Something Instead of Nothing

“The Fundamental Question”
Arthur Witherall

Well, there you go. How is this then not applicable to any explanation at all?

For example…

What am I missing here? An “evaluative principle”? How is that in turn not a part of what is trying to be explained?

We can say anything. But what can we then demonstrate in turn? And the very act of saying anything at all would seem to be necessarily in sync with the somethingness that we are trying to connect to or disconnect from nothing at all.

I must not be grasping his point.

But what does this tell us about the absence of purpose in the absence existence itself? All of this speculation is embedded in a somethingness that we are trying to understand as having or not having a purpose in relationship to nothing at all.

So, is this just more “metaphysical” “mental masturbation” or is there actually some meat on the bones? What on earth is the relationship between “value” and the “cause of existence itself”?

Value “beyond being”?! Value as “self-explanatory”?

Really?

Witherall can’t get nothing past you, can he biggs? Way to keep this dude on the ropes, son. By god somebody’s gotta tell the fuckin truth around here.

What is the cause of the question after the cause of existence?

A lack of self-evidence. Which means a lack of sharpness. Which, in turn, means a lack of existence.

AHAHAHAHAHAbradabra.

“The Fundamental Question”
Arthur Witherall

Come on, let’s get serious. Imagining that someone can produce an argument that actually links together [teleologically, ontologically] nature, causality, and human morality is as far removed as ever from constructing a context in which it can actually be demonstrated.

Theoretical speculation about the “fundamental question” is fine. As long as we are still willing to settle for “theoretical answers”.

This part in other words:

On the other hand, better this approach perhaps then simply inventing a God able to explain everything. Meanwhile we can continue to aim our scientific tools in this direction:

That remains the Holy Grail among physicists. Taking a TOE down off the skyhooks and accomplishing the task of accumulating all the necessary facts able to actually evince/signify what reality is.

Starting with that which seems closest of all to being true: that somethingness is.

“Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
Dr. Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine

Really, think about it. In grappling to understand what somethingness is we at least have the advantage of being something in it ourselves. We exist as something and when we look around all we see is something else.

Instead [for me] it’s always been part about groping to grasp why somethingness exists at all…and how it came to exist in the first place. After all, any number of astrophysicists will argue that first there was nothing at all. And then BOOM! the Big Bang. Everything there is somehow just “explodes” into existence.

Just don’t ask any of them to actually prove this.

At least with God we can attribute things to Him like omniscience and omniptence. End of story. As to how and why God came into existence…that is simply subsumed in His mysterious ways.

Or as Bryan Magee once superbly summed it all up:

[b]For a period of two to three years between the ages of nine and twelve I was in thrall to puzzlement about time. I would lie awake in bed at night in the dark thinking something along the following lines. I know there was a day before yesterday, and a day before that and a day before that and so on…Before everyday there must have been a day before. So it must be possible to go back like that for ever and ever and ever…Yet is it? The idea of going back for ever and ever was something I could not get hold of: it seemed impossible. So perhaps, after all, there must have been a beginning somewhere. But if there was a beginning, what had been going on before that? Well, obviously, nothing—nothing at all—otherwise it could not be the beginning. But if there was nothing, how could anything have got started? What could it have come from? Time wouldn’t just pop into existence—bingo!–out of nothing, and start going, all by itself. Nothing is nothing, not anything. So the idea of a beginning was unimaginable, which somehow made it seem impossible too. The upshot was that it seemed to be impossible for time to have had a beginning and impossible not for it to have had a beginning.

I must be missing something here, I came to think. There are only these two alternatives so one of them must be right. They can’t both be impossible. So I would switch my concentration from one to the other, and then when it had exhausted itself, back again, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong; but I never discovered.

space

I realized a similar problem existed with regard to space. I remember myself as a London evacuee in Market Harborough—I must have been ten or eleven at the time—lying on my back in the grass in a park and trying to penetrate a cloudless blue sky with my eyes and thinking something like this: "If I went straight up into the sky, and kept on going in a straight line, why wouldn’t I be able to just keep on going for ever and ever and ever? But that’s impossible. Why isn’t it possible? Surely, eventually, I’d have to come to some sort of end. But why? If I bumped up against something eventually, wouldn’t that have to be something in space? And if it was in space wouldn’t there have to be something on the other side of it if only more space? On the other hand, if there was no limit, endless space couldn’t just be, anymore than endless time could.[/b]

So, you tell me: What is he missing here?

How does one not go back and forth with so much crucial information still far, far out of reach.

“Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
Dr. Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine

This part gets particularly surreal. First there’s the part about nothing at all existing. Then there’s the part about encompassing this if there are no conscious minds around to encompass it. The only thing more surreal [perhaps] is the part where something is around but there are no conscious minds around to encompass that. If for example Earth is the only planet with intelligent life and next week a gigantic asteroid from space wipes it out.

Sans God what is to be made of somethingness then?

And, like Hawking, Shermer will almost certainly go to his own grave equally perplexed. As will you and I and everyone else reading these words. The only real distinction here being that some will be more perturbed by it than others. Another mystery embedded in “I”: dasein.

Just to toss one more hat into this ring and see if there were any legitimate arguments.

“Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
Dr. Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine

What this brings me back to over and over and over again is the inherently mysterious relationship between existence and the perception of existence. Are there parallel universes where intelligent beings are actually able to explain or to “resolve” this? What is either Existence or No Existence without minds able to make such a distinction? Other than to assume the existence of God?

Then this part:

Here too some argue that the only explanation can be God. But that just brings me around to pondering whether God created these conditions out of nothing at all or whether these conditions were necessary even for the existence of God. Out of something that ever and always just…was?

God again, right? Sans God, we can only endlessly ponder whether somethingness includes a teleological component that necessarily leads to the evolution of matter into mind into conscious reflections on all of this actually able to go back to grappling with the existence of existence itself.

Then it’s back to Magee above.

Unless someone here is able to link us to the very “latest” speculations on all of this.

“Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
Dr. Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine

Clearly, if, here and now, it is in fact impossible to conceive of nothing at all, that still leaves open the possibility that the human brain will continue to evolve such that one day it will be able to conceive of it. Or, instead, nothing at all may well have once “existed” but the human brain itself is not [nor ever will be] equipped to grasp it.

In the interim then what may well be our only recourse is to continue to explore it in intellectual contraptions that revolve almost entirely around worlds of words that tell us little more then what to think about more words still:

Got that? Okay, now take these conflicting theoretical contraptions and broach possible methodologies that might enable us to construct experiments and make predictions about the interactions we see all around us in the somethingness world. What procedures might be pursued that would allow us to connect the something factors back to the possibility of nothing at all.

There’s just no getting around God, here. Perhaps the most mind-boggling conundrum of all. Nothing, then God, then everything else? Or, always God and then everything there is out of…what exactly?

The Four Scientific Meanings Of ‘Nothing’
Ethan Siegel in Forbes Magazine

Again, your “thing” of interest can encompass anything that is something. You name it and it exists as a result of one or another sequence embedded in creation. We may not understand how or why it was created going all the way back to the Big Bang, but there it is here and now because something created it. It’s the part about before the Big Bang where creation itself becomes increasingly problematic.

Then the “scientific” stuff:

Of course this is that part where most of us are just along for the ride. We have no capacity to even grasp this in full so we are stuck with taking a leap of faith to the “scientific position” that seems to explain nothing in relation to something in relation to everything in a way that seems the least perplexing to us.

It’s fascinating to speculate about but who is kidding whom: for now this seems as far as it can go. Up to and including the most sophisticated and informed minds of all.

Though, sure, here I must acknowledge this pertains only to that which I think I now about such speculations here and now. There may well be a mind out there able to resolve it. If not here, on another planet. If not mere mortal, then a God, the God Himself.

Absolute homogeneity is logically impossible because logic cant work without distinction. That does not fundamentally prove that it is impossible, but it proves that, given that existence is there and logic shows us how to govern our portion of it, its can not also not-exist.

It shows us that, by ways of forcing outcomes (e.g. logic), it can not enforce itself.

Why Does the Universe Exist?
By Derek Parfit

That’s the distinction I make as well. Okay, you come up with an explanation as to why and how something must exist rather than nothing. But how does that resolution explain why it’s this existence and not another one altogether? And, even here, assuming that this is applicable to our universe in a way that is applicable to all of the other ones in the much conjectured multiverse.

Really, how can you exist as a self-conscious entity able to ask yourself things like this, and think the questions are idle?..make no sense? What makes no sense to me are those who just shrug off questions of this sort as just “philosophical stuff”. “Metaphysical foolery” as my ex-wife once put it. Something, she insisted, that has no relevance at all to the lives that we live.

Unless of course I find myself, from time to time, more or less thinking my own rendition of the same thing. Why waste your time dwelling on something that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever figuring out. On the other hand, grappling myself with questions like this takes my mind to places that are so unimaginably ineffable, that it allows me a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe something beyond the grave is included in it.

What would make no sense [to me] are extant self-conscious entities who did not ask themselves questions like this. Ever and always assuming that the evolution of self-conscious matter that we become acquainted with as “I” includes some measure of actual autonomy.

Which take some to God and religion. After all, the universe that does exist includes us. And since we are able to think up God and concoct all sorts of arguments as to why He must exist, that in and of itself seems to suggest that God and this particular somethingness are inextricably bound. If, so far, only in the minds of those among us who believe it.

God here too. The Goldilocks Universe. So many things have to be precisely as they are – newhumanist.org.uk/articles/415 … aul-davies – that a Creator is clearly one possibility.

But that then begs the question as to whether God Himself created the laws of nature or the laws of nature themselves are such that God really didn’t have a choice. The existence of existence simply was, is and always will be in accordance with its only possibly explanation. God, like all the rest of us, just being along for the ride.

Ive answered this as follows: the universe exists because it is precisely this universe; i.e. the one made out of valuing.

Valuing is the only way something trumps nothing.

(Leave it to Fixed Cross to bring heaven to earth, you’re welcome soldier)

Puzzling indeed. The Logic that ties together existence is a puzzle involving ones own heart. (That is, it actually involves actual existence. :astonished: ) ; which includes the existence of the thinker!
Philosophers before Moi havent been able to crack it, nor have scientists, because they did not have undivided hearts.

You know, coming from someone who believes in astrology.

Though, okay, sure, nothing is really completely out of the question. :-k

I dont “believe” in astrology. Unlike you Ive done the decades of research, being a man raised by scientists. You’re the believer here, my dude. If you would have a shred of scientific instinct in you you’d have accepted my challenges. The same goes for anyone who presumes to question things but doesn’t present the available data for experimenting.

People who think astrology has no bearing on reality think that it doesn’t matter if one is born in summer or winter, by day or by night, by full or new moon, even though both scientific evidence and common sense tell us that these things heavily determine the nature of the person.
The believer wants to think that he is a blank slate, to be filled only by…erm, his own, erm, blank slate…

The general consensus of scientists is that astrology is a pseudo-science, because it lacks the methodology of proper induction and verifiability. And these guys didn’t just wake up one morning and decide this. It is a conclusion reached after examining the nature of astrology very carefully.

Show me these scientific studies.

Its not true man, you and I know you are just making that up or read it in magazines.

There is falsification and this is what Ive been doing for ever and challenging you all to partake in.

Listen for a second. What I do is ask a person I know somewhat to give me several sets of date-hour-place, and from these I will pick the one at which he was born. This is scientific falsification. It can go absolutely wrong. So if it does not go wrong ever, this is proof. Ive been doing it with people I know only online and for a few weeks, and I still got them all correct so far.

The fact that people don’t even understand that this is proper falsification, and thus when it works, proper proof - and that these ignoramuses pretend to claim to know what science even is - is annoying as fuck.
You have no idea how disciplined I need to remain to address such obscenely blatant ignorance in a dignified way.

Naturally Ive not been the only one doing the proving. Many proofs have been given. Here’s another one speaking to the objective influence of Sun-Moon aspects.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1444800/

Son-Moon aspects are among the first things an astrologer looks at. I focus mostly on aspect-astrology myself.

vocaroo.com/miLkIHEYNRO

The Moon rules the animal passions. All cultures have known this. It rules menstruation. Only our own culture doesn’t know any of this. Or wants to not know it for some reason, because scientists do know it.
Moons gravity on Earth is different when it is between Sun and Earth than it is when Earth is between it and the Sun. In the former case there is a pull from two directions, both moving at different angles and velocities - this destabilizes and thus unleashes excesses.

Astrology is based on such basic physical things, and in time it has proven to be the case that there is no end to the depth of these influences; no matter how subtle, the influence is consistency there.