How does being come into being? How does existence come into existence?

Question

So, the universe was created by the big bang. And the big bang was created by some stringy things, or branes or whatever. But what created those strings? And what created the thing that created them? And so on, and so on, or as I know it, the precursor problem.

Simple logic dictates that being cannot come into being. It would require being already being for anything to come into being.

Therefore, being has always been. Rendering the endless tower of theoretical cards redundant.

The same goes for existence - existence cannot come into existence if you don't already have existence to begin with, therefore existence can only exist eternally.

All this being the product of my own reasoning, I wonder what established mainstream philosophy has to say on the subject.

Answer 1

IMO a statement like

"being comes into being" has no meaning.

In the context of your question the verb "to be" is used as a synonym of "to exist", as a full verb. Your question considers existing things like the universe or "stringy things", i.e. elementary particles. All these things are physical objects. I agree that in the case of physical objects it is meaningful to ask how these objects started to exist.

In a second step, you reify the verb "to be", speaking about the reification "being". You now consider the noun "being" an object and ask how started "being of the object being". But being is not a physical object, it is the reification of a verb. Therefore, this type of question is not meaningful.

Answer 2

Kant argues that being does not have being -- it is not a property or state, it is simply the reality of a thing having properties and states. His argument is narrower than yours, but basically the same, and it goes farther.

If existence were a state, then nonexistence would be a state. Yet what can nonexistence be the state of? Such a thing would not exist...

Instead, non-existence is only really the state of an idea, and not of a thing, and it does not really mean non-existence, it means not describing anything. To think of it as a property of things is just a grammatical error of omitting 'quotes'. The idea of non-existence is applied, in reality to a sort of 'quoted' object, a description of a potential object, and determines whether that description has instances.

Existence is the opposite of non-existence, so it must also be a property of potential descriptions, and not of actual things.

We want to think of time as the continuum along which all things exist. But if being is not really something that things 'do', then time is just an elaborate convention, not a real thing. He calls this a 'form of intuition', a necessary part of every description, which is necessary because of the structure of animal minds, and not a real aspect of anything other than potential descriptions. Space is likewise not real, but only a mental model.

Things have relationships 'in time and space' because humans need to experience many things that are all combined into a single, inseparable reality as separate objects in order to comprehend them. But he theorizes that the separation is not necessary for more advanced forms of intelligence, or would not be the same for alien beings. Every being with a mind has a nature dictated by its forms of intuition, its 'autonomy' which allows it to know when its judgments will serve it well.

So Kant agrees that everything that is ultimately real must be eternal and absolute, but that we cannot address the eternal and absolute until we are able to put aside time and space, which we cannot do in the form we take.

We can only interpret the correlations that phenomenal (spatio-temporal) reality has with the underlying 'noumenal' reality, and we cannot build or rely on an understanding of those relationships themselves because they are in fact relationships between things that we experience, and things that we cannot comprehend. Instead, we are limited to recognizing patterns and combining them according to the forms of intuition that are built into us, like space and time, logic and judgment.

Answer 3

Most philosophy does not delve into how the universe as a whole, (or this planet in particular as an object), came into being.

Philosophy is mostly engaged with how we relate and perceive our existence and the connections that those perceptions may create. That is the 'being' part of philosophy. Functionally, we are creatures of magnificent adaptation. Human beings have learned not only live, but to thrive, on almost every natural environment on the planet.

So, "How does being come into being?" As soon as there is consciousness of being, there is being.

Aristotle created the initial metaphysical idea in Being Qua Being (Being On Being), Ontology. I prefer to consider it in modern terms as Qua Being Qua (On Being On). The difference is that, after many centuries, we are well trained from an early age focus on who we are in the world. The 'Qua' essence is what philosophies are now formulating as the abstract principals we bring 'into being'. People 'know' each other by 'how they be.

Short version; Philosophy will not be able to help you answer the questions of creation. It will assist you to look at what it means to be made from the dust of stars, and create your own poetry (and value) for that.

• I suggest you begin with Aristotle and Plato first, to see the core tenants of Western Metaphysics and Philosophy. The ideas of modern philosophies you ask about will be easier to understand if you know the root ideas.

Answer 4

There are two ways to look into the problem.

1. Most philosophies assume one (or more) primal form of something, one of whose property is "existence". That thing(s) is(are) eternal or better uncaused. Rest of the things come into being when the rearrangement of that primal form (or derivatives thereof) into something that fulfills the definition of that thing. Like a fruit may come into being by transformation of a flower when the rearrangement of the constituents of the flower, lead to a thing that fits the definition of a fruit.

2. The other way to look at it is to argue that "existence" itself always exists (for it is existence) and lends itself to other things so that they start existing.

Answer 5

The answer that Aristotle have is that being comes from non-being; non-being is not nothing, but merely potentially being; when it is actual, it is being.

This theory was prompted by his theory of change and motion, which in turn was prompted by the questions that Parmenides and Zeno uncovered on change and motion.

What relevance does this have for contemporary notions of being? Well, our most best accepted theory of matter is QM. And here, what is actual, and therefore graspable, that is measurable, was once potential. To put it in more physically conventional terms: the wave function of a system is a potential which evolves according to a law and collapses randomly on measurement to a value in its spectrum, and this is the actual value measured.

Answer 6

How does being come into being? How does existence come into existence?

You presuppose one thing here. You say being/existence come into it. But what is the ground behind it?

From my point the question itself is not valid. Our mind and, probably, universe is constrained by some rules. And you may understand these constraints by looking the difference between our language and our thoughts.

Our languages has a hugr amount of words and there are dictionaries showing their meaning. But then, let we look for definition of "definition". We will use the words used there, look for their definition and so on up until infinity. This problem may be solved only if we have some basis, words that do not require definition. But how do we understand their meaning? Through common sense, of course. Now you may see that language is much less expressive and more constrained than our mind.

But our minds themselves are costrained. We think in yes/no logic. We use notions to think. But like language is weaker than mind, our mind is weaker than what you call "existence". And it may turn out so that our logic does not work for the whole existence.

You may see analogy in mathematics. Mathematics uses some axioms (constraints) to work. It is said without constraints it is nothing to think of. And same might apply to existence. For sure, there are no reasons to say everything has constraints. Thus, constraints are not universal and our words, our notions and logic do not apply there. But if so, we cannot say anything about unconstrained part of existence. We cannot even call it somehow. And can't say it comes into itself.

So, your mistake is to apply our constrained logic to unconstrained. And your question loses it's senses.

Answer 7

You can find similar idea in the Bagavad Gita also.

See: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/16

BG 2.16: Of the transient there is no endurance, and of the eternal there is no cessation. This has verily been observed by the seers of the truth, after studying the nature of both.

Explanation is given in the link. When the delusion ends one can realize that beingness...that existence...as you reasoned that there must be a possibility. [It is incomparable. It is beyond reasoning.]

Answer 8

So, the universe was created by the big bang.

No. The big bang was, to the best of our current knowledge, the beginning of the universe. But it didn't create the universe. Whether the universe was created at all is a completely different question that is not answered by the big bang theory. All we can say is that it's earliest moment (probably) was the big bang.

Simple logic dictates that being cannot come into being.

So what is this simple logic? Because I don't see it. Indeed, I'm not even completely sure what that sentence actually means.

Answer 9

Even though you are using different terminology, you are essentially asking what has been asked before:

1 - What created the universe (everything)?
2 - What created the creator of the universe?

You also state that "simple logic dictates that since something can not come out of nothing, it requires something to exist, for anything to come into being/exist."

If you believe in a "supreme being," the answers are very simple.
1 - The supreme being created the universe (everything).
2 - The supreme being always existed (with no beginning and no end). This is the one and only exception to the "simple logic."

If you don't, then there is a "bigger" universe that always existed and our universe is only a small part of it. So,
1 - our universe came out of the bigger universe, and
2 - the "bigger" universe has always existed.