How can the universe exist without us?
Without us, or anything like us, there would be nobody to observe and understand the universe. Worse yet, there couldn't even be a universe in the first place because the concept of a universe is a human invention.
Without us, nothing is describable because descriptions require a set of conventions called language and is invented by human society. If humans never existed, then everything would be completely indescribable. To call something a universe would be an act of description. So without us, there would be nothing that you can describe as a universe.
Without us, nothing is describable because descriptions require a set of conventions called language and is invented by human society. If humans never existed, then everything would be completely indescribable. To call something a universe would be an act of description. So without us, there would be nothing that you can describe as a universe.
Comments (54)
You seem to be assuming that for something to exist it requires a perceiver, but what stimuli does the perceiver require in order to perceive existence of something?
Subjective idealism, which appears to be what you are proposing, is refutable on a number of levels. Personally, I prefer the evolutionary approach. If you accept that evolution is driven by adaptation to environment, then you must accept that the environment exists independently of the being that evolves. The fact that some beings have evolved to name elements of their environment doesn't mean that they have conjured these elements into existence, but only that they have conceptualised them. When we speak of the 'the universe' we speak of our concept of an independently existing phenomenon. If the concept disappears because there are no beings around to conceptualise it, it doesn't follow the phenomenon ceases to exist also.
Quoting jastopher I did not intend to propose subjective idealism. I am not sure if my position does imply subjective idealism.
Quoting jastopher If there were no intelligent beings, then the very concept of a phenomenon would not exist. There would be no such thing as phenomenon.
The phenomenal world suggests a material world but that world is for us, and while it cannot be known as it is, it certainly is, with or without us.
You're equivocating with the word "universe" there, dude.
Welcome Mr.Berkeley; didn't you die for a long time ago, around 18th century? :sweat:
You seem confused. Are you saying that what we call the "universe" simply would not exist if we were not here to call it that?
What we call the "universe" exists independent of our labeling of it. Does a cat know that it is a "cat"? If it doesn't, does that mean that it does not exist? Before humans came along and started labeling everything with symbols, did the universe not exist even though there were non-linguistic animals that could perceive their environment and react to it?
Doesn't follow. Right about the 'concept of phenomenon'. Wrong about 'phenomenon'. What would remain would be the material stimulus that gave rise to the concept in the first place.
For me, what you are describing is the essence of Taoism.
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao. All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.
I’m presuming something was lost in translations with this last sentence. Take the relatively well known Buddhist concept of Nirvana. It is not made up of things—be these physical, mental, or any other category. Yet, in English parlance, it is not non-being but the very opposite: it is the essence of being, what the no-self doctrine is in large part about, tmk. I so far maintain that the same applies to what this last sentence of Taoism is addressing: birth of what holds presence/being despite not being anything phenomenal and in any way separated, for lack of better terms (what we normally associate with "being"). Don’t know if this is worthy of a debate, but I wanted to mention this perspective.
In agreement, though ... given such (re)interpretation.
Of course, it's hard to talk about the Tao. Impossible. That's the whole point. The Tao is what's there without human interpretation, cognition, language, attention, awareness. What was there before there was life and consciousness. The Tao does not exist. Existence, being, begins when we, conscious beings, break the world up into the 10,000 things, i.e. the world as we know it.
Daoist scholar to the rescue! (sorry, it's saturday)
Here you go, three translations side by side of ch. 1 of the "Daodejing":
https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing01.php
and:
Quoting T Clark
To me the Taoist quote implies that the Tao is that which returns us the the last mentioned "non-being", such that the Tao which is mentioned, or named, exists as this process. The nameless Tao is then the "non-being" to which the Tao we address brings things closer to. So the Tao does exist in this view (though not in the "stands-out" semantics of "exists"; and again, "non-being" to me here seems mistranslated, such that it is not in fact nothingness, though being no thing).
But I can agree to disagree.
... And yet the Daozang (=daoist canon) consists of +/- 1400 texts... The same holds for the "Daodejing" itself; chapter 1 speaks of the ineffable nature of the topic, and it's then followed by 80 more chapters. :grin:
Do you imagine Lao Tzu and his buddies were unaware of that? It's one of things I like best about Taoism, it's funny and it knows it's funny. Speaking about the unspeakable. LOL.
Until some point after the big bang, from which all things follow, there were no beings anywhere (leaving out God here, the Logos, "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God...") YET, here we are. That the universe could exist for a long time with no beings of any kind, and progress on to a universe where there are probably many observers and describers, should settle the matter of whether the universe can get along with out us.
In a word, "Yes! Quite well, thank you."
Now, if you want to throw in God, Logos, or whatever deity (deities) you want, then there was an observer (were observers) before the universe was created.
I don't recall Heraclitus ever mentioning that. Oh well. As you say ...
Reminds me of a story. I was at a dinner sitting next to a very nice 17 yo woman. Across from me was another young man, probably early 30s. On my other side was my 27 yo son. The woman, who is Jewish, was describing a visit she had made with a friend to a Catholic church. When time came for communion, not knowing better, she went up and got a wafer, didn't like it, and spit it out. She told the story as if it were amusing, which it was, but I felt I should tell her the significance of the Eucharist. I told her that Catholics consider the wine and wafer as the blood and body of Christ. Not a symbol, not a representation, but the actual blood and body. She didn't believe me. She and the other two kept trying to tell me that it was a symbol. I kept telling them that, to Catholics, it isn't. They never accepted what I was telling them.
So, if you want to think:
Quoting javra
That's fine. It wouldn't be in the spirit of the Tao for me to try to talk you out of it.
So as a self acknowledged Taoist of the form you’ve just prescribed, all reasoning is an illusion to you (see the link Ying posted: it's made up of words). I think I get it now.
Not to repeat myself too often, but: As you say …
I'm not a Taoist in any sense. I admire the way of understanding described by Lao Tzu. I've found it very helpful in my life.
As for the rest, I don't understand what you were trying to say.
Does the Universe exist if we’re not looking?
:grin:
I don't know about the past and present, but human consciousness shapes what exists. I'm not talking about anything mystical or supernatural. It's the most normal, every day, thing in the world. There are no trees until someone says "tree." There are no atoms until someone says "atom." Do you think that before consciousness, the universe went around saying "tree" and "atom?" I can see that it's hard to shift perspective to look at things this way, but it shapes my whole understanding, experience, of reality.
Around 25,000 years ago some modern human speaker of crypto-proto-Indo-European went up to one of these big megafauna and spoke the crypto-proto-indo-European words "Oh Tree, you are so tall, and strong, and so very nice. I think we will cut you down for firewood." The tree frowned it's wrinkly bark and thought, "Tall enough and strong to shake you off my branches and break your bloody neck, I am."
If there were no atoms unless somebody said "atom" then there would be no atoms composing the brain and tongue required to utter the word "atom". So atoms would never exist, and neither would we.
The universe does not require our services to exist. We require the universe to be nice to us so we can exist for a little while.
What isn't it the case that what exists shapes human consciousness? That makes more sense to me than the other way around. Matter makes the man.
We are all here. We observe the Universe. To our current knowledge - it exists. Period.
Humans disappear.
Only sentient and conscious beings (bears, birds, whales, tapeworms, ETC) exist on earth.
They are not aware of the concept of the Universe, or even what they mean on Earth for that matter. But they still exist, do they not? And the Universe they live in still exists, does it not? Just because they have a (very) tiny fraction of understanding of life and its complexities compared to what now-extinct humans had, this doesn't mean they are not contributing the Universe's functions.
Every animal dies. Except one Blue Jay.
The Blue Jay looks around and suddenly gains 100X the intelligence that humans once had. He thinks he knows (nearly) everything that could be known about the Universe. But he has no one to share it with. Does the universe exist still? Yes, of course, it does. Our Blue Jay exists in it. He thinks. But also breathes. And flies. And eats. And poops. DOES.
The Blue Jay dies.
Is the Universe still there as the bird dies? What about the very second its body ceases life functions. Does the Universe simply fade away? No, it exists. But nothing sentient or conscious is alive OR aware of it.
There is nothing to say that one rock on some distant planet in some distant galaxy on the other end of the Universe exists any less than your brother Timothy does. It just doesn't think, breath, fly, eat, or poop. But it DOES. Does what? Exist.
It is careless and fallacious to think that that one aspect of existence (consciousness) is the sole factor for justifying the grander, MUCH larger process that makes that very aspect (as well as many others) EXIST in the first place. In fact, it's so careless that it's a personal insult. (Not to me, but to the Universe)
Understand infinity and that the definition of it isn't tied to the ph level of your blood and perhaps you can understand the irrelevance of our existence. The only thing we are contributing is our perception and a rudimentary command of language we use to communicate with other
The word is revolting. The universe is revolted by you.
If no thought would entail that the thought is a contingent component in the world, and not identical with the world, therefore the idealist position which denies difference between thought and the world cannot hold. The only necessary absolute is contingency, it is the only thing that is not relative to thinking, which entails that the world exists separate from it existing for us. [Meillassoux]
I am not a good spokesman for the Taoist position on anything, so, I'm only painting my own picture inspired by my reading of the Tao Te Ching. If you believe, as I do, that the idea of objective reality is not the best way to understand the nature of existence, then the world is a mixture of what is inside us and outside us. This is a metaphysical, ontological, position. It's not true or false, it's an underlying assumption that I find helpful. In the same way, the existence of objective reality is not a matter of fact, it's an assumption you apply, whether or not you ever consciously examined it.
So there were trees before there was a word for trees. The splitting up of the universe into categories such that one category is "trees," has been established by ...well, who? What about "green things." Is that a self-evident split? The splitting is a human, or at least conscious, act. Taoists that that act is what brings things into existence.
Please keep looking at the universe in whatever way you find useful and satisfying.
Even though I never thought of myself as this kind of person, I found myself wanting to see the world objectively for... maybe the last 30 or 40 years. Probably around 1983. That year I got fed up with the god business and decided that I wanted to live in a knowable world where (as O'Connor put it), "The blind don't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay dead." Clear out the miracles, please.
What makes the world knowable (to me) is the decision to look at it objectively. I wasn't all that well prepared to be objective, having messed around with a lot of mystical stuff for a decade or so.
Nature, of course, didn't name those big green things trees and the little green things grass, and the medium sized green things bushes, but nature none the less made very big, very small, and many intermediate sizes of green things, and they are all discrete, unique, separate. Nature made us too, not for any particular purpose that I know of -- history and nature have this much in common -- they don't have a destination. We did not come into the world to name trees, even if we did.
After ruminating on the matter, he realized, "the interior of the atom isn't solid like a billiard ball -- which is what they all thought. It's mostly empty, though there is some forces at work inside it. There has to be something very hard, or strongly charged, at some particular place in the atom, which a few atoms hit and bounce off of.
What Rutherford discovered was the nucleus -- the neutron and the proton. The helium atoms were bouncing off the proton. (How he knew that his 'rays' were actually helium atoms is another interesting story.)
Well, Rutherford discovered quite a few things about atoms in fairly short order, because he assumed there was order and structure to the universe, and to the atoms which make up the universe. I like that. It takes nothing away from the world to know that matter is ordered and structured.
I've gotten in this discussion before. There are times, maybe most times, when I take no issue with an objective view of the world. I believe the sun will come up tomorrow, yada, yada, yada. I make my day to day decisions based on interacting with a physical universe which has, and has had for hundreds of millions of years, green trees and grass.
On the other hand, there are times when such an understanding can be misleading in a fundamental and important way. This is in no way a mystical or supernatural view of the world. To me, who comes from science and engineering, it is completely consistent with Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger, although I'm sure they wouldn't think so.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yeah, well, no. Nature piled all that stuff in a big lump together and we separated it out. That separation is the act of creation. The Taoists talk about how we broke the Tao into "the 10,000 things," a metaphor I love. That is what brought them into existence. It is a human act.
And of course he also knew that to know one atom is to know all atoms. This is not the case of white swan/black swan. Good god.
What does that mean?
The reductionist explanation of the world. You do not need to look at every instance of the most fundamental thing in order to explain reality. That's the job of the empiricist -- it's all white swans until we find a black swan. Then 'all swans are white' is false.
That's why I particularly like reading the "Zhuangzi". Well, the "inner chapters at least. :)
You are placing the 'concept' before the fact, yet it is perfectly obvious that the fact, in this case has to precede the concept.
Thus, you have your headline question completely backwards. "How can we exist without the universe'.
We are of little or no significance in the universe we understand to exist.
I think agree with this! You are talking about being. It seems you're not denying the universe's independent metaphysical "existence" only it's being. If you loosely replace your "describable" with "being" then what you wrote makes sense not as a subjective idealism or metaphysical idealism, but as an ontological idealism.
How can the universe exist without us? As you rightly say it cannot precisely because it exists through us. This is not a metaphysical or epistemological claim but an ontological and phenomenological claim.
1) The relativity of perception proves that metaphysical idealism is true - the perceived world depends for its existence on being perceived.
2) The perceived world cannot depend on being perceived by any merely finite intellect.
3) Therefore, since the perceived world does exist, there must be an infinite intellect (aka God).
By subjective idealism do you mean the idealism of Berkeley? Who refuted it? I know Samuel Johnson thought he did so by kicking a stone, but he was just an overweight and overrated lexicographer.
Kant thought he had demonstrated the fallacies of Berkeley’s philosophy in a section that he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This was added because much to Kant’s annoyance, many critics compared his work to Berkeley’s after the initial publication. See here for a précis.
Myself, I think Berkeley makes a profound and valid point, however I take issue with his nominalism. But the meaning of his ‘esse est percipe’ - which I read recently is actually incorrect Latin - is easily misconstrued from a realist viewpoint.