Something Instead of Nothing

Scientific knowledge is acquired through evidence that is always incomplete
So omniscience is impossible as it comes up against the problem of induction

In my view you are making a prediction about a future that you will not be around to actually confirm.

You can’t possibly know how close the human race [or an intelligent species on another planet] might come to an extant God or an extant explanation for existence.

Again, what I construe from your argument here is, above all else, a need on your part to believe that what you think you know about all of this “in your head” here and now is grounded in the certainty to which you believe it.

Human psychology in a nut shell.

But we don’t even know if, beyond all doubt, this feeling of certainty is not in turn just hard-wired into our brains by nature in a wholly determined universe.

The bottom line [mine] is that beyond the argument/assessment/analysis itself, you have no capacity to actually demonstrate that what you believe is true here is in fact true. Such that others are [through experiments, predictions, replication etc.] able to either confirm or falsify this belief.

Understanding knowledge, pursuit of wisdom, which is the process of becoming omniscient in a sense, understanding is a staircase and there is a top of the staircase, we have already experienced the top and the bottom, the point is to climb it and understand each step and not merely experience or know the step is there. To refresh our memory and understand.

How can I not understand the universe in its entirety when I am the entire universe confined to a single present moment of continuity? a collection of integrated experiences and knowledge as the very foundation of what I am existing as and conscious of.

I am part of the Universe - albeit an infinitesimal and temporary part - but it does not mean I understand what I am part of - at least not totally
But it matters not because in the grand scheme of things I am no more significant than a grain of sand in a desert or a drop of water in an ocean

Understanding yourself is understanding what you’re apart of. The path of wisdom.

The string of change goes back a long time leading up to now, we are embedded with this like dna, as well as the future. Understanding yourself is like understanding past, present and future.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

Complicating things considerably. Unless you insist that an explanation for God’s existence is included here, God explains everything else.

If not necessarily your own God.

Or one might argue that by definition existence must exist. But how specious is that with respect to existence itself? It’s really just a way of saying that we have no capacity to definitively explain existence so we’ll agree to say that it’s always been there. Which is basically the same boat that the “before the Big Bang there was nothing at all” folks are in.

In other words, you reach the end of road in regards to what your own brain can fathom and just stop there. Yes, something. Yes, nothing at all.

Or maybe not either one. Then you are falling over the edge into the sort of “metaphysical” speculation that all but makes your head explode.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

Arguments like this are often the most exasperating for most of us. Why? Because we do not possess either the background, the experience or the education necessary to fully understand it. Let alone the sophistication needed to even make the attempt to either verify or falsify it.

On the other hand, given all that is yet to be known about the 95% of the universe containing dark matter and dark energy – cosmogonic “things” we have barely just begun to understand – what does it mean even for the “experts” to speak of somethingness arising “naturally and inevitably from the operation of gravity on the quantum vacuum, empty space teeming with virtual particles that spontaneously pop into existence before disappearing again.”

That’s the part that gets some of us to grinning smirking. Sure, employ your background and intelligence to take a truly educated guess at it. But to actually imagine that you have pinned it down with your every own TOE?

Call this [here] the James S. Saint syndrome.

On this level, something and/or nothing reduces to a level that is eithwr cosmic , e.i above that which can be understood, or the invisible, that which Leibnitz indicated of the continuum of relationships as not approximate at the level of the absolute. This point defeats the theme ofnthe forum, (something or nothing), because at this level they are not differentiable not integrable.
Consciousness , thought, ideas, etc. reduce to mere words, beneath which lays the great chasm, consisting of neither, or both, unless one is bold enough to declare a separate differentiable being from mere existence.

The thema defeats it’s own conclusion, converting to it’s antithesis and becoming an eternal circularity.

And this is precisely what positive nominalsts are saying.

Sorry, double posting.

“the continuum of relationships as not approximate at the level of the absolute.”

This is crucial.

At the level of the absolute the nature of relationship is a type of contrast that is incontemplatable.

This is war in principle but can be transmuted or reversed in a way to become all usurping love.
Which is war, as not all wants to be loved in the same way, by the same absolute.

Thus compromise is, precisely because it is not divine, a necessarily thing to endure the world outside of a White Lodge.

A classic example of something instead of nothing. Though it may well mean nothing at all. :wink:

You’d have to read it to find out… :wink:

Presumably then you have. What did you find out? :wink:

Thats not a presumption which follows form any evident logic!

I may or may not have.

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

This is the point I always get back to. Sure, one can imagine any number of things that might explain the existence of something rather than nothing at all. But that doesn’t explain why those things are necessarily the explanation. We always get to the point where an assumption must be made that [so far] no one appears to have either completely verified or completely falsified.

Even the minds making the assumptions themselves have been imagined in all manner of surreal contexts: sim worlds, dreams, matrixes. The embodiment of solipsism or determinism.

Aside from the origin of somethingness, what makes something anything at all?

Of course going this route allows one to use anything as the brute fact. The existence of God for example. Or the “brute fact” can be said to be that something did in fact come into existence out of nothing at all.

But that sort of thing is never really satisfying is it? And precisely because there is almost nothing of which we can’t just shrug and say, “it is what it is, let’s move on”.

Oh, Kid games. :wink:

Lloyd Strickland from the Conversation website
theconversation.com/us

It’s less the most “novel” answer perhaps than the most “satisfying”. Why? Because not only does it encompass an understanding of somethingness, it grounds whatever that understanding turns out to be in a reason why it is this particular something and not another.

And even though it may not be the teleological foundation that suits us, it can at least be said to encompass the best of all possible teleological foundations.

In other words, if it can’t be God – the perfect explanation intertwined in the perfect reason – at least it’s not the god-awful “brute facticity” in which our lives are ultimately meaningless and absurd.

What doesn’t change however is that there still appears to be no way in which to move the discussion much beyond the “wild ass guesses” themselves.

Like this one:

Modern philosophers? Well, what they have as an advantage over the ancient ones is a vastly more sophisticated/comprehensive understanding of the universe that science has provided.

But, come on, how close is science to actually pinning down a multiverse in which [perhaps] our own universe is the “fittest”?

Instead, what science has succeeded best at is noting just how staggeringly vast this particular universe is: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=194813

And then this part: science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/f … ark-energy

“It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.”

Why is there something rather than nothing?
By Robert Adler
From the BBC Earth website

This certainly makes sense. After all, science deals not with what we wish to know [or believe] or what might be known going all the way out to the end of the metaphysical limb…but what in fact can be known going back to something out of nothing or something always existing.

Here though, lets face it, certain scientists become little more than certain philosophers. They are still speculating out at the end of the metaphysical limb, only with more actual facts than ever before.

But what on earth does it mean in terms of all this new knowledge that they have accumulated to speak of “nothing” as being inherently unstable?

Would they not need to find and then examine a nothing in order to demonstrate its properties? But in being part of the something that certainly seems to exist, how could this not be entirely futile?

And are not quantum mechanics and general relativity intrinsic components of somethingness? Why do they suggest something out of nothing rather than something ever and always?

What Nietzsche really meant, in one phrase, is, deal with it, man.
He didn’t even ask it of women.

Only playing along :wink:

What does this excessive amount of invisible matter/energy indicate about the fate of our universe, like whether gravity halts the universal acceleration (Big Crunch), or if we get blown asunder by the Big Chill and/or the Big Rip? Or what about those higher dimensions? Or what even about Heavenly Jerusalem being separated from us by a void indicate about the higher reaches (just food for thought, I don’t expect answers to all of those questions)?

We live in a monster labyrinth, and to decipher all of these mysteries would make big steps towards 1 day controlling all of these phenomena, and being masters of hyperspace (perhaps, we could even escape from the death of the universe in big chill or big rip big freeze by tunneling into the ocean of nirvana sprouting the bubbles of genesis in the infinite outpouring of the multiverse (and I say, OMNIVERSE!)