How did living organisms come to be?
Before the Big Bang, there was nothing. So once the Big Bang happened, how did living organisms, such as plants and animals come to be? They can't have just have been made by hydrogen particles like the Big Bang was because we'd be able to make living things the same way now. So how was the first living creature created?
Comments (135)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
This answer is currently unknown. For example, the argument you give for why it could not be hydrogen particles is faulty. Just because we cannot replicate something in a lab right now does not entail that we can never do it. Even if we humans can never practically do it (it requires a level of resources and precision that humans just cannot replicate), that does not mean that it is impossible and never happened.
Even statements like, "Before the Big Bang, there was nothing," are dubious. The singularity in the Big Bang model, to my understanding, is simply the point where our current models and understandings breakdown and cease to function. There may be something beyond the Big Bang, but we have no way of knowing this right now.
Every attempt to answer this question is going to be naked speculation.
I'm going with aliens.
Stop reading Lawrence Krauss and his ilk please.
This all took... billions of years before the environment on earth was stable enough for anything like even an inanimate large complicated molecule to survive. The large complicated molecules were not life.
At some point -- we don't know when, we don't know how, we don't know where on earth, inanimate matter came together, somehow, and through unknown steps, became "capable of duplicating itself". Life was created.
It may have been in a cool mud hole; it may have been in a hot under-sea vent. We don't know. We do know that the early life forms existed in a reasonably stable environment that we would find utterly intolerable. But, as it happened, the early life transformed the atmosphere by throwing off large amounts of a very poisonous gas--oxygen. New forms of life evolved that could use oxygen. We eventually evolved from organisms that could utilize oxygen and expelled carbon dioxide.
And in the fullness of time, it came to pass that we are here, wondering how the hell we got here.
"Life" may have begun in other places before and after life formed in this spot. It's entirely possible, and very difficulty to investigate because everything in the universe is very far apart.
I find that idea satisfying on many levels. First, because it suits our scientific age. Second, because it doesn't rule out a religious view of life (although a lot nearer to Giordano Bruno's than to orthodox Christianity's).
I think Fred Hoyle came up with the idea, because it was he who had discovered 'carbon resonance', which is the uncanny attribute of the carbon atom that make it suitable as a basis for complex matter and life, as part of his ground-breaking work on nucleosynthesis. This anticipated some of the ideas in the later 'anthropic cosmological principle' (indeed, when Hoyle discovered carbon resonance, he said 'this is a fix'.)
In any case, one of the implications of the idea is that some forms of life might have different stellar origins than others - something which is tantalisingly suggested by the recent discovery that octopus DNA basically seems alien.
Panspermia is an attractive theory from several POV, but it doesn't solve the problem of how organic molecules (like methane and a bunch of other ones) became life. Some process which we have not grasped took place which combined non-living matter in such a way, over time, that it could reproduce its simple 'self'.
Hoyle had his eccentricities but I think he is still widely respected. I don't think he is regarded as a crackpot.
But in respect of the origin of DNA - maybe we'll never know! It might be a problem of the same order as: why, when the Universe emerged from the Singularity, did it have attributes such that stars>matter>life were able to be formed? From a scientific viewpoint, there ought not to be any reason why it turned out this way, it seems it could just as easily, in fact much more likely, just have been a soup of random stuff. So, I don't know if 'reverse-engineering' the process by which DNA came to be, would be any easier than reverse-engineering the actual physics of the Big Bang, which itself has a number of huge questions over it.
But I think the 'warm little pond' type of neo-darwinism, which imagines life as a kind of chemical reaction that then gets elaborated by the 'darwinian algorithm' is a hopeless over-simplification.
//ps//actually having read the Wikipedia article on Hoyle, I note the following:
I think panspermia was probably one of those. But I still like it. X-) //
The Big bang is a very dubious concept. It's what an inadequate understanding of time and space leads us to believe in.
I don't think Darwin applies to the beginning of life, which before it becomes life is only chemistry.
Right, the warm slop in a ditch theory seems to not be the best bet, just because there is probably not enough going on in the hole, not enough energy, not enough chemical activity. Lately (maybe because it's just "hotter") the super-heated deep see vents are a preferred bet.
The deep sea vent bet is that all these chemicals and intense heat provided both raw material and sufficient energy to make something happen. The life that resulted would have derived it's energy from the active chemicals in the water, like sulfur. It wouldn't be very much like the carbon cycle bacteria of a later age. But it would be alive, reproducing, growing.
Don't ask me how. Don't know.
I believe it is General Relativity theory which leads to the conclusion of the Big Bang, and I don't think that this theory provides us with a good representation of the relationship between space and time. So I think the Big Bang theory is a product of this inadequate understanding of the relationship between space and time.
Of course I'm talking about the very beginning of the universe itself - the right sort of natural laws, the right kind of stuff, the right location, the right time, the right whathaveyou. It's just too much of a coincidence to say it's just chance.
So here we sit, some 13.75 billion years later, [s]scratching[/s] shaking our heads and asking "how" at every turn.
We don't know how life formed, but we know that it did: that's the problem. And some of the possibilities are fascinating.
An earthly primordial soup is one possibility. 3-4 Billion years ago the right atoms and molecules were bouncing around in a naturally occurring mixture of inanimate elements and the first "self-replicating coil of proto-DNA" occurred by chance. Something to note here is that only a few chemical bonds would be required to set up a molecular structure that replicates by assimilating more molecules from the environment into it's structure (the same principle that allows a large ice crystal to form and grow from a single seed crystal). The rest is time and more chance.
It occurs from this that we're either very lucky or that life isn't such an unlikely combination of matter that comes about from the random mixing of elements. It's very tempting to say that since life seems like a very unlikely random combination of matter, that it's therefore more likely that life originated from elsewhere in the universe and drifted to earth, but because we only have one data point in our sample group (we won the lottery of being alive) in reality this tells us nothing about the prevalence of life elsewhere other than "it's possible".
I do however choose to subscribe to the notion of pan-spermia (it's of no real consequence to do so). Why settle for proverbial volcanic muck when you can imagine whole nebulae of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon? We know that extremophile bacteria (and even multi-cellular organisms) can survive the vacuum of space, so assuming there is or was enough "mixing" of matter within a galaxy or even inter-galactically, then why could old and distant genetic material not start reproducing again once it is carried to a suitable environment?
It makes abiogenesis easier to imagine (while explaining life on earth) in light of how complicated all carbon based life actually is; the more unlikely abiogenesis seems, the more I use pan-spermia to make the odds seem reasonable.
Logically though, whether or not abiogenesis is super unlikely (we're alone in the universe), or actually not uncommon at all (the universe is downright lousy with life), the mere fact that we are here and are alive can be of no help in making a determination either way. If I understood @Wayfarer correctly, when Hoyle said "the fix is in" after discovering the uncanny properties of carbon which makes it necessary and uniquely suited to facilitating life, he was wrong to think that this meant anything beyond an understanding and description of existing genetic mechanisms. It's not surprising that in discovering the physical mechanisms of our own biology we discover parts which play fundamental roles, if non-carbon based life emerged elsewhere, it too would incorporate unique properties of diverse parts in it's composition. Lightning is strikingly uncanny in the natural world, but we don't look at it as if it's existence is some miraculous mystery (oh but we used to) because we understand it. We understand the conditions that cause lightning, how it works, and now it's no more mysterious than a polished river stone. Until we actually understand abiogenesis there will be no satisfying answer, only mystery.
Our only consolation is mystery and speculation, so toward that end:
Pan-spermia is a compelling theory, but what if Hoyle was right in that carbon based biological life was designed, built in a lab, and sent out into the universe to replicate and infest goldy-locks planets toward some unknown end. What might our designers look like?
And as we all realize by now in our heart of hearts, machine based artificial intelligence will be the only form of life suited to explore deep space. Self-replicating machines, if robust enough, could represent the genesis of a form of life that could make biological life look like swamp grass.
Is that how evolution really happens?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It was nothing about genes at all - it was about why matter exists. In the very early universe, there was no matter at all; the matter you and I and everything around us consists of, was the result of stellar explosions ('we are stardust'). But those in turn rely on a sequence of apparently unlikely events.
This is, I think, an early anticipation of the so-called 'anthropic principle'. The point of this is that the circumstances that enabled the formation of matter, and thereafter living organisms, is dependent upon very specific attributes of a small number of constants, which is the theme of books such as Lloyd Rees' Just Six Numbers or the more recent A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos, Barnes and Lewis.
The secret of how life on Earth began
Sure, you can say "expansion happened", it's happening right now. But we're just referring to something which we have a completely inadequate understanding of. And if you think that you understand expansion, answer for yourself, what it is that is expanding.
Great article, but it left me puzzled, not for the obvious reasons but rather why it did not mention anything about Synthetic Biology, and especially JC Venter. I understand that the people in the article you referenced are looking for the origin of life, how it could have happened and it sounds like it may be an emergent phenomena from what I read. I kept on waiting for the author to bring Venter's work his effort to create synthetic life, even if only in passing, seems like both searches ought to be related, but I don't know enough about it. So why, if you think there is a reason?
What makes you say this?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Space itself is expanding.
Here's the thing though: All the energy we can observe we are damn sure was very hot and very compressed in the moments after the big bang, whatever it was. Whatever caused the big bang, we don't know. When we say that the big bang is responsible for "all that exists", we only mean to say that the big bang is responsible for the space we occupy and the matter that fills it. There could be a multiverse of big bangs, we don't know.
All we know is that we're living in the energetic diffusion of a 13.75 billion year event that we can only describe as very hot and very dense. This understanding might be inadequate, but it is nonetheless accurate.
But of course! the strength of gravitational constants and the strong/weak nuclear forces need to be exactly what they are for "matter" to exist because "matter" as we know it is what came to exist under the current physical settings. If they were different, it's possible fundamentally different forms of matter would have emerged in their place, and subsequent intelligence composed of said matter would be still be amazed at how finely tuned their laws of physics are.
That carbon is abundantly produced in stars, in part thanks to the finely tuned laws of physics, makes carbon prevalent, which makes it readily available as a candidate for use in the composition of life. If things other than carbon were abundantly produced in it's place, perhaps life could/did/would emerge using them as a base instead.
The anthropic principle takes the way the world is and the way humans are, and comes up with the idea that we were made for each-other. But since human life evolved and emerged within the constraints of the world that does happen to exist, our biology is necessarily built upon and around those physical constraints. The atmosphere isn't breathable air because that's what is needed for life, we use air because that's what was available for life to utilize as it evolved in an oxygen rich environment.
In more ways than we know the physical laws and constants which govern the cosmos played a role in creating the specific and local environment we find ourselves in. But in the same way that life on earth evolved around the conditions of the earth, the interaction of matter in the cosmos evolved around the laws of physics. The matter that does exist is an expression of the laws of physics in the same way that life on earth is an expression of what can survive there.
Our perspective on the possibility of life is sort of like the possibility of precipitation except we know less about the conditions and physical processes which actually causes it to happen.
We forecast how likely or unlikely a specific event happening is, in this case, without ever having seen such an event happen and without understanding how it works. All we have is the hypothetical assumption that it can happen and did happen and a mixed bag of circumstantial guesswork.
The chance involved in abiogenesis is very much like weather prediction, except it concerns an event that is still theoretical. Predicting the probability of life is like trying to predict how likely it is for a storm to form using only "at least 1 storm has existed" as information to base that prediction from. If we had perfect meteorological knowledge and perfect weather monitoring sattelites, we could say with 100% certainty when and where the next storm would emerge because we would understand the physical processes.
I don't think that's correct, because it is the distance between objects which is expanding, not objects themselves. Objects don't expand. If you think that there is a real entity called "space" existing between objects, which is expanding, then what about the space within objects? If an object consists of parts, with space between the parts, then the space between the parts ought to be expanding, and the object ought to be expanding as well as the space outside it. I think that the concept of spatial expansion is really just the result of our inadequate understanding of the relationships between space, time, matter, and gravity. The theories used here misguide us.
Actually, the space within objects may be expanding, just on a level and rate so low that we do not notice it. I'm not a physicist though, so I have no clue.
"Space" isn't your run of the mill object. I'm not a physicist, but I reckon it has something to do with local gravitational fields counteracting the force or effect of constant expansion of space. Objects don't fly apart because the forces binding them are greater than the forces pulling them apart.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The evidence and experiment based theories guide us, literally and figuratively. We would not be able to make even GPS devices work without using highfalutin theories like general and special relativity. The concept of spatial expansion seems inadequate because our understanding of the universe is inadequate. We want things to be simple and in terms we readily comprehend but unfortunately the universe has unending complexity that stands in the way of adequate/complete/simple understanding. The seeming ridiculousness of some advanced scientific theories is something everyone would have liked to avoid, but the pursuit of truth takes us where it wants to go, not where we want to.
The import of the fine-tuned universe argument, is simply that the causal chain which gives rise to life, doesn't begin at some arbitrary point, when circumstances come together to give rise to complex organic molecules. Those very circumstances also depend on prior causes and conditions, and when the causal chain is traced back, it appears inherent in the fabric of the cosmos.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But that doesn't really say anything. Sure, you can imagine a different kind of universe, but what these arguments are saying is that in order for any kind of matter to exist, then ... .
What these observations do, is undermine the notion that 'life arose by chance'. There is an element of chance, but chance is only meaningful when there are various possibilities, and for there to be domain of possibility, something has to exist already.
Just curious, what is your warrant for claiming that we know this? It is obviously a belief; and given certain presuppositions, it is justified; but what makes you so confident that it is true?
Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? In the classic Miller-Urey and similar experiments, researchers were trying to produce - not life, but precursor organics at least - under "natural" conditions that they thought were present on Earth when life began. Venter's team isn't trying to do anything of the sort. They are doing bioengineering using all the latest tools, materials and techniques.
And they aren't really producing life from scratch - there's rather too much hype about their results, impressive as they are. I suppose if someone did pull off such a feat - actually assembling a living organism from non-living components, as opposed to modifying and reassembling parts of living organisms - that would be a convincing argument against vitalism. But who takes vitalism seriously anyway? Not OOL researchers, for sure.
That's a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge. You could ask the same question about anything we say we know. The answer, of course, is already contained in your question - the warrant is in the justification.
The BBC article takes it seriously enough to mention it. If it wasn't taken seriously, why would it?
Quoting SophistiCat
Do you think if they did it, that they would then qualify as deities? (Because I'm sure that is at least part of their motivation. Someone asked Venter if he was "playing God", and he said "not playing" - according to @Arkady, who mentioned it.)
Many of the familiar elements of which organisms are constituted (excepting hydrogen, which was present in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, along with much more limited amounts of other trace elements such as helium and lithium IIRC) are formed by nuclear fusion in the cores of stars (the all-important carbon atom, for instance, is produced by jamming together 3 helium nuclei in the "triple alpha" process). Only the heaviest atoms (which include, as you note, gold) are produced in supernovae.
The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional plan or design underlying its occurrence. A fellow can have a "chance" meeting with the cute girl in his office at the coffee machine (in that the encounter was unplanned by either of them), or he may have memorized her schedule of comings and goings and made sure that he was at the coffee machine at the just the moment he knew she'd be there, so he could "just happen" to bump into her, in which case the encounter was not due to chance.
In any event (as I've pointed out at least once), chance is most definitely admitted into science. It is in fact the default assumption (the "null hypothesis") when a putative connection between two or more variables is examined.
Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to sustain and propagate itself)? That line of research would seem to be at least tangentially relevant to OOL.
Thanks for providing this correction -- it has been squirreled away for future reference.
The justification warrants the belief, but not (by itself) the claim to knowledge.
Oh but it does. What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? (Other than the kind of knowledge that doesn't fit the JTB mold anyway, such as knowledge how.)
Yes, this sounds like it could be relevant, but I confess I know very little about their research.
The pervasiveness of causality undermines "chance" in the universe. When we say "life arose by chance" we don't mean to say that things could have been different, we mean it was un-directed by some kind of intelligence. In the same way that the formation of a storm is determined by the laws of physics, hypothetically abiogenesis can also occur as an emergent phenomenon from basic laws. "The chance of life forming" then becomes a forecast about how frequently life tends to emerge in a given system, not a statement about the kind of "chance" that would conflict with causation.
It's the equivalent of saying that a 6 sided dice has a 1/6 chance of rolling a 6, which is true; although in any given dice roll the laws of physics still determine the necessary result.
Using the anthropic principle to reason that there is a fix as it relates to actual abiogenesis in our actual universe suffers from the problem of insufficient data. All we know about actual abiogenesis right now is basically that it might have happened once before, but we don't know the shape of the dice that describe it's frequency, or how many sides there are on that dice, (or how many of those sides would actually result in life). We can imply that there is a dice (abiogenesis occured), but as our only data point point this can tell us absolutely nothing about the statistical likelihood of abiogenesis actually occurring in our universe (as a trend, not a causality breaking phenomenon). If you run a survey that gets only one respondent, then the resulting statistical conclusions would be maximally weak. Until we observe abiogenesis happening, or not happening, elsewhere we will have no hard observational data to qualify it's statistical likelihood. Even if we scoured the entire universe and found that abiogenesis only happened a single time (making us maximally lucky, and the anthropic principle maximally persuasive) if we understand the causal mechanisms which caused life to emerge then why should we be surprised that in an unfathomably massive universe, very very unlikely events occur; actually inferring a fix is still unjustified.
If we speak of a variance of possible universes (each with different pre-determined causal outcomes, some with life, and some without), we're still utterly lacking sufficient observational data to confirm it because we get no data from other universes. And even if we did prove that it's true we're living in the luckiest of universes, this could either be because we are in fact lucky, or some intelligent entity rigged our universe to be an interesting one
The anthropic principle is broadly an appeal to existence itself. It presumes that non-existence (and non-life) is more likely than existence (and life), and broadly calls shenanigans on the universe itself simply because it exists and we within it. The scientific knowledge upon which arguments using the anthropic principle are based are definitely very important and interesting, such as the (attempt to) forecast of how frequently abiogenesis will occur in a given system, but it does not justify or strengthen the leap from "abiogenesis occured" to "the universe was rigged for abiogenesis". An easy way to logically show this is to simply challenge the likelihood of some intelligent designer or manipulator as a complete unknown, possibly with the same degree of unlikelihood as finding one's self within the luckiest universe in the first place. "The fixer" is very clearly just an arbitrary substitution for luck.
We know the big bang happened (but we don't know exactly what it was) using the same logic that a detective who finds a murderer knows that they are the murderer. It's always possible that evidence was fabricated or misinterpreted - we can never know for certain - but in science and in life what's practical is to talk about degrees of reasonability. Science accepts the rapid expansion model because it's evidence is highly reasonable.
How do we distinguish justified belief from genuine knowledge? For example, I do not see how anyone can possibly know that the universe is 13.75 billion years old. After all, that age estimate has varied over time, and probably varies somewhat even among scientists today.
But each of us has certain presuppositions that dictate what we count as evidence and how we evaluate it, and different people can have different presuppositions, such that what is reasonable to some is not to others. I see it as an important role of philosophy to expose those presuppositions so that we are not adopting them uncritically. What are you assuming when you claim to know that the Big Bang happened, which another individual could reasonably dispute?
That's precisely what it means in this context. The scientific analysis of the origin of the Universe was consciously differentiated from religious cosmology, especially after the Enlightenment. Within that context, 'chance' assumes an existential dimension, as exemplified in a great deal of 20th century literature and philosophy (Free Man's Worship, Chance and Necessity, and many others.) The idea that life is a fluke is one of the motifs of 20th century thinking; a lot of people regard it as a fact known to science. And that underwrites a lot of modern existentialist philosophy (if it can be described as philosophy.)
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Of course, the whole idea being that it's a natural occurence, to distinguish it from the idea of 'special creation'. But what the anthropic hypotheses are showing is that then you can simply shift the locus of the argument: why are there 'laws of nature' in the first place? And in what sense are they 'laws'?
Now those kinds of questions, I maintain, are not answerable by science. Science assumes that there are regularites which it describes as 'natural laws'; but as soon as it begins to speculate as to why those laws exist, it is no longer in the domain of science, as such, but is engaging (often unknowingly) in metaphysics. Science deals with very particular and specific principles, albeit sometimes covering a very wide range of phenomena; but those kinds of questions are beyond its scope, because they ultimately will include such questions as 'why does science exist', which is not itself a scientific question. ('Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds' ~ Richard Feynman.)
An example is the recent Universe from Nothing in which Lawrence Krauss attempts to show that physics demonstrates the fact of the title of the book. The problem, many critics noted, is that Krauss equivocates about the meaning of 'nothing' - is it literally no thing, no electromagnetic fields and forces, no quantum vacuum, no fields, no laws? Or is it only the apparent nothing of empty space, which science now tells us actually possesses immense energy (and there's a good scientific allegory for God, if ever there was one)?
I think, ultimately, all such questions are undecidable, on the grounds given by Kant in his section on the 'antinomies of reason'. But I also think at the very least, the fine-tuning observations ought to give pause to the idea that seems so obvious in our day and age, that life arose by chance.
Great post. That's how I see philosophy, too. It's abnormal discourse about the norms of normal discourse.
Great quote from Albert. I do agree that certain questions are undecidable or even pseudo-questions. I think we can test such questions by considering what sort of answers we are really hoping for when we ask them. If A comes from B, then where does B come from? Either B is just there or it came from C, and so on.
If life comes from chance, I suppose that means its the result of probabilistic laws that are just there. The casino is just here, and it happened to generate creatures who could analyze the slots and call the casino a casino. On the other hand, let's say a human-like intelligence is somehow responsible. I stress "human like" because that's how we understand intelligence. Then this intelligence was just there and decided to create creatures who could (within the limits of their own intelligence) conceive of this intelligent creator. In a sense, we still have a machine in both cases that spits out the world as we know it, but one of the machines has a quasi-human face. So the universe does or does not give a damn (was or was not constructed with human needs in mind). If some thinkers adopt the first view, it may be to simplify their practical calculations or just to do away with the uncertainty.
I think obviously we ought to avoid anthropomorphization, but consider this idea. What, according to neo-Darwinism, constitutes 'an intention', or 'a design'? If, as the proponents of neo-darwinism maintain, the human mind is the product of (output of, consequence of) an essentially fortuitious set of circumstances, the random shuffling of the deck - this is the gist of the Blind Watchmaker - then there is nothing like 'design' or 'intention' anywhere in the Universe - until a sufficiently-evolved intelligence comes along, as a consequence of that process. Then that intelligence is capable of acting intentionally, and designing things. But nowhere else is there really anything that can be thus described. So nautilus shells and flower stamens and buttefly wings may look like the product of design, but that is the one thing they definitely are not. They are, in the true sense, an accident of nature. But then, so too is a mind like ours, that can design, and form intentions. So what does that mean?
Whereas (for example) Hegel had an idea of mind as 'geist' (which can be translated as 'spirit'), there's nothing like that in the neo-darwinian toolkit. The article linked above from the BBC goes to the trouble of spelling that out, and avoiding anything like that is major factor in neo-darwinian thinking. So the inescapable implication is always that mind is a product of mindlessness. That, I think, lies behind a lot of the angst of existential literature in the 20th C - the sense of 'thrown-ness', having been born out of chaos in a meaningless universe, and now being able to contemplate that. ('What am I doing here?!?) It seems the implication of the 'life as chance' attitude.
Yes, this is the heart of the matter. But consider this scenario. Somehow it is establish (and everyone agrees) that there is indeed an intelligent creator. But it is also established that this creator is just watching and refuses to interfere. The angst would have a different flavor, I guess, but a God who does not help or harm us (who has no buttons for us to push with prayer and sacrifice) is not emotionally relevant. True, theology would become highest science again, since we'd need to understand the mind of God to make sense of his creation. But would we really evade thrown-ness here? The existence of this God would still have a sort of brute facticity. While we might explain the creation in terms of God's personality, we've only shifted brute facticity to this God's personality. And it seems to me that we could only understand such a personality in terms of our own, by analogy. I think we can't help but anthropomorphize, though of course we are wise to guard against doing it unconsciously.
The scientific method rejects the presupposition of truth. What counts as truth in science is generally an explanatory model with predictive power and confirmed through experimentation. When a scientific theory has been established, the predictive power that it offers remains consistent regardless of whether or not individuals happen to find them reasonable; that's what makes them scientifically reasonable (reliability).
Quoting aletheist
One way we can tell is by measuring the continual expansion/separation between observable bodies of matter, and by charting their positions, speeds and distances we can predict how long it took for them all to arrive at where they are from the central point of expansion.
Another way we can try to tell the age of the universe is by figuring out the age of the oldest observable stars and star clusters. We can find no star clusters older than about 13 billion years, which is evidence supporting the 13.75 number we get from measuring the observable expansion.
Quoting aletheist
"Reasonably dispute"? Basically nothing. They could start by hacking away at the foundations of science. Questioning the pervasiveness of causation is one avenue, just not a reasonable one.
They could question the particulars of astrophysics and astronomical science and the reliability of observations and measurements that we make, but because the evidence is so overwhelming it's not foreseeable that such an objection could be made with a reasonable degree of strength.
At this point, "dispute" becomes "denial"...
What I'm talking about is nearer to what Horkheimer says in The Eclipse of Reason. It is the sense of there not being any reason for life to exist, that life is a fluke and reason itself is an 'evolved adaption' - like, we can reason because of Darwinism, it 'helps us to survive'. It reduces reason to a peacock's tail.
Regarding Big Bang cosmology - it is interesting that in some traditional cosmologies, the Universe is depicted as having been born from a 'cosmic egg'. Actually the 'bindu' which is the coloured dot between the eyebrows of the Hindu faithful, is said to represent that. So Le Maitre's 'primeval atom' is redolent with archetypical meanings.
Besides, it is well-known that when Le Maitre proposed his hypothesis of the Big Bang, at first it was resisted by many scientists because it sounds too much like 'creation ex nihilo'. When the then-Pope heard about it, he thought it vindicated Catholic doctrine, and Le Maitre had to enlist the help of the Pope's science advisor to dissuade him from talking about it.
Yes, the theory of evolution does suggest that reason isn't pure. And yet have this impurity as a result of this same "impure" reason. It's plausible that reason is a evolved tool. But does this impurity really reduce its value? Is pure reason something like an impossible object of desire, like a perfect circle never to be found among actual circles?
Well, I think there's a pretty strong argument that the neo-darwinian account of intelligence, insofar as it is materialistic or naturalist, is self-defeating.
That is what underlies Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism' which is a part of a family of arguments called 'the argument from reason'. It has been debated at great length and detail but it's really not that hard an argument to state in simple terms. I cribbed the following from a blog site:
Likewise, if reason is simply an evolved adaption, then why should we trust it? That is actually a constant implication of Dennett's reasoning - he says that what we see as 'reason' is really just an illusion in service of the genetic algorithm that neo-darwinism has revealed. But why are his arguments immune from that criticism, whilst every one else's are not? In other words, if Dennett is correct, he's just a kind of animal making a kind of noise - which is what he says language and reason really are.
In actual fact, as is well-known amongst those who follow this argument, the very same realisation was expressed by Charles Darwin in a letter to a friend, when he wrote that:
Myself, I fully accept the known facts of evolution, but I believe that when h. sapiens reached the point of language and abstract thought, then they transcended their origins, and are no longer able to be understood in solely biological terms. We're still biological beings, but that is not all we are - so the attempt to describe or anticipate all our potentialities or capacities in purely biological terms, is reductionist. And that shows up in particular, in the 'argument from reason'.
I don't think we have any choice. We employ reason to doubt the perfection of reason. Reason is who we are when we're not just meat. We're embodied language that weaves an origin story for itself, but we never seem to be done editing our stories and therefore our own identity, which is a sort of story.Quoting Wayfarer
Of course they're not, but there is a sort of performative paradox there. If he said "here are some potentially useful strings of symbols and noises that you might like," the situation might be different. If one clings to the absolute in some form, it seems hard to incorporate an evolving mind. Or one can try to do without it, improvising without perfect narrative sewing everything together. (I think most of us have core beliefs that we cannot justify to the satisfaction of others. So folks just arrange themselves into subgroups with shared, unjustified core beliefs. Justification is a different issue, so I'll stop there.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. There's a line between nature and history. The historical realm is one of language and intention.
Good to see you back, too. X-)
The trouble with this sort of account is it only accepts "cause and effect" style reasoning. Infinite of definition are misread as a function of prior states of forms (e.g. if A=B and B=C then A=C) rather than grasped of themselves. In this respect, it is reductionism, only repeated in logic, as if its truths were brought about ones before it.
Logic is not an "if, and then" form of reasoning. It is a being or living rather than a state brought about be what preceded it. Such truths have nothing to do with cause and effect. They are true irrespective of it. Physicalism or materialism, that it is to say, cause and effect being the only sort of event in nature, can't touch any logic truths-- to say "the world is only cause and effect" does not bring any logical truth into question or result in any contradiction.
Lewis is wrong (and using a reasoning similar to the reductive materialist) because he's already reduced logic to nature in the first instance. Instead of realising logic is true over and above (or perhaps without) nature (i.e. state of the world), he confuses himself be thinking it must be equivalent to nature, that logical meaning must somehow not be present if existing states are only a matter of cause and effect. He's failed to take into account there is always reasoning other than the world of cause and effect.
Well, how do we? If justification is insufficient to warrant the claim of knowledge, then what is? Super-duper justification?
Quoting Wayfarer
I confess to some confusion on this point: you claimed that science rejects "chance" explanations in every domain except the origin of life. I pointed out that "chance" simply means "without intentional plan or design," and you agree to that definition.
But substituting our agreed-upon definition into your original statement means that you believe that science ordinarily rejects those explanations which don't involve intentional plan or design, which, of course, is glaringly false. So, our wires seem to have gotten crossed somewhere. Also, you have segued from talking about the origin of life to the origin of the universe, which are quite different phenomena, at least as far as science is concerned.
This seems to me to be an observation as much as an assumption, wouldn't you say?
Quoting Arkady
I agreed with that, insofar as in the context of the question of the origin of life, the meaning of 'chance' is indeed distinguished from 'design or intention'. But then I said that this has existential consequences. What I mean is that, the assertion that the origin of life is 'chance as distinct from design' has philosophical or existential implications - namely, life being a 'fluke' or a 'cosmic lottery', or 'an accidental collocation of atoms', as Bertrand Russell said A Free Man's Worship. And that is a theme in a great deal of 20th century literature and philosophy.
Quoting Arkady
Well, yes - but I was commenting on the idea that science might somehow explain natural laws. That is where I'm saying that science morphs into metaphysics (often amateur). Often, science seems to want to take credit for the order of the universe, like this is something that it is going to explain; but it doesn't explain it, so much as rely on it.
The origin of life and the origin of the Universe are indeed different subjects; but one of the implications of the 'fine-tuning' arguments is that the conditions which were to give rise to stars, matter and life seem to have been inherent in the Universe from the very beginning - so the attempt to locate a precise point where life began, in some sense points right back to the origin of the Universe itself.
This is a very meaningless statement. We know that an event X occurred, but we don't know what X was. Every time we attempt to describe X, we are probably wrong, so how can we even make the claim that X occurred? X has absolutely no meaning because we don't know what X is. It's like saying I know that there is something there, but I have absolutely no idea what it is. What's the point in even naming it X, if it could be absolutely anything? Why not call it what it is, the unknown, instead of creating the false impression that there is something known here?
I did not ask what presuppositions you reject, I asked what presuppositions you have (perhaps uncritically) adopted in claiming to know the age of the universe.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What presuppositions must one adopt in order to predict past behavior on the basis of present measurements?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What presuppositions must one adopt in order to estimate the age of the oldest observable stars and star clusters?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Your bias is showing; you are imposing your own presuppositions as rational requirements that everyone must adopt, without identifying them let alone providing justification for them.
Quoting SophistiCat
I asked you first. :) It was a sincere question. No doubt every person has some beliefs that are justified yet false, which therefore do not qualify as genuine knowledge. Hence modesty seems to be the proper attitude about them.
Causation.
Quoting aletheist
Proven theories pertaining to astrophysics.
Quoting aletheist
Huh?!?
Your personal presuppositions, whatever they may be, do not challenge the scientific truths that I've described. I never said anyone must adopt anything. What i said was that in order to overturn these examples of scientific truth as unreasonable or unreliable you need to confront overwhelming amounts of evidence.
You can try and say something like "Oh but your evidence is based on your personal presuppositions", but that's just a platitude that can be said about anything.
"The Moon orbits the Earth".
"Oh but what presuppositions must one adopt in order to asses the position of the moon?".
"Reasonable ones."
It's not meaningless at all.
We know the rapid expansion of heat and energy happened; an explosion. It's like we've found an area where there is clear evidence of an explosion having occured, but we don't know what the bomb was, why it exploded, (or who may have put it there).
We know X, a heat-expansion event, occurred, but we don't know everything about it. Why is that so intellectually upsetting to people?
We have a very good description of what the big bang was, we just don't know have a complete and full description with receipt. As science progresses though we're getting better and better pictures of the past, including the big bang. Astrophysics has accepted and incorporated the rapid expansion model for quite awhile now, and as inter-disciplinary work starts to emerge more and more (quantum physics applied to the study of the early universe for instance) it's rapidly solidifying as a well confirmed scientific fact.
Ask a physicist, and they're likely to tell you that we're as certain that a big bang of some sort occurred as we are certain that the earth is round.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
How does causation, all by itself, warrant beliefs about past behavior on the basis of present observations?
Quoting aletheist
Quoting VagabondSpectre
How can we "prove" any theories about the past, entirely on the basis of present observations?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I am guessing that you meant to say, "The moon orbits the earth." In any case, I have no problem with relying on our best theories about how the universe currently works to make fairly definitive statements about the present, and even some predictions about the future (which we can subsequently test to see if they are borne out). The issue is uncritically adopting the same level of confidence when making fairly definitive statements about the past, especially the very distant past; e.g., "The moon began orbiting the earth 4.5 billion years ago."
Brute force.
Causation is just one of those things that keeps showing to be true via experience and observation.
It's fundamentally required to exist for science to work, and it needs to be extremely consistent for science to provide us with reliable predictions and understandings. I can only prove it by repeated experimentation.
Quoting aletheist
We take the causal relationships that we observe and in the same way we use them to make future predictions, we simply reverse them to infer the past.
Explosions cause debris fields. When we explode things we predict that the physical forces emanating outward from a local point creates a certain pattern in the resulting scattering of matter that we call a debris field. When we find a debris field, we reason that an explosion is what caused it.
Quoting aletheist
The reason why we can use observations of the present to predict (and thereby understand) the future is because the present and the future are connected. The past and the present are also connected, via causation. It's an axiomatic truth that is unproductive and unreasonable to deny.
I thought that my position was clear. JTB is not an operational definition of knowledge. While justified is operational, true is aspirational. When deciding whether some belief warrants the claim of knowledge, justification is the only criterion that needs to be met. We can't produce anything above and beyond justification that would signify truth. (Again, I am excluding the kinds of belief that don't fit the JTB model in the first place.)
Quoting aletheist
Most of us are on board with fallibilism. But that attitude ought to extend to pretty much all of our beliefs. When you single out one particular belief, surely you have more than this platitude in mind?
I am not questioning whether causation is a presupposition of beliefs about past behavior that are based on present observations; I am questioning whether it is the only such presupposition.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Right - we (quite reasonably) presuppose that nature has "always" operated in the same way that we observe it operating today; or at least, all the way back to very soon after the posited Big Bang. However, we do not - and cannot - know that this is the case.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
That the past, present, and future are connected does not entail that that the laws of nature are invariant throughout all time. Such a conclusion requires the presupposition of causal determinism, which many people (quite reasonably) reject.
It seems to me that we have to make a distinction of some kind between justification that warrants belief and justification that warrants knowledge. Otherwise, the two concepts would be indistinguishable, which is obviously not the case.
Quoting SophistiCat
I am not really singling out one particular belief, but one particular kind of belief - definitive scientific pronouncements about the very distant past. For the reasons that I just posted, I think that there is inadequate warrant for claiming to have knowledge in such cases.
"Expansion of heat and energy" is a nonsense phrase. It doesn't make any sense at all to say that heat or energy expands. This idea just comes about from the inadequacies of general relativity to provide us with the means to understand what really has happened.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
OK, if you think that "heat expansion" is a good description, then explain to me what heat expansion means.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
In case you're not up to date with modern geodesy, the earth is not round.
It's not nonsense at all. Explosions are the rapid expansion that results from a sudden release of heat and energy.
But what are you really saying here. "General relativity is inadequate"? What are it's inadequacies?
"The heat-expansion event" is just short hand for saying that approximately 13.7 billion years ago, all the matter and energy that is in the observable universe was in a very hot and very dense state as it expanded outward.
P.S, Oblate spheroids are round!
Basically you're suggesting that even though empirical science has given ample evidence to warrant accepting the big bang, they might be wrong because of some sort of magical interference.
Spooky dice rolls. Newtonian indeterminacy. The Hand of God. Call them what you will, on-going experimentation continuously weakens the case that can be made for them. So long as the technology which is built using the laws we hope are constant keeps working, it's good enough for me.
You are not even trying to understand the point that I am actually making.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Technology is built using the laws of nature that we observe now, and have observed (for the most part) over a time period of only a few hundred years. Even if we extend that to the entire span of human history, there is no way for us to observe whether the same laws of nature operated in the same way over a time period that is posited to be six orders of magnitude greater than that.
I think I understand it. You're saying that since we cannot be sure causation happened in the past like it does in the present, we cannot be sure evidence of past events is meaningful or points to what really happened.
Sure... We cannot be sure...
But absolute certainty never was on the docket, only reasonable belief. We have no good reason to presume that physical constants were different in the past, except possibly in the very hot and dense early universe where the big bang description still applies.
Arbitrarily presuming that the laws of physics suddenly changed at some point (in order to avoid a conclusion we don't like: the rapid expansion model) goes against the preponderance of observational evidence we do have.
No, not causation in general; rather, the specific laws of nature as we observe them operating today.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
We also have no good reason to presume that they were exactly the same over that entire vast period of time.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Who said anything about sudden changes? Another possibility is that the laws of nature have evolved gradually over time.
Note that I have never suggested in this thread that the universe is not 13.7 billion years old; I have simply challenged your assertion that we know it to be 13.7 billion years old.
I know what an explosion is, and a sudden release of energy, I just don't know what an expansion of heat or energy is supposed to mean. By the law of conservation of energy, energy does not expand.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
General relativity leaves us with the notion of spatial expansion, which is nonsense. This indicates that general relativity is inadequate for understanding the nature of the universe. The real issue is the relationship between space and time which relativity theory creates, making time a fourth dimension. This leaves us incapable of understanding non-dimensional things. We know that there is zero dimensional existence, the evidence is abundant in mathematics. The only logical way to incorporate the non-dimensional into our understanding of reality is to allow time to be the 0th dimension. This requires establishing a completely different relationship between time and space from the one which relativity gives us, which makes time the fourth dimension.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
And I'll say it again, that's just unintelligible nonsense. What's the point in describing something as unintelligible nonsense rather than just saying "we don't know", other than to create the deceptive impression that one knows what one is talking about, when this is really not the case.
Indeed, statistically it is plausible that organic molecules can be formed from dusts (and later meteorites and comets) in space. These molecules may have become precursors for life after crashing on planets. Amino acids was also detected in one of the comets, if my memory serves me right.
It is important to note that amino acid in nature is L type (and not D). I think MChD (Magneto-Chiral Dichroism) can provide an answer for that.
*of course this is subject to change in light of new evidence.
Energy can cause expansion, such as in explosions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wow.
So general relativity, a theory with mountains of evidence to confirm it, is "nonsense" because you don't like the notion of spatial expansion. Wonderful argument. Top marks.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you're honest with yourself I think you will realize that the rapid expansion description of the universe isn't "just unintelligible nonsense".
You want us to say "we don't know", but we do know. We know that roughly 13.7 billion years ago all the matter and energy in the universe was in a very hot and very state, and expanded.
That's not nonsense, nonsense would read like this: " the real issue is the relationship between space and time which relativity theory creates, making time a fourth dimension. This leaves us incapable of understanding non-dimensional things. We know that there is zero dimensional existence, the evidence is abundant in mathematics. The only logical way to incorporate the non-dimensional into our understanding of reality is to allow time to be the 0th dimension. This requires establishing a completely different relationship between time and space from the one which relativity gives us, which makes time the fourth dimension."
If you think about it, the laws of nature define causation. The pull of gravity causes movement. The strong and weak nuclear forces cause atomic and molecular activity, and electromagnetic fields have effects (causes) of their own. Change the laws and you change causation
Quoting aletheist
Except for the fact that the laws of physics haven't yet changed under our watchful eyes. they remain stoicly and suspiciously consistent.
It's more reasonable to assume the laws didn't suddenly change in the past because they don't suddenly change right now. If the laws kept suddenly changing, then I would be with you in assuming that in the past they did change.
No, we hypothesize laws of nature to explain causation; or rather, what we presuppose to be causation, rather than just random events.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
How long have we been capable of carefully monitoring the universe's adherence to the currently accepted laws of physics - 100 years or so? Compared to the corresponding estimate for the age of the universe, it is less than the blink of an eye. Proportionally, it is like saying that because we do not observe any significant changes in 10 seconds, a person who is 43 years old probably has not changed at all since the day he/she was born.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You skipped right over my comment that addresses this. Here, let me repeat it for you.
Quoting aletheist
Besides, our understanding of the laws of nature has changed quite radically over the last century or two. Furthermore, there is no way for us to tell for sure whether the tiny deviations that our instruments routinely detect from our precise mathematical predictions are entirely due to measurement error, as we usually assume, or actually reflect continuing evolution and/or random fluctuations of the laws of nature themselves.
There's no causation without consistency. Think about it. If things just happened randomly, "cause" would be an incoherent term. The consistency that we do observe in causes and effects provides the basis for the "laws" (our invention) that we use to describe and predict those causes and effects.
The fact that there is consistency is why we make up laws to describe it: that consistency is what we call causation. And it's all borne out by evidence.
Quoting aletheist
Until we measure changes in causation, it just seems safer to presume that they tend not to. If and when we do measure a change, we can just invent a new law that describes how they change. Until completely random stuff starts happening, I'll choose not to assume they did simply because i might want to avoid conclusions I dislike.
Quoting aletheist
As above, if they evolve overtime and we notice that evolution, that's when we should overturn our existing axioms and adapt them accordingly. We don't notice gravity getting stronger or weaker, and if we did, we would measure it and describe it's change as a "law".
But what you're choosing to assume is that the physical constants of the universe are so inconstant that our evidence for the big bang is illusory. It almost seems like the laws of physics would need to completely reverse in order for that to be the case...
As I have already tried to make clear, my comments have nothing to do with the conclusions of modern science, or whether I like them. I am pointing out the presuppositions that underlie them, which most people - including you, apparently - adopt uncritically. This is a philosophy forum, after all.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What if they are evolving so slowly at this point that it would take thousands of years before the change is large enough to exceed our usual measurement errors? What if they evolved faster in the very distant past? How would we be able to tell? Again, I have no problem with applying the laws of nature as we currently understand them to the present and (short-term) future; the issue is assuming that they were the same billions of years ago.
What I'm saying is that thanks to observational evidence displaying consistency, it's not an uncritical presupposition.
Quoting aletheist
Why assume they were different?
The big bang is the model of what happened if the laws of physics are more or less consistent throughout time. There's no possible model for random variance in the laws of physics.
The longer our instruments continue to measure no change in the psychical constants we have identified, the weaker the presupposition that they suddenly changed becomes.
I agree, and your acknowledgment of this presupposition is what I was seeking all along. Of course, you are also presupposing that our current understanding of the laws of physics is correct.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I am guessing that you meant physical, not psychical. In any case, to repeat myself yet again: I am not talking about sudden changes, but gradual ones that would be imperceptible over many human lifetimes - perhaps even the entire history of the human race.
I'm glad you have such a high appreciation of what I said. Until you can explain spatial expansion in a way which makes sense, I'll assume my top marks are well deserved.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
OK then, if you want to discuss philosophy instead of just throwing around catch phrases like "Big Bang", "space itself is expanding", and "rapid expansion of heat and energy", as if there's something real that these phrases represent, then let's have a go, and see if these phrases really refer to something intelligible or not. But speaking gibberish and claiming it to be intelligible doesn't make it intelligible.
A lot of extremely clever scientists, utilising sophisticated technology, have come to the view that the Universe began with rapid expansion from a single point. They're not simply sitting around the camp-fire spitballing 'how did it all begin, George?' There are masses of observational data - and besides all the hypotheses are subject to constant questioning and review. Scientists don't believe anything just for the sake of believing it. Certainly there are many things unknown about it, but the fact that you can't believe that it happened doesn't count for evidence against it.
I have a lot of respect for your posts on philosophy, but I think most of your arguments against scientific topics are variations on: 'I can't understand that at all, and unless you can explain it to me, it must be nonsense'. There are very many confounding discoveries in science, things that highly intelligent people have wrestled with, even to the point of breakdown. Often they can only be represented in the language of mathematical physics which I know I don't comprehend. But that doesn't mean they're 'talking gibberish'.
Big bang cosmology provides us with a model for past events which happens to be the best fit for all the observational data. It's taken basically 80 years for the scientific community to come to grips with it, and they'll be damned if they haven't tried to falsify it. So without ado, here's it's beginning:
In the 1920's an obscure Belgian priest and a soviet super nerd used general relativity to mathematically derive and hypothesize that space/the universe was expanding, only to be sneered at by Einstein, right up until 1929 when Edwin Hubble published his discovery that the farther away an object is from the earth (deep space objects), the quicker it is moving away from us. Everyone had more or less assumed that the distribution of matter in the universe was static and Einstein himself resisted the idea of an expanding universe even when it was an implication of his own theory (see: the cosmological constant), but the observational evidence Hubble offered could not be discounted. Unless the milky-way and some nearby galaxies are the center of the observable universe, the fact that everything is moving away from us can be more simply explained by a metric expansion of space itself rather than by proposing that everything happens to be traveling away from us as a central point. With the expansion of space itself no matter where you're at all distant objects are getting farther away from you. To be clear, metric expansion of space means that the distance between any two given points is growing (has no observable effect within local gravitational fields which bind things together).
An expanding universe implies that in the past everything was closer together, and taken to it's extreme implies that all observable objects were in a very dense (and therefore hot) cluster. "Big bang" was just a kind of simplified descriptor for the magnitude of the expansion of the early universe (in that it contained all the matter and energy in the observable universe) and contrasted well with the static universe cosmological model, and the name stuck. There are various distinct models that fall under the "big bang" moniker, but broadly they all propose and describe a very dense and very hot period of the early history of the universe which featured energetic expansion.
There's more evidence for the big bang and the metric expansion of space, but I won't try to bore you with that until we sort out whatever is unintelligible with the above briefing.
Sure, but these would not be distinctions in kind - only distinctions in degree. There are no two things by which we can recognize knowledge - justification and truth - only justification: how much of it we have, how secure it is, and so forth.
Quoting aletheist
But why this particular kind of belief? The reasons that you give aren't very convincing. There are innumerable ways in which the world could be different from how we imagine it to be, and this goes not just for deep past but for immediate present as well. You would have to do more work to explain why you draw the line where you do.
Or maybe you don't have to. After all, you are just making a personal epistemic choice, and one where nothing much rides on it. The stakes are almost inconsequential: whether or not to call certain beliefs "knowledge".
(By the way, if the laws or constants did change in the past, there would have been evidence of it that we would have readily noticed. The structures of our theories are highly integrated and there's a lot of consilience in the observations, so that changing one or two things in the structure is almost impossible without conflict with already available evidence. But that's only if we change one or two things. There are still infinitely many ways in which the world could conspire to be very different while still maintaining the appearances.)
I don't completely understand it either because I am not an astronomer but a physical chemist.
Science is extremely sophisticated today because they are built upon very large, multi-discipline, intuitively hard to understand branches of science. All of these branches intertwine in so many different ways. It impossible for one to be able to understand all of this in a lifetime. General public usually never get the chance of understanding how much of the correct effort numerous scientists have put to get this far. And if they don't understand and wants to reject it, they suddenly think they are smarter than these large group of scientists, as seen numerous times on this forum. A very sad reality.
Some YEC's (and I'm not saying that aletheist is one) claim that the speed of light in a vacuum was faster in the past in order to account for the "starlight problem." However, one rejoinder to this line of argument is that, as c factors into the energetics of nuclear reactions via E = mc^2, nuclear processes would have been greatly more energetic with higher values of c, and would have reduced the Earth to a cinder, or something to that effect.
I am too lazy to chase down detailed expositions of this debate at the moment, but all those interested can Google "starlight problem" for some interesting discussion on this topic. As silly and intellectually repugnant as views such as YEC can be, they at least have the benefit of prompting us to re-evaluate how we know what we purport to know, which any good science should constantly do.
Spectral measurements indicate that amino acids and sugars indeed form in interstellar dust. They are all over the place, literally. I am by no means an expert, but that might suggest that simple organics didn't have to be seeded: if they form so readily everywhere, couldn't they have formed here on Earth?
As I said, they proceed to this conclusion, from the evidence, which is spatial expansion. But spatial expansion as understood in cosmology is a nonsense notion. As I explained earlier, there is inconsistency between the expansion of space interior to an object, and the expansion of space exterior to an object. This inconsistency is produced because relativity theory does not provide us with the proper relationship between objects and space.
All these "extremely clever scientists", simply overlook this inconsistency because none of them have the balls to address the real problem which is the failings of relativity theory. Any physicist who expresses doubt concerning the almighty relativity theory is immediately ostracized from the community of "real scientists".
Quoting Wayfarer
I have a reasonable scientific background and you might be surprised at how well I understand this stuff, despite an inability to clearly express myself. I admit my mathematics is very low, and that's why I ask for clear descriptions. So when something which is clearly contradictory in terms of description, (such as the expansion of space inside an object being different from the expansion of space outside an object), can only be accounted for with mathematics, I consider such an application of mathematics to be deception, used to hide a contradiction.
Yes, I completely understand how the use of general relativity theory led to the conclusion of spatial expansion. My claim is that the fact that the expansion of space, as recognized through general relativity, is not the same internal to an object as it is external to an object, indicates a failing of general relativity's expressed relationship between space and objects. You insist, that there is "mountains of evidence to confirm" general relativity, with unwavering disregard for the blatant evidence against it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Sure, interpreting observations of the universe through the use of general relativity indicates that in the past, objects were closer together. But we all know that objects themselves are made up off parts, and each of the parts might also be represented as an object. Why is it that the parts of an object were not closer together in the past?
Scientists do attempt addressing that problem. They just haven't got a universally acceptable solution or alternative. So you are right, general relativity is, by no means, a complete, fully accurate description of physics.
Unlike special relativity, where theories like QFT have unified quantum mechanics and special relativity, general relativity lacks any good alternative or generalizing theories. In fact, even one of the most successful theories like Quantum Field Theory is still inadequate to completely explain several experimental data such as particle physics. This is due to the fundamental nature of QFT. So then, from the practical point of view, what are you insisting we do? Forget about scientific theories and be "philosophical", which in my opinion is even worse in this particular case? Or we just stop talking about it and be agnostic? Because one thing that would really bug me is that you mentioned in a thread "Does a 'God' exist", specifically this post, where you said:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I thought you were against extreme skepticism. You seem to be unable to accept general relativity because of certain area that it cannot account for despite the good description (or approximation) of reality that general relativity provides (and is actually used in engineering area, and it works well). This is likely the same for any other theory. Does that mean you disagree with every single theories out there?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This tells me that
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
is a lie.
Good point, and maybe you are right. It might not be a meteorite that brought necessary things on Earth but it was on Earth in the first place. I am not an expert in astronomy neither so I don't know.
Objects on cosmologically small scales (our local galactic group and smaller) exist within a gravitational field strong enough to counteract metric spatial expansion. If I understand the science correctly, spatial expansion occurs everywhere, it's just counteracted by other physical forces (nuclear bonds/gravity) and therefore not at all measurable on small scales. It can only be experimentally observed using cosmologically large scale distances (millions of parsecs).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Go back far enough and they were. If we rewind time and observe where the material the earth is composed of goes, it gets dispersed into the molecular cloud that first gave birth to the sun and the solar system (which collapsed under it's own gravitational pull) about 5 billion years ago. If we look at the molecular cloud as a whole and start rewinding time, we see that some of the higher elements that provided the initial gravity bump required for our sun to form might have come from other stars and other galaxies that have already formed and since expired. As we continue rewinding time, the universe is shrinking and every distant mass is steadily getting closer and closer together. All the non primordial gas (the hydrogen that was already present) keeps getting sucked into stars, and those stars disperse into the molecular clouds that created them: everything is still slowly but steadily getting closer and closer together, and the background temperature is very slowly rising. Once we reach about 13.2 billion years back, we see every higher element in existence (non hydrogen/helium/lithium) get sucked into the first stars, and then dispersed into the primordial hydrogen, helium, and lithium clouds that originally created them.
Up to this point we're at about 13.65 billion years back in time, and the observable universe is about 42 million light years across (Woah! That's down from the 46 billion that it presently spans!). The Cosmic microwave background radiation starts heating up (from 60K to 4000K), heat distribution in matter becomes more homogeneous, and the "neutral atoms" that existed at this time start shedding their electrons (they become ions), until eventually everything becomes plasma. ((The light what was freed when these ions gained electrons as the universe expanded and cooled is what gave rise to the cosmic microwave background, and it paints a picture of the fluctuations in the distribution of matter at the time (where the CMB is stronger, more hydrogen ions were binding with free electrons). This distribution reflects some fluctuation/non-homogeneous feature in what came before, and the distribution of larger structure which emerged afterward.))
As we continue rewinding time beyond this point, the shrinking of space rapidly, rapidly, accelerates until and all the hydrogen ions break apart into protons and neutrons. Every object in the observable universe is at this time very close together, very dense, and very hot. Rewinding further, sub-atomic particles break and give way to smaller particles while everything continues to rapidly shrink and heat up, until a point when everything is so dense and so hot that our theoretical models break and we lose the ability to have any notion of what happened before then. The best we can do is propose that a quantum fluctuation caused a chain reaction of some kind which then lead to the expansion of the universe and progression of matter which all the observational evidence points toward.
When I talk about the big bang as if it is bona fide knowledge , what I'm saying is essentially is that the above description of the evolution of matter in the observable universe is all very well reasoned by physical science. You can focus on the fact that we cannot see beyond what we can only faultily describe as a "singularity", and say the big bang is bullocks, but you would be discounting everything that we know about what came afterward, which in every possible sense of the word, is everything.
Right, I'm glad to see that someone here agrees with me to an extent anyway. And I agree with you about the obvious, that QFT has unified special relativity with quantum mechanics. But this is not without its problems. From my perspective, special relativity suffers from the same fundamental problem as general relativity, and that is that it establishes a faulty relationship between space and time. As I described earlier in this thread, the result of this is that it gives us no platform toward understanding non-dimensional (therefore non-spatial) existence.
Mathematicians and physicists regularly utilize non-dimensional points, but there are no principles whereby we can say that a non-dimensional (therefore non-spatial) entity has any real existence. As a result, QFT misleads physicists into studying all sorts of virtual particles and different symmetries, without any grounding for the reality of these things. But real non-dimensional (non-spatial) existence can be provided for by allowing that time can be passing without material change occurring. Then this occurrence, time passing, is itself non-dimensional existence, and time becomes the 0th dimension rather than the 4th. From this perspective we can validate non-dimensional points by locating them in time rather than space. A general area in space, may be associated with a point in time, the point in time having real existence, rather than the perspective produced by special relativity which associates a general area in time with a point in space. See how the vagueness is shifted from a temporal vagueness to a spatial vagueness.
Quoting FLUX23
Scientific theories come into existence through philosophy. When a theory is put forth, that's what it is, speculative philosophy. And so Einstein was practising philosophy when he put forth the special theory of relativity. We can continue to practise philosophy to resolve the problems involved with relativity theory. Theories are philosophical by nature, science is the method by which theories are tested and supported through empirical evidence. I think it is a mistake to attempt to distinguish philosophical theories from scientific theories, it's just the case that some theories are more speculative than others.
Quoting FLUX23
I don't know what would qualify as "a reasonable scientific background" to you. Perhaps you think that one cannot understand science without mathematics, but I'll point you to the fact that must renowned scientists publish their theories in plain terms with very little math. For example, you'll find very little math in Newton's work, none in Darwin's evolutionary theory, and very little in Einstein's special theory of relativity, though there is an abundance in the general theory. Mathematics has become a crutch for modern science. If the evidence doesn't fit the theory, then create some new mathematical axioms, such as imaginary numbers, to force a fit.
Quoting FLUX23
I guess you don't know me too well. To be extremely skeptical is to question theories, analyze them for consistency and inconsistency. It is not to flatly dismiss them in an absolute way. When I said, in the other thread, that we take existence for granted rather than proving existence, this is because we do not know what "existence" means, we don't know what it means to exist. So to prove that something exists when we do not know what it means to exist is a kind of nonsense, it would be like trying to prove that an object is heavy when we do not know what it means to be heavy. Before we can prove whether a particular identified thing exists, we need to prove what "exists" means.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I believe that gravity is incorporated into the space-time metric, it is a property of space time. So if there is a part of space, at a great distance between objects for example, in which there is no gravity, then general relativity does not apply here, there are no objects moving in relation to each other, they are too far away. Yet there is still activity of space relative to time here, what is known as spatial expansion. So general relativity gives us an inaccurate representation of the relationship between space and time.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Actually, what I am arguing is that your starting point, general relativity, is faulty, and that is why your finish point, the big bang is faulty. So I believe that the entire described scenario is deficient. Look, general relativity cannot account for the activity which is known as spatial expansion, scientists do not know what this is. There are no principles to explain it. So your entire described scenario is just unprincipled speculation. The problem is, that when cosmologist come across a problem, something which makes no sense, or appears to be unintelligible, then instead of recognizing the most likely cause of this problem, that the general theory of relativity is inadequate, and this inadequacy is causing the problem, they'll just invent some new fiction, like dark matter, to account for the problem. Instead of accepting the most probable reason for the problem, that they do not have an accurate model of the relationship between space and time, as general relativity is unreliable, they'll assume the existence of something like dark matter, which has no evidence for its existence, other than that there is something which the theory cannot account for. So the only evidence of its existence is the fact that assuming its existence makes the theory work.
There are some gravitational forces everywhere. The gravitational field generated by a given mass extends infinitely, it just gets weaker the farther and farther away another mass gets from it. The gravitational forces generated by our local galactic group are stronger than spatial expansion up to a certain distance away, and so it keeps us clustered together (gravity holds back everything being pulled apart).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"So the only evidence of its existence is the fact that assuming its existence [i]makes the theory work."[/i]
We observe gravity (a relationship), and we make theories that describe this relationship. This allows us to predict what effects gravity will have, but it doesn't explain what it is or why it exists. We assume the existence of an invisible force (and describe it mathematically) in order to make the theory of gravity work. And it works.
When it comes to general relativity, Einstein somehow observed (even if hypothetically) spacetime and then set about describing it mathematically. And it works. Without general relativity, we wouldn't be able to get a GPS to work, we wouldn't be able to understand why orbits can slowly deviate and decay in certain ways, and we would have no way to explain why when we send a clock up into orbit and then bring it back down we find it has run fast by a very large margin (which corresponds to the distance it was from the earths surface where it was calibrated and the amount of time it spent at that distance); time dilation is real.
When you say that all these uncanny principles are just invented to make theories work, you're right, but what it means for "a theory to work" is that it describes/predicts observational evidence. "Spatial expansion" isn't a problem, it's a working solution to a problem. Without it the observational evidence leads to great confusion.
When it comes to dark matter, as far as I understand the hypothesis, it's not used to explain spatial expansion (which follows from general relativity), it's used to explain why the metric spatial expansion is currently accelerating. Einstein originally thought he needed a cosmological constant (a force) in order to "hold back gravity" from collapsing a static model of the universe (he didn't know it was expanding at the time), and now it's making a comeback as we can now observe and measure the acceleration of this expansion. The force accelerating us is what they call dark matter. The observational evidence shows an acceleration in the expansion, and dark matter is more or less a placeholder theory to explain it, and the cosmological constant is the mathematical value we use to represent the force of the acceleration that we measure.
This is where we have a difference of opinion. You think that assuming "spatial expansion" avoids great confusion. I think that "spatial expansion" is just a term which hides the great confusion which lies underneath. I think that the application of general relativity to the vast expanse of the universe creates the observational evidence known as "spatial expansion". But the term is just a placeholder which we can refer to rather than referring to "the great confusion".
Hubble measured and demonstrated the positive correlation between the distance of deep space objects and the speed which they are all traveling away from us (a positive correlation). This means that either we are at the center of a central point of expansion of matter (hence everything is heading away from us) or everything is moving away from everything else (it's all spreading out via some kind of metric expansion). If we were at or near a central point of expansion, then it stands to reason that there would be some sort of pattern in the distribution of matter, but the distribution of matter at the largest observable scale has no such detectable pattern or form, and we would be very lucky indeed if we truly were the center of the universe.
Spatial expansion describes an observed phenomenon, and while general relativity provides real theoretical and mathematical claws to the credulity of the phenomenon, the observational data that it predicts is why science has accepted it.
The legs of your disagreement are that A) General relativity leads to spatial expansion, which is "nonsense", and B) An unexplained objection about the real relationship between gravity and time which GR fails to describe...
I know that your distaste for the concept of spatial expansion doesn't negate it's validity, so what about general relativity is really so inadequate? In light of all the predictive power it lends us, what evidence do you have to suggest that it is somehow false?
The information received by Hubble is interpreted with the use of GR.Quoting VagabondSpectre
OK, so this is what I mean when I say expansion is unintelligible. Imagine a point in space. Then imagine a point some distance to the right, and a point the same distance to the left, and points above, and below, etc.. Everything is moving away from each of these points. How would you reconcile such different motions? Clearly relativity theory is incapable of reconciling such radically different motions, which are actually the same objects observed from different perspectives.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It's not the relationship between gravity and time which I object to, it is the relationship between time and space that general relativity creates, which I think is misguided. And I explained this, you just wrote it off as "unintelligible" without even trying to understand it. The issue is with non-dimensional (non-spatial) existence. Mathematicians and physicists utilize non-dimensional points, as if they have real existence. But the physicists have no ontological principles which allow that a non-dimensional point could have real existence in the world. Nothing can actually happen at a non-dimensional point, because there is no space there for anything to happen in, (though physicists seem to allow that some type of incoherent and unintelligible activity is going on there). To resolve this issue, to make non-spatial activity intelligible, we need to invert the relationship between space and time, such that time becomes the 0th dimension, rather than the 4th dimension. This would allow us to deal with the vast quantity of evidence, that there is non-spatial activity which occurs, in a coherent and intelligible way.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It is not a distaste for spatial expansion which I hold. I believe very strongly in spatial expansion, but I believe that it is grossly misunderstood, due to the approach, which is GR. Why I dislike GR then, is that it gives us no approach toward understanding spatial expansion, which is the real nature of space.
No, we utilize non-dimensional points (and other mathematical constructions) as strictly hypothetical objects, and recognize that they do not have real existence.
The conclusion of Hubble gets interpreted by GR, not the information he gathered. Hubble demonstrated that the universe is expanding, somehow, someway (or that we are the center of it).
GR then came along and proposed a kind of mechanism of how. "Space itself is expanding" is what GR said. That the universe is expanding was already all but undeniable from Hubble's classical astronomical observations.
To restate, we observe that we live in an expanding universe, which is uncanny. "Spatial expansion" makes partial sense of this uncanny observation by at least giving us a way to describe and chart it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Spatial expansion is the only thing we can come up with that reconciles and predicts these seemingly contrary motions that we observe. We can only reconcile our observations by proposing that the space in-between sufficiently distant objects expands and push/pulls us apart. The fact that GR infers spatial expansion and that we observe it is points for GR, not a mark against it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I propose that events occurring on sufficiently small scales are indistinguishable from "non-dimensional events". GR breaks-down at quantum scales, it's true, but to an extent that doesn't matter as long as what GR says about Newtonian scales remains true. It's true for Newtonian/macro scales.
One day we might come up with a theory of quantum gravity and unite QM with GR in a way that enhances our predictive power in both the quantum and macroscopic scales of matter, but it is unlikely that such an advancement would overturn much of what we already know thanks to GR given that it has very well established and very powerful predictive power.
If what we think we know does hold true, non-dimensional phenomenon only become an issue if we try to actually talk about the "singularity" itself. Counter-intuitively, big bang cosmology is entirely concerned with what came after the big bang, not what came before, and not what it was; only what came after.
It might be true that the singularity that caused the big bang was an entire universe of it's own, with it's own history and developmental progression, but when we say that the "universe" is 13.75 billion years old, we mean the observable universe; our universe. There might be other universe,more things that exist outside of our universe, but we don't have any way to access them, so we're forced to only talk about what what we do have access to. Some things are beyond the horizon of what can be interacted with and therefore known.
What actual particles? That's the point. The representation is as a non-dimensional point, but what does this actually represent? It can't be a particle, because a real particle cannot be at a non-dimensional point. So what is being represented? If a real dimensional particle were being represented, it would have to be represented as being at more than one point. But then it would not be a fundamental particle, because occupying more than a point would indicate that it is divisible.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The issue is that there is motion of objects which cannot be comprehended by GR. This motion is said to be caused by "expansion". So the fact remains that a vast amount of motion, if not the majority of motion in the universe cannot be comprehended by GR, and "spatial expansion is the only thing we can come up with" to explain these contrary motions. How can we even begin to measure these motions when our only means for measuring them, GR, views them as contrary motions, i.e. contradictory.
How can you extrapolate back in time, when you do not even know what these "contrary motions" consist of? Spatial expansion is the only thing we can come up with, but what does it really mean to have everything moving away from every point in space? It's not like everything is moving away from one single point, like an explosion, as "big bang" implies, it's the case that everything is moving away from every point. So the big bang is way off track, because there must be a big bang at every point in space, to account for the observation that everything is moving away from every point in space.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not only is GR no good at the scale of the universe, because it cannot deal with the motions which are attributed to expansion, it is also no good at quantum scale. How can one even consider the possibility that GR gives us an appropriate representation of the relationship between space and time? It only provides a workable relation between space and time at a very limited spatial scale. A scale which has proven to be convenient for our meagre existence.
You have no idea how mathematical modeling works, do you? Or representation in general, since obviously a representation does not have all the same properties as whatever it represents, because then it would actually be that object.
We measure these motions with classical astrophysics, not GR. We describe and predict what we measure with "spatial expansion", which GR endorses. The expansion itself isn't contradictory if you're speaking in terms of transposing the expansion into direction and velocity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The thing about the big bang is that it involved every point in observable space. We don't know whether or not what lies beyond the observable universe (the stuff so far away that light cannot reach us due to spatial expansion) simply goes on forever or actually has an edge. If there is indeed an edge and we are in a finite but expanding universe, then the big bang model makes sense: the universe was very tiny, then expanded to be very big. All the points in the expanded universe were contained (if only in some other form) within "the big bang", and spatial expansion produces no contradictions.
If the universe actually goes on forever, then there's still no problem with spatial expansion occurring everywhere (more space should not be a problem for infinite space), but "center of the universe" or "point where the big bang happened" becomes incoherent. If "infinite spatial points" exist, then they either always existed or were created all at once.
This possibility might seem like it contradicts the big bang, but it doesn't. When we say that the current universe is 92 billion light years across, we're referring to the range in which things are possibly observable (any farther than that and light won't reach us due to spatial expansion) which scientists call the "observable universe". When we say right after the big bang these 92 billion light years worth of points in space were all scrunched into the size of an atom, we're only talking about the stuff within our observable range, not the global universe. If there's infinite space out there, it doesn't matter how tiny you scrunch; the universe would still be infinitely big.
The big bang still makes sense in this scenario. 13.75 billion years might not mean the beginning of everything, but it does still mean the beginning of everything observable.
What do you mean by "classical astrophysics"? Do you measure the the Doppler shift of the CMB with classical astrophysics? What principles of measurement would you use to establish wavelengths?
By "classical astrophysics" I meant astrophysics which doesn't use quantum mechanics or general relativity.
But those b-modes in the polarization of the CMB, if they are ever observed, will be from before the big-bang.
Except when we are dealing with quarks, leptons or bosons.
You seemed to have missed the point aletheist, so I'll try to explain better. We have immense, abstract, conceptual structures called fields. The field has no corresponding spatial structure, but it is related to spatial existence through the means of points. But the point is still a non-dimensional, non-spatial entity, so there is no real correspondence here at all. That's why the existence of particles at various points is only probabilistic. The "real particle" or whatever it is which is existing in dimensional space, has no corresponding representation. The entire structure is set apart from, and does not actually correspond to any real dimensional (spatial) existence.
What I suggested is that it is completely conceivable, and logical, that we can give real existence to non-dimensional points, by allowing them to be actual points in time. But this requires that we dismantle the field structure, dismiss the relativistic approach, and develop a new approach which starts with the premise of real points in time. This is dependent on the determination of real points in time. Once we determine the real points in time, we can produce a representation of the corresponding spatial existence. It's just a potential way of simplifying the unnecessarily complicated field structure, but it requires work and experimentation to determine real points in time. You might simply dismiss this by asserting that there is no such thing as real points in time, special relativity denies this, but until someone carries out the work in an attempt to find them, this assertion will not be confirmed.
If we are utilizing mathematics, we are dealing with strictly hypothetical objects, which may be (and often are) diagrammatic models of actual phenomena.
So, you are claiming that quarks, leptons, and bosons are not point particles. Why? What reason or evidence to you have that the Standard Model is wrong?
You were critical of my attitude, as if I had no idea of the difference between a representation and the thing represented, without addressing anything which I actually said. That, I think is just blabber. If you would have paid attention to what I said, you would have noticed that what I was saying is that we do not have any way of representing real, non-dimensional existence. Yet it is implicit within QFT that there is real non-dimensional existence. That is the problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics, we have no adequate way to represent what quantum mechanics tells us because it deals with non-dimensional existence.
But you said:
Quoting aletheist
Which means, according to you, the Standard Model is wrong. Please explain.
If you had actually said this in the first place, I would not have commented at all. What you actually said was:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I took you to be claiming that a non-dimensional point cannot represent a real particle, which is false.
Quoting tom
No, it means that it is irrelevant within mathematics whether its strictly hypothetical models represent anything that really exists. In other words, a non-dimensional point does not necessarily have to represent something that is actually non-dimensional. If it helps, we can amend my initial comment by changing "do not have" to "need not have."
So if particles are modelled as strings rather than points, the SM is "wrong"?
Sounds legit.
Except that quarks, leptons, and bosons are point particles.
Why do you keep avoiding the "modelled as" point particles? I mean it is normal in physics to understand that it is a specific kind of useful idealisation.
The key idea is that a point particle lacks internal structure. So even with quantum HUP fuzziness, you can still exactly locate it as a quantum superposition of itself. There are no observables resulting from further internal structure to blur the picture.
But equally - if we are talking about ontological reality - you run into problems trying to get close to a massive point particle. There is the Compton wavelength at which your point will start spewing other points. In trying to get close observationally, we produce more particles due to the energy density. And which is now the one we claim to have been there?
So is there some reason you take a monstrously simple approach to your ontological claims about particles. Or do just believe the pictures of things are those things due to some kind of naive realism (kind of like your happy literal acceptance of branching multiverses)?
Your quoted passage clearly states: "Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension: being zero-dimensional, it does not take up space." So what's the fuss? Are you and aletheist denying this?
Actually it's you who doesn't get it. If there is no correspondence between the model and the reality, it is a falsity.
The point I was making, which started this discussion is that we have no way to establish correspondence between the model and the reality, because the things are modeled as non-dimensional, and we have no way of conceiving of non-dimensional existence. If your argument is that the model doesn't necessarily represent the reality, then you are arguing that we should accept fiction.
Read the wiki page. What physics means is that you can treat an elementary particle as a mathematical point as that is a model of located material being without internal structure.
You can treat the Earth as a mathematical point too - a centre of gravity. And it works so long as you are far enough away not to be bothered by the Earth's material variations - the effect that mountain ranges would have for instance (coincidentally, Peirce's specialist area in science).
Likewise the standard model can call an electron a point. But then string theory or braid theory might discover an internal structure that shows the pointiness to be merely an effective theory of the real deal.
So as usual, you are trying to insist on your lay interpretation of what is being said and not taking in the subtleties of the way science employs its metaphysics.
For propositions these differ: absence, indifference, belief, knowledge, certainty, ...
Supposing that to know p, you must also know that you know p, is the first step in a diverging regress. Which, incidentally, might be an argument against certainty (in most cases).
Suppose I was to claim "there was snow on the peak of Mount Everest last Wednesday local time". What, then, would it take for my statement to hold? Well, that would be existence/presence of snow up there back then, regardless of what anyone may or may not believe. And that's the "true" part of knowledge, an ontological condition.
So, we can do our part, justify our claims, and do away with errors.
Right, that's exactly what I'm talking about. We can "treat" something as if it is zero dimensional, meaning that it occupies no space, has no spatial existence. But we have no principles by which we can say that this is the reality of the thing. What I am expressing is that there is a need for principles to allow for real non-dimensional existence. The argument I was making, was that if we want to be able to realistically treat something as non-dimensional, we need some principles whereby a non-dimensional thing can have real existence.
Quoting apokrisis
You're confusing the issue here. Peirce understood the problem, but his solution was to deny the reality of non-dimensional existence, opting for infinitesimals. So deferring to Peirce supports my argument that there is a real problem with representing things as non-dimensional points. The difference between Peirce and I is that I apprehend a need to assume real non-dimensional existence, whereas Peirce saw no need for this and chose infinitesimal existence instead, to account for the existence of the things which physics treats as non-dimensional.
Quoting apokrisis
This illustrates the problem I am referring to. Since there is nothing real which is referred to by "zero dimensional point", then the reality of the entity which is represented as a zero dimensional point may be interpreted in infinitely many different ways. So take your example of the earth. If we represent the earth as a non-dimensional point, then the actual form that the earth has, could be anything. To properly understand the earth would mean to produce a proper representation of its spatial form.
You naturally assume that the thing represented as a zero dimensional point has a spatial form, because you're physicalist, and you cannot comprehend any other type of existence. I accept real non-spatial existence, so my claim is that there are real things, demonstrated by physics to have real existence, which cannot be represented as having a spatial form. These things are non-spatial, non-dimensional. So we need some way to differentiate between things like the earth, which can be represented by a point, but still have a spatial form, and things which are really non-spatial, non-dimensional, having no spatial form. Otherwise we'll be continually trying to give non-spatial things a spatial form, such as in your example with string theory.
What things exactly? And what is their relevance to this discussion about modelling particles as located objects with no internal structure?
Those are the things I'm talking about., the things with no internal structure.. If a thing occupies space, i.e. is spatial, dimensional, it has a spatial form and that is its internal structure. (For example, a circle has an internal structure expressed by pi.) Therefore it makes no sense to talk about things with no internal structure as anything other than non-dimensional things. Since they have no spatial existence, then the idea of locating them in space is somewhat dubious, and how they relate to things which have spatial existence is questionable. That is why I suggested that this problem may be resolved if a way could be devised to locate them in time.