The Cosmic Womb

Much like Aristotle’s work, Birnbaum maintains that the division of thought, information, and matter is largely an illusion. Physical reality is a tangible subset of the totality of what exists. To put it more simply, what we can see is just part of what all is out there. When looking at the Big Bang from a purely physical perspective, it may seem random and purposeless – something random just occurred to create the universe.

Potentialism takes an extremely different approach. Since the Potential for something to exist must come before that thing’s existence itself, there is an in-between step between nothingness and cosmic creation. Birnbaum calls this the Cosmic Womb.

The term’s mirroring of childbirth is no accident. Birnbaum is often fond of using human imagery to explain the cosmos. Birnbaum often uses analogies to make difficult concepts easier to understand. Birnbaum also points out that since Potentialism drives the whole universe, we should be able to use terms interchangeably. Of course, the universe coming into being is like a child being born. We are part of the universe as well so that we come into being like the stars in the sky only makes sense.

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Think of the Birnbaum's Cosmic Womb of Potential as an area of unbounded Potential for creation – a place where Q4P builds endlessly towards becoming physical reality. To understand its ability to create the Big Bang, you need to truly understand what Potential is.

Potential is more than simply what it creates. It is infinite in nature. To illustrate this, let’s consider the birth of a child. The child itself represents the Potential of all that it might become. That, in itself, is a lot. Yet does it justify what we call infinite Potential? The truth is that a child represents far more than its own Potential. Within that child is the Potential to create children itself and all the potential those children have. And when those children have children themselves? See how it goes on and on and gets bigger as it grows? Every single person has, within them, the ability to create millions more people and each of those even millions more.

That is the true nature of the infinite within Potential itself. It is the cumulative Potential of all that not only is, but what can be created in turn from that first creation. Likewise, in the larger macro universe, it is no different. A cloud of stellar gas contains within it the Potential to create stars and planets, and in turn, life that can procreate as well. All this unbounded, primordial Potential builds until it reaches a critical mass, a point where so

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much energy is built up that something has to happen, leading to what Birnbaum calls the 0-point.

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