I see no evidence that something has not always existed. At most, the Big Bang suggests a phase transition of some sort not yet determined, not a creation event or something from nothing.
The way I consider as 'before' the big bang is like that moment after a computer is powered on, but before the boot loader has finished populating RAM with the OS, before the OS actually starts running. Everything that WAS there is getting clobbered by a completely different process, in fact by a completely different processor, than normally runs on the machine.
Eventually once the BIOS has loaded, the processor takes over and the system entered an entirely new paradigm of operation.
The problem here is that all trace of what was happening before, whatever was in the memory, was in the process of being "pounced". It doesn't matter once the system starts executing, and it can't be made sense of from the contents of memory after.
From the perspective of most of the system, all that initial state stuff comes in from "nowhere".
From the perspective of the debugger with only access to "normal memory", there's no way to observe what was going on before that happened, before power turned on, because as you say a
transition occurs there that puts it into an entirely new paradigm of operation.
Still, even before the computer was powered on, the memory was there, the bios was there, the processor was there... It just wasn't "on".
If I were in an environment inside a computer reading the instructions of the system, I would be lost were I to trace things back all the way to the initial entry; there's no further to go. That's "the beginning of process time".
Part of this is so difficult, too, because time is much more complicated than most people think it is. After all, of "process time" is a sort of "time" and it is subordinate to our view of time, then time as we experience is not the end-all be-all of 'time'
Something other than free will and determinism.
? Whataboutism?
Google sez the 8 great isms are:
"racism, sexism, capitalism, socialism, feminism, ableism, ageism, nationalism, and environmentalism".
I'm fine with saying nothing (as in absolute nothingness) can't exist. It can't exist by definition.
Then, can nihilism even exist?
Yup, the Universe is still completely purposeless. It's just that there must always be something that exists because nothingness is logically impossible. That doesn't necessarily mean our Universe is eternal either, though, and I have no idea if there are other Universes either. It may be whatever caused the Universe to expand is eternal, or it may be something else that's eternal, but we'll probably never know what the eternal thing is.
In some respects, I find the idea of "eternal" to be problematic, because time itself is just ONE dimension of change, and even if you have all the "frames" or "distance" along that dimension graphed, "eternalness" isn't actually capable of removing the
dimensionality there.
You take a block view and call that "eternal", but it's not. Time is still right there, it's the dimension along which you arranged the frames. Indeed you escaped nothing.
The only thing that exists free of that dimension of time are the rules themselves which define the transformation and
even those rules are STILL contextual to that space.
This would imply that the
only thing utter or eternal with respect to
all possibility is in fact
noncontradiction.
Everything else depends on some momentary context.
en.wikipedia.org
