Is there a definitive answer to this question, or is it still possible that 'nothing exists'?

Question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_there_is_anything_at_all

There are a few answers, but they do not seem to be certain, and there are arguments against answers to the question, what does this mean?

Answer 1

The OP's question asks whether Leibniz’ question

Why is there something rather than nothing?

has found an answer during the last 300 years.

Note: The question does not ask if there exists something, but why does there exist something. The question presupposes that there is a world in which we live.

Leibniz answered his own question by referring to God as the sufficient reason for all what exists. Concerning the existence of God Leibniz suspended the principle of sufficient reason and declared: God is “causa sui = the cause of his own existence”. Outside of a theological context this answer is not accepted, see also on this platform here.

IMO, Leibniz' question exceeds the scope of the human concept of sufficient reason and cannot be answered at the present time.

Answer 2

The nature of existence is such that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent. Impermanence is the Truth. Even nothing is impermanent because it arises conditionally, changes conditionally and vanishes conditionally. Impermanence is the permanent Truth of reality.

Answer 3

There's no definitive answer, but for me the best I've ever heard is ideas like Wolfram's Ruliad or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe, both variations of the idea that "something exists because everything exists" - everything's that's computable, mathematically or algorithmically, exists somewhere.

Answer 4

In order to ever answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" 

in a way that leaves no "somethings" left unexplained, I think we're going to have to start with "nothing". Otherwise, there will always be "something", either the stuff of the universe or the stuff that causes the universe, left unexplained.

So, my view is to try and figure out why any normal thing, like a book or tree,

exists and then see if we can apply it to "nothing". My rationale goes like this. I think a thing exists if it's a grouping that ties stuff (or no stuff as in the case of the empty set) together to create a new unit whole and existent entity. For physical/non-mental groupings, the grouping is visually manifested as the surface, or boundary, of the thing. For mental groupings like the concept "car", the grouping is better thought of as the mental label the mind gives to a set of collected sub-concepts. That is, the mental construct "car" groups together other concepts like tires, engine, chassis, use for transportation, etc. The grouping idea isn’t new. Others such as Aristotle (hylomorphism), Leibniz ("...that what is not truly one being is not truly one being either"), Graham Priest ("...it is clear that being and unity come to the same thing. If something is an object, it is one thing; and if it is one thing, it is certainly an object...To be is to be one..."), etc. have used the words “unity” or “one” instead of “grouping”, but the meaning seems to be the same. After all, what does a grouping into a new unit whole do if not create a unity or a one?

   Next, the grouping idea can be used to answer the WSRTN question.  When you 

subtract away everything (concrete, abstract, possible worlds, everything) that exists, including the mind of the person trying to imagine this, the resulting "nothing" would, by its very nature, be the whole amount or entirety of the situation, or state of affairs. That nothingness defines the situation completely. Is there anything else besides that "nothing"? No. It is "nothing", and that "nothing" is the all. A whole-amount/everything/"the all" is a grouping, which means that the situation we previously considered to be "absolute nothing" is itself an existent entity. One might object and say that being a grouping is a property so how can it be there in "nothing"? The answer is that the property of being a grouping (e.g., the all grouping) only appears after all else, including all properties and the mind of the person trying to imagine this, is gone. This grouping property is intrinsic to "nothing" and can't be removed to get a more "pure nothing". And, it is only present after all known existents are gone. So, existence is necessary, but at least this self-causing grouping aspect that's inherent to "nothing" provides an explanation, or mechanism.

I think two keys in visualizing absolute, metaphysical "nothingness" are 1.) in

realizing that the mind's conception of "nothing" is not the same as "nothing" itself, in which no minds are present. Of course, it's not possible to visualizing "nothing" in which our minds aren't there, but it's worth trying to get as close to possible and then extrapolating to try and imagine what "nothing" is when the mind isn't there. 2.) Humans define "nothing" as the opposite of being, but this is the human definition of "nothing". Humans aren't there in "nothing", so it seems like assuming that our definition of "nothing" as the opposite of being applies to "nothing" itself is unfounded assumption and prevents progress in answering the WSRTN question.

Thanks.

Answer 5

The concept of nothing and absolute zero (temperature) are very similar. Absolute zero "exists" but is impossible to achieve or measure. Nothing "exists" but is impossible to achieve or measure.

In physics, a "definitive answer" is measurable and repeatable.

Answer 6

One might approach the question of existence in the way that alethic nihilists approach the question of truth, i.e. because using the concept of existence results in a question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that is not only unanswerable for particular reasons having to do with the limits of our understanding, but unanswerable for a general reason of unintelligibility, then we would be better off no longer speaking of things as existing or not at all. (The perplexities of intentional and nonexistent objects also come to mind as inescapably inchoate examples of the hapless problematique generated by the concept of existence.)

Then what we will ask for explanations of, will not be the existences of things, but descriptions of things (including events) that are just "there." Nothing will be said to exist, just like that; we would speak only of the states of the things that "are there."

Quine worked on a modality-free system of logic, predicate functor logic. That this should be glossed as modality-free follows, I think, from Quine's project to escape modality-talk in the description and interpretation of things. Not a rejection of just possibility and necessity, then, but of actuality, too, as existence (and then existential quantification). On the other hand, Quine was one of the progenitors of an "indispensability argument" for quantifying over mathematical objects, so one wonders how strictly he was obsessed with being freed from modality, in the end. His partner in the indispensability argument, Hilary Putnam, famously said something about being willing to change his (Putnam's) mind as often as necessary when evidence and like considerations favored such changes, and Quine was seemingly not much of a dogmatist, either.

At any rate, yes, we might take the purported failure of attempts to explain existence in general as undermining the very question of existence in general, with the theoretical outcome that we reject existence-talk and say, in the limit, that nothing in fact exists (or fails to exist, though, for that matter). In this sense, perhaps we might style existence-talk as some sort of category mistake?