Judith May Browning 1950-2015 was the person who, back in the mid ‘eighties first challenged me with the thought that: The opposite of ‘something’ is not ‘nothing’ it is ‘something else’. Being a bit of a slow-learner, it took me about three decades to actually understand the full implications of this realisation. Eventually however, “the penny dropped” and the MOPECCA has since coalesced around this understanding.
The concept of nothingness, I now think, is an anthropocentric conceit. It seems to imply that if we cannot imagine something then it can’t possibly exist. Given that the concept arose as a rhetorical toy long before the modern concept of vacuum was discovered I think it came about as an adjunct to the concept of a supernatural Supreme Being.
I say anthropocentric rather than anthropic because the latter term only says that we see and discover that which is as it appears from our particular viewpoint because it is what it is – _already_, so to speak. We happen to be what we are and where we are and therefore the pre-existing great It appears to us as It does. Anthropocentric on the other hand says that we are special and therefore where we are is ‘special’ in some way that needs further explaining. In short, ‘anthropocentric’ implies everything is ‘about us’ whereas, in a 13.8 thousand million year old universe, we are just lucky observers who happen to have evolved and who are still learning, very slowly, how to properly take responsibility for our own actions.
The MOPECCA is anthropic only. It quite naturally implies that ‘our’ universe is unique only in the sense that it is one amongst potentially infinitely many others which are probably all different and probably very few are connected with each other.
The realisation that nothingness is basically a self contradictory fantsy implies that the vacuum of our universe has properties which constrain, if not actually define, what can happen here. The MOPECCA currently asserts that _c_ is a property of the vacuum (PAvac) which manifests as the fastest speed at which any other PA can disturb PAvac. Occam’s Razor type reduction implies that _c_ is not necessarily a limit applicable to any other PA within or to itself. Insofar as each PA is a unique network of being, inter-penetrated and/or entangled, with each other PA out to and beyong the ‘edge’ of our universe, the phenomenon of spooky action at a distance is explained quite naturally.
Optimistic realism 