s the other side of “letting facts create you”: do not let inherited zeitgeist vibes unmake you! Be here now, as the fella said, and make of this all what you will!

1. This is about as much as we know today. For more on the problems I discuss here, see this summary.

2. If you’re so-inclined, you can hear him discuss this more in a video here.

3. Sometimes people will assert that there’s a prosaic explanation for all this, but one that “our minds cannot understand.” It’s important to recognize that this would be a situation without precedent in history; so far, our minds can understand the most radically distant and unusual phenomena, and we do not encounter things we “cannot” understand, only things we do not yet understand. A “border” to understanding is hard to account for without recourse, again, to the supernatural. It would e.g. mean a border to what mathematics describe, to physics, to science, to language, and all these things are of course infinitely adaptable and often adapt to describe new phenomena ably.

4. I sometimes think of this vibe as being akin to the attitude of a young teen still furious at having been lied to about Santa Claus: one naturally adopts an exaggeratedly cynical pose, as it feels adult and sophisticated to assert that “everything is fake” or “nothing is real” or what-have-you.

5. I personally believe that nothing is queerer than we can imagine, but that’s as may be.

6. If Substack is in business for 5,000 years, as we expect, check back here to see as one by one every example of an unknown I provide will be addressed by the growth of knowledge. But there will not be fewer unknowns. Like the knowledge problem of the prime mover, the knowledge problem of the god of the gaps is structural, I believe: new knowledge creates, as it were, new gaps. (Stash whatever you want in there, honestly).

7. I think it might have some explanatory utility. For example: if this were a simulation, we might expect to periodically encounter borders of reality like map edges, past which we simply cannot go, and we do; we might also expect those borders to periodically expand, as though being patched to accommodate more exploration! Is a scientific discovery just DLC? But this is all simply science-fiction, and none of it, so far as I understand, is testable, unless we assume the developers are error-prone or something. And none of it address the question of the prime mover anyway!

8. I think any remotely sincere attempt to take seriously what physicists themselves say leads quickly to an expanded sense of what our universe might be.

9. In case it needs to be noted, religious answers for this problem do not solve for my critiques in this piece; they are all, of course, explicitly supernatural. If like Aquinas we say “God is the prime mover,” we’re simply naming the mystery. I have no objection to that, but it’s not an explanation in the terms we’re seeking.