Why Was There A Big Bang
People who don't believe in God or any higher power like to say that the Big Bang was the start of the universe and everything. Well even if that is the case, that still leaves the question of why there was a Big Bang in the first place.
Comments (317)
[quote=Frank Wilczek]Nothing is unstable.[/quote]
Something like the conditions of the universe are such that, given a specific set of circumstances, phenomenon X happens.
For me, the only way to avoid an infinite regress into "why" questions as to causal beginnings is to think that the universe is eternal: we live in a universe of universes, which has always been and always will be, in some manner.
IF this is true, then we can't ask why anymore. If it's false, the question you raise stands. I've heard it said more than a few times that nature is essentially active, thus there is something about activity which is less taxing than nothingness.
Well, I'll drink to that! :up:
Is there any hard proof that there was a Big Bang in the first place?
And if there was one, how come no one heard it? :wink:
I sometimes draw attention to this paragraph [comments by me]
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Quoting Manuel
I'm interested in Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology model, though I can't claim to understand the details of his argument for it.
No, or at least I don't know of any proof, its just that some people believe that's how the universe got started.
Apparently because humanity hadn't come into existence yet, and so therefore nobody was around to hear it, according to those who believe in the Big Bang.
And besides space is a vacuum so you can't hear anything.
Interesting. So, if no evidence and no witnesses, then perhaps it never happened?
John Hand's, in his magisterial and quite contrarian book, Cosmosapiens, explains all candidates for the origins of the universe, which includes Penrose's. Hand's book is a for the serious layperson, not so much as say a book made by Tyson, which would be more for everybody.
Hands essentially points to issues with all models, including, what he calls, "the Hot Big Bang" model. I believe he mentions that the cyclical universe gets around the big bang issue, but it doesn't address why the universeS are built in this manner.
We won't find out, I don't think. But evidence now confirms only one universe.
Cheers.
If God created the big bang, you'd still be left with the question of why. You'd also be left with that question if he didn't.
Maybe not. Who knows? Its just a theory.
(So many books, so little time!)
Call me romantic, but I think thereās a reason for it all. Not that one individual might ever know it, but we have a part to play.
I'll keep a note then. Hands' book is by far the best science book I've read, by far. But, as you say, too many books, too mucho info.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmm. Reason as in it happened because of X or Y, yes. Reason in some deeper sense is more problematic. We are the only creatures (so far) in the known universe to have reasons or knowledge. Quite baffling to have learned this much in the 20th century.
Too hard, perhaps. There is indeed evidence. Does it amount to proof? That'll be down to you.
Oddly, those who need no evidence to be convinced that god created the world seek evidence here.
:scream:
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474-400-why-physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event/#ixzz749vWdJlV
So, there are some kinds of theories that will be resisted because they seem to imply divine creation. I think that says something interesting.
Actually, my position is that we should have some evidence before we take anything for fact.
However, according to @HardWorker, Big Bang is just a belief:
Quoting HardWorker
Plus, if no one heard it and there was no sound, then it wasn't a "bang".
Unless Hoyle meant something else ....
There is voluminous evidence, but if youād rather believe some anon poster on an internet forum then that probably wonāt make any difference.
Well, we all are anon posters on an internet forum. And I didn't say I believe anyone.
But @HardWorker may have a point in that it does involve a degree of belief. Most of us have no access to that voluminous evidence, or no time or inclination to examine it.
So, arguably, we accept the theory on faith and trust.
Perhaps Corvius has it on faith that there was no big bang.
It's a gross equivocation of the meaning of both. I have faith and trust in science, insofar as I accept that it is conducted by people of integrity who have both the education and access to the resources to investigate and validate these kinds of theories. I presume that, if I undertook the same training and viewed the same research, then I would probably arrive at the same conclusion. But this is not really comparable to religious faith or trust. Please read up to that paragraph I quoted about Georges LeMaitre, who first discovered the 'big bang' theory. He was a Catholic priest, who nevertheless, as a scientist, admonished the Pope not to appeal to science to validate religion. I think that is a really profound lesson. I'd like to think that if M. LeMaitre were able to drop in on this thread, that he would not read things that would insult either his science or his faith.
If there were bing bang to create the size of the universe, then the explosion would have created immense amount of debris and dusts, which would still be floating around in your room, so you wouldn't be able to read your screen or type any texts for sure :D
Yeah sure Corvus, because you think that, then it undoubtedly must be so. No doubt you're an expert in all this kind of thing.
It is just a simple common sense WF. You don't need to consult an expert for that, I would imagine :D
I think you under estimated how large the universe is, and the power of explosion to create it, if it ever happened, I shudder to think. :chin:
I am quite certain that it wouldn't had been a bouncy castle pumping up affair for sure, if it really ever happened.
Observation achieved with the help of complex calculation and inference is evidence. I assume ongoing evaluation of method.
Belief and trust are ordinary qualities we engage to what degree we like, all the time. Science doesn't reify. It gives us jigsaw pieces. Being finite ourselves we don't and shan't see everything.
Quoting Apollodorus
We don't know how long time is, and we don't know how much (things) "nothing" has got in it. By analogy, if we are on what might "look" like an upswing on an existence wave . . . The "big gentle lapping"?
Some people, have had a glimmer of person, and time, and light, appearing in "rapid succession" (perhaps they turned a "corner" into "sight" in our "model"). A tenable enough variant view is that "person" appeared later, with human folk.
(Light has a noticeably specific measurement.)
What scientists have always been doing is tuning in natural ears / eyes and instruments. Diagrams in books and "music of the spheres" (intuited rationally as well as remembered or even misremembered from previous investigators) are expressions of findings from all methods.
We don't know how much before before, before before was.
All "why" questions are partly "how" questions. All "how" questions are partly "what" questions. The universe is analogies, all the way down (one of my mottoes :wink: ).
That is entirely possible, but there is still an "if" there.
Personally, I have no special interest in Big Bang as it has no practical bearing on my everyday life and I tend to place more emphasis on who it is that knows rather than on what is known.
Other than that, you are probably right :smile:
Wasn't the Hubble a mobile telescope in the space? If there were big bang, there would have been no Hubble. They wouldn't be able to see anything through the debris and dusts in the space. The hubble is a good evidence for no big bang.
I quit my Astronomy hobby some year ago, so haven't been following. Just being realistic, nothing to do with anti science. But if you think back, the scientists in the past used to believe that the sun was rotating around the earth, and earth was flat.
In the sense of a simplistic version of both (which sadly few people get beyond), yes.
This cuts "both ways" because the risk is bad quality religion getting enforced on false scientific grounds (e.g in the so called "communities" being identified by materialistic sociology, cramping individual style).
I don't disagree with that. :smile:
Trust the force, Luke.
So where have the debris and dusts all gone after the BB? It must have gone somewhere. You are not postulating some gigantic divine recycling depot somewhere in the space out there? The sky is clear as crystal at nights. Have you ever watched the night sky? BB sounds more magical than Harry Potter's magic wand.
The force where you pay attention to advances in science.
I do value Science, but also am aware that some of their theories are imaginative and unrealistic.
And beware there are many pseudo sciences too.
When you read physicists about the Big Bang it's not described as an explosion, it's an expansion of condensed matter all at once in every direction. Big Bang is a misleading appellation.
Wow, that is a bouncy castle pumping up then. ok.
Exactly. Now you have it.
So why was it condensed at first place? What was the nature of the condensed matter?
I see the phrase as similar to the frugal mother who whips up a meal "out of nothing" i.e what didn't look like much.
The bouncy castle pumped it up.
There you have it too. :)
Does that mean there is an intention to mislead? Or is it unintentional?
Not only that, but why did it suddenly decide to expand all over the place in all directions all at once and without making a sound or saying something? That's acting suspiciously, no? :wink:
That is what I thought.
And if it wasn't a "bang", then maybe it wasn't "big" either?
I'm not debating if the science is accurate (how would I know?) just what they say it was.
:ok: :smile:
Yeah, come to think of it, the bouncy castle belief on the BB theory sounds more esoteric than the explosion scenario. That would have looked like a scene in Harry Potter. :)
My view is that the Big Bang occurred because it was logically possible and logical possibility = existence.
See the video.
Isn't that a "leading question"?
It is an inferred question I suppose.
That there is something is beyond dispute, even if there are some somethings here or out there so inclined to disagree. Why there is something cannot be answered by appeal to something, but cannot be asked if there was not something. The ability to ask a question, however, does mean that there must be a suitable answer to the question. And yet, some think that the question leads to a necessary answer. Some non-contingent being or ground of being. But of course such is not necessary. It is an expression of personal preference or a desire that there be meaning in existence. To the assumption that such meaning can be found rather than made, here too we can ask why.
:100:
Amen. Apollodorus is heading for a ban. Shouldn't have to say this stuff.
How many Slytherins to stir a cauldron? :grin:
I think the over-arching point is that it would have been inconceivable for classical culture to entertain the idea that the Universe is the product of chance or that it is not 'animated by reason' in a generally Aristotelian sense. The realisation of this possibility is part of the advent of modernity and a major theme of 20th century culture. I often cite Bertrand Russell's essay, Free Man's Worship, as a paradigmatic statement. For modern cultures it's normal, part of the air we breathe, so we don't notice how strange it is, and how strange we are. Or estranged.
In any case, it was one phase of cultural development. 'Freud remarked that āthe self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by scienceā, referring to the Copernican revolution, Darwinās discovery of natural selection, and Nietszcheās declaration of the Death of God. In a strange way, the Copenhagen Interpretation gave back what the European Enlightenment had taken away, by placing consciousness in a pivotal role in the observation of the most fundamental constituents of reality.' The anthropic cosmological principle likewise suggests that the evolution of rational sentient beings wasn't simply the fluke occurence that Russell presumed. I think culture is heading for a post-secular future, where the bleak materialism of the modern period is simply one cultural form, and an impoverished one at that. We need to realise a cosmic philosophy capable of sustaining a sense of there being a reason for existence, to replace the one jettisoned by The Enlightenment.
That assumes that they could not free themselves from the idea that the cosmos is a product. Aristotle argued that the cosmos is eternal, that it did not come into existence. The pre-Socrates explained things in terms of one or more elements. Anaximander's arche, (beginning, principle, cause) was the apeiron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apeiron
Which of course is merely a speculative mystification and not itself scientific at all. Oh yeah, and wrong, or besides the point, in every significant way. CI briefly conjured up again is an exorcised spectre all but banished again from fundamental physics. Stop deluding yourself, my friend, by repeating that silly mantra.
That may be a bit too optimistic. I think it will depend on which culture becomes dominant in the end. Advanced science cannot exist without substantial financial investment. It has, until now, chiefly benefited from the support it has received from Western capitalist society. But the world is changing very fast and as the West is rapidly declining demographically and economically, and rival systems like those of China and Islamic states are on the rise, science may soon find itself under the control of non-Western totalitarian regimes ....
What is also needed is an alternative economic philosophy that doesn't rely on endless growth, consumption and the stimulation of artificial needs. What is needed is a social philosophy that encourages the cultivation of a superior state of being, rather than endless acquisition and consumption. That's the most difficult change to envisage.
Even I've been thinking along that line. There's something seriously wrong with the economics of this day and age. It's not that there are particular people, states, or forms of government to blame - economics, at the end of the day, is materialism maxxed out.
I maybe wrong about this but I've detected a positive development in economics in that knowledge is held at a premium - to fuel the "endless growth" you talked about, businesses need new ideas, new technologies, new philosophies, etc. However, knowledge is viewed as an adjunct, an auxiliary, playing only a secondary role in the economic machinery; plus the knowledge that's relevant to economics is just a tiny band, centered around technology and science, of the knowledge spectrum.
What we need to do is somehow flip this relationship between material goods and knowledge - people should want and be willing to pay for knowledge, the whole gamut, material goods then become means of acquiring knowledge.
I suppose it all boils down reworking our priorities:
1. Current state of affairs: material goods are needs, knowledge is a means of fulfilling those needs.
2. Proposed change: knowledge becomes a need, material goods help in the acquisition of knowledge.
If ever I start a company, say making mugs, my slogan would be "We sell knowledge. The mugs are complimentary". The mugs could have snippets of information on philosophy, science, religion, etc.
The 'instrumentalisation of reason' that the New Left describes.
The philosophical problem is precisely the elimination of telos, purpose, from ethics. The Universe is deemed to be inherently purpose-less - as Russell said, the 'accidental collocation of atoms', as the Universe goes on its merry way towards the ultimate heat-death.
I'm not pitching for a return to traditionalist ethics. There needs to be of re-envisaging of human goals knowing what we now know about cosmology.
But as I noted already in this thread, the very idea of the 'big bang' lends itself to religious interpretation - that is what the Pope wanted to do, but LeMaitre discouraged him from making pronouncements about it. But the big bang theory was and is resisted by some, because it seems too near to creation from nothing. I mean, when you think about it, it is saying that the entire vast universe burst into existence from a match head, in an instant. Fred Hoyle and many others always resisted the idea. I don't see anything inherently antagonistic between the idea of creation and physical csomology.
And the other point that really struck me about Russell's essay, a Free Man's Worship is that Buddhism, for example, always knew that 'the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.' It's not news to them! It's a result of deliberately narrowing the scope of philosophy to the phenomenal realm, the very realm of constant change and decay, and then boo-hooing about it.
Sorry - just riffing on a few of my favourite themes.
That's a nice way of putting it. I didn't know people were so lax with words though because the correct expression, in my humble opinion, should be "instrumentalization of reason and knowledge."
That said, now that I thought about it a little more, the purpose of knowing stuff is to apply it in our lives and materialistic application seems to be the most obvious way. Nonetheless, there are a lot of ideas out there that are not amenable to physicalization but useful still; given how economics, as I mentioned earlier, is an almost exclusively materialistic enterpise, such ideas might, to our detriment, die out. What kinda ideas, in your view, can't be commercialized in the current economic climate?
Quoting Wayfarer
If you ask me, telos and ethics seem almost inseparable because telos justifies ethics. Even secular ethics such as utiliatrianism and deontology are teleological in a nature. Utiliatrianism's telos: maximum happiness for the maximum number of people. Deontology's telos: A fair society (no exceptions). Ethics becomes meaningless sans telos.
It's intriguing to say the least that a pope, no less, wanted to co-opt a scientific fact, the big bang, and give it a religious spin. The similarity between that piece of cosmology and Christian doctrine was just too good an opportunity with respect to how it could be treated as proof of creation for the Vatican to pass up.
Quoting Wayfarer
Buddhism is about that which can be observed by any person, anywhere, at any time - change aka impermanence, the birth-death-decay process is central to its philosophy.
However, do you suppose that yes, the Buddhists are right on the money - the hallmark of phenomenal world is change - but, the million dollar question is, is the phenomenal world all there is to reality?
'All compound things are subject to decay', but 'There is, monks, an unborn ā unbecome ā unmade ā unfabricated. If there were not that unborn ā unbecome ā unmade ā unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born ā become ā made ā fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn ā unbecome ā unmade ā unfabricated, escape from the born ā become ā made ā fabricated is discerned' ~ source.
What that 'unborn, unbecome' is, however, is never the subject of speculative metaphysics in Buddhist philosophy.
I should say however that Buddhist cosmology is not based on a linear model of history, like the Christian view, but on the (probably more archaic) cyclical view.
Check out this review.
So, Buddhism did have a finger in that pie though, it seems, they decided, for good reasons no doubt, not to open that can of worms. Good to know. Thanks. :up:
The Big Bang seems based on the material principleĀ of inference, so I was trying to seek materially based inferences (the explosion and bouncy castle scenarios) of the possible causes for the BB, but couldn't quite come up with a reasonable understanding in both cases.
They've tried to invent notions in which all of this could occur in the absence of any soul whatsoever, which is fine and dandy, I suppose. It still doesn't predict anything -- it can't -- and it isn't science.
To examine it using pure reason, though, we need to attempt to understand the universe from a scope that goes beyond the limits of our linear understanding of time. And I think we can do this, a little bit. Not completely...I don't think the human mind can or should understand that.
But yeah, to comprehend a beginning at all is to experience the universe from a three dimensional perspective, which our greatest minds have told us isn't a comprehensive perspective to possess.
What some less scrupulous minds are doing is to point to the Big Bang as "the beginning" in and of itself, as though it's understood. This works on the general populace, who don't really think much. They hear a scientist say, "The Universe began at the Big Bang," and think, "Wow. These scientists KNOW EVERYTHING. LITERALLY EVERYTHING." No. Beyond the first few seconds of "the Big Bang" (whatever that's supposed to mean) proper scientific minds readily attest to the fundamental principal that, even mathematically, they have no description whatsoever for what was actually going on.
They can make up weird ideas however much they want, but truly your guess is as good as mine or anyone else's.
Because, truly, we can't accept that things are as they seem to us here. What can seem like expansion could just be a movement in another dimension farther away from the initial starting point.
View it like a CD for instance. If the initial starting point is one place on the CD with a laser hitting it, in the next moment it could be anywhere on the CD, and the independent information would have seemed to expand for however many bytes the CD is. And we may not even be dealing with a CD as such, but a "format", if you want to call it that, of information that is light years beyond our reckoning.
I don't even like to think about it really. It's too much. I'm glad we don't know. There's a lot here for us to explore...we shouldn't be tinkering with some of this stuff.
My initial post was asking, if the big bang was a scientific religious theory.
Oh neat. I wouldn't say it is that, either. Scientifically, it's really something we're still trying to understand. You don't have to believe it was God, though, on your own terms.
Still, anyone who tells you they understand what it was like is lying to you.
Even if it were to be taken for granted that linear time is the best time (or what have you) the rate of expansion being discussed is nothing like a "bang" and incomprehensible to the human mind.
You know...did it make a sound at all? Did it sound like a bang or a zipper being unzipped?
Maybe a small step forward can be made by admitting that the "Big Bang" was not really a big bang but is only called so. We may then arrive at some sort of definition or understanding through elimination of what the "Big Bang" is not.
I think so too. After all, if my understanding of the OP is correct, we are trying to look into the issue through philosophical inquiry. And in order to do so, we need to ask questions. Either that, or we don't have the discussion :smile:
Philosophical logic and analysis are the methodical principle to sieve out the claims of pseudo science and science religions from the genuine scientific theories. :)
So time is eternal. But from where this whole construction came? From nowhere when it is eternal ir maybe it was created by the gods. But how create time if there is no time in the first place? Maybe with god-like imaginary time as Hawking proposed to address exactly this questiin. But who set that imaginary time in motion?
At the moment I am reading 'The Matter With Us: ' by John Rawles, and he suggests,
'In the beginning was the Big Bang. The Big Bang is, of course, a metaphor. It is a metaphor for the moment when the whole mass of the universe exploded from an infinitesimally small point, whose density was infinitely great, and temperature unimaginably hot. The '"Big" of Big Bang is therefore symbolic, representing not size but important...The Bang, too, is metaphorical, because a Bang is a sound, a pressure wave transmissable through a gas, which can be heard at a distance as a sudden noise.' I think that the idea of the Big Bang being seen as symbolic is worth thinking about rather than seeing at a literal reality in the way which people often thought of the creation story.
Of course, I realise that your question is really looking more at the underlying causation. In his analysis, Rawles is looking at the scientific method is a human construction and he also queries the way we think about causation in itself, and he suggests that cosmology can become too concrete.
It didn't all came from a point. Like I suggested in my question that would give the problem of what happened before the bang. What was the kick before? How could there have been a kick if there was no time yet? Was it the unmoved mover? I dont think so. The only way out is the quantum approach. The whole spatially 3d universe once existed around the Planck-sized mouth of a spatially 4d cut-open torus. There were field fluctuations (virtual particles) only. Time went to and fro or up and down. Then BANG!!!. Every virtual pair was driven outwardly on both sides of the torus. In 2d there two circles of matter, normal and anti, inflating away from the mouth. To become real shortly after. Like that multiple bangs can occur. Bang bang bang...
The hot Big Bang model merely posits a hot, dense early state of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, from which it has since been expanding + cooling, leading to the present state of the universe which we observe. And the primary pieces of evidence for this are:
- the observation that space is expanding
- the observation of nearly uniformly-distributed leftover heat from this early state, the cosmic microwave background radiation
- the observation of the relative abundances of elements predicted by the big bang model
The tl;dr version is that we observe that the universe is expanding, and has this leftover heat glow. If the universe is presently expanding and cooling, then it follows that at some prior time it was denser and warmer. You rewind the cosmic clock backwards as far as you can go, and you're left with a very hot, very dense early state. This is the Big Bang; a hot dense early state of the universe, almost 14 billion years ago.
But we can only rewind the clock back so far, before our theory (general relativity) breaks down and ceases to be a good description of physical reality- at some point, quantum effects become significant, and general relativity is not a quantum theory. But we don't have a good alternative, because we do not currently have an accepted theory of quantum gravity (there are a variety of candidates, like string/M-theory, loop quantum gravity, and so on). And when we rewind the clock all the way to a hypothetical time "t=0", we get an absurdity: various physical quantities run to infinity- the "initial Big Bang singularity".
Some people, especially in popular science journalism or lay discussions, refer to this as a "beginning of the universe"... but this is dubious, because the fact that our theory predicts an apparently absurd result (i.e. infinite physical quantities, curvature pathology, etc) at precisely the point where we expect it to cease to be applicable (because quantum effects become significant, and GR is not a quantum theory) should tell us we're probably encountering an artifact of a broken theory, not something physically real. To be able to say what, if anything, preceded this state, we would need a successful quantum theory of gravity. Until then, people are free to speculate... but we just don't know either way. But there is no equivalence between the BBT and theistic creation myths- the Big Bang model, at least the part of it that is well-tested and widely-accepted, does not say anything about how the universe began, and unlike various religious myths, is corroborated by a large body of observational evidence.
Nearly. But one different model is enough to make it shake at its fundaments.
The only parts that are legitimately in question are the details, particularly regarding the very earliest stages where gravitation would be significant on the quantum scale.
Which is why, rather than alternative models, we mostly have extensions to this core idea, like inflation, cyclical models (CCC, LQC, etc), and so on, because the core idea is on such solid footing.
The only parts? Thats the essential part. A new theory could handle it. And I have one.
No, the essential part is the hot dense early state of the universe, from which it expands and cools, and no, you don't. Well, you might have a pet idea or theory, but not a serious competitor to the BBT, because there are none, and certainly not from randos on an internet message board.
Should have known this thread would be crackpot-bait, smh.
How do you know I'm a crackpot? The universe has shown itself to me. Sometimes it all falls in place. Without pressing, stressing, or consciously contemplating it. Of course you have to have knowledge first of QFT and GR. And I have both. It came Naturally.
I dont deny the HBBT. But I found a way to make it start.
I already expected such reaction. You big bang guys are so predictable. Thanks for wishing me luck tough.
There is something rather than (just) nothing because in the beginning there was nothing to prevent something from spontaneously coming to be (i.e. BBT). :smirk:
It is ASSUMED in GR that curvature is internally only. But space can be part of a larger dimensional one. If matter sticks only to 3d space it can expand in a 4th. This is not-done or not-said or non-spoken off though. But there is nothing to principally forbid this. But saying this costs your job.
What, if anything, preceded the Big Bang remains an open question. Not only open, but necessarily so, given that we lack a theoretical framework to talk about what happens past about 10^-42 seconds after the hypothetical "t=0", when the observable universe was smaller than the Planck length (and so requiring a quantum theory of gravity to adequately describe the physics at that time). General Relativity can't tell us either way: neither geodesics nor any sort of causal relations can be traced backwards past the initial singularity (which is itself very probably an artifact of GR breaking down at these scales). Not necessarily because there wasn't anything before that, but because GR has ceased to be a good description of physical reality past this point: our theory has broken down, or been pushed past its proper domain.
So we need a new theory, in particular a theory of quantum gravity; and candidate quantum theories of gravity do extend back past this point- both string theory and loop quantum gravity/loop quantum cosmology describe, essentially, a cyclical cosmology where the Big Bang expansionary phase follows a prior contractionary phase. Cosmic inflation, which is widely accepted despite its lack of observational confirmation, also describes a time before the Big Bang.
So one way or another, it seems quite implausible that "there was nothing before the Big Bang", both in terms of the actual physics, as well as any sort of conceptual coherency to this idea.
Man!!! Show some imagination. "There is no theoretical framework". Non true.
"it seems quite implausible that "there was nothing before the Big Bang"
There WAS something before the big bang. Or better, way ahead of it.
Yeah I'm not interested in making shit up,
Thats clear! You only repeat existing shit!
From what I've seen, that's all you're interested in doing here.
And what have you seen? I cant help it that you dont understand.
"that's all you're interested in doing here."
Whats all?
This is exactly the reason there could NOT have been a big bang!
Bah!
Instead of courage, why don't you show us some math? You present your theory as if it was fact without anything backing it up. You didn't observe it, you can't observe it and even if you could, observing it would not tell you the underlying mechanics of what is happening.
The standard model is accepted because it checks out. It is backed by math. Everytime we did notice it doesn't check out, we adjusted it theoretically until the math works out again. Then we went and probed the theory in reality, eventually finding evidence to support the math.
Without any shred of evidence you can present, your theory is about as valid as the Egyptians claiming that their creator god Atum simply spat and sneezed out the universe.
Yes I already expected that question. Let me say this. The math is easy. It merely describes the idea of whats going on. Im way past of the math description. And this is not the place to show it. If you want I can show you a small wordly explanation. But Im not giving away here the whole math description.
Here you are simply wrong. How did Einstein invent his GR?
There are quantum fields. The idea is pretty simple. These fields can be described by Feynman diagrams, but only for perturbative approaches. The non-perturbative approach CANNOT use Feynman diagrams. At least thats the prevailing view. So what then? Im not sure yet but I have an idea.
The basic quantum fields are three massless Weyl-fields (rishons) interacting by 7 gauge fields. There is a massless graviton field. But the gravitons are not pointlike, solving infinities. No strings but kinda similar. Later I write some more about the arena on which this is all happening. With a surprising interpretation of dark energy.
Are you saying that there was a 'before' before time? Was there any time at all, or perhaps there was more than one time. Do you mean time as an invented physical term or as our life-experiential time. If you say they are the same then what makes you so sure?
Hawking invented imaginary time to take care of the time before time. Multiple times always shift the problem.
Hawking's imaginary time turns time into space and nowadays they say this is also what gravity is. So with Hawking's picture the universe is not eternal but as he says springs from nothing. Something springs from nothing for Hawking because energy is balanced with gravity such that it is just force and thus can spring from nothing. Before someone has a theory of an eternal universe they need to have a theory of a universe finite in time, otherwise you are begging the question by pushing it back in time
I think it'sYOU who is the crackpot. Only your crack doesnt really crack anything.
The PBS digital series has said that entropy comes from quantum physics, that time comes from entropy, and that gravity comes from time. So it seems the quantum is the root of gravity. How this works is what present research in studying. Quantum gravity!
No. Time is just a coordinate on a manifold. This time coordinate has a varying pace. Together with space it forms the whole of spacetime, Entropic time shows the asymmetry you talk about. There is no metric of asymmetric change. Where did you get THAT from? The problem with 4d smooth clasdical spacetime is that it contains potential singularities and that it's supposed not to lay in a higher dimensional space. Crackpots like him above are not able to leave their safehouses. Be it because of lack imagination or because of fear (which doesnt take awsy the fact though that they possess SOME knowledge. That of math, the easiest part though, but nailing him down). When no time is there before the bang it just cant bang. However imaginary you make time. Right. Now look for things untrue mister wiseguy!
Now here is a sensible thing said!
If it's the garden variety then its allright with me. Much to be learned from flowers!
What on Earth are you talking about? Empty verbiage. Though speaking of oneself as a parrot DOES show a sign of intelligence. The parrot is the sublime allegorical metaphore of crackpots, cracking without substance but loud sounds. Oooooh, I like this! Polemics!
Remember, the Big Bang, despite the imagery it evokes of matter flying apart in an expanding bubble, is all about space i.e. the Big Bang is simply the creation of space. The Big Bang singularity is matter (mass) squeezed to a single point, volume = 0. Density of the big bang singularity = (all the matter/mass there is)/0 = Not allowed! Hence The Big Bang (create space)!
Its not about the "creation" of space. Its about the expansion of space. The BBT, at least the parts that are well-corroborated and widely-accepted, doesn't include anything about a "beginning of the universe" or "the creation of spacetime". Its not a theory of origins. Its a theory of the universe's development from a hot dense early state, to the expanding/cooling state we presently observe.
Compare it to how evolution isn't a theory of how life began, but how it developed from some prior state to the currently observed state.
[quote=Wikipedia]Although there is no direct evidence for a singularity of infinite density, theĀ cosmic microwave backgroundĀ is evidence that the universe expanded from a very hot, dense state.[/quote]
:up: My bad for not thinking/reading before posting but it was such a satisfying explanation for me.
Its an extremely common misconception/error, and one that science educators/communicators and popular science journalism is constantly propagating. Lots of popular-level articles and videos that casually refer to the Big Bang as the creation, origin, or beginning of the universe, when the accepted theory simply does not include any such thing.
Great! So, I've been wrong all this time. :roll:
Any ideas why space would need to expand?
the prevalence of the misconception also probably has something to do with the rather aggressive propaganda campaign on the part of theists/Christianity/the RCC in particular to speak into existence an equivalence between and/or corroboration of the Christian creation myth by Big Bang cosmology.
Maybe the universe did have a discrete beginning or creation, but its not a part of any accepted or established physical theory.
Excellent point! I'll be sure to use this formulation of "origins" (or their current lack of theoretical explanation) in further discussions to clarify the distinction between metaphysics & physics on this topic. :up:
So, you see the hand of religious types in the invention and perpetuation of the myth that the big bang is about the origins of the universe. Come to think of it, it does further the agenda of a creation stories. :up:
:up:
And it continues to this day; William Lane Craig is a particularly egregious case, he continues to deliberately misrepresent contemporary cosmology as providing support for his Kalam cosmological argument, specifically the premise that the world/universe began to exist (and no doubt other apologists/theologians follow his lead here).
Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. No accepted or established scientific theory tells us anything either way.
I guess we could chalk it up to two things:
1. Misunderstanding (communication gaps). Not getting the facts straight.
2. Religious zeal. Some believers are too eager to make a point that they're willing to gloss over important details. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias.
Strangely enough you didnt accept that when I told you that
Yes.But you would think Im a jackpot!
Apologies. My life isn't perfect! G'day!
Who's life is? You think mine?
But I don't think this is generally true. Many people just hear the popular science TV shows or Youtube channels refer to the Big Bang as the "beginning of the universe" and so just assume that must be true. But Craig knows better, and does it anyway.
What bothers me is why did cosmologists stop the extrapolation at, to quote Wikipedia, "...hot dense state..." They could've simply drawn the trajectories of all the galaxies back to a point just as William Lane Craig and I thought. It's not that there was a law against it, right?
But it makes a big difference whether you are imagining extrapolating a line - a linear relation - or instead an asymptotic curve.
Do the two parts of the cosmic equation - spacetime extent and energy density content - go to infinite value because they trace back all the way through the Planckscale event horizon and meet at a point, the confounding singularity, at some further distance beyond?
Or are the two parts of the equation yoked to each other in reciprocal fashion - as the Planck triad of c, G and h suggest - so that instead they converge asymptotically to create that event horizon that marks the beginning of both spacetime extent and its entropic spreading.
Because that's where our theories cease to be good descriptions of physical reality. As we rewind the clock backwards and the universe gets smaller and hotter, eventually we reach a point where quantum effects become significant, and general relativity ceases to be a good theory. General relativity is a classical theory, it does not include quantum mechanical effects, so once we reach the point where gravitation dominates on the quantum scale in the very early universe, we need a quantum theory of gravity to describe what is happening... which we don't have. So we can't rewind any further, as we have no description of how physics works in those extreme conditions.
And the fact that GR spits out an evident absurdity- the "Big Bang singularity", where all the mass in the universe occupies a 0-dimensional point where density, temperature, and spacetime curvature run to infinity- in precisely the situation where we expect it to cease to be applicable is no doubt why the overwhelming majority of cosmologists don't believe there was any such thing- the singularity is an artifact of a theory pushed past its breaking point- and that a successful theory of quantum gravity will remove such singularities (which is exactly what happens in candidate theories of quantum gravity like string/M-theory and loop quantum gravity/loop quantum cosmology).
Do you see how you just confused the expectation of being able to rewind (in linear fashion) beyond the Planckscale event horizon with the acceptance that it is the actual limit of such rewinding?
You have been very dogmatic about the Big Bang not counting as the actual beginning of the Universe, but that is just a failure to rid your metaphysics of this assumption about linearity - the ability to extend any straight line to infinity.
What QM tells us about GR is that its straight lines become eventually so completely curved that they turn into little circles. You wind up with a description of a spacetime foam that is populated by blackholes and wormholes. A mess of naked and disconnected fluctuations, in other words.
So the Universe - as we understand it to be, via our models - is this classical realm dominated by its Euclidean flatness. We then look a little closer and have to come up with further models like GR and QFT that introduce some curvature and uncertainty. Then we track those speed wobbles in our initial Newtonian determinism and find eventually it all goes completely out of control. All the straight lines turn into curves so tight they are a foam of circles. All the uncertainty becomes so great that all that exists is naked fluctuation with no grounding context.
QG might be regarded as a project that restores linearity to the physics in a way that will let us punch right on through the Planckscale event horizon and see what lies "beyond" ... as some extrapolatable continuation of a spacetime extent and its energy density content. But as with the HartleāHawking imaginary time proposal, everything we know and love as the metaphysically taken-for-granted might just curve into each other and thus vanish up its own collective arse. :razz:
So the problem lies with projecting linear expectations onto GR and QM, which are already themselves frameworks for dealing with the gathering curvature and uncertainty of reality, and then expecting QG to be the triumphant return of Newtonian straight-line metaphysics.
GR works because it uncouples the connection between spacetime extent and local energy density. So in a Universe that is generally large, cold and empty - which means what, about at least 10^-10 seconds old and down to barely 10^15 degrees? - the two halves of the one reciprocal deal can seem clearly separated. You have a backdrop of flattish spacetime in which reasonably well located events are taking place. The electroweak symmetry has cracked. The Higgs field is on. Particles now have a mass that means they can go much slower than light, even if they are still a long way from being at any kind of rest.
But as we wind the clock back towards the Big Bang, we see all that familiar asymmetry being swallowed up into the anonymity of an increasingly more general set of symmetries, until we arrive at a vanilla GUT force and a matchingly vanilla notion of a relativistic quark-gluon soup, just before everything merges into the one cosmic vagueness of an event horizon, beyond which lurks only our notions about a quantum foam of fluctuations that could also be described in GR terms as a host of tiniest possible circularities - a hot mess of spatial blackholes and temporal wormholes.
So quit holding out hope that a QG theory will restore linearity and so discover a time and a place (and a higher heat or energy density) that lies over the well-demarcated Planckscale event horizon. That will enable you to be less dogmatic in your proclamations about the Big Bang not marking the beginnings of metaphysical linearity as we know and love it. The Universe that is generally large, cold and just about empty. :smile:
They've actually looked to see if the universe shows overall curvature, and it doesn't. As far as we can see a modified Euclidean geometry does work. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be curvature that's just so vast we can't see it.
That's the prevailing view in physics right now. No singularity.
Sure, that's perfectly fair. I'm mostly just stating what is the conventional wisdom, and I'm aware that the hope in QG allowing us to peek behind the curtain and tell the rest of this story is only one among many. I think there's a lot of value to the suggestion that we've pushed this type of program to its limit, and we have to think outside the box to really move past the present stalemate. We're well past holding our breath for string/superstring theory to yield any testable (let alone actually confirmed) predictions, so may as well bang our head against a different wall, for something new and different if nothing else.
But I do object to the suggestion that there's anything "dogmatic" about pointing out that the parts of the BBT which are widely-accepted and observationally-corroborated don't include any beginning or origin of the universe. We can't test the relevant physics, can't re-create the relevant conditions even at the LHC (not by several orders of magnitude), so we're purely shooting in the dark in those earliest stages of the universe. And I'm not claiming that there was no beginning or origin of the universe; I'm certainly not ruling that out at all. My only purpose is to counter the familiar and misleading talking point (found mostly in popular-level content on cosmology/BBT) that this is a generally accepted or observationally well-established part of the standard cosmological model accepted by most cosmologists, or that the BBT is primarily a theory of the origin of the universe (rather than of its development). It just isn't.
But they looked and found it has dark energy and so an "internal pressure" that means spacetime isn't contracting, nor even coasting to a gravitational halt, but is undergoing open-ended acceleration.
So there are three generalised curvatures the Universe could have had - closed and hyperspheric, flat and Euclidean, and open and hyperbolic. The surprise is that it looks to be hyperbolic and so the event horizon of the Big Bang can be matched by its inverse of the event horizon of a de Sitter space Heat Death.
The end of the Universe is also a problem. It was hard to believe it could actually be so finally balanced in terms of its gravitational contraction and thermal expansion that it might indeed just coast towards a stop over infinite time - another singularity! And if it had too much gravity, too little matter, then it is almost just as improbable that it would have lasted the 14 billion years until now without collapsing.
So a faint positive curvature allows the Universe to stay open and yet come to an eventual Heat Death halt in terms of its cosmological event horizon ā the size of the region that counts as the observable Universe.
The source of that dark energy or cosmological constant still has to be explained. It would be nice if the simple theory - that it is curvature contribution from the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum itself - pans out. That would make the force something internal to the fabric of spacetime itself - all part of the Big Bang deal.
Quoting frank
Well singularity is a technical term in maths for some kind of radical break or discontinuity in the smooth continuity of a function. So it can take many shapes.
Folk who were rewinding the GR-regulated evolution of the Cosmos past the Planckscale were aiming at a singularity shaped like a zero-D point. They wanted to shrink things to where spacetime was infinitely small. But QM said that meant it also had to be infinitely hot - as such complete certainty about location was a matchingly complete uncertainty about momentum.
But actually tie to the two curves together by inserting all three Planck constants into your cosmological equations - as QG would have to do - and you get instead (hopefully) a smooth transition in terms of a singularity-masking event horizon.
No, it's flat and Euclidean.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said, the prevailing view now is that there was no singularity of any kind. Big bangs happen from time to time in a greater universe that could be without limits.
How can you know that if we see only a minor part of that universe. It can be locally flat and globally curved.
The "point" is that there IS no such point.You can say that that point lays an infinite amount of time away and thus asking about the time before makes no sense but a black hole has a beginning too.
We don't know. What we see is flat. Read my whole post.
:ok:
The dogmatism relates to the assumption of a beginning/origin having to exist at some smaller scale/hotter temperature beyond the Planckscale event horizon of the Big Bang.
Spacetime and energy density are so yoked together that going "smaller" and getting "hotter" really doesn't make sense if curvature reaches its maximum at that scale. We arrive at a "just before" that is all blackholes and wormholes ā a quantum foam at best.
That might be still a "something" we can model as a pre-Bang state. It just wouldn't be any kind of time, place, or state of materiality, as we claim to know it from this side of the cosmological event horizon.
So the Big Bang would in that view be the start of the Universe in the sense that the term has any useful meaning.
After all, I'm sure you would agree with the conventional reply when folk ask what is the Universe expanding into. Very quickly you will say it is just the expansion of the metric itself. The Universe is not embedded in some larger space.
But why doesn't the same logic apply to the origin of the Universe? Why does it have to be developing out of something? Why can't the development itself be what produces a developed something?
Quoting Seppo
I'm trying to highlight the problem with what you say is the generally accepted metaphysics.
It could be the case that Universe didn't start at the "point in time" that is its Planckscale event horizon. It could be true that there is a lengthy pre-bang story along the lines of Lindeās eternal inflation or Big Bounce cosmology. It may well be that QG is a theory that sees beyond the Planckscale and finds some kind of spacetime/energy density story that pushes the origin of that spacetime/energy density story into realms that are simply just smaller and hotter.
But these ideas are speculative, simplistic, and don't even tackle the essential questions about why there are these things of spacetime and energy density. Again, we pull folk up who ask what space our Universe is growing into, yet seem untroubled by bouncing cosmologies or branching inflation fields that presume a familiar notion of passing time as the place in which our Big Bang universe appears as just another material development.
Nothing useful is added by these kinds of linear extrapolations. The question is why spacetime and energy density are even a thing that came into being. Telling people not to bother so much with the Big Bang, wait for the full story of the "universe" beyond the Planckscale, is buying into the bad metaphysics that simply makes good careers for mathematical physicists looking to stay relevant in a time where there is little actual progress to report.
My inclination is instead to turn things around, take the Big Bang seriously as its own origin point, and see how that fits what we already know in terms of GR, QFT, the Planck triad of constants, and general symmetry breaking and condensed matter physics principles.
The Planckscale describes the first moment when spacetime as the backdrop, and energy density as its contents, could be told apart. It's a tale of co-dependent arising. And that is already the story the Big Bang theory tells in its talk of a beginning that was a relativistic realm of vanilla GUT force fluctuations. In what sense did either distinct particles or a background vacuum exist when the world was still so hot that the void was completely filled by its own wild fluctuations? Big Bang theory then says that was the initial lack of proper separation that became fairly quickly an expanding~cooling process of increasing separateness.
You don't have to like the scenario. But again, the point is that we agree not much progress has been made these past 20 years or so. Conventional thinking might be that we just need to be able to punch through the Planckscale event horizon to discover what further cosmological structure lies beyond its veil. I say the event horizon most likely simply marks an actual limit on counterfactual being. And that is at least an alternative worth being discussed - as has indeed happened with some of the loop and condensed matter models.
You might be thinking just of space and not spacetime. Inertial expansion is flat but accelerating expansion is curved.
Quoting frank
But even Lindeās eternal inflation is a story about a fractally branching multiverse so it indeed all branches from one initial starting point. There is a singularity in the need to explain why there was the first Planckian shoot that became the vast tree.
But if I had to pick a pre-Bang cosmology, an inflating multiverse seems the best candidate. It at least provides an anthropic reason why we live in a branch that happens to have the ārightā randomly chosen physical constants - I mean all the constants besides the three key Planck ones the multiverse must also presume. :grin:
What caused that to happen?
The prevailing view (the dogma) is that space can't be embedded in a higher dimensiolal one. But thats questionable, although the dogma forbids asking this. But 3d space can be immersed in 4d space. Causing expansion to be an illusion.
This comes very close.
But gravity would need some mass of matter before it can exert, no? According to your saying, the formation of the matter was done by force of gravity, but gravity needs the formed matter, no?
Which sounds like needing even more powerful force of gravity, if it were gravity. But where did the gravity come from?
Sure, I would have thought if the dusts formed into planets, then it would need some mass pulling the dusts prior to the formation of the planets. But ok, it seems a good theory.
OK, how do you explain the dusts forming into human bodies?
Can it be replicated in the lab experiments?
:roll: :chin:
That's not enough. There is needed a periodic inflow and outflow of heat.
After the the bang, order is restored and all fields happily move on in unity, holding hands by virtual fields
A miraculous wonder that can be addressed! ?
"What came before the Big Bang?" questions stimulate some creative thinking on both sides of the Realistic Science versus Idealistic Philosophy divide. And "spontaneous symmetry breaking" is a genius modern myth, along with the math-magical metaphor of instantaneous-inflation-from-nothing-to-cosmos. Relative to the ironic evasive tactic of "no-thing is unstable", the notion of the pre-bang symmetry-of-nothingness is precious. Both sides assume without evidence, that some-thing existed before our space-time era began. But one imagines that what-is-is-what-was. While the other envisions that what-was-is-what-will-be. ???
Planck probably thought that by calculating the smallest possible measurable time or length, that fades into asymptosis or ellipsis, would put an end to such "before the beginning" nonsense. But, for curious philosophically inclined seekers, "what-if?" questions are irresistible honey for the imagination. And some posters on this forum will take-up hard-line (this-is-what-is) positions on such conjectures, which are by definition unverifiable. It would be nice, if for a change, we could just freely speculate on such pre-columbian "what's out there over the horizon?" scenarios, without coming to blows over which party is the biggest idiot : the short-cut-to-India optimists, or the sail-over-the-edge-pessimists. :cool:
People who BELIEVE in God (whatever that means) say the same thing, whether they call it a big bang or not, and the same problems arise.
What created god? He's uncreated? Infinite? Unknowable? So maybe the universe is uncreated, infinite, unknowable. As Carl Sagan would say, "Why not save a step?"
At / below the Planck radius, "before the BB" makes no sense to speculate about; rather, based on extant scientific data, all we can intelligibly say is that the Planck-era "universe" seems to have been an acausal vacuum fluctuation that is still 'expanding', and is not "the origin" but development of this vacuum fluctuation into an apparently unbounded, dissipative megastructure self-generating (along a cosmic-thermal gradient) astronomically countless, fractal-like, systems and subsystems, which we simplistically, for convenience sake, call (this) "universe". No woo required. :eyes:
Could be. I'll look again.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe we don't mean the same thing by "singularity.". Did you get a chance to watch this video?
You have clashing brane theories that make use of string theoryās higher dimensionality. So this is another example of reductionist desperation in my eyes. But mathematical physics is certainly not dogmatic about these kinds of things.
But there are good reasons for just 3D, like the fact that gravity and other forces arenāt leaking away into this embedding space. They weaken at the square of their distance and not the cube.
And more to the point, cosmology noticed that all the stars become increasingly red shifted with distance from us. So unless the Earth is the still centre of an exploding creation, you have to accept the conventional Big Bang cosmology.
Stuff collected. Infinite density cannot be; it went boom!
Planck was actually just thinking about the problem of why the heat radiated by an object didnāt add up to infinity like a simple extrapolation of know physics said it should. He introduced the notion of a quantum cut-off point. That ushered in physicsā next big paradigmatic revolution.
So that should tell us something about the need to avoid infinities if we are to have the bounded finitude we actually observe as our natural habitat. Existence is a limitation on too much everythingness. Creation is not about getting something out of nothing but of developing constraints on unbounded fluctuations.
I believe Anaximander said something along those lines 2500 years ago. Indeed, all pre-modern cosmologies seem to be the same creation story of order arising out of chaos.
Put together Planckās h, Newtonās G and Einsteinās c to make Okunās cube of physical theories and you have a model of a mechanism where the positive curvature of quantum fluctuations is balanced by the negative curvature of gravity at a rate that is scaled by the speed of light. We have a set of fundamental constants that are cast in a dialectical or reciprocal relation with each other.
So we discover there is this broken symmetry at the root of things. It is not unreasonable to wind that back to the symmetry state that marks its beginning.
Metaphysics has always reasoned this way. But modern thought - on both sides of the realist-idealist divide - has gotten into the habit of simple reductionism and itās cause and effect monism. Creations canāt be self-organising say the reductionists. They demand a creator that stands outside the creation.
Quoting Gnomon
That is true. But also, there is ample science to constrain the free speculation. Yet then cosmology is like quantum theory in that scientists themselves go crazy with their speculation as they have not invested too much effort in questioning the reductionist habits of thought that have generally made science so successful.
That makes it an interesting situation - like consciousness studies too - where those who are very well informed about the material facts are also blinded by the paradigm within which those facts were developed. Both the well informed and the uninformed can make dogmatic assertions about the nature of the Cosmos and the nature of the Mind that are ill thought out for their different reasons.
I don't really have any objection to any of this. I actually think its a really good point that we should be suspicious of proposals that appeal to our sense of a sequential narrative (like cyclical cosmologies), and if/when we finally break through this impasse its going to be in a way no one foresaw (and I think this also applies to particle physics). If the current projects/paradigms (string theory, supersymmetry, etc) were going to bear fruit, you would have hoped it would have happened by now... and that just hasn't happened, we've been spinning our wheels for decades (then again, nature isn't too interested in our time schedule so who knows).
But as a hobbyist (my background is in philosophy not physics), I tend to be a bit more conservative in sticking to what is the widely held view of people with actual formal expertise on the subject, hence my comments here sticking to what I guess is sort of the party line on the topic RE quantum gravity and early Big Bang cosmology.
Great posts, btw- very interesting commentary. :clap:
If you're going to be so damn reasonable then I have to rescind that dogmatic comment. Bugger. :smile:
Quoting Seppo
Yep.
Quoting Seppo
Again, that's fair.
It it just that the party line too often feels like the party members papering over their own divisions and confusions so the general public/taxpayer funders don't catch on to what a mess they might be in.
In fact I parked particle physics and cosmology a decade ago to give them time to catch up with themselves and see if some actual new consensus might emerge. Loop and condensed matter approaches were encouraging at the time, but also starting to fall apart like strings did.
I think what did it for me was the loop guys suddenly promoting bounce cosmology as the kind of "theory" that a new multi-billion euro collider might just be able to test. Suddenly there was a new party line to be built around a ginormous funding application ... and let's not look too closely at its scientific merits.
But in case you are interested in where I am coming from, there was this really good blog post by the "Hammock Physicist", Johannes Koelman, in 2010. He was so on the money for me that it was no surprise he appeared to give up his academic ambitions and turn to making a living in industry soon after.
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/physical_reality_less_more
I wrote up a precis at the time which I can simply paste here just in case it has value.
Oh yeah, this is definitely the case. Physics is.. sort of broken right now (cosmology and particle physics at any rate), but that's not a story that gets broadcast to the public. After all, they might be less inclined to throw money at e.g. the next bigger and better particle accelerator we need to continue chasing the supersymmetry dragon (and we can't have that)!
Another awesome post btw, think I'm going to have to print this one out so I don't have to read it on the computer (damn thing gives me a headache after a while). Going to check out the Koelmann blog too, looks like some good stuff there as well.
Quoting Seppo
Then who tha hell are you to criticise me? My "background", as you put it very imaginatively, is physics. And my foreground is philosophy. On top, it's raining on me. I have two lions of science on both sides.
Then it needs a fix.
WTF is Koelmans? Sounds Dutch: The cool man.
@Seppo is suddenly very quiet! Now why should that be?
I said, the prevailing view. Branes and pyrotechnics dont offer a good explanation to confine matter (except gravitons) on a brane.
Not true.
Why not?
Mathematical physics no. Physicists yes.
I've criticized you for the (frankly rather ridiculous) things you've said. Not for any items of personal trivia. And as a self-admitted crackpot (points for honesty btw), I'm just not interested in what you've got to say any more, on this or really any other topic. Not because you're wrong, necessarily, I just don't care. Life's too short to bother with crackpots, even if broken clocks are still right once in a while.
Sorry/not sorry.
Finally a reply! But as crackpot tells jackpot that it doesnt wanna dance no more, I leave crackpot and letit be! No sorry.
Then you miss out on the revelation of the century! The universe has spoken to me! In the language of Nature which I describe by math, the easy part.
Who said anything about "woo"?. What I said was :
"Both sides assume without evidence, that some-thing existed before our space-time era began. But one imagines that what-is-is-what-was. While the other envisions that what-was-is-what-will-be. ???" Now which side is pitching "woo"? Are you just being contrarian? :smile:
Of course, I was putting words in Planck's mouth to illustrate the philosophical problem of the abrupt beginning of our space-time world from an initial state of infinity-eternity, that we are not able to penetrate with our physical science. Not to be deterred, we still attempt to go beyond that physical limit, with meta-physical imagination. And such speculation is posited by some famous serious scientists. Yet contrarians refer to some of those conjectures as "woo" (in a non-Shakesperean sense), while the other shot-in-the-dark guesses are "justified" scientific inference from limited information.
Anyway, I just read a section of a book, written by Astronomer/Physicist John Barrow, on "classical cosmology". There, he noted : "prior to the Planck time 10^-43 seconds we know nothing of the state of space and time nor even if such familiar entities existed". He goes on to say, "during this fleeting era (10^-43 to 10^-35 seconds) there is a complete symmetry between all these interactions (fundamental forces) . . . . complete symmetry between matter and antimatter". [my emphasis] So, according to the scientist's BB theory inferences from current conditions to Planck time conditions, the Singularity was symmetrically balanced.
Which raises the question for both materialist physicists and non-materialist meta-physicists, "what caused that sudden symmetry break . . . that instant imbalance?" Anything we say about that pre-Planck era is inherently speculative, and based on certain assumptions. The pertinent presumptions here are A- "matter (particles) is fundamental", or B- "mind (reason ; law) is fundamental. Neither side of this debate knows what it's talking about, in scientific terms. But as philosophical inferences, they are both worthy of serious consideration. IMHO. Scientists tend to prefer a physical scenario, such as the Quantum Fluctuation hypothesis (due to random Chance). And some Philosophers prefer to consider a non-random lawful scenario, such as Aristotle's First Cause/Prime Mover (a deity of "pure form"). Which acts via teleological Intention. Admittedly, the latter is not an empirical scientific theory, but then neither is the imaginary Quantum Fluctuation scenario. So, why not give due consideration to both propositions? :cool:
"The Swerve" refers to a key conception in the ancient atomistic theories according to which atoms moving through the void are subject to clinamen: while falling straight through the void, they are sometimes subject to a slight, unpredictable swerve.
__reference to De Rerum Natura, by Lucretius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swerve
Note : the poetic invention of a sudden unexpected change in course foreshadowed modern "Quantum Fluctuation" proposals to explain how acausal randomness can be a creative disruption of Chaos to produce an orderly organized world.
Prishon says: No symmetry between interaction! Symmetry break based on wrong assumption. Higgsy mechanism no exist! Matter antimatter are equal and were always equal. Also now! Anti rishons on othere side of 4d open torus! Anti quarki and anti lepton on other side. Quarki and lepton contain same anti as normal. On other side of open torus Prishon sees anti quarki and anti leptoni. But on both sides equal number both.
The Universe was also expanding and cooling at an exponential rate while in that vanilla unbroken state - according to the simplest extrapolations. So the Universe just had to cross a threshold where the unified conditions finally broke in the usual phase transition way. Or not so usual if this breaking also released an inflationary spurt.
Quoting Gnomon
But GR and QM are empirical. Phase transitions are empirical. Everything back to the Planck event horizon has at least an evidenced basis that constrains its speculations.
Even versions of teleology are empirical to the degree that quantum nonlocality and retrocausality are accepted as a thing - Jack Sarfatti offering an example of such a line of thought here.
So the reason to take one side seriously is that there is good evidence for its starting assumptions.
Quoting Gnomon
An expanding and cooling space of fluctuations will at some point cross a threshold where the fluctuations cease to rule as correlated actions start to take over. The simple example is steam condensing into water. So order emerges as all the hot particles become regulated by some larger collective state. Lawfulness appears. It is almost as if a divine hand intervened ā¦ not. :razz:
So in general, once you have a Planckian world with the ingredients of spacetime and energy density, the future is baked into that material package. The puzzle - the need for new physics - lies in how to account for that starting point.
My own points here is about taking the emergence of spacetime and energy density seriously and looking for some kind of naked symmetry breaking story which produces that initial division itself. Donāt just keep shoving that basic step further back in ātimeā to some other āplaceā that has āinfiniteā energy to expend. The next step for cosmology has to be the one that breaks down the very notion of dimensionality and gives it an emergent explanation.
This is why loop quantum gravity was a promising approach. Many different versions were at least suggesting that naked 1D fluctuations - an action without a space to give it direction - could still knit together a web of correlations. A quantum foam would find its own emergent order that cooled its chaos. There was evidence for the speculation in terms of running computer simulations of the maths being proposed.
Materialist approaches also can claim to know what are the known unknowns. The key to unlocking progress is figuring out the grand unified symmetry that describes the Plankscale initial conditions - the one that unifies the Standard Modelās hierarchy of known symmetry breakings.
So the materialists have a pretty well defined project ahead of them. The issue of what came ābeforeā the Big Bang is interesting. But there are big gaps to fill in the story of what the initial symmetry state looked like first.
Quoting Gnomon
My own approach is influenced by Peircean systems logic. And that would argue that the initial conditions were a vagueness - a ārealmā where the principle of non-contradiction had yet to even apply.
So law and fluctuation would have been indistinguishable to the degree that both were present. They would have āexistedā as just the latent possibility of such a division.
And this is what the reciprocal structure of the Planck constants tell us. At the beginning of the Big Bang, fluctuations had the Planck temperature and so were as big as the spacetime world they were happening in. The buckling effect of the hot contents was equal to the confining impact of its would-be container. There would thus be both law and chance in balanced existence, but right on top of each other in sharing the same scale, and so not yet actually distinguishable as two divided aspects of the one larger reality.
The Big Bang is the birth of the division and growth in scale that increasingly locates chance to the local scale of being, and law to the global scale of being.
This is why the Universe seems so perfectly divided in its era of Newtonian classicality. There is a rule by global law. And that allows the writing of prescriptive equations into which any "chance" measurement can be inserted as a local variable.
Chance is so constrained that you can count it as entropy, or distinguishable microstates. The only real fluctuation is quantum, and that has been tamed by decoherence now. Just as law has been pushed so far towards its global limit that it appears to transcend our Universe (becoming written in the mind of God so far as many materialists are concerned :smirk: ), so too chance has been pushed to the edge of the cosmological picture - and thus led to pathologies of extrapolation such as the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.
So yes. We can boil it down to metaphysical first principles like the dialectical opposition of law and chance. But then we want to avoid the chicken and egg debates about which came first, or which is the ground to the other. That is the kind of causal logic that sets up the two sides of the one story as disjunct monisms. Both good old fashioned materialism and good old fashioned theist woo (or idealism) are logically in error because of their shared reductionism.
It is written into the Planck constant derived equations that describe spacetime and energy density that the logic is dialectical or reciprocal. Local chance and global law are themselves the two sides of reality that had to co-arise as a unity of opposites, a symmetry breaking that was self-organising. You have the triad that is the h that scales pure fluctuation or energetic curvature, the G that scales any deviations from global flatness, and then the c that is the scalefactor for their ever expanding and cooling trajectory towards their respective asymptotic limits.
This kind of logic ought to be very familiar for anyone who has studied ancient Greek metaphysics, or even Eastern approaches like Taoism and Prat?tyasamutp?da. In more recent Western tradition, we have Hegel and Peirce.
But as it happens, even a central loops thinker like Rovelli can write an enthusiastic book about Anaximander as the first scientist ... and miss the essential metaphysical point ... of what Anaximander meant by ... apokrisis, or "separating out".
I'm not sure. I'm not taking sides. But I'm referring to whatever alternatives you have in mind when categorizing the Science versus Woo controversy. It's all philosophy to me. :grin:
Exactly! :wink:
Prishon say: rightydididili! :smile:
Sorry, if I confused you. I was asking a philosophical "why" question, not a scientific "how" question.
As a philosophical layman, I tend to take the more holistic cosmological perspective of "Emergence", instead of the analytical reductive scientific view of "Phase Transitions". :nerd:
Phase Transition :
Phase transitions occur when the thermodynamic free energy of a system is non-analytic for some choice of thermodynamic variables
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_transition
Evolutionary Emergence :
[i]* As a supplement to the mainstream materialistic (scientific) theory of Causation, EnFormAction is intended to be an evocative label for a well-known, but somewhat mysterious, feature of physics : the Emergent process of Phase Change (or state transitions) from one kind (stable form) of matter to another. These sequential emanations take the structural pattern of a logical hierarchy : from solids, to liquids, to gases, and thence to plasma, or vice-versa. But they don't follow the usual rules of direct contact causation.
* Expand that notion to a Cosmological perspective, and we can identify a more general classification of stratified phase-like emergences : from Physics (energy), to Chemistry (atoms), to Biology (life), to Psychology (minds), to Sociology (global minds). Current theories attribute this undeniable stairstep progession to random accidents, sorted by ānatural selectionā (a code word for āevaluationsā of fitness for the next phase) that in retrospect appear to be teleological, tending toward more cooperation of inter-relationships and entanglements between parts on the same level of emergence. Some AI enthusiasts even envision the ultimate evolution of a Cosmic Mind, informed by all lower level phases.
* Zoom back down to the sub-atomic level, and we find another set of "upward" emergences. From the universal Quantum Field of statistical possibilities, "virtual particles" or "wavicles" mysteriously appear from nowhere as almost real particles of matter, such as Bosons & Leptons. Those minimal particles of matter are bound together by strange forces into the paradoxical state of matter called "entanglement". They also tend to cluster into the dynamic structures we call Atoms, as-if foreordained to snap-fit into designated roles in the smallest whole systems. From that barely-real phase of reality, atoms assemble into molecules and thence into larger aggregations of matter. After each emergence, those integrated systems display complex patterns of information, and new physical properties . . . eventually even mental qualities never before seen in the mechanical material world.[/i]
http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
PS__ 180 Proof's answer to the topical question was "there is no why?". If that is the case, why are we discussing the BB on a philosophical forum instead of a scientific forum?
I'll drink on this too! Only, I dont think there are universes in universes. Maybe they appear in series. One big bang sending it all to infinity. Then a new one, sending it behind the one before. Etcetera ab minus infinitum ad plus infinitum.
I'm not qualified to discuss some of the technical issues you raise concerning Big Bang theory. But, I can grok your notion of a "dialectical opposition of law and chance". I see that creative dialectic in Darwin's concept of Evolution : Randomness generates diversity, and Selection (apokrisis -- choose, sort out, decide) winnows down the multiplicity to the "fittest" few. Randomness is a series of unrelated accidents, while Selection chooses only those accidents that have something in common : fitness for a niche in Nature. But post-Darwin scientists, with a reductionist worldview, tended to put their emphasis on the chaotic unregulated aspects, and took for granted the orderly regulatory function of Natural Selection. But, from a more holistic perspective, NS seems to be essentially a "law of Nature".
In the June-July issue of Philosophy Now magazine, Ray Tallis notes that the laws of Nature seem to be more than just "habits" or "regularities", and act like directional agents for the path forward of evolution. He raises the "dubious notion" of natural laws as "being agencies in themselves". He presents the metaphor of a horse, which in a state of nature acts upon its own internal urges and needs : eating grass, propagating the species, and escaping predators. But a horse with a human rider, behaves completely differently. It is under the control of an external agent, who has needs and goals that may often be in opposition to those internal motives.
He discusses linear "natural necessity" as compared with some unpredictable irregular patterns of natural behavior. The "necessity" view says that "the laws of nature do not shape what happens, but are simply the shape of what happens". In that case, "the laws of nature . . . come to look less like explanations than descriptions". They are mere regularities, instead of regulators. This would mean that "the natural world is not the obedient servant of a legislative master", as implied by the original meaning of a top-down Royal Mandate intrinsic to the word "Law".
Tallis disagrees with the "that's just the way it is" implication that the predictability of nature. that scientists rely on, is a mere time-worn groove in stone. Instead, he says, "necessity is verbal, logical, or theological, as such, it has no place in grown-up philosophy of science". Ironically, while the laws of Nature are reliable, the laws of Science are continually being revised as our understanding deepens and matures : to wit -- predictable Newtonian Laws as superceded by unpredictable Quantum behaviors. Which he sums up as, "there has been a gap between the habits of nature (which do not change) and the laws of science (which do)".
And that brings him back to his original topic : "the compatibility of law-like nature, with the exercise of freedom by human agents". Within the scope of Nature, we have the steady, but non-progressive cycles of the horse, which continues to behave as its ancestors did millions of years ago. On the other hand, we have the relentless, but unpredictable progression of human Culture, riding the horse, with a will of its own. By imposing its will, human nature gains the freedom from natural laws, that allow it to become a guiding agency astride the horse. Thus a Metaphysical Principle rules over the Physical Habits of Nature. Which raises the "dubious" question of who or what was the Lawmaker, Regulator, Selector, Agent, Rider for the powerful Big Bang horse. Is that too woo to be true? :smile:
Arenāt you just re-mystifying the view that Tallis wants to de-mystify?
The Big Bang falls within his description of Natural Habits. Regularity is emergent as symmetries are broken and the general cooling-expansion of the Universe prevents its ever returning to its less organised past.
The quark-gluon soup was a moment of featureless hot generality. It was followed by symmetry breakings that created a world organised by the strong, weak and EM force, that has Newtonian masses moving at slower than c, and so on. The laws of particle physics, then eventually elemental chemistry and code-regulated biology, eventually emerged.
The Universe kept cooling-expanding and further ever-more specified levels of ālawā emerged like a rocky shoreline with the tide going out.
So everything is unified as a tale of dissipative structure, Chance becomes increasingly constrained in its forms.
But at the same time, chance is becoming increasingly specific in its form.
The quark-gluon soup becomes a collection of broken-out different forces and particles. You get the possibility of protons and electrons, thus atoms, and thus chemistry as a higher level of dissipative structure.
So from the generality of vanilla chaos, we get the specific randomness of chemistry on the surface of the earth. We have dissipative structures like geothermal ocean floor vents that are where life can gets its own metabolic start.
Thus a planet like Earth is already both severely constrained by an accumulation of cosmic constraints, and yet also left with matchingly definite local degrees of freedom. It is already a highly complex system just with its plate tectonics and atmospheric weather systems.
And then life and mind arise as another level of code-based causality - one both constrained and enabled by that accumulation of physics, chemistry and planetary geology. We have to obey the second law of thermodynamics, but we can also accumulate free energy to spend how we like.
Science simply becomes a way of looking at that situation through the eyes of a culture that wants to understand its reality in terms of the causal levers it can pull, the buttons it can push, to control the material possibilities we find in the world.
So where is the woo? The Universe is organised by thermodynamics. That results in pockets of complexity like a planet. Code-based dissipative structure like life arises within entropy gradients like a thermal vent, and then a photosynthetic flux. Eventually that life becomes organised by higher levels of code such as neurons, words and numbers. It develops a āselfishā point of view that imagines itself as the technological lord of creation.
Big deal. :razz:
Although he doesn't make it explicit in the article, Tallis seems to be raising the same old questions that many scientists would put-down to "Mysticism", or even worse, "feckless Philosophy". Having noted that [natural] "laws somehow act upon the 'stuff' of nature from outside it", and that [natural] "laws are a 'quasi-agency'", he seems to be poking his nose into fundamental mysteries. "Outside of nature" is what many call "super-natural". I was merely going along for the ride on the horse that Tallis was directing.
Speaking of "outside nature", how could the Big Bang -- the first stage of an ongoing series -- be labelled a "habit"? Are you implying that it was just another routine step in an eternal cycle of repetitions? For most cosmologists, the BB is the beginning of what we now call "Nature". And anything prior to that, such as habitual regularities would be pure speculation, on super-natural questions. Of course, some of those cosmologists can't help such conjectures, even when it gets them into "woo" territory.
If the universe is prevented, by Entropy, from "ever returning" to it's initial state, that means it's a one-way trip. And not cyclical, as some would have it. In football lingo, "it's one and done". In that case, what might have preceded that auspicious, for us humans, beginning is a legitimate -- not mystical -- philosophical question. It's not a scientific question though, because it cannot be dis-proven empirically. But, since the BB was indeed a "big deal" for those of us who ask "why" questions, trying to de-mystify the provenance of the BB is an act of Wisdom, not necessarily a slippery-slope to Woo.
If our world is defined by its context, the circumstances that led to the BB need to be defined in some way, before we can claim to have a complete philosophical worldview. Of course, some people have religious or political motives, rather than philosophical or scientific reasons for asking such questions. But, by reflexively labeling all such "before the beginning" questions as Woo or Weirdness, would tar many serious scientists and philosophers with the same brush as the "religious nuts" and "wacko weirdos".
That's why I don't accept the "woo" label for my inquiries. Instead, I see it as Science-With-Both-Eyes-Open. Your left eyes informs the analytical & reductive right brain, while the right eye views the world through the filter of the intuitive & holistic left brain. Together, we get a stereoscopic 3D worldview. But with one eye closed, we are blind to half of Reality . . . and may label the missing parts as "woo", or worse. :smile:
Provenance : the beginning of something's existence; something's origin.
Philosophy :
Quite literally, the term "philosophy" means, "love of wisdom." In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other.
https://philosophy.fsu.edu/undergraduate-study/why-philosophy/What-is-Philosophy
Context : the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms." - Socrates?
Looking at the sun "With-Both-Eyes-Open" will completely blind you. Remember, the old skalds tell us, Odin sacrificed an eye for wisdom. "The right eye" represents our cognitive biases (i.e. subjectivity, introspection, dreaming), which when "open" doesn't see reality at all, but rather sees mostly our own self-flattering (folk psychological / epistemological) projections instead. Reality, in fact, sublimely exceeds both our perceptions and our conceptions; only the proverbial tip of the iceberg ā which we exist clinging to! ā is all we are ever not "blind" to. It's an 'illusion of knowledge' to assume ā make believe ā we can ever, or that we have, access to "the whole of reality" (i.e. to see over the encompassing horizon) ā whatever that means: the part necessarily cannot contain, or encompass, the whole to which it belongs; and assuming otherwise, which is the perennialist vice, Gnomon, is the mother of all woo-woo.
He was pointing out how this way of speaking retains a transcendental framing that doesnāt make causal sense.
The error of thought is in thinking that the material world is essentially passive stuff that needs to be made to move. That then raises the question of how particles get moved by ālawsā.
But if you switch to a constraints-based perspective - a Peircean metaphysics of habits - then the presumption is that nature starts āin motionā and becomes organised by globally emergent patterns. Temperature falls and ālawsā, or the constraints of symmetry breaking, get locked in.
Quoting Gnomon
The start would be the least habitual possible state of being. It would thus be the most chaotic, the most vague, and the most symmetric state of being.
This we can know just by rewinding the way things are. The Planckscale gives us this answer. At the Planck temperature and energy density, fluctuations are the same size as the world that is meant to contain them. And talking of a time ābeforeā such a state is like asking about a state more circular than a circle. Time only begins once energy fluctuations become smaller than the spacetime that contains them. It is only with cooling-expanding does the possibility of change, difference and history become a reality worth mentioning.
Quoting Gnomon
You mean, the future is the Heat Death? Well, duh.
Quoting Gnomon
But you can only argue this way by rejecting the alternative that Tallis writes about. As I say, if you presume matter is passive and at rest, then a transcendent hand is needed to get it moving. But if instead you presume matter starts free and restless - just a fluctuation - then organisation will emerge simply because fluctuations will all start to interact and collectively fall into constrained patterns. A history of accidents will accumulate in the same way randomly falling raindrops will start to carve the habit of a river in a landscape.
Have you simply misunderstood Tallis here? You are taking the view he critiques.
Quoting Gnomon
You are quite right that many physicists just talk about the laws of nature as if they were written in the mind of God. Many are indeed believers in creators. Many believe in a time before the Big Bang. Many believe in all sorts of things consistent with transcendental causality.
I agree they are dealing in woo to the extent they remain mired in such an ontology.
Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?
It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are?
The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.
1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.
2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."
Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time.
Ha! Ever the contrarian. Another point of wisdom is "don't look directly at the sun, with one eye or two."
:smile:
In the first paragraph of Tallis' article, entitled āThe Laws of Natureā, he says : ā. . . to apply that knowledge {about states of matter] outside of the laboratories in support of our agency [free will], are perhaps the most striking expressions of the way in which humans transcend the material worldā. He doesn't specifically address the question of ācausal senseā. But he seems to be in favor of ātranscendental framingā of the FreeWill question, which he has addressed in previous articles and books. In which he concludes that "freewill is not an illusion", i.e not "woo". His framing of the freewill question seems to me to be inherently transcendental.
Transcendental Freedom :
What is more, the Existential Intuition opens up the sense of transcendent objects that are, by analogy with the embodied self, more than what the self experiences of them. ___Tallis
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-can-i-possibly-be-free
Quoting apokrisis
So, you agree that the ultimate source of āhabitualā [regular, reliable] behaviors, rather than acquired in the process of evolution, could inferred as laws of nature [necessities] that predate the Bang. By that I mean, if-then instructions for system operation that were programmed into the seed (Singularity) of the Big Bang?
Quoting apokrisis
That āduh, everybody knows about heat deathā conclusion came as a surprise to Einstein, who assumed a stable and eternal universe in his calculations. And only when faced with contrary evidence, was forced to rename his Cosmological Constant as what we now know as Dark Energy.
Quoting apokrisis
The alternative you refer to may be where he looks at an alternative to the notion of mandated laws, āthe laws of nature do not shape what happens but are simply the shape of what happens" (e.g. a river formed by accidents). To me, that āexplanationā is what he is arguing against -- saying āthey come to look less like explanations than descriptions". In other words, describing the effect is not the same as explaining the cause.
Quoting apokrisis
I suspect that those physicists, such as Isaac Newton, who called the necessities of nature ālawsā, would not agree with your label of āwooā, for anything that does not comport with your own ontology. They were not being āanti-realistā, but describing reality in terms that everyone could understand. Those who prefer to call those dependable regularities āhabitsā are implying that they could have been otherwise. But how would they know that, except by re-running the program of evolution several times to see if each execution followed the same basic path. All we know for sure is that Nature seems to be constrained by built-in limitations. So, if you imagine a reality with different constraints you will be dealing with imaginary āwooā, rather than with Reality as we know it. :cool:
Yes. Those scientists, who address the question of "something from nothing", necessarily assume an omniscient view of eternal existence prior to the Big Bang. For example, a Multiverse, of which our 'verse is merely one of zillions, is necessarily eternal, in order to escape the question of "how do you account for something new and without precedence?" In the multiverse model, a Creator (from scratch) is not necessary. because what you see now, is what has always existed in one form or another. But then, who created the Multiverse, or was it self-created? That eternal power to create new worlds is uncannily god-like. :joke:
He means that life and mind transcend their worlds by being organisms with an intentional point of view. They are in a semiotic modelling relation which puts them "outside" the material world they have a need to control.
So no. He doesn't argue for a spooky dualist transcendence. He is just talking about how organisms transcend their environments by being in a modelling relation with them.
An organism has choices due to genes and neurons. Humans have even more choices due to linguistic and numeric habits of thought.
Quoting Gnomon
I wouldnāt use that computer jargon. My argument is structural. Probabalistic systems go towards their equilibrium states.
Quoting Gnomon
Interesting version of the history.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't believe you followed what he says. But then, I don't think Tallis is that hot a writer either.
Quoting Gnomon
Nope. The structuralist view is just arguing that the regularities of nature are immanent rather than transcendent. They emerge from the chaos of possibility as structural inevitabilities, rather than being God-given laws that animate matter.
Quoting Gnomon
It's like when Og invented the wheel. Re-run history as often as you like. Let the whole tribe test every geometric possibility. The story always comes out the same in the end. Wheels wind up being circular. Folk wind up getting into the habit of thinking of circles when they want stuff to roll, regardless of whether they have "freewill" or not.
Quoting Gnomon
I'm not arguing that different realities are possible. As a structuralist, I am instead saying our own Big Bang universe is very likely to be the only one of its kind as a consequence of the "strong structuralism" principle.
Maybe you might want to argue for worlds based on other symmetry breakings than the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) of the Standard Model. But maybe also, these just are the only series of phase transitions by which a material existence could emerge - one that, Og-like, had to fiddle around with triangular wheels, and square wheels, before arriving at the greatest simplicity of a round wheel.
Can you suggest a simpler baseline gauge symmetry than the U(1) of electromagnetism? The symmetry of a single rotation/translation, or sine wave?
Once you arrive at the universal simplicity of a circle, beyond that you can only aim at the greater simplicity of a circle that is even more circular. Or in other words, there is no beyond. You have arrived at the limit of that kind of "endless" possibility.
The contest here is between two ways of looking at the metaphysics of Being - the transcendent and the immanent. And it is not even a contest.
But if you study particle physics, you will find this isn't how it works.
We happen to now live in an era where the Cosmos is ruled by its mathematically simplest possible symmetry - the U(1) of electromagnetism.
And when we wind back to recover earlier higher symmetry states, like the SU(3) of the Big Bang's quark-gluon plasma, we see how everything we love and hold dear - all that "matter" and all that "void" - dissolves into a hot confusion of nothing very definite at all.
Keep winding the clock back to the Planckscale and all useful particle structure or spacetime geometry goes out the window. The maths of symmetry itself dissolves. There is a lack of constraint of any kind once you get out beyond 24-dimensional SU(5), or 248-dimensional E8, symmetry stories.
So modern physics rests on concrete knowledge of Lie algebra. The brute facts here are Platonic. :smile:
The onion is tightly structured when its dimensionality is as strongly limited as it is possible to imagine - when all dimensional possibility has been crunched down to just a 3D realm in which the U(1) of EM is present as the concrete limit. But then wind back from that final destination by adding back dimensionality and all that tight structure begins quickly to come undone.
Like leaving town for the country on a dark night, you soon pass by the bright-lit city limits with all its neat regularity of 24 and even edge-of-town 248 dimensional maths. Occasional flashes of sporadic simple groups light up the darkness like truckstops, but even those become increasingly rare.
Travel forever and you may even reach the Monster group.
But the point is that the onion fast runs out of layers to be peeled as its dimensionality expands so fast that it becomes an entirely different kind of thing - a beetroot perhaps. :grin:
And likewise, talk about the Big Bang has to give up on overly concrete notions like spacetime and matter. A 4D vacuum filled with a quantum foam is about where things begin to start.
Beyond that, and there ain't even enough dimensionality to constrain anything in a useful fashion. Everything is too curved or disconnected to be part of any larger coherent sense of structure.
So every philosophical debate about the creation of the Cosmos starts by taking stuff for granted that science and maths already tells us we shouldn't be taking for granted. Beyond the Big Bang, concrete dimensionality and materiality have already left the room.
It is unclear to me how anything can give us the "ultimate" answer - one that cannot in turn be challenged with the same question: Why that and not something else or nothing at all?
What does it mean to explain something? We substitute an explanans for an explanandum, reduce what we want to explain to something that does not itself cry out for an explanation, at least in the current context. Something that we assume we already understand. But what could we already understand about a putative ultimate truth? Whence such understanding?
For people who find satisfaction in ultimate explanations, those explanations usually take the form of some religious or metaphysical story or method that appeals to them on some level. When they find something like that, they say to themselves: "Yeah, that sounds about right. I'll run with it." This sort of leap of faith is something that we practice all the time when dealing with minor questions and decisions, as well as matters of taste and preference - we call it intuition, confidence and such like. And that works out alright a lot of the time for practical everyday purposes. But such an approach seems to be incongruous with the sort of thoroughgoing skeptical inquiry that moves us to ask ultimate questions in the first place.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I would agree with this, for the most part. The conclusion that I would draw is not that we must strive towards something more fundamental and less contingent than some brute facts du jour. If there is a "God's Eye View" it is in any case epistemically inaccessible to us. So brute facts are all we have to work with. We just need to recognize them for what they are: contingent, mutable, subject to taste and temperament, and most of all, contextual. The explanations that we settle on depend on what sort of answer we are looking for in a given situation.
Was that transcendent "intentional" perspective inevitable : due to an accidental structure of the Singularity, or to an intentional arrangement of its structure? Is Life-Mind-Intention a product of combining matter with physical laws? If so, which? And in what proportions? :smile:
Quoting apokrisis
Well, duh! The structural regularities of our universe are necessarily immanent in the structure of the system. But how the system arrived at that highly-unlikely anthropic structure is an open question. Apparently. by "chaos of possibility" you mean that a human-friendly universe is an astronomical accident. That would be a Weak Anthropic argument. And the Las Vegas odds, of such a cosmic-coincidence-of-initial-conditions occurring in finite time (in eternity anything possible must happen), are a bad bet. Therefore, the theory of Inflation was proposed to cover the bet in a fraction of a Planck second. But, if you believe in such Voila!-instant-universe-from-nothing Magic, I have some prime real estate in Afghanistan to sell you. :joke:
What Are The Odds? :
If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldnāt be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-multiverses-measure-problem-20141103/
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. To assume that Life & MInd & Intention & Love emerged from "the chaos of possibilities" is believable, only if that infinite Chaos was limited & enformed by the logical structure of Cosmos. Therefore, the infinite potential of Chaos and the finite structure of Cosmos logically must exist prior to the actualization of potential and the realization of Cosmos in the Big Bang. And that priority is what I would call "Transcendent", in that neither Infinity nor cosmic potential can be found immanent in the actual universe we inhabit. So, Transcendence wins by a mile. Yet, it is still Structuralism. :nerd:
Chaos :
In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the undefined state from which the Big Bang defined (created) space/time.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Why would the Big Daddy in the Sky go to all the trouble of pre-arranging an anthropically structured Big Bang that takes 13 billion years to eventually deliver the fleeting blip of a biofilm on some random chunk of real estate?
Creating it in a week, complete as a Garden of Eden, makes more sense if you want to talk probabilities.
Quoting Gnomon
Remember that the claim of the Standard Model is about there being a very limited variety of mathematical symmetries for nature to pick from. And indeed, ultimately, just the one final one that is the simplest.
If you want to make an argument here, you need to argue against the odds of wheels being circular. And I note, you carefully avoided trying to argue against that.
I don't know why an intentional universe creator would bother to instigate a messy world like ours. But I have a theory, based on my Enformationism worldview. It's obvious to me that the mythical creator of the idyllic Garden of Eden is a fairy tale. Other ancient creation myths included the imperfect workman Demiurge of Plato, or the Gnostic's evil god Ialdabaoth. Those gods were not Omnipotent or Omni-benign, and their creative deficiencies are reflected in the imperfect world we inhabit today.
So, anyone postulating a non-accidental creation event must confront the Problem of Evil. And the only resolution I can think of is to assume that the omnipotent Creator has the potential for both Good and Evil. That's the kernel of my BothAnd principle : the real world has both good & bad properties, from the human perspective, so any explanation for the world's existence must resolve that innate contradiction. And just blaming it on random accidents is not explanatory.
Therefore, instead of a loving "Big Daddy", I envision a General Creative Principle that is more like abstract Mathematics than flesh & blood Mankind. Math includes both positive and negative values. So, the entity I call "The Enformer" or "G*D", is an update of Plato's LOGOS, but also includes the principles of Ethos and Pathos. Since Reason, Character, and Emotion are characteristics of our world, specifically the Cultural aspects instead of the Natural properties, the First Cause must have possessed the Aristotelian Potential for those same qualities.
In keeping with the theme of Enformationism, the hypothetical Enformer, was essentially a Programmer, not a Magician. By that I mean S/he initiated an evolving process, instead of merely saying the magic words : "let there be light', and presto! a perfect world appears. As a result of programming a Singularity with design parameters (laws & initial conditions), a prolonged process of Evolution began, and will have an end. The End will be the output of the program. And, due to the inherent randomizing uncertainties, presumably even the Programmer does not know exactly what the Final Answer will be ( maybe 42). Evolutionary Programming is inherently uncertain, but by a process of trial & error, it gradually optimizes itself, by means of looping feedback (mutations & selection).
I won't go into the details of the Enforming hypothesis here, but you can simply think of it as a 21st century Myth, or as Science Fiction, if you like. But remember, that all other explanatory alternatives (Inflation, Multiverse, etc) are likewise fictional projections from what's known, into the unknown territory beyond the boundaries of space-time. So, my story can only be judged by its philosophical explanatory power, not by its empirical evidence. :cool:
G*D :
[i]* An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a creator deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole, of which all temporal things are a part, is not to be feared or worshiped, but appreciated like Nature.
* I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. Thatās because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Demiurge : a god is a deity while demiurge is something (as an institution, idea, or individual) conceived as an autonomous creative force or decisive power.
Note -- the Demiurge functions like a computer program, which obeys the instructions of its programmer as it carries-out an assigned task. In my story, the program works-out a "what-if" question, based on certain parameters. But, if the programmer knew the answer in advance, the program wouldn't be necessary. Yet, there are non-factual philosophical questions that can only be answered in practice, not theory.
Quoting Gnomon
This doesn't stack up for me. And organic and immanent metaphysics instead emphasises the complementary nature of symmetry breakings and the reality of chance.
So if there is "good and bad" in the world, this is only a well-formed dichotomy if both sides are part of the one deal.
And if there is "positive and negative" in the world, this is just a simple mirror-level symmetry - easily reversed as it is a symmetry breaking on a single scale of being and so not the complete asymmetry of a dichotomy, a symmetry-breaking that itself produces hierarchical scale.
So symmetry-breakings that work - at the cultural level you seem concerned with - would be ones like competition~cooperation. A functional society is one that balances local or individual differentiation against global or general integration. There has to be the creative energy of selfish striving, and there has to also be a general social project that is the context and meaning for that individual freedom.
To talk of "good and bad" is way too simplistic - a dualism that wants to be reduced to a monism.
If you can't see the need for both sides of the equation - as you can with the matched and yet asymmetric social qualities of competition and cooperation, differentiation and integration - then you aren't thinking in sufficiently fundamental terms.
In maths, positive and negative add up to nothing. If you go left, you can go right, and end up back where you started. Unless your symmetry-breaking produces scale, every difference becomes just a self-annihilating fluctuation.
This is why the Big Bang needs some hidden asymmetry in its particle production. It has to make a difference to be a left-handed or right-handed particle, otherwise particles are produced and just as fast annihilated.
So we know from good argument that reality can only arise via proper dichotomies - ones that result in scale asymmetry. Each side of a pair is defined by it being as far away or unlike its "other" as possible. And yet also, that makes both equally necessary as each is the ground to its other.
Your argument falls apart before it gets started if it is couched in merely anti-symmetric terms like positive-negative and good-bad.
Quoting Gnomon
Biology is characterised primarily by the functional dichotomy of competition~cooperation. It is "reasonable" - in the Peircean sense - that life has hierarchical organisation. It is divided by the asymmetry of being locally spontaneous or indvidualistic, and globally cohesive or interdependent.
Even bacteria form biofilms. The planet's climate is regulated by a balance of photosynthesis and respiration that maintains a liveable atmosphere. So from top to bottom, over all scales, life is based on the "goodness" and "reasonableness" of being balanced by its two opposing tendencies.
Aristotle got it to the degree he stressed hierarchical order and the unity of opposites.
But you are taking things back to a simplistic religious framing that just accepts there is a problem of evil, or a problem if a creator isn't the determiner of every detail.
These are just problems if your metaphysics is stuck at the level of symmetry-breaking or dialectics which only thinks in terms of a single scale of being - a world where every left is matched by its right.
A more complete symmetry-breaking produces asymmetric scale or hierarchical order. You arrive at a local~global story where two opposites anchor the two extremes of scale. It then becomes clear that both extremes are necessary for there to be anything at all. As conflicting impulses, both are equally necessary.
Once you have developed your metaphysics to that point, all the causality is within the model. You have arrived at an argument with self-organising immanence.
Quoting Gnomon
But talking of a programmer immediately makes chance a big metaphysyical problem. Computers are deterministic devices. Chance doesn't even enter the story. And to claim some "swerve" to introduce uncertainty is a patent act of desperation.
So it is much better to argue like Peirce and other organicists. Chance and necessity become the complementary extremes of Being - the two poles that unite to arrive at the balance that is actuality.
And this is what physics argues about the Big Bang. Chance is real in nature as quantum indeterminism. Necessity is also real as the constraints of a decohering thermal structure. At the Planckscale, these two contrarieties have exactly the same scale. The universe is as curved as it is hot. The container is indistinguishable from its contents. But an instant later, the two are already being divided in their opposing directions by the dichotomy of cooling~spreading. The curvature flattens enough that there is some measurable degree of spacetime. The heat spreads enough that there is some measurable degree of localised energy density.
So your story predicts neither what physics has figured out about the start of the Universe, nor what sociology has figured out about the organisation of biological collectives.
Quoting Gnomon
Good metaphysics grounds good science. But even most scientists don't understand why they wind up where they do. That is why quantum indeterminism, or human altruism, become the scientific version of the old religious puzzles like the problem of evil, or the problem of God's omnipotence.
Everyone's metaphysics must divide the world somehow. Symmetries must be broken to get any kind of reasoning started.
But what we see is that most folk get stuck at the first step - a symmetry breaking that only speaks of two directions at the one scale of being. Go left, or go right. Add more, or subtract to get less. Say yes, or say no.
Productive metaphysics instead continues on from this kind of "dualism yearning to be monism" to a fully-broken dichotomy - one with the asymmetry of a hierarchical or triadically-developed scale. The division has to be complementary - mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive - so that all its causes are to be found within it. No need for transcendence.
I don't emphasize the "good and bad", because my philosophy is BothAnd. It acknowledges the Duality of Reality, but "reduces" to a Monism in Holism. :smile:
Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Note -- there's lots more at the link
Quoting apokrisis
No, I don't believe the Creator is the "determiner of every detail". Instead, the Programmer created an evolutionary program that works out the details via trial & error, not magical intervention. :cool:
Evolutionary Programming :
Special computer algorithms inspired by biological Natural Selection. It is similar to Genetic Programming in that it relies on internal competition between random alternative solutions to weed-out inferior results, and to pass-on superior answers to the next generation of algorithms. By means of such optimizing feedback loops, evolution is able to make progress toward the best possible solution ā limited only by local restraints ā to the original programmerās goal or purpose. In Enformationism theory the Prime Programmer is portrayed as a creative deity, who uses bottom-up mechanisms, rather than top-down miracles, to produce a world with both freedom & determinism, order & meaning.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Quoting apokrisis
You have missed the whole point of the Enformationism worldview. An Evolutionary Program is not "deterministic", but it is teleological, in that there is an Intention (goal) that drives the Selection of the fittest. No "desperation: needed, just a modicum of Reason. :nerd:
Quoting apokrisis
A symmetry break does indeed begin with a duality, as in the mitosis of a cell : one becomes two. But that's just the first step. For example, a single stem cell has the potential to evolve into a variety of functional cells. The antique notion of a "swerve" was just an attempt to explain how a linear process could become non-linear. For example light always travels in a straight line --- until it encounters curved space, that is. :joke:
If light bends/deflects due to gravity, then why do we say that light travels in a straight line? :
https://www.quora.com/If-light-bends-deflects-due-to-gravity-then-why-do-we-say-that-light-travels-in-a-straight-line
Quoting apokrisis
I'm sorry. But you won't have a clue what my "story" predicts, until you have heard the whole story. The Enformationism website is just the first chapter. The rest of the story is told in an ongoing series of blogs. I think you are confusing my 21st century creation myth with the traditional stories of creation, that are steeped in Magic instead of Science. :halo:
Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
Ultimate Enforming Principle : http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page24.html
Quoting apokrisis
In the Enformationism worldview, the Big Bang "division" was also "complementary" (BothAnd). The only "transcendence" is in the sense that a Programmer transcends the Program. You might say that the metaphysical Intention (Will) of the Programmer is embodied in the physical expression of the evolutionary program. To wit : Mental Information (Idea, Form, Concept), is transformed into Causal EnFormAction (Energy), which then transforms into the physical expression of the original concept (Matter, Sculpture). Just as a pool shooter is not on the table, only the First Cause transcends the Effect : an evolving chain of Causation. Can your "triadic" scale explain the Big Bang without reference to some prior Agency? Could our finite evolving universe be it's own Cause? :smirk:
PS__An eternal circular process has all its "causes within it". But it's going nowhere. By contrast, a linear one-way process, from hot Big Bang to cold Big Sigh (heat death), must have an origin, a First Cause, a Prime Mover -- a Reason for Being.
Quoting apokrisis
No. I am not a scientist, nor a mathematician. I'm just an amateur philosopher, who created his own personal worldview -- for his own private personal use -- based on a layman's unfettered alchemy of Quantum Queerness and Information Ubiquity. My Enformationism philosophy is not grounded in any particular model of physics or cosmology. Instead, it combines elements of a variety of both ancient & modern models, and both philosophical & physical concepts. But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. The key influences of my model can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and the conceptual offshoots of those seeds have survived the weeding-out process of both Natural and Cultural Evolution.
Speaking of which, Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest" applies, not just to physical organisms, but also to metaphysical concepts. So, the ancient intuition of cosmic Teleology, has been refined in the forge of scientific evolution, and currently takes the form of Eutaxiology. That's why the Enformationism thesis is not a religious worldview, despite the inclusion of the notion of a "Creator" or "Programmer". The logical necessity for such "First Causes" comes not from divine revelation, but from philosophical reasoning and inference. Even after several thousand years of scientific maturation, the basic logic still applies to any space-time process, and to meta-physical thinking. If the Enformationism thesis is "grounded" in any model, it would be the recent revelation of Matter-Energy-Information equivalence. And that equation crosses the artificial boundaries between Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious worldviews. :nerd:
Eutaxiology (from the Greek eu ā good, and tax ā order) is the philosophical study of order and design. It is distinguished from teleology in that it does not focus on the purpose or goal of a given structure or process, merely the degree and complexity of the structure or process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutaxiology
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
Landauerās principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
Inside knowledge: Is information the only thing that exists? :
Physics suggests information is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time ā the problems start when we try to work out what that means
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431191-500-inside-knowledge-is-information-the-only-thing-that-exists/
:up: It's the way of the future my friend! Cellular biology will bring Panpsychism home.
:rofl:
The problem I see with that is that the sole criteria for success in evolutionary theory is just to survive and to procreate. That's why 'evolutionary ethics' can only ever amount to either utilitarianism or pragmatism, there is no sense of being an over-arching purpose or aim. None of which bothers non-rational animals, as they're never capable of asking themselves why they must suffer and die; but humans, having reached the threshold of self-awareness, cannot but be tormented by that awareness.
In cosmic terms I see the evolution of sentient rational beings as the way that the Universe realises horizons of being that it could never otherwise see. Einstein wrote in a letter of condolence to a greiving father 'A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ā a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.'
So 'the sage' or the 'awakened being' is in some sense the culmination of that whole process of cosmic evolution. That is something made explicit only in the Indian soteriological traditions although you find hints of the idea in Greek philosophy.
Itās fine to have your own private metaphysics I guess. But I did think you were aiming to go beyond this kind of simplistic understanding of āinformationā.
Sure, there is some good reason fundamental physics has shifted its notion of measurement towards entropy and information as basic quantities. This shows an acceptance that āmatterā isnāt primal but just a story of generalised potential that has become structurally constrained. It shifts the maths of description towards a probabilistic view - the emergent statistical patterns of systems composed of countable independent degrees of freedom.
And this then couples with the shift toward ontic structural realism - the view that symmetry-breaking in particular describes the fundamental invariant structure of nature. It is symmetry maths that in-forms Being in such a way that it can come to be measured in terms of information theory.
So there is a danger in being dazzled by physics having a flashy new ruler. We have an abstraction - a degree of freedom. And we can apply that in Procrustean fashion to count anything.
But that only then makes sense to the degree the acts of measurement are framed within some specific theory about the global structural constraints which are producing this local grain of countable events or material actions.
So that is why I ask about that side of your private metaphysics. It sounds like you want to invoke some kind of cellular automata or genetic algorithm approach as the cause of the structural invariance found in Nature. But I think history is showing that kind of thinking to be too ācomputer science-yā.
Particle physics has been hugely successful using the maths of permutation symmetry as its theory about Natureās structural invariance. Information is likely better understood in that specific context.
An evolutionary or developmental view of metaphysics accepts that the basis of reality is an instability that has to become stabilised. The Cosmos exists not because it was brutely given in a materialistic fashion but because it became structured in ways that formed it to have a generalised persistence.
So Darwinian evolution is just an extension of a process or structural view of metaphysics generally. The Cosmos that exists is the one that worked best in the sense of achieving a stable persistence.
Quoting Wayfarer
Cosmology simply demands a capacity to persist. So sentience pops up as something secondary to the primary telos of being - ie: surviving.
Thermodynamics then gives an adequate reason for sentience to evolve. The Big Bang universe fell out of equilbrium due to certain glitches like the Higgs field. Ugly lumps of gravitating mass began to clutter up the place. They tried to radiate away the clumps by fusion - the dissipative structure we call a star. But stars eventually collapse and explode in supernova, scattering even more unpleasant crud - the heavy elements - across the universe.
You get planets - hard core stellar waste. Biological sentience then evolves in places like ocean floor thermal events, doing a little bit of cleaning up in terms of eating rocks, reducing matter back towards the heat which can finally rejoin the cosmic background radiation.
But bacteria becomes complex life. The biofilm becomes Gaian in its ability to regulate the climate of the Earth to its liking.
But fortunately for the Cosmosās entropy-based telos, all these forms of secondary structure - from stars to humans - are minor and fleeting parts of its general expanding-cooling story.
There is just no way - looking back from the eternal Heat Death - that awakened minds were some kind of culmination of the cosmic reason for its being. :grin:
//hey I'm just perusing a 1967 book by Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. This book is called The Biology of Ultimate Concern. Turns out that Dobzhansky, despite being one of the architects of Dawkin's ballyhoed evolutionary synthesis, was quite a religious guy and speculative philosopher. A snippet.
I submit that Darwinism as generally understood, doesn't have any bearing on metaphysics as such. It's one of the characteristics of current culture that everything must be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of Darwinian theory and judged accordingly. It is in this regard that Alfred Russel Wallace dissented from Darwin's philosophical attitude, as did C S Peirce:
[quote=Agapism;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agapism]In 1893 Peirce used the word "agapism" for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Sr. which he had absorbed long before, Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring, and as God, as Love, does even and especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn **. Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called the process "agapasm", such that: "The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose." Peirce held that there are three such principles and three associated modes of evolution:
"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism."[/quote]
I must say I find 'agapism' a dreadful word, although I appreciate the meaning.
Many critics have noted a resemblance between the Christian agapƩ and the Buddhist 'bodhicitta', notwithstanding the absence of personal God in the latter.
Now we are looking at evolution as a function of information, where information is the interaction of systems - similar to mechanical necessity, but a little more spiffy, wouldn't you say?
the Platonic expression 'aporia' immediately springs to mind reading that New Scientist article you've linked to (and hey, I'm a subscriber, although I do often ask myself why, as it's a very expensive subscription).
There is no such thing as 'information' simpliciter. There is only information about something, or information that means something, in some context. The idea of there being 'pure information' is just complete confusion, in my view.
As thrashed out in one of the other threads about this topic, this whole 'information craze' starts with Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics, where he says 'information is information, not matter or energy.' He said something like, no metaphysics which doesn't admit this can survive. Cue the rush to seize on this new so-called 'building block of everything' - not least because Weiner is one of the architects of 'the information age', so what could be more appropriate! But as that New Scientist article so adroitly points out, the result is confusion piled upon confusion.
Information is the interaction of form. Or, information = evolutionary interaction.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not for information philosophers. The result is clearer by the moment.
Of course in Yogic logic, this is ancient history. :smile:
That is not the definition of āinformationā, That is your definition.
āThe many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in commonā ~ Heraclitus.
Have you read this review from Soren Brier?
It could be better written, but it gives a sweeping coverage of what weāve been discussing.
Zinger of the week. :up:
//hey that's a terrific paper, right up my street. (I've seen Henry Stapp speak, that passage from him is spot on, in my view, I'll read that paper too). You can really see how the kind of understanding that crystallised in the 1960's (although with roots going back a long time beforehand) is now becoming more acceptable to the mainstream. Very heartening. I also like the way the author links between Eastern philosophy and Peirce's semiotics. :ok: //
Sounds like naĆÆve realism to me? :chin:
It is a sadness to see, given we know that everything is information, that there are still people who are clueless as to what information is. :smile:
The Enformationism worldview does not claim to "know" what the "over-arching" purpose of this experiment in evolution might be. Barring a direct revelation from the Programmer, all we can say is that our world seems to be progressing toward some future state that is more complex and integrated than our current situation.
That positive progressive outlook doesn't necessarily give us reason to hope-for-heaven, or to expect an idyllic harp-strumming afterlife. But it does give us a reason to be mildly optimistic about the ups & downs of a less-than-perfect reality. It also allows us to create our own personal goals beyond mere clinging to life, and making recreation of procreation. Although we are not (yet) in full control of the cosmos, human culture is motivated by imagining a near-future Utopia, to aim for in our personal and political aspirations.
Of course, a solid grounding in Pragmatism will make our Romantic imagination more likely to succeed. That's why most human societies have produced idealistic religious systems, in addition to pragmatic political organizations. to encourage us to keep-on-keeping-on, despite the daily setbacks and disappointments. The human ability to imagine a more perfect world gives us an advantage over the "lower" animals, who can only deal with Reality in a Pragmatic survival-of-the-fittest mode.
I can't say for sure that our world was designed with mankind in mind. But a historical perspective shows that the rate of change (both positive and negative) has accelerated since the advent of Homo Sapiens. That progression is most obvious in the form of technology, which gives us control over Nature far beyond the innate tools of animals. But, we can also see some degree of moral & ethical progress, as described by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. Therefore, if we look at the world from a higher & broader vantage, we can find more philosophical criteria for success, than just our biological animal nature. :smile:
I'm glad to see that you enjoyed the addition of a little optimism and positivism, not to say Pollyannaism, in your bleak Realistic life. Apparently, you were so overwhelmed with emotion, that it brought tears to your eyes. :joke:
I'm afraid a "simplistic" understanding is the best I can do, since I am not trained in more complicated interpretations, and technical jargon (" ontic structural realism"). So, I try to describe my "private metaphysics" in language that a layman can understand. So no, I was not aiming to produce an abstruse academic paper for a few philosophical pundits. :cool:
Yes, the 20th century "information craze" has earned the label of "The Information Age". But, as you noted, most of the attention has been directed toward the empty vessels that computers encode with mathematical values, that are neither matter nor energy, but abstract ratios & relationships.
However, my interest is primarily in the meaningful aspects of Information, which was the original referent of the term : the contents of Minds, not Brains; Intelligence, not Data. Unfortunately, since many of the posters on this forum are materialists -- with philosophical physics envy -- I am forced to deal more with the tangible forms of Information. But that's OK. The ubiquity of Information (the matter-energy-information equivalence) is a part of its intrigue for me.
So, for me, the 21st century Information explosion is going beyond the mere enthusiasm over pragmatic malleable data, and has crept into every corner of the human experience. Information is not just a practical tool, it's the essence of everything. :smile:
It's your move. :wink:
That was the tree that fell in the forest, with no ear to hear it---lol!! No ear, no big bang!!! The great expansion. Did they ever decide whether it was an oscillating universe?
OK, I'll move. Your relentless optimism reminds me of a program, featured perhaps in a scene cut from The Matrix. Don't get me wrong. You add value. Another vegetable in the soup.
Thanks. It's hard to find reasons for optimism on a relentlessly hyper-critical forum. I do find that having philosophical and scientific reasons for (moderated) optimism is far preferable to the grim (we're all in this alone) Existentialism of Materialism.
I gave up my blind faith in religious salvation long ago. And it's hard to find reasons for optimism on a forum full of hyper-critical cynicism. But the knowledge that our world is not merely an astronomical accident -- randomly going nowhere -- does provide some incentive for global optimism -- realizing that the world is not just going to hell in a handbasket, but actually progressing toward some higher state.
Realistically though, my optimism is moderated by the less-than-perfect current state of affairs. But knowing that the future can be better than the past is enough incentive for positivity to avoid sinking into existentialist despair. So, I'm just following the advice of Sartre : to accept the personal responsibility for giving my life meaning and value, by constructing an idiosyncratic positive worldview from the latest available evidence, instead of taking some ancient Utopian myth on faith.
Signed, Just Another Veggie in the Stone Soup :cool:
Existential despair', a painful sense that no human activity of any kind could ever be of any worth. 'Life is nothing until it is lived. It is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it.' - Jean Paul Sartre.
https://www.icaad.com/blog/existential-despair
An idiosyncratic person is someone who does things in his own way
Reply to Wayfarer :
"That positive progressive outlook doesn't necessarily give us reason to hope-for-heaven, or to expect an idyllic harp-strumming afterlife. But it does give us a reason to be mildly optimistic about the ups & downs of a less-than-perfect reality. It also allows us to create our own personal goals beyond mere clinging to life, and making recreation of procreation. Although we are not (yet) in full control of the cosmos, human culture is motivated by imagining a near-future Utopia, to aim for in our personal and political aspirations."
Cheer up buddy! Salvation will show itself in the moments before total doom. The Earth will prevail and all life will live again as is meant to be: in paradise. Apparently there has to be done wrong on scary scales before we all can rejoyce in the wonders of creation again and all species and sorts can wander freely and fearlessly again on this beautifull Earth. Better times not visible yet but surely to come. The natural and the love-lovers, including those longing for small quarels and struggles, are to come and to stay. Untill the end of the Sun!
Thanks for that. Overall I like your style and I value your contributions. And your blog is very well done.
But Iād beware of dismissing āreligious salvationā in such casual terms ('harp-strumming afterlife'). It's like saying, science be damned because of eugenics, or something. Of course the cultural forms of religion have become moribund over the centuries and often deteriorated to caricature, but āthere would be no foolās gold if there were no goldā.
Earlier in this thread Apokrisis linked to a great paper (in my opinion anyway). It's discussing the convergences between Peirce's semiotic metaphysics and Advaita Vedanta, among many other things.
This snippet stood out for me:
The reason that rings true for me is that Iāve always detested the āblind watchmakerā schtick of Dawkins et al but I also have no time for theistic creationism. Thereās something else bubbling up through the floorboards and squeezing in through the blinds that is nothing like either of these.
A more perfect world: look where this ability to imagine a more perfect world brought the world: to an increasingly barren and aridly acid world on which a major part of the once flourishing "lower" creatures have no place anymore these days. A huge part of the biodiversity has simply been destroyed in modern man's attempt (and it are mostly men) to recreate the world.
Quoting Gnomon
Well, in perhaps only this regard, I'm optimistic about intelligence, but very much less so 'intelligent life'. I hope we're at least smart enough as a species to engineer a fully functioning synthetic metacognitive agent before we top ourselves off and join the fossil record of this boiling, toxic, mudball. :victory: :smile:
I fully detest along. Dawkins et al. His "The Selfish Gene" (of which his watchmaker book is a copy in a different guise) shows an attitude that betrays his incompetence of finding new memes (to speak in his own poor idiom or jargon). So he objectifies us, animals, genes and memes. According to the knowledgeable pro(contra) fessor we are just vessels created by the selfish genes to ensure their passing on. Memes are involved in people. We are puppets on the strings of memes and genes...What a vision... I pity this man.
I apologize, if that comment sounded dismissive or damning. But it was just intended to convey that my personal worldview does not envision any kind of "salvation". Instead, I assume that the evolution of the world, including all of the pain & suffering, is working-out just as intended. By that I mean, the Hegelian dialectic is inherent in the program of Evolution.
Even in my native Christianity, the notion of salvation seems to imply, either that God created a world where evil is allowed free expression, or that God is not omnipotent enough to counter the evil acts of Satan. So, even as a Christian, I concluded that Evil (pain & suffering) must be a part of God's plan, from the beginning, and Satan (the accuser, adversary, prosecutor) was just an agent for testing Faith, as indicated in the book of Job.
The reference to "a harp-strumming afterlife" was also an expression of my rejection of almost all life-after-life doctrines. The afterlife views of pre-Judaism Hebrews was similar to that of the Egyptians, in that a heavenly hereafter was reserved for those who where already gods in human form (Pharaoh), who was just going home, after a brief sojourn on Earth. The average Hebrew or Egyptian had no reason to expect anything after death but eternal darkness in the grave (Sheol). Again, today, those who hope to go to heaven, or a higher dimension, or Nirvana, seem to assume that God (or Fate) made a mistake in assigning them to endure the sufferings of an imperfect world. By contrast, I assume that this imperfect world was intended to evolve toward a more perfect state. It's an experiment, not in blind faith, but in freewill under less than optimal conditions.
Admittedly though, that feeble alternative to Fatalism, is no consolation for those of us currently living in this uncertain world of ups and downs. That's why I find Existentialism to be a pragmatic solution -- to make the best of a bad situation, by adapting your attitude to reality, rather than expecting reality to change to suit your preferences. So, my personal moderated Optimism is not based on hope for Salvation. Of course, it also means that, if I wake-up after death with wings & harps, I will be pleasantly surprised. :smile:
I assumed as much. The reply was intended to be Ironic. You have made your dismal view of Reality, "boiling, toxic, mudball", clear from the beginning. Ironically, my moderated optimism allows me to take your derogation in stride, and even to find it somewhat amusing, as a sign of the depths that "a spent philosophical discussion could hit". :grin: :joke: :cool:
Dismal : depressing; dreary.
Does that dismal view of the current state of the world, mean that you'd prefer to go back to the totally natural -- no synthetic furs -- Caveman times, where biodiversity meant that your only problem was to avoid getting snapped-up by a T-rex, or stepped-on by a Woolly Mammoth, and watch-out for talking snakes? That must have been a perfect Garden of Eden.
Unfortunately, as the Bible says, that Idyllic child-like existence was destroyed by the human arrogance to rely on Human Reason, instead of divine Revelation, to learn how to create a Cultural Utopia. Is your solution to this "increasingly barren and aridly acid world" to turn back to God's Providence? It was Reasoning that got us into this mess. But some of us still arrogantly rely on that imperfect talent for imagining something better than what-is : what could be. Perhaps a race of robots *, sans ego, will do a better job of creating a perfect world, as in The Matrix. :joke:
I'm kidding, of course. I know where you're coming from. But I prefer Optimism to Fatalism, as an onward & upward, rather than backward, worldview. :smile:
* synthetic metacognitive agent : as envisioned by
No apologies required. But I think there's a point that is being missed here, albeit a difficult one to state. But let's say deliverance, liberation, mok?a is an unsurpassable state of being, the 'more perfect state' that life is developing towards. Nothing to do with 'wings' or 'harps', which are of course iconic cultural depictions of dimly-remembered intuitions.
Reading āthe myth of the fallā symbolically - what it symbolises is the beginning of self-consciousness, the emergence of the sense of ownership, of the awareness of loss, of self-aware being. That is why the tree from which the apple was taken is the ātree of the knowledge of good and evilā. Animals have no such knowledge - they simply dwell in the present, eating and being eaten, fleeing from terror and seeking sustenance. The predicament of self-awareness has not yet befallen them. So in literal terms, what is described in the myth of the fall as happening in a single moment, probably occupied hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary development. But that doesnāt make it less meaningful, and the loss of that myth leaves modern culture impoverished in a crucial way - foremost, the puzzling ubiquity of the sense of loss, lack, grief and guilt, which despite our marvellous technology still seems to haunt us. (Great essay on this from a few years ago, The Strange Persistence of Guilt, I donāt know if itās paywalled but itās well worth the read.)
Now you add another layer as you present your optimism as a choice. Sartre's a dark philosopher, after all, speaking of human being as an impossible quest to become god (something like that, he's not easy to parse).
Quoting Gnomon
I don't share that sense of cosmic progress, though I am aware and appreciative of technological progress. If we don't destroy ourselves, return to the dark age, or something like that....maybe we'll create a brave new world. Perhaps we'll neo-humans who live on water, minerals, a few plants, and sunlight. We could be at a sort of beginning, no matter how late it seems. Or perhaps the trans-humanist will take over in 3024 and create a vampiric apex predator. Or perhaps a big rock will smash up our unloved lifeboat in all this void.
Small point, but do you not think certain non-human animals are complex enough to have crises of conscience? I doubt that they know they are mortal, but I image they suffer ambivalence, envy, guilt, grief.
Let's throw in working to improve that reality while simultaneously adapting one's attitude and I'm with you. Also include an escape clause: some situations are so dire that a self-induced painless exit is reasonable.
Elephants are said to be among the higher mammals that recognise the death of their kind. And there was this story - about two herds of wild elephants that trouped to the home of Lawrence Anthony, a wildlife protector, within a day or two of his death in March 2012. Nobody can explain if they somehow knew of his demise, but it did seem a bit spooky.
But as a general rule, I think h. Sapiens is unique in this regard, partially, or even mainly, because of language and the ability to tell stories. We evolved into āmeaning-seeking beingsā. Watched an interesting mini-documentary last night on the Lascaux caves - the anthropologist was explaining that the animals represent seasons, the movements of the herds, and the dots represent stars and seasons, with one group of dots representing the Pleiades constellation which appears in the Northern spring, signifying a new year. I presume (I donāt know if he mentioned) that these paintings would have been overseen by the shamans as part of their powers of predicting when the herds will arrive and the plants will bear fruit.
A lot of that kind of sense of relatedness to nature is obviously what is dissolved in the acid of global modern capitalism, which is accompanied by the back-story that really life evolved by chance, that humans are a kind of fluke, that the Universe is just the play of dumb matter. I think itās falling out of favour although it still holds sway amongst the secular intelligentsia and those who hold the levers of the Western military-industrial complex.
That's because, contray to animals, we are born naked. We are born without tools to operate in the world. Our brain is not a tool. It gives us ideas to grasp and operate by using hands, feet, back, eyes, ears, etc. We can interact with fellow people by talking, singing, art, listening, understanding, exchanging scientific ideas and math. We can experience love, as do animals. Love means inclusion, love is against isolation. Animals don't need language. They are transfixed. No need for apperception, at least, not in the measure we need it. Parrots can talk. The can perfectly copy sounds. These sounds lack a fertile base though, from which new sounds can spring up and evolve.
What? Makes as much sense as any other coherent answer here.
Yes. The key insight of :The Fall" myth is that humans are both blessed and cursed by their "knowledge of good & evil". Which makes us moral agents, who are forced to make hard choices, but without the omniscience to know the consequences of those choices. Some Misanthropes on this forum seem to be willing to trade places with the "lower" animals, who are merely faced with choices of Life or Death, instead of Good or Evil. Human self-consciousness includes awareness of our Existential plight. Yet, most animals seem to be unbothered by questions about Life's Meaning, or the inevitability of Life's End. That human tendency to philosophical ennui, may be why Feynman advised his fellow physicists to "shut-up [about metaphysical questions] and calculate". :cool:
They don't have to bother. They just live.
What other choice do we have, besides depression and suicide, when faced with our lack of omniscience or omnipotence? As a Christian, I used to think of Existentialism, and its Existential Despair, as a "dark" and Pessimistic attitude. But now, as a post-Christian, I view the choice to take responsibility for our own choices, as a Pragmatic attitude. Even though we may not have a heavenly father to look-out for us, homo sapiens still have the innate qualities required of Moral Agents : self-awareness, etc. :smile:
Quoting Zugzwang
The natural progression of this exploding cosmos is not evident, unless we include the gradually-evolving cultural progress of the human element. FWIW, the links below provide some of the evidence that allows me to have "a more optimistic outlook". :grin:
Cosmic Progression :
Unexpectedly, organic Life appeared in the middle of the "life span" of the Cosmos, . . .
http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page28.html
Moral Progress :
Steven Pinker, probably motivated in part by this pessimistic trend in academic & religious circles, has contributed a plethora of reasonable & plausible evidence for a more optimistic outlook.
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page71.html
I agree, that some oppressed people in the world, have compelling reasons to consider suicide as "an escape clause". Yet, ironically, most of those suffering souls do not make that drastic choice. So there seems to be an innate "will to live" despite all incentives to give-up. That perseverance in the face of despair, may be one source of dogged optimism. But my positive outlook is more of an intellectually-developed philosophical worldview, as summarized in the BothAnd Principle.. :smile:
The BothAnd Principle :
. . . .The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity). . . .
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Yes. But humans do "have to bother". It's in our nature to compare what-is with what-could-be. And to strive to better a bad situation. Would you change places with a blithe Panda bear, contentedly chewing on bamboo, unbothered by the immanent extinction of its species? :cool:
Gallows humor. Was Sartre a bit of a Jerry Seinfeld? Is there fun to be had in the darkness? The entertainment industry suggests that we love to watch an apocalypse unfold.
We can also speculate about a relationship between surfaces and depths. It may be that the darkness thinkers are more amused than most on some fundamental level, and this makes them able to play with ideas that others find sacred: like endless moral progress, some sort of Reason for or in it all. On the other hand, perhaps some surface optimists (not saying you) insist too much. The larger issue is how to take philosophers. Are they joking, bluffing, lying to us, lying to themselves, somehow telling the complete truth to everyone involved?
As far as Pinker goes, I haven't looked closely, but I have a general idea. And many things are good today in a way that they haven't been before. I don't curse the way things are. I just think the future is hard to predict, and that the house of cards, imperfect as it already is, could be blown over. AFAIK, there's nothing stopping an asteroid from wiping us out. How do believers in a cosmic logic, with humans at the center of it, deal with this possibly? Square it with the Thesis?
And why is this beautiful animal on the brink of extinction? Like many other species? Why has 10% of all biodiversity disappeared in 100 years?
Totally on your page there (although I think it was David Mermin who coined that phrase.)
I think nowadays ānatureā has become a stand-in for āthe unconditionedā in traditional philosophy. Itās the unpolluted, the pristine, the sacred ancestors - the nearest secular culture can come to āthe sacredā. But that looses sight of the fact that in traditional cultures, although nature was esteemed, she was not idolized.
Thereās been predictions of Armageddon, āthe end of the worldā, in Christianity since it started. How they deal with it is to say that the Faithful will at that point all go to Heaven, where they will all live forever. (although I also have to say the possibility of actual Armageddon has seemed chillingly real ever since Hiroshima.)
Iām not aware of similar movements in Eastern cultures, which tend to have a more cyclical view. Buddha predicted that after some time - might have been as little as 500 years - his teaching would die out, but the Buddhist tradition also teaches that in due course another Buddha will re-appear. In Mah?y?na Buddhism, there are references to the many ālife-bearing orbsā throughout the Cosmos, where periodically Buddhas will appear and teach. I recall reading once a translation from a Tantric text, where the Buddha ārecallsā Manjusri from another world to help teach on this one.
In any case, the background to Indian cosmology generally is conceived in terms of cycles of creation and destruction that occupy many billions of years. Even though itās plainly a mythological construction, in terms of the time-scales involved, it is quite realistic (subject of a half-hour special by Carl Sagan many years ago.)
Sounds as if you speak from a tower of saddened ivory. What's wrong with viewing the mind as settled in the brain? The brain is made from matter. The point is though that even particle physicists don't know what the Nature of matter is. I don't consider the brain as part of me. It merely helps me to live. For someone looking at me my brain is matter. For me it shows me ideas, gives me (the body) feelings and thoughts and dreams and fantasies or even gods (though I care more about their magical creation). Matter is only matter for hard materialistic physicists. To me, matter has content too. A content that sparks or lightens up the brain in me. And the physical world outside of me.
Many, in times of crisis, might. I wouldn't, but then things are going OK for me, for now.
[quote=Whitman]
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
[/quote]
For some perhaps. But 'shut up and calculate' might instead be interpreted in terms of worldly power and the species becoming more godlike. From this POV, it's the species that's (self-)idolized. Nature must only be obeyed as much as is necessary for its domination.
Armageddon will arrive 100%. Will it not be by human action (the chances it does appear by human action are in the present state of our planet fairly big though) than it is because the Sun will turn into a red giant. All life in the cosmos will one day stop to exist. Only to reappear after a new big bang behind us. Not to be confused with heaven though you can think of it like heaven.
I just heard a bit of "gallows humor" in YouTube's The Expanse. Miller, the battle-scarred detective on space station Eros, was surrounded by men with guns. So the situation was not looking good for his survival. When encouraged by his partner to hang-in there, he quipped "optimism is for *ssholes and earthers ". Not exactly a Seinfeld quote, who when asked "what's your script about?", replied "nothing". Nevertheless, the dour detective persevered, and lived to quip another hopeless day. :joke:
Quoting Zugzwang
I don't personally know many "believers in cosmic logic", but I'm currently reading the book by Astronomer Physicist John D. Barrow, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. He's no Pollyanna, but he looks on the bright side of the cosmic coin. He lists several cosmologists, since the 18th century, who "believed in an evolving, melioristic universe". The book's Introduction, by famous physicist John Archibald Wheeler, makes an assertion that "squares" with my thesis : "our own time has made enormous headway in sniffing out the sophisticated relations between entropy, information, randomness, and computability". [my emphasis]
Wheeler also says, "The philosopher of old was right! Meaning is important, is even central. It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. . . . That is the central point of the anthropic principle". Based on his positive assessment of the "Cosmic Logic", he postulated the concept of a Participatory Universe, in which humans are not helpless victims of fickle Fate, but collectively affect the course of evolution via feedback from its participants. So, you can, like those serious physicists, choose to interpret the evidence in a positive light, or negative. Of all the products of Evolution, only humans have any semblance of FreeWill, of Free Choice, to emphasize the positive, or the negative aspects of Reality. :nerd:
Meliorism :
[i]1. The belief that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort.
2. The belief that there is an inherent tendency toward progress or improvement in the human condition.[/i]
The Participatory Universe :
Wheeler's hunch is that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well.
http://www.spacemachine.net/views/2014/11/participatory-universe
My tower of mental facts, not material ivory, is built upon the foundation of ubiquitous Information. So, it's true that the Mind is a product of a material Brain. But that Brain consists of immaterial Information. Are you aware of the Matter-Energy-Information Equivalence Principle? Matter is indeed physical, but Energy is only a mental inference from the effects of Causation on Matter. And Information is the Aristotelian "Substance" of both. Hence, the Brain is made from intangible Information. :nerd:
Information :
[i]* Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
* When spelled with an āIā, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an āEā, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
So, why worry about the infinite array of possible futures, what could be, when what is "now" is at least OK. Worrying does not not change the future. Only actions, both positive & negative, can change what-might-be into what-is. Don't worry, be happy. :grin:
Stoicism : an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge; the wise live in harmony with the divine Reason (also identified with Fate and Providence) that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.
This formerly Hot thread seems to have cooled-off. And the topical question, which implies a rational (intentional?) First Cause, seems to have elicited one succinct cynical answer : "there is no why" (i.e. no reason), and a variety of philosophical curiosity postulations : "the reason-for-being for whom?". The succinct answer is plausible, only if nothing existed prior to the Big Bang, hence no reason-for-being, apart from Serendipity. But even atheist scientists are aware of the poverty of the "no why" retort. Which is why so many irrational or unintentional Causes, or just-so Prior Conditions, have been proposed by those who seek only data, not reasons : Quantum Fluctuation, Many Worlds, Multiverse, Hyper-Inflation, etc. So, we are faced with A> the simple Brute Fact of the world's Self-Existence, or B> the rational inference of a specific Cause to explain the observed universal Effect.
Alternative "A" implies the eternal existence of an evolving (but cyclic) material universe, while "B" assumes a non-cyclic world, with a specific point of beginning. Which implies the eternal or timeless existence of a creative agency of some kind. However, both "explanations" are speculative, not observed facts. Yet, the existence of Reasoning ability (homo sapiens ; observers) in the Effect, implies the potential for Reasoning in the Cause. So, to ask about a "Reason for Being" is a legitimate philosophical question, even though it's not a question subject to an empirical answer. Therefore, those who ask such questions are motivated, not by Pragmatic concerns, but by philosophical curiosity. Presumably, animals (and cynics) don't feel the need to know such hypothetical (impractical) information. But recorded history shows that "why" questions are innate to the human condition. Only the incurious, or fatalistic, are afraid to ask the Big Why questions. :cool:
Serendipity : the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way..
Cynical : bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic.
The "why" question always leads to infinite regress.
If I would be a believer in god that actually inquires into his beliefs, I would say that god is the infinite limit of that infinite regress of questions.
There is no ultimate answer to the question "what caused the universe to be created" because to every answer that we come up with, we will be able to ask "and what caused that?". What we can do however, is define a limit that is beyond questions and language, the limit of that sequence of infinite regress questions, and call that limit "God". (What I did is just named something as "God". I havent attached any attributes to it like all powerful or all knowing)
To folks that studied math in depth to some extent, infinity is defined such as for every number M that we choose, infinity will be bigger than M. Relating it to our topic, infinity, or "God", could be defined as an answer to every question that follows the question "what caused the universe to exist". For every question "what caused X" in the infinite regress, we can say God caused it, but we can't ask "what caused God", because we define God as the limit of this sequence of questions, which is not a cause in and of itself, like infinity is not a number.
All of the above doesn't prove that there is some entity that created the universe. All it does is challenge the definition of "God" and the atheists that claim "god doesn't exist". All they do is assume a certain definition of god and try to disprove it with silly attempts. What if what religions truly originally meant by the word "God" is something totally different than what mainstream culture (and religion) thinks?