Sorry, I don’t understand any of your thinking here.

Nothing exists in the universe.

Lots of things exist in this universe. Indeed, that it is a universe is itself a thing that exists.

It doesn’t do what you suggest.

Since this universe is a collection of existing things (spacetime volumes, particle seas, structures, contents, laws and properties), it cannot tell us what a nothing-state would do. A nothing-state cannot behave like this universe because it lacks all the things that cause this universe to follow fixed behaviors and have stable contents with durable properties.

In fact your attempt to define nothing by observables

I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by “observables” and how am I defining nothing “by observables” in whatever sense you mean?

destroys your premise that a lack of law introduces random change

My premise is the lack of laws. That this results in random behavior is the conclusion, not the premise. You seem to have skipped my entire actual argument. So I don’t know what you think you are rebutting here.

as we can observe the lack of law lacks change

First, we observe no volume in this universe where there is a total lack of law, so you cannot have made this observation you claim. You are making no empirical sense here.

Second, it is logically impossible that a lack of all laws will lack change, since to remain unchanged would be a law (ensuring one state is more probable than other states). That’s exactly what would not exist if nothing existed. So you aren’t even making logical sense here.

hence the first postulate of relativity

What is the “first postulate” (do you actually mean postulate?) of “relativity”? And how does it produce your conclusion?

Because if nothing exists, neither will any “postulated things” of relativity—unless they are logically necessary and thus must always exist even when nothing else exists, but then it wouldn’t be a “postulate.” So you seem to be contradicting yourself here. Even if you are saying anything intelligible here, which I am starting to doubt.

Not to mention the arbitrary constraints you impose about the necessity of the mind.

What “arbitrary” constraints? What “necessity” of the mind?

If this is a poorly worded sentence (maybe English isn’t your first language), and what you mean to ask is how Malpass and I come to the conclusion that “theists never explain how it is that a disembodied mind can do things,” then you should watch Malpass’s video and read my article on specified complexity of minds. Because that’s a side point here. It’s covered elsewhere.

You would have to theorize cognition first to make that claim.

I have no idea what you are talking about here.

You really just refined quantum vacuum fluctuations to fit the definition of God then arbitrarily stated it can’t be

I distinguish quantum cosmology from nothing-state cosmology. Perhaps you mean my describing the inescapable law of a nothing-state as a quantum law, because it is an inalienable law of any true singularity. That is not “vacuum fluctuations,” as those require there be a vacuum. I am talking about a state lacking even a vacuum in that sense, and about laws that are inevitable, not arbitrary. So you seem to be confused here.

But yes, a geometric singularity will have no thoughts or feelings (and thus won’t be a God), yet will inevitably explode into an endless multiverse, as proved in my article. You have not referred to a single step in that argument, so you seem unwilling to engage with the actual argument in this article.

In fact your attempt to define nothing by observables destroys your premise that a lack of law introduces random change, as we can observe the lack of law lacks change hence the first postulate of relativity. Not to mention the arbitrary constraints you impose about the necessity of the mind. You would have to theorize cognition first to make that claim.

You really just refined quantum vacuum fluctuations to fit the definition of God then arbitrarily stated it can’t be

That’s a good point. If “nothing” had no potentials, then you are also ruling out creation, because then even a God could not make anything out of nothing.

For God to create ex nihilo, then then nihil must have the potential to become something else, which God is then actualizing.

And you are right that “God could give it a potential it didn’t have” doesn’t work because that would require nihil have at least one potential: to potentially have any potentials. But “to potentially have any potentials” is logically the same as “having all potentials.”

Even if someone tried to legerdemain their way around that, they’d have to argue that nihil has only that one potential—but how can it have one and only one potential if it contains nothing, not even potentials? To say that there is some rule or power that makes an exception for nihil allowing it to have just that one potential and not others is to contradict the statement that nihil was truly nothing. There is a more nothing nothing than that: the one that lacks that weird guardrail. And since there is nothing logically contradictory about that greater nothing, obviously it must predate any other kind of nothing—in the absence of anything selecting which particular lesser nothing would exist instead.

Let’s address this as a logical fork.

Either nothing is a state that has potentials within it, or it isn’t.

If it is, then your “from nothing comes everything follows”. That’s inescapable.

And while I am not as sold as you are that nothing with no potentials is literally logically incoherent to strong certainty, I think that you’ve made a weak proof that has to be overcome.

But let’s do the other fork.

If the other fork is a nothing that has no potentials within it at all, then nothing can never have existed.

Not deductively, in this case, but to 100% inductive, indeed Cartesian, certainty.

Because even God, at that point, not only would violate the nothingness state by existing Itself and thus be an actualized potential, but (even if we ignore that) could not create from nothing.

You cannot create something that has no potential to exist. And the nothing state that has no potentials within it cannot produce nothing.

You can’t alter the nothing state to have those potentials either. Because, putting aside that there’s no evidence (not even Biblical evidence) that God did that anyways, it’s incoherent to say that you can grant potential to have potential, because then it was a nothingness that had the potential to have potential, and then by virtue of nothing stopping it from actuating that potential it would, and then we’re back at the first tine.

So if there is a single object in the universe, that kind of potentialless nothing could never have existed.

Which is strong inductive evidence to the conclusion that such a potentialless nothing can’t exist.

if you eliminate all objects around you, that doesn’t reduce where you can go, it increases it. … Taken to its logical conclusion, if you eliminated everything, then anything is possible.

This is perfectly put. And exactly right.

I actually think there’s more than just a joking insight here. The a priori restrictions of a more traditional plot that has an expectation of some kind of gimmick, or sensible resolution, or trite lesson, actually really restricts comedic and sitcom writing. For the same reason that improv can generate such remarkable reactions because it can arrive at an unexpected outcome because of the lack of restrictions, and video games and tabletop roleplaying too can tell emergent stories from systems interacting without fudging toward pre-desired outcomes, Seinfeld and shows that follow in its veins like It’s Always Sunny can be more fundamentally creative because they eliminate artificial restrictions.

As Richard has pointed out in other presentations of this idea, it’s like the point that, if you eliminate all objects around you, that doesn’t reduce where you can go, it increases it. Filling up space and time with objects actually constrains your possible worldlnes. Taken to its logical conclusion, if you eliminated everything, then anything is possible. There are no more walls.

Generally, what folks arrive at is that, through a combination of biological and cultural evolution, humans generally use sloppy heuristics and intuitions that work well enough.

For example, collective responsibility and punishment ideas, and stereotypes, are stupid if you actually believe in them, but they’re often going to have some validity to them, unless they are exclusively created by dishonest or utterly misinformed actors. Similarly, consensus and groupthink has obvious problems, but not only does consensus and groupthink at least have the benefit of moving past people being too arrogant to not admit that they’re wrong, it also lets groups make decisions quickly. All of these things are, for reasons Richard would likely say are fundamentally Bayesian, just generally good guesses in the right contexts.

In the case of agency overdetection, it’s far less harmful to have a false negative than a false positive. Same reason why dogs bark at nothing and animals in general frequently have false positives on alarms: better to look silly and waste a little bit of energy than to act too late for an actual threat.

This in turn almost certainly has to do with fundamental realities of information processing. As we’re learning now with automation and both pseudo-AI and real attempts at AI, it’s actually really hard to do what humans seem to do so effortlessly. From the way that our visual system works to our social cognitions to our ability to interpret ambiguity from stimuli ranging from auditory stimuli to language, our brain is using a ton of things that are basically compression or shorthands to be able to arrive at “good enough” reasoning. What’s remarkable from what we’re learning is that this isn’t just an evolutionary optimization that might have a ton of ability to improve: In terms of arriving at quick decisions, our biases are actually reasonably functional, especially in a pre-social context. (You may notice that a ton of our biases and sub-optimal reactions, things like our stress reactions, make a lot of sense on the savannah or as hunter-gatherers and not any sense in post-agrarian societies). Gladwell has his serious issues, but Blink is really interesting in constructing a case for intuitions.

Indeed, that’s the awkwardly false intuition of theists, mistaking what the word “law” means in different contexts to build a Bugs Bunny understanding of physics.

In actual physics, “law” just means a fixed relationship between observables (when x is present, y results), which we have long actually understood meant an underlying physical structure that we are observing, not a law “giver” making that happen. I use the example of Archimedes’ “law” of buoyancy in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical.

Yes, it looks like you had to tread carefully in your wording whenever you used the word “nothing”. For instance,

But that attributes too much substance to nothing. If there really is nothing, there is nothing there. So there isn’t a point on any timeline where there is “nothing.” No thing (not even a nothing) is transforming into or is replaced by another. There is just “a thing begins.”

And it’s hard to describe that without making heads spin.

I am really intrigued by the concept of causatum ex nihilo. But I can see how someone could say it is just a play on words getting from “nothing” to “not even laws of nature” to “therefore anything goes” to Big Bangs.

Christians claim that a law requires a law giver. If that were true, and there was truly nothing, then there was no law giver, and then there was nobody there to say that existence must follow the laws of thermodynamics or any other physical laws.

Well, theory of humor:

The joke was that being about nothing was actually about a bunch of something that just wasn’t considered meaningful or significant or exciting, thus making fun of the human use of the word nothing in describing literally almost the entirety of actual human lives.

The joke was no doubt punching up at studio execs and capitalists who constantly reject artistic pitches for shows on some version of “that isn’t about anything so no one will watch it.” Which may in fact have been said about their show in their struggle to get it produced in the first place.

If so, then it is humor of the false: making fun of the fact that rejecting the show because it’s about nothing is absurd because “that it’s about nothing” is obviously false. Which does make fun of the truth that people think ordinary life is “nothing” (yet here is an entire hit TV show about that so-called “nothing”), but the truth is that that belief is false.

Here, that reflects the fact that people need to define what they mean by nothing and check to make sure the thing they are talking about actually meets that definition.

This is what tripped up Lawrence Krauss when he got rolled for arguing a primordial quantum spacetime was the “nothing” that theologians and metaphysicians are talking about (because scientists suck at philosophy and never actually read it so as to actually know what it is discussing). In reality he either was failing to present a thing that met his definition of nothing, or using the wrong definition of nothing and thus not even contributing to the conversation he thought he was.