Earth exists whether you want it to or not, whether you like it to or not. Your subjective beliefs do not matter. This is a fact. But presuming someday Earth is destroyed, smashed apart by cosmic forces or hurled into the center of the Sun, it objectively existed at one point in time. And imagining as far as you can into the future, will never erase the past, that Earth existed at one point in time.
Even if nobody remembers, and there is no evidence of Earth, no evidence of humans, no evidence of life.
Even if all life and cognition were obliterated throughout the known and unknown universe.
Earth existed, just one time, and that one time is enough. One time is enough for absolution. If something exists once then it exists for eternity. You can change its parts, destroy it, remake it, but Physics is the law. Energy is never gained nor lost. The mass of the Earth never disappears. Remembrance is not required for existence. Cognition is not required for existence. Earth exists whether you know it or not.
But now there is a new level of permanence. If Earth had existed just one time, in the distant past, then it must exist for all time. Past, present, or future, human knowledge is not required by existence. Existence precedes cognition and awareness. Existence > Essence. This creates the imminence of objectivity. Objectivity and existence are linked together. And if anybody admits the existence of anything then it must exist for all time.
Because everything in the past, cannot un-exist. Again I repeat the most important factor. Human knowledge is not required. Awareness is unnecessary for existence.
Insightfoul: existence is only an idea. It is not an objective criterion as such, we really can't know what existence is. Once you can define existence, then we can go from there.
I hate to get Berkeley, but how does one know something “exists”? Because we take it for granted that existence is an idea that describes what we are seeing. But, and this is a loaded argument, the stars that are being discovered by high magnification space telescopes, are known not to be there anymore. We are seeing them, but they are no longer there.
Granted, the earth is right under our feel, so we say it exists, now. But who is to say it will exist for all eternity? And why? I assure you, I agree with you, that it is almost a certainty that eternal timelessness assures the truth of your assertion, but how can it be a certainty, other than from a feeling or an intuition that it is so?
Again, when we say, things exist, we can only say it from the time we have become conscious of it. How could we say anything without consciousness? Unless we hold to the view that consciousness, just like the earth has infinite duration. Can you go into this in more detail?
Otherwise it sounds like you are stating a truism.
‘Something’, ‘exists’, ‘once’, ‘eternity’ … these are concepts which are only used by thinking beings. The universe has no need of such ideas… is simply is what it is.
Why do thinking beings create these concepts? So they can interact with material reality effectively. So they can interact with each other effectively. For example, the Earth is constantly in flux and yet we abstract a ‘thing’ we label as ‘Earth’ which is relatively stable and unchanging. We a society agree on this definition of ‘Earth’. We also agree on the meaning of ‘existence’. We do not say the the Earth exists when it has been dissolved into energy. The interaction with a material Earth would be much different from interaction with the residual energy of Earth. We understand the purpose of making the distinction.
In English (and most Info-European languages), we inflect verbs to describe time. If something exists and then is destroyed, say, it will always have existed from that point on. That’s how we use grammar to describe the situation. Saying it exists for all time is just a grammatical error of verb tenses.
The matter of an ice cube is not destroyed when it melts, but the ice cube is.
The way I would but it, insightfoul, would be to say that you are committing an error of language. To say that “Earth exists” even a billion years into the future when our Sun has exploded or it has consumed Earth by expanding into a red giant is just an improper use of language (I disagree with OH that it’s a grammatical error–it’s a perfectly well-formed sentence–but rather that it is a semantic error–“Earth exists” doesn’t mean what you want it to mean).
I can see what your point derives from, however: if we draw out time graphically as we often do–drawing a horizontal line with arrow heads at each end, marking the ends as “future” and “past” and the middle as “present”–everything that happens or exists in time certainly seems static. Just because we can mark a point on this line as “the present” does not allow us to erase anything that occurred or existed to the left of that point (closer to the end marked “the past”).
But still, the proper use of language mandates that when we describe those events or existences to the left, we say “They did exist” or “They did happen”–not “They do exist” or “They are happening”. Saying “X exists” implicitly means “X exists now”–you don’t get to extend the scope of that meaning to cover all of time.
Perhaps a better way of arguing your point would be to say that certain facts about the past will always remain true rather than certain objects will always exist. So “Earth existed at time T” will always remain true insofar as it actually happened (we might even get away with saying “Earth exists at time T” since the explicit qualification of when Earth exists establishes that we don’t mean that Earth exists now). You might even be able to say similar things about the future if determinism is true.
No, but that’s precisely the problem I’m addressing, objectively.
Existence does not occur, and “then it will always exist thereafter”. Existence doesn’t operate like that. Think of existence as a continuum. Once it exists, it exists for all time. You don’t “bring it into existence”. Therefore it grammatically is incorrect to then say “it will always exist thereafter”.
Because your grammar suggests that things are brought into and out of existence. That’s an unnecessary presumption to premise existence upon.
Existence is not merely an idea. It is also a conception of sense data, and represents a biological perspective, namely of the human specie and cognition.
Therefore existence is ingrained in matter, rationality, and objectivity. Subjectifying existence is difficult/complex. Objectifying existence is easy/simple.
Think of time like an objective realization, not a subjective perception of humanity.
Time and space exist, whether you are aware of it or not. Time and space is objective, not subjective. Your perspective is that time and space is subjective first and foremost. Consider the alternative premise, that time and space are objective.
Humans “wake up to” the objective existence of time and space. That is Consciousness. The brain depends on the universe/existence. The universe/existence does not depend on the brain.
Bodies come and go, live and die, transform from one shape to another. But how you define me, or yourself, is the description of existence. To describe existence is the difficult preliminary step. First you need to describe/cognize what it is you will later claim exists. You put reality into words. But that does not mean your ideas necessarily correlate to reality or existence. That is the confusion, between idealism and realism.
If existence is merely an idea, then many of these contentions are accurate and justifiable. But if existence is reality, then these contentions are unjustified.
Consider that “Earth exists” for all space and time, for a continuum Earth had existed at one point, and that is enough for it to exist for all time “as Earth”. For example, say that a meteor the size of the moon struck Earth and broke it apart into a million pieces. Earth is destroyed, and gone. You may say then that “Earth no longer exists”, but this is the semantic error I’m talking about.
Just because the Earth is smashed into a million pieces, doesn’t mean its existence is destroyed, you see?
This is an objective interpretation of existence. Once it exists, it always exists, as if there were an omnipresent memory system of the universe. Another aspect of this, is memory. If you forget something, or history forgets something, then does that mean a historical occurrence didn’t exist?
If you completely forget that you owned a tricycle as a child, then does that mean the tricycle drops out of existence? No, the tricycle existed, just one time, and that is enough for absolute, infinite existence.
A thing only needs to exist just one time, and it exists for all space, for all time, to infinity. You don’t even need to remember.
The future has an objective quality to it. For example, skip ahead 10 years forward. Something exists in the future. Now rewind back to present. We may not be aware of future existence. We may not “know” it, yet. But existence is objective, permanent, and absolute.
Just because we are not aware of the future, doesn’t mean future existence is deleted.
Existence is beyond time. Time is a subset of existence, a portion of existence.
Existence is not contingent on human knowledge and consciousness. This is the basic logic and premise of Transcendental Philosophy.
So what I’m doing is, essentially, introducing Transcendentalism to people.