I didn’t think you were intending a serious discussion.
I don’t think “a singularity” and “the absolute” are quite the same thing. A singularity is the ultimate concentration of a substance - money - matter - energy - - ignorance —
I don’t think a true absolute singularity can exist.
As it applies to what? - I think you have to be more specific.
Complexity and singularity are opposite types of order. In order for certain type of entities to exist there must be a complex system that yields opportunities for elaborate structure and construction - life requires a complex system - socialism/communism destroys life due to its concentrated simplicity - too close to being a singularity.
Logic dictates that conscious existence is the only existence. Only self-defeating, lazy logic demands that creation create itself, which is antithetical to logic. So that leaves, creation as eternal, immutable. It is but it only is due to consciousness, underlies all creation. Only in bizarre fantasies does something, such as consciousness, come from an explosion of nothing. I can’t find a shred of logic in even pondering that. Especially since nothing or non-existence is not a possibility based on the actuality of existence, being all.
Next step, reasons based on observations.
Repetition? If patterns alter, no true repetition. That is the overall logic of inherent change built into the progression of time.
Cyclical repetitions, such as orbiting, planetary shapes, day to night, etc., often observed except in terms of the progression of time, which needs addressing.
The circle. Observed often but never in perfect form. So for the non-committal afraid of discovery, let’s call existence circular but non-perfect, to make it bite-sized.
My contention beyond existence being the Singularity, in terms of being the Absolute, is that oscillating “patterns” form both the known and unknown reality, however our limited perception cannot detect such invisible complexity.
Why oscillating? A central hub makes more sense if we draw from our overall understanding of reality. Points to eternal oscillation on quantum levels of interactivity, dimensions above our space/time, and below our space/time.
Existence is the only concentration of matter/energy/everything known as it, thus a singularity by its very definition. Absolute because it is eternal.
I dont see any connection between patterns, energy, oscillation, and an idea of an absolute. Stop trying to apply psuedo-scientific, botched physics snippets to philosophy.
To have a concentration - there must be something that isn’t concentrated - same with a singularity - it can’t exist unless there exists something that it isn’t.
Complexity Theory is an adjustment from chaos theory in that patterns form.
It also means that just because we don’t understand it, we know there’s an underlying pattern.
Your modern plasma television makes patterns of complexity to give you a consistent picture using probability math. With more knowledge, it may no longer be probability math to us…
Complexity is short hand for “it works but we don’t know why”
Nevermind, then. Thanks for wrapping that one up, EC. I was counting on science nerds to help but if they can only surmise the “obvious,” then they won’t be contributing much.
Guess this will be hashed out by philosophers, using the width and breadth of logic.
The concept of nothingness is a paradox. Take the origin of this universe and everything before it and after it. Did it happen or not? We can’t know what exactly happened and how but we can be certain it did happen since we are here and everything exists…so something took place…what was it??? we can speculate…we get two paradoxes…either the world has always been and a physical world reliant on causes and matter formed without it(or something like this, things stop making sense here and we run out of language to even thing about these things and describe their elements) or the world has come into existence, which spawns the paradox of backwards tracing causality that would imply something that came out of nothing(and we arrive at the former paradox in a different way)…does the world exist???yes or no???if it does, then asking how so can not be nonsensical and groundless…and if we ask…what do we get???we get the above…or we get idiots who propose paradoxes and think they explain everything and are self-explanatory…
In cosmology(a SCIENTIFIC discipline) there are two main theories(mathematical modelling): big bang and the fluctuating universe that simplyy expands and contracts perpetually…this is purely theoretical science…philosophy is not a science…the only valid discussion here is not about idiots and their chaos or their unicorns but rather along the lines of the kook Richard Dawkins…a rational and logical discussion on whether people should or should not discuss the paradoxes and metaphysical questions at all…of course…Richard Dawkins himself does not do that…but he says we should…and this is a valid question.
Consciousness, the concentration, has always been. Eternal, immutable. What it became is a whole ‘nother can of worms. Let’s stick with my idea. No paradox. Our forever chicken has been found, but what has our chicken produced?
Order and chaos are not just in the mind. Order is the existence of patterns. Patterns are real–they either exist or they don’t–which means order and chaos are real.
Order can also come out of chaos. If you think of chaos as going through random fluctuations and producing random things spontaneously, then there is no reason an orderly universe can’t come out of chaos. If it’s chaos (ie. randomness) then there are no limits, no rules, restricting what it can and can’t do, what it can and can’t produce. So anything is possible, including the creation of an orderly universe. From that point on, the orderly universe unfolds in an orderly manner, according to it’s rules and laws, because it has to–that’s the kind of thing it is, the kind of thing chaos created–a thing characterized by orderliness and therefore bound to its own rules and laws in all that it does.
I agree with this. I see no reason the universe can’t have it’s own internal reasons for existing. I don’t see why it necessarily needs an external cause to be explained. Human beings are very limited in what they are capable of understanding, so I don’t expect anybody to be able to comprehend what it is about the universe that allows it to be self-sustaining. I believe that if we could somehow comprehend such a thing, and understand that this thing is indeed what underlies the universe (behind the perception of the universe, its core inner nature), then we would say “Ah, that’s why the universe exists.”
IOW, the “cause” of the universe’s existence is not a cause in the temporal sense. It didn’t come about by something “before”. It is more a basis, a foundation that is ever-present, and everywhere the universe exists; it is “within” all things that exist (even time and space if those are “things”), and not something distinct from the thing.
I sense bitterness.
You do realize no one here knows who this “greek kook” is, don’t you? Nobody brought it up except you.
I share your skepticism that patterns not repeating in exactly the same way every time means chaos is at work. It depends on how the patterns change. If the change itself is a pattern, then it’s just more order. Example: I do a series of bench presses–up, down, up, down, etc.–a pattern–but I slowly become fatigued, my muscles become incrementally tired with every press, and so the up, down, up, down starts to slow down, or maybe I’m not able to lift the weights as high every time. But this kind of change is predictable–it is a pattern itself–a pattern of slowing down or being lifted less high each time–which just means a pattern built on top of a pattern. Real chaos would be patterns changing in random ways such that we cannot predict how the pattern is going to change from one instant to another.
This isn’t about existence vs. non-existence, it’s about chaos vs. order–either way, things exist.
I agree with you here, but what is your reasoning? Why is conscious existence the only existence? Are you saying consciousness is the ultimate underlying strata of the universe, that which explains and justifies everything, doesn’t need an explanation for itself, and is the very core, the true inner nature of the universe?
I don’t know if this is what you have in mind when you mention “oscillations”, but it’s true that at the end of the day, everything exists as waves. I’m sure you’ve heard of the quantum physics term “wave/particle duality”–things travel as waves until they are measured, at which point they become a particle. But even the particle hasn’t shed its wave-like characteristics, it was just forced to start over from a concentrated point.
I think the reason for this is that the most fundamental law of the universe is change–everything must change if it is to exist at all. This means the idea of a constant, steady thing called a particle is inconsistent with the nature of existence, so it exists as an oscillating wave.
I agree with this–if anything is absolute, it would have to be the totality of existence–by definition, it is–but I think a singularity means concentrated in a single point (or close to a point), or in a more abstract sense, a homogeneous, uniform thing that is the singular thing it is because all diversity and differences within it are no longer manifest, no longer separate. All there is is this one thing.
Woaw! You fail to see a connection and immediately conclude that the problem is not with you but with Wendy? Instead of telling her to stop, why not try asking what she means?
Really? I don’t think that’s necessarily true. They say the state of the universe at the beginning of time was a singularity–but there wasn’t anything else. If there was anything that existed, it was within the singularity.
Do you mean whatever isn’t this concentrated consciousness is whatever’s “other” than this consciousness? The rest of the universe? But how do you imagine this consciousness relating to the universe in general? I wouldn’t think there could be “other” that isn’t connected to this consciousness in the same way this consciousness is connected to whatever it’s connected to.
You are paraphrasing Kant here. He noted how there exists antinomies, like this one here, that the human mind encounters in its thinking and cannot help but be puzzled by either outcome. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “the world has always been and a physical world reliant on causes and matter formed without it”. By “world”, do you mean just existence itself? To be contrasted with a “physical world” which presumably denotes our physical universe? And what do you mean this physical world formed “without it”? You mean the eternal world of existence itself didn’t play a role in bringing about our physical universe, even though in coming into being, it is a part of existence?
I’ve never had a problem with either prong of the eternal universe vs. ternal universe antinomy. I don’t see why a universe with a beginning in time cannot be sustained by something general and abstract, something that exists “outside time” so to speak, something that always exists and exists everywhere. It serves as the “basis” of existence, not a “cause” (which by definition must come before the universe in time). I also have no trouble understanding a universe that always existed–no beginning, retroactively eternal–as it too can be accounted for with an abstract, timeless foundation that always is and is everywhere (you said yourself that the universe “just is”–so why not an eternal universe?). If we have no problem imagining the universe continuing forever into the future, the past is just the inverse of this. So why is there all of a sudden a problem just because we inversed it?
You know, for a nice guy, you sure seem to have no hesitation being mean to people.
I think the latter has been debunked and scientists now-a-days believe only in the BB theory. That’s not to say they’ve got everything figured out–just that, based on the accepted model, they don’t predict the expansion to one day stop and under the influence of gravity start contracting into a Big Crunch. But the fact that their mathematical models can’t even predict what happened exactly at the moment of the BB (they can predict everything that’s happened in the history of the universe up to one Plank unit of time after the BB, and before that, their guess is as good as anybody else’s). Some have taken advantage of this fact to propose that in that Plank sized period of time, the universe wasn’t actually maximally condensed into a true singularity but was condensed just so very close to a singularity before which is was contracting into that very-close-to-singularity state–much like the cyclical universe that you proposed as the second possibility.
An egg?
The way I imagine a universe with a beginning in time is that it exists because it rests upon an abstract, atemporal foundation–which is to say, a foundation that doesn’t come into existence at a certain point in time but “always is”. ← And even that is a poor use of language–not like it exists through time (as though at any point, it could stop existing) but outside time such that thinking about it as a time-bound entity doesn’t make sense. With that, it is master over time, not visa-versa. It can dictate the nature of time–what it does, how it works, whether or not it has a beginning. A beginning to time is neither here nor there to it, just as is eternal time. If there is a beginning to time, it just means that this foundation for existence is such that the universe it creates is one with a beginning to time. Maybe a different kind of foundation would be suited to a universe without a beginning to time.
all knowledge is paradoxical because all proofs rest on some identity theory and so in the underlying abstraction the problem of self reference will always be there.
gib i read the first line of your post and wanted to say that i don’t think that we can have a perception that isn’t patterned. the problem is in deciding whether we’re seeing a pattern out there in the world or whether we’re superimposing it on everything.
i think this is technically a non sequitur. the issue here is that you’re trying to assert answers to questions that are unanswerable. that’s one of the shitty parts of doing philosophy. having to deal with it that some questions really can’t, not don’t…but can’t have answers. people who can’t spot which questions those are end up spending a lot of time fighting with other people who can’t spot which questions those are. philosophy in practice is epistemology. gotta be able to show your work about how you know what you know…and if you’re trying to know things you can’t know then that’s really hard if not impossible.
