"How Is There Something from Nothing?" Is the Wrong Question: Semepoietic Continuity and the Origin of the Universe

For decades, popular physics has proffered the spectacle of particles flickering out of the vacuum: something from nothing. The vacuum, however, is not empty but the lowest-energy state of quantum fields. Absolute nothing, by contrast, would possess no fields, no energy, no structure, no probability, and therefore no capacity to fluctuate or generate a universe. The classic origin question is therefore malformed. To ask how the universe “came into existence” presupposes a before, a temporal transition, and a causal sequence precisely where the availability of such concepts is under examination. Drawing on quantum decoherence, stability-bias, and the framework of Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT), this essay explores Semepoietic continuity: the proposal that quantum and classical descriptions are distinct resolutions of a single processual actuality. It contends that once absolute nothing is recognised as an incoherent starting point, the explanatory landscape changes fundamentally. Cosmic endings need not imply annihilation, nor need beginnings imply creation from non-being. The mystery is no longer how something unfolds from nothing, but whether there was ever a nothing from which something could come.