The Problem of Beginnings: IX. Returning to the Big Bang

We can now return to the question with which we began.

What happened before the Big Bang?

The temptation is to answer.

Perhaps there was another universe.

Perhaps there was a quantum state.

Perhaps there was a multiverse.

Perhaps something else entirely.

These may be serious scientific possibilities.

But they do not answer the conceptual question we have been following.

For if time itself begins with the universe we are describing, then before cannot simply mean an earlier moment within that universe.

If a theory proposes some prior state, then we can ask whether that state belongs to a larger temporal framework.

If it does, we have moved the beginning elsewhere.

If it does not, then before may no longer be the right relation.

The same applies to space.

We might imagine something existing outside the universe.

But if the universe means the totality of space-time under consideration, then “outside” cannot simply mean another place.

We have learned to be suspicious of cosmic containers.

And then there is causation.

What caused the Big Bang?

Perhaps something did.

But we cannot infer this merely from the fact that events within the universe have causes.

A cause is a relation between things or events within some structure.

The emergence of that structure is not automatically another instance of the same relation.

None of this tells us what happened at the beginning of the universe.

It tells us something more modest.

It tells us to be careful about what our questions presuppose.

And this matters because the popular versions of these questions often take concepts that work beautifully at the local level and simply enlarge them.

A local beginning becomes the beginning of everything.

A local cause becomes the cause of everything.

An empty place becomes nothingness.

An earlier event becomes something before time.

But enlarging a concept does not guarantee that its conditions of application survive the enlargement.

A map of a city cannot simply be enlarged until it becomes a map of the whole world.

At some point, the map itself becomes part of what needs explaining.

Perhaps our questions about the beginning of the universe have something of this character.

We have been trying to stand outside the universe in order to explain it.

But there may be no outside from which to stand.

And this gives us the boon we can finally bring home:

A concept that works within a world cannot automatically be used to explain the conditions of that world.

This is not a prohibition on asking cosmic questions.

Quite the opposite.

It may be what allows us to ask better ones.

Instead of asking only:

What happened before the Big Bang?

we might ask:

What does “before” mean in the context of a theory in which time itself has a boundary?

Instead of:

What caused the universe?

we might ask:

What conditions make causal explanation possible, and do those conditions extend beyond the universe?

Instead of:

Why was there something rather than nothing?

we might ask:

What makes “nothing” intelligible as an alternative to something?

The questions have not disappeared.

They have become more difficult.

But they have also become more precise.

And perhaps that is what the journey was for.

We went looking for an answer to the question of the beginning.

We came back carrying a way of noticing when the question itself has crossed a boundary.

There is only one thing left to ask.

Why did we imagine the beginning in the first place?

The Problem of Beginnings: VIII. The Beginning That Has No Before

We have been trying to imagine the beginning of the universe as an event.

Something happens.

And then the universe exists.

But an event normally has a place in a sequence.

There is a before.

There is an after.

Something changes.

That is what makes it an event.

So if the universe began, we are tempted to imagine the beginning as the first event in a sequence.

But then we immediately ask:

What came before it?

Perhaps the difficulty is now clear.

We are treating the beginning as though it were an ordinary event.

But perhaps it is not.

A beginning within the universe can have a before.

A beginning of the temporal order cannot have a temporal before in the same sense.

This does not mean that nothing happened.

It means that the word happened may itself depend upon the order whose emergence we are trying to describe.

The same applies to space.

We can ask where an event happened because events occur somewhere.

But if space itself is part of what begins, asking where the universe began may be asking for a location outside the very field of locations.

And causation presents the same difficulty.

We can ask what caused an event because causes and effects stand in relations within an already structured world.

But the emergence of that structure cannot automatically be treated as another event within it.

Perhaps we have been making the same mistake in three different forms.

We have imagined:

a time before time,

a place outside space,

a cause before causation.

Each seems to require a larger framework in which the thing being explained can occur.

But if the beginning concerns the emergence of the framework itself, the framework cannot simply be placed around it.

This suggests a different meaning of beginning.

Perhaps a beginning is not always the first event.

Sometimes it is the point at which a new order becomes possible.

A musical composition begins when its first note sounds.

But the possibility of melody depends upon relations among sounds.

A language begins for a child not with the first word in the abstract, but with the emergence of a system of distinctions through which words can become meaningful.

A path begins when movement acquires a direction.

In each case, the beginning is not merely an item.

It is the emergence of a new field of possibilities.

Perhaps something similar is required when we think about the universe.

We need not imagine a thing appearing at a location outside space.

Nor an event occurring before time.

Nor a cause operating before causation.

We might instead ask:

When did there first exist a world in which events, places, causes and possibilities could become distinguishable?

That question is still difficult.

But it no longer demands an impossible vantage point outside the world.

And perhaps this is the clue we have been looking for.

The beginning of something need not itself belong to the order that it makes possible.

The beginning of time need not have a time before it.

The beginning of space need not have a place beyond it.

The beginning of a causal order need not have a prior cause in that order.

A beginning can be real without being preceded.

Perhaps that is what we have been trying to imagine all along.

Not the first thing.

But the first becoming.

And if so, there is one final question.

If the beginning is the emergence of new possibilities, what does that tell us about the world that comes afterwards?

Perhaps we have been looking for the beginning as though it were the answer.

Perhaps the beginning is only where the question changes.

The Problem of Beginnings: VII. When Possibility Begins

We have been looking for the beginning.

First in time.

Then before time.

Then in nothing.

Then in a cause.

Then in a background.

Finally, in a first difference.

Each time, the beginning moved.

Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong direction.

We have assumed that, before something happens, its possibility is already there.

A seed can become a tree because becoming a tree is already possible.

A building can be constructed because its construction is possible.

A person can learn a language because the possibility of learning it already exists.

Possibility seems to come first.

But does it?

Consider the first door.

Before there was a door, was there a possibility of entering that room?

Perhaps.

But entering became possible in a particular way only when there was a doorway.

The possibility was not simply waiting somewhere.

It emerged with the relation between the spaces.

We encounter this everywhere.

A path becomes possible when there is somewhere to go.

A conversation becomes possible when there are speakers who can respond.

A tool becomes possible when there is something it can be used to do.

A new form of life becomes possible when new relations among conditions arise.

Possibilities seem to multiply as the world acquires new distinctions and relations.

Perhaps possibility is not a warehouse.

Perhaps it is a becoming.

This changes the problem of beginnings.

If possibility itself can emerge, then asking:

What was possible before the universe?

may be no easier than asking what was happening before time.

Possible for whom?

Possible where?

Possible within what relations?

A possibility is not simply a thing waiting to become actual.

It is a way in which things could become otherwise.

And ways of becoming otherwise depend upon what already exists.

The possibility of a door depends upon walls, openings, movement, rooms.

The possibility of speech depends upon bodies, sounds, listeners, and histories.

The possibility of life depends upon conditions that make life possible.

Possibility seems therefore to have a history.

Not necessarily a history of things that were once possible and then became impossible.

A history of new possibilities becoming available.

This gives us a different way of thinking about beginnings.

Perhaps the universe did not begin when the first thing appeared.

Perhaps what began was a field in which new possibilities could continually emerge.

A beginning would then not be the transition:

nothing → something.

Nor even:

one state → another.

It would be something more subtle:

a world acquiring the capacity to become otherwise.

If so, the first difference mattered because it made further differences possible.

The first relation mattered because it made further relations possible.

And what we call a universe may be less like a thing that appeared than like a process in which possibilities continually become available.

We began by asking:

What came before the universe?

Now another question has taken its place:

What would it mean for possibility itself to have a beginning?

Perhaps the answer is not that possibility suddenly appeared.

Perhaps possibility began when there was finally something that could be otherwise.

The Problem of Beginnings: VI. The First Difference

We have removed the background.

There was no earlier time.

No empty space.

No prior state.

No obvious cause.

So perhaps we have finally reached the beginning.

But there is still a problem.

A beginning must begin something.

And for something to become something, it must become distinguishable.

A thing becomes this rather than that.

An event becomes one event rather than another.

A boundary separates one region from another.

Difference makes distinction possible.

So perhaps the universe began with a difference.

But immediately the old question returns.

A difference from what?

We seem to need two sides.

Something here.

Something there.

A before and an after.

A this and a not-this.

But if this is the first difference, there cannot already be a fully formed second side waiting for it.

Otherwise it was not first.

We have arrived at a strange possibility.

Perhaps the first difference cannot be a difference between two already existing things.

Perhaps it is the difference that makes two things possible.

That sounds almost impossible to imagine.

Yet we encounter smaller versions of it everywhere.

A boundary does not merely separate two already independent territories.

It helps make them distinct as territories.

A doorway does not simply sit between two rooms.

It makes an inside and an outside available as places one can enter and leave.

A distinction can therefore be productive.

It does not merely describe a difference.

It can establish one.

Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe is so difficult to picture.

We keep imagining the first thing.

But perhaps the more primitive event is not a thing at all.

It is a distinction.

Not:

Something appeared.

But:

Something became distinguishable.

And yet even that formulation is dangerous.

Distinguishable from what?

We are tempted to answer immediately.

From nothing.

But we have already learned that nothing has no address.

So perhaps the first difference does not stand between something and nothing.

Perhaps it is the beginning of the very possibility of distinguishing something from something else.

There would be no completed world waiting on either side.

There would be only the emergence of a distinction from which a world of differences could develop.

This changes the meaning of “first.”

The first need not be the earliest item in a sequence.

It might be the first condition under which a sequence becomes possible.

And perhaps a beginning is not necessarily an event that happens first.

Perhaps it is the emergence of a difference from which before and after can subsequently become meaningful.

If so, the question—

What came before the first difference?

—has become almost impossible to ask.

For “before” is now one of the things the difference makes possible.

We began by looking for the first thing.

Perhaps we should have been looking for the first distinction.

But there is one problem left.

If possibility itself depends upon relations and distinctions, then perhaps even possibility has a history.

And if that is true, we have not yet reached the beginning.

We have reached something stranger:

the point at which possibility itself begins to become possible.

The Problem of Beginnings: V. The Background That Wasn't There

A beginning usually has a background.

A match is struck in a room.

A tree grows from the ground.

A building rises on a site.

A conversation begins among people who are already there.

We rarely notice the background because it is already present.

Then we ask about the beginning of the universe.

And almost immediately, we imagine one.

Perhaps there was an empty space.

Perhaps there was a state of nothingness.

Perhaps there was some prior condition from which the universe emerged.

But what if there was no background?

This is harder to imagine than it sounds.

We are accustomed to seeing things against something else.

A figure against a surface.

An event against a history.

A change against a previous state.

An object against a surrounding space.

Even when the background is empty, it is still there.

But if we are asking about the beginning of everything, what would be the background?

There cannot simply be another region of space.

That would be part of the universe.

There cannot simply be an earlier time.

That would be part of the temporal order.

There cannot simply be a prior state.

That would already be something.

And so we face a peculiar difficulty.

We keep trying to imagine the beginning against a background that the beginning is supposed to bring into existence.

Perhaps this is why the imagination keeps producing darkness.

Darkness feels like the absence of everything.

But darkness needs a space in which there can be no light.

Silence needs a world in which sound is possible.

Emptiness needs something that could be absent.

A background is not nothing.

It is one of the conditions under which something can become distinguishable.

And this may be the deeper problem.

We tend to imagine the universe as one enormous thing that appeared within some larger setting.

But if it is the whole of the relevant setting, there is nowhere else for it to appear.

There is no cosmic stage waiting for the universe to enter.

The stage is part of the performance.

Perhaps, then, we should stop asking:

What was the universe in?

and ask:

What made a universe possible as something distinguishable at all?

That is a different question.

It does not ask for a prior object.

It asks about the emergence of the conditions under which objects, events, relations and histories can become distinguishable.

Perhaps a beginning is not always the arrival of something against a background.

Perhaps, at the deepest level, a beginning is the emergence of a difference that creates a background and a foreground together.

If so, there was no empty stage before the universe.

There was no stage.

And that makes the question of the beginning stranger still.

For if there was no background, what could the first difference be a difference from?

We may have reached the point where even the word first begins to wobble.

The Problem of Beginnings: IV. The First Cause That Arrived Too Early

If there was nothing before the universe, perhaps something caused it.

This seems to solve the problem.

Until we ask a simple question:

What caused the cause?

Perhaps the cause did not need a cause.

Perhaps it was eternal.

Perhaps it existed outside time.

Perhaps it was necessary.

There are many possible answers.

But notice what they have in common.

We have begun by assuming that the universe must have a cause.

Why?

Because things that happen usually have causes.

A glass breaks because it is dropped.

A tree falls because of wind.

A building exists because someone built it.

Within the world, causation is everywhere.

But these are all local relations.

A cause is related to an effect.

There is something that causes, and something that is caused.

There is a process connecting them.

There is a difference between what happens before and what happens afterwards.

There is a world in which the relation can occur.

And then we ask:

What caused the world?

We have taken a relation that operates within the world and extended it to the world as a whole.

But if causation is one of the relations that belongs to the universe, can we simply assume that it also stands outside the universe, waiting to bring it into existence?

Perhaps.

But that requires argument.

It cannot follow merely from the fact that things within the universe have causes.

After all, we do not normally ask what caused the existence of the whole causal order every time we explain an event.

The match causes the fire.

We do not need another match to cause causation.

The question changes when we move from:

What caused this?

to:

What caused everything?

The second question may look like a larger version of the first.

It may not be.

A city contains doors.

It does not follow that there must be a door outside the city through which the city entered.

A sequence contains earlier and later events.

It does not follow that the beginning of the sequence must itself be an earlier event.

And a universe contains causes.

It does not follow that the universe itself must stand within a larger causal order.

Perhaps the first cause arrived too early.

Not because it is impossible.

But because we placed it inside a framework that may not yet have existed.

We imagined a cause before the universe.

But before may not have been available.

We imagined a cause outside the universe.

But outside may require a space beyond the universe.

We imagined a cause producing the universe.

But producing may itself be a relation within the world whose emergence we are trying to understand.

The difficulty, then, is not simply finding the first cause.

It is deciding whether “first cause” is a coherent extension of the concept of cause.

Perhaps causation explains how things happen within a world.

Perhaps it does not explain why there is a world in which things can happen.

And perhaps that is not a failure of causation.

Perhaps it is simply the point at which a local relation reaches the edge of its domain.

Which leaves us with a different question:

What kind of background must exist for a cause to be a cause?

The Problem of Beginnings: III. Nothing Has No Address

We have removed before from the place where we had put it.

There is no obvious earlier time in which the universe was waiting to begin.

So perhaps we can try another answer.

Before the universe, there was nothing.

This sounds different.

But does it?

Try to imagine it.

What do you see?

Perhaps darkness.

An empty expanse.

No stars.

No matter.

No movement.

Nothing at all.

But notice what has happened.

We have imagined a place.

And there is already a problem.

If space began with the universe, there can be no empty space before the universe.

An empty room is still a room.

A dark sky is still a sky.

A vacant landscape is still a landscape.

We have not imagined nothing.

We have imagined something in which nothing is happening.

Perhaps we can remove the space.

Then what remains?

Nothing.

But for how long?

We have now smuggled time back in.

We have imagined nothing lasting until the universe appeared.

But something that lasts has a history.

And something with a history already exists within a temporal order.

So we remove time as well.

Now there is no place for nothing to be.

And no time for it to last.

And no distinction between nothing and anything else.

The imagination begins to fail.

This may not be an accident.

Perhaps nothing is not a primitive condition from which something can emerge.

Perhaps it is a concept that only becomes possible within a world of distinctions.

We can say that a room is empty because we know what could be in it.

We can say that a glass contains nothing because we know what it would mean for it to contain something.

Absence is intelligible because there is something whose absence can be recognised.

Even emptiness has an address.

But absolute nothingness has nowhere to live.

There is no place in which it occurs.

No time during which it persists.

No boundary separating it from something else.

No observer standing outside it to notice that it is empty.

This creates a peculiar reversal.

We usually imagine:

First there was nothing.

Then something appeared.

But perhaps nothing is not the simpler state.

Perhaps it is the more sophisticated concept.

To call something absent already requires a world in which presence and absence can be distinguished.

So perhaps the universe did not emerge from nothing.

Perhaps the very idea of nothingness depends upon a world in which something can be absent.

If so, we have been asking the question backwards.

We began by asking how something could emerge from nothing.

Perhaps we should ask instead:

How did the possibility of nothing become possible?

The Problem of Beginnings: II. Before Before

The question returns almost immediately.

What was there before the universe?

We have already noticed the difficulty.

If time began with the universe, then before appears to have nowhere to stand.

But the word is so familiar that it is easy to underestimate what it asks of the world.

For one thing to be before another, there must be some kind of order.

Breakfast comes before lunch.

Monday comes before Tuesday.

Childhood comes before old age.

In each case, before relates two distinguishable moments within a sequence.

But what if there is no sequence yet?

What would it mean to ask what came before the first moment?

We might imagine an earlier moment.

But then the first was not first.

Or we might imagine an endless succession of earlier moments.

But then the question of a first beginning has simply disappeared.

The problem is not that we have failed to look far enough back.

The problem is that looking back is itself what is in question.

Suppose we say that there was nothing before the universe.

The sentence sounds reassuring.

It gives us an answer.

But notice what it imagines.

There was a before.

And during that before, there was nothing.

Nothing lasted until something happened.

But how long did nothing last?

The question sounds absurd.

That is precisely the point.

An empty period is still a period.

A time in which nothing happens is still time.

So we cannot solve the problem by placing nothing at the beginning of the temporal sequence.

We have merely extended the sequence and emptied it.

The same difficulty appears when we imagine a cause.

Perhaps something caused the universe.

But a cause is ordinarily prior to its effect.

If the causal relation requires temporal order, then a cause before time again assumes what it is meant to explain.

This does not prove that the universe had no cause.

It shows something more modest and more troublesome:

our ordinary idea of a cause may not travel beyond the conditions in which causes become distinguishable.

Perhaps this is the mistake we keep making.

We encounter a limit.

Then we treat the limit as if it were another place.

We arrive at the beginning of time and imagine more time stretching behind it.

We reach the edge of space and imagine empty space beyond it.

We encounter the absence of everything and imagine a condition in which that absence patiently exists.

But perhaps a limit is not always another region.

Perhaps the beginning of a relation is not itself another instance of that relation.

The beginning of temporal order need not be an earlier moment.

The emergence of space need not occur somewhere.

The conditions under which causation becomes meaningful need not themselves be caused in the ordinary sense.

This leaves us with an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the question:

What came before the beginning?

is not difficult because the answer is hidden.

Perhaps it is difficult because before is one of the things that has yet to become possible.

And if that is so, we have reached an even stranger question.

Not:

What came before before?

But:

What must happen for there to be a before at all?

The Problem of Beginnings: I. The Question That Starts Too Late

How did the universe begin?

It seems an innocent question.

Perhaps the most innocent question imaginable.

Everything we know begins somewhere. A tree begins as a seed. A building begins with construction. A conversation begins when someone speaks. Even the things that seem permanent have histories.

So it is natural to ask:

When did the universe begin?

And then, almost immediately:

What happened before it began?

There is only one problem.

If time began with the universe, what could before mean?

This is not merely a scientific difficulty. It is a conceptual one.

The word before describes a relation between events within a temporal order. One thing happens before another because both can be located in a sequence.

But if the question concerns the beginning of temporal order itself, then the relation may no longer apply.

To ask what happened before time began is rather like asking what lies north of the North Pole.

The words form a question.

That does not guarantee that the question has somewhere to go.

Yet this is precisely what makes the problem interesting.

For our ordinary understanding of beginnings has a familiar shape:

First there is one condition.

Then something happens.

Afterwards, there is another condition.

A beginning is a transition.

But a transition requires some way of distinguishing before from after.

What, then, are we imagining when we imagine the beginning of everything?

Perhaps we picture an empty universe waiting to be filled.

But where is this emptiness?

Perhaps we imagine an infinite darkness before the first light.

But when does this darkness occur?

Perhaps we imagine some prior cause producing the universe.

But where does this cause operate?

Each attempt to imagine the beginning seems to smuggle in something that has already begun.

Space.

Time.

Causation.

Absence.

We imagine a stage before asking how the stage appeared.

Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe remains so difficult to think.

Not because it lies unimaginably far in the past.

But because our ordinary concept of a beginning may already assume the world whose beginning we are trying to imagine.

And so the question with which we began—

What happened before the universe began?

—may have started too late.

Before asking what happened at the beginning, perhaps we should ask a more dangerous question:

What must already be possible for anything to begin?