[b]Jim Holt
…“messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.[/b]
What’s that make philosophy then?
As Grünbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time.
Wow, that explains nothing so well.
For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.” Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.
Tried that myself.
To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness.
Let’s begin some place else, he muttered.
As the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed has put it, “The earth is not the center of the solar system, the sun is not the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is just one of billions in a universe that has no center, and now our entire three-dimensional universe would be just a thin membrane in the full space of dimensions. If we consider slices across the extra dimensions, our universe would occupy a single infinitesimal point in each slice, surrounded by a void.
In case you needed some cheering up.
Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?
And how about arithmetic: 1 + 1 = everything. Or, sure, 1 - 1 = everything.