Could true nothingness ever have existed, and what would that even mean?

[Evelyn97]

Physicists occasionally talk about the universe arising from nothing, pointing to quantum vacuum fluctuations as a mechanism that could, in principle, generate something out of apparent emptiness. But philosophers are quick to point out that the quantum vacuum is not actually nothing in the strict philosophical sense at all, it is a physical field, governed by real physical laws, with real measurable energy and real structure. Genuine philosophical nothingness would mean the complete absence of absolutely everything, no fields, no laws, no space, no time, not even the bare possibility of anything existing, and it is genuinely unclear whether that kind of nothingness is even a coherent, meaningful concept rather than something we can only gesture vaguely toward with language while never quite managing to actually picture it.

The deeper puzzle, sometimes phrased as why is there something rather than nothing, has haunted philosophy for centuries specifically because nothingness seems, at least on its face, like it should have been the simpler, more natural default state, requiring no explanation at all, while the existence of anything whatsoever seems to demand one. But that intuition itself might be quietly smuggling in an assumption, that nothingness is somehow the natural, default, low energy resting state of reality, when there may be no coherent reason whatsoever to think nothingness was ever more likely, more natural, or more probable than something.

Some philosophers argue the question is fundamentally confused because it treats existence itself as though it were just one more property some possible universe either happens to have or happens to lack, the same way a ball either happens to be red or happens not to be red. But existence might not work that way at all, might not be simply one property among many that a state of affairs could have or fail to have, in which case asking why there is something rather than nothing may be a bit like asking why redness happens to be red, a question built on a subtle category error rather than a genuine, well formed puzzle awaiting a real answer.

Others take the question completely seriously as one of the deepest genuine puzzles in all of philosophy, arguing that any complete metaphysical picture of reality that cannot even in principle address it is leaving out something essential and irreducible, whatever the eventual correct answer, or even the correct kind of answer, actually turns out to be.