Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language

Question

The existence of beginning. Origin/start/begin. All require something before. Are all just arbitrary measurements of traits we find of interest. Mapping how they change over time? The global Idea of Creation myths rely on a first beginning before anything. With no evidence of something coming from nothing ever witnessed. Does this mean there was never any beginning? leaving the only explanation that existence has always just existed. Without ever beginning? Or Is the very Topic A misunderstanding of applied language. Where the words used to phrase the questions, are themselves more misunderstood leading to them becoming interchangeable. Is humanities age old obsession with creation. More the study of language rather than how something can come from nothing? (feel free to give helpful criticism to revise or clarify this conceptualization)

Answer 1

It took a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, to propose an expanding universe in 1927. Einstein in 1915 had added a term to his General Relativity equations to produce the steady-state universe he assumed must be the case. It's pretty clear what Lemaitre's bias was, expansion implies a beginning, and a moment of Creation. It's interesting to me than in Buddhist thought they insist the cosmos is eternal, but has cycles, with the Creator deity simply the first into this realm after it's cycle of destruction, arriving from another realm, and when another later being arrived after the first wished company and it was simply mistaken in thinking it had created it.

As you say that moment of Creation leaves a puzzle. From what? How did the initial state of simplicity, of concentrated high energy and low entropy occur, given our experience says those are unlikely to occur by chance? We think time began with the Big Bang, so we may not be able to meaningfully talk about 'before' it. The idea there was also simply no space in the same way, is perhaps even more conceptually unsettling. Loop Quantum gravity and String Theory, propose our spacetime as emergent, as arising from a more fundamental and more complex domain. Another way to go is a new picture of an eternal cosmos, in the shape of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (Wikipedia link). In short it could go either way, and in truth the real answer may well be beyond our comprehension, our cognitive biases about what we expect likely obscure our chance to see other options.

You seem to be after something more general. If you say why would the universe arise from nothing, you can equally say, why not? If the likelihood of something arising from nothing is low, it still happens, like very occassional spontaneous electron-positron pair production from vacuum fluctuations. The universe starting might have been incredibly unlikely, but in an infinite era of nothingness there could still be a finite chance of it. One idea goes that the energy of particles and the energy of their fields have opposite signs, implying if everything was together once again they would cancel out, and that the universe could literally be made from no energy (there are issues with this picture because energy is not conserved in an expanding universe, but every chance better theories that for instance account for dark-matter, could reconcile with this picture).

Causality as a notion is suspect in modern physics, which has replaced them with probabilities that conform to continuous symmetries, which is to say conservation laws. For discussion see here: Is the idea of a causal chain physical (or even scientific)? The TLDR is, we humans love narratives, to tell stories of things that happen to subjects, that's obe of our deepest cognitive biases. But it seems the cosmos is a pattern, not a story. What we really mean when we ask about a beginning is, how do we tell the story of how we got here, and most of all we want to find from that story, what 8s our place in it, how should we situate ourselves towards the world, the cosmos? Really it's a category error to go to physics for that, and it leads towards a kind of 'cargo cult' mentality towards whatever the new thing in physics is. They say the Greek medical model of balancing the humours was influenced by aquaducts and sewers needed for a healthy city. Newton's era saw a cosmos of clockwork. Victorians understood ourselves and the world as like engines. Now in the era of computing we coincidentally think the movements of quantum information and it's limitation to light speed (except in a sense for entanglement), are fundamental. We see what we are ready to see, and history teaches us it will probably be at best partial, and at worst dangerously wrong.

We should turn to different directions for meaning, for making sense of ourselves. And we should recognise the role of our choices, and of creativity in it, rather than thinking we can just find a sense of meaning and place by observing alone. The disentangling of meaning-cosmologies from physical cosmology discussed here: What are some philosophical works that explore constructing meaning in life from an agnostic or atheist view?

Answer 2

The question of the beginning or no-beginning of the universe is not a “misunderstanding of applied language”.

The issue is more serious: Currently we lack the concepts to think about this question. It seems that our thoughts are trapped within traditional principles, which arise from thinking about every-day phenomena and events.

The endless discussion about beginning or no-beginning of the universe shows the limits of our current concepts and principles. One cannot tackle these questions using as tool our traditional concepts. At the moment, these questions have to be left open.

The question of the beginning of life on earth ("chicken or egg") seems to be an easier problem. It has been tackled by means of molecular chemistry and microbiology. The clue is the interdependent development of nucleid acids and aminoacids, the entangled development of information carriers and protein-synthesis on the basis of this information.