but that’s just it. If you think it “feels like” anything, it’s not nothing!
I didn’t say that it feels like anything… that’s where 'imagination’ comes in, in removing the Self from the equation of existence completely… or actually experiencing a removal from the equation of existence completely, like that guy.
Maybe I have too…
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
Sean Carroll
Yes, the objectivists within the scientific community. As though because they engage the “scientific method” in exploring questions all the way out at the very end of the metaphysical limb this enables them to come up with the optimal [empirical] answers. The scientific equivalent of philosophers here who employ logic in order to accomplish the same thing: resolve it.
Meanwhile, the ontological relationship between something and nothing would seem to remain as elusive as ever. And, in the absence of God, how can there even be a teleological component?
Then those who insist, “that’s just the way things are…but this is the way things ought to be instead.” And not just in regard to the is/ought world!
But “feeling satisfied” is what I always come back to myself. The part where what we believe is intimately – and existentially – intertwined in what comforts and consoles us. And that’s the part that gets entangled further in the subconscious and unconscious components of the human mind. And who is to say where the brain ends and the mind begins there. Even assuming human autonomy.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
That has to be it, right? Even for those who plug a God, the God, their God, they can’t really get around pondering if there might have been nothing before God. Other than through yet another leap of faith.
And “mind-boggling” indeed. Especially when you consider that [presumably] whatever our something is, it had been around for billions of years before minds here on planet Earth could juxtapose it to nothing at all. We don’t even know for sure [in a free will world] if human minds are capable of grasping “all there is”. Before it was nothing at all?
Of course, to ask “why things are” introduces the element of teleology. Okay, we figure out that everything there is came into existence out of nothing at all. Or we figure out that everything there is has always been around. But why? Is there someone or something in nature that can provide us with a meaning for existence…or a purpose?
And even if the author finds that column what are the odds that his answer to the question is the right one?
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Now this is a truly crucial observation. Aside from the objectivists among us who actually do believe that how they think about nothing, something and everything that there now is reflects the whole truth, the more sophisticated minds can’t help but grasp just how mind-boggling existence qua existence itself is.
How do you wrap your head around it? In other words, if you don’t just take the shortcut to God.
Everything that we note around us once did not exist. Then it did. Then over time it will not again. It might take billions of years before planet Earth is gone but it is predicted that the Sun on the way to its own demise will swallow the Earth whole. At best we can reduce everything down to atoms and to subatomic particulars that do their thing…forever?
But existence itself? In a No God universe? How can it either always have existed or come into existence out of nothing at all? Which rendition seems the most preposterous?
And we too are all along for the ride, aren’t we? Is it an unanswerable question? Hell, we don’t even know whether any answer we do come up with isn’t the only answer we were ever able to come up with. Why? Because all the matter that encompasses “everything there is” [whether from nothing or always around] is inherently, necessarily subsumed in the immutable laws of matter itself.
Then back to those here who insist their pole is anything but greased. They’ve climbed all the way to the top. How? By constructing a “world of words” “in their head” allowing them to “think up” the solution.
Then when you ask them to demonstrate it, all they have available for you are yet more “arguments”.
Is only the physical a something?
Glad to see MagsJ recognizes not all thoughts are thoughts the mind claims as itself, though possibly from itself.
Kinda like the universe materializing as thought from God’s mind, but not all of it (our willful evil and its consequences) claimed as his—though sustained regardless, in the name of love.
Obsrvr was on the right ex nihilo track but spun MagsJ ‘round instead after this. Weird.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Still, think about that. How can any definitions that we mere mortals here on planet Earth come up with to encompass “nothing” not start with the fact that we are in a “something” going all the way back to all that we do not know about existence itself?
It would be like those in Flatland defining the third dimension in order to grasp it as we do. Defining it into existence. And the novella Flatland was a satirical account of the rigid class morality that was Victorian England. So, let’s define morality into existence in order to determine which actual behaviors we choose are right or wrong.
Then the part where whatever we define “nothing” to be, it’s then definitions all the way down…
All the way back to, “okay, but what came before nothing at all?”
Define that into existence please.
How about this then from Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Only we really have no idea “here and now” if the human brain itself, as but one component of a mind-numbingly vast multiverse is even capable of pinning something like that down. We don’t even know whether, if it does, it was never able not to in a wholly determined Reality.
We can’t leave Him out, right?
He just does. Presto! God and His “mysterious ways” account for everything.
Biggy, did you pop into existence ex nihilo? Do you deny you have parents/guardians?
The universe has a bellybutton. It’s low entropy at the beginning, and ever increasing entropy, and (by contrast) irreducible complexity wherever it is found uninitiated by human/contingent intelligence.
Obv the Creator of all bellybuttons (beginnings, singularities) is going to have no bellybutton (is going to be necessary rather than contingent, and have intelligence to spark the beginning and the nonhuman/AI irreducible complexity).
Even if there was no identifiable beginning because it began all at once complete (fractal)… that can’t happen without a mind to sustain it, especially when you factor in information exchanged between previously unentangled (physically, anyway) moments.
Nothing has no power to enforce itself. Thats why it doesn’t exist and why there is something.
(my own resolution, seems simple but it appears Im the first one to come up with it)
Leibniz was not the worst of em but its boring how he repeats the trick of postulating “God” to replace the, or any, question. Why? Because God. See my post in the “When I say Philosophy” thread.
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5#p2882893
Why God? Because philosophy.
Right.
And going back to your own definitive understanding of existence itself, how would you go about demonstrating this to us? In say, one of your videos?
That’s why such assessments as this are always contained in “intellectual” or “philosophical” or “metaphysical” assessments. Or, for you, astrologically?
And then, for the faithful, trust them: it’s a God, the God, their God all the way down. On the backs of the turtles perhaps?
Note to others:
25 words or less please.
The Christian God.
And if you want a laugh, ask her to bring the Christian God here:
Note to the Christian God:
Why this something…
“…an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages”
…and, if not nothing, something a little more in sync with the belief that the Christian God is “loving, just and merciful”.
So now philosophy is taking the place of something?
Plato calls this the Good.
Ironically… after the big bang & stuff (so it goes)… the Good called everything good, too.
Wonder what that could possibly imply.
Wonder why stuff isn’t totally good anymore… if we even have the ability to recognize it.
You tell us, Biggy. If you don’t believe in the real Good, do you have a real Good-shaped hole? How do you even recognize it as such?
No, seriously.
To The Corner with you, then.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
Right. Mere mortals on this third rock circling this hum drum star in this hum drum galaxy in what may or may not be this hum drum universe can say with confidence that our own something embedded in everything there is has always existed.
Now all we need is the Nova documentary or the YouTube video substantiating it with ample evidence. Or, as is often the case in forums like this one, a “world of words” assessment…the logic of which invariably going around and around in “metaphysical” circles.
Or, as he encompasses it:
Okay, admittedly, this certainly seems to be the must reasonable set of assumptions to me as well. You know, for what that’s worth. The existence of nothing? Then – poof! – the Big Bang bringing into existence everything that revolves around this:
And this:
But…
Really, how can anything just always exists? Do you know anything that has? How is that not equally way, way, way beyond actually being demonstrated. We’re just partial to it because something is what we are a part of now.
Why there’s something rather than nothing
By Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post
This is perhaps the optimal answer. It really comes down to whether any of us here are [realistically] able to confront the gap between what they think they know as this “infinitesimally tiny speck of existence” and all that would need to be known about existence itself…and still convince themselves that the answer is within reach.
With or without God. With God the answer is already known. Without God and it almost certainly never will be. By us. Or, at any rate, not in our lifetimes.
For example, Frank Drake, the man “who led search for life on other planets” just died. Is there life on other planets? And, if so, how does that factor into an understanding of existence itself? There may be civilizations out there with brains actually able to solve it. But that’s now all moot for Frank. Just as exchanges like this will one day be moot for all of us.
Unless, of course, there is a God.
Please. Time is easily one of most boggling aspects of reality itself. Is there really a, what, set of mathematical equations and/or scientific experiments that can leave no doubt that it came into existence with the Big Bang?
If so, by all means, link me to them.
On the other hand, who is kidding whom, here. How many or us are able even to grasp the conjectures of those like Hawking? Instead, it just seems entirely implausible that there could be nothing – no time, no space, no matter – and then it all just “popped” into existence, “inflated”, and over 13 billion years became the universe as we know it today…about “93 billion light-years across”.
One light year alone being 6 trillion miles. That’s the equivalent of going around the Earth about 40,160 times.
Come on, the only thing more unfathomable still, perhaps, is that all of this was simply always around forever and ever.
Have you ever read Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos?
Entropy starts out ordered with the Big Bang, or first cycle. That’s a problem science can’t touch.
Likewise, if the universe were infinite, we would have already achieved heat death.
The vacuum energy & branes & stuff… something had to light the fuse, so to speak, or this never would’ve kicked off.
The other thing not many mention is what a beginning even means if the whole thing began complete (so every now is the beginning, and end, really, and the beginning & end, & every now, exist in Being/Time).
The only philosopher I have read that seems to understand Time (God’s Being) is Kant… but I have barely scratched the tip of the philosophy iceberg.
The BB is based on the observable universe and the argument for it is circular in that it answers why there is a apparent limit.
It holds that every point in the universe is the centre of the universe and that the expansion we observe accounts for the time the universe has existed. The other sleight of hand of the BB theory is that time itself began at the same moment, and it is all carefully and cleverly wrapped up in a bow of uniformitarianism.
Aside from that uncertainty all the rest is wild speculation.
My feeling is that, since we know that the universe is subject to great change I see no reason that the fabric that uniformitarianism assume could not also be subject to change. Could the BB have been the result of a contracting universe. And so could our universe be on an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction?
So if something from nothing gives you a chill, then you have your imagination to reject it, and it would be as valid an idea as anyone else’s
cosmic microwave background radiation comes to mind
there was never nothing. ex nihilo is kind of a misnomer.
“I problemi filosofici riprendono oggi in tutto e per tutto quasi la stessa forma interrogativa di duemila anni fa: come può qualcosa nascere dal suo opposto, per esempio il razionale dall’irrazionale, ciò che sente da ciò che é morto, la logica dall’illogicità, il contemplare disinteressato dal bramoso volere, il vivere per gli altri dall’egoismo, la verità dagli errori? La filosofia metafisica ha potuto finora superare questa difficoltà negando che l’una cosa nasce dall’altra e ammettendo per le cose stimate superiori un’origine miracolosa, che scaturirebbe immediatamente dal nocciolo e dall’essenza della ‘cosa in sè’. Invece la filosofia storica, che non é più affatto pensabile separata dalle scienze naturali, ed é il più recente di tutti i metodi filosofici, ha accertato in singoli casi (e questo sarà presumibilmente il suo risultato in tutti i casi), che quelle cose non sono opposte, tranne che nella consueta esagerazione della concezione popolare o metafisica, e che alla base di tale contrapposizione sta un errore di ragionamento: secondo la sua spiegazione, non esiste, a rigor di termini, nè un agire altruistico nè un contemplare pienamente disinteressato, entrambe le cose sono soltanto sublimazioni, in cui l’elemento base appare quasi volatilizzato e solo alla più sottile osservazione si rivela ancora esistente. Tutto ciò di cui abbiamo bisogno e che allo stato presente delle singole scienze può esserci veramente dato, é una chimica delle idee e dei sentimenti morali, religiosi ed estetici, come pure di tutte quelle emozioni che sperimentiamo in noi stessi nel grande e piccolo commercio della cultura e della società, e perfino nella solitudine: ma che avverrebbe, se questa chimica concludesse col risultato che anche in questo campo i colori più magnifici si ottengono da materiali bassi e perfino spregiati? Avranno voglia, molti, di seguire tali indagini? L’umanità ama scacciare dalla mente i dubbi sull’origine e i princìpi: non si deve forse essere quasi disumanizzati per sentire in sè l’inclinazione opposta?”
Translation:
"
Philosophical problems today resume in all respects almost the same interrogative form as two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite, for example the rational from the irrational, what it feels from what is dead, the logic from illogicality , the disinterested contemplation of the longing will, living for others from selfishness, the truth from errors? Metaphysical philosophy has so far been able to overcome this difficulty by denying that one thing arises from the other and by admitting a miraculous origin for the things esteemed superior, which would immediately spring from the core and essence of the ‘thing in itself’. On the other hand, historical philosophy, which is no longer conceivable apart from the natural sciences, and is the most recent of all philosophical methods, has ascertained in individual cases (and this will presumably be its result in all cases), that those things do not they are opposite, except in the usual exaggeration of the popular or metaphysical conception, and that at the basis of this contrast lies an error of reasoning: according to his explanation, there is, strictly speaking, neither an altruistic act nor a fully disinterested contemplation, both things are only sublimations, in which the basic element appears almost volatilized and only at the most subtle observation is it still existing. All that we need and that in the present state of the individual sciences can really be given to us, is a chemistry of moral, religious and aesthetic ideas and feelings, as well as of all those emotions that we experience in ourselves in the large and small commerce of culture and society, and even in solitude: but what would happen if this chemistry concluded with the result that even in this field the most magnificent colors are obtained from low and even despicable materials? Will many want to follow these investigations? Humanity loves to cast out doubts about origin and principles from the mind: shouldn’t one be almost dehumanized to feel the opposite inclination within oneself?"
looking for source
(While forging for re-source)
.
Dunno, but do a search for Italian & read the context including Hobbes:
transversal.at/transversal/0613/waterhouse/en