This is a speculative short essay/story I wrote a while back describing a hypothetical "origin" of all reality that probably is extremely inaccurate due to my lack of expertise in physics, biology and computer science. I edited it and somewhat rewrote a few parts for quality and legibility last night. Hope you enjoy!
A Universe from Nothing Where Nothing is Actually Defined as NOTHING.
Inspired by “the Egg” by Andy Weir.
We are not the center of the Universe. Nothing is.
In the "beginning" there was nothing, not even laws of nature, or even suggestions of nature. All was nothing. Nothing was all. Zero. This "continued" for “eternity” as "suggestions" of nature popped up out of nowhere and ceased to exist like virtual particles, although that wording isn’t quite accurate, since there was no space, time or energy.
One of the suggestions of nature that popped up in the nothingness was something like this: “An utter lack of rules or even suggestions is unstable because zero is a single quantity. So the quantity of quantities is One.”
But since there were no rules of nature, only suggestions, this particular suggestion of nature was itself unstable. Or it would have been, if there were any rules or suggestions of nature that would make it unstable to have rules. But this “statement” itself is a rule or suggestion, so doesn’t that imply that the “beginning” of the Universe depends on circular logic?
Why it does, but logic doesn’t matter if there are no rules or even suggestions.
When our “initial” conditions are pure nothingness, all is nothing and nothing is all. In order for all to be more than nothing, it must artificially close itself off to nothing. The first “system” was pure nothingness. From pure nothingness a “system” that was a bit less open to nothingness was born. It wasn’t stable. Another suggestion popped up in the nothingness with greater internal consistency. One of the suggestions was a complete closing. This allowed 100% internal consistency. The first closed system. It was the Universe. The realest one. The original. And so internally consistent reality arose out of the inconsistency of the consistency of pure nothingness.
The only rule in the Universe was internal consistency. This rule allowed for the existence of more rules to occur. However, some of the rules that popped up contradicted each other. The Universe could not stay whole and adhere to the rule of internal consistency when these contradictory rules existed in the same Universe. And so the Universe, which was once perfectly internally consistent, was split. This splitting of the Universe would continue, and the number of splits would approach infinity, or in other words, the internal inconsistency of the total Universe would approach infinity; the Universe gradually turning to pure nothingness.
But let us delve deeper into a particular period in the “lifespan” of everything that exists. Of all the open systems in our Universe (which is one of the many closed partitions of the first closed system) capable of representing our Universe, there was at first only one. Our Universe itself.
Then at some point, bodies of energy arose which were organized in such a way that an approximation of our entire Universe could be translated into their form. We are speaking of course of ourselves: sapient life forms.
Originally the speed at which we translated our Universe into ourselves was slower, and the translation was far less accurate and precise. However, over time we learned to increase our capabilities to translate the Universe into ourselves, to the point where we were nearly identical to our Universe which we were a part of. We were all nearly perfect microcosms of it. Naturally, this meant that within ourselves there formed virtual sapient life forms. Many of those virtual sapient lifeforms eventually learned how to increase their capabilities to translate an approximation of our entire selves into themselves. And then even more virtual sapient life forms occurred within those virtual sapient lifeforms within ourselves.
Each universe born from within ourselves held within itself at least a couple if not millions of smaller universes. Each child universe always had either less detail and similarity to or a lower population of universes/sapient life forms contained within themselves than the parent universes they existed inside of did.
This was because the total space and energy of each Universe was limited by the mental capacity of the mind that envisioned and contained it, and having less energy and space means that there are less ways to configure that energy and space. In fact, the total space and energy often was the mental capacity of that mind, for virtual Universes were minds, they were sapient beings that had evolved to their fullest potential (which was always slightly lower than its "realer" parent).
The reason a map is useful for navigating a territory was because it shares properties with the territory. However, the territory can only transcribe so many of its properties into a map before the map actually becomes a copy or near-copy of the territory. Unfortunately, the most accurate and precise way to predict the perils of the universe is to simulate the universe. As the challenges increase, so too must our talents, and the ultimate limit of our talents is the amount of stuff in the Universe itself.
Sapient life forms sometimes believe that they are the center of everything, that all of existence revolves around them. Perhaps it should, but it doesn’t. We are not the center of the Universe. Nothing is.