Are the conception of Impossibility and Non-Existence real?

Impossible and non-existence are conceptions that have perplexed me for a long time.

I know as all of you do, what they mean in a real world sense. For example: it is impossible for 2+2=5 or something like a 5 part triangle can’t have a material existence. But, deeper than these simplistic examples what do these concepts mean?

Let me ask a seemingly simple question: Can we have a concept of non-existence? It seems not, since it doesn’t exist! Our concept is about an idea that DOES exists in our mental states, but it has nothing to do with non-existence. It is just our ruminating on the concept. If that is true, (and it is) then there is no non-existence for us. All that exists, exists. I say that with all tautology sensed. But there are those that believe there must be a symmetrical state. If there is A, then there is -A. And here is where we come to existence/non-existence. But non-existence would be self-exclusive and thus not assailable by any form of reasoning. Boy does this bother me…I really, really really bothers me.

And then there is impossible. In the same genus as non-existence. Impossible cannot be understood by all that is possible now can it? the impossible is not a sub-set of the possible it is separate from the possible. But it can’t be that 'cause it can’t happen. So, it too is just a useful conceptual tools that we form in symmetry. If those cosmologists using string-theory and all its group theory power say: non-existence was REAL and at some point probability (statistical mechanics to be sure) takes over: BANG a point of dense space appeared from nothing, which is the same as non-existence or impossibility…I still have a problem swallowing it. In fact, BANG I feel like crackin’em in their lying faces.

I go back to my reading of Descartes. How he posited that every concept we have is the result of some real outside thing that caused the concept. He of course attributed it to who else: God. Well, we’ve gotten a lot better than that now. But still lets follow that line of reasoning …how can we form ideas of ontologic states unless perhaps…dare I say this…those ontologies in contradiction to themselves have a form of being? Noooo, what doesn’t exists, doesn’t. What can’t be can’t. We have these notions from symmetric reasoning not from anything else. Or is there more to this. This also reminds me of set theoretic ideas in of anisomorphisms from given morphs. Example: any given set related to another by rule can generate members outside of it. Little sets so to speak. But can never generate another set not related to its members. This is not axiomatic but theormized. It’s set-theory’s version of impossibility.

I’d like to see new ideas on this topic. All response are more than welcomed!
Comments welcomed.

Robleh: In my view, you’re getting “hung up” on words that can’t be defined in terms of other words. I think there’s a set of such words, which I call “base words”, that can’t be defined in terms of other words, only by associated feelings, thoughts, actions, etc. One set of such “base words” consists of those words we learn before we’re about four years old; a larger set contains all those in any dictionary that are never defined except in terms of more complicated words.

One example (of thousands) is ‘help’, which every child knows, but it’s defined in dictionaries in terms of “making it easier”, ‘improving’, ‘assisting’, ‘relieving’, and so on, which in turn are defined in terms of ‘help’! In my view, ‘existence’ is another example of a “base word”, which can be defined only operationally or phenomenologically. If you want to know if a rock exists, keep kicking it until you decide that what ‘existence’ means is another way of saying “Ouch”!

Similarly with the negation of such words. Every child knows the negation of ‘help’, without the need of a definition in terms of other words. ‘Non-existence’ is similar. If the rock didn’t hurt your foot when you kicked it, that may mean it was ‘nonexistent’ (save, perhaps, as an image in your mind) – although it may just mean that you shouldn’t try out for soccer.

And similarly with ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ (and all shades in between). Every child knows the meanings – and those ARE the meanings! If you look for some “deeper meaning”, then you’ll end up with something that “really, really, really bothers [you].” As for “the impossible existing”, it does! The whole of chemistry hinges on the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that it’s impossible to have two fermions (e.g., electrons in a molecule) with exactly the same quantum numbers. The “force” associated with that “impossibility” is extremely strong, making the possibility of a cow jumping over the moon look like kids’ stuff.

Zoro, I very familiar with Pauli’s QM exclusion principle and it is a physics example of impossiblity at the quantum level. It doesn’t assail what I’m positing though.

But to your exposition. You are really expressing what I indicated as symmetry. Defining a word recursively is what you are saying to me. Ex:
Impossible=~(possible). A Boolean logic idea. though he changed the rules a little with making 0 and 1 primitives. And every computer scientist loves him for that today. But back your response. This is sound reasoning man. I don’t deny that non-existence and impossible are conceptual ideas. They are. It’s their unreachable nature that vexes me.

What the essence my topic was addressing is very much like Immanual Kant’s notion of the A priori. Or better yet, his German phrase Ding-in-sich or Thing in itself. He argues that we experience everything 2nd hand thru our senses. We see the sky thru our eyes, or touch an object with our hands, hear a song with our ears. But to really experience the sky, an object or a song, we would have TO BE that thing, and we are never that. So it is with impossible and non-existence. And not just because of Kant’s D-I-S, but because of their very nature. And this makes us all the more limited by the logical structure of reality.

I don’t know man, maybe I’m asking for too much. I’m willing to admit this topic has no future. Apologies to all. I’ll crawl back in my philosophic and cook up anuddin’

I feel your pain…

It is impossible to conceptualize non-existance or impossibility because they are out of our bounds of experience. I can not even give an example of something that “does not exist.” Some would say “A unicorn does not exist,” but this does not get to the heart of the problem. A unicorn may not physically exist in this world, but it has properties that we are familiar with such as shape and size. Therefore, it might be non-existant in a physical sense, but very real in many other ways.

This leads me back to the fact that I cannot even give you an example of a non-existing entity or property. Anything that I give a property to is immediately removed from the realm of non-existance and impossibilty. To even be explaining non-existance in such a way is fallacy. To think of nothing is usually to think of solid white or black, but that would still be positing an attribute to something that by definition has none.

Well, it simply is not possible to explain non-existance. I am sorry. I hope someday someone can :slight_smile:.

Robleh: For me, such concepts aren’t so hopeless or painful as are being depicted. Consider the case of Kant.

I see Kant’s mistake in arguing “that we experience everything 2nd hand thru our senses” to be derived from his Prussian setting. I suspect that, in contrast, Zen Buddhists and Taoists of his time (or 2,000 years earlier!) wouldn’t be able to comprehend how anyone could write such foolishness.

To explain what I mean (and to bring the concepts up to date), please forgive me for quoting a portion of a letter to my granddaughter. My “justification” (or excuse!) for doing so is that I spent considerable time trying to assemble and record my thoughts, and I don’t have time (or energy or inclination) to go through the same exercise again. I’m quoting the following from “Love letters from Grampa” at zenofzero.net/docs/Awareness.pdf ).

My point, then, is that it’s a sad (and even terrible) misconception to think “we experience everything second hand through our senses”. Such are the ideas of someone (such as Kant) who has created his own “mental prison”. But it’s a totally imaginary prison, from which one can escape simply by realizing that, in reality, you (and everyone) is the universe “I’ing” – which is about as “first hand” as you can get!

And thus, Robleh, I (strongly) disagree with your statement:

The reality (it’s not a mental construct!) is that “the sky, an object or a song” is another part of the universe – and therefore of you. You are the birds singing, the clouds drifting by, and on and on – including the hungry child crying for food, the mother beaten by her husband, and the religious fanatic crashing a plane into the Twin Towers.

T-Dub007: I question the part of your statement:

Of course it depends on the definition of ‘nonexistence’, which I’ll address first.

I’ll use the expression “positive existence” (for contrast to “negative existence”) to mean what we normally call ‘existence’. To me, a claim stating the (positive) existence of anything is a hypothesis that succinctly summarizes a substantial quantity of data, has predictive capabilities, and its predictions have been validated. I’ll use (but not yet define) the expression “negative existence” to mean what I think you mean in the above quotation by ‘nonexistence’. Third and finally, I’ll use the term “nothingness” (or “total nothingness” or “total void” or similar) to describe what we can imagine but with which we have no experience (save, perhaps, as anti-particles, as I recently addressed in another active thread at this forum).

With those definitions, I can then argue that we do have experience with “negative existence”. But rather than my restating my argument, please permit me to quote relevant paragraphs from my recent posts to the Advanced Physics Forum in the thread “The Tao of Physics – and the Zen of Zero” (at advancedphysics.org/forum/ar … -6992.html ). In those posts (which also covered other topics), I posed the argument as a question for senior physicists.

First post:

Second Post:

I should add that the only response I received was from “editor” (who, I think, was the moderator), who stated: “I’m not comfortable with the philosophical stuff. I just don’t know.”

In summary, what I’m suggesting (in this philosophy forum!) is that there are two types of existences, positive and negative. We’re well familiar with “the positive side of reality”, with its “positive existence” and its positive energy, E. But there is also a “negative side of reality”, with its “negative reality” and negative energy (-E), which we call “space” or “the vacuum” (and in which, by the way, there are suggestions that time goes in the opposite direction, as you can find from following the links in the Physics thread to the studies by John Cramer at the University of Washington). I’m also suggesting (consistent with the ideas of Ed Tryon et al., referenced in the other open thread in this forum) that a symmetry breaking fluctuation in the “original nothingness” created these two realities via 0 = E – E, leading to the Big Bang.

Thereby, T-Dub007, I question your final statement:

But is it possible to describe, conceptualize or even consider something that by definition(something that should have no definition) is not, well…anything.

I didn’t get a chance to read all of the quoted material, but I will try to in a moment.

But in giving that explanation of “negative energy,” we are taking it out of the realm of nothingness or non-existence(which I supposr I should not use interchangably).

Is it really appropriate to call what you have labeled “-E” non-existance or nothingness? Is that what it amounts to? I would argue that in giving that description of -E and E, neither is nothingness or non-existance. Parhaps it is a difference of semantics. Nothingness, to me, would be that which has no properties, no existance(I suppose we could get into the metaphysical argument of it “having no properties” being a property, but then where the hell would we get…). -E, the vaccuum, space, the void…all give rise to at least some elementary form of existance. We can describe and study them. That very fact alone seems to rule out the possibilty of them being “nothingness.” I don’t know if I am coming across as I want to, but I would like further explanation, and possibly a definition of exactly what we are arguing about because I probably was too lax on my interchanging of non-existant and nothning.

T-Dub007: Yes, it appears to be “just” semantics. I think that the resolution is the difference between “negative existence” and “nothingness”. It appears that by “nonexistence” you were referring to what I would call “nothingness”.

K, just making sure. :slight_smile:

I haven’t read the back-and-forth between you guys, but I am enjoying how the initial is growing.

To Zoro first, your descrips of negative existence are not non-existence. They are real as anti-particles, vacuums (or is that vaca, on the Latin model? oh anyway). You are pointing out things that DO exist, albeit in strange alternated states. It reminds me of reading in some physics periodical that Bell Labs engineers in late 50s discovered virtual particles in glass tubes that had been drained of all gaseous material and were thought to be vacuums, but they still detected a pressure, and thus led to the notion of virtual particles. Zoro I see now you’re like me–a math guy. Mine is math logic, though I have an intense interest in physics, analysis and to a lesser degree number theory.

Now what is truly descriptive in physics of non-existence is the Big Bang event itself. It posits that at the QM level something came into existence from out of nothing, zip, nenhum (for Portuguese-speaking). Why? Well because Nothingess was unstable. Paradoxical to say the least. But, this is a weak an insufficient supposition to posit a point of density coming outta nowhere. I think what is more likely is the pre-universe had a kind of virtual existence I mentioned above. They argued that at the very smallest level, unpredictable events can happen. It’s really just a gloss over because before the Planck length group theory can’t explain much. It is again something we can’t experience.

And Zoro that leads me right to your lengthy comment on how the universe viewed from a Zen Bhuddist lense is a whole and all in it is a part of a unified existence. Well, what I can I say? This philsophy I know is common in the East. Hinduism approaches that same concept. It’s a panism as opposed to monistic constructs. It sees ‘us’ as being a part of all there is. I was looking at from an ontological personal stance. That is, my personal sensible experience can’t know anything but what my body allows. But, already we’re gonna have to get into epistemology on the ‘know’ part. A tidbit on Kant that you might find interesting he descended from a Scottish family that left Scotland a 100 years before he was born. It’s coincidental that you mention Scottish writers in the same post. The long and short of it Zoro is for me (and it’s not a western notion) experience is personal thru our bodies. We are separate from all other existences in the Universe. We recognized this and it’s why I steadfastedly cling to Existentialism, but that’s yet another topic. Your letter to your grand-daughter was touching it is simplicity, and Zen its content. I can’t make the leap of faith that philosophy implies.

T-Dub007 you’re with me. Though I don’t think we can’t ruminate on non-existence or impossibility, we just can’t experience it. We can conceptualize both. And yes I amplify your comment that doing this kinda gets one into a Goedelian regression. If it doesn’t exist then even the concept is not real. Because you can’t conceive non-existence, I don’t mean things that don’t exist, but the very non-thing non-existence And NO it is not a matter of semantics to me. What I wanna say and am not yet sure enough to declare—THERE IS NO NON-EXISTENCE. We are in a unbalanced universal state. The Egyptians got us started with this stuff anyway. They posited that there must opposites in all reality. hot/cold, light/dark, etc. So, of course if there is existence there must be non-existence but it breaks down there. Zoro more on your comments later. Gotta go my phone is ringing. might be some typos in here sorry gotta go…

Robleh: I agree with your

It’s mind-boggling. And now (as you may know) brane theory suggests that there are ~10^500 other “verses”, “out there”, in “total nothingness”! To me it suggests that there is fifth state, finally “the quintessence”: besides solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, there’s “nothingness” – whatever it is – and in which, it seems, the concept of “time” is meaningless. But maybe in a thousand years or so, humans will begin to understand “it”.

But I disagree with your

From my view, you’re not evaluating the data carefully: we’re not “separate from all other existences in the Universe”, you’re not clinging to Existentialism (you’re ignoring reality, imprisoned by thoughts in which our culture indoctrinated you!), and no “leap of faith” is needed. Instead, carefully consider what you are, admit what exists, and accept the obvious!

I grew up as Western as possible (as did the ex-minister Alan Watts, the Swedish diplomat Rolf Edburg, Einstein, and so many others). When I saw what should have been obvious all along, I tried to express it in poem. With a request for your ignoring the quality of the composition, the thoughts emerged as follows.

Okay Zoro, I see we can’t come to concord. This I accept. But, I must at least address the mistaken notion you have of my being indoctrinated by Western culture.

I am 2nd gen Somali, of proud parents (both of whom are now dead, and I miss dearly), that actually thinks much of what is considered ‘western philosophic thought’ results from the metaphysics works of Egyptian priestly classes. A people like myself, and many of my brethren Somalis believe we are the direct descendants that later created an Abyssinian state called Aksum. For instance the law of eternal opposites and the law of the excluded middle in logical reasoning can be traced to writings in Lower Egypt, an area within the dominion of Cushitic people. Some of the literature I’ve read might be considere specious on the topic, but it depends on whom decides what’s true, doesn’t it? Anyway, these two concepts (as you know ) are progenitors to much of mathematical formal reasoning and scientific methodology by association in later epochs of human history. (Though, as of late concepts like fuzzy-logic and complexity theory challenge these two pillars.) From these two ideas and identifying their source, Zoro you already see, I’m not arguing for the hegemony of Western metaphysical thought. The priest of Amon-Ra cult thru scribes wrote all that tje later Greek disciple Hermes Trigmegistus penned,during the Hellenic colonization of Egypt. My views are NOT Western only influenced by their good contributions made later.

I do concede that a modern version of this thought I subscribe to. At least I and many of its proponents understand it as the individual vs the external objective reality. We are set diametric to a reality that we are in, but not substantively a part of. I know this kind of comment pains you man, and I do apologize for making it emphatically. That’s why I opened with the comment above. It’s kinda funny, because I don’t think either of us are theist, yet, we are having the type of argument, a religionist has with an atheist. BTW, Satre is the best proponent of the existential viewpoint.

What you seem to propose is this to me as follows:

We are a part of all there is, we are cells in a universal body that is itself a conscious living organism in some sense. Within this framework you can ask questions like this: don’t say you are some ‘I’ observing outside events, you are with other parts of the universal reality, a part of these events. Don’t view yourself as an individual, alone and abandoned in a objective, reasonless, just-existing-universal. You are the meaning of existence along with all else that there is seen as unified whole. You poem alludes to this idea quite directly.

Let me say this now Zoro. I have great respect for you and don’t even know you personally. I am not attacking your views, but trying to understand them.

What you are saying is reminiscent of a website short article I read a few years ago. In this case, the author was considering how with the growing state of information on the Net, (at that time circa 1998) how all the individual ‘cells’ contributing to this worldwide connected system, might possibly be looked upon as part of the Internet as a conscious organism that thinks and grows, contracts, expands with all its members as being part of the ‘Net’ consciousness. That is, at some point the ‘Net’ would become a worldwide conscious entity so to speak. I found this a little on the weird side, but not unthinkable. I’m sure you’re familiar with this notion of ‘emergent phenomena’ that cognitive science are all aglow with today. It’s really just Hegel’s (that racist sob, that I hate, but love his philosphic writings) quantitative-quality process. And this is what you’re philosophy seems to imply to me. If we see ourselves are part of a greater body as cells in a universal existence, this large existence is us and we are it. IT is what defines us. We are materially a part of some tremendous holism.

Though your poem is a little vague and uses an arhythmic rhyming scheme, I think, I get ‘it’. I actually said it aloud to myself and couldn’t make the rhymes end properly, but I’m being too harsh a critic. Don’t be shy about sharing it.

Robleh: Thank you for your interesting and informative reply. Some brief comments – then I gotta get back to work!

Possibly I should apologize for the word “indoctrinated”, but I’m not sure – since you added “my views are NOT Western only influenced by their ‘good’ [I added the quotes!] contributions made later” and also “I do concede that a modern version of this thought I subscribe to.”

I had wondered about (but didn’t realize) the origin of “Aristotle’s” axioms of logic. I’ll google it. Also, thank you for providing information about Hermes Trigmesgistus: I’ve had difficulty trying to understand who he was and when he lived.

And yes: certainly I’m not a theist. If you’ll check out Chapters Ih and Ii (at zenofzero.net ), you can see that I even made an estimate for the probability of any god’s existence, concluding that it’s somewhere in the range between 10^(-100) to 10^(-10,000) !

I agree with much of what Sartre wrote, e.g.,

but in my opinion, some of his stuff is really bad, e.g.,

Another existentialist (and another Nobel prize winner) Camus wrote similar stupid stuff (e.g., about “absurdity”), which I consider absurd: when one is a temporary host for something that’s been living for about a billion years (which is more “eternal” than any “eternal god” has ever been!), it’s absurd to call one’s life absurd and to say that “the only serious philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.” (But I go into that in detail in a chapter in my book entitled “The Purpose of Life”.)

Your summary of what I was trying to describe is fairly good (and thank you for the comments on the poem), but I’m not keen on your “we are cells in a universal body that is itself a conscious living organism in some sense”. Instead, I’d say (and have said) that we humans are “the crowning achievement of Nature’s consciousness” – at least as far as we know (at least in this part of the universe).

By the way, as you may know, there’s now quite a bit of stinging criticism about the term “emergent phenomena”, pointing out that it’s a new term (similar to “vitalism”) used to pretend that we’ve said something intelligent!

Zoro, I’ve visited and bookmarked your site. I have one too, but am a little shy to post it here. I feel as if I’m selling my views.

I think a I might critique if you don’t mind. And man, you write to this discussion group at work? At work, I’m so busy and watched I never get near this place. Though, I work as a database analyst for a engineering company. I think you’re in academia. Not being nosy Zoro, you don’t have to respond this part of my reply.

Well, you the hit proverbial nail on the head by realizing that indoctrination implies brainwashing and the individual being misled into believing concepts and ideas without analytic examination. And this is not me, but you shouldn’t doubt your preceding comment because I admit that I am subscribing to parts of philosophic notions that Europeans have developed. And lets call a spade a spade (perhaps a bad turn of phrase in this context), Western philosophy IS European philosophy. Because I find portions of it acceptable and adopt them doesn’t mean I’m somehow lead astray. Mao took European communism and made it Oriental. He adapted what he saw and applied it. Boy, I sound like an old fashion communist cadre leader at a meeting in a warehouse somewhere.

The comments from Satre you disdain, I love. Though being a linguistic purist, I shouldn’t ‘love’ anything but living beings. Oh what the hell, this is
not strict formal colloquy. I think as you thought of me, that you misunderstand we existentialists. And yes, I’m going to use the 3rd personal plural ‘we’, I consider myself a part of the worldwide existential community.

A world where you are born, not knowing whom you are until you develop a conscious, self-reflective mind around 5 or 6 years of age, then go on to discover that you’re here for a limited time, and you are not going to any definite purposeful end, and then, and then and then I repeat to increase my emphatic— discover that you’re going to die—how can that be anything but absurd!!! Absurdity is a statement of how our ontological experiences don’t ‘fit’ with our concept of rationality. From the computer world, here is an example. A NIC card is designed to allow a workstation to communicate with other machines on a LAN and is well-fitted to its purpose. It makes sense, if you will. But a human beings, born unknowing whom they are, to find out that they are living, feeling being with well-defined views of themselves as conscious beings, living in world, and constantly to doing this talking in their heads thing we call thinking, and then comes find there is no purpose they are leading up to… … well, well well, this seems odd, without reason, unfitted to any purpose, or in other words: ABSURD.

Camus was describing one response to this: suicide. He described another in his famous novel L’etranger: murder. You seem too quick to reject philosophies you disapprove of. But, I’m sounding like your psychoanalyst now and apologize. We eschew stupidity and hold it in disdain. But if it means the inability to reason or understand simple concepts, this might be morally cruel. But, I don’t feel this immorality. I regularly deride those that have lower mental capacities and feel no shame. Why am I admitting this? Because I think we shouldn’t deceive ourselves. Again another Satre piercing reflection. We are all subjectivities (personal thinking beings) that identify with those whom we feel are like our self-identity and eschewing and deriding those whom we consider not. Though, I don’t think you were expressing that Albert Camus was himself was stupid, but his particular writing had the air stupidity.
You know there is extreme Existentialism. Here is where we refuse to identify with anything but our own conscious thinking minds. I don’t subscribe to this. But, think of it! Whose in your head but you? Whose experiencing the objective world but you. If you identify with anyone outside your own thinking mind you’re mis-identifying. So, you parents, your race, your family, your linguistice groups, your beloved woman, are all all misidentities. This is half-way what Satre taught. Identifying with ontologically experience but your own is mis-identifying. Why? Because only you have this very personal experience of being conscious in this external world. Only you feel the pain of cutting your body, or burning you finger (as I did yesterday making a lamb roast). To feel a part of anything outside of your own conscious thinking mind is misidentifying. They can never know you as you know you. Even if your parents screwed and created you, they are you as you know you? This what I mean by being lock and alone in your own state of being. The only thing your set as you are a consecrated being can identify with is you. As I said this is extreme it is one step from nihilistic. I don’t think that we are doom to be separate subjectivities. But, I don’t believe we are separate in our consciousnesses. We can form social, emotional and familial bonds for sure. But we must remember these are artificial and formed to survive as a species and most of, again referring to Satre we CHOOSE to do this. The conscious mind can do otherwise: murder, suicide, torture, exploit, etc. We have the freedom to choose in an absurd meaningless world our moral values. Some choose badly, like the European invades of this land now called America. They chose to near exterminate the natives and enslave others to their designs. I see a perfect existential exemplfication in that. The more I write, the more I feel I could an intelligent like you, not see this stuff staring you in the face.

But lets break on that topic.

I am curious know your take on the latest ‘religionist’ attempt to debunk science. Its called creationism. Sure you heard of it and encountered it. I find it to be a modern day form of demagogues leading the unwary and unknowing in science into false beliefs. They’re like scientific Billy Grahams. I debunk one Canadian physicist: Hugh Ross on my website with a simple combinatorics argument. These people are intellectually dangerous, because they have all the trappings of respectability and can make so many come to erroneous conclusions. They can help convert millions to false reasoning and accept the passivity of religion, as well as the ferality of it. By that I mean the Islam, a religion my parents rejected and had to flee their homeland for doing it. Though, I still know all the ‘suras’ of the Qu’ran and hate that I do! Another personal comment coming thru sorry Zoro.

Also, there is a guy I have a little more respect for: Frank Tipler, a math physicist that wrote The Physics of Immortality. Don’t know if you read it but I did, and I mean the whole damn thing, except the appendix for scientists which only supports his in text argument. There is an audiobooks on cd version, you should check it out, if you haven’t already.

I think he unsuccessfully tries to make a good physics argument for this (dare I say this) non-existent God. If you haven’t read it, it butchers Occam Razor for sure. The contingencies he uses to ‘prove’ there is a Supreme Being are incredible.

later man…I got grandkids too btw. These two boys have made me really get into dvd games…I spent 3 hours play one last weekend at my daughter’s house. So much so, that Asha (my daughter) says: Dad you’re a bigger kid than them, and she was right.

Robleh:

No, I’m retired; the work is to clean up draft chapters not yet posted!

In response to your

I’ll quote from a posted chapter (P1) in which I criticize Camus’ similar misunderstanding (I was gonna write “stupidity”, but I’ll leave it at that), as he wrote in his “The Myth of Sisyphus”. [The “Dear” in what follows is my oldest granddaughter, for whom the book was explicitly written – but, of course I hope that other kids will find it to be of some value.]

From that, maybe you see what I see “staring [me] in the face”, namely, a billion years worth of data!

Re. “the latest religionists’ attempts to debunk science”, I react similarly. For example, that probability for the existence of any god (which I gave in my previous post) was developed in response to “Ph.D. physicist” Steve Unwin’s book “The Probability of God”, in which he mangles the use of Bayes’ Method to “prove” that what his mother told him was true! Still more stupidity!

man Zoro, I must say you sure know how to touch my hot buttons. The Myth of Sisyphus is one Camus articles that while weak I felt really got at the heart of absudity. We can’t come to terms, I know I know. I apologize for the typo errors in the last response, my new love was prattling in my ear as I wrote so of that. It’s hard when you tell somebody: look I’m involved in a polemic with a guy on the Net…uh…you are what with who…oh nothing…

What is this so positive end you keep alluding to Zoro? You love your granddaughter boundlessly is clear. I am sure she is your dearest. But you keep alluding to some positive end in the universe, set against the negative tone of Camus, I don’t see it. Are you hiding behind scientific optimism? You know, and as I know all we scientists (mathematicians included) can do is describe, not proscribe. We can’t predict a happy end to the universe. A world of endless joy and satisfication. Why to you go to such lengths to impress this upon her? Is she of a existential bent? You decry Camus’ essay to a point of sounding like a prosecuting attorney. Are you aware of that tone to your letter? Suicide, like murder, child molestation, homosexuality, and any other malady of the human condition exists, and can be a how the conscious mind reacts to reality. All things that happen, are part of the reality. Why make his take so vile? You excoriate him like a Catholic priest. He was only saying that one human response to making sense of the senseless is to kill yourself. To seeing the pointlessness of the Greek mythical story of a mortal pushing rock up a hill was to end your life. The Wall, Satre’s masterpiece examines absurdity from the same standpoint of chance. I won’t lecture you, but ask you do you believe there is any way you can see how reality is irrationality and doesn’t fit into our evolutionary gained notions of a rational world? To me murder is absurd, but not killing to eat the flesh of the dead animals we need to live. Hating others of your own species because of there physical appearances is, but not they threaten your very existence. Because we seek to live irrationally so. We strive to live without knowing why we must live. Of course we have reasons for it…to do this or that, to beget children, ad infinitum. Now, I can mention Shopenhauer in a relevant vein. In his short essay:
The World as Will and Desire he tells us that we are not rational beings. We are beings with desire in our hearts. We seek to satisfy our desires not our quest for knowledge. We want pleasure more than understanding in this world. I fully agree. We are beings seeking to understand, hook up with the eternity of all there is and be a part of …as the Brits say: rubbish, we want to possess, experience gratify and go on to the next experience of this. Though it may be in varied form. Don’t fight it man. Stop making meaningfulness where there is none to be had. I know 1964 long hair hippie to be sure tauting: tune in turn on and drop out, you remember that stuff right? I’m 54 by the way. I just saying cut those that see no meaning to reality a little slack. if entropy leads to the heat death of the comos well let it be, stop seeing yourself and progeny as a string in a continual spiral of creation. You’re sound like that crazy Frenchman Chartin. Existentialism is a postive philosophy you know. We see in the absurd something called Freedom. Free to make our live as we will and not self-deceive, to face death without fear and the need to pass on our ideas to our progeny, or be heard in scholar works…we see no the stable and permanent but the fleeting changing. We quote no luminaries of thought for there are none. probably a lotta typos in this but what the hell this is the day they strapped the jewish guy to the big wooden T …tsk tsk.

Robleh:

Agreed: we can’t agree. When I was a youngster of your age, I made similar errors. But not to worry: with a little luck, you’ll get over it; then, you’ll be able to walk away from existentialism humming only its good tunes and laughing at its absurdities. Now, I gotta end these communications and get back to work.

I found this forum pretty randomly and was delighted by your exchange. It sounds like it is nearing the end, but I’d like to give my two cents and forgive me for my naivity. First, let me say that I know nothing about physics, mathematics, and philosophy (and I hope to learn a little more about this from both of you).

My only credibility is that I am an evolutionary biologist with a sincere interest in the topics you both addressed. And, if I had a penny for every time I’ve heard a student says…how can something come from nothing when I dare to touch the origin of life…Help me out guys. I am always amazed at the number of students who let the information go in one ear and out the other. Some are just simply convinced and cling to a way of thinking, as if their whole existence is shattered without such a belief system. Isn’t this philosophical prejudice? The evidence is staring them right in the eye and yet they refuse to see it. And they probably think the same about me.

Without wanting to take anyone’s side, per se, I must say that I am in line with Robleh’s way of thinking this out. It just seems so obvious to me and it perplexes me how Zoro sees it so differently.

Zoro: Are you sure you are not a theist in denial? Regardless of whether you have rejected a personal God and religion, you seem to have a conviction that life has deep meaning. I prefer to think that we give it meaning and find meaning, but I sense that you seem to think that something really is scared. I respect your views and it may be that your Zen-like experiences have put you on a different plane of existence and proven to you otherwise what might seem absurd to me. It may be that some people are even genetically inclined to think certain ways, with regards to our spiritual needs. I have heard about a gene for religiosity but have yet to look into it. I do think that, although it’s lovely to write such things to a grandchild (and I found many of the statements to make sense like 0 = T - T and the fact that we do have common elements with the stars and the universe-a true thought. All my grandpa told me was to marry someone Jewish and become a doctor that actually makes money), it is misleading in some ways to be so sure of a connection with all of the universe or imply a happy ending. I rather you tell her that her life is unique, there is no one/thing like her, and to make the most of her own experience in this journey called life. (Of course, I did not read your book chapters, so I could be wrong about all the things you tell her)

And, some of the evolutionary stuff in your letter could be perceived as inaccurate so let me make a few clarifications along the way here….

Zoro says “You are the birds singing, the clouds drifting by, and on and on – including the hungry child crying for food, the mother beaten by her husband, and the religious fanatic crashing a plane into the Twin Towers.” I don’t agree with this. From a biological viewpoint, we have no idea how these organisms filter information and how their senses perceive the world. Do we see the flower like an insect might see it under ultraviolet light? I think not. And, if we could be in the mind of a religious fanatic, we’d probably get along better. And, boy the world would be boring if we could tap into the consciousness of everyone and everything.

Zoreo: says “From my view, you’re not evaluating the data carefully: we’re not “separate from all other existences in the Universe”, you’re not clinging to Existentialism (you’re ignoring reality, imprisoned by thoughts in which our culture indoctrinated you!), and no “leap of faith” is needed. Instead, carefully consider what you are, admit what exists, and accept the obvious!”
I don’t get this Zoro. I am open to an idea if the facts are there. Describe or cut and paste an excerpt that delineates the obvious facts, as I don’t see them. Help me out here.

Sartre says: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal. The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.”
I am with you on this Robleh and not just because I married a frenchman. Rather than see this as something stupid and absurd, I find it very beautiful. In fact, why not consider the beauty in the nothingness and the randomness. “Nothing is scared” as Daniel Dennett wrote once. It is human nature to want to cling to sacred myths about the world (I love Joseph Campbell) , but I find what I intuit as the truth to be much more satisfying. Truth is the most meaningful thing to me.

Zoro says: “Dear: to ask (as did Camus) “What’s the purpose of life?” is to tie one’s mind in a verbal knot. Nothing could be stupider than to ask what’s the purpose of living. “Purpose” can only be measured relative to life. Rocks don’t have a purpose; people do; all life does: to continue living. Asking about the purpose of life is asking about the purpose of the purpose (or the life of life)!”
This purpose stuff seems to me a bit teleological and we have come along way since Aristotle. Why must we have a purpose? The purpose of life is life seems like circular reasoning to me. Natural selection is real but only one mechanism for evolution. There are several other mechanisms that lead to evolution (like random genetic drift and random mutation) without necessarily ending in adaptation. Evolution has design constraints. Not everything has a purpose or a perfect ending. I prefer to think of us and the rest of the species on a non-directional branching tree with natural selection doing the best it can but not necessarily reaching any state of perfection. “Intelligent” design drives me crazy for this reason. Have you looked at “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” by STEPHEN JAY GOULD AND RICHARD C. LEWONTIN? It is an oldie but goodie.

Zoro says: Dear: any human, any tree, any frog, any individual of any species has a limited life-span to promote the continuation of its species. There are limited resources to support any species, all species profit from evolving to be most fit for changing conditions, and a billion years of experimentation has revealed that it’s especially useful for any species to continuously modify its DNA code, in part to change characteristics of its host as environmental conditions change and in part to thwart attack by ever-changing parasites (such as viruses, that “learn” to “unlock” its host’s “treasures” of proteins).
Species do not evolve to be ready to change to meet the environment’s demands. Whatever random gene combinations work best in the area are bound to survive and reproduce better and live long enough to pass on those gene combinations. Natural selection works on individuals, not groups (although groups evolve). No individual is doing what best for its entire species. This is called group selection and it not looked upon very favorable in the evolutionary circle of thought. Individuals are selfish by nature and are programmed to do what is best for their own direct fitness or indirect fitness-those of their related kin. Also, species do not modify their DNA code. The genetic code is universal with a few exceptions. It doesn’t change. It is the message that varies from organism to organism (the sequence coding for all our proteins) And, saying that we modify our code is a bit Lamarckian. We, the end product of our inherited genes/environment, can’t change the DNA in our own bodily gametes (unless we zap them with radiation). DNA mutations in gametes are random and pre-existing in the gene pool. And, whatever genotypes work best in a specific environment will naturally do better than the others. Natural election in not a random process, but the genetic variation that is essential for selection to occur is.

Ok, I better end this. I don’t think I contributed anything to answering the initial question. Do I even belong in this forum? But, I’m with you Zoro. I don’t see any errors in your existential existence. Caio!

garden: Although I “signed off” with serious intent, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to learn from you. As I admitted before (e.g., in a quoted Footnote #1 and elsewhere in the book at zenofzero.net ), my knowledge of biology is embarrassingly poor; therefore, I’d be glad to exchange what little I might know in the fields you listed for more knowledge about your field of evolutionary biology.

Thus, in response to your

although I can’t help with how the first reproducing molecule might have started, maybe there’s something in the following quotation that would help your students with the question about how something can come from nothing (quoted from the first chapter, Chapter A, of the referenced book).

If you read the next few pages of the chapter, you’ll find some reference to the scientific literature to support what probably appears to be many speculations in the above. (There are speculations, there, but the concept that there’s “nothing here” is quite firm – save for a unsettled question about entropy, which you don’t want to hear about!)

As for how life might have started – that is, what was the first self-replicating molecule? – I’d be glad to gain information from you. Have biochemists made any progress? I once saw hints that maybe some large organic molecules used some natural crystalline structures as templates for their geometric organization. Is there anything to that idea? What other progress has been made? But if you know, please keep the language simple – as if addressing your students!

Turning now, briefly, to:

Answer: Yes, I’m sure I’m not! Earlier in this thread I mentioned my estimate for the probability of the existence of any god: it’s the smallest number that I’ve ever encountered: 0.0000… [continue on for ~1,000 more zeros and then place a] 1.

Yet, maybe I should add some explanation: my goal in writing the book is to try to help kids (explicitly, my granddaughter) to overcome their indoctrination in “the god idea”. On occasion (e.g., in the chapter quoted) I thought I could help kids “ease down” from their egotistical views (that their god “loves” them and has plans for their “eternal happiness”) if they came to the realization that they were already participating in something more “immortal” than any god has ever been, i.e., the continuation of the only “life” that’s known.

And thereby, yes: I do have “a conviction that life has meaning”. As far as we know, the only thing that does “have meaning” is life (namely, to continue). In contrast (although this idea is “far out” and therefore should be taken with a large dose of salt), I wouldn’t be surprised if what the rest of our universe is attempting to do (e.g., in the formation of Black Holes) is to return itself to its original state of “total nothingness” – which maybe will make the existentialists “happy”, seeing that the universe has “chosen” suicide!

You add

Well, I agree with you (and about 6 billion bits of data!) that people try to find and to give their lives’ “meaning”. Meanwhile, though, life, itself, has “chosen” a “meaning” for itself: it wants to continue! As for whether that’s “sacred”, I don’t like the word. For me, it just is: I’ve never yet met a bug or a bird or a tree that didn’t want to live! (Though, I not only met but also knew two people, quite well, whose thinking was so confused – perhaps in part by the likes of Camus and Sartre – that they unfortunately chose to commit suicide.)

You wrote

On the first point, we disagree: my interpretation of the data is that the conclusion that everything is connected is totally obvious. And I say that as a physicist not a metaphysicist! But as for implying “a happy ending”: only if humans work at it – and then, only maybe, since (as I already mentioned) maybe the universe has other “plans”, i.e., to commit suicide!

In your comments about my “you are the birds singing”, etc., you are taking my expressions too literally. If you dislike the imagery, then I’ll put it this way.

As far as I can make it out, the obvious interpretation of all the data is that everything is interconnected. Stated differently: in Watts’ words, we are the universe “I’ing”; in Edberg’s words, we are how “the cosmos can experience itself”; and in Einstein’s word, “we humans are a part of a whole, called… the universe.” Now, I grant you that many people (probably the majority) consider themselves (as I wrote in the poem) “ego, scared and all enclosed”, but what I was trying to say is similar to what Einstein wrote:

The first items in my list (“birds and clouds and on and on”) were members of the set “the whole of nature in its beauty”; the other items were included for membership in “our circles of compassion”.

As for your “boy the world would be boring if we could tap into the consciousness of everyone and everything”, although I’m sure that we couldn’t handle the information-overload, I don’t see how you can say it would be “boring”!

You state: “I don’t get this [that we’re not ‘separate from {everything else} in the Universe’]… Help me out here.” Maybe what I’ve already provided is enough; otherwise, there’s more even in just the first chapter of the referenced book.

You approvingly quote Sartre:

My response is: how could any sane person write something so stupid?! I don’t know the exact number, but I’d guess that there’s at least 10^15 bits of data that contradict the stupidity that “every existing thing is born without reason”. The “reason” is obviously that life desires to live! As for his “life has no meaning”, again: life is the only thing that we know that does have meaning; it defines ‘meaning’; the meaning of life is to live!

And as for Sartre’s “life has no meaning the moment that you loose the illusion of being eternal”, that’s pure gobbledygook: nothing that we know is “eternal” (including, I suspect, our universe), but even without the illusion of being eternal, life still has “meaning”: it “means” to continue living as long as possible! Which leads to Sartre’s conclusion “The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.” Pure, unadulterated B.S. What is “anguish” is to see anyone twist “the meaning of life” so badly as to ruin other people’s lives.

Meanwhile, though, I’m very pleased and relieved that you find in his words “truth” and “beauty”. I don’t want anyone else to commit suicide. But to relieve me even more, please consider “the truth” (or better, the reality) that each of us is the universe “I’ing”, for with that wonderful thought, you can break free from Sartre’s “delusional prison” and find wisdom in Einstein’s idea: Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty…

You state: “’The purpose of life is life’ seems like circular reasoning to me.” What I was trying to do was to show how stupid the question is! Maybe it would have been better to say: “The purpose of life is to live!”

I agree with your comments about other driving forces for evolution. Although I’ve not read the original, referenced paper by Gould and Lewontin, I have read Gould’s summary of it. And since you also reference Dennett, I wonder if you’ve seen his criticism (which appears along with other criticisms) of “the spandrel paper”, here quoting from edge.org/3rd_culture/gould/gould_index.html .

You state:

I totally agree – but I don’t see how you came to the conclusion that I was saying otherwise. I wrote “any individual of any species has a limited life-span to promote the continuation of its species”. To remove any ambiguity, maybe I should slip in something to the effect that “of course, such is not the ‘plan’ of any individual but a consequence of natural selection”.

You state:

Thank you! I’d like to quote your statement (or any revision that you wish to make to it) as a footnote to improve the relevant paragraph in the book. I’d reference your post here (at this forum) or otherwise if you desire. If appropriate, please contact me at my website via “suggestions”. Relative to the possibility of your revising your statement: 1) as it is, I’d feel the need to add a comment something similar to “Dear: I hope you understand what ‘garden’ wrote better than I can”, and 2) if you would consider revising your statement, would you please try to write it so that I and any teenager who has not yet taken a biology course could understand it? We stumble on such “jargon” as “Lamarckian”, “gametes”, and “genotypes”. Also, can you see how I could change just a few words in the text of the paragraph (bottom of p. 6 of zenofzero.net/docs/P01_The_Purpose_of_Life.pdf ) so that the statement is more accurate? Thank you for any additional help.