A Rational Cosmology: The Impossibility of First and Last Entities

Essay XXVI

This is Essay XXVI of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

There never was nor can there ever be a moment at which no entities exist. It follows that entities have always existed and will always exist -- though entities that exist at one time need not be the same entities as those that exist at another time.

Entities cannot arise in any other manner except through some relationships among other entities. To claim anything else would be either to concede that there are such things as "pure qualities" outside of entities that give rise to entities, or to hold that entities could originate spontaneously, ex nihilo.

The former notion has already been refuted in prior essays, and the latter claims, at its root, that A does not equal A. Such a scenario would propose that, at one instant, an entity has zero measurements of every quality, i.e., that the entity does not exist, then, at the next instant, some of its qualities suddenly have measurements of nonzero magnitudes.

Where did they get these increased quantities of qualities? Why, nowhere, of course! This leads to two possibilities, the first being that 0 does not equal 0, since zero equals a series of nonzero numbers which represent the measurements of the qualities of the spontaneously generated entity, for, if that entity did not get those quantities from any other entity, it must have gotten them from itself, i.e., always had them. This is, of course, an outright concession of logical error.