Spida, (I understand I write lengthy posts, but response times are sad at best, and it's impossible to discuss anything of real value with only short posts)
Maybe you cannot remove things from Existence, but you can regress to a time before those things existed. This is exactly what is implied(I believe)when Theoretical Physicists say that time and space did not exist Pre Big Bang.
To be honest, I always thought that theoretical physicists just like to sound smart. You might be right that it's just a poor description. When they fail to explain something in a meaningful way, I assume it's equivalent to how some religious people say "god works in mysterious ways", "god is simultaneously everywhere at once". The statements are ultimately just for "wow" value. They are emotionally charged but mean nothing. I don't even try to rationalize. I assume the premises are wrong, and I reinvent the wheel; if I do not, and the premises actually are wrong, then I will spend eternity rationalizing nonsense.
Interpretation of erasure in the sense of resizing reality
Actually, you might be right about removal, but in a different sense, and only to a point. The idea that objects are only ever replaced is only valid if the "size" of existence remains constant. If we take existence to be something like a 9x9 matrix, and set each entry to 0, we might call this a "void". However, there's no reason the matrix needs to be 9x9, and I can't think of any reason it would have to stay that size. You could "remove" objects in a meaningful sense by simply shrinking the matrix's size. Say "1" is a blob and "0" is void, all the matrix is "1" except for the center which is "0". If you kept shrinking the matrix until only the center existed, you'd have effectively converted the blob to "nothing", because its squares are undefined now.
This has its problems too though. For example, though I cannot think of a reason existence has to stay the same size, I also cannot think of a way it could change size. On pen and paper, it works, but in practice, I can't visualize it. I would actually really like this interpretation though, because it correlates nicely with the idea of an expanding universe; you can equate the expansion of the universe to an increase in the amount of data it contains.
Reality check
Of quick note, though we're talking about a universe as if "we" share a single one, I'd like to point out that I don't believe in objectivity in the slightest.
This might be the center of the issue: we're trying to make sense of a situation that never actually happened. Suppose this reality is much like a video game. This video game, much like an RPG, has a rich backstory. But, does this mean that the backstory ever actually happened? When you play an RPG, do you think the developers actually enacted the back story? Of course not. They just planted traces of the story, and you assumed everything happened. In reality, the game world only existed up to the point where you started playing. Trying to extrapolate the game world's objective time to the far past is actually a logic error.
Maybe there never was chaos. Maybe we just expect chaos to exist, but in reality, we just move from order to order. Only ever peering outwards at chaos, but never acting it out.
Now if you remove 'time' from the equation what you end up with is an "Eternal State" where paradoxically something needs to exist outside of time in order to initiate time(and space), i.e. the expansion, or Inflation of the Universe.
Yeah, but time is just an index. When you pick an eternal state, all you're saying is that t = constant (think about t in the sense of a physics equation which models the world). Time still exists, you're just not moving it.
The way I usually approach this, is that we let t = constant, which means that we are executing some single instant of reality, but then we make it a part of this instant's code to run t = t + 1. So, time moves inductively, or, reality is similar to a recursive function.
Perhaps it's not too much of a paradox at all. The idea of time, after all, being a sequential thing, is slightly incorrect. Instead, we have time space, where time is more like a coordinate in a space of its own right, where each point on its coordinate axes results in a specific permutation of reality. Saying that "time exists" or "time does not exist" is then similar to arguing whether or not the x-axis or y-axis on a graph exists; existence isn't really of importance because we are talking about ranges of possibilities. What really exists is a
point on a graph, not the axis. The axis is the space where things are made and unmade; this is because we can add and remove points at will. In this way, "something" and "nothing" actually has some meaning.
To fix the paradox, decide that it's not time that's coming into existence, rather, it's the motion across time that is beginning; the sequential part. What's coming into existence is a point which moves across the time axis.
So in the context of what I am talking about here at this stage of existential evolution even the 'void' itself does not exist as it *is* 'space' which hasn't been created.
This fits nicely with the reality resize model.
I suppose there is difficulty here as we are metaphorically 'Programmed' for this Four Dimensional Reality Construct so to think outside of it requires a bit of conditioning. Is it correct to think in this manner? I believe so.
While you're right in a sense, in that we can't easily think of higher geometric dimensions, I think you've made a logical error regarding the time dimension. Basically, you've made certain assumptions about time in your paradigm, then you've realized they don't work. Instead of realizing that this means that your initial assumptions are incorrect, you've decided that it must be simply beyond you to make them work. It's like assuming that for n = 5, n + 2 = 8. But when you realize that 5 + 2 is actually 7, you start trying to make the assumption fit (rationalize it) instead of simply changing n to 6.
I think the time dimension is the most basic dimension. You cannot fathom its non-existence because all of reality is defined in terms of it. Meaning, that without time, reality also doesn't exist. You can define any n-dimensional structure and it will make geometric sense, but it simply cannot exist unless it is defined at some moment. Time is like a painter's canvas, and all the other dimensions are the colors drawn on to it.