What Was Nothing Preceded By?

Article 1 in the series: In Search of the Foundations of Reality

When we try to think about the beginning of reality, we almost immediately become trapped in language. After all, our words emerged within an existing world of space, time, matter and causality. Concepts such as emergence, movement, change or process already presuppose the existence of time in which something can happen.

The moment we speak about “before” or “the beginning”, time silently slips back into the discussion. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to describe, using existing language, something that may precede space, time and matter themselves.

Perhaps the problem runs even deeper. Language automatically carries within it the structure of our reality. The crucial question therefore becomes: how can we ever capture in words what may have occurred in a pre-reality phase — a phase before matter, space or time existed? And if words fall short, might that pre-reality perhaps be approached more adequately through a mathematical language?

Another question also remains intriguing. There must have been a primordial state, preceding the period represented by the Big Bang. Even within that initial state — perhaps a state in which there was “nothing” — the principles that later appear as the laws of nature must already have been implicitly present. Yet these ordering principles must always have existed, even though they had not yet manifested themselves in explicit form.

Perhaps “nothing” should therefore be understood differently. Not as a total absence, but as a completely undifferentiated state in which space, time, matter and processes did not yet exist, yet which may nevertheless have contained an inherent potentiality. This immediately raises another question. Why should order or structure emerge at all from such a potential state? Why should distinctions arise between plus and minus, high and low, coherence and difference?

Perhaps the possibility of order is already embedded within the deepest structure of reality itself. Not in the form of matter or energy, nor as explicit laws of nature expressed through formulas, but as a fundamental possibility for coherence, distinction and structure formation. At this point, the idea begins to touch upon the thinking of Baruch Spinoza, who argued that God does not exist outside humanity, but rather manifests within everything itself.

Here too, language once again falls short. The moment we speak of “eternal laws of nature”, it already seems as though space and time are present. Perhaps it is therefore better not to speak of pre-existing laws of nature, but rather of an immaterial ordering principle: an inherent possibility for reality to organise itself relationally.

That ordering principle is not located somewhere. “Somewhere” already presupposes space. It should instead be understood as a fundamental possibility for coherence and structure formation. Not as a supernatural intelligence, but as a deeper potential order that has not yet materially manifested itself.

In that sense, material reality would not be the beginning of order, but rather a later manifestation of ordering principles that are always and everywhere present. Perhaps physics and philosophy meet precisely at this point — not in providing definitive answers, but in recognising that we are attempting to speak about a reality that may precede the very categories within which our thinking and language themselves emerged.

Perhaps, then, the ordering principles of nature constitute the absolute point of origin. A beginning before time, space, matter, radiation or anything else existed. Perhaps it was precisely these ordering principles that formed the conditions under which the first “something” could emerge from “nothing”.

The next question, then, is whether we may be able to identify the conditions under which these ordering principles could give rise to the first “something”. What is the first structural distinction through which a process of becoming could set itself in motion?