Is the ontological truth that “something exists” unconditionally certain? For example, is the fact that “something exists” necessarily certain regardless of the time? If “something exists” at one point, does something always exist?

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what ‘existence’ means. I’ve come to this conclusion: Existence is when things interact with each other. Existence == interaction. The opposite of existence isn’t non-existence, it’s non-interaction, i.e. stasis. When you stop interacting with the world, you slowly cease to exist. Memories of you begin to fade. You slowly lose reference to that world. If I were to stop interacting with Quora on the daily basis that I do, I slowly lose relevance, reference, and then finally existence in the world of Quora.

Worlds don’t just exist physically, they also exist contextually. That’s how you pierce through the dreck. Find a context that you can understand and define your concepts against that. I know this question wants to consider things ontologically, but I challenge you to go ahead and peruse the Wikipedia page on ontology from a high level. How in the world can you discuss an existence which isn’t a kind of interaction? The only way you can define it is as how things interact.

To take this further, one derives little salience from considering the existence of inanimate objects. It’s the realm of very very dry philosophy, you won’t be able to approach a question such as yours through such consideration. Just go play Conway’s Game of Life. Individual things can cease to exist, it’s that simple. What we’re after is a more general sense of what existence means. Once atoms exist, will they always exist? Once democracy exists, will it always exist?

To that end, I would argue that while individual things can cease to exist in a system, the system itself makes sure that more instances of that kind of thing will eventually arise. Once an ocean starts making jellyfish, even if all the jellyfish die out, the system is such that it’s created an economic niche in which jellyfish can thrive, so eventually that niche will be exploited again, by a jellyfish-like creature. The story of biological evolution isn’t a story of bacteria turning into humans, it’s a story of economic niches being found and exploited. Once you reframe your thinking that way, evolution can be spotted everywhere, not just biological systems.

I’m going to segue into the concept of existence as felt by sentient agents, because diving further into the metaphysics of what it means for anything to exist to me is a fruitless exercise, and because considering the concept as it relates to thinking, wanting, feeling beings is essential for being able to contemplate how reality just, well, happened.

One of the more interesting movies I’ve seen recently is The Old Guard. Charlize Theron leads a group of immortal beings who spend their time fighting for what they feel is right. The movie’s brilliant existential insight comes out of what these immortals choose to do with their time. They began as fighters, and, amazingly, kept fighting even as the world modernized around them, they simply adapted to all the new war tech.

This choice carries with it a ton of juicy implications. Fighting has always struck me as an eminently strange activity. You have to learn a ton of skills that simply don’t transfer to anything else. There’s a massive amount of ego crap you have to get over in yourself in order to do it well. And, at least in the real world, the only way to really do it honorably is to do it for a nation-state, i.e. on the behalf of civilians.

But then I started thinking, well, what else would a band of immortals do? What is immortality actually good for? In Altered Carbon, those who initially gained immortality used it to amass wealth and privilege and rule the world. It’s science fiction set in the far future though, only barely touching on how they got there, while The Old Guard deals with the immediate pressing existential question of, if you have infinite time, no way to lose it, what would you do with it?

And I think the filmmakers got it right. You’d do things to maximize your level of interaction with the world. Things that make you feel alive. And nothing makes you feel alive and in touch with your full self than fighting for that life. And early life is characterized by constant warfare. The modern world was built on the backs of three, count em’, three world wars. We just didn’t label the first one (the Napoleonic Wars) a World War even though it was.

And, well, aren’t we all fighting for something? Whether it’s your right to party or your conception of justice, or just to learn some skill so you can later use it to put together a better life for yourself? Fighting in a very literal way characterizes existence itself. What can’t fight for it’s existence, eventually loses it.

And so to bring this around to your question. The most pure form of existence is fighting for that existence. If something exists now, does that mean it will always exist? We’ve already determined that if something arises, and then dies out, it’s likely to arise again, eventually. Not exactly in the same way, obviously, but aliveness means on some level that something has the capacity to perpetuate itself.

I hope you can appreciate the correspondences I’m trying to draw here and not just thinking all of this is off-topic. The world in which no agency or sentience existed eventually yielded one in which such things did exist. And we can look at how they got created, over millions of years, as a model for how it was like before nothing of the sort ever existed. It was Conway’s Game of Life, before this happened:

Just a collection of brute individual elements interacting according to weird rules.

And how did those arise? It really shouldn’t be that hard of a question to acknowledge that there’s an answer to, even though it’s really hard to think about. You can’t use the tools and approaches of intellectual rigor, because just as how our current understanding of physics fails to be able to simulate the Big Bang, none of our intellectual tools can handle “something from nothing.”

But we already have “new things emerging from simpler circumstances,” i.e. evolution. You can carry that all the way back to the beginning of everything.

And then you can use Hermetic reasoning to posit how that happened. The Law of Polarity specifies that for everything there is an opposite. For every nothing, there is an all. The definition of existence that I shared earlier, that of things interacting with each other, means that before there were things, there was a Nothing and there was an All, I would consider the All at this point to be a potential rather than literally everything. Before things existed, It wasn’t just Nothing that was there, the potential for nothing to become All also had to be there.

Potential is a funny thing. It can affect things all by itself. In fact our entire concept of capitalism is built upon its dynamics. A price is nothing more than a potential. You wouldn’t think that someone buying something at a price would affect the market, but that’s literally how it all works. Manipulating potentials can make you very very rich.

And so when literally Nothing existed, the force of the potential eventually matched the stasis force keeping the Nothing coherent. Then the first thing that got created was when the Nothing started interacting with the potential for All.

This certainly isn’t a philosophically rigorous way of dealing with the topic, but like the Big Bang, all we can do is have faith that our logics and reasons which only make sense now didn’t just spring up out of nothing, but rather from constituent parts.