Metaphysician by calling
Neo-Genesis 0
In the beginning was Awareness,
and Awareness was with Being,
and Awareness was Being.
One of the basic and commonly asked questions of metaphysics is: why is there something rather than nothing? For clarity’s sake since we are involved in philosophy, we will substitute the term nothingness for nothing as it is the preferred term denoting a general state of non-existence. The fact there is something tells us that if there were nothingness, then there could have been something–that nothingness could potentially become something. We also know that nothingness would lack and boundary or limit and could not have any gaps. We can refer to this as the no-boundary condition. But if nothingness has potential and cannot be limited, then it cannot remain as it is, for that would be to remain limited to what it is. The potential to be something must be actualized. But it cannot become just any something. It must transition into a very specific something–awareness. It is only through awareness that it is possible to distinguish between something and nothingness. This means that it would be necessary for there to be a gradual transition from nothingness to awareness. Awareness of what? Awareness of being–awareness synonymous with being. At this point we have the starting point of the idealist philosophy.
If we were to rerun this analysis from the materialist perspective, we would need to be able to answer why was there a fully developed mathematics, a set of equations, and set of ideally tuned physical constants that at one point magically exploded from a singularity to become the universe as we know it, or possibly an unimaginably large number of universes that together make up a multiverse rather than nothingness. This is a much less rational and more complex starting point than the idealist one outlined above. If we were to apply science’s Law of Parsimony, commonly referred to as Occam’s Razor, we would have to use the idealist’s starting point rather than the materialist’s since it is not just the simpler, but the irreducibly simplest.
We can also reverse the process. As an alternative, we can consider the results of stripping existence of all content. Once again, we are left with awareness of being. Awareness/being is not the content of existence but the context; it would remain after all content had been removed. And if we then remove awareness as the context of existence, we are then back to nothingness with potential for something. Our conclusions would seem to be validated.
P.S. This I is offered as a revision to my original starting point where I held that the question of “why is there nothing rather than something?” was unanswerable and hence existence was a contingency that had to be accepted as a brute fact.
To clarify accepted terminology (a partial reference to the Wikipedia entry for nothing):
"Nothing", used as a pronoun subject, denotes the absence of a something or particular thing that one might expect or desire to be present ("We found nothing," "Nothing was there") or the inactivity of a thing or things that are usually or could be active ("Nothing moved," "Nothing happened"). As a predicate or complement "nothing" denotes the absence of meaning, value, worth, relevance, standing, or significance ("It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing"; "The affair meant nothing"; "I'm nothing in their eyes").[1] "Nothingness" is a philosophical term that denotes the general state of nonexistence, sometimes reified as a domain or dimension into which things pass when they cease to exist or out of which they may come to exist, e.g., God is understood to have created the universe ex nihilo, "out of nothing."[1][2]
The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Śūnyatā (emptiness), unlike "nothingness", is considered to be a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu, and Bodhi). Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in this tradition allows one to be totally focused on a thought or activity at a level of intensity that they would not be able to achieve if they were consciously thinking. A classic example of this is an archer attempting to erase the mind and clear the thoughts to better focus on the shot. Some authors have pointed to similarities between the Buddhist conception of nothingness and the ideas of Martin Heidegger and existentialists like Sartre,[20][21] although this connection has not been explicitly made by the philosophers themselves.
In some Eastern philosophies, the concept of "nothingness" is characterized by an egoless state of being in which one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos.