Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Thought Experiment

Imagine the following: a perfect simulation of a world is running on a supercomputer. Inside that world lives a person. Not a game character, but someone who feels, thinks, and remembers. To him, his reality is as solid as ours.

Now we shut the machine off. From the outside, our immediate intuition is clear: this person disappears with the loss of power; his world dissolves into nothing. His consciousness seems to hang by an electrical thread.

But what if, a week later, we turn the computer back on and resume the simulation from the exact same state? For that person, nothing happened. No waiting, no pause. His life continued as if it had been an instant.

This small thought experiment leaves us with the following intuition: the reality of a simulated world appears to depend on the electrical impulses of the machine that runs it.

Intuition Bomb

So far, intuition does not seem problematic. The simulation lives on the computer and dies when the computer is turned off. But let's think a bit further.

Suppose the same simulation isn't run on a digital processor, but with pen and paper. A patient and obsessive person performs every step manually, following the program's rules. Every calculation the computer would perform in nanoseconds is written carefully in a notebook. And at the end, after an impossible amount of hours, the result appears: the output of the simulation. Say the notebook reads "happy", because in that moment the simulated person was happy.

So where is the consciousness in this case? There are no transistors or electrical signals. Just a notebook filled with pencil marks. Is the consciousness inside the paper? In the pencil graphite? Does it shut off when we close the notebook? Doesn't all of this feel absurd?

The same would apply if we use vacuum tubes, an abacus, or even a group of people manually executing each algorithmic step. The "simulated person" doesn't depend on the specific technology we use to represent it. The simulation can always be transferred to another medium.

And that's when the intuition breaks: perhaps the consciousness of that being doesn't depend on any machine at all. Maybe the computer (or notebook, or abacus) is simply a tool for us to represent the state of a another world at a specific moment.

A Mathematical Analogy

To ground this intuition, let's consider something simpler: a mathematical function.

Take the most trivial function you can think of, for example: y = x + 1. You can plot it on a computer, or calculate its values by hand:

If x = 0, then y = 1.
If x = 1, then y = 2.
If x = 2, then y = 3.
And so on, forever.

Now, does this function only exist while someone is graphing or calculating it? Does it vanish the moment we turn off the computer or close the notebook? Obviously not. No one would say that the straight line defined by y = x + 1 ceases to exist just because we're not looking at it.

The common intuition is that mathematical functions "are there", independent of our representations. When we draw them on paper or on a screen, we're not creating them, we're observing a piece of something that already exists.

Mathematical analysis, in this sense, is like opening a window. We don't manufacture functions, we investigate them.

Every Simulated World Is Just a Complex Function

If we easily accept that a simple function like y = x + 1 exists (at least in some abstract sense) beyond our representation of it, why not apply the same logic to more complex systems?

A simulated world is, in essence, just a highly intricate function: a set of rules that determine how one state evolves into the next. Mathematically, there is no difference in kind between the line y = x + 1 and an entire universe with stars, oceans, and conscious beings. The only difference is complexity.

Just as a linear function exists even if no one draws it, a simulated world exists even if no one runs it. When we turn on the machine, we don't create the world. We simply generate a representation of it. A window. The world itself does not live or die with the hardware.

And if this holds true for simulated worlds... why not for our own?

Infinite Worlds

If a simulated world doesn't stop existing when we shut down the machine, but instead exists by virtue of its logical soundness, a huge consequence follows: there isn't just one possible world. There are many. Probably infinitely many.

Because if the rule is that every logically consistent system "is something," then there's no reason to stop at this universe. All other describable, non-contradictory worlds also exist.

This, of course, is counterintuitive. We're used to thinking of this world as the only real one, and everything else as fiction. Possibilities that "could have been," but weren't. But from this perspective, those possibilities aren't floating in some hypothetical limbo: they exist too. Not as imagined futures or potential outcomes, but as fully real worlds, just like ours.

If that's the case, then the multiplicity of worlds isn't some imaginative excess. It's the natural outcome of logic. Any attempt to say "only some worlds exist, not all" would be arbitrary. A human-centered intuition, not a universal rule.

The universe we inhabit isn't the real one. It's just our real one. We experience it as unique, like a room feels unique to the person inside it. But that doesn't mean the other rooms don't exist. They're simply separate, inaccessible, self-contained.

Concrete and Abstract Are Just Perspectives

At this point, a central question arises: if infinite worlds exist, what makes our world feel different? Why does it feel so concrete, while the others seem merely abstract?

The simplest answer is: we confuse perspective with essence.

From our point of view, this world is physical, immediate, solid. We can touch it, measure it, bump into it. The other worlds, being out of reach, we call "abstract".

But let's flip the perspective. Imagine again the simulated being. For him, his world is physical and concrete. His objects have weight, texture, color. His sky is as real to him as ours is to us. Our universe, the one containing the computer or the notebook, would be totally inaccessible to him. From his point of view, we are the abstract ones.

This reveals something important: abstract and concrete aren't two different ways of being. They only refer to the perspective of the observer. What is concrete to someone inside a system appears abstract to someone outside of it and vice versa.

In this light, "physical existence" just means being inside a system. But ultimately, every world, ours included, shares the same ontological status: a consistent logical structure.

Even our supposedly "solid" universe is no less abstract than a mathematical function. The concrete is a point of view. The abstract is another. Both are just aspects of the same thing.

Where Are These Other Worlds?

When we hear that infinite worlds exist, our first impulse is to imagine some enormous space containing them all, like bubbles floating in a cosmic sea. But that image is misleading. It comes from our physical intuition: in this world, things exist in space and relate to each other within it.

Other worlds are not "in" any place, because space itself is an internal property of each world. Our universe has its own spacetime, with its dimensions and laws. Another possible universe might have its own, with entirely different rules. But there is no shared space that holds them all together.

That means these worlds can't collide or overlap. They are logically coexistent, but not spatially related. No proximity, no distance. Just independence.

Think of all the fictional stories that have ever been told. Each story contains its own narrative, its own setting, its own internal laws. From inside the story, characters have no way of stepping into another story. Not because someone prevents it, but because "being beside another story" doesn't even make sense within the story.

The same applies to worlds: each is complete in itself, self-contained under its own rules. And our universe is just one more story in that great set of stories.

Conclusion: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

We finally arrive at Leibniz's question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

The traditional answer seeks a first cause: a creator God, a prime mover, a necessary being that explains the leap from emptiness to existence. But that leap is only a problem if we think of existence as something rare. Something that needs special permission to happen.

What we've seen throughout this exploration points in the opposite direction. There's no need to explain why something exists instead of nothing. The real question is: how could there possibly be nothing?

Because everything that can exist, does exist. Mere logical possibility is already a kind of being. A function as simple as y = x + 1 doesn't need to be drawn to be real. And a complex world, with galaxies and consciousness, doesn't need to be executed on a processor to be real either. Its consistency is enough.

Existence isn't a privilege reserved for this universe. It's the general condition of anything that is logically possible. And "nothing", if even possible, would only be one of the possible worlds.

From inside a world, we call "concrete" what we can touch and measure. From outside, that same world looks abstract. But ultimately, those differences are just a matter of angle. Ontologically, our world and any other share the same status.

That's why we're here. Not because a god decreed it. Not because a cosmic dice roll broke the silence. We're here because there was no alternative. Everything that can be, is.