Can nonexistence exist? A curious new angle for which to argue for God's existence?
I've made a video explaining the argument, but I will put it in a simple text form below and I'm curious about your thoughts on the argument. It goes as follows:
Non-existence can't exist
-so, there must be infinite existence in all directions for all time
-something which exists carries certain attributes: is affected by things, effects things, takes up space and encompasses time
-things are separated by things which are not of the same type, so the only thing that could separate existence itself would be nonexistence which cannot exist, thus there must be one undivided existence
-this undivided existence must carry all the attributes labeled above. These attributes, when defined as being all-encompassing, define all the omni's associated with God: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. And perpetual change through creativity: omnificent.
-add to this the fact that it must encompass all time: eternal, and you get all the labels attributed to God
-thus, the notion of God can be grasped from a purely logical standpoint.
View a much more detailed outline in my YouTube video, I'm ready to see what ideas you can add in support or against this argument!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FJwYgaFaRM&ab_channel=S2SPhilosophy
Non-existence can't exist
-so, there must be infinite existence in all directions for all time
-something which exists carries certain attributes: is affected by things, effects things, takes up space and encompasses time
-things are separated by things which are not of the same type, so the only thing that could separate existence itself would be nonexistence which cannot exist, thus there must be one undivided existence
-this undivided existence must carry all the attributes labeled above. These attributes, when defined as being all-encompassing, define all the omni's associated with God: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. And perpetual change through creativity: omnificent.
-add to this the fact that it must encompass all time: eternal, and you get all the labels attributed to God
-thus, the notion of God can be grasped from a purely logical standpoint.
View a much more detailed outline in my YouTube video, I'm ready to see what ideas you can add in support or against this argument!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FJwYgaFaRM&ab_channel=S2SPhilosophy
Comments (220)
As I noted before, the answer to all of those is "quantum vacuum." Whether or not that is a good answer is open for discussion.
But will a "quantum vacuum" hold that state perpetually for all time? Or is it a transient state? Can an infinite quantum vacuum exist on the outskirts of the universe for all time and if so, what does that say about nonexistence existing?
I brought it up because @180 Proof and I discussed it earlier as the answer that always derailed the subject of whether or not there can ever be nothing. To oversimplify - space is permeated by a field of vacuum energy. If you've got space, you've got something, i.e. you don't have nothing.
I wasn't a part of that discussion, is this "vacuum energy" you talk about the same as dark matter or just a related concept?
Either way, the longer I think about this subject the more I notice logic and science go hand-in hand here. Even the string theory, if it is true--would argue that atoms are made up of strands of energy that are in constant motion (take up space and are reliant upon time to do so--a union of the two). Stop time, the strings stop moving, they no longer take up space, thus they no longer exist. The entirety of material existence, you could thus argue, is made up of the union of time (change) and space. Returning to the God-argument, it is intriguing that the Christian concept of God has similarities--God the Father begets the Son, and the union of the two is the Holy spirit. Time begets space, and the union of the two is the material world...
I won't get into an argument about this with you. I'm already walking at the edge of my understanding. On the other hand, when I looked it up, the web says that vacuum energy is semi-sort of the same thing as the cosmological constant, which is associated with spacetime.
? The Four Different Meanings Of 'Nothing' To A Scientist (Ethan Siegel; Forbes; May 1, 2020)
[sup]• a condition where the raw ingredients to create your "something" didn't exist
• nothingness is the void of empty space
• nothingness as the ideal lowest-energy state possible for spacetime
• nothingness only occurs when you remove the entire universe and the laws that govern it[/sup]
From (some) philosophers we might expect "nothingness" to express (exhaustive) absence of everything/anything (i.e. by negation), like the missing complement to existence, in some cases anyway. Oddly enough perhaps, this also implies absence of constraints, conservation (physics), etc. Not much to speak of it seems.
? Nothingness (Roy Sorensen; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Aug 31, 2017)
More colloquially we might say something like "there's nothing in the drawer", meaning it's empty, ready to be filled. Different from the other uses.
The variety/ambiguity is best avoided I guess. So, what are talking here anyway?
The physics here is unnecessary. The sentence above is simply not well-formed.
Go ahead and form it better, I have run through many different sentences in my mind and any sentence discussing nonexistence in general seems to face a strange language breakdown, which I somewhat discuss in the video and I will further discuss in my response to jorndoe.
I mention in the video that there is a distinction between saying something doesn't exist and talking about nonexistence itself. When you say something exists, you refer to it in the material sense as not existing, but by naming it (such as unicorn) we recognize the existence of the idea.
Saying things don't exist in a material way poses no problem, we are just left with space. But space is still a thing, so as long as we only talk the material it poses no issue for us. But when we talk about a total or absolute nothingness, in which space could also not exist, this is when the problems arise. And to be honest, it also poses problems for language as well. The Meriam-Webster definition of nothingness is "the quality or state of being nothing." It is odd to attribute qualities and states of being to that which can have no qualities nor state of being because it is nothing, but language doesn't offer us much choice here. The word itself in many ways seems out of place with every other word, as nothingness or nonexistence makes reference to something that can have no reference to it. This is absolutely a part of the argument, and a part of how I establish certain qualities or attributes must necessarily exist and exist in an eternal sense which combined together begin to look very similar to the long-held notion of God thus pointing to the idea that we could grasp this idea from a purely logical angle.
I should also probably mention, that although the argument begins from physical and scientific position, it is largely meant to be a platform by which to lunge into the metaphysical. I only argue that "absolute nothingness" can't exist, but there is nothing stopping the possibility of material nothingness. But I am unsure of even this last part, things become difficult when you think of multiple planes of existence.
My point is the familiar one, that it can't be made well-formed. That is, it is ungrammatical.
Existence can be treated as a second-order predicate, as in ?(x)f(x); non-existence might be the negation: ~?(x)f(x). But you would treat non-existence as a property, and then attribute that property to nothing - or something like that.
It's not even a contradiction.
And we are back to the notion it is impossible--grammatically, logically, etc. I am aware of this, and is the basis of the argument. Now, whether I am good at articulating it, that is a whole different question...
I used to think space is not a thing like usual physical objects. It is an object but non physical, because it cannot be seen and touched. Space is not nothingness either. As you say, it exists and affects us.
So it is rather a precondition of all the physical objects, which can be classed as a priori object, and its property is emptiness. The problem seems that we only think about either physical objects or nothing.
But there must be non physical objects such as space and time, and they exist as precondition of all the physical objects in the universe.
Time is another non physical object, in that we cannot see, hear or touch, but it exists. It affects us, its property is that it is in non reversible with futuristic motion and it is the precondition of all events in the universe.
Space and time must not be classed as physical object or nothingness. They should be classed as non physical objects, which are a priori, because they are universal and necessary condition for all the objects and events in the universe.
:100: :up:
No, were are back at illformed; it's not false, it doesn't say anything. So the same goes for any deductions that one attempts to derive from it.
Thanks.
:nerd: :wink:
If language, philosophy, etc. don't allow for the discussion of absolute nothingness, that says it all right there. I talk about absolute nothingness as being "smaller than infinitesimal" and existing for a time that is "less than instantaneous." This is why it can't be found nor pointed to nor talked about. It doesn't even exist in the plane of ideas, because if it did, it wouldn't be absolute nothingness. Even ideas take up space and time. Even if it is just in the neurons of our brain or data on a computer hard drive.
I should also mention, it isn't the sentence which is the contradiction as much as it is the word itself. Nonexistence is a noun, nouns refer to things. But Nonexistence refers to nothing...
A lot of your problems I tried addressing already in the video I made, the words "exist" and "doesn't exist" operate fine when speaking about the material world. You begin with an existent idea and then point to the tangible world and say that idea isn't manifest in a tangible way. But it isn't absolute nonexistence, because the idea exists. Ideas also take up space, even if that space is in our neurons. It takes up time, thinking about them and talking about them isn't instantaneous. They also have an effect and affect things, otherwise we wouldn't discuss them. So, ideas belong to the realm of existence, so whatever is truly nonexistent can't exist even as an idea.
Your predicate argument can also be used to prove my point. If there can't be absolute nonexistence anywhere, then we need to define whatever it is that fills in all the gaps, and so it is quite convenient to use "exist" as a predicate for something which is infinite and fills in all the gaps which we call "God." Now, I was hoping to establish a more sophisticated argument than that, but if we want to get into the semantics of exist being a predicate that is what I would do.
Space-time is being conflated with existence
Itemising the argument in the first part of the OP :
i) there cannot be non-existence - therefore existence is infinite.
ii) space-time = existence
iii) therefore space-time is infinite.
Regarding item ii), space-time is being conflated with existence, rather than existence being a property of space-time.
If existence is a property of space-time, then there can still be existence in the absence of space-time.
In which case, item iii) does not follow. IE, space-time need not be infinite, and if not infinite, then not omnipresent.
Infinity cannot be itself if it fails to account for the absence of itself. Such a failure would render it finite. Same with eternity.
Quite simply, X = X and -X, whether logic likes it or not. And not.
I'm not against your conclusions, and not against your arguments, mostly because there is an oversimplification of my argument which is missing key elements. Perhaps I did myself an injustice by saying "look at this video" instead of writing a novel, but that video was already on my to-do list and got my argument out for criticism.
i) There must BE an infinite existence, but it doesn't mean we must always use the word "existence" in an infinite way. We can still say finite things don't exist.
ii) space-time IS and existing thing, but NOT necessarily and infinite one. I actually argue in the video that it isn't an absolute infinite because it has a finite beginning with the big bang, hence the metaphysical component of the argument is that there must be a greater existence which is infinite across all time.
iii) this one is answered also above ^
Infinity isn't a thing, but a perpetuation of a thing or state of being, a property. In your argument, you treat it as a thing which it is not.
The term "non-existence" and the concept connected to it are quite tricky when it comes to their usage, as I will show.
I believe that you should first define "non-existence" so that we all have a common reference to discuss about. Because if I have a different meaning for it than yours and other persons responding to this topic, there would be an issue in our communication, wouldn't there?
Also, there are a lot of times in which just examining the definition of a key term in a subject/topic, helps a lot in answering it. Sometimes it can even answer the key question fully! (I have done this quite a few times!).
Now, Oxford LEXICO --which I normally use-- defines "non-existence" as "The fact or state of not existing or not being real or present".
But what a bad luck! It's one of the times that we fall on an inconsistent definition. The word "state" implies clearly existence (= condition in which something is)! So one must certainly remove it, in which case the definition becomes "The fact of not existing or not being real or present". "Fact" however is something that is known or proved to be true. And you cannot apply this to something that does not exist, that is you have no idea about it! How can you?
So, unfortunately, I will have to throw the whole definition to the trash!
On the other hand, I think we are very lucky in the present case! It's not a coincidence that "non-existence" cannot be defined, at least not in a consistent and satisfactory way. The reason is that this term, like a lot of other of similar nature, as a concept implies "absence of anything". And that's all you can say about it. Yet, even it this case, there's some inconsistency, because it involves "any thing", and a thing refers to something that exists! ("Lack of something" is even worse!)
In this sense "non-existence", "nothingness" and "emptiness" are almost synonyms with each other.
I believe that "non-existence" can be only described figuratively, as "Absolute darkness and silence", "Empty space". This desctiption can be applied to both material and immaterial things. "I can see nothing in the dark" means that nothing exists for me under such a condition. "I have no idea about that" means that I have no idea in my mind, my mind is empty as far as that is concerned.
After having said all that, I come back to your statement "Non-existence can't exist". It cannot exist as what? A term/word, a concept, a reality, something physical or non-physical? I believe that you have to clear this.
Quoting Derrick Huesits
How is this --and more specifically "infinity"-- derived from the statement "Non-existence can't exist"? And then, "what directions"? Do you mean everywhare in space?
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Well, I think this needs to be worked on grammatically somehow ...
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Right. The concept of God (or a Supreme Being) can only be grasped on a purely logical basis. But this is not something new ... On the other hand, I can't see how all the attributes you have mentioned that could be attributed to God are derived from "non-existence".
Anyway, my contribution to the topic was about "non-existence" and I enjoyed that because it was a new subjected for me! :smile: So, thnaks for offering me this opportunity! :smile:
Doesn't matter how I treat it, as a thing or or state of being or a property. The argument stands. So long as you use the word "it" like you did, the argument stands. It also stands for any not-it that you can conjure up with your best thinking.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading how you came to conclude the word "nonexistence" has the same problems I did, it simply is a concept you can't talk about, and you can't find! Hence, the idea that anywhere you look you find existence, and if you had the power of infinite travel you would still perpetually find existence hence the comment "in all directions." But the part it seems most people here struggle to grasp is the argument isn't purely physical, it is meant to be a metaphysical argument. It is OK for the universe to be finite as long as there is a greater existence within which it dwells and permeates it. For example, there is an entire world of ideas which dwell in our minds, their existence exists within the existence of our bodies. Thus, you could say existence is tiered. Ideas exist within our bodies, our bodies exist within space-time, and space-time exists within ??? (possibly God? this is where the metaphysical argument comes in).
Now, I also agree with you I could better explain how I gain the omni's from all this.
We start with the Eternal component--all time--and work our way from there. You can't say "there was a time when there was nothing." That, simply, wasn't a time. That was nothing, so we can ignore it (humor intended).
i) Omnipresence is infinite presence in all directions. So, one existence without divide that is everywhere.
n. This, alone, doesn't solve the need for infinite existence because "presence" alone isn't a thing, and isn't an existence. It needs to be able to "do" something. "Doing nothing" for an eternity is--begging the question here--pure nothingness. Hence we add in infinite potential and awareness.
ii)Omniscience is infinite awareness in all directions. So, one awareness without divide that is everywhere.
n1. I am purposely defining omniscience using different words than are typical because "knowledge" is a finite word, and adding the word "all" before it doesn't necessarily correct this limitation. The word "aware" is very open-ended and can't be put in a box, so-to-speak.
n2. Omnipresence and omniscience aren't enough to create change, so nothing changes here--we still have infinite nothingness.
iii)Omnipotence--now we add in potential in all directions
n. combined with omnipresence and omniscience change can occur anywhere, in all directions, infinitely. But, even with potential, there still is no "need" for it to occur. My car with a full tank of gas can sit perfectly still in the same spot for a very long time and go nowhere, even with perfect potential to do so. This is where we need the sort of "key and ignition" so-to-speak of this whole machine of existence.
iv)Omnificence--unlimited creativity
n. this concept is reliant upon everything else above, and to say it ever "stops" would be to put a limit on it so it wouldn't be "unlimited" creativity. Thus, this is what keeps the machine of "change" going ad-infinitum. This, ultimately, perpetuates existence and makes it eternal thus it truly goes full-circle from here.
We can only TRULY talk around finite things. Otherwise, we are forced to talk about the infinite from within. Thus, there is an element to which it can't be "grasped." And, this goes for logic also, it is a tool to "grasp" truth. Perhaps it is best to just talk about eternity as a continuation without an end. It is a direction. In this way, it is similar to directions such as up, down, left, right. They don't have outer limits, so they are infinite even though we typically use them in a finite way, "10 feet to your left." The reality is, you are arguing something which you have no ability to prove, and every attempt to prove it would render you wrong. If I told you to find the finite limits of the direction left, for example, and you gave an answer, I could immediately respond back with something further. The minute you establish an end, you demonstrate an end which is further away. It is simply a continuation, and the logic isn't so "flawed" as you presume.
I think the mistake in your reasoning is that you nail down X to what you think it is. Try thinking of it as what you don't think it is. In other words, substitute X for whatever would defeat your argument. There you have it.
The problem I face is that others perceive that whenever I answer yes or no, I must hold the inverse of my conclusion. Thus, if someone asks me if I think God exists and I say yes, then I am automatically precluded from thinking that God does not exist. That is simply not true. Everything and nothing is happening and not happening, everywhere and nowhere, all at once, now, never and forever.
In order to make any sense of anything, you must first stipulate to agree on a premise. Or, as has been argued elsewhere on this board, there must be a "gentlemen's agreement." True as that might be, the burden of proof is upon the proponent and it is a violation of the agreement to argue "self-evidence" or "can't prove a negative." So we just pretend that X is something that helps us make our argument and not the other guy's.
We potentially agree more than you think, but not in the way that you think. I think logic as it stands now is 2 dimensional, and as such you get contradictions when a 3rd dimension logical argument is provided that crosses the same point as the 2 dimensional one. For example, I personally believe in a physical life and a spiritual or "metaphysical" one. Seeing people obsessed with death, dying, killing, suicide, etc. I would say they are "dead" but yet clearly they are alive, so x and ~x simultaneously, but they are two different planes of realities and our two dimensional logic can't handle it.
That is, of course, true. Because, by my reasoning (or what some would call a lack thereof) everything is true. And not.
You are doing well to corral the fundamental arts beginning with these points. 'Non-existence' as 'Nothing' cannot even be meant, so thus I have put it in single quotes. To flesh out the steps in your scheme, I add explicitly:
Thus, existence is mandatory, period, and so it is a given. and so this fact can never be undone. Thus, we have both a truth and its proof. One cannot later on claim that it was optional.
‘Nothing’, not being able to be, has no productive capability. This, too, is a truth and a proof. One cannot later on claim such as that ‘Nothing’ can divide into positives and negatives, for this capability would be a something and thus one did not truly start with ‘Nothing’.
So, there must be Existence as a continuous partless something with no spacers of ‘Nothing’ present (yes, I am being redundant here)! The Cosmos is indivisible.
To no surprise, science has already identified this Existence. It is the partless fundamental fields of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) that give rise to the elementary particles.
At this level, there is no Time or Space yet; the quantum fields are all atop one another (and can interact with one another).
Recall that Einstein did away with Newton’s supposed absolute and fundamental Space and Time. The notion of them is emergent from the true fundamental quantum fields.
What I am doing here is winnowing away all the previous and wrongly proposed fundamentals… to see what’s left standing.
So then, note too that Faraday got rid of the supposed classical particles being fundamental as spigots of fields and that the same was done for quantum particles in Quantum Mechanics (QM) and its QFT to support the Standard Model (SM) which works to great precision.
Quoting Derrick Huesits
This would be the fundamental quantum fields which ever remain as themselves. They exhaust all Reality, period.
Excitations in these quantum fields are the elementary particles, as quanta of certain discrete stable unit energy levels dictated by the waving nature of the fields. As the fields are everywhere, the particles may then travel anywhere to further combine upwards, which we take as ‘thing’s with ‘parts’.
In truth, while the notion of there being things is useful, it is that these so-call ‘things’ are events and process. The sun is a long event but it is not identical with itself over time. Its semblance is a ‘thing’ to us’
In charged particles, the unit charge level also adds to the strength conferred by the unit quantum strength for stability.
The model of these fields as sums of harmonic oscillators at every point is correct and true in that it shows the nature of the elementary particles. So it is that when adding energy to an electron in an atom that the electron can only jump to certain quantum levels.
Quoting Derrick Huesits
This is another truth and a proof, that there is no separation, never, that all is one, indivisible, though not under ‘God’, which ‘God’ needs more definition, but is indeed as itself as a must be as a default condition.
Quoting Derrick Huesits
The quantum fields are all-encompassing and omnipresent as all there is. They only have whatever power that they can have, which also serves as what they can ‘know’.
They cannot be still, for then not anything would have happened, and so thus we have another truth and proof that there has to be “perpetual change”, meaning that it is continual and that not anything particular can ever remain for even an instant (would be small or else All would pass in just one flash). At any rate, change is constant, but the fundamental quantum fields remain themselves at heart. ‘Stillness’ is out, it gaining single quotes now, such as with its sort of cousin, ‘Nothing’.
Quoting Derrick Huesits
More truths and proofs, in that ‘Beginnings’ and ‘Ends’ are out now, too, in that the quantum fields have to be eternal, or at least timeless (we can’t as yet tell presentism apart from eternalism).
‘God’ as a kind of a Person with Mind seems to be out, too, for systems of mind emerge at higher levels, and ever have ‘parts’ (events and processes really), and those had to emerge previously.
The quantum fields would be as a God-who-is-not-a-person, as having the labels of fundamental, everywhere, the Ground of Determination (G.O.D), all the power that is, eternal, ungenerated and deathless, the One, the Necessary, etc.
Well done!
That's a pretty strong indication that what you're trying to express is not coherent.
TO the extent that there's anything meaningful to say here, its just tautology and nothing interesting follows from it, certainly none of the religious/theological conclusions you're trying to draw.
Its almost like a sort of Greatest Hits of sloppy philosophy or something: reifying non-existence and trying to say some nonsensical things about it, then concluding on that basis that God exists.
Maybe it's just that a temporally/spatially "limited" world goes against our intuitions — the principle of sufficient reason.
Apply sufficient reason to everything/anything, and you'll get "something extra" (which is ampliative nonsense, since everything/anything already is all-inclusive), or you get a self-reference, or you delineate the principle (which I think may have my vote at the moment).
After all, the principle of sufficient reason is neither verifiable nor falsifiable (check Watkins' "all-and-some" statements), and since it's easily ampliative metaphysics, some care/suspicion is warranted.
The argument is fallacious on similar grounds as the ontological argument for God is. In fact it is Parmenides all over again. You define something into existence, but it is simply our language that works this way and our language does not decide what exists actually and what does not. The ontological argument is more sophisticated though, because you need all kind of additional assumptions, namely that existing carries certain attributes and that it means to be affected by things etc. Why would that be? Some things are affected vy some things, for instance humans are affected by emotions, and other things are affected by other thing, rock for instance are not affected by emotion. Why cannot there be an entity that is not affecte by anything?
In fact it seems to me that according to your argument God cannot be affected by anything but itself. God is infinite existence. Ininity is all encompassing, ergo God exists as all, so everything that can affect God, is synonimous with God itself.
Let's just say, it exists.
No arguing about your subjectivity. The real question is, why come on a philosophy forum that deliberates over the truth and say there is no truth assertively as though you have it?
The word "nonexistence" is not coherent, and that is precisely the point. If you prefer I don't use that word, I can argue all the same without it and say existence is infinite. But it eliminates a deliberate reductio-ad-absurdum argument I am using here.
Eternity is the driving force of all infinites. Remove that, and you remove the infinite. Without eternity, space becomes limited, ideas are limited, creative potential is limited. But with eternity they can operate without an end. Thus, eternity isn't on-par with the rest of the infinites, it is a precursor.
And therein lies the dilemma I referenced before. My having said there is no truth is automatically transmogrified by you into an understanding that it is my position that there is no truth, when in fact there is.
Side bar: A philosophy forum is the best place to discuss the issue of whether or not logic has a weakness that relies upon a gentlemen's agreement for it's worth.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
It sounds like you got to the end of the road for the physical portion of the argument, the question is if it can make the jump into the metaphysical from here. In the video, the method I used to make the jump was to mention the finite beginning of the universe, the Big Bang. Here we see a certain curiosity in that there are potentially multiple forms of infinites. This is similar to my comment above where I mentioned eternity is the driving force for all other infinites, to include space, ideas, etc. In the case of the universe, with a finite beginning, we need to project a continuation before it, and a continuation that somehow established the laws by which the universe would be run. Now, I realize many of the universe's laws might be logically necessary, but certainly not all, and even to say it is random becomes questionable. Because, how is random generated in the first place? To say it just is because it is isn't an argument.
There is definitely a lot to say here, I'm curious to hear your thoughts before putting too much deliberation here as obviously I'm already convinced this is proof enough but needs proper criticizing to make the link stronger.
It doesn't rely upon a gentleman's agreement, it needs modernizing to make it less simplistic. This project has already led me to see that I should put some effort into improving the logical method as a whole, it doesn't do well when talking about both physical and metaphysical concepts at the same time. I have a another video that demonstrates at least a small portion of this, basically the idea is take what is normally seen as binary and twist it in a third direction--the 3D portion of the logical argument. I'll link it below, a good portion is introduction which you can skip, I get to the good stuff towards the end.
https://youtu.be/SVGVjsJ7JYk
Now you are challenging me to learn. :grin: I don't think I'm up for that. But if the burden of proof lies upon the proponent, and the proponent says that X cannot = -X, then he should have to prove it. If he says that it is self-evident, then he should submit a lessor proof. Any greater proof should have lesser proofs that are not anecdotal. If he says that "you can't prove a negative" then he has stipulated that logic is based upon that which cannot be proven. So, we all just agree that X=X and go on our merry way.
But I was taught that, in order to argue, the participants must first agree on a premise before going forward in disagreement. If one doesn't want to go forward, then don't accept the premise. That is all I've done. I refuse to accept any one's premise and place the burden of proof upon them, where it belongs. I won't accept anecdote and nothing is self-evident.
I've been told I'm full of shit and that may be true, but maybe the modernizing you refer to could dumb it down enough for me. We'll probably never know unless I follow links and proceed down what could be a rabbit hole.
On the other hand, I'm comfortable with X being X and -X at the same time. Many people cannot handle that, and I think that is fine. But I think they will continue to struggle with the divorce between the general and quantum, and the fact that every time they find an answer, a thousand new questions arise, and they seem to be getting further from the truth, rather than closer to it. But I do enjoy watching them struggle. It's like life itself. Cool.
Grass is green and grass is yellow. Grass is not green and grass is not yellow. All of these are true. The reason is because "grass" is a broad category, which can include many states the plant goes through from germination to life to death. But as with anything, the category can be subdivided to make it more specific. Make it specific enough, and the apparent contradictions dissolve. The real question is, do we have the patience for that or do we just want to over-generalize and call it green. The problem here is what I call the knowledge-understanding distinction. Understanding is very open-ended, knowledge is a closed box. People with understanding like you are good at cutting open that box, but all that really does is show the superiority of understanding over knowledge. It does nothing to prove understanding as lacking truth.
Perhaps another way of putting it, you have enough understanding to create problems, but not enough to solve the problems you've created.
Indeed, it does. But then:
Quoting Derrick Huesits
...so you didn't learn the lesson - you are still talking about it.
I have nothing in my pocket. You think I can take it out and put it on the table to examine. Your posts are literal nonsense.
I've flagged your duel accounts. You had best sort those out with a mod.
I already stated previously I fat-fingered my last name and this was the only way to fix it. This forum doesn't provide a "help and support" link I already tried that. I intended to switch completely except for a mistake with login on a different device. If your intent is to remove this argument/discussion on that basis I think it says it all right there.
That being said, your comments have little to do with philosophy. I advise looking into reductio-ad-absurdum and how it works. The whole intent is to demonstrate certain ideas as absurd, thus negate them. But you must first suppose them to be true. This is philosophy, this is logic, if you don't understand it there is little I can do for you there.
Your first post wanted me to clarify that my position is that grass not grass (and is, too, but you get my point, even if you don't agree with it). But I don't think you were contesting that so much as you were trying to explain that while I might be able to play, I don't have anything of value to offer. I glean as much from you second post, to which I respond here. This post is clearer.
So, I will argue, by saying this (which I have said before, but not to you): I am no physicist and I am not a professional philosopher. However, when I see them struggling, I wonder if they might not want to go back to the drawing board and challenge the very premises they originally agreed to before launching themselves into what they may find a fun, challenging and lucrative endeavor, with plenty of insights and "AHA" moments, but where they nevertheless make their frustrations and chagrins public for simpletons like me to read and consider.
So, while I might not know enough to solve a problem that I did not create but merely pointed out for smarter people than me, I expect them to solve it before concerning myself with their hand-wringing and lost sleep. It reminds me of the guy who beats his horse and expects better performance from the horse.
But that was all really just me arguing. I have, in fact, solved the problem but I don't think they want to hear it. The answer is "A". "A" is all, which necessarily accounts for the absence of itself. A = A and -A. Some people have gone down rabbit holes of a limited number of multi-verses (2, 10, etc.) while other talk of infinite universes and alternative me that are identical, or have one atom reversed, missing, displaced, re-colored or configured and infinite times and blah, blah blah. It's ALL true. And not. Other people call it God. In fact, that brings up another example: people talk about paradox. Well, I'm perfectly comfortable with paradox. God cannot be God if God doesn't want to be God. After all, it's God, right? What kind of pussy-ass God could not be not God if he felt like it? That ain't no God.
Anyway, animals have taught me I am right about this. And not. That does not render me immobile and unable to function because my open mind had my brains fall out. Quite the contrary. I look upon everything with awe and except it for what it is and is not.
I'm rambling. Dinner is ready.
You are very entertaining to argue with, but perhaps not the best person to put a theory through the fire with. Your last post opens many rabbit holes, but perhaps it's best I not jump into them this time...
You seem to be the right person for my question.
Ants exist: Ex(Ax) where Ax = x is an ant
Unicorns don't exist: Ax~(Ux) = ~Ex(Ux) where Ux = x is a unicorn.
How do we translate, "nothing exists" in predicate logic???
Furthermore, if God exists - and he does - then there can clearly be nothing, for God can do anything and thus God can, if he so chooses, destroy everything, including himself. Thus, if God exists, it is possible for there to be nothing.
Ironically, then, an argument that proves something must exist (as opposed to just showing that something does exist), would disprove God, not prove him.
Sorry. I shouldn't have eaten so much.
So, your theory as far as it goes checks out, the philosophy being confirmed by science, which is really pretty far since it applies to the entire Cosmos, not just the universe!
The forced Existence as Necessity shows that it has to be ever and always, too, which is usually called ‘Eternal’. It is unbreakable and unmakeable.
Eternal pertains to an endless duration of time, while infinite pertains to an endless extent.
If there is presentism, then there is time; otherwise, if there is eternalism, then this is a timeless all-at-once type of eternal. We can’t tell them apart. In eternalism, we traverse an already complex block of past and future, this seeming as time to us. The mode of time has to get resolved, but we can go on to estimate well, I hope, about the supposed Big Bang. We know what comes right after a Big Bang, and it is useful, but I shan’t put it here yet.
Of course, the Bang is a continuation of the Cosmos since something banged. Also, since it happened once, it could happen again. I just hope that it doesn’t happen near me!
Stephen Hawking thinks that there is no boundary at all at the Bang, no before, no outside, etc., but others don’t agree, so I’m putting that in limbo for now.
He’s right, though, about the universe summing to a near-zero balance of opposites (he says zero; I say near) in that the negative potential energy of gravity balances/cancels the positive kinetic energy of stuff. His negative energy of gravity can make stuff for free and the universe is indeed a free lunch… This capability would still have to be a something.
Before the Bang, the quantum fields are still there, since they can never go away, if we continue to look at happenings in time, as we’re used to doing that. The field fluctuations are of a wee and most tiny bit of energy. This so-called zero-point energy rest state is not really zero for physicists. Plus, the rest point for the Higgs field that gives mass to some particles is even of a higher energy!
So, then, for the Bang, perhaps some lightweight stuff accumulated in Eternity’s Waiting Room, there being more and more amounting until a kind of bandwidth saturation point was reached, meaning that an infinite density could not be reached, and so, Boom.
The same for the Block Universe of eternalism if its events became all at once, I guess. I don’t like to guess.
Presentism has grave problems and eternalism has every event of past and future (to us) already there and figured to infinite precision (even the 3 body resists solution; and can there really be infinite precision? And why its specific starting point for the universe?).
As for ‘random’, Anton Zeilinger seems to have shown to 3-sigma that randomness is the bedrock of reality.
Just when we have made great leaps, larger than any before, we see that there is more work to do.
Righto - I'll leave you to it then.
The presenter argues, fallaciously, that the answer to the above question can't be "yes" because that's, as per the presenter, a contradictio in terminis.
However, nonexistence is a concept and so as a concept, nonexistence does exist. How on earth are we able to talk about it otherwise?
You are an open book with no cover and no pages. Thus, it's not really open, but it is.
That's the short answer. Of course there are complications folk can introduce, such as a first-order predicate for existence; but they are odd logical variations that lead to all sorts of complications.
See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/#AntMeiFirOrdVie
What's happening in this area is a search for a parsing of existential statements - especially negative existential statements - that is cogent. That whole area of logic is washed over by both @Derrick Huestis's. To my eye nonexistence is a hollow predicate. So when I say "Ronald MacDonald does not exist" I'm saying something like that he is a fiction, an invention of advertisers, and not a person that you might meet in the street. The issue is how to get this clear.
But apparently this is Quoting Derrick Huestis
So there's that.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yep.
There is getting to be some repetition here which is wearing me out, but for what it's worth this thread has convinced me a different angle of approach might be better. When you say nonexistence is a concept, you're saying it is something which creates a contradiction. The whole word and every use of it creates endless contradictions. The point of this introductory statement was to show the absurdity of it, thus negate the possibility thus we must accept the concept of an infinite existence. Concepts are ultimately things, as I have previously stated, so even when you talk about things that don't exist, all you're saying is they don't exist as a material reality, but they will always exist as a concept.
"Nothing" can be use as a pronoun, adverb, noun, and adjective. Saying "nothing exists" uses it as a noun, so you can't then separate it as "no thing."
Regardless, the first part of this argument should sound confusing because I'm trying to use reductio-ad-absurdum. The whole entire idea of "nonexistence" is quite absurd, and many words have been spilled talking about that reality. But yes, the first part of the argument should sound confused because I talk about it as though it were a possibility, but really it isn't, infinite existence is what we have.
That is true. And not. Likewise, you are an open book with no cover and no pages. Thus, it's not really open, but it is. And not. You are learning, my Padawan. :razz:
You are arguing that it is impossible for there to be nothing, yes?
That's incompatible with God's existence.
If God exists, then nothing that exists exists of necessity. That is, it is possible for there to be nothing.
God exists. Therefore, it is possible for there to be nothing.
To deny this you either have to deny that God exists - but you can't do that if you're trying to prove God - or you have to insist that there are some things God cannot do (namely, destroy everything). In which case the person you believe in is not God but some hobbled creature not worthy of the name. Either way, you're denying God's existence. So, if God exists, it is possible for there to be nothing.
There is a lot there, and a lot to unpack. I will pounce on the spot where I think I can make the most headway, remember I'm trying to make the leap from this to the metaphysical realm of existence, or the "beyond the cosmos." One thing I found myself thinking about a lot today is randomness. You mention some physicists as viewing randomness as the "bedrock of reality." Some quick research into this topic showed that apparently this concept of randomness was at odds with the views of Einstein. Reason is leading me to take Einstein's position, and it also places me in a good spot to promote the "omnificence" concept.
For this, I pose the question: Can randomness occur without being deliberate? Zeilinger argues that light reflecting off a mirror or being absorbed is a completely random phenomenon. But if it is truly random, then it could be the case that no light is absorbed, or all light is absorbed, and everything in between. But we don't see variation in the reflectivity of a mirror, so while it may be random at the individual level, it is patterned at the macro level, and what governs this to ensure that this "randomness" is patterned in such a way?
But really, there is no "random" at a macro level anywhere, everything is deliberate. Even human acts of obtaining "randomness" such as rolling a dice revolve around a deliberate act. At a macro level, there is randomness nowhere, but at a micro-level there seems to be randomness everywhere, and the governance of this--to my knowledge--is not fully known.
There is no "true" random, and presuming this statement is true, there is no "random" to the Big Bang and universe either. Everything is patterned, organized chaos. Even the logic we have been discussing demonstrates a necessity for pattern. But where things really get ambiguous is where the patterns are no longer necessitated by any logic, and yet they are patterned anyway. Here I find a kind of border line where arguing "omnificence is necessary" can be done. But if you have omnificence, you have a mind, you have a force that can create patterns, designs, uniqueness, etc. It organizes the "chaos" that exists out of necessity into a pattern that keeps changing and morphing but never dissolving back into chaos.
It is the odd thing about this universe, everything that is "chaos" can be zoomed out of far enough to look beautiful. Black holes are one such example...So, back to the original question, can randomness exist without being deliberate? Especially when there seems to be two choices: random or patterned, and patterns seem to be the far more common choice than random.
God can't do anything, and he can't do everything either for that matter. It is a commonly upheld religious belief, the quick example I'll give for that before delving into the philosophy around it is found in 2 Tim 2:13 "If we believe not, yet he stays faithful: he cannot deny himself."
The simple philosophy is, if God is all powerful (omnipotent), and God uses that to wipe away his power (omnipotence), then he wouldn't truly be all-powerful. In other words, baked in the cake of the word is the built-in recognition of he can't take away his own power, or any of the other omni's either for that matter.
Bible passages are not evidence. But Jesus said "with God all things are possible", did he not? And the word 'cannot' is ambiguous - so the passage you cite is entirely consistent with what I have said if 'cannot' is interpreted expressively (and that's how you'd need to interpret it if you're not to convict your holy book of containing contradictions).
Ok, I will go about this the other way that seems to confuse the living daylights out of half of the people on this forum. "God can do all things," "no thing" is not a thing, thus he can't turn "all things" into "no thing."
Yes, of course. Destroying everything is something God can do - it is an action, and it is an action that God can perform, because God is omnipotent. To suppose him unable to destroy everything is to suppose there to be something over and above God that constrains what he can do - which is confused.
Thus, from something nothing can come.
"Destroy" typically means to remove the order or structure. If I bulldoze a house, the house is gone but the material that went into it still exists. This seems to correlate to how God destroys in most religions. It isn't the creation of a "nonexistence," going back to that fun contradictory word.
I'm a bit confused about the whole issue but here's some further analysis:
Redness exists & Non-redness exists.
Redness is a state/quality that red objects display. Non-redness is a property that (say) blue objects have.
Existence & Nonexistence.
Existence exists means simply that there's a state/quality - existence - that some objects like men, cars, stones possess.
Nonexistence exists, in similar fashion, describes the state/quality - nonexistence - of some objects like unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns.
A little bit more about, nonexistence exists. This statement doesn't amount to a contradiction because "nonexistence" refers to a quality/state and "exists" implies that quality/state is one in which some objects are in. True, no? It doesn't amount to saying a nonexistent object exists in which case it would be a contradiction.
Is there anything God can't do? If you answer yes, you don't believe in God. The answer has to be no.
That's all that's needed. Draw as many distinctions as you like between different senses of 'destroy'. It is of no avail. The fact remains that God can take everything and anything out of existence if he so chooses. He's not restricted to rearranging the furniture of reality. He can remove it all. Again, to deny this is to hold that the existence of some things depends not on God, but something else - which is heretical and confused.
I just see a blanket statement, not an argument. "God can do anything" is not the same as "God is all powerful." And "all powerful" is very different than the human conception of power. For example, the ability to create is far greater than the ability to destroy. It can take 40 years to create a cathedral, but 1 day to tear it down. So--which one is more difficult, or requires more "power?"
Yes they are. But even if they are not - and they are - it would be absurd to insist that a person who is constrained is nevertheless all powerful. For one can just posit a person who is not constrained in that way and that person would have more power than the constrained one - and what clearer contradiction could there be than to maintain that the person with less power is the more powerful one?
Quoting Derrick Huestis
What do you mean? Do you mean that real power - power of the kind God has - involves 'not' being able to do things?
Anyway, you have said I have not argued anything - on the contrary, here is my argument:
1. God can do anything
2. If God can do anything, God can destroy everything
3. Therefore, God can destroy everything
4. If God can destroy everything, then it is possible for there to be nothing.
5. It is possible for there to be nothing
So I have clearly argued something. You, however, have not addressed my question: are there things God cannot do?
I didn’t go for ‘random’ at first, but I came to realize that there can’t be any specific input or design going into the Eternal Existence that has no Beginning, nor anything going into it, for that matter, and so what would be its nature given that its bedrock can’t have a pre-definition?[/quote]
Quoting Derrick Huestis
The probabilities in QM results are unitary, in that they add up to one. This is like a pattern. When quantum systems don’t interact with something they are deterministic. Maybe it is that since we can’t take the whole universe into consideration during quantum experiment we get probabilities.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
Quantum probability ‘randomness’ averages out at the macro level, which is called decoherence. This use of “deliberate” suggests that there is mostly determinism at the macro level, which I would agree with. Others flat out won’t like it, emotionally, but the alternative is ‘not determined’, which is even harder to take. No one has ever been able to say what the ‘free’ in free will is supposed to refer to, other than the trivial sense that the will is usually able to operate. We are left with other non-starter notions such as one being a mini self cause, which wouldn’t know anything, or ‘random’, which would hurt the will, and never help it. Maybe some ‘randomness’ at rare times creeps in, but I hope that one is not standing at the edge of a cliff when this happens, or the ‘random’s vote gets swamped out but the majority votes. All in all, the fixed will grants consistency. Learning provides for new and better fixed wills to come along that have a wider range of intelligence behind them.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
Minds emerge later on, where there is more complexity. Look to the future for even higher human beings. In the past, we ever see but simpler and simpler things.
Determinism is still on, though, in presentism, as one ‘now’ leads to the next ‘now’, it getting consumed, and even more so, in a way, in eternalism, since it is all pre-determined.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
The leftover relic of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation shows some minor variations. What we see in the universe as galaxies could be the quantum fluctuations writ large. From a very great distance out, the universe seems to be pretty smooth.
A Black Hole exists at the center of our galaxy. We are nowhere near this core but well safe from its harm out on the Orion Arm.
Again, what would be the nature of the forced Eternal Necessary Existence?
Random?
Everything, either as linear or all once?
A default for what is partless to have to be tiny?
I hear you, hopefully I can get you to understand it as intended and then maybe it will make more sense.
I'm using the word "nonexistence" as a state of being that is permeating and all-encompassing. So, think of a "great abyss." In this great abyss all forms of existence are gone. So no space, no time, no ideas, no physical matter, no God either if you believe in that. Now, if you try to explain the properties of this abyss you begin to have problems. How big is it? Well, there's no space in it, so none. How long does it last? Well, time doesn't exist to it, so none. What ideas does it impress upon your mind? Well, none, it vanished from my mind after realizing it had no size and no time component to it, there is nothing to say here.
It really is beautiful you keep stumbling upon the contradictions the Bible presents clear as day as a necessary truth. I suppose that is to say, perhaps the Bible is both logical and philosophical? But anyway, Christians at the very least do believe that the "more powerful" are "less powerful" and vice-versa. The first will be last and the last first as they say.
But it is worth saying, at this point the only real answer to give as you hammer your point in without strong logical points to explain the contradictions you create, God did "constrain" himself in Christianity by becoming man and dying. So yes, technically God died, so that constraint is over with.
But still, I don't see much logical argumentation to be had here.
"...there is nothing to say..."
Then whence God?
I don't read the bible - never have. I don't care what it says. I care only what Reason says.
But you care what it says. And Jesus - whom you believe to be God, yes? - said "with God all things are possible". So Jesus and I have something in common: we understand what omnipotence involves. It involves being able to do anything. Like wot Jesus said.
You mention necessary truths. Oh dear. More heresy. There are none. If God exists, then there are no necessary truths. For if God exists, then nothing exists of necessity and nothing happens of necessity, as God can destroy anything and everything at any point, thus all existences are contingent.
I presented a deductively valid argument with premises that cannot reasonably be denied, and you insist that I have argued nothing? Perhaps 'argument' is another word you do not understand.
Again: is there anything God cannot do? If so, why call him God? If there is not, then you are refuted as God can do anything including making it the case that there is nothing.
As odd as it might be to say, I have a sort of meshed view with eternalism and linear time, although I can't say this idea is well formed. I would say that anything which is to become an existing thing anytime in the future carries the property of existence in a sort of eternal sense, even before it is created. But, I also view the future as changeable and non-determined (not the same as indeterminate!), so what those things are which exist but haven't come into being yet can't always be known, even with "omniscience." I view this as necessary, but would prefer not to get into an argument with Bartricks over it!
Now, in explaining this, I've also negated my personal belief the concept of randomness.
The views of "determinism" and "indeterminism seem to leave out the possibility of "continued determinism." To explain this concept, I'll go back to the idea of omnipotence. If there is an omnipotent force, and that omnipotent force extends it's reach out to determine all things for all time, then it has done two things: 1. make time finite as it reached the end and 2. make itself be not omnipotent any longer, it would become past-tense: it made it so, but doesn't continue to do so. It just follows the path.
Thus, there can be "determinism," but it is a continuous process by which all the future isn't decided, and this is necessarily so.
This further edifies my point that there must be an infinite creative source, omnificence, but this is not the same thing as "randomness."
"Randomness" can achieve repeats, and this can happen for randomness on a macro-level as well. But a repeat isn't a change, and so a repeat of the universe can lead to the question if time continued or went back. If it can't be decided if time continued or went back because "randomness" led to a repeat, then we pose another interesting problem we can explore. But infinite creativity entails within it that there be no repeat thus this problem wouldn't occur.
There is much to say on this topic, I'm unsure if my words have done justice to my position here, I'm finding myself exhausted for today!
Reality is we aren't even using the same terms, we would have to agree upon that before getting anywhere, we are simply not using the words the same at all.
I can't do much more arguing for tonight, but the general concept is we get rid of the concept of nonexistence, accept existence is infinite and eternal, then establish the universe isn't completely infinite and eternal and thus establish there must be something greater than the universe which is this "infinite existence." We then attribute qualities to it which would ensure that it exists for all time and with no end that's where we pull in the omni's and then say it has all the descriptors of God, thus it is God. That is how it is supposed to go anyway, currently trying to strengthen the metaphysical portion of this argument with PoeticUniverse.
God is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person.
To be omnipotent is to be maximally powerful. You are not maximally powerful if you lack the power to do something.
Thus, God - being all powerful - is able to do anything. And that means God can destroy anything, including himself.
And that means that it is possible for God to take all things out of existence.
And what be the case if God did that? Why, nothing would exist. Which you seem to think means a thing called 'nothing' has existence. Which is just silly. But even if it wasn't silly - and it is - it would not prove God. All it would mean is that nothing can exist. How would that get you to God? That is, let's reify nothing and say that it can have existence. Okay. Where's the problem with that?
Sorry that you don't seem to be a condition to discuss the matter further. I'll leave you with something to ponder upon if you care to. What is your definition of existence?
I've already written it in this thread and put it in the video. Has to do with space, time, affect and effect, for further explanation look at past posts.
Quoting Bartricks
That is your definition, not mine, and is riddled with contradictions.
Sure, I could kill myself but is that a power?
I've had 15 foster kids in my home, and many struggled with the issue of power. Sure, an 8 year old can present himself as powerful lighting houses and schools on fire, but now at age 11 they still keep that kid locked up. Doesn't seem to be a power to me. And the teenager who put many holes in my walls and trashed my house, all it got him was more detention, more constraints, and less freedom. Again, doesn't sound like a power to me.
So, an X exists IFF X is in space, in time, and x participates in causality? Am I right?
Then, if God exists, God is in space, in time, and God is part of causality. However, you said that space and time are finite; isn't that why only God could be existentially infinite and eternal. How then, can God, an infinite, eternal being exist in space and time? :chin:
(Just this first point for now…)
Your view might somehow help with a problem with presentism, which is:
The turning of a ‘now’ into the next ‘now’ sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous ‘now’ wholly consumed in the making of the new ‘now’ all over the universe at once in a dynamical updating—the present now exhausting all reality. (Or at least just locally, according to Rovelli, which we can look at another time.) It’s not that the incredibly short Planck time couldn’t be the processing time, but… I don’t know.
The present undergoes a dynamical ‘updating’, or exhibits a quality as of a fleeting swoosh, and this additional dynamical aspect is what threatens the substance of the debate between the presentist and an eternalist opponent.
What is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as ‘to be’ or ‘has been’ is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of what is, and so presentism has no true ‘nonexistence’ of the future and the past—which means that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.
In other words, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no true ‘nonexistence’, for this as ‘Nothing’ cannot be. This is saying that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.
!
!
V
The unborn future is inherent in the past,
Its ‘will be’ is real, with no unreal contrast class,
As there’s no opposite to existence—no Nil;
It’s not just that future is going to exist.
The present ‘now’ undergoes an updating,
In a fleeting swoosh that passes it away,
For the ‘now’ fades, consumed, as future becomes,
Yet, what will become past can’t just non-exist.
Presentism's 'now' occurring everywhere at once is also severely bedeviled by Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity.
Lee Smolin is one of the few who are for presentism, calling it ‘Temporal Naturalism’:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.8539.pdf
To Be or To Become
Being or becoming: that is the question
That haunts Existence’s investigation:
Whether ’tis simpler for the All to offer
The slings and vectors of a told fortune
All at once, in a marble monument,
Or to perform in the sea of actions,
And by disposing ever create them?
It's not 'my' definition, whatever that means. What on earth do you understand being 'all powerful' to involve if not being able to do anything? 'Not' being able to do some things?? Look, if you want you can define being all powerful as being a cabbage - but what's the point in that, given then all you're doing is seeking to prove a cabbage exists? So, either you're talking about God with a capital G, or you're talking about someone or something else. But if you're talking about God, you're talking about an omnipotent person, and an omnipotent person can do anything. I mean, even those silly theists who think otherwise admit that they need to argue their case (which they do by insisting that being able to do the logically impossible is no ability at all - that's not a good case, my point is that they nevertheless recognize the need to present one).
Omnipotent - it means 'all powerful'. Which means you have the power to do anything, for if you didn't, then you'd lack a power.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
Yes.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
A constraint is a constraint - it stops you doing something. So, if you are constrained, you lack power. The power to place oneself in constraints is, however, a power.
Anyway, your case has been refuted: God can do anything and thus everything that exists is capable of not existing - which means that a state of 'nothing' is possible.
And again, even if one allows you to reify nothing and predicate existence of it, that generates no contradiction. For nothing would now simply be a state that has the property of existence.
Right, good one! :smile:
Quoting Derrick Huesits
OK, I see what do you mean by "all directions".
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Good point!
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Wow, very interesting position!
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Yes. This is much better! :smile:
Quoting Derrick Huesits
Certainly. A good point too!
***
Now, about "omni-"s: Although you describe them very well, I personally don't like or use these terms, because they don't mean much to me. Well, except maybe for fun: A while ago, thinking about Covid, the big and catastrophic events of the natures (floods in Europe and the USA, fires in Greece, etc.), the wars happening all together in 2021, but of course every year --actually, all the time-- and then about "omnibenevolent God" (The Greek Orthodox Church loves to bring it up all the time), a new "omni-" attribute came to my mind: "The omniabsent God"! Even if taken as a joke, it says really a lot, doesn't it?
I'm not an atheist, i.e. I don't believe that there is no God or a Supreme Being. I'm just not interested in that subject. It doesn't add anything important or valuable to my reality, my view of the world, my knowledge, etc. And most importantly, it has no influence on my reasoning (critical thinking). So I prefer to just ignore the subject.
This was a pleasant exchange! :smile:
I don't understand how you came up with the idea of 'one undivided existence' from nonexistence. Could you elaborate the possible connection between them please?
Quoting Derrick Huesits
I fail to see logical linkage between those attributes, "defined as all-encompassing" and the undivided existence. Where does this inference come from?
What does "all-encompassing" mean in the real world ?
If that's what your response is, your definition of existence is, let's just say, unstable - sometimes it's limited by space, time, and causality and at other times, it isn't. Something doesn't add up.
The proposition "non-existence can't exist" is a linguistic curiosity and not a path to an ontological truth
Because words happen to be in the form of a proposition, it does not necessarily follow that they have any meaning, at least no more than Carroll's - 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe".
A further consideration is the philosophical problem regarding the proposition "non-existence can't exist". As our knowledge of the world is about "existence" (ie, avoiding the problem of referring to non-existent entities), how can a proposition - a set of words - enable us to transcend to knowledge about "non-existence" ?
Quoting Corvus
Undivided existence would have the attribute of "all encompassing" among other things. Perhaps a fun mind game here would be to talk about holes in the fabric of space--something some scientists have proposed as a hypothesis. A hole in space would have no space, so it would be a hole 0 units wide by 0 units tall. Similarly, a "break" in time would encompass no time, so it would be a break of 0 seconds and no fraction.
It has already been extensively argued that there is more to the idea than semantics, if you want to argue this then read those arguments.
I hastily summarized for you while telling you to go back and read past arguments. If you want to argue this, go read them so I'm not forever repeating myself.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
It has been!
Quoting PoeticUniverse
There's a lot of interesting philosophy that can be made here. The past carries its existence in the present so long as as the present is built up on the past. So then, if the universe were to collapse back together and "reset," would the past have been erased? Perhaps the concept that the past builds up the future is a necessary one. This goes back to my idea that time is change, so if there is no change--a reset--then there is a challenge as to if any time passed at all. And I think we both agree at this point that time must be infinite. Or, perhaps a better, "always indefinite"--without borders, continuously flowing.
I still think there needs to be some work into the possibility of time being eternal and linear all-in-one. If you have true determinism, which I've already argued operates against the concept of the infinite in multiple ways and can be derailed by previous arguments about the infinite, then perhaps you could have a true eternalism. But continuous determinism seems to be most logical here, and I would even argue we see this principle in our universe. For example, whether or not our universe would be made up of anti-matter doesn't seem determined, but once it was established to be matter there was no going back, and this is what makes up the whole universe today. This principle of continuous-determinism is ever present in our lives--we make decisions, and there's no going back. You can't "undo" having a child, you can't "buy back" years waisted to drugs, you can't "go back" and fix waisted college years. There is a continuous determination that happens in our life, and that is the principle of free-will, not "indeterminism" as so many falsely claim.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing this is "what is determined exists in eternal time, what is undecide belongs to linear time, and they coexist without contradiction."
Carlo Rovelli did some work on this. He’s my favorite philosopher/physicist, along with Lee Smolin.
From Rovelli on ‘Neither Presentism nor Eternalism’:
[i]Relativity is not the discovery of a new ontology of simultaneity: it is the discovery that there is no fact of the matter, whether two distant punctual events happen at the same time or not.
Notice that what we directly experience is local becoming, not global becoming. That is: we are directly aware of things happening around us, not far away in the uni- verse. The local becoming that we experience and the becoming well described by Newtonian physics, happen to have a peculiar feature: events can be distinct between past present and future, and labelled by a single time variable t which is tracked faithfully by any good clock, irrespectively from the way the clock moves.
We are always tempted to extrapolate our experience assuming that what is true locally is true globally. Some- times this works (the Maxwell equations, found in England, happen to work pretty well in far away galaxies as well), sometimes it doesn’t (mountains are not always in the North, the ‘up’ directions are not all parallel and the Maxwell equations are modified in the atomic nuclei.) In the case of becoming we are tempted to extrapolate local features of becoming to global features: to assume that all events of the universe can be uniquely and objectively separated into past, present and future, and labelled by a single time variable t which is tracked faithfully by any good clock, irrespectively from the way the clock moves. We have learned that this extrapolation is wrong.
The reasonable choice is to recalibrate the notion of becoming, dropping the illegitimate extrapolations implicit in its old conceptualisation.
This is possible. There is real becoming in the universe. Things happen. The relativistic equations describe this unfolding of happenings. Each individual time-like worldline describes a sequence of events, namely a specific unfolding of local becoming. Distinct local becomings are not independent: they are weaved to one another by the structure described by the four-dimensional pseudo-riemanniann geometry of general relativity. The ensemble of all events of the world cannot be objectively arranged into a single simple succession of global instants.
This impossibility is not the absence of becoming. It is the fact that becoming is more complex than a naive non- relativistic extrapolation assumes. The temporal structure of becoming is not the non-relativistic line with a special point, the ‘present’, but rather the one defined by the causal structure formed by the light cones of a pseudo Riemanniann manifold.
Relativity does not deny temporality, it shows that it is less trivial than we thought.
The different nows at different locations are not simultaneous: they are independent, and in communication via the causal structure of spacetime. They are thus partially related, but not fully. Some ‘nows’ in a distant galaxy are definitely in our past, some in our future. But there is a long sequence of distinct ‘nows’ (different moments of time) which are all neither in the past nor the future with respect to the ‘now here’. This is of course nothing else than Einstein’s key discovery: objective simultaneity is meaningless. We can think of reality as becoming is complex and multilayered [30, 31].
Different aspects of experiential time depend on different natural structures. Some aspects of our common-sense intuition about time do not carry on to relativistic becoming. Directionality, for instance, is rooted in the fact that we interact with the world via macroscopic coarse-grained variables. It is a property of these variables and it does not belong to the elementary grammar of relativistic becoming. Hence the fundamental becoming I am referring to is un-oriented [6]. Similarly, our vivid sense of the flow of time is a consequence of the functioning of our brain, rooted in memory and anticipation, and so on [30]. But the fact that so many aspects of experiential time depend on approximations, and on complex structures, does not alter the fact that what elementary physics describes is happenings, not entities.[/i]
More from Rovelli:
[i]WHAT IS REAL NOW?
What is real in the universe, then? The question is ill defined. Reality has a temporal structure, therefore asking ‘what is real?’ without specifying ‘when’ leads to mixing events that are real now with those that were real.
There is a long tradition of contrary comments by major physicists (‘Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them’, Eddington, 1920. ‘The objective world simply is, it does not happen’, Weyl 1949. ‘Each observer has his own set of “nows”, and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time’, G ?odel 1949. ‘An observer is merely a world-line, once and for all, on the four dimensional manifold?’, Geroch 1984. All quoted in [27].) I disagree with them. They played a rhetorical role when the new physics needed to break with old habits of thinking, but they are not the best guide for clarity today. A different case is the commonly quoted phrase by Einstein: ‘For us believing physicists, the difference between past, present, and future amounts to an illusion, albeit stubborn’ (Einstein to Besso’s wife, 21 May 1955), which I believe is misinterpreted, when taken out of its emotional context (on this, see [30], Chapter 7).
Events in the past but are not real anymore. Hence to talk about the reality of something we have to specify a time. But to specify a time it is not sufficient to specify a number. We have to locate a region in the rich temporal structure of the universe. There are facts that are real now on Earth, facts that were real in the past, or will be real in the future with respect to here-now, and there are also facts that are real on distant galaxy at a time which is neither in our future, nor in our past, but nevertheless they are in the past of one another.
This may be hard to develop an intuition for, but it is just the way reality is. Our ancestors had equal difficulty in figuring out how people could live upside down on the other side of the Earth.
The fact that some events can be ‘real now here’ without being ‘real now’ in some other location is no more and no less mysterious than the fact that some events can be ‘real now’ at some time without being ‘real now’ at other times, which so much anguished Mc Taggart [7]. Hence relativity does not really add nor subtract much with respect to the pre-relativistic debate on the reality of time.
The fact that there is no preferred objective foliation of four-dimensional spacetime into three dimensional ‘time instants’ is not a denial of becoming: it is only a a denial of a synchronised global becoming. The ‘third option’ between Presentism and Eternalism is simply what most relativists give for granted: there is no global notion of present, but there is a local becoming, at every point of spacetime. The ‘present’ is not illusory: it is well defined, but relative to a location: in non relativistic physics, it is relative to a temporal location, in relativistic physics is relative to a spacetime location.
The four-dimensional spacetime is only a cartography of the relations between these multiple local becomings.
Einstein’s discovery is that Newtonian space and time and the gravitational field are the same entity. There is a tradition of expressing this discovery saying that ‘‘there is no gravitational field: space and time become dynamical’’. I think that this is a convoluted and misleading way of thinking, which does not do justice to Einstein’s discovery, and has the additional flaw of becoming meaningless as soon as we take into account the fact that the gravitational field has quantum properties.
The clean way of expressing Einstein’s discovery is to say that there are no space and time: there are only dynamical objects. The world is made by dynamical fields. These do not live in, or on, spacetime: they form and exhaust reality.
One of these fields is the gravitational field. In the regimes in which we can disregard its dynamics, this field interacts with the rest of the physical objects as if it were a fixed background. This background is what Newton discovered and called space and time. We can keep using the evocative terminology ‘‘spacetime’’ to indicate the gravitational field. But it has practically none of the features that characterized space and time. Relativistic spacetime is an entity far more akin to Maxwell’s electric and magnetic fields than to Newtonian space.
In classical GR, a given solution of the field equations might still have some vague resemblance to the Newtonian’s notions, since it defines a ‘‘continuum’’ which things can be imagined ‘‘to inhabit’’. But the only compelling reason for thinking that ‘‘spacetime’’ is the gravitational field, and not — say — the electromagnetic field, is the contingent fact that we live in a portion of the universe where the gravitational field is sufficiently constant for us to use it as a convenient reference.
Quantum mechanics reinforces this point of view. A solution of the classical field equations is like a particle trajectory: a notion that only makes physical sense in the classical limit. The gravitational field has quantum properties, and therefore it cannot define a spacetime continuum in the small.
Properly speaking, relativity has taught us that the effective way of thinking about the world in the light of what we have learned so far is to give up the notions of ‘‘space and time entities’’ entirely. This is not a dramatically radical view, since it is not far from the way space was commonly conceptualized before Newton. On the other hand, it has a novel twist of great interest, especially as far as time, and the relation between time and space, are concerned.
In Newtonian physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, what remains is space and time. In relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. As Whitehead put it, we cannot say that we can have spacetime without dynamical entities, anymore than saying that we can have the cat’s grin without the cat (Whitehead, 1983).[/i]
Thank you, neutrinos, for our universe of matter!
https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-explain-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-20200415/
Shouldn't the space inside a totally sealed cube, container or ball be regarded as divided (separated) space from the outer space?
Omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience are only meaningful real attributes, if a subject with such attributes demonstrates omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience in action in front of us any time when asked.
When the subject has not been coming forward to show it for thousands of years, and when it is impossible to locate for any ordinary living being, a subject who are with the attributes no matter how hard looking and searching every corner of the world for thousands of years, then should we not conclude that there is no such a being with such attributes existing?
We’re already in touch with the unknown,
For that’s ever the reach of science shown.
Reality is grasped by focusing
On what interacts with what and the means.
There is a realm of happenings, not things,
For ‘things’ don’t remain the same on time’s wings.
What remains through time are processes—
Relations between different systems.
Quantum fields are the fundamental strokes
Whose excitations at harmonics cloaks
The quanta with the stability
To persist and thus obtain mobility.
The elementary particles beget,
As letters of the cosmic alphabet,
And combine in words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and life’s glory.
Good day, I've run out of things to say.
If the cube moves, then the space inside the cube moves also, thus it is not technically the same space. It is the same amount of space, yes, but not the same space technically speaking. For example, if that cube is in New York, it is a space in New York. If in Boston, then a space in Boston, etc. And, if we simply chose to demolish the cube, the same space still exists, just now without the cube, it can't be demolished with the cube...
Quoting Corvus
This is the definition of magic. For those who believe the greater existence has free will and can choose to completely ignore you if it chooses, then the way to go about this is prayer which may or may not be answered.
Quoting Corvus
You can only see what is finite and exists separate from you, so whatever is truly omnipresent extends everywhere so you could never go outside it and never see or contact it externally, everything must occur within it.
Quoting Corvus
I wouldn't use the term "bad" to explain it, but there is an obvious contradiction if omnipotence is used to remove omnipotence thus establishing the reality that the being doesn't truly have omnipotence...In other words, the greatest power is to create, destruction is a lesser power, creating can go on indefinitely but there are only so many things you can destroy--it is no surprise here that in Christianity, the Devil who opposes God strives to destroy all things...
Quoting Corvus
I personally see the word omniscience as a tricky word, and there is a reason this has been used as a way to attack the concept of "God." You could say it means knowing what is going on everywhere all at once, knowing all future, knowing all good and bad, etc. I think the least contested of these would be knowing what is going on everywhere all at once. The reason I am not inclined to not accept the "know all future" idea is because I don't consider an all-existent being as being required to establish all future. It actually creates problems for omnipotence to say this being "decided" all things and can decide no more, but if you open to door to say not all things are decided, then not all future is set in stone, and not all future can be known. Christianity, at the very least, seems to embrace this idea with Bible passages that confuse many people (things were declared changed by God from the original plan).
As far as "knowing" bad, I reject this concept also on the premise that what is "bad" is simply a negation of everything which is "good," and what is "good" is that which is sustainable for an eternity without destruction: a destruction which unfortunately we see all too much of in this world which many religions have described as "broken" or "fallen." To put this simply, lets say you lecture me on a subject, then I go through and change everything you said to be the opposite. For example, you say "climate change is occurring due to the industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels and is causing great harm" and I then alter it to say "fossil fuels are good for the environment, solar panels are bad, we need to abolish them from all rooftops!" I then study this opposite version and hold my head high at my "knowledge." But you, who realize it is just the opposite of what you were lecturing on, say "it isn't knowledge." I reply, "you think knowing bad things is knowledge, and this is a bad thing, therefore by your own definition I have knowledge!"
In the Cosmos, there may be some basic ‘knowing’ …
— All is One —
Everything connects to everything else
Through overlapping quantum field patterns,
And so nothing is separate at all, as it seems,
But is one large all-encompassing whole.
— Blake’s Vision Confirmed —
Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within a
Grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.
— The All Is In the One —
All ‘things’ are connected, entangled,
As in a hologram each part contains the whole;
Everything interpenetrates everything;
The Cosmos is a seamless web of information.
— Seeing All? —
The connection of everything to everything
Is as a rudimentary perception,
But (responders can fill this in).
— Happenings —
Nature draws the world with interactions;
What’s real are relations between systems.
Events ground to the notion of ‘objects’;
‘Things’ are built by elementary events.
— Quantum Memory —
In the brain’s memory, every piece of info
Is cross-correlated with every other piece,
Which allows instant access and association;
Memories could be stored holographically.
— Instant Recall —
Memory does seem to be holographic,
Residing everywhere in the brain,
Every piece associated with others related,
Instantly broadcasting all the connections.
…
— The Will of the Cosmos? —
Where’s horrid Hell and gloried Heaven yon?
Who’s the scribe of my slab written upon?
I ask if I’m the stylus or the slate:
I’m both the dancer and the danced upon.
That the supernatural is supposed to be everywhere but is found nowhere implies that there is only the natural, making 'God' to be more of a Deity who no longer gets involved after throwing some stuff together, which makes Him a great scientist rather than a magician. So, then, while some livable planets or at least one came out of the humungous expanse over 14 billion years due to the odds of something working somewhere by having millions of the right conditions, a lot of good and horrible happenings can go on as a surprise and an amusement to Him.
The Great Scientist Deity sits back in his plush chair to watch this long great adventure movie or soap opera that He's never seen before…
Scientist deity to some, teacher deity to others. This "adventure" without him could be a lesson or it could be a show. It could have a point, or it could be pointless, meaningful or meaningless. The concept of "Love" gives eternal meaning to things across all time, it is an infinite concept and thus exists in eternal opposition to death. It promotes creation and rejects destruction, thus we see it as the desire preceding family and the desire rejecting war and death. If this infinite existence truly is aimed in the direction of infinite creation, the true fulfillment of omnipotence, we can assume it carries this trait, "love." And thus, perhaps we can assume this is a lesson and not a show, and a powerful one at that as we see our own constant aim against the principles of the infinite across time in history. Our "Death" is simply the manifestation of our desire against the infinite coming true for us at last.
Sometimes you and I gravitate toward the same conclusion, humor aside, that the universe is allowed to go on without pre-determination, as hands off by 'God', and so that is like a Deity. It is also that a 'God' would not be bound to time, plus many don't see him operating in time, doing this, doing this, Himself changing all the time, dumbly bumbling through 13 billion years to get us to come to life.
https://iep.utm.edu/god-time/
I'm taking it that 'God' is timeless/changeless, aka eternal, absolute, fundamental, 'IS' and thus a 'God' operating in time would be a changing 'God'. This is akin to the quantum fields ever remaining as they are, which they have to.
So now I have to invent a word, 'Theity', which isn't in the dictionary, for the unlikely 'God' who operates in time, as many think He does, such as when they pray to Him to change His Perfect Mind.
At least with the Deity notion, the believer doesn't have to stumble over the dilemma of why 'God' acts exactly the same as nature does and as nature would without Him as we well see through the science descriptions of what went on after the Big Bang.
The processes are of understandable laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, with no extra-natural of miracles. We know what happened in the first fractions of a second after the supposed Big Bang and can predict the course of the Universe to its thinned out future. After the start the progress was very slow, just as it would be naturally; it took 13+ billion years for life to appear on Earth.
So, 'God' the Deity is not a personal 'God'. God’s Good Plan would operate at the general, universal sense, not at a specific, personal sense. Example: water is good but also necessitates floods and drought; a farmer wishes for rain and the wedding party across the street hopes for sunshine. And so forth, as self-explanatory as what’s best for all.
Human nature must be imperfect. There can be only one 'God', plus perfection would be boring, and creatures and their natures are of a non personal general-for-all recipe of ingredients that can let life happen and be lived.
If we were Angels, life would be so just;
Instead, we try, we push, we climb, we lust,
We dance, we dream, we feel, and love with zest;
Yes, all this, thanks to the beast within us!
We have lesser abilities than the Whole/'God' because we have to be of smaller extent than it and also so as to be able to operate in the world. There can be only One Whole/'God', with the designs within or without necessarily having to be of less dimension in our lesser realm.
The 'God' not operating in linear time would be the Block Universe and we would be inside 'God'; however, I've given up on the Block Universe… allowing for some presentism.
Now after Now
Life’s a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows,
Stretched as time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.
No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of truth from the Tree of Knows;
Computation makes not yet the morrows;
There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.
Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.
To future columns we stretch our present row,
By a lifeline of tenuously spun vow.
Oh, how soon the weighted web begins to fail;
The only real time under our feet is now.
Yet, still,
We, of the endless forms most beautiful,
Are stunned that our glass to the brim is full,
Life’s wine coursing through us, as magical,
On this lovely, rolling sphere so bountiful.
Of course, the Deity God could be outside of time. Or He just lets the universe alone that He started in time to do what it does (this relieves 'God' of having to be so slow-minded that cosmic and biological evolution took so mind-numbingly long.)
As for 'God's' Love, it is also for sure that it would Unconditional Love… and we can do that in our lives, too, and do:
Higher Consciousness
The three lower consciousnesses that are
Obsessed with the securing of objects,
With the chasing of sensations, and with
Power/control will never ever be enough.
There are NO actions of people that can
Justify our becoming irritable
Angry, fearful, jealous or anxious if
We give them our unconditional love.
Stress is the difference between what we
Expect to happen and what does happen,
Especially when we put our needs ahead
Of other, oft resulting in needless anger.
If we don’t accept the unacceptable,
Then we lower our level of consciousness
Our response will mirror their uptightness—
Which can spread the bad moods onto others.
Conscious Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of our lives playing in our minds,
Granting us a sobering distance from it.
From a safe subjective place that’s free of fear,
Our soul, our conscious awareness, can witness
The strange thoughts and emotions that surface
On the mind, sent by the subconscious brain.
Putting ourselves in the place of others
When hurtful things are done to us,
Expands our consciousness, compassion, and love
Since we can come to know why they did it.
When we converse with ourselves, it is our
Higher Consciousness—our Conscious Awareness
Or I, that questions our lower consciousness
Impulses toward securing, sensation, and power.
Seeing the big picture of life and its stages
And connections lets one not get annoyed, say,
At being cut off in traffic, for s/he
May be old, learning, lost, growing, or angry.
Putting the needs of others ahead of
Our own produces the byproduct of
Happiness and reduces stress, for we
No longer have unrealistic expectations.
Some fall for their thoughts, hook, line, and sinker:
Conditioned responses, reflexes, or
Overwhelming emotions, some spurious,
Or ancient, planted by evolution, or unbalanced.
Emotions are slow to react to logic,
Like molasses or slow forming crystals,
Or not at all, like rocks, blocking them.
Unless and until they change, progress halts.
Reason and emotion are hard to coordinate,
Each having a separate pathway to the mind,
That, perhaps, is all there is to tell about the
Miseries and follies of human history.
From its safe subjective place that’s free of fear,
The higher self, our Conscious Awareness, can witness
The strange thoughts and emotions that surface
On the mind, sent there by the subconscious brain.
First-level thoughts are beliefs and desires,
But second-level thoughts are beliefs
And desires about the beliefs and desires,
Becoming able spectators of the scene beneath.
Higher Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of the lives playing in the mind,
Granting one a sobering distance from it.
This detachment allows
The ‘thinking about a thought’
Without the thought itself
Trying to steal the show.
(soul acronym = spirit of unconditional love)
So far, we have both been eliminating what is impossible in order to better corner the truth, and this is where I think we are:
[b]Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be!
Such as Nought, Stillness, and the Block’s decree,
As well as Apart, Beginning, and End,
Determinism, Blame, and Theity.[/b]
What does it say? That He is just absent and lets us go our way?
Can a God who encompasses all time be timeless? Or encompass all change and be changeless? These words operate differently on different properties, and thus I'm not convinced you can wholly establish either stance. Some aspects of this concept "God" could interact with time with no contradiction (think omnipotence), other aspects no (we can interact within omnipresence, but not with it as a separate entity), and some aspects require such interaction as "that which has no effect nor affects anything doesn't exist." Perhaps this is part of what has the concept of a three-in-one God intrigue me, that there can be an element which is timeless and distant, such as the "first person" of the three, with progressive interaction from the second to the third.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
If there is an all-existence God which owns all perfection infinitely, then creation without him would necessarily be imperfect. But, we aren't completely and totally imperfect, we haven't destroyed ourselves (yet), so if this is true then there must be at least a little of this infinite perfection present and not a true absenteeism.
They can. But you can't imagine because you are bound.
I'm doing a bit of a play on words here. Not timeless, all time, not changeless, all change, but these operatives don't necessarily have to leave a direct influence on the thing which holds them.
Perhaps I should give an analogy:
A glass full of water is different from a glass which is empty, even while the water has no direct effect on the glass itself. The glass can revert from the former state to the prior state with no distinction.
Analogies don't work wrt to gods. They can be timefull and timeless at the same time.
It says that God is not interfering with human affairs. It says that God created Man and left him to chance. It says that the "humanized God" (God with a human-like face) that man has created does not actually exist (hence "absent"). It says that this God has nothing to do with a Supreme Being that governs the whole Universe and not the Earth alone (in which God seems to rule according the egocentric Man and his tales).
I could mention more, but I'm sure you got the point.
I hear a statement of belief, not a logical argument.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
What is this "it" and and what are the arguments for it? Or is it just a statement of your beliefs.
Nonexistence exists = Nonexistence is a thing AND that thing exists.
What kinda thing is nonexistence? I know of only two planes/worlds a thing can be of:
1. The mental world: The world of ideas. Nonexistence is an idea and in that sense, nonexistence, the notion, exists. Ideas are things.
2. The physical world: The world of objects that our bodies can bump into. Nonexistence is not a physical object like a stone or an elephant. Ergo, nonexistence doesn't exist in the physical plane. Physical objects are things.
The follow-up question: What does nonexistence mean/refer to?
It means/refers to,
3. The state of not being part of the mental world. Nonexistence is about non-things.
OR/AND
4. The state of not being part of the physical world. Nonexistence is about non-things.
Thus, to say "nonexistence exists" is to claim that nonexistence refers to a thing (mental/physical or both) which is a category error; there's no point discussing the alleged contradiction.
I think you need to clarify more in detail what you mean by undivided in "undivided existence" before going into "all encompassing" too. Is undivided meaning impossibility and immunity of physically separating, or enclosing, or totally severing off and detaching one part from the chunk of the whole part? Or does it mean something else?
When you say something is all encompassing, it suggests the all encompassing subject is later than the object what is encompassed in time, because an object must exist first before something can encompass around it, unless again encompassing means something else. This sounds like "all encompassing" is some sort of a posteriori and artificial plastic blanket rather than religious or something divine nature, would you not agree?
If that is the case, then it sounds like a being with some emotional problems deciding to ignore his seekers by irrational freewill. (How do you prove the omnipresent being also has freewill?)
Why should you pray to a irrational emotive being who would hide away and ignores you with no reason?
Quoting Derrick Huestis
Surely if a being is omnipresent, then it must be both inside and outside of the perceiver, and the perceiver should be able to feel what is inside the perceiver, if unable to see the omnipresent hidden inside the perceiver, and surely what is outside of the perceiver must be seen and perceived?
Surely omnipotence means it can do both good and also bad too, but if the omniptencer is a divine being, then it would not do bad. That is just a logic from the definitions. However divine being seems also denying / restricting the definition of omnipotence. It follows that omnipotence and divinity seem clashing / restricting properties of each other.
To create something, the old negative things must be destroyed first. It cannot always be looked at as destruction is evil and creation is good. It is not some morality issue. You are looking at it from your moral point of view and making judgements on the process or events of the divine.
What is the definition of "devil"? Does it exist? Can you prove the existence?
More points to follow ....
You took the words right out of my mouth...(it must have been while we were ki..) ?
This is what happens when you take statements from here and there at random, disconnecting them from their context. This statement refers to a pun I made. There are no arguments or beliefs involved here! :smile:
And, as I see, you did something similar with @VincePee. You are obsessed with "beliefs" and you don't realize that you are also presenting your beliefs, even if in an indirect, covert way, like "Or is it just a statement of your beliefs" Isn't this actually what you believe? :smile:
Here we are not trying to attack the concept of God, but rather trying to clarify the concept of "omni" p.p.s.
Omnipotence, omnipresent and omniscience seem contradictory concepts which are problematic. Because any being with these attributes doesn't seem to exist in the real world.The contradictory attributes also mutually restrict the properties themselves and definition of God.
All depends on how narrow or wide your definitions of the attributes are, but omniscient beings must know not only everything that has happened, happening and will happen in the universe, but also whys, hows and ifs and whens. If not, the being is not omniscient.
Good or bad is just one's judgement or feeling on something or event. Nothing to be worried about in knowing or unknowing something in good or bad terms. It is a factual capacity or state to know something, be it good or bad, and facts of the knower, when the knower knew or un-knew something.
And does he also sends texts using his mobile phone, and watching TVs, drinking beer, while reading his comic books and mags, while taking a break from playing the online games? :rofl:
:strong: :pray:
So far, we have no 'Nothing' existing, thus Indivisible as Continuous with No Separation within, and thus Eternal without Beginning or End;
no Stillness, thus our Constant Change/Time of Presentism, making the Block Universe rather doubtful, although the mode of time favored by theists;
no Determinism projected (but hard to show choice as not stuck to a fixed will of the moment);
'God's' Unconditional Love projected, although confidently, thus no Blame;
no instant evolution, it taking very long, plus a 'God' not observed, thus then projected as perhaps just a Deity 'God' only kicking things off in the Big Bang via fine-tuning scientific expertise, with no likely personal Theity 'God' intervening in time.
It's only the most difficult assignment ever!
And then we have to explain how a Mind could be First, instead of evolving later on, since that is the reverse of the process we see in the history of the universe.
Me might magnify some of our human qualities, such as both being able to view the whole scene at once and also view it in detail, to get an insight into the nature of the 'Designer'.
Yes, for we were made in His image.
He gets a quadrillion requests every second from all over our universe and from all the others universes in the Cosmos. He transfers the short ones to his phone and the longer ones to his email for better recall. He's worried about his memory ever since He couldn't retrieve His earliest memory, there not being one since He is Eternal; but He is forever working on it. Perhaps it would be, "Why Me?"
His million-foot-wide TV only shows live reality shows, but they are ever the same old, same old follies of human history. He has no money, so He can't afford Netflix. The churches don't forward the money to Him, even though they accept all denominations. He never can pay when He goes to stores, so they usually put up a sign, "In God We Trust; Others Pay Cash'.
He's too lofty for comic books and so He is currently reading 'The God Delusion' and other books by Richard Dawkins to get the whole story of how his fine-tuning worked. Sometimes He reads 'People' magazine to see how we're doing.
His beer is the ultimate brew, called 'ButWiser', and sometimes He turns water into wine.
He cooks his food in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
He didn't have friends at first, so thus he made humans, but found that He couldn't trust them.
He's so old that He's getting OldTimers' disease, but the up side is that soon everything will seem new and surprising again.
Have no fear though, for He's not at all like his portrayal in the Old Testament.
The Blowing of the Big Bang[/b]
Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as wind along the waste,
Omar knew not whither, willy-nilly blowing…
Now I’m knowing, that out of this muddle,
Indeed, it’s that chaos doth free me to be,
For it’s all of disorder in disarray,
An ultimate disorganized confusion,
Whence all sprung, banged, and exploded,
With no hint or trace of order, law or plan.
‘Twas mayhem, bedlam, and pandemonium,
Wreaking havoc upon the turmoil of a tumult,
Heaping high upon, a commotion of disruption,
In the utter fullness of the uproaring upheaval…
The maelstrom to end all messes and shambles,
The lawless free-for-all of total energetic anarchy,
Entropy crowned the King of the great hullabaloo,
That cosmic hoopla from which all hell broke loose.
Never there was to punish one for not even knowing,
Why you are here in this world so much growing,
That become here all so willy-nilly going.
As life’s rose—outspread your fragrance blowing!
Whither flowing free, whether knowing, or not,
Hitherto, I know not whence, but am whither going,
Willy-nilly, hence that’s all there is to knowing…
Hence thither forth I go on hither flowing to find
That I am ever more free to be in body and mind.
It is of Ovid’s “rude and indigested mass:
The lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam’d.
“No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois’d, did on her own foundations lye:
“Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.”
So it is that we the living might hereby agree,
To live a being that is much more intense,
To leap toward higher orders of actuality,
To revel in the glories of this conscious life,
To attain each minute a more euphoric joy…
And to bring this forth to all,
The increased intensity
Of life’s experience,
And build on it, etc.,
Ever growing;
Forever, amen.
So what is the purpose of his existence?
We'd first have to show Him to be, and then identify His nature, and then get at His purpose, although He appears to be an unnecessary step to posit in the first place, for Existence has to be. and that's that, end of story, not needing anything extra.
I feel that first you have to define whether the divine being is physical, spiritual or conceptual in its nature.
If the being is spiritual or conceptual in nature, then trying to prove him via physical methods would just end up in categorical mistakes.
Can there be a distinct and separate intangible category such as called 'spiritual' which cannot walk the walk and talk the talk of the materiel? If so, it can't interact with us and so it just goes along its separate and merry way.
Anyway, there’s no big wondering required for where things came from. Existence isn’t optional; it is mandatory because ‘nonexistence’ cannot be, much less be productive. Forever quantum fields are already seen as fundamental. There is no ‘coming from’ for what is eternal.
Every existence is optional and contingent. Because existence is not included in the subject. It is a mere predicate of a subject. That means, all existence can be negated without contradiction. Even space is contingent existence. If you put down a physical object anywhere, then the space the object occupies will disappear. No more space.
A building is in the town centre. It can disappear any day, when they demolish it for build a road through it. Gone. No more.
But physical existence means that it is visible, touchable, audible and perceivable. It also takes up a location in space, so you can go and see it. When this is not possible, it is not physical existence. Trying to assert an invisible, inaudible, untouchable, and un-perceivable object as some existence is irrational.
"Eternal" "Eternity" "Infinity'' and "Forever" are another concepts which have been misused for a long time. They come from the adverbs "eternally" and "infinitely" which are just expressing one's emotion for denoting a long time. Eternity, forever and infinity don't exist in the real world.
If one is truly wanting to use the concept of eternity and infinity, then he must still be out there in the field counting the time until it really ends. And then when the time had indeed ended, he could then start using the terms, because he had then experienced and witness the true eternity and infinity. But then if it had ended, then it is no longer eternity or infinity.
So realistically, eternity and infinity doesn't exist. They are just figments of one's imagination.
But just sitting in a room when the time is still ticking on, eternity and infinity must not be used as if it is something that one owns like a table or chairs. Plainly doing so is just plainly illogical. They are just emotional expressions in linguistic terms.
The temporaries come and go; the Fundamental Existence of the quantum fields remains.
Yes. The immaterial can’t exchange energy with the material unless they speak each other’s language, but if they can, then there is no distinct category of immaterial at play in the first place.
Quoting TheMadFool
Good to see you joined the conversation again.
Using the word to say something doesn't exist in the world of ideas is very tricky because language operates in this world, so it would have to be used here in a way that would be quite ambiguous.
Specifying "physical nonexistence" operates just fine with no problems. You speak from the plain of ideas so you can label many things that exist as ideas that don't exist physically without issue.
You say there are only these two plains but I would say that space-time is another plain that both physical and idea plains exist within. The argument for this is simple: you can't move an idea out of your head with your hand because it operates on a different plain then your hand, and similarly you can't use either your hand or your mind to bend space or time because they likewise exist on another plain. Now, there is some very specific interaction between these plains in some very specific ways, but conversations over this is best reserved for another discussion.
Some people also believe in a spiritual plain, but I'm not going to argue over this concept here.
Needless to say, "nonexistence" is open-ended in what it refers to without specification, so I use it an "all encompassing" way unless I put some specification before the word.
We can own the idea or concept even if we don't own the manifestation of said concept. This is what philosophers do. Questioning why someone would own, discuss, and argue for a concept they see manifest in the real world could be easily turned into a question of why you might be on a philosophy forum. There is some emotional element to many of your posts, untangling them from the logic requires a bit of work.
Quoting Corvus
There is a lot here, doubt I will answer everything, but restricting power is never the denial of it. The strongest of men can handle a baby very gently, strength never has to be used to it's full potential. Now whether the "omnipotencer" can do bad, I suppose that depends on terms. I use the term "bad" as being that which is aimed against the infinite principles (yes, I know you hate the word infinite). I argue that power to create is greater than power to destroy, and destruction ultimately takes away power the more it is enacted thus it wouldn't be a principle of omnipotence. In this way, the Christian notion that we are eternal makes sense, regardless if good or bad (aimed at destruction). It wouldn't be in the nature of this being to annihilate us, so putting bad people in a place where they can destroy everything around them and attempt to destroy themselves as well (think demonic torture here) without being able to escape and spread destruction elsewhere seems to be a satisfactory solution.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how silly this sounds is to present the opposite.
"Philosopher presents novel argument he doesn't believe in."
Of course I believe it, but it isn't "just a statement of beliefs" which is why I add connecting arguments, and then respond to criticism in a way that I believe properly supports my claim. This is the part you seem to leave out.
I would eventually like to write a philosophical/theological book on these ideas, but it is hard to move forward without criticism. Being criticized isn't a problem, having shortcomings on a youtube video is also not a problem, I don't have to "prove" myself to anyone, the only goal is to find out if there are flaws I haven't noticed that prove a great weakness for criticism. So far, the greatest "flaw" seems to be adequately describing the philosophy to avoid misrepresentation and superficial criticism. But, a few people have reached the 'core' of the argument and their input is greatly appreciated.
Here you get it wrong, the universe is in every way like a magnificent mind, performing many trillions upon trillions of calculations instantaneously without flaw. "Conservation of energy" is possible because the universe never makes an error in its calculations. What is tricky to explain isn't how a Mind could be first, but how the First Mind could create many minds much like it but so much smaller (and unfortunately sizably more inclined to error as well).
I'm OK in that we have to build up to the desired points, which you are hinting at getting on to, since the readers won't all be that accepting of as declarations of "Mind" being so, especially as this is the polar opposite inverse of what they see in the reality of the history of the universe.
Perhaps 'conservation of energy' is just due to how it has to be traded without lending/borrowing possible. There is only the energy that was or is becoming.
The Fundamental never rests and so we see a kind of topological-like transmutation of it (since it ever remains as itself) as constant change according to what we call the laws of nature, with no miracles, skips, blips, or errors unless it has some 'random', which could be because the Fundamental can't have any input to it. We on Earth are in the Goldilocks zone, where we naturally ought to be, and not impossibly out near Neptune.
As smaller minds inside the 'Mind' or created outside of it, we have to be less, and from other limits, too, perhaps as being in a lower dimension, being chained to time, limited ingredients put in, of a poor craftsman, and never being able to equal the One Mind because there can only be One.
Of course, it was easy for us to out think the 'God' of the Old Testament and its cosmology and more, but that shows nothing but the human writing of a bad role model into it that many would not follow in the sense of the imitation of His qualities portrayed.
The intended design by 'God' as the Designer or by evolution as a design without a designer evidently had to be what it became, although it's not all that pretty, but workable, and it really sticks that we can't tell one case from the other, suggesting that 'God' is the same as nature and thus a redundant idea.
Most of the universe seems to a vast wasteland, most of the 10**76 'particles' of it. It's as if among all that extravagance, there was likely to be a few planets having the right conditions for life, it still taking 13 billions years of cosmic and biological evolution to get to that life, giving credence to natural processes from a very messy Big Bang.
We have to somehow dig deeper to get to the 'Mind' doing it.
What I wrote once:
To look for what endures in the ongoing cause,
Turn to the basics, such as the conversation laws,
For they in summation with infinite precision
Maintain the balance in all the decisions.
On infinite precision:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/
Calling something "silly" instead of explaining why it is not true, is not a responsible attitude and certainly it does not behove this place. You should just explain why your saying "Or is it just a statement of your beliefs" is not actually a belief of yours. If you can't, you can simply admit it. Or just ignore it. Anyway, that would be much better than producing a "demonstration" that is totally incongruous with my point.
Of course, all this is what I believe. I admit it! :smile:
I actually used a reductio-ad-absurdum argument there, but it is becoming apparent to me that many on this forum don't understand this form of argumentation. I also distinguished the terms and demonstrated how the terms I was using were much more specific than the ones you were and how this affects the argument. And so, I really don't know how to respond to you to solve this problem for you, perhaps I just need to simplify the language and sentences for you, even if it becomes less precise in the process.
Maybe I can make this part more apparent:
"Just a statement of beliefs" = beliefs presented stand-alone without logical connection.
While I might believe in what I talk about, I'm trying not to do this but instead reason out my beliefs.
I am not sure if randomly promoting the quantum fields to the Fundamental Existence has any meaning when the OP has been trying to prove God.
The suggestion was to define the nature of your God in its substance. Is it physical, spiritual or conceptual? Or non physical something like space? I am not sure what exchanging energies mean. Could you please elaborate on that, if relevant. Thanks.
Sure, one can own any idea one wants. It is the freedom of one's imagination and thought. But it is one thing to own the blank concepts, and totally different thing altogether actually to draw some imaginative conclusions from them when there are no logical or tangible connections.
It is not that I don't like "infinite", but I just cannot find anything which is infinite in the real world. :)
So when someone says "infinity" or "eternity", I just wonder what it is denoting. Is it poetry? Or is it some rhetoric? But I usually understand it as verbal expressions for the emotions of a long and unmeasurable length of time for the subject who used the words.
As said earlier, destruction shouldn't be regarded always as bad. Because before you build or create something, you might need to destroy what has been the past, and the presence, in order to clear and make space to build or create the new afresh.
Not "randomly" promoting.
Quantum Field Theory is the most successful, accurate, and important Theory in the history of science, giving us the Standard Model and a myriad of devices that work.
The quantum fields accord with Derrick’s points in his OP, and further inform us in physical actuality of labels and associations that have been also used for ‘God’.
Since the quantum fields are already fundamental, the hypothesis for ‘God’ would want to attend to that.
[quote="Derrick Huesits;d11741”]
Non-existence can't exist
-so, there must be infinite existence in all directions for all time
-something which exists carries certain attributes: is affected by things, effects things, takes up space and encompasses time
-things are separated by things which are not of the same type, so the only thing that could separate existence itself would be nonexistence which cannot exist, thus there must be one undivided existence
-this undivided existence must carry all the attributes labeled above. These attributes, when defined as being all-encompassing, define all the omni's associated with God: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. And perpetual change through creativity: omnificent.
-add to this the fact that it must encompass all time: eternal, and you get all the labels attributed to God
-thus, the notion of God can be grasped from a purely logical standpoint.[/quote]
"Exchanging energies" means to be able to interact with the material. If something 'mysterious' is inert or of a distinct and separate category, then it's as if it isn't even there. If not, then it's material, too, since it can interact.
So, no 'intangible', 'non-physical', etc., affecting us and we back. 'Supernatural' would thus seem to be out and not there, or if it is then never the twain shall meet.
There's no 'space' as nonphysical. The quantum fields exhaust reality. "All is field", as Einstein claimed. There is also no space as something separate from the fields that is just there to hold the fields.
The OP was not trying to prove God using quantum physics. If you read the OP again, it starts with Non Existence and its meaninglessness. The OP is based on philosophy of logic, not quantum physics. Then OP talks about space, and its properties before going into God and proof.
I think trying to trust everything qp says blindly feels irrational. It can fall into the trap of trusting anything a famous person said, scientist said or science said. The tendency itself can degrade into some sort of pagan religion.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
I am not sure if that statement is correct. What do you mean by "fundamental"? In what sense? What is non fundamental?
Again, exchanging energies between matters sounds vague and ambiguous. It doesn't sound like a philosophical, logical or scientific statement at all.
I could have understood better if it said "communicating", "having conversation", "engaging" or "making use of". But then these are terms for actions or events between some beings with linguistic abilities or at least the animals with emotional and intelligent communication capabilities.
I have re-read above post a few times just trying to grasp what it actually means, but you have lost me. Exchanging energies between immaterial and material subjects sounds and all the rest of it, just don't make sense because it is abstract and empty in the content, and is hard to imagine what it could actually be in real life. Do you have any real life examples for these events?
Not just "said", as religion does, but shown and used and known.
Whatever accords to the OP, especially the happy case of a real physical example, is a candidate for 'God'. The OP starts with 'nonexistence' not being possible and thus the Base and Only Existence having to mandatory and continuous, without even any little spacers of 'nonexistence' with it.
Quantum fields are such, as fundamental, with no deeper parts, and omnipresent, as everywhere, with all the omnipotence they can have, as power to form the elementary particles, and omniscient, in the way of what all can become from it.
An example of what is not fundamental would be such as a proton, for it has quark constituents that have to be prior. What is fundamental, then, is of an even more lightness of being, such as fields.
No one knows if there is 'God' or what its nature would be if there is 'God', such as Personhood.
The closest I can think of that is of our real life is Descartes' declared separate and distinct categories of the mental and the physical. This fell apart because then the mental and the physical would not be able to interact.
Further, there is no 'metaphysical' being true by just saying the word. So, it's not like we can have an option to say if 'God' is 'spiritual' or 'supernatural' or 'intangible', and such. We have to see what comes out of any analysis we can do to approach it to make it have to be so.
Derricks' truth and proof of Existence not being optional really already suffices, but for us being curious as to its method, and quantum fields answers this.
We apparently don't have all the Omnis to the extent wished for in a 'Person God with Mind', but this may not be what Reality is bound to, plus how could any mind be fundamental, much less a really extensive one.
I suggested a Deity Scientist rather than a personal-god Theity Magician, but we can only meet a Deity's doings at the Big Bang, which we are not yet able to do, but, again, with Existence being a must, there is not really any more to it that it has to answer to.
It sounds too imaginative and naive judgement to conclude that quantum field is God for all the reasons listed up there. It would be a good idea to go back to Kant and then Kierkegaard if one wants to find God, rather than futilely trying to prove God using the quantum field.
Descartes' dualism is only significant in the history of philosophy, and no one really takes seriously his theory of the immaterial substance soul these days. It was more for his methodical doubt which gets mentioned for the revolutionary way of philosophizing at the time in the historical point of view, rather than his dualism.
Well, QFT doesn't prove 'God' as a Person with Mind but rather replaces and gets rids of that type of 'God' idea to leave us with just a Ground of Determination (G.O.D.) type basis. Even the Deity 'God' becomes unnecessary as redundant.
QFT needs to be expanded to include quantum gravity and dark matter (unless neutrinos are already it) and then it will become the Complete Theory of Everything rather than very nearly.
Well, many religious 'God' followers believe in the 'immaterial soul' and the rest of the 'supernatural' in the way of having hopes and wishes. It's a whole nother story of why they want it.
I've been thinking about this one, I'm not in a place to be too verbose in my response but I'll throw out a few possible arguments in promotion of the idea of a mind:
1. I've presented the case for creativity--omnificence--this acts like the god-function which "picks itself up by the bootstraps." Although logic leads us to this all-powerful existence, it doesn't mean anything exists other than itself of course, so creativity would get it there (hence, the universe). But creativity isn't the same thing as randomness, creativity is patterned and randomness is not. Imagine a universe created without patterns...needless to say, everything is patterned, hence creativity, and creativity is only known to be generated by something which has some kind of forethought...
2. Consciousness as a higher-level of existence. If consciousness a higher level of existence or being then, for example, a rock, it would be odd to say infinite existence is more like a rock and less like us who are superior to it. It would also imply we are superior to infinite existence because we have consciousness, and the inferior thing (infinite existence with no consciousness) some how generated the superior thing.
3. Love as a metaphysical power. I've done enough charity to know that love is a powerful thing. Quick example: last time I was in Tijuana a 17yo who has been resistant to going to drug rehab did so because it was what I wanted and he's known me for 5 years and knows I care about him deeply. The bond of love allows me to have a direct influence on his life. It would be odd to say omnipotence excludes this power when it is supposedly all-powerful, but if it does include the power of love then we must draw one of two conclusions: Things with no mind or consciousness can love, or infinite existence has a consciousness.
God as a personal being who is believed to be caring and salvaging the world would be beneficial for the followers and believers for giving the possible psychological comforts in their daily lives and hope for the possible immortality after death.
It is doubtful if quantum field as a replacement for God could serve any purpose at all.
Replacing the quantum field as God on one hand, and then bringing up immaterial souls exchanging energies with the physical bodies on the other sounded inconsistent.
You say I draw illogical conclusions without tearing apart any of my logic. You are quite the sophist, like I said you argue with emotion.
Quoting Corvus
Perhaps you forgot you were finite? Hence, we are forced to use our imagination which you so despise, yet even then we can't truly "find" infinite because our minds themselves are also finite. Based on your current arguments, I get the feeling you might be a flat earther because you've never seen the roundness of the Earth anywhere you've gone...
Yes, the belief provides comfort.
Quoting Corvus
It's doubtful that an Eternal Fundamental Existence with no beginning and thus no input could have any purpose. The only trait is that it cannot not be; that is the complete message: being is a must.
Look into fine tuning.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
In our universe, the lesser ever leads to the greater.
Not exactly. The energy released by the sun is many times less then the energy of the big bang, but as that energy dissipates smaller creations can come to be, all the way down to us weak humans. Basically, we needed the energy of the universe to lessen to come into being. As power goes down, creativity rises.
By definition sophist is the one who brings out his fabricated theories with loose logic and jumpy conclusions. Sophist also tries to influence others to follow his dogmatic assertions for his financial motives such as writing books or just to boost his own ego by trying to convince others with his made up stories as if it is a newly discovered truth.
I am just a reader who has never made a single penny from my studies and readings all my life, and never intending to make a single penny from it or writing books or anything like that.
I am just a student of philosophy and literature learning by readings purely motivated by a love of wisdom. The only thing I have done was having read your stories about the nonexistence and God, found the problems with your logic, and just pointed out some problems in the logic and asked a few questions about them by replying to your points.
Now anyone with a common sense can say about this situation, and will see the truth. Who sounded like a sophistic poster, and who is a Socratic student in this thread?
Quoting Derrick Huestis
No one really witnesses and experiences roundness of the earth directly. Their daily life sensing of the earth is the flatness of the land. It is the scientific education and learned observations, which gives the knowledge of the theory that the earth is round. Asserting as if one's sense of the earth must be round in one's daily life, and suggesting others for being flat-earther for no evidence or ground does sound pretentious.
All beings is contingent. They may exist now, but they might not exist tomorrow, or any moment. That is what existence means.
Perhaps a certain arrangement of atoms, yes, but the underlying matter, no, and the underlying space, also no. The sophist doesn't believe in an absolute truth, it is subjective, up to the individual. For this I criticize you. You keep making claims you uphold, but no supporting logic, and you don't directly attack the logic others present, but say "I do not see." There is a lot you can criticize in this way, you can go back to Descartes "I think therefore I am" and reject that we know about anything more than our mind. Ultimately, this discussion has many built in assumptions, and relies upon those to build up new ideas. One of those assumptions is that our process of scientific discovery is true. This also entails mathematics, physics, etc. To reject these fields of study is an argument for elsewhere, but yes, if you can undermine them as you seek to do you would undermine a portion of my argument.
The sun's energy is as a thousand atomic bombs going off every second, a mere pittance compared to the Big Bang. It's just the Bang made the sun to be possible. Our sun is a third generation metal-rich star, which is also what we needed, plus our planet being in the Goldilocks zone with other right conditions such as having a moon (else the Earth would wobble like a top, its surface areas ever going in and out of zones too freezing and too hot, alternating).
Glad you're still looking into the logic! There's no greater philosophical quest.
Logic is in short supply, and only getting worse. Perhaps a detour, but I can't help but think the universe is like a giant processor, performing infinite calculations and ensuring everything follows the laws (mathematical calculations) to the T. But, who wrote the code?
We are back to the Great Scientist Programmer Deity, although many believers don't want a 'God' like that, plus what is He doing sitting around there all fully formed as the First.
I was an information engineer computer programmer at IBM for 31 years creating software in support of the logic design. I've been retired for 20 years now.
An Unnatural Universe? Fine Tuning?
Physicists note that the universe seems unnatural, in that 6-7 base parameters had to be just what they are, to the nth degree.
Some of the parameters can be understood:
From Victor Stenger:
For fine-tuning, only ‘dimensionless’ numbers that do not depend on the system of units are meaningful. The Fine Structure ‘Constant, ‘a’, is not even a constant. There can still be long-lived stars if we vary the parameters and certainly the universe is not fine-tuned for this characteristic. The 7.65 million electron-volts needed for Carbon to form actually hinges on the radioactive state of a carbon nucleus formed out of three helium nuclei, which has over a 20% range to work with without being too high. The vacuum energy of the universe is not fine-tuned, for the large value of N1 is simply an artifact of the use of small masses in making the comparison. The Expansion Rate of the Universe in not fine-tuned since the universe appeared from an earlier state of zero energy; thus, energy conservation would require the exact expansion rate that is observed. Same for the Mass Density of the Universe.
Plus see:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/07/05/the-universe-itself-may-be-unnatural/?sh=763422766c9d:
https://futurism.com/is-the-universe-unnatural
Has the multiverse finally become necessary?
The quantum fields can still be the All; they are there before and after Big Bangs; they are always there.
I have been pointing out the problems in your logic, and also asking you to clarify the ambiguous and vague concepts such as underlying matter and underlying space in your posts. There are different type of space concepts. I am still not sure what exact your definition of underlying space and also underlying matter are.
As I have said in the previous post, I have not been asserting any theories or principles of my own, so why do I need my own logic, and how could I be a sophist without claiming anything at all? It is you who are claiming that the underlying matter and underlying space is the evidence of existence of God, and replacement of God.
My point was that it needs more concrete and solid clarification for your assertion of replacing God with some unknown nature of underlying matter and underlying space.
This type of reductionist claims had been long before in history, and usually they only get mentioned as the historical significance by the contemporary readers and academics in these days.
If you recall the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks, they have tried to see the world as one underlying element, like Water by Thales, Air by Anaximander, Fire by Heraclitus, Numbers by Pythagoras, and Atom by Democritus. Yes atom by Democritus !!
It just sounds so similar to hear your assertion of underlying quantum field or space, for the evidence of God, and the ancient Greek philosophers fundamental element for the world.
The only difference is that they were in 500 BC, and your claim is in 2021 AD making roughly 2500 years apart. But the Greeks already had their rich mythic Gods needing no proofs, and looking far more sophisticated world / God view than the 2021 version.
THE MEADOWS OF HEAVEN
We of the highest consciousness ever known
And the most versatile form that’s been grown
Reside as consequent beings in this Earthly realm,
Possibly the most fortuitous creatures
That the universe has ever wrought.
Indeed,
We are this universe come to life—
Necessarily from a long line
Of ‘fortunate accidents’.
It had to be this way, for any universe
In which we could emerge
Would have to be appropriate for us
Or we wouldn’t be here to discuss it.
Looking back,
We already know ahead of time
That we will discover
The many ‘happenings’
That made us possible.
All this we know and expect
Because we are here.
Perhaps in some other ‘wheres’,
Junkyard universes litter the omniscape,
For they flunked, failed, and miscarried—
A quadrillion trillion universes broken down
For every one that worked to any extent at all.
In some of these forlorn universes,
Perhaps the material was inert
And so it just sat there, doing nothing, forever.
In others, maybe gravity was insufficient
Or had no natural place to collect particles
And so they thinned out endlessly,
Spreading coldly toward infinity.
In yet others again,
Even those in the same ballpark as ours,
Perhaps the portions weren’t quite right.
Although they may have formed a few elements,
They went no further than that for a zillion years.
It could also be that all the possibilities-probabilities
That are of so many imbalances must ever trace back
To the Perfect Imbalance of matter and antimatter,
This no longer seen as improbable.
In our universe, the dark chest of wonders
Of Possibility and Probability opened up
In just the just right way:
Naked quarks spewed forth,
Among other things,
And boiled and brewed
In one of the steamiest broths
Ever cooked up.
They somehow simmered and combined
Into the ordinary matter
Of protons and neutrons.
Then quite independently,
By some unknown means,
Dark matter-energy arose as well,
In just the right mix, and, luckily, too,
Some very long filaments,
Called cosmic strings,
Formed and survived long enough
To be useful as collection agents,
Which were merely imperfections,
As in an unevenly freezing pond—
A kind of a cooling flaw.
None of these happenings were connected,
Except by Potential’s destiny,
So, ‘fortunately’,
The cosmic strings attracted,
By their gravity,
Both dark and ordinary matter,
Which in turn
Attracted even more of the same.
These pearls of embryonic galaxies arose
And were strung along these cosmic necklaces,
As can still be noted today.
So it was
That some almost incidental irregularities,
Frozen out as cosmic anchors,
Were latched onto by matter, both light and dark,
The proportionate portions of which were favorable,
The dark matter dwarfing our ordinary matter
For some reason of a happy ‘circumstance’.
‘Fortuitously’, as well,
Anti-matter, if there ever was any,
Did not fully cancel out the uncle-matter.
The universe could not foresee any of this
In and of itself’s fundamental substance(s),
For if it could have
Then we’d only have the larger problem
Of how the foreseer could have been foreseen,
Ad infinitum…
So it could have been like the ‘trying out’
Of all possibilities in superposition…
A brute force happening
Of every path gone down.
We know much of the rest of the story
Of how the stars and their supernovae
Created the light and heavy elements,
Which combined into molecules,
Which ‘auspiciously’
Became able to replicate themselves, as DNA,
And progress to make cells, tissues, and life.
And then there was the luck of oxygen,
A mere waste product of photosynthesis
By bacteria, and later, plants,
That could fill the lungs
As well as build an ozone layer of protection
From the harmful rays of outer space.
Luck on top of luck, good fortune,
And then prosperity…
‘Stumbled along’ the right path.
Of course all this took many billions of years—
And it is of course this long ‘yardstick’
That baffles the mind and sticks in the throat,
But demonstrates the long time lag needed
To produce even the tiniest of advances.
It bears some of the hallmarks
Of ‘randomness’ at work,
Although quite probable
If Potential had it all ‘worked out’.
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth
For over two hundred million years—
Imagine the length of that time.
They were supreme and invincible—
The kings of all the Earth ‘forever’,
On land, sea, and even in the air—
Heading towards forevermore and beyond,
But…
Dame Fortune once again intervened
When the asteroids or some such catastrophe
Finished off the dinosaurs,
As well as 90% of the existing species.
This ‘random’ event left a vacuum
In which newer species could thrive.
Proto-man gave way to near-man
And thence to us, eventually,
When two ‘monkey’ chromosomes fused together,
Making ‘us’ incompatible with the chimps
And so our ancestors then
Truly descended from the trees!
‘You’ were once a lucky shrew, darting all about,
But then attached to a favorable evolutionary line…
Every single one of your forbears on both sides
Being attractive enough to locate a loving mate,
And they fortunately had the good health to celebrate!
We came to need no specialized niches,
Since we could adapt to any terrain,
Having brains that could learn much more
After birth than instinct could bestow before.
Our higher consciousness
Was the crowning glory—
We had won the human race—
The be all and end all; the grand prize
Of the universal lottery.
So there is nothing more,
Aside from our own progress
To be and learn.
This is it!
That’s all there is.
DNA remembers every step of our evolution—
And you can see this in ‘fast’ motion
When embryos form simply in the liquid womb,
Replicate, and then grow cells
That diversify into a human being
After going through some nonhuman stages.
The human embryo actually forms
Three different types of kidneys,
One after the other,
The first two discarded
(Resembling those of jawless fish
And reptiles, respectively)
Before our final kidney appears.
There is also a fetal coat of hair
That then greatly diminishes.
Thus four billion years compresses into
The nine months of pregnancy.
So then hail and good fortune,
Fine fellows and ladies,
And welcome all of you
To the Meadows of Heaven—
The highest point of all being,
Although we are surely
Still in our infancy.
The path “chosen” by Potential ends here,
With our consciousness.
There were many pockets of universes,
And it is was this very one
That could sing our verses.
The further design
And the role of mankind
Is now in our hands.
We were borne here upon the shoulders
Of so many who have long since come and gone,
All of them advancing the cause,
Over eons of wiles—so here we are.
Fare thee always well, fine friends,
For we are some of
The luckiest sons and daughters of being
In a rare medium well done.
Celebrate; live; be,
For everyone dies,
But not everyone lives.
(One of the objectives)
The Programmer sets the if-then switches,
Like eight-way 3D Rubic Cube intercepts,
After having set the quarks and leptons,
And coding stars to generate atoms.
Then more precise tweaks, to dark energy,
To umpteen decimal places so rare,
And the forming of the DNA code
To blend life’s ingredients, stirring slow.
Darn, the n-body problem is so tough,
For unforeseen side-effects e’er arise,
Among branches of the would-be life-tree,
A zillion variables overlapping.
This was all still in a simulation
To test out the the coming universe.
Fixes were needed.
The Programmer sat up at his terminal,
Brought up his 1,000,000,000 line program,
And opened the patient for surgery,
Working swiftly from a red inked printout
Marked up during a long coffee hour.
He clamped off the bleeding capillaries,
Redid most of their interfaces,
And bloodlessly sealed them shut again,
Although these were only preparatory
And minor repairs in auxiliary areas.
Next, the main arteries had to be incised,
And therefore it was no longer possible
To open and unblock the incursions in sequence,
Since indirect ramifications and side concerns
Concerns quickly arose and wildly flared,
As fleeting thoughts, for one thing led to another,
Thereby requiring immediate attendance,
Lest, they, in the formless impressionism
Of the art of computer programming,
Fade to vague remembrance, and reappear later,
Always at an inopportune time, as defects known as bugs.
The phone rang while he was juggling
These evaporating images and so he had to ignore it;
But, no matter, for PhoneMail would record the call.
Twenty minutes later,
He had sutured the incisions and readied
A compile and regression test which would
Either attest to the quality of the operation
Or reveal its fatal errors and necessitate
The revitalization of the patient or, at worst,
Require a complete restoration to
Preoperative health from a backup file.
Then He fed it all into the Big Bang.
Having an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs and many species to provide an opening for mammals to evolve seems too risky and clumsy for a ‘Designer’ to have done. Other near extinctions happened too; seems natural.
Our planet is very good at promoting life,
But it is much better at extinguishing it.
Of the billions upon billions of organic things,
99.99% are no longer around here living.
Of all extinctions, the Permian was the worst.
245 million years ago, for 95% of species perished,
Suddenly disappearing from the fossil recording.
Life had almost come to a total obliterationing.
“Hurray,” said the shrew; now I can evolve!
‘You’ were once a lucky shrew, darting all about,
But then attached to a favorable evolutionary line…
Every single one of your forbears on both sides
Being attractive enough to locate a loving mate,
And they fortunately had the good health to celebrate!
Our blind-fated path was the further paved
When disasters finished most of the species.
Far from a feature of Intelligent Design,
It opened up the space that was needed.
Actual footage of the Great Permian Asteroid:
So,
The universe is a quantum computer,
Reckoning the future with its qu-bits;
The path that goes the furthest wins the prize,
It being the best of all possible worlds!
An Answer to the Confounding Exact Parameters
What great needle played, stitched, wound, and paved
The strands of the quantum fields’ types of waves
To weave the warp, weft, and woof of our ‘verse
Into being’s fabric of living braids?
The Bang’s source is a quantum computer
That reckoned all future with its qu-bits.
The path that went the furthest won the prize,
Earth being the best of all possible worlds!
The universe’s quantum computation
Finished just before the Big Bang start,
And then it played out in time perfectly,
As the longest path of complexity.
How else could the ‘shambles’ of Explosion
Result in life in our universe that’s
Only .02 percent of its way along?
The universal constants were self-taught.
Mass/energy has been shown to be
Equivalent to information, so,
The quantum universe did compute
Itself, pursuing paths that go onward.
It reached out to see what’s possible
And what’s not, like particles forming
In the quantum world, but, better than that—
It made the potential possible.
It ran scenarios of consequences,
Ever abandoning those paths that end,
Near at once, as quantum computers do,
Since it explored all ways in parallel.
Only thus could the exacting events
So improbable and deep in their depth
Have come forth in the Universe’s progress,
In its precisely tuned Macrocosm.
There never was, nor will be, but just ‘now’—
All things, interacting—instant know-how;
Thus mind ‘matters’, matter ever ‘minds’; so,
The Cosmos self-adjusted—as the Tao.
Or still:
The ‘God’ idea has fallen from its throne;
Forever quantum fields’ excitations’
Elementary quanta roll on those fields
That are everywhere and remain themselves.
The Creation of the Universe:
Nothing can escape from being something, even nothing. The absence of attributes is an attribute.
[b]Of the Forced Defaults for Existence
With no Beginning or End[/b]
Since Existence has to be, of not ‘nil’,
‘Supernatural Magic’ isn’t required;
So, there’s only the natural as the base;
One degree of freedom is the forced default.
Motion is a must, or naught would happen;
It can’t have parts, so it’s continuous;
Since no end, it must remain as itself.
There can’t be anything else but it.
It is everywhere, with no gaps of ‘zilch’,
Waving, since that’s ubiquitous in nature;
Transmuting into the elementary
Particles as stable rungs of quanta.
Only quantum fields fit the criteria,
Particles as spigots failed to flow,
Newton’s Space and Time faded away from
Einstein’s relativity special and general.
Quantum field points just going up and down
Form the field waves by dragging others with;
These sums of harmonic oscillations
Force the fixed quanta energy levels.
The universe is one complex quantum field,
For the 24 quantum fields interact,
This containing the whole of physics.
There’s no ‘God’s’ eye view; anything happens.
On the One and Only Existence
Prolog
In this lost haunt on the Orion arm
Of the galaxy, safe from the core’s harm,
The philosophers meet in the forum,
As sleuth-hounds unweaving the Cosmic yarn.
We search for the Start of the Universe,
The End, the Before, the After, the Kinds,
The Measures, and All That Lies Between:
The Music of the Spheres’ Magnificat.
We follow every single avenue,
Whether it’s brightly lit or a dark alley,
Exploring one-ways, no-ways, and dead-ends,
Until cornered where the Truth is hiding.
Since we all became of this universe,
Should we not ask who we are, whence we came?
Insight clefts night’s skirt with its radiance—
The Theory of Everything shines through!
We are ever in touch with the unknown,
For that’s ever the reach of science shown.
Reality is grasped by focusing
On what interacts with what and the means.
There is a realm of happenings, not things,
For ‘things’ don’t remain the same on time’s wings.
What remains through time are processes—
Relations between different systems.
An Eternal Basis has to be so,
For a lack of anything cannot sow,
Forcing there to be something permanent,
As partless, from which the particles grow.
Consider quantum fields of waves atop
One another: waves are continuous,
And so qualify as Fundamental;
Quantized lumps are particles, then more.
Note that there is no other absolute:
Newton’s fixed space and time got Einstein’s boot;
Particle spigots making fields are mute;
Classic fields have no fundamental loot.
There’s a lightness of elemental being
Since any more would have to be of parts,
And thus go beyond the fundamental arts.
The puffs of vacuum energy are small.
On the Forced Defaults for the Only Existence
There can only be the one Existence,
Forced, with no option for it not to be,
Which is no mystery because the ‘Nil’
Cannot be, even as spacers within.
There is neither ‘Full’ nor ‘Null’,
But a lightness of being near ‘Zero’,
As that’s what the universe amounts to,
Nor ‘Nil’s kin as ‘Still’, since there’s constant change.
This must-be partless Existence Eterne
Can’t end, so it must remain as itself,
Transmuting into multiplicity
Of the temporary as ‘elementaries’.
Since Existence has to be, of not ‘null’,
‘Supernatural Magic’ isn’t required;
So, there’s only the natural as the base;
One degree of freedom is its forced default.
Motion is a must, or naught could happen;
It can’t have parts, so it’s continuous;
Since no end, it can return to itself.
There can’t be anything else but it.
It is everywhere, with no gaps of ‘zilch’,
Waving, as that’s ubiquitous in nature;
Rearranging to the elementary
Particles at stable rungs of quanta.
Only quantum fields fit the criteria;
‘Particles as spigots’ failed to flow,
Newton’s ‘Space’ and ‘Time’ disappeared via
Einstein’s relativity special and general.
Quantum field points that just spring up and down
Form the field’s waves by dragging on others.
These sums of harmonic oscillations
Force the fixed quanta energy levels.
So the wave estimate proved to be right;
An electron/photon goes through both slits
Because it is a spread out field quantum.
Quantum jumps are due no wave fractionals.
The universe is a large quantum field,
For the 24 quantum fields interact,
This containing the whole of physics.
There’s no ‘God’s’ eye view; anything happens.
The anything in the massive universe
Is a lot of needed ‘extravagant’ stuff,
Since on Earth the right conditions obtained,
Our planet being where and what it has to be.
Cosmic and biological evolution were forced,
Stars collecting the elementaries,
Producing all the atomic elements
That went on to molecules, cells, and more.
All this took 13.75 billion years,
Since, again, there were no hoodoo shortcuts.
Life and consciousness emerged, no ‘Mojo’—
Since before that time on Earth there was none!
We, too, are forced to exist.
‘Magic’ has fallen by the wayside, it
As trancendence an intangible writ,
Unable to be distinct from matter,
Having to talk/walk the talk/walk of it.
An extra distinct realm isn’t needed,
As ‘intangible’, ‘ineffable’, etc.,
For it only begs the question—a shock!—
And as separate couldn’t have effect.
The ‘nonmaterial’ and ‘nonphysical’
Haven’t shown anything at all to date,
Plus, all the more they’d have to be explained;
The ‘metaphysical’ search has to fail.
The ‘God’ idea has fallen from its throne;
Forever quantum fields’ excitations’
Elementary quanta roll on those fields
That are everywhere and remain themselves.
Epilog
The quantum fields’ unity is the Whole,
Being ever, exhausting Reality,
Unbreakable and Unmakeable,
As partless and continuous monads.
All that emerges is still the fields at heart,
Though secondary and temporary,
Arising and at some time returning;
The quantum fields are Indivisible.
Quantum fields are the fundamental strokes
Whose excitations at harmonics cloak
The quanta with the stability
To persist and thus obtain mobility.
The elementary particles beget,
As letters of the Cosmic alphabet,
And combine in words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and life’s glory.
Why Something?
Quantum states melt via uncertainty,
And this means that no quantum property
Can e’er be zero—a precise amount,
And so it is that motion can ne’er cease.
The Something
The quantum field is the bridge between ‘Nil’
And basic matter, and can ne’er be still;
Thus the ‘vacuum’ is the quietest field—
The closest approach to ‘Nothing’ that can be.
No ‘Null’ nor Matter Full
‘Nothing’ had no chance to be the hero,
Plus QM scrubs the idea of zero
Out of the physical world of being;
‘Zilch’ ne’er sleeps, but is e’er up to something.
A Mere Blip
But for the small quantum uncertainty,
The Cosmos sums to naught, its lunch being free:
No net electric charge; a weightless brick;
Minus-potential = plus-kinetic.
Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be!
Such as Nought, Stillness, and the Block’s decree,
As well as Apart, Beginning, and End,
The Unfixed Will, Blame, Fame, and Theity.
I like this way of putting it, very succinct.
This does seem to be a problem with computers, they are linear. I noticed in math there is a curious way to bypass the linear using imaginary numbers, or i.
A quantum computer would be even better, as operating in parallel. Would the Existence be composed of bits, given that mass/energy seems to have been shown to be equivalent to information? Not much to go on yet for that idea, although lately many philosophers veer toward an information base.
Bits boil everything down to black and white, they don't allow grey area. I personally view this as the knowledge/understanding distinction. Knowledge puts everything in a box, similar to the concept of bits: 1 or 0. Understanding is open-ended, and in this way chases the infinite. Understanding can draw conclusions which can then be used to draw even more conclusions, etc., indefinitely.
I would think the Infinite Existence fits more in the understanding category than the knowledge category, and I would even say infinite knowledge is, by definition, complete understanding of all things. In this sense, it breaks away from the concept of computers that deal with absolutes: 1 or 0, with no grey area. But as of yet, I don't have a good logical way of explaining this nor explaining the necessity, other than to state that many elements of physics and chemistry could have been altered and a completely different universe could have come from it, but somehow this one came to be, so it isn't a binary reality but one with multiple possibilities, of which only one was selected.
The grey area for quantum computer qu-bits is that they can be 0 and 1 at the same time.
Quoting Derrick Huestis
So, there is either a multiverse or the brute force but near instant method of the quantum computer type of following all paths in parallel.
'Following all paths' example in our already made universe:
Sciam: Graham Flemming has some lasers spitting out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After traveling through some mirrors and lenses, these minuscule flashes disappear into a smoky black box, in this case containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics measured to billionths of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once!
Following the exotic rules of quantum mechanics, photosynthesis derives its ferocious efficiency of over 95%. We can perhaps harness great amounts of energy to help humankind.
This is all absolutely mind bending! The crossing of seemingly forbidden gaps is, again, called quantum tunneling. Classical physics cannot come close to achieving these speeds found in quantum tunneling and entanglement. Christopher Altman says that many new experiments continue to find quantum processes at play in biological systems, a process once thought not possible.
Life’s quantum dance has finally come into view by using the fermosecond lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning. It’s amazing beyond words!
Now, back to the green sulfur bacteria. Flemming and his researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of fermoseconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reactions centers where energy conversion takes place. As described earlier in the thread, they saw that energy travels in several directions at the same time, finding the efficient pathway retroactively when the quantum process collapses. Then the electrons’ energy followed that single, most efficient path.
Perhaps we can someday manufacture cheap solar power out of organic molecules.
As for the enzymes and the tunneling also observed there, two studies, one published in ‘Science’ and the other in ‘Biophysical Journal’ have found that some enzymes appear to lack the energy to complete the reactions that they propel; the energy could only come from the quantum realm.
So there are 3 possibilities, but what about 4, 5, or more possibilities? And out of the many possibilities, what determines a specific one will come to fruition? This is hard to explain without some kind of mind concept. I think part of the issue is people throw these problems to the concept of randomness without explaining what makes something random. In the real world, random takes up an incredible amount of computing power. This is the whole basis of cryptocurrency and how miners get Bitcoin. And that uses megawatts of electricity around the world. Random is no simple concept, order and patterns are simpler than random, but to confess the universe follows patterns is a confession it is deliberate, and then if it is deliberate the question becomes "how?"
This is still a tough one (if not a multiverse stumbling onto a workable universe), since we only but make the 'how' into a much larger question by shifting the problem onto a mind or a near all-at-once quantum computer path figuring the fine tuning that has to be all the more explained, with either one having to foresee what 10**76 particles would do over 13 billion years, plus why would so much time be required to carry out the implementation of the 'deliberate' formula.
Time for some off-the-wall attempts:
The universe seems to end with a complete blended symmetry order, in its wide dispersal, and it seems to have begun with a severe grouping order of matter and anti-matter, like the chess pieces at the beginning of a match. Could there be an all-at-once quantum superposition of everything possible whose quantum probabilities had to trace forward and backwards to these only two states that could make time go forward, thus having to form only the patterns that could accomplish it?
Or something like that as the guidance principle.
Notes from 'Everything Forever' by Gavin Giorbran, although I have much more but it is long:
Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, if it did, that is, very high order, especially as seen as a grouping order, with but one general arrangement of matter versus antimatter, which beginning we will call ‘Alpha’, instead of the high disorder of other mixed-up arrangements, this high order resulting in the distinction between past and future and the second law of thermodynamics?
Assuming this low entropy beginning is true, although it’s often thought that this would be a seemingly rare, unlikely state, as just one out of so many others possible as disorder, must rather be very likely, even as to be the only way a universe can begin, since the universe indeed began as such.
Why, though, does whatever brought on this universe, end up with this initial state for the universe to be of the highest possible grouping order? And is it in any way related to the proposed end of the universe being of a featureless blend of dispersal that is a symmetry order (which end we will call ‘Omega’)?
Is our universe’s Alpha start in time is so improbable as it seems, what with its severe grouping order of separated matter and antimatter, such as that of the separated white and black pieces at the beginning of a chess game, as with these ideas from Gavin Giorbran.
Such an arrangement seems a rarity, but it may rather be that time cannot go forward if there is no progression from this very distinct grouping order of the Alpha Start toward the proposed Omega End of a totally blended symmetry order, this idea similar to an end as disorder of high entropy from any start of low entropy.
The universe is now in its its diversity stage, both at large and in our own Earthly aisle, yet its future of a blended symmetry order perhaps ever pulls/guides the present along, such as in the “time is like a river” analogy, this ‘flow’ proceeding inexorably from Lake Alpha to Lake Omega.
How and why was the seemingly rare state of the high ordered Alpha beginning of our universe accomplished?
The IS, as great as it is, is still subject to two boundaries, as the start and end described above.
All the probabilities of all the ending balance must trace back to the one and only state of the most probable beginning of all, the greatest imbalance of all, matter and anti-matter, with Totality in a quantum superposition, all at once—of no time and of no space, the quantum probability patterns really being so, not just a math tool.
The separation of matter and anti-matter is the greatest possible imbalance, but all the probability balances must trace forward to the greatest and most probable balance at the end of all.
The ultimate, flat, symmetry order of the Omega—the end of all, draws the river of time along, guiding it, through the probability patterns.
The Time River of Probabilities flows smoother and further near its center, while near the shores there are eddies and swirls, contrasts, lumpiness, ebbs—even back flow.
The nows proceed and the moments play, motion but apparent, as successive frames—all the alternate plot’s scenarios being, which will blend at the Omega.
Our two brain hemispheres, too, must reflect the nature of the universe itself, as the left-side grouping order versus and with the whole of the right-side symmetry order.
Top-down drives the bottom-up ‘events’, the future ever affecting the present; The flat whiteness of the Omega End brings forth the diversified prismatic colors fro the Alpha Start.
Electrons, protons, seem ‘bottom-up’, but are ‘enfolded’ in the top-down whole, as with Bohm’s implicit order guiding the blooming, unfolding, explicit order.
There are still many more ways for the universe to be lumpy, in degrees, than for it to be perfectly smooth, and that’s why there’s still some grouping order, as with galaxies and solar systems.
The no longer ‘improbable’ symmetry of uniformity comes at future’s end; This Omega symmetry order is the opposite of Alpha’s grouping order.
The fundamental reality then is en-un-foldment; particles are abstractions from that. Electrons don’t exist continuously but are coming, going, then coming again.
Probabilities are actualities, so probabilities exist, so then we have a simple solution to why our universe came from a dense state.
All the possible patterns of the past and future exist simultaneously, independent of the passage of time frames, so, the history of a temporal universe moving through those possible patterns will inevitably trace backward to the extreme, greatest imbalance, and hence to the severe order of the Alpha start.
It seems strange that time began from Alpha, unless patterns are physically real, so then time invariably originates from the greatest imbalance of them all.
Time’s forward direction is ever toward balance. and so when it’s traced backward, that same path invariably originates from imbalance; the temporal universe is as it must be.
Since pattern space is existingly there then the flow of time is built into reality, causing probable time-worlds to exist, while extremely improbable time-worlds will not.
The must-existence of patterns is great, for the hierarchy of atomic elements, star systems, bio-life, consciousness, and, finally, intelligence and wisdom.
If time and change were not restricted to probability’s arrow of time built into pattern space then anything could happen and would happen, as chaos.
The end promotes the means in that time’s river, having a specific ending, explains why the universe’s wave function is specific. If what’s possible was just coming from the past, there’s no reasonable explanation for the control of all the probabilities, such as the wave density of atomic particles, A river only from the past would be flowing outward into chaos, but it can’t.
(Take the above with a grain of salt.)
Of the Necessity of the One Eternal Existence[/b]
The strong part of the OP is that The Eternal Existence is necessity, with no option not to be, given the impossibility of ‘nonexistence’. That covers the ‘why’ that wasn’t even a decision, in that the Existence cannot not be and has no choice but to be. There is no mystery to this. No awards to grant to it. No amazement. It is a natural state. It is at least G.O.D.—the Ground of Determination. There is no saying that by all rights there ought to be ‘Nothing’ and that the Something had to be a rare event; it was mandatory.
All that goes on has to be within the Existence, as there isn’t any other or else, and thus whatever happens has to be a rearranging of The Existence, even the Big Bang. So, there is a greater Cosmos or state beyond our universe, which is of course The Existence, as subject to never being able to go away.
Our Earth was forced to be, too, since it happened from what had to be, so it is a truth that Earth had to be, as inherent in/from The Eternal Existence that is the only Existence.
So, we have been extending the implications of the Necessity to find the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of our workable universe with life in it.
Who needs a proof of the implementation (‘how’) when we already have the truth of the ‘why’? We do, because are curious and look for meaning and purpose. ‘Meaning’, if there is any, is forced, too, yet the only trait we can count on for the Existence is that it has to be.
The Eternal Existence, not having a Beginning, can’t have had any specific design imparted to it, so it is only as what it has to be, which has to be both everything possible and not anything in particular.
There is our universe within it, and so that can be done, at least, albeit it took a mind-numbingly long time to get to us.
How did it do it?
Not instantly, apparently.
The forced quantum fields are only what can be, as the simplest?
A zero or near-zero balance sum of opposites divides into kinetics and gravity that ultimately can cancel as positive and negative energy and more such balances?
Being all at once, as Existence is complete, it is all there, intact, with no more forthcoming, and so it does everything, as it is everything, potentially, it happening in time? (this being like the proposed multiverse.)
There is no ‘instant’ option above, unless the universe as a block universe was instantaneous but takes time to play out in our type of time.
It calculates a workable universe from scratch, solving the n-body problem?
The quantum possibilities/potentials in superposition adjust to what will keep on going, since they can’t stop ‘looking’? (Stillness is not possible.)
‘God’ did it? But this shifts the question to the larger ‘How’ of a Mind.
Math did it? Ask Max Telmark.
The Existence is relational, with no intrinsic properties and no absolutes? But, still, how? See Carlo Rovelli.
Spontaneous? From ‘Nothing’? No reason? These still require a capability, and that would be a something.
Observation, including any kind of interaction, brings the best of the potentials into actuality? See Wheeler.
Quantum computer?
I think that you mistake the non-existence of something for the existence of something. I'll explain in an example:
A cat has one tail more than no cat (by no cat, I mean the non-existence of a cat, an empty place).
A dog is no cat.
Therefore, a cat has one tail more than a dog (no cat).
A dog has one tail, so a cat has two tails.
By using the non-existence of something as something (an object), you're creating a fallacy. Howether, the rest of the argument is very interesting, I never thought about the omni descriptions of god as elements that can be attributed to the universe itself. But I don't think all of the divine attributes apply, for instance, the omniscience would imply an awareness of things, and at least so far, there's no evidence for this awareness.
I will stop the quote here because it isn't about the nonexistence of something. After the discussions on this thread I've decided maybe a better word to describe it is a pure nothingness, so not the idea, not the space, nothing.
Quoting Nikita
So based on what I said above, this analogy is different because you have the idea of the cat (the idea exists), plus you mentioned an empty place. If I'm correct in assuming empty place means the same as an empty space, space is a thing so once again you don't have a pure nothingness.
It is a tricky argument, because I have to first make you think of something, nonexistence, then demonstrate that your mind can't think of it. Pure nothingness takes up no space, no time, etc. so it is impossible to think about. This is very different from saying an object doesn't exist (it isn't a pure nothingness).
I also think there is a strong argument to be made for this existence having a creative component, which gets us closer to the standard idea for God. There's also an argument to be made in viewing love as being a constructive power, it can influence both people and animals in ways brute force can never do. I noticed you shy away from these concepts a little, they don't fit in well when it comes to the beginning of the universe as a science-only proposition. This is what makes them perfect though, as they might demonstrate a greater metaphysical force that lurks just out of reach of the sciences.
It's also that the plans for our universe are already in The Existence, among everything possible, and they get to life and consciousness, which is pretty far, and so perhaps that wins out, somehow.
Love comes from an emotional. system, at least in us.
More clues:
From quantum non-locality and entanglement, we know that information is more primary than distance, and that things don’t have to have the appearance of being near each other to be related or to cause an effect.
Everything connected to everything would seem to be a ‘perception’ or an 'awareness' as far as one could be had by that network. Furthermore, 4-D touches 3-D everywhere. The all-at-once connections, as like in a hologram, might seem to provide for the direction of what goes on in the overall information process. I am thinking like a yogi and a guru, the entire cosmos situated within me.
Quantum non-locality seems to imply that every region of space is in instant and constant contact with every other, perhaps even in time as well, and so the holistic universe is governed by the property of the solitary whole; so that could be the underlying guidance principle. An individual particle might ‘know’ something about what to do, acting according to all the others.
Thus both our awareness and the holistic universe, each having a singular nature, might be the clue. Perhaps they are of the same basis of fundamental awareness, but separate as two manifestations, each controlling a different realm, internal and external, our internal consciousness giving us ‘future’, and the external consciousness granting ‘future’ to the universe. I don’t know which has the tougher job.
Lee Smolin has it that qualia are intrinsic, as fundamental, and Chalmers has it that information is fundamental and can express itself in two ways, in consciousness and in matter.
Quantum entanglement suggests that each particle has the entire map of the universe, the information ever updated, the universe being as a single entity. While this may not be consciousness at the level we have, it may help the universe accomplish something of the movements of particles and fields in their energy, mass, and momentum, in some global way that goes forward overall.
This may not seem to be saying a whole lot, in depth, but since the quantum realm is beneath everything then one would surmise that it must have all to do with everything that goes on.
It is still that the apparent atoms and molecules make the happenings, via physical-chemical reactions; however, this observation cannot be equated to an ‘explanation’, for we must wonder what underlies the chemical mattering and reacting that seems to have a unity of direction to it.
Better yet; since The Existence is completely self contained, with no beginning and no end, as not affected by anything outside itself, it would just BE, and so it IS, not just having the plans for the universe, but already having the universe. The darn Block Universe keeps trying to reinstate itself.
We may be stymied since we can't tell presentism apart from eternalism.
I had finished with the yogis and the gurus, and the seers and the oracles only know of the future; so, I surmised, to uncover the deepness of the present, for nature and the conscious animates, I must seek out Nature’s Great Poet in her Uni-verse, in order to fully apprehend the ethereal phantasms of the entangled and enchanted branches in the forest of nature, bringing them into the light.
Fortunately, I was a poet myself, and so I could gain entrance to the elfin dell, as a human, having to first pass through the neophytes, resisting their temptations and spells; however, the sensual can often take a back seat to the intellectual, although the ecstasy can be similar.
I had been there once before, bringing my epic poem, ‘Flora Symbolica’, unto them, and writing up the results in ‘Elfin Legends’, and so they had bid me to return one day on a quest. Theirs was more of an ethereal world, whereas mine was often clunky, except when I dreamt at night, and it was time for me to wander again, to ask about and better understand the quantum guidance principle, especially learning from those closer to nature and the heavens, they being the elven mixture of spirit–angel beings and humans, and thus aware of the causal nexus.
I flew to England, to the special forest Fairy Kingdom, near Gallienne’s old haunts, and waited for the funnel to open up into the tunnel, and then I came out into their realm and walked on for a full day, seeing no one straight out yet, just sideward waverings, but noting many new colors hereto–fore unknown, as there were more waves and frequencies here.
[i]Here the blesséd and haunted old forest,
Whereat the base of an oak I rest,
While all about lay wondrous deep coverts,
And a green-turfed path that leads o’er a crest.[/I]
They all knew what I was after, as evidenced in the first encounter.
“To pass and learn of the connectedness of all things, you must kiss me, after which I’ll give you your first clue.”
The kiss vibrated deep within my being, and I felt it to my core, and then she related, “All of life’s entities embrace one another, including cells, organisms, species, and biotope”.
I was on my way again the next morning, the hours having flown by, as when Einstein had sat next to a pretty girl and had noted the much quicker passage of time, over the slower passage of his instant of touching a hot stove.
I learned more as I meandered through the labyrinth of the forest.
She said, “Hold me tight and love me, and I will unveil some of the poetic structure afterward.”
Well, two days went by, and she revealed more of my quest, “Living conscious creatures are as a poem, they ever revealing further dimensions and expressing new properties at every level of organization, via strokes, letters, phonemes, words, phrases, and sentences, in and of a [uni]verse of rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, metric, and melody. This relates to the quantum All.”
I was hungry for the continuation of life’s quantum poem, and hoped I’d be able to move on more quickly, but her allure was testing my resolve; however, she told me something very soon after we’d rubbed our cheeks together, “Meanings in life are not just discovered or gleaned by mere observation but by understanding through participation, these informationally derived meanings combined to make sense in a non-reductive process, as in the relational reality of life happening at our semantical level of syntactical information exchange, with no breaking of any of the holistic connections, all this as the epic whole of the book of nature.”
[i]It was so still you could hear a nut fall,
And the musical strain of mystic call,
In soft tones flowered upon the silence,
As floating on the surface of the All.[/i]
“There is the particle and there is the wave—either one forced on us by our observations, being jointly known as the ‘wavicle’, all three states of which are truly not the actual reality.”
Beautiful!
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Nonsense!
The particle and the wave are very real. Though the particle is a pop-view.
She continued, “The actual reality is quantum fields.”
After two weeks with her, I had to survive the passage through the land of skulls and roses.
Finally, I emerged, unscathed, into the Land of Spring, and found out about more about growth.
“There are no objects that are identical with themselves over time, and so the temporal sequence remains open. Nature is a ‘possibility gestalt’, with the world forming anew each moment, from the deeper, enfolded realm, which is a unity in the sense of an indivisible ‘potentiality’ which can realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states.”
[i]‘Twas that time of morn when the exiled rise,
Thrown to time’s Earthly bondage through the skies,
Being for an hour their own Heavenly selves,
Their full glory unhidden by disguise.[/i]
“It still appears to us, though, that the world consists of parts that have continued from ‘a moment ago’, and thus retain their identity in time; yet, matter really only appears secondarily, as a congealed potentiality.”
[i]These forest fairies, dryads, nymphs, and fauns,
Ever flash their nude blossoms on the lawns.
They beckon me along, for though the air
I pass thoughts of love, verses, and songs.[/i]
“In a stable configuration of matter, such as in the inanimate, all the quantum uncertainties are effectively statistically averaged out, this thus ever being deterministic; but in the case of the statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations the ‘lively’ features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level.”
And so they tell more, “Physical phenomena are made of information processors that generate overlappings of correlated multi–dimensional wave fields which are propagating through time, as fields of possibility, whose intensity is a measure of the probability of an object-like realization.”
[i]The life of her face is in her deep blue eyes,
Soft-lipped mouth, and the ears that pointed rise,
As the moon and stars reflect in a pool,
Which look as for a lifetime pours surprise.[/i]
“So, there is form before substance, relationality before a materiality that is of a secondary arising and importance, its information being primary. Impressions of realizations are left in our world by the gestalt that ‘lives’ in the multidimensional spaces of quantum superpositional possibility.”
I used to be a believer too. Then I wondered. Why am I so assured God does not exist? Why do I think they are not there? It concerns me. Why thinking about god at all? Because they're there. The've created it all. How can an eternally infinite wonder exist on its own? It can't. Creation took place. The word was spoken and it was there, crestion.
I truly like your poetic words. If you strip them from what is meant by them. But these wotds up here are too much...
"Quantum entanglement suggests that each particle has the entire map of the universe"
QM doesn't suggest that.
We have the same template for 'God', as an even larger Wonder.
[i]I dive into her eyes, her soulful gate,
And worship before her heart’s flaming grate,
Midst flowers in the gardens of her dreams,
Then whirl back up through her eyes as her mate.[/i]
“There are no point masses then, but only smudged particles, such as we know of in the space-filling representations of the distribution of electrons in the shells of atoms—called the ‘cloud’.
“What remains unchanged over time are certain properties that find expression in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, electrical charge, etc., these necessarily being closer to the basis of all.”
At last, I met the ultimate Poet, the Elfin Queen, who told, “There is a relationship structure that arises not only from the manifold and the complicated interactions of the imagined building blocks of matter, but also one that is substantially more inherent and holistic.”
She continued, “So, then, the weaves, warps, and woofs of the quantum bits as strokes makes for the letters of the elementals, as in the alphabet of the standard model, forming the words as the atoms that go on to form the molecules as the phrases, on into cells as sentences, up to the paragraphs of the organisms, and unto the stories of the species, via the unity of life’s conscious literature as the unified verse in which we live out our poems.”
[i]I’m left with a feeling that’s no mere spell,
But a fact in Heaven that’s fancy in Hell,
Of elemental affinity’s flame,
Deeper than thought, much older than speech can tell.[/i]
I had discovered The Poetic Universe.
I headed back home, this taking a few months, never stepping into the same universe twice, or even once.
Funny thing, I thought, they didn’t use poems in what they told me, but, then again, they are as living poetic forms themselves.
My Report
We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling our live’s deeper thirsts,
As new riches, from strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentences—uni versed.
We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beauty’s true pense,
Revealed through life’s participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.
The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes—
The alphabet of the standard model,
Forming the words as the atoms whose mights
Merge to form molecules, as phrases,
Onto proteins and cells, as sentences,
Up to paragraphs of organisms,
And unto the stories of the species.
In this concordance of literature,
We are the Cosmos’ book of adventure,
As a uni-verse of sentient poems,
Being both the contained and the container.
Our poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from the profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm;
We’re both the existence and the essence.
Informationally derived meanings
Unify in non-reductive gleanings,
In a relational reality,
Through the semantical life happenings.
Syntactical information exchange,
Without breaking of the holistic range,
Reveals the epic whole of nature’s poetics,
Within her requisite of ongoing change.
So there’s form before gloried substance,
Relationality before the chance
Of material impressions rising,
Traced in our world from the gestalt’s dance.
All lives in the multi–dimensional spaces
Of basic superpositional traces
Of Possibility, as like the whirl’s
Probable clouds of distributed paces.
What remains unchanged over time are All’s
Properties that find expression, as laws,
Of the conservation of energy,
Momentum, and electric charge—unpaused.
A ‘Mind’ as the The Existence is dubious since:
— Systems can’t be Fundamental. We look back and see the simple being first.
— We’d have to explain this greater level as just being so all the more than the lesser level that we won’t accept as just being so, and so forth.
— Life continuing on Earth seems precarious, given many near extinctions.
— Achieving life took a very long time.
— Throwing a large asteroid at Earth to provide an opening for us to evolve after the Permian Extinction doesn’t seem intelligent.
— the Big Bang was messy.
Yet, The Existence must be everything possible and mind has happened, although it didn’t come first. Our minds becoming actualized this universe’s reality out of everything in a superposition?
Deliberate:
Our universe seems to be a rarity, and thus unnatural, since it works and some of the parameters had to be exact. So, something is behind that, yet life was and can still be barbaric, although that may be of 'best can do' due to what is good in general.
My vote:
I’m voting for a multiverse since because there is a universe implies that there can be others, many of which don’t work. Our universe doesn’t seem to be optimal, but perhaps some other one is, yet we get by, for now, but our continuation is not for sure.
The Eternal has to be everything,
All paths contained within, or the default;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
Still, what chose the song our universe sings?
All universes might spring forth, in turn,
Most inert or not going far enough,
With some reaching life after a long time,
Such as ours, precarious as its life is.
The Eternal is as a multiverse,
As all paths, which thus lacks information,
As in Babel’s Library of all books,
Being as Nothing’s zero’s non ‘info’.
2nd vote:
The quantum fields could not have been otherwise, forced as the only default.
The Reality of Light
The Oddness of Light Photons
Light is ‘null’ to time—not a part of it,
Nor is light of space—it makes space-time ‘lit’.
On a light beam there’s no extent or time!
Light seems to have neither reason nor rhyme.
Lighting the Way
To ‘ride a light beam’ makes time instant,
With the all of space shrinking to a point.
Extending Penrose:
To find out what there was before the Big Bang, we should look to what remains at the end of our universe.
There are only photons; they cannot decay on their own. All that ever was is embodied in them. There is no mass any more.
Photons don’t ‘experience’ time or distance. It doesn’t matter that we would see them as far apart an in time. They have no clocks and no rulers. They are together all at once.
…
The next big Bang occurs from their singular point and they deliver the next universe that is inherent in them by emitting electrons and positrons which go on to form atoms.
Alternately:
Since light photons are timeless and spaceless, Everything happens in an instant at infinite speed at a point before the Big Bang, this containing the universe from beginning to end; however, it takes time to play out, given that there is a lot of mass in between the start and the end, making the speed of light to be finite. It’s like a time-dilated broadcast.
The universe must ever steer toward the blended symmetry order at the end, from its grouping order of matter and antimatter at the start, plus steering a path in between lumpiness and smoothness, this then bringing out all that has to occur in between for those two boundaries.
Already There
Light’s full speed in a true vacuum
Of no time and no space is as ‘infinite’,
For it is already everywhere;
In other words: everywhere in no time.
The Zero-Point Extended
This point of creation-annihilation
Is extended into a faux reality,
Both by finite consciousness and by
Light slowed by virtual particle pairs.
Light/Matter
Light photons colliding make for
Electrons and positrons, and vice-versa,
With the forward-time of photons being
Canceled by the backward-time gravitons.
Phantasmal Being
Each ‘now’ that’s created and recreated
Over the various relative quanta
Has really already happened, coming, going,
And never ever returning, gone in a flash.
Once Upon a ‘Time’
Of course, it did all really happen ‘once’,
As in all-at-once, in the timeless realm
That must be the state of the ‘eternal’ IS,
With IS being close to what’s called the ‘Wiz’.
The Play
Our ‘reality’ is as a flip-book’s pages turning,
The still pictures changing a bit, granting
An apparent motion, such as in a movie;
However, we do get to experience it!
Come and Gone
Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.
Being Nothingness
Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.
The Mechanics of Reality
The result, being the message, is undeniable,
But herein we speak of the messenger,
Which is the implementation,
As that of a recording, over a live band.
What Makes No Difference is No Difference
There is no difference in what makes none;
‘Eternalism’ is now playing, the living film—
A reality show in the inner theater
Of the mind’s eye, with the ‘I’ observing.
Uncaused
For what is causeless there is no point
At which any specific direction
Can be imparted to it; thus, there is none:
Everything that is possible can happen.
The Shimmering Gleam
We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.
Here and Now Seeming
We are as beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though frames of time that quench life’s thirst.
Nowhere Man/Woman
Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light eternal of all time to be known.
A Brief History of All History
Alice looked to the stars and remarked, “I’ve come such a long way to be here, with you both, but my possibility was there in the beginning, with me spread all over the place. Now with you two in Honolulu.
“I’m taking a cosmology course from Professor Victor Stenger, the guy you play tennis with, Patrick, and the final exam is coming, so I’m going to practice for it now, adding in some reflections of my own.”
“The Planck era at 1E-43 seconds was the first hint of me, as a cyclical compactfication or a vacuum fluctuation eruption in an indefinite realm that’s as close to Nothing as can be, but it can’t be a Nothing as such, since that would be a definite, whereas the vacuum as the basic something must be fuzzy, uncaused, and so zero is out. Motion can’t cease or all would come to a standstill. ‘Stillness’, like ‘Nothing’, is impossible.
“To learn the Secrets of what IS and ever WAS, we must brave the crypt and ghost of cause. The quantum foam as quantum fields is ever and always, and has pairs of virtual particles quick appearing and then annihilating and disappearing, as noise, in a kind of sub-existence when not anything forms to persist. They are somethings, as one might even call possibility or potential, but are not yet as true, meaningful existence until they become part of an information process and thus endure. This state has always been, and must be, so jot: that this All is ever here to be, since ‘Nothing’ cannot.
“Here we fathom the cryptic, where the shade of substance slept with arithmetic. There is a basic lightness of being because anything more would then be of parts, and thus lie beyond the fundamental arts. The impossible ‘Full’ joins the impossible ‘Null’ in oblivion.
“So, where the causeless reigns supreme, the spark nursed by embers is the first that the universe remembers when it fires toward the other members in a processing way. The opposite twins as virtual pairs rule the causing call, these positives and negatives constituting the All.
“It proceeds very quickly. At 1E-36 seconds, in a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) transition, the strong force separates from the electro–weak force, the strong force providing for stability and the weak force for changeability.
“Inflation begins, as a slow rolling scalar field generates negative pressure, causing an exponential expansion of spacetime. The doubling is of a vacuum energy density of 1E73 tons/cm^3. Quantum fluctuations lock in nearly scale invariant 1E-5 variation in energy density. Inflation was so fast that some virtual particles couldn’t recombine, thus becoming real. Here the enigma of the ever immortal is undone and unloosed through its portal.
“At 1E-34 seconds, inflation quickly ends, the decay of the scalar inflaton field causing reheating. Is this the ‘let there be light moment’? No, photons don’t exist yet, but other massless vector quanta like left and right weak and B-L particles may exist. Things are not well known about this era. I am still a twinkling in the cosmic eye.
“At1E-34 to 1E-8 seconds, in the quark era, there is the quark gluon plasma, and then quarks and perhaps proposed super partner particles dominate matter content.
“At 1E-17 to 1E-15 seconds, SUSY (supersymmetry) breaking occurs when proposed super partners acquire mass with the LSP (lightest supersymmetric particle) expected to have a mass of about 10 Tev. In induced gravity models, this is where mass energy first generates the induced gravity field; gravity is born. I am grounded.
“At 1E-10 seconds, there comes the electroweak transition, when the electroweak force, under the action of the Higgs mechanism breaks symmetry. The photon is born. The Standard Model particles acquire mass.
“Lo! The quantum fields guide me, as illumination beside me, having produced the elementary particles, while the mind whirls round and round, as the ear draws forth the sound, as the eye sees the light, and of the dark the fright. Fear not the proof—it’s the beauty of the truth.
“At 1E-5 seconds, quark confinement comes about when the QCD (Quantum chromodynamics) vacuum becomes superconducting to color magnetic current. Quarks and gluons become confined.
“At 1E-5 to 1 E-4 seconds, in the hadron era, protons, neutrons, and pions, etc., form. Now my future atoms are on the horizon.
“At 1E-4 seconds, hadron annihilation occurs during a brief period of proton/anti proton and neutron/anti neutron annihilation. A slight favoring of matter over anti matter, possibly locked in by CP violation by the neutrinos being only left-handed (CP is the combination of charge symmetry and parity symmetry) at reheating allows some excess protons and neutrons to survive, with ten billion photons for every matter particle, which tells us how many annihilations there were.
“At 1E-4 to 10 seconds, in the next era, leptons are the dominant energy density, such as electrons.
“We are up to about one second after the Big Bang now, at neutrino decoupling, when mass energy falls low enough to free neutrinos, creating the neutrino cosmic background.
“At 10 seconds, electrons and positrons annihilate, leaving a tiny fraction of electrons remaining. At this point the total number of electrons equals the total number of protons. This is a beautiful symmetry.
“From 10 seconds to 57 thousand years is the radiation era, in which photons created from the annihilation of matter and anti-matter dominate the energy density of universe. Light has been let; I will shine.
“At 1-5 minutes, nucleosynthesis begins, as fusion of protons creates helium, deuterium and trace amounts of lithium. A few of my basics are there.
“At 57,000 years, there is matter/radiation equality.
The radiation density (photon and neutrino) and matter density (dark and atomic) are equal. This is because radiation density falls more quickly due to the stretching of the relativistic particles’ wavelengths. Dark matter clumps into structures. Atomic matter begins oscillation due to the battle between gravity and photon pressure generating acoustic oscillations. The first sounds of the new universe come forth as the ‘word’.
“At 380,000 years, there is recombination, when the temperature falls low enough to allow atoms to form; photons decouple. The CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Radiation Background) is born, locking in its structure for us to look back at later—the record of the earliest visible time in the universe.
“For 5 to 200 million years, there is a dark age, as the photons fall into the infra red energy range. The universe goes dark. The atomic gas continues to fall toward the dark matter clumps, which grow more pronounced.
“Near to 100 Million years, the densest clumps halt their expansion and begin collapsing.
“By 200 Million years, the first mini halos form and within these the atomic cloud cools and collapses to make the very first stars whose light brings to an end the dark era. We are totally of stars to be, as stardust.
“At 200 million years, there are the first stars, which are very massive and short lived, but emit some lower atomic elements since this doesn’t require extra energy. They die in violent neuron star collisions or in supernova explosions, filling the cosmos with the higher atomic elements that needed energy to be added, building dust for new stars and the planets of solar systems, and the elements for life.
“At 200 to 800 million years, there is the epoch of ionization, in which the radiation from the stars and possibly the first quasars, ionizes much of the remaining neutral hydrogen and helium. A thin mist returns and partly obscures the CMBR, but future Low Frequency Radio Telescopes may be able to see the epoch of ionization.
“At 1 to 2 billion years, there become infant galaxies, as star groups merge. There are frequent collisions of galaxies, high star birth rates, and high supernova rates. Heavy element production changes the pattern of star formation, making them lower mass, less luminous and longer lived, like second and third generation metallic stars of today that life had to wait for. The stage is set for the emergence of life, although it is still 6 billions years away; the cosmos will then have eyes to see and minds to think, like ours.
“At 2 to 3 billion years, there is a star birth and quasar peak. In the dense environment of frequent galaxy collisions, the star birth rate reaches it maximum, as does the forming and feeding of supermassive black holes, as darkling beasts. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.
“At 6 billion years, there are the first very rich galaxy clusters, since enough time has elapsed for the densest regions to stop expanding and form these clusters.
“At 7 billion years, there is decelerated acceleration.
The effects of dark energy kick in. The universe once again begins to accelerate its expansion rate, but gentler.
“At 8 billion years, the first modern spiral galaxies form, although some elliptical galaxies form in the first billion years, but classic spiral galaxies aren’t seen until at about 5 billion years.
“At 9 billion years, there is matter and dark energy equality, since the falling density of matter, both dark and atomic, become equal to that of dark energy.
“At 9.1 billion years, our sun and Earth form. We are inherent, as ever. Our solar system forms in the outer disk of the Milky Way, a relatively safe place. The stage is set for the emergence of humankind in the Cosmos—for us to meet and love. All this from stabilizations forming, onward and upward, in emergences, taking on a life of their own, and so on.
“At 13.7 billion years, there is the present time. Human civilization perhaps reaches its peak and perhaps begins heading into decline and eventual extinction due to over population, resource depletion, and environmental destruction, which generates conflict as human nation states fight for ever dwindling resources, aggravated by global warming. Hopefully, humankind is not typical and intelligent life solves the problem of balancing intelligent life needs with available resources by developing communitarian economic social structures.
“By the way, all of this is dynamic in time. There cannot be a block universe because it’s infinite into the future, it’s a complexity as First, it can’t have a definite blueprint, and we would not need brains to redundantly figure things out if they were already set, as in a movie, as conglomerations are.
“At 16 to 17 billion years in the future, the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda galaxy. Somewhere within this time our sun enters into its red giant phase, vaporizing the Earth. Humankind, perhaps already extinct for over 4 billion years, is not around here to witness this event, though possibly a new intelligent species who emerged after the extinction of human–kind might be. It will be a very sad time for them unless their technology includes very advanced space flight. We are just a tiny and insignificant spark of all time considered at large, as less than 5% of all matter types.
“At 20 billion years, the growth of structures ceases, for expansion due to dark energy empties each casual patch of the Cosmos. The great story of our universe draws to a close. It was a ride to the middle of nowhere that takes away the meaning of what out baggings meant.
“At 100 billion years, what remains of the Milky Way is alone in its causal patch of the Universe. We are alone.
“At 1000 billion years, which is a trillion, the last stars die, giving rise to the final, silent dark; however, stirring in the vacuum of spacetime itself are the ever present vacuum fluctuations. One small patch quite by some indefinite chance fluctuates sufficiently to create a volume of false vacuum which cuts off from its mother universe by negative pressure, and explodes into a new universe, creating new spacetime and future hope for the emergence of intelligent life in the cosmos. I’m done.”
“Cripes!” I exclaimed, “and that’s only a part of the exam, as the overall scheme, with more details to it.”
Cho added, “Very good, and Patrick and I came up with something like your idea, as Fundamental Possibility, since there’s no point at which to impart any definite plan to Totality, given that is has no ‘outside’ and no ‘before’.”
“Yeah,” answered Alice. “Cosmetics is much easier than cosmology, by far; however, I’m so glad to be as me, relating to both of you. We, although distinctive outcroppings of the ‘IS’, as the Cosmos ongoing, aren’t really independent, self goings-on, but are all of the play’s expression continuing and happening from the one big effect of the Big Bang—and that’s what does us all.”
I partially agree with this, except it is a little too us-centered. I'd reverse it and say our conscience takes a part in this far greater conscience, with the overall conscience being infinite.
Partially yes, but there is also a crucial intellectual component to it. It is simultaneously a choice and a feeling, sometimes the feeling leads to the choice, and sometimes the choice leads to the feeling. From my experience, when the choice leads to the feeling, there is generally a much higher level of commitment.
Further adding to this, as a foster parent I've noticed that our ability to love and feel loved is developed in childhood, so when it is lacking the emotions aren't enough to compensate for the intellectual aspect that is missing. In the vacuum of love we develop large ego's and become so self-centered we can no longer feel empathy for others. 1/3 of the kid's I've had were sexually abused, and this love-vacuum has formed numerous kids to be abusers of other children, I've known of 5 at this point. I had an 8 year old who tried burning my house down, by 11 he had caused permanent eye damage to a gal in a facility. I've had numerous other problems I won't mention here. But there is one commonality: none of them have any idea how much they are hurting others. They have the emotions, but there is a brokenness to them, and a brokenness to the intellectual understanding of love as well. They believe themselves to be loving while doing all the opposite things. To simplify love as being only a feeling is a grave mistake, but understanding it more fully is also an almost impossible task without understanding the greater component of existence in general. I don't think love belongs to humans, but is something humans partake of, even if imperfectly.
This is a sad story, yet, we wouldn't even be around were it not for evolution doing as it had to do, granting a barbaric life for millions of years to all the hominids who came before, and to the whole tree of life beneath that. Even now, from evolution's 'design' of human nature without a designer (who would have done it much better out of Love) the times are still tough in many places, and will be getting worse from global warming and viruses, which is a large opening for evolution to weed the silly from the wise, to sift the best from the rest in terms of survival (the unvaccinated will die).
From tsihcrana:
[i]The [computer] program would, by pure doggedness 'and accident', eventually simulate the universe* (and probably create several AIs on the way). In that simulation would be 'beings' who think they are real, alive, and conscious, but who are ultimately just code adhering to the rules of the program. They're not special or unique or serve any purpose to the computer running the simulation. The simulation doesn't care about their plight or take anything from their existence. It just runs the code.
We're just the same: created by eons of chance/change and ruled by the genetic 'code' that haphazardly arose from those changes, unaware of our mechanical nature and liable to ascribe meaning to things because that's what our 'code' has us do. When genetics arose that said "oh, what's the point of existence?" and killed itself those genes obviously didn't endure. We are the descendants of genetics that thought life was meaningful only because the alternative (thinking life is meaningless) isn't long-term viable. Mutations that led to life that didn't want to live led also to early demise for those organisms, so a 'desire to live' set of genes will always populate the gene-pool. Life is no more meaningful than that. All that we care about we care about because it aides survival, and all that we fear we fear only because it threatens survival.
The universe is populated with these immortal particles that obey laws. Those laws lead to change, and by accretion those changes lead to complexity. The universe says "change everything" and let what what is stable, or what is complex (in the right way), endure. We are what endures, and nothing more.[/i]
Of the Cosmos’ Poetic Universe[/b]
All the temporary complexities
From the Eterne must someday fade away,
Namely, our universe with its grandness
Dispersing its greatness into blandness.
In between, the Basis writes a story
That gets lived by the transients within,
As us and all the stars, moons, and planets—
In one book from the Babel Library.
What’s Fundamental has to be partless,
Permanent and e’er remain as itself;
Thus, it can only form temporaries
Upward as rearrangements of itself.
The ‘vacuum’ has to e’er jitter and sing,
This base existent forced as something,
Given the nonexistence of a ‘Nothing’;
If it tries to be zero, it cannot.
At the indefinite quantum level,
Zero must be fuzzy, not definite;
So it can’t be zero, but has to be
As that which is ever up to something.
What’s continuous means a field, naught else,
That waves; ‘Stillness’ is impossible.
A field has a changing value everywhere,
For the ‘vacuum’ e’er has to fluctuate.
The fields overlap and can interact;
So, there is one overall field as All.
It’s the basis of all that is possible—
With another forced default of motion.
From field points moving in their one degree
Quantum field waverings have to result
From their dragging e’er on one another.
As sums of harmonic oscillators,
Fields can only form their elementaries
At stable quanta energy levels;
Other excitation levels don’t persist.
Since the quantum fields are everywhere,
The elementaries as kinks can move
To anyplace in the realms of the fields;
As in a rope, only the quanta move.
At each level of organization
Of temporaries in the universe
New capabilities become available,
And so they take on a life of their own
In addition to what gives rise to them.
The great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
As the strands of quantum fields’ webs of waves
That weave the warp, weft, and woof, uni-versed,
Into being’s fabric of Earth’s living braids.
Quantum fields are the fundamental stroke
Whose excitations at harmonics cloak
The field quanta with stability
To persist and obtain mobility.
As letters of the Cosmic alphabet,
The elementary particles beget,
Combining to words to write the story
Of the stars, atoms, cells, and life’s glory.
This is the Poetic Universe.
The weave of the quantum fields as strokes writes
The letters of the elemental bytes—
The alphabet of the standard model,
Atoms then forming the stars’ words whose mights
Merge to form molecules, as the phrases,
On to proteins/cells, as verse sentences,
In to organisms ‘stanza paragraphs,
And to the poem stories of the species.
Of this concordance of literature,
We’re the Cosmos’ poetic adventure,
Sentient poems being unified-verses,
As both the contained and the container.
We are both essence and form, as poems versed,
Ever unveiling this life’s deeper thirsts,
As new riches, through strokes, letters, phonemes,
Words, phrases, and sentences—uni versed.
We have rhythm, reason, rhyme, meter, sense,
Metric, melody, and beauty’s true pense,
Revealed through life’s participation,
From the latent whence into us hence.
From quantum non-locality entanglement,
We know that information’s primary
Over distance, that objects don’t have to
Be near each other to have relation.
Everything connected to everything
Would seem to be a ‘perception’ as an
All-at-onceness, so a particle
Might ‘know’ something about what to do.
Informationally derived meanings
Unify in non-reductive gleanings,
In a relational reality,
Through the semantical life happenings.
This is a realm of happenings, not things,
For ‘things’ don’t remain the same on time’s wings.
What remains through time are processes—
Relations between different systems.
Syntactical information exchange,
Without breaking of the holistic range,
Reveals the epic whole of nature’s poetics,
Within her requisite of ongoing change.
So there’s form before gloried substance,
Relationality before the chance
Of material impressions rising,
Traced in our world from the gestalt’s dance.
All lives in the multi–dimensional spaces
Of basic superpositional traces
Of Possibility, as like the whirl’s
Probable clouds of distributed paces.
What remains unchanged over time are All’s
Properties that find expression, as laws,
Of the conservation of energy,
Momentum, and electric charge—unpaused.
A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth.
A poem is both the thought and the presence,
An object born from one’s profoundest sense,
An image of diction, feeling, and rhythm;
It’s both the existence and the essence.
Poetry makes clear what’s just barely heard,
For it translates soul-language into words,
Whereas, music plays right on the heartstrings;
Merged, they create song; heart and soul converge.
Poems are renderings of the soul’s spirit,
The highest power of language and wit.
The reader then translates back to spirit;
If the soul responds, then a poem you’ve writ!
…
Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be!
Such as Nought, Stillness, and Permanence,
As well as Apart, Beginning, and End,
The Unfixed Will, Blame, Fame, and Theity.
…
When the universe ends, sparse photons left,
All splendor, life, and objects will have gone
The way that all temporaries must go,
To oblivion—oh, grand complexities!
Only the Eternal Basis remains
As potential for all possible books
In Everything’s Great Repository
To author another universe’s story.
I had the very same thought and questions based on this argument years ago. It’s nice to see these ideas resurfacing independently through other peoples logic/ thought process.
The issue I have is resolving the fact that everything must have an opposite in order to be manifest. As we know there are physical things which act so there must be non physical things that do not act. It’s like if there was only “white” and no black we would not be aware of the whiteness and ultimately white loses its significance/meaning as it cannot be defined - it has no parameters or contrast with anything.
This is where time and empty space/ void comes in. I believe they are qualities of energy. Because without them energy could not act (time) or be physical (space) as matter. I try to explain it as 0 = -1 +1. Zero is the whole, +1 is energy/matter and -1 = space time. They mutually permit the existence of each others qualities. When combined they are ultimately nothing but potential - the singularity.
Potential is not nothing but it also isn’t anything. It’s a “capacity” to be. And potential can be broken into its four qualities: the space to be, the time to be, being (the physical) and the action to become (energy)
What is the opposite of Benj96? There are many people who are different from you, but that doesn't make them opposites. Not everything needs an opposite. What is the opposite of blue? Black, but then that is the same for red, green, ultraviolet, infrared... So the same opposite exists for multiple things meaning it isn't a true 180 degree opposite like left and right or north and south.
Quoting Benj96
The words "nothing" and "anything" refer to different categories of existence here. There are multiple planes of existence--physical, emotional, intellectual, virtual, spatial, etc. They all exist, and they all interact with each other, but whenever I listen to someone try and explain all other planes of existence in terms of the physical alone, it is like watching them shove a square peg in a round hole. Obviously, potential doesn't fit completely in the physical plane alone, thus you make this response implying it fits better on a different plane (but still exists).