The Sufis (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism</a>) consider nothingness to be the fifth element of nature.
Nothingness in mathematics is an issue and a problem. Proof by contradiction was at one time controversial. That the empty set is unique is an axiom in some versions of set theory.<p>An operational definition of nothingness is that you apply a sensing operation to something, and if the sensing operation does not succeed, the thing being sensed is a nothingness. Nothingness is defined by the sensing operation. This resolves some, but not all, of the problems.<p>The other side of this is "what is a something"? That's what led Democritus to invent atoms as a philosophical primitive. Everything bigger than an atom is a grouping of atoms and is defined by some abstraction over the primitives. Straightforward. Then came subatomic physics.<p>The article contains a theological discussion which is just the first cause argument for God. The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". That argument hasn't had much traction in recent centuries.<p>(I once took "Epistemological problems in artificial intelligence" from John McCarthy. People were serious about this stuff when the logicians ruled AI. Today, not so much.)
Kabbalistic Judaism also addresses the capacity for somethingness to emerge from nothingness. Very interesting interpretations of these metaphysical puzzles.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh</a><p>Tzimtzum, "contraction", proposes that the physical world is infinite somethingness/nothingness (essentially equal representations of one thing) made manifest in the realm of light/waves and distinctions.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum</a>
If anyone has got a few years to kill to meditate on this I recommend "Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance" followed by Jed Mckenna books.
I like to ponder whether the territory is some giant graph of abstract conscious agents, and space-time as perceived is a simplified map of one’s adjacent nodes (connected agents).<p>Of course, this puts conventional causality on its head and at this point is ultimately unfalsifiable.
I have no idea what the obsession with 'Cameron Winklevoss' is but it's kind of funny that he's an actual person and not some tradition like 'Alice' and 'Bob' in cryptography.<p>Also the inhabitant of the empty set is omnipotent, so the first assumption is actually that there is no God.
The question can be reformulated as whether non-existence (nothingness) exists which is obviously a contradiction. Nothingness is the opposite of existence and hence it does not exist by definition.
Sorry, it's hard to get past the first section.<p>The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all.<p>The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it?<p>Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?