View Full Version : Ultimate question: Why anything at all?
“Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.” In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics— the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space where fields are zero and unchanging.” But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “[Quantum mechanics] doesn’t answer the question, ‘Why do we live in a world governed by these laws?’… And we will never have an answer to that.” “Does that bother you?” I ask. “Yes,” Weinberg says wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.” Here’s how I see it: The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question.
[B]Why there is something rather than nothing?
Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. There are infinitely many such possible ways. All these ways seem to be equally probable—which means that the probability of any one of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened. “Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of any one of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.” Because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probabilily of Nothing existing is zero.
http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2009/06/05/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/
So he is arguing that if you have a lottery with an infinite number of combinations , there is only 1 number that corresponds to nothingness (the empty set). The chances of picking that number among all the others is essentially 0, so that isn't going to happen. I guess he's trying to say that the universe exists because existence is far more probable than non-existence.
"We can use the axiom of extensionality to show that there is only one empty set. Since it is unique we can name it. It is called the empty set (denoted by { } or ∅)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_the_empty_set
Does the argument sound persuasive?
Does the argument sound persuasive?
No. By similar reasoning, the number 3 cannot exist since on a scale of real numbers, it has probability 0 of existing.
apeiron
Aug30-11, 08:47 PM
Because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probabilily of Nothing existing is zero.
My favourite question!
Inwagen's argument is also made in more formal detail in a good review paper by Leo Apostel, Why Not Nothing?.
He more correctly argues that the probability of nothing is 1/n, or infinitesimal rather than zero.
And he even deals cleverly with the argument where it is granted that the probability of nothing must be much larger - naively, a 50/50 choice.
Apostel's paper looks at a wide range of other answers too, but sadly seems only available online in pages-missing form via google books. And of course the relevant page (p28) is one of those missing.
I myself take a Peircean tack on the question, as outlined in an older thread.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514
wuliheron
Aug30-11, 09:21 PM
Tools
Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.
This is a popular poem that predates the Tao Te Ching and illustrates the viewpoint that the whole concept of "something" and "nothing" are relative and have no meaning outside a specific context. The same can be said for other concepts such as God, infinity, etc. Without clear definitions of the terms and clear contexts you might as well be dividing by zero.
“Why is there Something rather than Nothing”This is the kind of question that makes me bang my head on my desk. Why do people spend time on such useless questions? Oh, I know, philosophy asks the questions that don't need to be asked. <bangs head on desk>
Carry on.
apeiron
Aug30-11, 09:38 PM
This is a popular poem that predates the Tao Te Ching and illustrates the viewpoint that the whole concept of "something" and "nothing" are relative and have no meaning outside a specific context. The same can be said for other concepts such as God, infinity, etc. Without clear definitions of the terms and clear contexts you might as well be dividing by zero.
This is where the Greek and Chinese traditions really differ. The Greek's realised that this very fact could be used to create metaphysical clarity.
If you have one thing, you always have also its other - everything that it is not. And so nature always separates into dichotomous alternatives. Philosophy then becomes about approaching this systematically. If you have the one, you have the many. If stasis, then flux. If chance, then necessity. If substance, then form. Etc.
So if we have something, we have to clarify our notions about it by seeking the foundational dichotomy. The simple opposite to nothing in fact seems to be everything (rather than merely something). So zero or infinity. And you can continue from there.
Each part of a dichotomy is defined by its other as the crisp context . So there is actually no methodological problem standing in our way here.
disregardthat
Aug30-11, 09:43 PM
Where are we drawing these probabilities from? 0 chance of Nothing existing? That doesn't make any sense at all. I see this as a faulty attempt at "resolving" a genuinely unanswerable question. "Why does anything exist?" It sets your mind in a whirl, no answer can be given.
Willowz
Aug30-11, 10:08 PM
I have a better question. It's the ultimate of any kind.
If everything is possible. Is it possible for something to be impossible?
apeiron
Aug30-11, 10:34 PM
I have a better question. It's the ultimate of any kind.
If everything is possible. Is it possible for something to be impossible?
If everything is possible, it seems certain that at least some of those things (and more likely many of those things) are contradictory and would cancel each other out. Therefore it would be impossible for every possibility to become an actuality.
This would be a sum-over-histories view of the possible. A quantum system takes every avenue as a probability, but most of those trajectories cancel away to nothing.
Of course, you have other arguments like Tegmark's assertion that infinity is large enough so that every possibility is also an actuality.
Which is why you have to go back a step to answer the more fundamental question about the nature of existence.
Does reality just exist in infinite variety as Tegmark would require (in which case the fundamental question becomes "why is there an everything rather than a nothing, or even just a something")?
Or if you think that existence must have a cause, then you need to be able to talk about the process by which it might have developed. So again, why anything? How did it occur?
And a self-cancelling sum of histories over infinite possibility seems the best bootstrap story anyone has come up with so far.
wuliheron
Aug30-11, 11:03 PM
Each part of a dichotomy is defined by its other as the crisp context . So there is actually no methodological problem standing in our way here.
If there is no methodological problem standing in our way, then there is no dichotomy.
apeiron
Aug30-11, 11:13 PM
If there is no methodological problem standing in our way, then there is no dichotomy.
That makes no sense. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide, it means a crisp metaphysical choice. Binary options that are mutually exclusive as demanded by the law of the excluded middle.
That makes no sense. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide, it means a crisp metaphysical choice. Binary options that are mutually exclusive as demanded by the law of the excluded middle.Please post where you are getting this definition.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 02:36 AM
Please post where you are getting this definition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy:uhh::uhh:
cueball B
Aug31-11, 07:12 AM
I have a better question. It's the ultimate of any kind.
If everything is possible. Is it possible for something to be impossible?
That is more of a paradox than anything else. Almost the same thing as the god paradox. "If god is omnipotent, can he create a rock that he himself can not lift?"
And the OP makes sense to me. Existence in one form or the other is more likely than nothing at all. The existence we are experiencing right now however, (this earth, this life, this universe) is almost as likely as nothing.
Chance of no existence what so ever: 1 in an infinite amount of numbers
Chance of existence some in one form or the other: infinite chances - 1
Chance of the existence we enjoy: 1 in an infinite amount of numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy:uhh::uhh:
Nothing there. As a matter of fact I did a search on your definition, and the only place it appears is in this thread. Please post a link to it, so we can see if you put your own interpretation on a definition. Or if you found some obscure sentence that's not being found. I'm refering to where you said "crisp metaphysical choice".
JordanL
Aug31-11, 12:43 PM
Any ontological answer to the question "why is there something instead of nothing" almost certainly has to include that idea that existence is the why of existence.
One could say that in the vast sea of possible imagined ideas, our existence represents a small portion. I feel that is a reasonable statement to make. Following that, our existence represents a manifestation of a subset of ideas, that is part of the superset of all things that can be imagined.
Manifestation of an idea refers, in the context I am using it, of the ability of idea to persist without conscious imagining, as things within our Universe appear to do.
In that sense, what you are describing is a justification or reasoning for nihilism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism), as the discussion about "something vs. nothing" eventually leads towards existential nihilism in the form of a logical conclusion of the argument being presented: if everything is nothing, no thing can have inherent meaning.
It is ultimately, from my perspective, a discussion about what the difference is between ideas and reality.
Existence in one form or the other is more likely than nothing at all. The existence we are experiencing right now however, (this earth, this life, this universe) is almost as likely as nothing.
Chance of no existence what so ever: 1 in an infinite amount of numbers
Chance of existence some in one form or the other: infinite chances - 1
Chance of the existence we enjoy: 1 in an infinite amount of numbers
Some have criticized this argument because it's not a "causal" explannation. Elliot Sober, however, argues that scientists do accept other "equilibrium explanations":
These explain the actual situation as the outcome of most or all of the possible initial states. There is no attempt to trace the path by which the actual initial state developed into the present situation. It suffices that the result is invariant. Why do I have enough oxygen to breathe even though all the oxygen molecules could have congregated in one corner my room? The physicist explains that while this specific arrangement is just as likely as any other, the overwhelming majority of arrangements do not segregate oxygen.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/
I'm not sure how convincing this is?
apeiron
Aug31-11, 03:48 PM
Nothing there. As a matter of fact I did a search on your definition, and the only place it appears is in this thread. Please post a link to it, so we can see if you put your own interpretation on a definition. Or if you found some obscure sentence that's not being found. I'm refering to where you said "crisp metaphysical choice".
You are kidding right? Crisp means definite. Metaphysical means fundamental. Choice means options. Where is your difficulty?
Are you saying that you believe the philosophical definition of a dichotomy is the inability to decide?
I said this:
This is where the Greek and Chinese traditions really differ. The Greek's realised that this very fact could be used to create metaphysical clarity.
If you have one thing, you always have also its other - everything that it is not. And so nature always separates into dichotomous alternatives. Philosophy then becomes about approaching this systematically. If you have the one, you have the many. If stasis, then flux. If chance, then necessity. If substance, then form. Etc.
So if we have something, we have to clarify our notions about it by seeking the foundational dichotomy. The simple opposite to nothing in fact seems to be everything (rather than merely something). So zero or infinity. And you can continue from there.
Each part of a dichotomy is defined by its other as the crisp context . So there is actually no methodological problem standing in our way here.
So you are trying to say that this is not:
It is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:
jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts.
The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other.
Jeez, books are written about this stuff:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10684&ttype=2
It is so basic to human thought that perhaps, like water for fish, it goes unremarked yet is everywhere in philosophy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism
Any ontological answer to the question "why is there something instead of nothing" almost certainly has to include that idea that existence is the why of existence.
One could say that in the vast sea of possible imagined ideas, our existence represents a small portion. I feel that is a reasonable statement to make. Following that, our existence represents a manifestation of a subset of ideas, that is part of the superset of all things that can be imagined.
Manifestation of an idea refers, in the context I am using it, of the ability of idea to persist without conscious imagining, as things within our Universe appear to do.
In that sense, what you are describing is a justification or reasoning for nihilism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism), as the discussion about "something vs. nothing" eventually leads towards existential nihilism in the form of a logical conclusion of the argument being presented: if everything is nothing, no thing can have inherent meaning.
It is ultimately, from my perspective, a discussion about what the difference is between ideas and reality.
The problem of the initial argument is that it relies on probabilism. Whereas we have no idea why several universes would exist, or why there would be any manner of assigning probabilistic quantities to different versions, or why there could, or should, be any mathematical underpinning for the existence of this, or multiple, universes.
The argument therefore fails immediately, for me, since there is no rational underpinning for the probabilistic, or mathematical, postulate. And even if I follow the postulates of the argument for a large part, I would rather assign to the idea that the relation between universes, if any, should be nondeterministic. Our one experienced universe simply exists for the reason that it can exist.
I fail to see why this discussion would lead to existential nihilism, or even the conclusion: everything is nothing, ... .
You are kidding right?No, I'm trying to get you to use standard, well known definitions as required by our guidelines.
JordanL
Aug31-11, 05:04 PM
The problem of the initial argument is that it relies on probabilism. Whereas we have no idea why several universes would exist, or why there would be any manner of assigning probabilistic quantities to different versions, or why there could, or should, be any mathematical underpinning for the existence of this, or multiple, universes.
The argument therefore fails immediately, for me, since there is no rational underpinning for the probabilistic, or mathematical, postulate. And even if I follow the postulates of the argument for a large part, I would rather assign to the idea that the relation between universes, if any, should be nondeterministic. Our one experienced universe simply exists for the reason that it can exist.
I fail to see why this discussion would lead to existential nihilism, or even the conclusion: everything is nothing, ... .
This is actually the point I was making. I was rephrasing the original argument presented in a way that I knew how to address it.
My rejection of the original idea comes from my belief that the universe exists so that it can exist, as you also stated. Nihilism is the idea that fundamentally conflicts with this concept, and it is the nihilistic underpinnings of the original post that lead to my rejection of it as an explanation for the "ultimate question", as the OP posed it.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 05:21 PM
No, I'm trying to get you to use standard, well known definitions as required by our guidelines.
Well what was non-standard there? I mean really? And what was not supported by the context of what I had just written?
Here is what you singled out:
That makes no sense. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide, it means a crisp metaphysical choice. Binary options that are mutually exclusive as demanded by the law of the excluded middle.
So I said a dichotomy is not correctly defined in metaphysics as an inability to chose (Wuliheron may have mistakenly been thinking of a false dichotomy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy).
It is correctly defined as a pair of choices which have the basic logical properties of being jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive.
So now do you want to keep quarrelling about that definition or do you accept it?
If you want to keep on, then please supply your understanding of the standard definition so I can see what the heck is bothering you here.
Willowz
Aug31-11, 05:29 PM
But, Evo is right. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide. Or I haven't encountered that definition.
Willowz
Aug31-11, 05:33 PM
But, with topics like these semantics will always get in the way. Its all mathematics.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 05:52 PM
The problem of the initial argument is that it relies on probabilism. Whereas we have no idea why several universes would exist, or why there would be any manner of assigning probabilistic quantities to different versions, or why there could, or should, be any mathematical underpinning for the existence of this, or multiple, universes.
If you dig into this, there is a decision to be made about whether things are interacting or non-interacting.
An infinity of possibilities that don't interact will have a different equilibrium behaviour than an infinity that does.
There would be two clear extremal cases, and hence probability spaces.
With non-interaction, you would have a Tegmarkian ensemble in which every possibility could also be an actuality (there would be nothing to stop it, and so it would logically happen).
With total interaction, you would instead expect just one actuality to emerge from any host of possibilities. One outcome would out-compete all the rest as the persisting equilibrium state.
You could of course have every result inbetween, if interaction was in some degree strong or weak.
But I think there are good arguments for total interaction and therefore the emergence of some total balance of constraints, which in turn says even from an infinity of possibilities, only the one thing will become actual.
This of course seems to rule out nothingness as one of those possibilities though. But we are now taking a developmental perspective on existence. It has to come into being via a process (a competition amongst possibilities that finds its probablistic equilbrium). And it is pretty logical that nothing can come from nothiing, and because there is now patently at least one something, then nothing was never actually a possibility. :smile:
But that may not completely vanquish the notion of nothingness. A developmental process happens "in time". In some sense (not the usual sense as we are beyond particular spacetime in this discussion) there is a beginning state and an end state.
So it could be said that in the beginning was everything (an infinity of possibility, an unlimited potential) and that in evolving into a concrete one-ness, it will end up creating as near to nothing as possible.
Sound like the Big Bang where all possible dimensionality and materiality gets cooled and expanded to an empty heat-death void? The end state of the universe would still be a something, but it would also be nothing much.
But anyway, you can build a stochastic treatment on either an interacting or non-interacting basis. And one would appear to predict an infinite ensemble of actualised worlds a la Tegmark. The other would appear to predict the opposite - all possibility boiling away to leave only the one actuality. And we can say a lot about that because we live in it.
Our one experienced universe exists for the reason that it can exist.
The universe exists so that it can exist.
I am not great on philosophical discourse, at some point they boil down to irrelevant word games. But I'll indulge myself. There is a slight difference between the above two statements.
Do you assign will to the universe? Or do you belief it has self-moving, self-creationary, autonomic attributes?
apeiron
Aug31-11, 05:55 PM
But, Evo is right. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide. Or I haven't encountered that definition.
No, I wuz right because I said that is what it does not mean.
If you dig into this, there is a decision to be made about whether things are interacting or non-interacting.
...
But anyway, you can build a stochastic treatment on either an interacting or non-interacting basis. And one would appear to predict an infinite ensemble of actualised worlds a la Tegmark. The other would appear to predict the opposite - all possibility boiling away to leave only the one actuality. And we can say a lot about that because we live in it.
The problem is that I denied, or questioned, the relevance, or even validity, of a mathematical underpinning of this, or any, universe. To go from the idea, a universe exists, therefor multiple universes do/might exist, is a leap of faith, but somewhat plausible. To go from the idea multiple universes exist towards universes have a probability of existing, or there is a probabilistic relation between them, is a tremendous leap of faith which I find implausible.
I can't comment on the rest since I don't know enough of it, and don't believe in the rational basis of it.
Willowz
Aug31-11, 06:24 PM
No, I wuz right because I said that is what it does not mean.I stand by my previous post.
JordanL
Aug31-11, 06:27 PM
I am not great on philosophical discourse, at some point they boil down to irrelevant word games. But I'll indulge myself. There is a slight difference between the above two statements.
Do you assign will to the universe? Or do you belief it has self-moving, self-creationary, autonomic attributes?
I believe that the concept of will itself is irrelevant. Will implies acceptance of something and rejection of its opposite, and a Universe is by definition the set of things which the accepted and rejected must both exist, thus the concept of will is a concept which applies to a lower level of understanding than the Universe or any interpretation of it.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 06:34 PM
To go from the idea multiple universes exist towards universes have a probability of existing, or there is a probabilistic relation between them, is a tremendous leap of faith which I find implausible.
But just by leaping to an acceptance of multiple universes requires that there must be some lack of interaction between them (or how do they stay apart?). So you have already taken one of the two possible routes (and in doing so, dichotomistically :devil:) you have created the clear idea of the other choice.
Now we exist in a world in which there appears to be both interaction and non-interaction - or perhaps more accurately, both integration and differentiation. So we do have a legitimate basis for speculating about what might be the larger case concerning our world.
Our experience of our world also gives weight to the idea that things develop - they have causal histories, they roll down entropic gradients. Our reality is not a static existence but a dynamic process.
So again, that seems a legitimate basis for speculating about the larger case. We would be more right to think that the same applies outside our world than not - on Bayesian reasoning at least.
There is no need for leaps of faith here. Just the usual philosophical story of starting where you are and then seeing how that may constrain what could be.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 06:38 PM
I stand by my previous post.
So where did Evo say that a dichotomy is not an impossibility to decide? I haven't seen those words anywhere yet. Can you back up your claim by quoting from her post?
Willowz
Aug31-11, 06:47 PM
So where did Evo say that a dichotomy is not an impossibility to decide? I haven't seen those words anywhere yet. Can you back up your claim by quoting from her post?
Evo was pointing out this part from your eleventh post (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3477808&postcount=11):
A dichotomy [...] means a crisp metaphysical choice.
I believe that the concept of will itself is irrelevant. Will implies acceptance of something and rejection of its opposite, and a Universe is by definition the set of things [in] which the accepted and rejected must both exist, thus the concept of will is a concept which applies to a lower level of understanding than the Universe or any interpretation of it.
So you subscribe to a believe that things exist which are accepted or rejected. Are these things atomic, undividable, entities? [What is the nature of these things?]
The universe exists so that it can exist.
The second part of the question. My original claim was: 'The universe can exist, therefor it exists.' That is substantially different from 'The universe exists so that it can exist,' which to me (unless it was a typo), looks like it implies it has self-moving/self-creationary/autonomic attributes. Does it?
No, I wuz right because I said that is what it does not mean.You don't get to make up your own words. Stick the the dictionary defintions.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 06:53 PM
Evo was pointing out this part from your eleventh post (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3477808&postcount=11):
Well, yes, we know that. So again, where did she say anything that justifies your:
But, Evo is right. A dichotomy does not mean an impossibility to decide.
I realise this conversation could not be sillier. But if you keep insisting on making the false implication that I thought something else and Evo was correcting me, I have to ask you to please go back and read the words that have been written with more care. Otherwise you risk being infracted for trolling I would have thought.
Well, yes, we know that. So again, where did she say anything that justifies your:
I realise this conversation could not be sillier. But if you keep insisting on making the false implication that I thought something else and Evo was correcting me, I have to ask you to please go back and read the words that have been written with more care. Otherwise you risk being infracted for trolling I would have thought.You created your own definition, that is prohibited by the guidelines. You should know better.
Guidelines - explicitly defining key terms;
In particular, please make a concerted effort to adequately define key terms whose meaning might otherwise be ambiguous and to provide proper justification for any claims that might be contentious.
A good rule of thumb is to place yourself in the shoes of your readers and ask whether a prospective post is clear enough and developed enough to be understood by them-- Does this make sense?Cut the nonsense.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 07:06 PM
You don't get to make up your own words. Stick the the dictionary defintions.
You still have not said what words are made up. In what way did anything I say fail to follow familiar philosophical usage?
To be going on and on here, you must be alleging that you know of a different definition to the term, dichotomy, within metaphysics to the one that I have argued. So let's see you cite it here. Where are the words?
Willowz
Aug31-11, 07:08 PM
Hey, I don't mean to be nitpick and I'm sorry if I offended your intelligence. But, there was no need for the "metaphysicality". Off to another thread.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 07:27 PM
Guidelines - Cut the nonsense.
But I explained my use of the term dichotomy and was reacting to Wuliheron's apparent misuse of it. Now you can ask for further clarification. You can ask for sources. I can happily give both. And have already done so.
Yet still I am being hounded for apparently not adopting a usage which is "standard", and you cannot explain in what way it is not standard.
You have made the claim, out of the blue, that I have invented a definition. And yet the first definition you would find on Google leaves you no support on that.
if there is a concept A, and it is split into parts B and not-B, then the parts form a dichotomy: they are mutually exclusive, since no part of B is contained in not-B and vice-versa, and they are jointly exhaustive, since they cover all of A, and together again give A.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy
How is that not a "crisp metaphysical choice" in the context of the argument being made - that nothing and infinity are the kind of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possibilities that arise when metaphysical concepts are being made clear?
JordanL
Aug31-11, 07:33 PM
So you subscribe to a believe that things exist which are accepted or rejected. Are these things atomic, undividable, entities? [What is the nature of these things?]
I subscribe to a belief that existence is a prerequisite to the abstract acceptance or rejection of it. Even if these things are not atomic, undividable, etc., the abstract of their acceptance or rejection provides an informational input upon our universe in that they are reacted to, (by either their acceptance or rejection).
My point is that a "will" requires both decision and direction, and that the decision is expressed as both the acceptance of something, and the rejection of the things which are mutually exclusive with what is accepted.
To ascribe will to the Universe, you are also making an inherent claim that the Universe is part of a larger set which contains both the things our Universe accepted (everything that can be experienced or imagined or interacted within our Universe), and the things our Universe rejected.
Or another way of saying what I am talking about is that no set which contains all sets, including itself, can exercise will be definition.
If you believe the Universe to have will, you must also believe it to be part of a system or set larger than itself. Conversely, if it is not part of a larger system or set, it cannot have will.
I believe that the Universe is part of a larger system or set, and that it has will in the sense that there are things that are part and not part of our Universe, but not in the classical sense of conscious decision.
The second part of the question. My original claim was: 'The universe can exist, therefor it exists.' That is substantially different from 'The universe exists so that it can exist,' which to me (unless it was a typo), looks like it implies it has self-moving/self-creationary/autonomic attributes. Does it?
They are substantially different, and I was being less careful with my words. The intended meaning was compatible with your intended meaning. Accidentally, through negligence, I created a similar statement that I also agreed with, but was not the point I was trying to convey, if that makes sense.
apeiron
Aug31-11, 08:48 PM
You created your own definition, that is prohibited by the guidelines. You should know better.
Re-reading your post, it is still ambiguous.
Are you meaning to say here that you believe the correct definition of a dichotomy is indeed "an impossibility to decide"?
Can you answer directly, yes/no. Then I might have some clue about the source of your complaint.
Ok, let's take this a bit further.
How is a dichotomy a metaphysical choice?
Ok, let's take this a bit further.
How is a dichotomy a metaphysical choice?
If I were to argue the point, I would do it by saying that dichotomy represents a set of choices which inherently through their existence, (which metaphysics deals with through Ontology), exclude one another.
I don't think that's the most semantically accurate way of defining dichotomy, but it certainly seems more true than false.
Ok, let's take this a bit further.
How is a dichotomy a metaphysical choice?
An interesting thread has been derailed enough with this nonsense. Open a separate thread or PM me if you really want to discuss this.
disregardthat
Sep1-11, 08:25 AM
I think Evo might be trolling this thread.
I think Evo might be trolling this thread.
Disregard that. Trolls are not fundamental to existence :)
An interesting thread has been derailed enough with this nonsense. Open a separate thread or PM me if you really want to discuss this.Nothing serious has happened. Or at least we can put it aside.
In my opinion some imporant points are;
"Vageness" (in reference to the link you provided)
Mathematical realism and Indispensability Arguments, such as (all in order to aviod Vageness);
(P1) We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
(P2) Mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
(C) We ought to have ontological commitment to mathematical entities.
I don't know where you want to go on from here. QM, time...
The thread would be most productive if we could go through Tegmarks reasonings for a mathematical universe. That is, why does he think it is indispensabile? "Just because it is", doesn't cut the mustard.
My point is that a "will" requires both decision and direction, and that the decision is expressed as both the acceptance of something, and the rejection of the things which are mutually exclusive with what is accepted.
Ah. I agree on direction but not on decision. I am inclined to intuitive arguments which discard mutual exclusion as an emergent property of a delusional linguistic game.
To ascribe will to the Universe, you are also making an inherent claim that the Universe is part of a larger set which contains both the things our Universe accepted (everything that can be experienced or imagined or interacted within our Universe), and the things our Universe rejected.
It was a question, I don't ascribe will to the universe.
I believe that the Universe is part of a larger system or set, and that it has will in the sense that there are things that are part and not part of our Universe, but not in the classical sense of conscious decision.
No idea what is meant here. But I mostly reject mathematics as a basis for philosophical answers.
They are substantially different, and I was being less careful with my words. The intended meaning was compatible with your intended meaning. Accidentally, through negligence, I created a similar statement that I also agreed with, but was not the point I was trying to convey, if that makes sense.
Ah, ok.
Ah. I agree on direction but not on decision. I am inclined to intuitive arguments which discard mutual exclusion as an emergent property of a delusional linguistic game.
Hmmm... how do you describe will without something like decision? How can you have intended direction without decision?
Hmmm... how do you describe will without something like decision? How can you have intended direction without decision?
Decision implies binary choice, at least, to me. I don't think that (binary choice) exists, in an ontological sense.
It's a bit of more lengthier thought experiment, but it starts of with the question: Have you ever experienced a 'thing'?
To me, the answer to that question is: No. And since I deny that things exist, as atomic undividable entities, and see them as linguistical delusions, I reject mathematics (which is a more precise, and therefor, to me, more flawed form of language) as a delusion.
(My general feeling described very briefly.)
EDIT: I should have said that if you deny that things exist, that then choice is a delusion.
EDIT: Essentially, this is a reversal of the Platonic argument. Plato stated that 'real' things exist as imperfect approximations of 'ideals.' In that terminology, I would state that 'ideals' are the imperfect approximations of 'real' things.
Re-reading your post, it is still ambiguous.
Are you meaning to say here that you believe the correct definition of a dichotomy is indeed "an impossibility to decide"?
Can you answer directly, yes/no. Then I might have some clue about the source of your complaint.I said to stop making up your own words for definitions. Show me where "crisp metaphysical choice" is a definition of "dichotomy".
Once again the rules.
explicitly defining key terms;
In particular, please make a concerted effort to adequately define key terms whose meaning might otherwise be ambiguous and to provide proper justification for any claims that might be contentious. Doing so will go a long way towards stimulating productive discussion, whereas failure to do so will inevitably lead to lots of confusion, wasted words, and effort, and ultimately to moderator intervention as outlined above.
How likely is it that someone will be confused by, or misinterpret, what I have written? You should strive to make your posts intelligible, well supported, and unambiguous.
If you wish to be allowed to post here, you need to obey the rules. One of the biggest problems with online *philosophy* is sticking to well known, clear definitions that are understood by all. Acting obtuse isn't helping you.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=47294
This thread needs to get back on topic.
Decision implies binary choice, at least, to me. I don't think that (binary choice) exists, in an ontological sense.
It's a bit of more lengthier thought experiment, but it starts of with the question: Have you ever experienced a 'thing'?
To me, the answer to that question is: No. And since I deny that things exist, as atomic undividable entities, and see them as linguistical delusions, I reject mathematics (which is a more precise, and therefor, to me, more flawed form of language) as a delusion.
(My general feeling described very briefly.)
Hmmm.... I don't see decision as being binary either, even in the way I described it, which is not mathematical either. Allow me to elaborate.
Let's suppose that we are creating a list of things which are true about our planet. Not an exhaustive list, just some of the things that are true. It has an atmosphere, it has gravity, it has liquid water, it exists approximately between -40 and +40 centigrade on the surface.
Now these sets of things are approximated facts. But they, by definition, exclude other possible facts. For instance, it if has an atmosphere it cannot lack an atmosphere, which is an alternative but invalid fact. If it has gravity it attracts other masses, instead of not interacting or repelling them.
The idea that the truths of our planet have non-binary but opposed falsities does not inherently imply decision. But it is necessary for decision.
The following is an argument I am presenting for philosophical reasons, not because I believe it to be true.
Suppose that the facts of our planet represented intent. That they are "supposed" to be this way. In order to be intended, it must represent a set of facts that do not include ALL facts. If it included all facts, then both those intended and not intended would be true. So within existence, which contains all truths of any meaning to us, the specific truths of any given thing, in this case the Earth, represent a portion of all truths.
Intent requires the exclusion of possible truths, or the transformation of a true statement into a false statement. For example, in the absence of reality, any statement is tautologically true by its utterance. But reality in many ways is not tautological, and this implies that not all statements are true (which we observe to be an accurate statement).
The statement is not reversible. The presence of possible false statements does not prove intent, they simply must be possible for intent to be an explanation. Why, if intent represents direction only, is this the case? Direction would be the pursuit of a specific truth or specific set of truths, not the exclusion of possible truths or the presence of possible falsities.
It is because decision, or the ability to exclude possible truths from the group of all truths, is also necessary for intent. Will is defined as follows:
1.the faculty of conscious and especially of deliberate action
3. the act or process of using or asserting one's choice; volition
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/will
Using these definitions I will paraphrase and connect the ideas by stating that will is the expression or the act of intent.
Decision does not imply binary choice in my opinion. Decision implies the acceptance of some non-empty group of possible truths, and the rejection of some non-empty group of possible truths, but not between binary choices, simply incompatible ones.
In that sense, what I am saying is not that Ontologically there is absolute truth and absolute falsity; I am saying that existence requires that the false exists in order for it to be rejected. If the Universe were to have will, then all truth and all falsity exist, even if not within our Universe. The implication of that, in my opinion, would be far more important than the idea that the Universe has will. My original point, which again I didn't express very well and perhaps am still not expressing very well, is that the existence of all possible statements and ideas is necessary for the Universe to express will, and that a "place" to contain the statements and ideas which are false within our Universe must exist as well if the Universe can express will.
So I see the question of whether or not the Universe has will as being the same as whether or not there exists an infinite multi-verse, because in my mind, an infinite multi-verse is required for the Universe to have will, even if the reverse is not true.
In the sense of all things being linguistic illusions, regardless of the "illusion" being presented, the illusion exists within some thing that can contain the illusion as a truth or a falsity. The presence of the illusion proves the existence of existence, for the purpose of creating an illusion.
Hmmm.... I don't see decision as being binary either, even in the way I described it, which is not mathematical either. Allow me to elaborate.
The problem with a lot what you said is that what you feel is not a linguistical delusion, I think is, and what you feel is not a binary choice on existence, I feel is.
I basically seem to default to a not very well fleshed-out current-day version of Parmenides view that the universe is an undivisable whole. (At least, I don't think there are things with clear cut boundaries. Since math [/logic] assumes that, I wonder about the relation between math and the world and our understanding of it.)
In the sense of all things being linguistic illusions, regardless of the "illusion" being presented, the illusion exists within some thing that can contain the illusion as a truth or a falsity. The presence of the illusion proves the existence of existence, for the purpose of creating an illusion.
Evidently. :biggrin:
The problem with a lot what you said is that what you feel is not a linguistical delusion, I think is, and what you feel is not a binary choice on existence, I feel is.
I basically seem to default to a not very well fleshed-out current-day version of Parmenides view that the universe is an undivisable whole. (At least, I don't think there are things with clear cut boundaries. Since math assumes that, I wonder about the relation between math and the world and our understanding of it.)
Evidently. :biggrin:
Interesting. I see where we're diverging too.
I seem to default to the following: Anything that can be described exists within the fact that it can be described. Because of this the Universe and existence are as divisible or undivisible as you describe them to be, even if not within our experienced Universe or existence. (That is, all statements and ideas are true, even if they are not locally true.)
Nothing serious has happened. Or at least we can put it aside.
Nothing except more infractions for no defensible reason. A philosophy forum should be moderated by people with a working knowledge of philosophy.
Interesting. I see where we're diverging too.
I seem to default to the following: Anything that can be described exists within the fact that it can be described. Because of this the Universe and existence are as divisible or undivisible as you describe them to be, even if not within our experienced Universe or existence. (That is, all statements and ideas are true, even if they are not locally true.)
Hmm, no.
I saw a falling star tonight when I was thinking about the 'undivisability' of things. Great, I had my first mystic experience! :cool:
I asked the question: Did you ever experience a 'thing'? So, let's take the falling star as an example.
What is a falling star? I know, from hearsay, that it is a collection of rubble passing through our atmosphere. Does it have a boundary which makes it a 'thing'? No. It consists of rubble, a level deeper of atoms (silicon, water, air molecules it interacts with, light it dissipates), a level deeper QM 'clouds'.
Does it exist? I would say no. The abstraction 'falling star' exists, but not in physical reality, but as a linguistic experience, a fuzzy abstraction (a sign) of an imperfect [sensory] experience of a physical phenomenon.
The same seems to be true for 'a chair,' 'a star,' 'a person,' anything.
But the basis of math, arithmetic, is that I can abstract physical phenomena into abstract things and can, for instance, count them. One falling star, two falling stars, etc. But discrete things don't seem to exist in reality, except as linguistical phenomena. How can we assume that counting things actually says anything about reality? [Except as an imperfect approximation?]
Similarly, the basis of the denial of the existence of things is that those (discrete) things exist. But discrete things don't seem to exist, only the linguistic abstraction, how can we deny the existence of physical things except as a word game? Does the denial of the linguistic abstraction imply the non-existence of the physical phenomenon?
The basis of logic, and the excluded middle, is that something is, or is not. And this then, to me, seems to be a reduction at absurdum, an abstraction [logic] of an abstraction [linguistics] of [imperfect experiences of] physical phenomena? The first abstraction I have doubts about, the second abstraction might as well be called absurd?
Nothing except more infractions for no defensible reason. A philosophy forum should be moderated by people with a working knowledge of philosophy.
I've worked large forums as a moderator before, so I have some advice:
Forums and their moderators are not about fairness or correctness or truth. It is about following instruction. It does not matter if the rules are not applied how you interpret them, they are applied as the moderators and administrators interpret them.
Forums are kind of like dictatorships, in that the merit of a decision does not matter. Or rather, your interpretation of the merit does not matter. If the moderator has been tasked with enforcing rules, it is because their judgment has been trusted as the final interpretation of those rules.
The defensible reason for any infraction is that it has been given. The very fact that the person who gave was capable of giving it is the reason that it is correct, within the context of this forum. That is why there are many different forums with many different kinds of communities.
If Evo cited a rule to challenge something you posted, you cannot both defend your position and understand the reason. It is one or the other, because the moderator is correct and you are not, because they are the moderator. In that sense, defending the position inherently means misunderstanding the reason, and moderators often have few tools to deal with that situation other than conversation and infraction.
My advice to you would be this: if you believe that the reasoning is flawed, first accept that you received some kind of infraction, then seek out the moderator in a PM with the solitary intent of understanding how you violated the rules. Do not seek to change the rules, or change interpretation, try and find under what assumptions the infraction is valid, then understand that participating in this forum means agreeing with those assumptions.
Hmm, no.
I saw a falling star tonight when I was thinking about the 'undivisability' of things. Great, I had my first mystic experience! :cool:
I asked the question: Did you ever experience a 'thing'? So, let's take the falling star as an example.
What is a falling star? I know, from hearsay, that it is a collection of rubble passing through our atmosphere. Does it have a boundary which makes it a 'thing'? No. It consists of rubble, a level deeper of atoms (silicon, water, air molecules it interacts with, light it dissipates), a level deeper QM 'clouds'.
Does it exist? I would say no. The abstraction 'falling star' exists, but not in physical reality, but as a linguistic experience, a fuzzy abstraction (a sign) of an imperfect [sensory] experience of a physical phenomenon.
The same seems to be true for 'a chair,' 'a star,' 'a person,' anything.
But the basis of math, arithmetic, is that I can abstract physical phenomena into abstract things and can, for instance, count them. One falling star, two falling stars, etc. But discrete things don't seem to exist in reality, except as linguistical phenomena. How can we assume that counting things actually says anything about reality? [Except as an imperfect approximation?]
Similarly, the basis of the denial of the existence of things is that those (discrete) things exist. But discrete things don't seem to exist, only the linguistic abstraction, how can we deny the existence of physical things except as a word game? Does the denial of the linguistic abstraction imply the non-existence of the physical phenomenon?
The basis of logic, and the excluded middle, is that something is, or is not. And this then, to me, seems to be a reduction at absurdum, an abstraction of an abstraction of physical phenomena? The first abstraction I have doubts about, the second abstraction might as well be called absurd?
Ah, but you see, your interpretation of reality is within mine, it just excludes the rest of my interpretation. As the interpretation exists, it discretely exists, even if not within this Universe. Similarly, my interpretation does as well, even if not within this Universe.
All ideas which can be described with language are things, even your interpretation, and as things, they neither represent an objective truth nor represent any kind of permanence. There was a state in which both of our interpretations were not extant, so neither of our interpretations represent a constant truth of any kind from any perspective. Tautologically both of our interpretations are approximations of some "thing", not the thing itself.
Whether or not a thing is experienced or conveyed as information is completely irrelevant to the existence of those things, because all things, whether abstractions or not, had a time or a state in which they were absent, and so do not represent any kind of ultimate truth, either for you or for anyone else. They can be more true or less true, but not the truth.
Experiences are just as valid and invalid as knowledge for justifying existence, because they are both part of existence. In order to justify existence you must describe it within something larger than existence, otherwise you describe it incompletely.
A more concrete example of this principal would be the following: suppose you had a program to simulate the deterministic nature of a Universe. Could this program simulate our own Universe from within it? No, it could not, as it would require all of the totality of our existence within this Universe to create a simulation of our existence within this Universe. Our existence can be described as real or simulated, but they describe the same thing.
If real, they are discrete, and if not, they can only exist within some thing discrete which can contain their indiscreteness in order to be experienced as discrete. The fact that they can be interpreted as discrete, even if they are not, means that their discreteness holds at some level, even if it is a level beyond our own experience of existence.
Ah, but you see, your interpretation of reality is within mine, it just excludes the rest of my interpretation. As the interpretation exists, it discretely exists, even if not within this Universe. Similarly, my interpretation does as well, even if not within this Universe.
Great!
All ideas which can be described with language are things, even your interpretation, and as things, they neither represent an objective truth nor represent any kind of permanence. There was a state in which both of our interpretations were not extant, so neither of our interpretations represent a constant truth of any kind from any perspective. Tautologically both of our interpretations are approximations of some "thing", not the thing itself.
This is my point. I wonder whether 'discrete' things exist, as far as I know, I have a fuzzy understanding of the universe, and even a fuzzy experience of the linguistic abstractions I assign to what I experience. I find it a leap of faith to conclude from that those things exist, in an ontological sense, from that fuzzy understanding.
Since logic and math presuppose the existence of things (which don't exist), any mathematical description of the universe [as a collection of things] would therefor be flawed.
Whether or not a thing is experienced or conveyed as information is completely irrelevant to the existence of those things, because all things, whether abstractions or not, had a time or a state in which they were absent, and so do not represent any kind of ultimate truth, either for you or for anyone else. They can be more true or less true, but not the truth.
For the sake of the argument (I am not that rabid on it), I deny the existence of things altogether.
Moreover, you presuppose the existence of things by them being able to be absent. Like Parmenides I would say: Nothing is absent, nothing is present, the whole universe is the only thing there.
Experiences are just as valid and invalid as knowledge for justifying existence, because they are both part of existence. In order to justify existence you must describe it within something larger than existence, otherwise you describe it incompletely.
The existence of the universe, yes. The existence of discrete things within it, no.
A more concrete example of this principal would be the following: suppose you had a program to simulate the deterministic nature of a Universe. Could this program simulate our own Universe from within it? No, it could not, as it would require all of the totality of our existence within this Universe to create a simulation of our existence within this Universe. Our existence can be described as real or simulated, but they describe the same thing.
I would agree to that since the universe is an undivisable thing, and therefor couldn't be put in itself.
If real, they are discrete, and if not, they can only exist within some thing discrete which can contain their indiscreteness in order to be experienced as discrete. The fact that they can be interpreted as discrete, even if they are not, means that their discreteness holds at some level, even if it is a level beyond our own experience of existence.
Again. I wonder, and for the sake of the argument deny, that there are discrete things. Except for the one universe.
I would say that 'discreteness' is a fuzzy delusion of my perception of my internal linguistical games. So, I again deny that discreteness holds, in an ontological sense, at some level.
EDIT: Again, it's a bit of stretch, but it comes from my own, say even mystical, experience, that I never in my life have met 'a thing.' And I wonder what that means.
This is my point. I wonder whether 'discrete' things exist, as far as I know, I have a fuzzy understanding of the universe, and even a fuzzy experience of the linguistic abstractions I assign to what I experience. I find it a leap of faith to conclude from that those things exist, in an ontological sense, from that fuzzy understanding.
The existence of the universe, yes. The existence of discrete things within it, no.
You find it to be a fuzzy understanding, but in concluding that it is fuzzy, you assign varying degrees of truth or falsity to them. How could one do so with things that do not exist? Things. In the absence of discreteness within the things of our Universe, there would be no such thing as truth or falsity at all, for any particular thing that is either true or false would be a declaration of the truth of falsity of existence itself.
For the sake of the argument (I am not that rabid on it), I deny the existence of things altogether.
Moreover, you presuppose the existence of things by them being able to be absent. Like Parmenides I would say: Nothing is absent, nothing is present, the whole universe is the only thing there.
In denying the existence, you confirm it exists. How can you deny that which is not extant? In order to deny it must be described, and this that can be described exists tautologically within its description.
I am not saying that the absence of things confirms their existence. Quite the opposite. I am saying that the things which can be declared false or can be denied must be present so that they can be declared upon.
How can one deny that which is not anywhere or within anything? The denial of it provides it exists within the context of denial. That has nothing to do with whether or not it is a thing or whether or not it is discrete. It by definition exists, as an idea, as a thing, or as something indescrete, in order to be commented upon at all.
I suppose the leap I am describing is that knowledge and experience are as concrete an existence as physical existence, they just interact with our Universe using different rules and different mechanisms. But they are a part of existence, or existence is a part of them, however you wish to phrase it.
Again. I wonder, and for the sake of the argument deny, that there are discrete things. Except for the one universe.
I would say that 'discreteness' is a fuzzy delusion of my perception of my internal linguistical games. So, I again deny that discreteness holds, in an ontological sense, at some level.
EDIT: Again, it's a bit of stretch, but it comes from my own, say even mystical, experience, that I never in my life have met 'a thing.' And I wonder what that means.
If the issue is mostly about whether or not the parts are discrete or not, and thus can be confirmed to exist inherently instead of as a part of the whole, then I would say that the idea of inherent or whole existence as you are describing it is missing the point.
Things do not need to be separate to be inherent, and the whole does not need to be divisible to have things. You can choose to engage all things as part of arbitrarily large or small systems, (ontological systems), because the only part of existence that has been utterly consistent has been this: all things exist within a larger existence, and contain smaller existences.
Where you decide to stop along this infinite chain of regress is unimportant and arbitrary in my opinion. Each thing within it contains the same infinite microchasms of existence, just as all things are contained within the larger macrochasm of our Universe's existence, and at least to me, logically it is also contained within infinitely larger existence.
There is no stopping point or starting point. Existence contains the Universe, the Universe does not contain existence, so dividing the Universe up into the real and not real is unimportant to me from an ontological perspective.
Side note: I am not actually trying to convince you of anything, and I would like to say that I've found your points fascinating and thought-provoking. This is an angle I have not had to consider the idea I'm proposing from before, and even as I explain it within the context of what you are presenting, my conclusions are not fully formed, and I am not nearly as firm in these opinions as I'm sure I seem to be.
Nothing except more infractions for no defensible reason. A philosophy forum should be moderated by people with a working knowledge of philosophy.I found your old thread very readable. http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514
You find it to be a fuzzy understanding, but in concluding that it is fuzzy, you assign varying degrees of truth or falsity to them. How could one do so with things that do not exist? Things.
No, you see. That's where I totally disagree with you. In the claim of 'assignment of varying degrees of truth of falsity,' is a presupposition that things exist. (To what can I assign if I don't believe in things, but think that the concept of 'thing' is a delusion?)
Again, I don't deny that I (fuzzily) perceive 'things' as emergent attributes from an internal linguistical game which is the result of an imperfect reflection on reality, but I fail to see how that would make things exist since everything I perceive is fuzzy, and -again- I have never encountered an (undividable/atomic) thing in reality, or in thought.
In the absence of discreteness within the things of our Universe, there would be no such thing as truth or falsity at all, for any particular thing that is either true or false would be a declaration of the truth of falsity of existence itself.
Yes, there cannot be a thing, as truth, since things don't exist. Truth itself is a delusional linguistic abstraction stemming from a linguistic game.
In denying the existence, you confirm it exists. How can you deny that which is not extant? In order to deny it must be described, and this that can be described exists tautologically within its description.
I deny the existence of things, not the universe. The universe I perceive, it exists.
I deny that description is the proof of existence of things. The description is a delusional linguistical game in itself.
I am not saying that the absence of things confirms their existence. Quite the opposite. I am saying that the things which can be declared false or can be denied must be present so that they can be declared upon.
Which is a stretch to far for me, since I deny things exist, and therefor, things cannot be declared false.
How can one deny that which is not anywhere or within anything? The denial of it provides it exists within the context of denial. That has nothing to do with whether or not it is a thing or whether or not it is discrete. It by definition exists, as an idea, as a thing, or as something indescrete, in order to be commented upon at all.
No, the denial is on the fact that 'How can one deny that which is not anywhere or within anything,' is a linguistical stament, a word game, an imperfect delusion. 'The universe is,' is also a word game, but something I experience; 'that what is not' is (only) a word game, since it cannot be experienced.
I suppose the leap I am describing is that knowledge and experience are as concrete an existence as physical existence, they just interact with our Universe using different rules and different mechanisms. But they are a part of existence, or existence is a part of them, however you wish to phrase it.
To me, knowledge and experience and physical perception is the universe - they are all -for lack of better words- 'fuzzy'.
(After that, there is the process of accepting that there is also a physical universe, that I am a part of that, and that knowledge and experience are probably reducable to the universe itself- but I really don't want to start a debate on materialism.)
If the issue is mostly about whether or not the parts are discrete or not, and thus can be confirmed to exist inherently instead of as a part of the whole, then I would say that the idea of inherent or whole existence as you are describing it is missing the point.
Things do not need to be separate to be inherent, and the whole does not need to be divisible to have things. You can choose to engage all things as part of arbitrarily large or small systems, (ontological systems), because the only part of existence that has been utterly consistent has been this: all things exist within a larger existence, and contain smaller existences.
Yeah, well, unless I deny that last statement since the universe is undividable. No things exist.
There is no stopping point or starting point. Existence contains the Universe, the Universe does not contain existence, so dividing the Universe up into the real and not real is unimportant to me from an ontological perspective.
Ah. But you constantly do divide, or make statements which imply that you can divide things. For instance, a 'decision between accepted or rejected.'
Why do I reject decision (in free will)? Because:
A) I reject 'things' exist, except as for as delusions from my mind stemming from a linguistic game. And
B) A decision is a choice between (two) things.
Therefor, decisions don't exist. It is impossible since there is nothing to chose between.
Side note: I am not actually trying to convince you of anything, and I would like to say that I've found your points fascinating and thought-provoking. This is an angle I have not had to consider the idea I'm proposing from before, and even as I explain it within the context of what you are presenting, my conclusions are not fully formed, and I am not nearly as firm in these opinions as I'm sure I seem to be.
I am not trying to convince anyone of anything here too. I just think that I am deluded in my perception of reality, that's an uncommon stance.
But I mostly reject mathematics as a basis for philosophical answers.
So I'm guessing you wouldn't agree with Friedman's quote below?
"the philosophers of the modern tradition from Descartes are not best understood as attempting to stand outside the new science so as to show, from some mysterious point outside of sciences itself that our scientific knowledge somehow mirrors an independently existing reality. Rather, they start from the fact of modern scientific knowledge as a fixed point, as it were. Their problem is not so much to justify this knowledge from some 'higher' standpoint so as to articulate the new philosophical conceptions that are forced upon us by the new science. In Kant's words, mathematics and the science of nature stand in no need of philosophical inquiry for themselves, but for the sake of another science: metaphysics."
If you don't agree, what are some reasons you think this view is mistaken?
So I'm guessing you wouldn't agree with Friedman's quote below?
"the philosophers of the modern tradition from Descartes are not best understood as attempting to stand outside the new science so as to show, from some mysterious point outside of sciences itself that our scientific knowledge somehow mirrors an independently existing reality. Rather, they start from the fact of modern scientific knowledge as a fixed point, as it were. Their problem is not so much to justify this knowledge from some 'higher' standpoint so as to articulate the new philosophical conceptions that are forced upon us by the new science. In Kant's words, mathematics and the science of nature stand in no need of philosophical inquiry for themselves, but for the sake of another science: metaphysics."
If you don't agree, what are some reasons you think this view is mistaken?
Well, for those who missed it, I just gave an ontological/metaphysical argument that math may fall short of describing reality by questioning a fundamental assumption in it: the existence of things. (Which leads to, among others, counting and the law of the excluded middle.)
I have no other reason except for a) a feeling that we know way less than we think, b) the above argument, and c) (a reason stolen from fundamentalist Islamist) that the rational method leads to reductions at absurdum, or, doesn't seem to have improved our understanding of nature one iota, and d) doesn't seem to have solved any fundamental problem in the world.
I therefor, jokingly, posted that a more fundamental question than 'Why change?' would be 'Who are you?' Now that seems like an unscientific question, but stemming from Greek tradition, if we drop all assumptions, shouldn't the question about other intelligences be more fundamental to our core (ontological) knowledge of the world given what we experience?
but stemming from Greek tradition, if we drop all assumptions...
Do you have a source for this?
Perhaps you mean here the method of induction. So where does that leave deduction (and hence mathematical argument)?
a) a feeling that we know way less than we think,
This is what really confuses me also. On the one hand, one can't help but have this sense of immense progress in selected domains (like in physics) so that we are getting closer to ‘the real properties of the natural world’ and yet if we assume we are like all other animals and not gods, our knowledge must be pretty slim. It seems almost a sure thing that things-in-themselves (if that term even applies) will forever be hidden from us as Kant argued. Consider Pinker's argument:
We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.
Thus, it's argued that our minds like most other biological systems/organs are likely poor solutions to the design-problems posed by nature. They are, "the best solution that evolution could achieve under existing circumstances, but perhaps a clumsy and messy solution." Thus, it seems we cannot have direct knowledge of how the world is like as the knowledge has to be routed in terms of the resources available to our theory-building abilities/mental organs and these are not likely to be "pipelines to the truth".
What is even stranger is the "the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". Why is abstract mathematics so effective especially given its unlikely role in natural selection. I mean abstract mathematical thinking doesn't appear to have played any role in our evolution. I mean our ancestors didn't even know they had it, I think? I mean, what survival advantage does the ability to do abstract mathematics have to do with dealing with every day objects?
Do you have a source for this?
Perhaps you mean here the method of induction. So where does that leave deduction (and hence mathematical argument)?
One might wonder whether deduction, and you should define that, is a mathematical argument.
EDIT: Critical thinking is assigned to the Socratic school of thought, but probably older than that. I forgot why it is assigned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
This is what really confuses me also. On the one hand, one can't help but have this sense of immense progress in selected domains (like in physics) so that we are getting closer to ‘the real properties of the natural world’ and yet if we assume we are like all other animals and not gods, our knowledge must be pretty slim. It seems almost a sure thing that things-in-themselves (if that term even applies) will forever be hidden from us as Kant argued. Consider Pinker's argument:
We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.
Fortunately, this problem is solved by all religions. :biggrin: (This was a joke. Thing is in your argument you assume an awful lot, which I tried to avoid in the ontological denial.)
Thus, it's argued that our minds like most other biological systems/organs are likely poor solutions to the design-problems posed by nature. They are, "the best solution that evolution could achieve under existing circumstances, but perhaps a clumsy and messy solution." Thus, it seems we cannot have direct knowledge of how the world is like as the knowledge has to be routed in terms of the resources available to our theory-building abilities/mental organs and these are not likely to be "pipelines to the truth".
Plato's cave enhanced with biology and evolutionary theory. The problem is that Plato already showed that without biology and evolutionary theory our understanding is hopelessly ineffective. (But to be honest, I don't care to much about these questions. The only interesting thing about my original denial of existence of things is that it might reasonably show that math is inadequate to describe reality. I don't really care to much about the other, for me, unanswerable questions of existence.)
What is even stranger is the "the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". Why is abstract mathematics so effective especially given its unlikely role in natural selection. I mean abstract mathematical thinking doesn't appear to have played any role in our evolution. I mean our ancestors didn't even know they had it, I think? I mean, what survival advantage does the ability to do abstract mathematics have to do with dealing with every day objects?
I don't buy into that claim except for that I think it's nice to believe as a physicist.
As for the last question, it just seems to me that nukes come in handy when dealing with existential questions of survival.
But, also, you reduced to Darwinism, which is amoral. I rather stopped worrying about that, and wonder more about why we fail to 'transcend' amorality.
EDIT: Maybe we should stop the thread, or discuss the reasonability of math being able to describe reality, or it's unreasonable effectiveness elsewhere.
The thread would be most productive if we could go through Tegmarks reasonings for a mathematical universe. That is, why does he think it is indispensabile? "Just because it is", doesn't cut the mustard.
I think Tegmark comes to that conclusion because to a large extent,
"the propositions of physics are equations, equations that contain numbers, terms that refer without describing, many other mathematical symbols, and nothing else; and that these equations, being what they are, can only tell us about the abstract or mathematically characterizable structure of matter or the physical world without telling us anything else about the nature of the thing that exemplifies the structure. Even in the case of spacetime, as opposed to matter or force—to the doubtful extent that these three things can be separated—it’s unclear whether we have any knowledge of its intrinsic nature beyond its abstract or mathematically representable structure."
Thus, in physics, the propositions are invariably mathematical expressions that are totally devoid of direct pictoriality. Physicists believe that physics has to 'free itself' from ‘intuitive pictures’ and give up the hope of ‘visualizing the world'. Steven Weinberg traces the realistic significance of physics to its mathematical formulations: ‘we have all been making abstract mathematical models of the universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations' ( e.g. so-called 'Galilean Style').
But I think it's far-fetched to jump the ship and say there is nothing but math because one still has a "math-phenonology" unification problem replacing the mind-body explanatory gap. For how do mathematical entities lead to phenomenology? It seems to me that mathematical objects because of their abstractness are just the best mental objects/tools we have for describing stuff that our senses and every day notions cannot describe. But there seems to be far more than just mathematical objects as introspection/subjectivity reveals:
"And Since we know—more certainly than anything else—that experience is real, and is therefore wholly physical, if materialism is true, we have reason, as materialists, to think, with Priestley, Russell, Eddington, and others, that experientiality is a fundamental feature of the physical."
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262513102pref2.pdf
klimatos
Sep10-11, 10:14 PM
This is the kind of question that makes me bang my head on my desk. Why do people spend time on such useless questions? Oh, I know, philosophy asks the questions that don't need to be asked. <bangs head on desk>
Carry on.
My sympathies, Evo. I only hope that you have an indefinitely large supply of desks. I would have said "an infinite supply" except that some reader would have been sure to ask me "just exactly what do you mean by 'infinite'".
My sympathies, Evo. I only hope that you have an indefinitely large supply of desks. I would have said "an infinite supply" except that some reader would have been sure to ask me "just exactly what do you mean by 'infinite'".LOL, unfortunately I only have one head. :frown:
foolishwun
Sep26-11, 11:29 PM
Reality is an illusion, but the thing that's being eluded is also a part of that illusion.
First consider the fact that there is a possibility that all that exists is the very moment where you understand what I am saying now, with all memories of the even recent past nothing but an artificial arrangement of atoms and electrical activity. There is no objective present, only a quantumly subjective one. Think of it as a quantumly decided random outcome in infinite dimensions. A random position, a random present, a random set of universal laws, a random observer existent in any way that agrees with the universal laws and the logic that allows it to exist in the first place. It's like when you look directly at an electron or photon or whatever and say "why am I in the universe where this is here, instead of somewhere else in the wave funtion?" The same concept can be applied to every dimension of your subjectivity: location, present, even the universe that allows you to exist in the first place. Each of these things exists, at an abstract level, perpendicularly to the last, and the observer is a random outcome in any place where he/she is possible.
Anyone get what I mean? >.>
Reality is an illusion, but the thing that's being eluded is also a part of that illusion.
First consider the fact that there is a possibility that all that exists is the very moment where you understand what I am saying now, with all memories of the even recent past nothing but an artificial arrangement of atoms and electrical activity. There is no objective present, only a quantumly subjective one. Think of it as a quantumly decided random outcome in infinite dimensions. A random position, a random present, a random set of universal laws, a random observer existent in any way that agrees with the universal laws and the logic that allows it to exist in the first place. It's like when you look directly at an electron or photon or whatever and say "why am I in the universe where this is here, instead of somewhere else in the wave funtion?" The same concept can be applied to every dimension of your subjectivity: location, present, even the universe that allows you to exist in the first place. Each of these things exists, at an abstract level, perpendicularly to the last, and the observer is a random outcome in any place where he/she is possible.
Anyone get what I mean? >.>
To me it sounds like a random collection of words.
Can you describe the idea, using short logical arguments. [after all philosophy should be logical?]
Today I have a mood for some philosophy!
...
Why there is something rather than nothing?
...
Do you know why does a dog lick his balls?
I guess you can put the dog as a metaphor for the universe. =)
Willowz
Sep27-11, 12:17 AM
Today I have a mood for some philosophy!
Do you know why does a dog lick his balls?
I guess you can put the dog as a metaphor for the universe. =)Durrrrr! Does not compute.
Durrrrr! Does not compute.
You can answer these both questions using similar logic...=)
NorEaster
Oct1-11, 07:54 AM
Interestingly, this post was sent as a post-reply forum alert (within a forum email), and I remember commenting on this subject, and yet I can't find whatever it was that I posted within this thread. I guess I'm just not doing something right, but I still can address some of this.
Reality is an illusion, but the thing that's being eluded is also a part of that illusion.
The truth is that your singular perception of reality is an illusion - crafted by the cognitive vetting process that manages all information that is allowed to be loaded into your corporeal brain's short term memory. That said, to believe that the whole of reality is an illusion is to suggest that you are the Alpha and Omega of what lies above and beyond existence itself and are being served by that existential whole as the central purpose of that whole. A good self image is important, but there are boundaries between what is good and what is a little too good, and your assertion might be an illustration of the crossing of such a boundary in this case.
First consider the fact that there is a possibility that all that exists is the very moment where you understand what I am saying now, with all memories of the even recent past nothing but an artificial arrangement of atoms and electrical activity.
In reference to your perception, this is true, but only regarding your perception. The caveat that I would inject here is that what you understand to be "now" is anywhere from 3-7 seconds in the past (delayed reality perception) since the cognitive vetting process takes a moment to shed, mask, amplify, minimize, and otherwise "massage" all the data (stored residual, ruminative, audio/visual/sensory) that is streaming into your short term memory as a mix-down wash of corporeal consciousness at this specific instant.
Once that data has been streamed in (in the form of a residual data clone of the real associated "burst" whole of indivisible conscious intellect) the carbon storage material (that we're all constructed of) stores that cloned data for quick access, since this is on-board data storage/access/application/configuration capacity is what makes the brain itself such a superior survival data management system (as opposed to the point-of-application DNA directives system found in much more primitive corporeal matrix wholes). The original Intellect "burst" (a dynamic information/event unit hybrid) immediately associates with existing "bursts" from the same corporeal authoring brain, forming a unique existential hybrid collective, but that's a subject for discussion within a different thread.
There is no objective present, only a quantumly subjective one.
Actually, there is a definitive present, but it only lasts the span of the contextual environment's Unit Rate of Change (URC) before being replaced by the next change (event) unit. We refer to each of these indivisible event units as "now", and it's fair to say that they are very short-lived. They do - however - survive as associated unit configurations of information (the facts of these event units having occurred), but that's a completely different form of physical existence, so in truth, these event units do not literally survive the instant. That said, they can logically survive as contributive holon units within larger event holons, which can also be integral to progressively larger event holons, giving all associated event units logically representative survival as long as the umbrella event trajectory survives.
It can get pretty complicated when you start examining umbrella event holons that approach the sophistication of those that we perceive as material existence. By that time, the holon layers are fairly extreme, and the contextual ramifications are very rigid (by juxtapositional default impact, of course), and the potentials have become comfortably predictable.
Think of it as a quantumly decided random outcome in infinite dimensions. A random position, a random present, a random set of universal laws, a random observer existent in any way that agrees with the universal laws and the logic that allows it to exist in the first place. It's like when you look directly at an electron or photon or whatever and say "why am I in the universe where this is here, instead of somewhere else in the wave funtion?" The same concept can be applied to every dimension of your subjectivity: location, present, even the universe that allows you to exist in the first place. Each of these things exists, at an abstract level, perpendicularly to the last, and the observer is a random outcome in any place where he/she is possible.
What you're suggesting is superposition, which defies the elegant efficiency of the real reality that sits beneath you and allows you the progressive stability and capacity to consider its structure. What we know of reality - that it is exceedingly crisp in its elimination of what is cumbersome and non-essential - is directly contrary to the launching-of-infinite-realities-upon-the-manifestation-of-the-choice-not-made notion that bases what you just described. What exists as stable and relatively reliable can't be structured as a result of that which is random and infinitely malleable, since these qualities sets are incompatible with one another at a core level. This means that the random existential foundation that you describe can't progress into the stable and dependable real that serve you as well as it does from moment to moment. The point of stability in any system that is inherently instable simply does exist. There can't logically ever emerge a transition point from true instability and randomness to what is essentially its own antithesis.
As far as random is concerned, it is exactly what it suggests that it is - completely undependable and unpredictable. There are no actual degrees of randomness. There are only incorrect perceptions of that which is not truly random, but actually structured within a pattern scheme that has yet to be accurately discerned or observed by the unassociated and freely dynamic Intellect. If you are positioned 3 inches from a 100 square yard patterned whole, your point of perspective is simply too close to allow you to view the pattern that exists despite your inability to observe it. That doesn't mean that the pattern doesn't exist until you finally get around to realizing its existence. It means that you are incapable of observing it in its entirety until that moment when the pattern becomes obvious to you. This is why there is the material capacity to back up a bit and take another look. Maybe not "why" that capacity exists, but since it does exist, it's good to take advantage of it now and again.
Reality exist, and while it's not Harry Potter-ville, it's pretty amazing.
Anyone get what I mean? >.>
I get what you mean. Do you get what I mean?
shashankac655
Oct23-11, 05:16 AM
Why there is something rather than nothing?
Actually, this itself is an assumption!!! what makes you think there is something?
What if our consciousness is just an illusion.
Some Ancient Indian philosophers came up with the theory that the universe is our consciousness(an illusion)
Maya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion))
Don't ask me for proofs ,i was just trying to tell that some people have tried to answer this question.
What if our consciousness is just an illusion.
That doesn't make sense. How can consciousness be an illusion?
shashankac655
Oct24-11, 03:02 AM
That doesn't make sense. How can consciousness be an illusion?
I was thinking that our whole life is a big dream and we will all wake up when we die.
:wink:
Why anything at all?
Well anything is just a term we use in a descriptive capacity.
Like a fish that lives in water, we are the same but in a different kind of fish-bowl.
We only know of how to describe things that we can sense, or things that we have a created a way to sense, like mathematics.
No one can visualize four dimensions visually, but mathematics provides a gateway to sensing this in a new way, and like any other language, it helps us make sense of the world by reducing some aspect of it down so that it can be attempted to be understood.
My best guess is that these "senses" will evolve with new language that is beyond our current understanding.
Just in the way that the pythagoreans couldn't come to terms with real numbers, it will probably be the same with us. The future will have language that is so far removed from our current state of being, just like we take the complex numbers for granted now, when even a couple of hundred years ago, many could not comprehend the necessity and the power that these give us.
You would think that you could not differentiate the two, something and nothing. But it does seem, here, that I can by simply saying that this question wouldn't be asked if there were nothing. But that is implying that nothing is of what we think nothing is to be. Or in other words, is this question even something? I'm unsure.
SW VandeCarr
Oct26-11, 07:38 PM
Actually, the original question assumed anything exists. I demand proof that anything exists.
Actually, the original question assumed anything exists. I demand proof that anything exists.
Descartes: "I think, I exist"? I think one would have trouble trying to question their own existence.
SW VandeCarr
Oct26-11, 09:41 PM
Descartes: "I think, I exist"? I think one would have trouble trying to question their own existence.
I exist. But I'm not sure about you or Descartes. Besides, the question is "why" anything exists. I exist, but I have no idea why.
apeiron
Oct26-11, 10:05 PM
I exist. But I'm not sure about you or Descartes.
You only need the existence of one particular thing to motivate the more general question of why should anything exist. And it is a legitimate metaphysical question that is worth taking more seriously.
Some try to answer it in terms of material cause (some event like a quantum fluctuation).
Some employ final cause (existence is necessary to complete some sort of purpose).
The OP was about an argument based on formal cause - the ways to exist far out-number the simple alternative of non-existence.
So it is a question that forces you to question your very understanding of "existence" and "causality". What is the ground beneath these fundamental notions?
SW VandeCarr
Oct26-11, 10:20 PM
So it is a question that forces you to question your very understanding of "existence" and "causality". What is the ground beneath these fundamental notions?
Frankly I find these discussions rather useless and annoying. The OP's question as to "why" anything ultimately exists has no answer IMO outside theology and as such should be off limits, even in this forum.
apeiron
Oct26-11, 10:37 PM
Frankly I find these discussions rather useless and annoying. The OP's question as to "why" anything exists has no answer IMO outside theology and as such should be off limits, even in this forum.
That seems an odd reaction to me. Philosophy is in fact more about how to frame questions properly than in delivering the certainty of an answer. You can always hope to do at least that much.
While perhaps theology does start with its answer, then seeks its supporting framework of argumentation (in so far as it needs to justify what people are going to believe from social indoctrination anyway).
But here in this forum, it is pretty clear that you have to demonstrate why the question has no possible answer before you can call for it to be ruled "off limits". Are you suggesting it is a tautology or ill-posed for some other standard reason?
SW VandeCarr
Oct26-11, 11:34 PM
But here in this forum, it is pretty clear that you have to demonstrate why the question has no possible answer before you can call for it to be ruled "off limits".
I would challenge that outright. I don't need to show that no possible answer exists. I have only to refer to this thread and other similar threads that have made no progress toward a satisfactory answer or to even suggest how a satisfactory answer could be formulated outside of some first cause argument. When a first cause argument is framed in terms of "why", it's difficult to see how it's not theological.
Nano-Passion
Oct27-11, 12:11 AM
THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS!!!! That was an extremely interesting read to say the least!! I've grappled with this question hard and long and this was a very invigorating read.
"Why is there Something rather than Nothing?
If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it."
I like this quote, its very true!
apeiron
Oct27-11, 01:56 AM
I would challenge that outright. I don't need to show that no possible answer exists. I have only to refer to this thread and other similar threads that have made no progress toward a satisfactory answer or to even suggest how a satisfactory answer could be formulated outside of some first cause argument. When a first cause argument is framed in terms of "why", it's difficult to see how it's not theological.
But the OP did not offer a "first cause" argument. It was an argument from formal cause.
And when you say "first cause", it is not clear here whether you in fact mean efficient cause or final cause.
Some arguments posit a first event (an efficient cause) - either a god chosing to act, or something like the first arbitrary swerve of an atom in Greek atomist philosopy.
More sophisticated arguments, like Aristotle's, are based on final cause. Things start out as merely potential and then develop towards the actual. So Aristotle's "unmoved mover" was not a god of the "lighting the blue touch paper" variety but the concept of a final state (of actualised perfection) that draws the potential towards it, "inspiring it to develop".
It is the outcome that causes the move. Or perhaps the better way of putting it, it is the limit on change. This is an ontology in which the problem is not about getting anything started, but finding the reason it eventually stops. A very different way of thinking about "why anything".
ThomasT
Oct27-11, 04:12 AM
Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. There are infinitely many such possible ways. All these ways seem to be equally probable—which means that the probability of any one of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened.This depends somewhat on how one views/defines the evolution of our universe. Apparently, there's only one possible way "that the world might be, down to every detail" at any given instant, during any given interval -- which is the way that the world actually is.
Depending on one's view/definition of the evolution of our universe, some of the future possibilities that might seem apparent wrt certain views can be ruled out, rendered impossible, wrt certain views. In the views where the evolution of the universe is limited in some way, there's a limited number of possible continuations with each possibility having a positive (> 0) finite probability of occuring.
The assumption that certain fundamental dynamical laws (maybe just one fundamental dynamic) are operational seems to suggest that the evolution of the universe will exhibit certain evident salient, and therefore predictable, characteristics. For example, wrt a local deterministic universe where the speed of change is limited by c, the prediction that the spatial configuration of the universe one nanosecond from a time, t, will not be appreciably different from the spatial configuration at t.
Anyway, wrt our universe, the possibilities don't seem to be infinite, but instead seem to be quite limited -- depending, as I mentioned, on the assumptions one starts with, and there don't seem to be an infinite number of reasonable alternatives from which to choose.
“Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of any one of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.” Because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probabilily of Nothing existing is zero.The problem is that there aren't, based on observation and certain inferences relating to observation, reasonably, an infinite number of ways for reality to be. The fact of the matter, the reality of any given universal configuration, is the configuration itself -- which necessarily entails that it isn't some other possible configuration.
But we're just considering the two possibilities, something and nothing. If, since we don't know why there's something rather than nothing, we give these two possibilites equal weight (which I think is the usual probabilistic approach), then each has a 1/2 probability.
However, there is something rather than nothing. Which is all that we know, or can know, about the something vs nothing problem, since, by definitions, we can't experience nothingness. So, we can't even say that nothingness is a possiblity.
Thus, the question does, imo, reduce to, "why/how our universe?". Wrt this I think that there are some cosmological models that extrapolate/speculate back to before the point of departure of the mainstream "big bang" cosmologies.
Does the argument sound persuasive?No.
apeiron
Oct27-11, 04:19 AM
A good thinker on the issue is the process philosopher Nicholas Rescher.
See "On explaining existence" - http://cla.calpoly.edu/~rgrazian/docs/courses/411/Rescher-OnExplainingExistence.pdf
Briefly, he outlines why efficient cause-based explanations fail. Then argues for a "constraint of possibility" approach - what he calls the hylarchic principle.
Existence-explanation via a hylarchic principle of protolaw turns on a distinction between substantival explanations in terms of the operations of entities and process explanations in terms of primordial operational principles - principles that underlie rather than merely reflect the nature of the real. It is predicated on acknowledging that explanation in the case of existence-at-large cannot operate in the orthodox order of the efficient causation of preexisting things. In resorting to a hylarchic principle one can thus abandon altogether the hoary dogma that things can only come from things. A fundamental shift in explanatory methodology is at issue with this hylarchic approach - the shift to a nomological mode of explanation that operates in terms of laws which lack any and all prior embedding in an order of things. The fact of the world’s nonemptiness is now accounted for as the consequence of a constraint by principles rather than as the product of the operation of causes.
The neat trick he wants to then pull off is to show that because there are grades of possibility - with only the constraint-satisfying kinds being "real" - then the possibility of nothingness can be ruled out (so proving there must always be something as some possibilities will always become the actual due to the causality of proto-laws).
The role of a hylarchic principle is now clear. As a protophysical law of a characteristically preexistential kind, it reduces the range of real possibility so as to exclude from it (inter alia) those worlds that are existentially empty. A hylarchic principle is simply a particular sort of possibility-restricting condition - a rather special one that narrows the range of eligible cases down to nonempty worlds. And so the task of explaining why there is something rather than nothing can be discharged by relatively orthodox, direct and unproblematic means, since what is necessary must be actual.
Still more ambitiously, Rescher hopes then to connect to science by suggesting that GR or QM may already be laws of this form - ones that exclude null outcomes as actual possibilities.
For such an approach to work, it would have to transpire that the only ultimately viable solutions to those cosmic equations are existential solutions. This explanatory strategy casts those “fundamental field equations” in a rather special light. They are not seen as ordinary laws of nature that can be construed as describing the modus operandi of real things that are already present in the world, but rather as preeconditions for the real - as delimiting the sorts of possibilities that can be realized. We thus have an account of the following structure: The fundamental field equations, seen to function not merely as laws OF nature, but as laws FOR nature, as protolaws in present terminology - delineate the domain of real possibility. And the nature of this domain is then, in its turn, such as to constrain the existence of things.
ThomasT
Oct27-11, 06:46 AM
@ apeiron,
Thanks for the links and comments. Whatever you write wrt anything has always made me think and provided motivation to learn more.
But I mostly reject mathematics as a basis for philosophical.
This sorta of argument is a very strong argument against the original position at the start of the thread, I think. If one assumes that mind-independent reality transcends mathematical (necessary) truths/logic (e.g. reality is not mathematical), then these types of arguments are arguably not very convincing. I'm going to read the Rescher piece. Looks interesting.
ThomasT
Oct27-11, 04:51 PM
This sorta of argument is a very strong argument against the original position at the start of the thread, I think. If one assumes that mind-independent reality transcends mathematical (necessary) truths/logic (e.g. reality is not mathematical), then these types of arguments are arguably not very convincing. I'm going to read the Rescher piece. Looks interesting.I'm glad you're going to read the Rescher piece. I was printing it out (I like to read upside down ... resting) when I ran out of black ink.
I will trust your assessment of it.
What I've read of it so far seems to be in line with the my current mode of thinking on this.
I will trust your assessment of it.
I don't trust myself because I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding some his arguments. In my mind, of all of Rescher's possible responses to the question "Why is there anything at all?", the one that I found the most compelling (but unfortunately also unappealing, as Rescher notes) is Mystification: the question is legitimate but unanswerable for a linguistic ground chimp like us. Back to Mcginn's argument, again.
Specifically, I had trouble understanding his Nomological Approach for the major reason that he notes himself:
"How is one to account for the protolaws themselves?". It seems like that approach is just passing the buck elsewhere and the problem remains? I kind of was sympathetic to the mathematical/probabilistic arguments quoted at start of this thread because they were simple but in all honestly I think MarcoD's criticism is extremely persuasive to me, especially since I lean towards treating mathematical objects as mental stuff. I'm guessing that someone who is more of a Platonist on mathematics (e.g. Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, come to mind) may be more persuaded by Rescher's arguments, I think? One author who takes a very Platonic approach in trying to answer this question is Rickles:
The strategy I am advocating is that physics, in becoming more or less completely aligned to mathematics (in terms of content, at least), will be able to penetrate down the ladder of explanation to the very deepest rung of all: existence. We do not have the same kind of problem with the existence of mathematics. Mathematical statements are necessarily true in the sense that if they are true in one world (in the sense of modal logic) then they are true in all worlds. They are not created. They are not located in spacetime. The question of why is there something rather than nothing simply does not make sense if the somethings in question are mathematical.
http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rickles_Rickles_fqxi_2.pdf
How about this take. Something implies that there was a chain of causes that resulted in that something and that means there is a reason for it to be true. But, Nothing is by definition has no cause so it is missing what can make it true.
But what was the initial cause is a question for physicists and not philosophers.
apeiron
Oct29-11, 05:25 PM
But, Nothing is by definition has no cause so it is missing what can make it true.
But wouldn't the absence of causes be part of the definition of true nothingness? Causality would have to be one of the things "not there". :smile:
But wouldn't the absence of causes be part of the definition of true nothingness? Causality would have to be one of the things "not there". :smile:
I would say causality would be only concerned with " it is here".:biggrin:
apeiron
Oct29-11, 06:27 PM
"How is one to account for the protolaws themselves?". It seems like that approach is just passing the buck elsewhere and the problem remains?
This is where Rescher would benefit from a more Peircean approach. If you are taking a developmental perspective, it is no problem for "laws" - globally general constraints - to emerge from vague and tentative beginnings.
Both laws and what they regulate develop jointly. Ultimately they are cut from the same cloth - the kind of absolute state of possibility that Peirce called vagueness.
One author who takes a very Platonic approach in trying to answer this question is Rickles:
Interesting paper, but Rickles kind of kills his own argument by citing Connes on the view that there is "primordial mathematical reality" out there which is separate from the "deductive tools" which exist in our heads.
So reality looks mathematical, rather than reality is mathematical. There may be a correspondence between the two, but it is epistemic, not ontic. And thus the way that the world takes on mathematical-looking form (ie: develops some set of laws, regularities or constraints) might be entirely different to the way humans reconstruct those forms (via a logico-deductive process).
And then the core of Rickles' argument is that he can imagine subtracting away all material objects so as to create an empty reality - a nothingness - but he can't imagine how to subtract away the existence of mathematical truths. They are always going to be there (well, somewhere) even in the absence of any thing. So a state of no-thing is impossible as an actuality.
But this has holes. If, as I argue, maths describes forms, and thus constraints, you don't subtract them away, you get rid of them by relaxing them. You remove by generalising (such as going from a geometric to a topological level of description).
An empty world - in the sense of one with all its possible local degrees of freedom definitely removed, all its contingent facts erased - is in fact in a highly constrained state. Indeed, infinitely constrained. We would be talking about everything being completely limited and so nothing actually occuring. But that would leave this "empty" world now also completely full of contraint.
Rickles' view is that it is trivial to subtract away local degrees of freedom, but impossible to subtract away mathematical forms. My argument is instead that the two aspects of existence are a yo-yo balance, and any effort to remove one gives you more of the other. It is for this reason that there is always something rather than nothing.
Relaxing constraints give you more degrees of freedom. Tightening constraints gives you less degrees of freedom.
So again, it is not that subtracting one is trivial and the other impossible which forbids the existence of nothingness, but the reciprocal causal relationship that constraints and degrees of freedom have with each other.
Interesting paper, but Rickles kind of kills his own argument by citing Connes on the view that there is "primordial mathematical reality" out there which is separate from the "deductive tools" which exist in our heads.
So reality looks mathematical, rather than reality is mathematical. There may be a correspondence between the two, but it is epistemic, not ontic. And thus the way that the world takes on mathematical-looking form (ie: develops some set of laws, regularities or constraints) might be entirely different to the way humans reconstruct those forms (via a logico-deductive process).
I'm lost here also. As I see it, I think the major problem with Rickle's argument is the following statement:
"so long as we are willing to accept that reality is mathematical".
That’s a major problem especially for those who view mathematics as mental objects or believe that reality transcends mathematics (MarcoD). I always assumed that qualia/consciousness defies mathematical/formal description so the existence of such stuff seems to seriously raise doubts about whether mathematics can fully describe reality. There are some, however, who argue that this isn’t a major stumbling block because we have no way of knowing "what is like to be a mathematical structure", so maybe certain mathematical structures could have the intrinsic properties we associate with qualia/consciousness? I’m not sure I buy this argument.
Furthermore, maybe I’m misunderstanding but is Rickle’s point that there is no problem concerning Godel’s theorem, with respect to his position, valid? He seems to suggest all of the following:
1. Godel’s theorem does not tell us that there is any problem with mathematical truths per se; only that there is no algorithmic way of generating all such truths. We must distinguish truth and provability.
2. Furthermore, there’s a distinction between the tools (i.e. theories) we use to represent reality and the reality itself.
3. Godel’s incompleteness theorem applies to the former alone (theories). Indeed, this does impose a limitation on physics’ theoretical prowess in that if reality is a certain way (related to properties of arithmetic) then a complete account using any logico-mathematical representation will prove to be impossible. This is an epistemic limitation rather than a limitation imposed on reality.
But then he also suggests that for his argument to be valid one has to accept the view that:
4. Reality is mathematical.
Wouldn’t that imply that there is no difference between the tools (i.e. theories) and reality so that Godel’s incompleteness theorem would apply? Maybe I'm mistaken. I have trouble with these types of arguments.
How about this take. Something implies that there was a chain of causes that resulted in that something and that means there is a reason for it to be true. But, Nothing is by definition has no cause so it is missing what can make it true.
But what was the initial cause is a question for physicists and not philosophers.
That is a non-question... like most others. It's been known for a while now that everything is out of our immediate reach - consciouness, matter, time, space, spacetime... even causality which is the BASIS for ALL our knowledge has been shaken by modern theories like quantum mechanics. Then neuroscientists keep pressing that being conscious is an automatic and autonomous process, much like being asleep and dreaming and perceiving your decisions after the fact. Push hard enough and you cannot but see that we don't really understand anything, anything at all. Nothing "has really changed since Socrates and his famous "I know that i know nothing" unless you want to fool yourself into the common delusion(which falls down on its face upon closer examination)
epenguin
Nov7-11, 07:14 PM
I will now give the explanation I thought of the last but one time this question was asked here, I think this happens roughly every three months, which is that if there were nothing there would be nothing to prevent there being something whereas if there is something there is something to prevent there being nothing.
"I know that i know nothing"
Wouldn't that lead to some type of regression? I still think Descarte's argument is pretty strong: "I think, I exist". That was a pretty simple argument and yet very profound. Unfortunately, beyond that, certainty in our knowledge seems pretty questionable. Unless, you are a Platonist, I guess?
Wouldn't that lead to some type of regression?
Sure that's an oximoron but science isn't a scroll of truths. It's an endevor to help us get along.
I still think Descarte's argument is pretty strong: "I think, I exist". That was a pretty simple argument and yet very profound. Unfortunately, beyond that, certainty in our knowledge seems pretty questionable.
"There is an experience of being" - that would be less questionable by the neuroscientists' lot than the "I" implied by Decartes which would seem a too loaded term to the current trend of approaching the consciousness topic.
I have a different opinion than the general stance of neurology, but on the other hand, i don't disagree with their stance entirely. I just don't think it's all there is to consciousness at all.
bohm2 wrote
So he is arguing that if you have a lottery with an infinite number of combinations , there is only 1 number that corresponds to nothingness (the empty set). The chances of picking that number among all the others is essentially 0, so that isn't going to happen. I guess he's trying to say that the universe exists because existence is far more probable than non-existence.
yes but there is still the problem of there is something doing something before the universe.?
bohm2 wrote
The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question
you are saying why is the system chosen over enough.but this is not the ultimate question because whatever it is that picks one over the other will itself be under scrutiny
infact what ever anyone trys to say is the start to everything it will inturn be asked why and where.you can never get to a start with out this problem occurring.
take god where did he come from this goes asking well where did that god that created that god come from .
yes but there is still the problem of there is something doing something before the universe.?
you are saying why is the system chosen over enough.but this is not the ultimate question because whatever it is that picks one over the other will itself be under scrutiny
infact what ever anyone trys to say is the start to everything it will inturn be asked why and where.you can never get to a start with out this problem occurring.
take god where did he come from this goes asking well where did that god that created that god come from .
I agree. It is as if our logic is simply just limited and things begin to fall apart at this level. There may be no way to answer this question (in our minds with our logic.) It seems to be able to be discussed and abstractly "answered" in some way, but it still never makes "real sense". At least it seems someone always has a new question - as it goes here.
Another place that logic falls apart, what did I absolutely just say? What does this mean? What are words when one just connects to another few - which intern connects to memories and understandings in my mind. What is my mind? See? It just continues.
Another place that logic falls apart, what did I absolutely just say? What does this mean? What are words when one just connects to another few - which intern connects to memories and understandings in my mind. What is my mind? See? It just continues.
Causality is still our number one foundation of knowledge, despite some recent questions about its universal validity. For some reason, nature has "chosen" to interact via virtual photons as mediators of the EM interaction(as far as we/i know) and there appears to be a something that initiates these interactions(something that has and acquires mass in relativistic settings and is thus different from light and photons). This is almost touching the subject of existence and the nature of existence and it seems obvious that if we lose causality, we'll lose the ability to say anything that seems meaningful about anything at all.
Edit: So perhaps we can reduce the "Ultimate question: Why anything at all?" to "Why charge?" Why do particle-like systems have the property called charge out of which the familiar casality arises? Would non-interacting "particles" be existing or would that be another form of existence(sounds a bit MWI-ish and we couldn't know either way). I guess the point is that it's not a settled question what the "anything" in the title really is and a solipsist might argue that the question is "Why me?":tongue:.
That is a non-question... like most others. It's been known for a while now that everything is out of our immediate reach - consciouness, matter, time, space, spacetime... even causality which is the BASIS for ALL our knowledge has been shaken by modern theories like quantum mechanics. Then neuroscientists keep pressing that being conscious is an automatic and autonomous process, much like being asleep and dreaming and perceiving your decisions after the fact. Push hard enough and you cannot but see that we don't really understand anything, anything at all. Nothing "has really changed since Socrates and his famous "I know that i know nothing" unless you want to fool yourself into the common delusion(which falls down on its face upon closer examination)
I did not reply earlier b/c I did not get the notification. first, I will top you on the charge question. here is a post I made in reponse to Garret
Lets say you manage the three generations, would your theory answer these questions anytime soon.
1. all couplings values and their relations and origin. That includes computing the behavior at all energies (and distances-up to edge of the universe if there is one(CC)). and if there is a physical cut-off or not.
2. the theory must predict particles with their masses explained.Inculding light and its clear interaction picture with matter.
3. What is charge exactly and how does the value come about.
4. the origin of Spin and entanglment.
5. how do particles behave in flight, like the double slit experiment.
6. The real source of the effect of relativity. That is of course includes what is Space and time. and what is vacuum made of.
7. the relation between all of the above.
8. the origin and the fate of the universe or(universes)
But Most of all what is existance made of, if not a mathematical imperative.
But it is unfair to say we know nothing b/c we have models that do a good job as you know, but I do think as we make progress our models will become more exact and will reach an ontic stage. and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on earth are deluding themselves. and the fact that you participate in PF atests to that.
Now, I will send you some material via PM, which is not suitable for disclosure here(rules), in the hope that it will give you a different prespective.
Galteeth
Dec2-11, 08:44 PM
On a basic level the question "Why is there something rather then nothing?" ontologically entails the existence of something, as only if there is something is the question possible.
To me, this is the most satisfying answer.
Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”. Other disagree using this argument:
Metaphysical nihilism (MN)
1. There is a world with a finite number n of concrete objects (accessible from our own: i.e. possible relative to ours). Call this world wn.
2. The existence of any object o in wn is contingent.
3. The non-existence of o does not imply the existence of another object o'.
4. There is a world, wn-1, accessible from wn containing exactly one less object than wn. There is a world accessible from wn-1, w(n-1)-1, containing exactly one less object than wn-1.
5. By iterating the above procedure (i.e. by repeated ‘subtractions’) we arrive at a world wn-m = wmin, accessible from wn, that contains exactly one object.
6. Therefore, by steps 2, 3, 4, from wmin there is an accessible world, wnil = wn-m-1, containing no objects at all (= MN).
http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rickles_Rickles_fqxi_2.pdf
On a basic level the question "Why is there something rather then nothing?" ontologically entails the existence of something, as only if there is something is the question possible.
To me, this is the most satisfying answer.
That is kind of where I was headed in an earlier post of mine:
You would think that you could not differentiate the two, something and nothing. But it does seem, here, that I can by simply saying that this question wouldn't be asked if there were nothing. But that is implying that nothing is of what we think nothing is to be. Or in other words, is this question even something? I'm unsure.
Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”.
I don't necessarily disagree with that, but even if you were to take that stand, it still does not say that nothing is impossible. It just says that with our logic, nothing is impossible. Though, can that statement be made sense of?
But it is unfair to say we know nothing b/c we have models that do a good job as you know, but I do think as we make progress our models will become more exact and will reach an ontic stage. and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on earth are deluding themselves. and the fact that you participate in PF atests to that.
How does my participation on PF attest that i have learned anything philosophically substantial about reality and the world? If anything, most people who come here realize that the world they recognize is either utterly incomprehensible or so bizarre that they may just go ahead and say - "Hey look, i am a flying elephant" instead. Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.
and all the people who work in the high end physics do blieve in that otherwise they would not spend their time, so I don't think that some of the smartest people on earth are deluding themselves.
They are not, but you are. They are perfectly aware of what they don't know, hence why they don't come here too often to give lessons. What is there to discuss except a handful of utterly ridiculous propositions about the world we think we know?
As for the PM's - thank you, i'll have a look tonight, it's always good to have other viewpoints. The most aesthetically pleasing "model" as far as i can see is that of the hologram, as it retains locality and causality(i don't see a better way out of the Bell's theorem while retaining some sort of reality and keeping the the theory of evolution, and all the other knowledge, etc...), whereas giving us a strong sense of comprehension and a good deal of visualization and a possibility to have a world-view expressible in human language. It almost clicks for me, but there is likely an infinity of things i don't know and am not currently aware of, so this is only relevant as a philosophical consideration.
Galteeth
Dec3-11, 09:07 PM
Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.
lol wut
Show me 1 physicist that understands how the world works without employing voodoo, magic and phantasy and i'll apologize.
lol wut
Sorry, not you. I was talking about physicists(PhD's, Nobel Prize winners, etc.). Most lay people seem to intuitively understand how the world works :tongue:
I guess you guys are smarter
I am not sure if netspeak is allowed here, but you could have a look at the respones it gets:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=netspeak
Some have argued that it isn’t “logically possible for there to be nothing at all”. Other disagree using this argument:
http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Rickles_Rickles_fqxi_2.pdf
As I replied in post #103, and as Rickles himself argues, MN can subtract away everything from a world, but that still leaves a world. So this approach is a dead-end.
Rickles says an empty world still contains mathematical truth. I don't think you have to get all Platonic to see this. If you cannot subtract away the spacetime points that make up this empty world, you are left with some kind of logical geometric structure. Enough to make concrete the notion of a manifold, of a topology.
Mathematics itself is just the model, the descriptive idea. But MN is left with the reality that would have to inspire that idea.
You can still ask what "nothing" would look like (my answer, a vagueness). And therefore can it logically exist. But you would have to create a mental image of it by some other means than subtracting away a set of local objects to leave an empty stage.
As I replied in post #103, and as Rickles himself argues, MN can subtract away everything from a world, but that still leaves a world. So this approach is a dead-end.
So what you're saying here is even the empty set is, in the final analysis, a set? Kind of like even if we were to take all the stuff out from the bucket, the bucket remains? If that is what you are arguing, would this still hold in a Machian-type universe?
So what you're saying here is even the empty set is, in the final analysis, a set? Kind of like even if we were to take all the stuff out from the bucket, the bucket remains?
Yep. And wasn't that the whole problem with set theory as a foundational idea?
If that is what you are arguing, would this still hold in a Machian-type universe?
It might help to define your view of a Machian universe. But I agree it has the right kind of contextual self-organisation. The parts anchor the whole, which in turn anchors the parts.
But I don't think the Machian approach is expressed in a way that allows you to dissolve its structure in the way needed.
The MN argument is de-constructive - based on subtraction to zero. But then that "zero" still clearly exists as a something.
So what you want instead is "de-mergence" - some way to dissolve or fade away both the contents and the container, the set along with its elements. To do that, you obviously need an emergent theory of both contents and container in the first place.
It might help to define your view of a Machian universe. But I agree it has the right kind of contextual self-organisation. The parts anchor the whole, which in turn anchors the parts...But I don't think the Machian approach is expressed in a way that allows you to dissolve its structure in the way needed.
I'm not sure either but as I understand Mach's relationist position: without parts, there is no whole. So without the stuff in the bucket, the bucket could not exist. I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of Mach but that's how I interpreted his view because according to Mach's principle, in absence of matter, space should not be able to exist. But I'm not sure if the latter implies the former?
I'm not sure either but as I understand Mach's relationist position: without parts, there is no whole. So without the stuff in the bucket, the bucket could not exist. I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation of Mach but that's how I interpreted his view because according to Mach's principle, in absence of matter, space should not be able to exist. But I'm not sure if the latter implies the former?
Mach's bucket was more the claim that without some kind of reference frame context, how would the water in a spinning bucket know that it should have a centrifugal dip in its surface? Local inertia seemed a global contextual deal rather than a locally inherent property.
But it still left the mechanism of downward causation a msytery, as Davies notes in a reference you are familiar with too...
There are a few examples of clear-cut attempts at explicit whole-part causation theories in physics. One of these is Mach’s principle, according to which the force of inertia, experienced locally by a particle, derives from the particle’s gravitational interaction with all the matter in the universe. There is currently no very satisfactory formulation of Mach’s principle within accepted physical theory, although the attempt to construct one is by no means considered worthless, and once occupied the attention of Einstein himself.
http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/The%20physics%20of%20downward%20causation.pdf
So, as far as the OP goes, Mach is not much of a help, although he was leaning towards the kind of ontology I like.
As I said at the start, a comprehensive paper on the options regarding "why anything" is...
Apostel, L. 1999. Why not Nothing? In World Views and the Problem of
Synthesis, ed. D. Aerts, H. Van Belle, and J. Van der Veken, 17-49.
The Yellow Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte". Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
It's not online, but if you are particularly interested in the literature, PM me an email and I can send you a scanned copy.
As I said at the start, a comprehensive paper on the options regarding "why anything" is...
Apostel, L. 1999. Why not Nothing? In World Views and the Problem of
Thanks I read it last night even though I should be studying. It was a pretty extensive review of most of the positions on here but man, does he go way out there in Section 15: "Why not nothing? And Heidegger". I just don't see how taking any of these positions has any socio-political repersussions. For instance,
On the other hand, if the reason for existence is found in the organic unity of those possible worlds that are realized, its meaning and value will also lie in the consensus, the communication, the solidarity of mankind, culture and ethical system.
Where the heck did that come from?
apeiron
Dec10-11, 10:28 PM
I just don't see how taking any of these positions has any socio-political repersussions.
I don't read Apostel as arguing that the "why anything" question must have ethical import, just that how it is framed/answered inevitably is going to reflect people's prior ethical concerns.
So some like to believe everything is essentially random, chance, meaningless, etc. Others that existence is purposeful, rational, etc. Our emotional baggage is going to get caught up in such an ultimate question. Apostel says this is why being willing to address the question is important - it serves to bring out our deepest beliefs into the open. The philosophers happy to tackle it are usually ones with an axiological agenda.
I don't particularly agree that is a good thing - unless we then manage to get beyond wishing for some certain kind of answer.
PatrickPowers
Dec10-11, 11:59 PM
“Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.” In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics— the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space where fields are zero and unchanging.” But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “[Quantum mechanics] doesn’t answer the question, ‘Why do we live in a world governed by these laws?’… And we will never have an answer to that.” “Does that bother you?” I ask. “Yes,” Weinberg says wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.” Here’s how I see it: The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question.
[B]Why there is something rather than nothing?
Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. There are infinitely many such possible ways. All these ways seem to be equally probable—which means that the probability of any one of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened. “Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of any one of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.” Because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probabilily of Nothing existing is zero.
http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2009/06/05/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/
So he is arguing that if you have a lottery with an infinite number of combinations , there is only 1 number that corresponds to nothingness (the empty set). The chances of picking that number among all the others is essentially 0, so that isn't going to happen. I guess he's trying to say that the universe exists because existence is far more probable than non-existence.
"We can use the axiom of extensionality to show that there is only one empty set. Since it is unique we can name it. It is called the empty set (denoted by { } or ∅)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_the_empty_set
Does the argument sound persuasive?
The argument is arbitrary. He would have to work much harder than that to get me to accept a specific probability for Nothing. As far as we know the probability of nothing is one and we lucked out bigtime.
The concept of probability in an infinite set is unintuitive for most people. All I can say is that I studied it in graduate school and it makes very good sense. Probability zero does not mean impossible and probability one does not mean certainty. There is no other reasonable way to do it. The fact that something exists does not imply that its probability is greater than zero. Get used to it.
As to why anything at all exists, I have no idea. But I think it is quite possible someone someday will develop a persuasive argument.
PatrickPowers
Dec11-11, 12:01 AM
So some like to believe everything is essentially random, chance, meaningless, etc. Others that existence is purposeful, rational, etc.
"Random" simply means "unpredicatable." I see no dichotomy here.
apeiron
Dec11-11, 02:39 PM
Probability zero does not mean impossible and probability one does not mean certainty. There is no other reasonable way to do it. The fact that something exists does not imply that its probability is greater than zero. Get used to it.
Do you understand the argument? If nothingness is deemed to be an ultimately simple state, then there is only one way it can be. Whereas somethingness would have an apparent infinity of ways of being. There is no obvious limit on its variety.
So the probablity of nothing is such that it almost surely does not exist, while the probability of something is such that it almost surely exists.
One may find all sorts of reasons to dispute the probabilities being assumed (is nothingness in fact infinitely varied? Is somethingness indeed somehow inherently limited). But this handwaving probability argument seems a good enough place to start a metaphysical discussion on the issue.
For your point to have any meaning here, you would have to show us first why somethingness must be limited to just one way of being.
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 02:45 AM
Nothingness it is not empty space it is not infinite or boundless variety whatever that means, and not even the potential of what is yet to come...
There´s nothing to nothingness...no thing to talk about.
The only valid use of nothingness as a concept intends to refer to the relative absence on something which exists and that it is not present in X space time frame.
PatrickPowers
Dec12-11, 03:14 AM
Do you understand the argument? If nothingness is deemed to be an ultimately simple state, then there is only one way it can be. Whereas somethingness would have an apparent infinity of ways of being. There is no obvious limit on its variety.
So the probablity of nothing is such that it almost surely does not exist, while the probability of something is such that it almost surely exists.
One may find all sorts of reasons to dispute the probabilities being assumed (is nothingness in fact infinitely varied? Is somethingness indeed somehow inherently limited). But this handwaving probability argument seems a good enough place to start a metaphysical discussion on the issue.
For your point to have any meaning here, you would have to show us first why somethingness must be limited to just one way of being.
As best I can understand it, your argument is that each way of being is equally likely. Nothingness is one way of being. Somethingness includes virtually infinite ways of being. Therefore Somethingness is much more likely than nothingness.
The part I don't accept is that idea that each way of being is equally likely.
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 03:33 AM
The comparison of likelihood of probability in between nothingness and something is absurd !
Nothingness or shall we clarify, NO-THING, does not qualify as an object with property´s such as "being"/existing...and thus it is a false question !
It simply if it is the case that Something does exist then Nothingness cannot be conceptualized as an absolute any more...the assertion of the first immediately excludes the second...
By the same token not everything that exists necessarily had a beginning !
Thus if its is the case, as it seams, that the Universe had a beginning, to prevent an infinite regression in the causal chain, its final cause, must necessarily to not have had a beginning...from where it follows, and granting that the best known rational mechanical explanation in so far asserts a Multiverse as the cause of our Universe, a place where all possible worlds do exist, seams rather natural to conclude, that the Multiverse has no cause nor it did begun to exist...
PatrickPowers
Dec12-11, 03:43 AM
The comparison of likelihood of probability in between nothingness and something is absurd !
Nothingness or shall we clarify, NO-THING, does not qualify as an object with property´s such as "being"/existing...and thus it is a false question !
It simply if it is the case that Something does exist then Nothingness cannot be conceptualized as an absolute any more...the assertion of the first immediately excludes the second...
By the same token not everything that exists necessarily had a beginning !
Thus if its is the case, as it seams, that the Universe had a beginning, to prevent an infinite regression in the causal chain, its final cause, must necessarily to not have had a beginning...from where it follows, and granting that the best known rational mechanical explanation in so far asserts a Multiverse as the cause of our Universe, a place where all possible worlds do exist, seams rather natural to conclude, that the Multiverse has no cause nor it did begun to exist...
You are absolutely correct. The probability that nothing exists, given that something exists, is zero.
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 03:52 AM
...Someone should had explained to William Lane Craig that his second premiss on the Cosmological Argument for God is plain wrong...not everything that exists begins to exist !
apeiron
Dec12-11, 04:00 AM
As best I can understand it, your argument is that each way of being is equally likely. Nothingness is one way of being. Somethingness includes virtually infinite ways of being. Therefore Somethingness is much more likely than nothingness.
The part I don't accept is that idea that each way of being is equally likely.
It's the OP rather than my argument. I don't personally believe a probability argument is going to offer any safe conclusions here.
That's why we discuss these things. To discover their weaknesses.
And you still seem to have it wrong. If nothingness did have one way of being, and somethingness an unlimited number of ways, then they are not equally likely. That is the basis of the OP. So at least you are right if you also don't view one vs infinity as equivalent.
And even if you were to take an a priori position that nothingness and somethingness should be treated initially as a simple 50/50 probability, there is still an argument against that. Here is Apostel's view, for instance.
In section 8 we applied the principle of sufficient reason. Its negative
counterpart is the principle of insufficient reason. We are familiar with
this from the fundamentals of the probability theory. "If n possibilities
are given and there is no sufficient reason to choose one of these in
preference to another, then they are all equally probable". If "el or e2
... or en" has a probability factor of 1 (or is even necessary), and if there
is no SR to make el preferable to e2, all e, will have a probability of l/n.
We shall apply this to the set of possible worlds. In the most unfavourable
case for the refutation of "Nothing exists", we place the empty worlds
(which we shall call L) on one side and the not empty worlds (which
we shall call B) on the other side. We consider the two sets as a unity
and assume there is no reason to choose empty in preference to not
empty, or not empty in preference to empty. Assuming that there have
to be "worlds", then L has a probability of 1/2 and B too.
This is an extreme case, however. There is only one way of being "empty" , whereas
there are many ways of being not empty. We can therefore assume that
there are 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n, infinity, different non-empty worlds. In each of these
assumptions, assuming that we have no reason to suppose that one of
these worlds is more probable than another, the principle of insufficient
reason determines that the probability of L always decreases (from 1/2 to
l/n) and that the probability of B always increases (from 1/2 to 1/3+1/3
to 1/4+ 1/ 4+ 1/4 etc.).
If an infinite number of possible worlds exist, the
probability of L will approach the limit zero. We shall now apply the
principle of insufficient reason to the totality of all these distributions of
probabilities over possible worlds. In one distribution L has a probability
of 1/2. In all the other distributions L has a lower probability, and in an
infinite number of distributions the probability of L is arbitrarily close
to the limit zero.
All this follows if we can apply the principle of insufficient reason
both to the individual 2, 3, ... n possible worlds and to the assumptions
about the number of possible worlds, and if our ignorance or ontological
indifference (or both) are so great that there is no known and/or existing
reason to choose one world in preference to another. In concrete terms,
all the foregoing follows from the fact that being can offer more variety
than nothingness.
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 04:10 AM
...you seam to have misunderstood my argument...my point was that there is no likelihood on anything in the first place, less alone a value for it...probability does not even apply to the problem once the first premiss, something, excludes the second, nothingness ...
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 04:20 AM
My position on this regard is that the idea that nothingness precedes something is absurd ! The very qualification of no-thing only makes sense by referring to the absence of something...the term excludes an absolute value in its very own definition....
apeiron
Dec12-11, 04:47 AM
My position on this regard is that the idea that nothingness precedes something is absurd ! The very qualification of no-thing only makes sense by referring to the absence of something...the term excludes an absolute value in its very own definition....
I agree - for quite different reasons most probably - that the idea of something arising from nothing is absurd. But that is a subtly different question from the OP.
The question here is about the possibility of there being just nothing - period. Now we know that isn't in fact the case. But was it ever even an honest possibility?
How can logic rule that out? Logic may rule out the kind of nothingness that spawns a somethingness, but it does not appear to rule out a nothingness of the kind that spawns...nothing.
This seems a rather coherent and self-consistent concept of nothingness - more so than the fecund kind. And the OP is about why we actually do have something rather than that kind of nothingness.
Albuquerque
Dec12-11, 05:07 AM
I agree - for quite different reasons most probably - that the idea of something arising from nothing is absurd. But that is a subtly different question from the OP.
The question here is about the possibility of there being just nothing - period. Now we know that isn't in fact the case. But was it ever even an honest possibility?
How can logic rule that out? Logic may rule out the kind of nothingness that spawns a somethingness, but it does not appear to rule out a nothingness of the kind that spawns...nothing.
This seems a rather coherent and self-consistent concept of nothingness - more so than the fecund kind. And the OP is about why we actually do have something rather than that kind of nothingness.
It seams to me that we must assume such kind of nothingness is possible in the first place and yet we don´t have any good reason to believe so...on its own premiss nothingness cannot be time dependent thus it does not follow a moment from where it can transit to something without contradicting its own conceptual terms...
(I apologise for my far from bright English which is not my first language)
apeiron
Dec12-11, 01:55 PM
It seams to me that we must assume such kind of nothingness is possible in the first place and yet we don´t have any good reason to believe so...on its own premiss nothingness cannot be time dependent thus it does not follow a moment from where it can transit to something without contradicting its own conceptual terms...
(I apologise for my far from bright English which is not my first language)
They are still two separate arguments. In one, the debate is whether nothingness is itself a true possibility. In the other, the debate is whether nothingness actually existed (for a while, until something arose).
So in considering nothingness as a possibility, we can agree it must have no properties at all - no time, no space. It is not even an empty world.
And there is where the probability argument in fact slips up. It depends on some firm notion of countable worlds to get off the ground. And true nothingness could have nothing that smacks of a worldliness, such as change or development - any kind of temporal progression.
True nothingness, by its definition could never spawn an actual world. So the existence of something proves that there was never "a time of nothing". And yet is still seems an active possibility. There could still have been a nothing (as an alternative to our existence and how it came about).
To finally eliminate nothingness as even a possibility, further work is needed. We have to have an argument which says our world came about through this process, and logically this is the only kind of origin it could have had. And look, as the "complementary other" to existence, it exhausts all other possibilities. There is now no room for nothingness even as a logical possibility.
In other words, we employ the usual logic of metaphysical dichotomies.
Nothing vs something is a very weak kind of dichotomy. For the reasons discussed, it does not really work as the terms are not mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. No-thing is a simple negation, based on trying to subtract away all things (or actually, just the "some" that are taken to exist). And as you point out, we cannot finally subtract away time or space, or at least the potential for change, the potential for stability too, in any intelligible way. We can subtract to create an empty world, but not a non-world.
What we need is the kind of complex negation that is a strong dichotomy. In which the two polar alternatives cover every possibility and are definitely related by their very lack of relation - it is the total metaphysical exclusivity that exhausts the need for any further consideration of other possibilities.
As I said earlier in the thread, this leads us to some form of the arguments of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce. Where what are opposed are vagueness and crispness, replacing the weaker thesis and antithesis of nothing and something.
The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.
Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).
With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".
All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.
Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.
So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).
They are still two separate arguments. In one, the debate is whether nothingness is itself a true possibility. In the other, the debate is whether nothingness actually existed (for a while, until something arose).
So in considering nothingness as a possibility, we can agree it must have no properties at all - no time, no space. It is not even an empty world.
And there is where the probability argument in fact slips up. It depends on some firm notion of countable worlds to get off the ground. And true nothingness could have nothing that smacks of a worldliness, such as change or development - any kind of temporal progression.
True nothingness, by its definition could never spawn an actual world. So the existence of something proves that there was never "a time of nothing". And yet is still seems an active possibility. There could still have been a nothing (as an alternative to our existence and how it came about).
To finally eliminate nothingness as even a possibility, further work is needed. We have to have an argument which says our world came about through this process, and logically this is the only kind of origin it could have had. And look, as the "complementary other" to existence, it exhausts all other possibilities. There is now no room for nothingness even as a logical possibility.
In other words, we employ the usual logic of metaphysical dichotomies.
Nothing vs something is a very weak kind of dichotomy. For the reasons discussed, it does not really work as the terms are not mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. No-thing is a simple negation, based on trying to subtract away all things (or actually, just the "some" that are taken to exist). And as you point out, we cannot finally subtract away time or space, or at least the potential for change, the potential for stability too, in any intelligible way. We can subtract to create an empty world, but not a non-world.
What we need is the kind of complex negation that is a strong dichotomy. In which the two polar alternatives cover every possibility and are definitely related by their very lack of relation - it is the total metaphysical exclusivity that exhausts the need for any further consideration of other possibilities.
As I said earlier in the thread, this leads us to some form of the arguments of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce. Where what are opposed are vagueness and crispness, replacing the weaker thesis and antithesis of nothing and something.
The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.
Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).
With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".
All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.
Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.
So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).
Great post!
This is a murky area and probably a very difficult question but have you thought on ways to introduce time in this model, especially after SR and its blockworld view(the blockworld view seems to nullify all attempts at understanding).
With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".
But isn't a relational or antisubstantivalist interpretation of spacetime capable of doing just that? I thought Mach favoured this approach but that's not important:
According to the relational theory…what we call “space” is simply the totality of actual (and perhaps possible) spatial relations between material objects and/or concrete material events. If there were no material objects and concrete material events, space would not exist, for the relata of the relations constitutive of space would not exist, just as a family tree cannot exist without there being people to bear the family relations to each other that are constitutive of the tree.
de Broglie waves as the “Bridge of Becoming” between quantum theory and relativity
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1107/1107.1678.pdf
apeiron
Dec12-11, 04:37 PM
Great post!
This is a murky area and probably a very difficult question but have you thought on how to introduce time in this model, especially after SR and its blockworld view(the blockworld view seems to nullify all attempts at understanding).
Yes, indeed that is something I've put a lot of effort into. But it would have to have its own thread.
Suffice to say, I think a thermodynamic approach to time is the key - seeing it as a gradient of change which gets dissipated. So a phase transition model in which we go from one kind of equilbrium (the instability of vagueness) to the more stable one (of a heat death universe).
There is a lot of thinking in this direction. For example, Prigogine's The End of Certainty is a stimulating read here. As the Nobellist father of dissipative structure theory, that should be no surprise.
But you also have loop quantum gravity theorists going in the same direction, because they must also make time (and space) emerge from vagueness (their quantum foam). And people like Rovelli are coming out with thermal time models.
So there is certainly a literature to ground speculation here.
SR leads to a blockworld in the same way that QM leads to MWI. They are models that have no constraints to break their internal symmetries. Yet clearly, the world as we experience it is not like these models. Those claimed symmetries are in fact broken.
This does not falsify SR or QM - so long as the models do not make a claim to be complete. The something missing (the further contraints) may get put in by hand, but it is not that difficult in practice to do that. So the models don't get us into trouble. SR and QM are fine in themselves.
However, when doing metaphysics, that is when we have to talk about what the models omit, as well as what they include, and so what kinds of further deductions would be valid.
Blockworld is one of the false pathways of thought that arise if you "believe" some particular model too religiously. At least, IMO.
apeiron
Dec12-11, 04:44 PM
But isn't a relational or antisubstantivalist interpretation of spacetime capable of doing just that? I thought Mach favoured this approach but that's not important:
Yes it should. That is what I said about loop approaches - they presume some kind of vagueness as their ground. The unoriented roil of a spin-foam, or whatever. Then space and time emerge from this via the evolution of constraints - a network of concrete relationships that solidify the generality of possibility into something specific and actual, with a definite history, and so a definite future.
This is also Peircean. It is all about self-creation via relationships. Contraints must arise as the "sum over histories" or least mean path. The least action principle is also the basis of dissipative structure theory and so a thermodynamic approach.
So Mach, Peirce, Rovelli, Chew. Many see the essential story. But science picks the low hanging fruit first (a further example of the least action principle, hey? :smile:).
SR leads to a blockworld in the same way that QM leads to MWI. They are models that have no constraints to break their internal symmetries. Yet clearly, the world as we experience it is not like these models. Those claimed symmetries are in fact broken.
Philosophically, I agree somewhat with your point, that it's always good to keep an open-mind and be aware that we are discussing models, yet, when discussing reality we only have our models to rest upon(it's been a tradition to regard everything else as empty talk). Yet, if we don't believe what they strongly suggest, it would seem that absolutely everyone on PF is talking mumbo-jumbo when they refer to reality. There is some truth, as far as it's attainable, that reality is relative to a frame of reference, as evidenced by clocks on the satellites orbiting the Earth and the experiments run at CERN which rely on the veracity of SR. So even if truths don't exist, it's more of a fact that reality is relative(and time is relative which lead to a blockworld), than it's a fact that reality is split at every quantum interaction(this is more of phantasy than a fact). I am far from dogmatic on it, but i'd put my money on the blockworld than on MWI any day of the week(even if it doesn't tell the whole story because no model is complete).
Time holds the key to most troubles in fundamental physics(that's Smolin's opinion in "The trouble with physics", as my own opinion is hardly worth much)
Albuquerque
Dec13-11, 04:31 AM
The vague is a notion of a fundamental state that admits to development - the vague can always become something. As a state of pure potential, it is not a nothing (that is a possibility it excludes). But it is also as near a nothing as possible. Likewise, a pure potential can become anything. So it is also as near an everythingness as possible. It is an infinity of degrees of freedom as yet unconstrained, but by the same token, unformed.
Somethingness then becomes the emergence of constraints, of limits, of form. And the cause of this emergence employs all four of Aristotle's causes (whereas the "something from nothing" kinds of argument usually just appeal to some kind of local effective cause - a triggering event).
With the notion of vagueness, we can not only subtract away all things, we can also dissolve away any idea of space and time - so get rid of both the contents and the container to have less than an "empty world".
All sorts of things flow from this view. For instance, when now asking the question "why anything", the only alternative is that things might have remained forever vague. But this is illogical, forbidden, because constraints could also exist. The question can now be answered in terms of the inevitabilty of constraints.
Of course, you still have to construct that model. And people like Peirce, or Geoffrey Chew with his bootstrap approach to particle physics, have attempted such models. But at least the metaphysics gives a clear idea of what the model needs to be about - the development of global systems constraints.
So the Why Anything? argument is useful because it reveals the inadequacy of nothingness as a global concept (no-things can only be localised particulars of some crisply actual world). And even of effective causes as the way to get everything started (again, effective causes are only local and particular).
As a layman I confess to be strongly stuck with the hard deterministic approach and with the concept of a block Universe as far as what I do understand these concepts intend to refer to which in itself is formally vague...
It follows I have trouble in conceptualising vagueness in any other way then the one who merely reports to the epistemological problem...thus vague for me refers to the temporary lack of awareness on the decision making constrains or good reasons that I might have towards some goal or some form of inquiry and not so much as reporting to a state in itself...in that sense I see it more as an "illusory effect" upon consciousness then an actual thing with its own "property´s"...I have trouble in imagining a true random process in motion without any sort of precise constrains as I understand motion itself as a form of means to ends, functions to systems and can´t conceive on any form of "behaviour" as being truly loose, although I wilfully admit complexity might strongly build that impression...
In the face of an interacting "indecision effect" from a system to another which is "alien" to its nature I am conceptually grounded with imagining lack of process/motion rather then an open ended form of process with no guidance...I don´t even know what it means motion with no guidance...as I am left wondering, what propels it ("its beingness") ? what vector goes nowhere in particular, or aims no goal ?
...again I hope the language barrier and the layman approach on the problem are not strong enough to prevent a fruitful exchange of ideas on such a hard problem...
Regards>Albuquerque
Albuquerque
Dec13-11, 05:19 AM
Post Scriptum -
...a block multiverse where all possibility´s of being are deterministically covered does not require any kind of intelligent designer with a volitional intention to justify the process of change...in fact "intention" and "volition" as I understand them, rather refer to the search for completion (first person perspective) then being the result of completion (holistic perspective, Being with no mind)...thus as I see it the need for "minds" is more the product of incomplete beings unfolding their process of completion then a final process where awareness is required...hope that settles the problem raised above !
Albuquerque
Dec13-11, 06:39 AM
...one interesting exercise is to relate what has been said with Godel´s incompleteness as an argument against the mind of all minds (and any kind of mind for that purpose) who cannot justify its own volition or wilful intentional process from within itself, thus ending up being more then an argument just against computation or mathematics but also against free will, against conscience and against Gods at large...
I am far from dogmatic on it, but i'd put my money on the blockworld than on MWI any day of the week(even if it doesn't tell the whole story because no model is complete).
I wouldn’t put my money on either model. Until we can answer such questions as below:
Russell held that there are “three grades of certainty. The highest grade belongs to my own percepts; the second grade to the percepts of other people; the third to events which are not percepts of anybody, “constructions of the mind established in the course of efforts to make sense of what we perceive.” “A piece of matter is a logical structure composed of [such] events,” he therefore concluded. We know nothing of the “intrinsic character” of such mentally constructed entities, so there is “no ground for the view that percepts cannot be physical events.” For science to be informative, it cannot be restricted to structural knowledge of such logical properties. Rather, “the world of physics [that we construct] must be, in some sense, continuous with the world of our perceptions, since it is the latter which supplies the evidence for the laws of physics.” The percepts that are required for this task—perhaps just meter-readings, Eddington had argued shortly before—“are not known to have any intrinsic character which physical events cannot have, since we do not know of any intrinsic character which could be incompatible with the logical properties that physics assigns to physical events.” Accordingly, “What are called ‘mental’ events…are part of the material of the physical world.” Physics itself seeks only to discover “the causal skeleton of the world, [while studying] percepts only in their cognitive aspect; their other aspects lie outside its purview”—though we recognize their existence, at the highest grade of certainty in fact. The basic conundrum recalls a classical dialogue between the intellect and the senses, in which the intellect says that color, sweetness, and the like are only convention while in reality there are only atoms and the void, and the senses reply: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall."
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN?
The journal of Philosophy, April 2009. P.181.
Unfortunately we will likely never have the answers to such questions. One can’t expect much from a cognitively-limited, arrogant, linguistic ground chimp like ourselves.
Edit: I'm starting to hate reading/writing my posts. They're too pessimistic/negative/misanthropic. I need to change my attitude.
Albuquerque
Dec13-11, 09:32 AM
...if anything my case is not against what has been labelled as naive realism but against minds as independent self justified willing systems...if minds cannot justify their own circumstances by which they would came to be what they are and thus through it the product of their will, then it reasons their so said free willing comes as an illusion from the process by which they circumstance is brought to existence in the specific way it is brought up...I decompose mind as an independent volitional entity and reduce it to a reactive deterministic necessary interacting process from reality with reality itself, whatever is reality..."subjectivity" in here translates to local perspectivism, and "observer" to am interacting system within the System who acknowledges and processes information accordingly with the conditions that such System provides, and which itself could not chose...a World without a mind, which cannot reason itself, or to repeat itself within itself...
apeiron
Dec13-11, 01:38 PM
Unfortunately we will likely never have the answers to such questions. One can’t expect much from a cognitively-limited, arrogant, linguistic ground chimp like ourselves.
Edit: I'm starting to hate reading/writing my posts. They're too pessimistic/negative/misanthropic. I need to change my attitude.
LOL, yes, be a glass half full guy instead. :smile:
The complaint in your extract is that we are just modellers of reality. Even our perceptions, our impressions, our measurements, are shaped by our ideas, our theories. We are cut off from the source of our impressions~ideas in some radical way.
But you can flip this around and see it as the crucial fact. It is because we are epistemically separated from reality that we can model it! You have to have mental distance to be able to imagine that reality could be other than what it appears, and thus see it more truly for what it is.
All this "ground chimp" stuff misses the glorious fact that our language ability does create a completely new realm of modelling for us. A chimp has to take its reality as brute fact. We get to stand back and wonder at it. Consider the other possibilities that put our actuality in its full context.
Our separation from reality is not an error to be deplored but a fortunate development that we should exploit to the full.
as a direct consequence of reading this thread, i started looking about for related stuff, which lead me to various places.
one of those places was the introduction to a book called "The Master and his Emissary." while i have not read it in depth, it occurs to me that there is a partial answer of sorts to bohm2's pessimism, which is:
only half of our brain is concerned with the "dissection" of reality into a self-consistent model. the other half sees things on a more holistic level, is perfectly happy with ambiguity, and non-linguistic apprehension. the resolution of reality into its constituent parts, can only take us so far, either our devices cannot extend our senses far enough, or our ability to logically deconstruct can only produce models which "make sense" to us. the nature of the beast is probably beyond such a reductionist approach, but that doesn't leave us with nothing. we have our intuitions, and our imaginations with which to transcend such limitations.
if i understand the implications of this (and perhaps i do not), it means that we have an entire set of separate tools with which to select the theories our analysis devises. we can leverage our innate "dualness" to our advantage. one sees this in the joy of discovery the experimentalist makes: his mind conjures up a possible reality, and his experience either validates this, or invalidates this. we can "dissassociate" but we can also "connect", and the very nature we have allows us to do either/or.
it may be that we never know exactly "why" we are here. but i believe we may yet gain some insight into "how". and this, in itself, will be a satisfaction of sorts, because we know how deeply interrelated form and function are.
there is good reason, given how fruitful it has been, to regard the "inside" and "outside" of "us" as distinct, it gives us a flexibility in reacting to our world that many creatures simply do not have. but i feel we should not forget, that in many ways, this is our own construct, a way we seek to understand, and as such, is somewhat less than the totality of what is actually transpiring. we are the observed, as well as the observers, such a distinction is (for lack of a better word) theoretical.
apeiron's conception of "the vague" sounds very reminiscent to me of the zen concept of the void: it is not something, it is not nothing, everything exists "in" it, but not like the wall i frequently bang my head against. it is what you get when you lose the quality of distinction, which (the act of distinguishing is what i am referring to) creates (amongst other things) dualities, logical structures, and (more pertinently for us) the sense of identity.
i consider it likely that this "vague" is, and always has been with us, that time itself, is a kind of "something" like space and sub-atomic particles are. mathematically, it's sort of like the null set: the null set doesn't have any members (so it's unique), but on the other hand, has every single property and quality that anything can possibly have. the only thing you need to get from the null set to something that has some definite quality is..."not". you draw a line, a boundary, and then you have opposition. you divide an indivisible whole, and then many things are possible. as soon as we put a bracket around the null set, like so:
{Ø}, then boom! out comes most of mathematics. if the universe (multi-verse) is indeed some sort of structure which has discernable underlying principles (a view espoused by max tegmark, for example, but which certainly has its detractors), then this is all you need to "explain" all this stuff going on around us. one tiny pair of brackets. one slash. and then there was two.
and such an event(?) could certainly rapidly seek to organize itself, as a dynamical system. sort of like a match burning, drawing on context (available energy) until its all used up (heat death). if this is true (and who knows, i could be very wrong), and humanity survives long enough, we will probably witness some fantastic acts of creation going on in the galaxies around us. should be quite a show.
apeiron
Dec14-11, 02:17 PM
apeiron's conception of "the vague" sounds very reminiscent to me of the zen concept of the void: it is not something, it is not nothing, everything exists "in" it, but not like the wall i frequently bang my head against. it is what you get when you lose the quality of distinction, which (the act of distinguishing is what i am referring to) creates (amongst other things) dualities, logical structures, and (more pertinently for us) the sense of identity.
All early attempts at metaphysics started with the idea of the vague forming itself dichotomously to become the crisply something. So you find it in both East and West thought circa 6th century BC. It is there in the I Ching, Taoism and Buddhism (dependent co-arising). Zen is a later echo.
To the first thinkers, this was the obvious way realities develop. But it was the Christian tradition in particular that invented the idea of "something from nothing", creation ab initio. And then modern science got going with the rediscovery of atomist philosophy - a doctrine also dependent on the idea of nothingness, of a true void.
We can say that the original conception of nature was organic - realities developed from vague states of potential by a dichotomous separation into complementary definite things. And the modern conception is mechanical - realities are manufacture by construction, the lumping of parts into arrangements that make functional wholes.
It is this mechanical view that McGilchrist bemoans as "left brain thinking".
And he is sort of right. The brain itself has an organic logic. Relax your mind (as in meditation) and it goes vague. It is not a nothingness but a state of humming potential. Then use your mind and it becomes brightly about something when it separates experience into figure and ground, event and context. There is the something we are definitely attending, and the penumbra of all that situates it, gives it meaning - because it has with equal definiteness been suppressed.
And this dichotomous style of processing is basic to brain architecture. The left/right divide is just one of them.
So material reality, our minds, and our logic, can all work the same way - organically. But the Western tradition has chosen a mechanical conception of all three instead. It kind of works. It is certainly simpler. But ultimately it is a frustrating and limiting view of life - McGilchrist's argument.
I don't think the concept of "vagueness" really helps. It seems one could still ask "Why vagueness rather than nothing"?
apeiron
Dec14-11, 09:34 PM
I don't think the concept of "vagueness" really helps. It seems one could still ask "Why vagueness rather than nothing"?
Again, we know there is a something - our reality - and so that is a strong constraint on any speculation. Whatever gave rise to our somethingness, or stands in some other way as its contextual other, has to be able to satisfy this constraint.
Somethingness has no coherent connection to nothingness. Well, you can subtract away a lot of things, but you are still going to be left with something (the world that has been made empty). And you can't do any better trying to come the other way either - imagining a nothingness suddenly bursting forth with a somethingness (even a QM fluctuation needs to take place in something).
Vagueness on the other hand has a natural connection to the crisp. As things become less crisply developed, they become more vague. And out of a vague potential, something could always crisply develop.
So two ontologies. Only one of which can carry the causal relationship which we seek, already knowing that something does indeed exist.
Perhaps it is not an ultimate answer. There still seems to be the possible question of why anything - even a vagueness? But then can we really wish away naked possibility, the "existence" of raw potential, in the final analysis? Is it not in fact the limit on not existing? If there is nothing else, there is still always possibility.
So the fact that things exist, logically implies that things were always possible. It also logically implies that things were never impossible.
So we can say a generalised state of possibility must have existed. And a generalised state of impossibility - an actual state of nothingness - cannot exist.
Then vagueness is our label for that generalised state of possibility. We no longer have to worry about nothingness as a rival ontic primitive.
Impossibilities - the definite absence of things - can only arise as a later development, the emergence of crisp constraints on what is otherwise rawly possible.
Albuquerque
Dec15-11, 03:04 AM
I believe your last approach clarify´s the problem in a more tangible way regarding what you meant with vagueness...
My perspective upon the very meaning on a why, concerning any matter to which we can remark a final why, brings me to think that absolute why´s never ask what they seam to ask...they are a projection ad infinitum towards complexity but not a projection to a final justification, as a final justification cannot itself be justified...
Thus asking for the purpose of a spatio temporal process where time itself cannot come out of nothingness once time is the justification on any transition renders the question invalid of any meaning...
In that light my best answer to a final Why it is very simply a just Because...and Reality as the LAW ends up being very much about that...it strikes me as the profound meaning of Truth itself...That, which is the case, and that cannot be put into question.
Thus asking for the purpose of a spatio temporal process where time itself cannot come out of nothingness once time is the justification on any transition renders the question invalid of any meaning...
Some physicists have argued that entaglement, non-locality, etc. may be interpreted in this way. Gisin argues:
Yet, amazingly, quantum physics predicts entirely different kinds of correlations, called non-local correlations for reasons described below. Physics has a word for the cause of these non-local correlations: entanglement. But physics offers no story in space and time to explain or describe how these correlations happen. Hence, somehow, nonlocal correlations emerge from outside space-time (for an explanation of this provocative terminology see appendix A).
From Appendix A:
What could it mean that nonlocal correlations emerge from outside space-time?
Who has ever started a physics course with equation and not with a story? Clearly, in physics we need stories as much as equations. For this purpose we have a catalogue of possible tools to tell our stories. Until recently, all stories took place in space-time. But, this story-toolbox evolves as our theories evolve in parallel with our mathematics toolbox; see for example the tools used today to talk about the deformation of space-time in general relativity. However, as we have seen in section II no story in space-time can describe nonlocal correlations: we have no tool in our story-toolbox to talk about nonlocal correlations. Hence, we usually say things like "event A influences event B", or "event A has a spooky action at a distance on event B" or "event A causes a collapse of the wave-function at location B". But we know that this is all wrong: there is no time ordering between the events A and B; hence no story in time is appropriate. Moreover, the distance between A and B is irrelevant; hence the distance should not occur in our story. The usual reaction to this situation is to give up the search for any story, i.e. in some sense to give up the very possibility to make sense of nonlocal correlations, i.e. to understand them. Some physicists simply claim that the maths are too complicated, hence we can't complement the equations by good stories. But we have seen that the maths are trivial: this can't be an excuse to give up! Admittedly we need to enlarge our story-toolbox. A difficulty is that the new tool must include some strange features that can't be described within space-time.
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time? Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1011/1011.3440v1.pdf
Video summary (this French guy has a really good sense of humour):
9WnV7zUR9UA
But I'm not sure if this non-locality and its implications really solves anything with respect to this question of "Why something rather than nothing". Even a purely Tegmarkian position (Platonic view) that stuff like mathematical objects are "real" (even though they don't exist in space-time) and are necessarily true and that's what our science is actually discovering, seems incapable of solving this problem, I think?
Albuquerque
Dec15-11, 10:00 AM
Even if true, I don´t think our "angular" description of reality is exclusive once what reality objectively refers to in the first place is to the very relation itself between subject and object, observer and observed, and not to the thing "per si", which on its own is not only devoid of any potential but equally devoid of any justification and meaning...that said my position is no more in favour of "minds" as complex (maybe complicated) observers then it is on atoms as more linear "observers", as interacting agents, who process information around them on their own particular and limited way, say through electromagnetism and so on...as I see it to "observe" stands for getting affected by something more then "aware" of something which strikes me as a very obscure term...in resume, as long as I keep believing in causality for all its convenience, I am not particularly inclined to make minds a special and unique miraculous form of relation, although I believe its entertaining to have one...
Being is not about observers about time or about Why, and thus not even about reason...if anything, LAW which is the expression of Being, is the very prime condition of what "reason" stands for in its being there...Why ? Because !
Now, I'm confused as I always thought that with respect to the ontolgy of space-time there were only two options:
1. Relationist: space and time could not exist without matter.
2. Dualist substantivalist ("container/bucket"): spacetime is the container/bucket and material objects are the contained (objects in the container).
With (1), if you remove matter there's "nothing" left. With (2), if you remove the objects the bucket/container/empty set still remains. But apparently there's a third option:
3. Monist substantivalist: There is no need for the dualism of the container and the contained (or for fundamental containment relations):
Spacetime is substance enough. There is no need for the dualism of the containe(r?) and the contained (or for fundamental containment relations). When God makes the world, she need only create spacetime. Then she can pin the fundamental properties directly to spacetime.
Spacetime the one substance
http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/spacetime.pdf
So I'm guessing that in this third ontology, if one removes that "one" stuff, nothing should remain? But what about stuff that may not be described as propagating in space-time like quantum correlations? Gisin has argued that:
quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe how they occur.
Quantum nonlocality based on finite-speed causal influences leads to superluminal signaling
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.3795v1.pdf
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time? Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1011/1011.3440v1.pdf
I mean, if stuff like these quantum correlations defy spatio-temporal descriptions, it seems that all 3 views are somehow flawed? Although I'm guessing the relationist view would still be safe?
Now, I'm confused as I always thought that with respect to the ontolgy of space-time there were only two options:
1. Relationist: space and time could not exist without matter.
2. Dualist substantivalist ("container/bucket"): spacetime is the container/bucket and material objects are the contained (objects in the container).
With (1), if you remove matter there's "nothing" left. With (2), if you remove the objects the bucket/container/empty set still remains. But apparently there's a third option:
3. Monist substantivalist: There is no need for the dualism of the container and the contained (or for fundamental containment relations):
Spacetime the one substance
http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/spacetime.pdf
So I'm guessing that in this third ontology, if one removes that "one" stuff, nothing should remain? But what about stuff that may not be described as propagating in space-time like quantum correlations? Gisin has argued that:
Quantum nonlocality based on finite-speed causal influences leads to superluminal signaling
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.3795v1.pdf
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time? Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1011/1011.3440v1.pdf
I mean, if stuff like these quantum correlations defy spatio-temporal descriptions, it seems that all 3 views are somehow flawed? Although I'm guessing the relationist view would still be safe?
Classical concepts like matter, space and time are linked together by motion. DO you understand what motion is? I don't. I don't think anybody does(i haven't seen anyone who does and certainly haven't seen anyone who understands quantum motion). We have a description, classical in nature that is deeply flawed. It implies that objects cease to exist at point X and reappear at Y a moment later. A quantum description would imply that we don't know what happens to object when in transition from X to Y, or if it moved at all. It would appear to require a measurement(a specific conscious inquiry), thus a strong point can be made for Wheeler's participatory universe, which imo is a better and more consistent ontology than the ones you listed.
apeiron
Dec17-11, 06:21 PM
So I'm guessing that in this third ontology, if one removes that "one" stuff, nothing should remain?
To motivate his arguments, Schaffer presumes substance as irreducible, fundamental, non-derivative, etc. So already many other possible ontologies are ruled out. He then is examining whether substantivism itself is monistic or dual.
In the context of the "why anything" question, Schaffer would still face the challenge of why substance and not an absence of substance.
A broader view of possible ontologies would be this....
http://www.wylieb.com/Philosophy/Teaching/ActualTeaching/PHIL2109/Metaphysics10.htm
Is there such a thing as space? If so, what kind of thing is it?...Here are two views:
A bottom-up view. Space is composed from its points, much as a record collection is composed from its records....
A top-down view. The parts of space are ontologically dependent on space itself, just like.....
And I would then add the third ontic possibility of holism - space is a result of the hierarchical interaction of these two directions of causality, of local construction and global constraint.
With the further developmental ontology that adds then a notion of time, the gradient of change made available as the vague becomes crisp.
So broadly speaking, I would agree with Schaffer that fundamentally all would be one, and duality would arise out of this. But the fundamental is not the one-ness of substance but the one-ness of naked potentiality.
I mean, if stuff like these quantum correlations defy spatio-temporal descriptions, it seems that all 3 views are somehow flawed? Although I'm guessing the relationist view would still be safe?
So QM is incompatible with substantivism? :smile: Yes, it is amusing Schaffer employs QFT to argue for monistic substance, yet fails to mention the little issue of non-locality. Locality is of course built into the substance view axiomatically.
The relational view, by constrast, is based on an ontology of form, or global, downward acting, constraints. And clearly, non-locality fits quite nicely with the idea of global constraints.
But again, a complete view would have to marry both aspects of causality, the substantial and the formal. It is not a case of either/or, but the interactionist story of both. Then to unite these two things under one monism, we have to step back to somewhere. So both must emerge from something like raw potential via a process of mutal development.
Then to unite these two things under one monism, we have to step back to somewhere. So both must emerge from something like raw potential via a process of mutal development.
I agree. I'm not sure what to call it though but it seems to have some properties similar to the same "stuff" that gave birth to our universe, in that it defies spatio-temporal explanation. I mean there must be some remnant of this pre big-bang stuff somewhere? Maybe it's this quantum correlations that seem to defy space-time descriptions? I've always felt the same about our mental/phenomenal stuff/qualia (as per McGinn's argument) but I'm sure I will be accused of being a mystic and I really hate being associated with anything like that. I still like Kastner's paper I posted previously. I just realized he's posted on this forum and I didn't even know about it until today. Interestingly, Schaffer does try to bring forth a complete monist model in a later paper:
Monism: The Priority of the Whole
http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/monism.pdf
I'm actually sympathetic to his "priority monist" view. It seems more reasonable than "existence monism" and also more in line with relationism than substantivalist ontology but maybe I'm confused. I'm guessing you would argue that neither has priority and both the macro and micro should be equal?
apeiron
Dec17-11, 08:06 PM
Interestingly, Schaffer does try to bring forth a complete monist model in a later paper:
Yes, and note how Schaffer again waves away the issue of possiblia. So this is not a "complete" approach, or only complete within a carefully chosen reference frame that is based on the crisply existing and excludes the vaguely possible.
In particular I will assume that there is a world and that it has proper
parts. More precisely, I assume that there is a maximal actual concrete
object—the cosmos—of which all actual concrete objects are parts. I should
stress that I am only concerned with actual concrete objects. Possibilia,
abstracta, and actual concreta in categories other than object are not my
concern...
I'm guessing you would argue that neither has priority and both the macro and micro should be equal?
Yes. At least neither would have causal priority, even though one might be granted temporal or developmental priority.
Among philosophers who take vagueness/potential seriously, like Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce, you do have something perhaps coming first - some kind of "substantial" act, a spontaneous fluctuation, that gets things going. And then after this comes the revealed possibility of substantial action being met by the countering force of emergent constraints.
With Peirce, this is his doctrine of firstness, secondness and thirdness - the spontaneous acts, the possibility thence of dyadic interactions, followed by the "taking of habits" or regularisation of physical laws, which is the emergence of form/constraints.
But while a temporal progression can be projected on to the issue of development, at the level of causality, neither the local nor the global would be prior, in the sense of being more important, more fundamental, carrying more weight in the scheme of things.
Albuquerque
Dec18-11, 04:34 AM
...how come speaking on potential can be related with not having constrains ? How come increasing the spectrum from set to power set is said to be related with vagueness ? Either there is causality in place and mechanic relation from the beginning or the whole foundation goes down the drain as magic, no matter what direction you choose to approach the problem be it holistic or not...
...as for time, one can easily extend the concept from the "classical" relativist perspective of space time and apply it to any kind of change process who proves to be more fundamental...motion does n´t appeal to me either, but such is beside the point of what time ends up standing for in practical terms which again is change...one must be careful on how one stacks words together or we end up creating words to address the same phenomena needlessly...as I see it time cannot be removed out of the equation nor some sort of meta space call it what you will...there must exist an axis of order for whatever meta substance there is with a simple rule as simple as present not present relating the discrete bits of such axis...("not present" would stand for null rather then absent...meaning null as being countered by an opposite direction of a mirrored nature or something similar...absence is more a matter of ilusion then a matter of fact the way I see it...)
Albuquerque
Dec18-11, 04:47 AM
If you find the time and the appeal, I would like you to clarify as most as possible your notion of "vagueness" as I may be missing some fundamental idea in your view which would be unfortunate...maybe you could start by defining some model for freedom at large....my dull imagination cannot wrap my head around any concept of pure freedom no matter how much I try...in that sense your wise input would be greatly appreciated !
apeiron
Dec18-11, 04:52 AM
If you find the time and the appeal, I would like you to clarify as most as possible your notion of "vagueness"...
I collected some grounding ideas and literature references in this thread....
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514
I agree. I'm not sure what to call it though but it seems to have some properties similar to the same "stuff" that gave birth to our universe, in that it defies spatio-temporal explanation.
Space, matter(chairs, cars, etc.), time and motion are classical concepts, they are derivative(and secondary) and comprized of the momentary excitation of the respective field(this - the field ontology - is by far the single and only ontology that stands all evidence thrown at it). There is no other ontology and there are no particles('particles' are the classical momentary state of the field - sorry, language fails me here). Matter is a state of the field, why reality is like that, would be a very good question for philosophers to answer. Perhaps fields have a mind of their own(joking :tongue2:).
If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet - N. Bohr
apeiron
Dec19-11, 03:19 PM
Matter is a state of the field, why reality is like that, would be a very good question for philosophers to answer.
Fields are just another modelling concept. They have the advantage in that they are both local and global, so do offer a holistic approach.
A field can define a space by filling it, while locally specifying its material content. Local particles can be described as excitations and so given a contextual definition. Etc.
So if reality is holistic and systematic in its causality, we should expect a field ontology to be good at capturing that essential local~global organisation.
Of course, like any analogy, there are then shortcomings. Fields have no memory, no persistence. All is flux. So it is hard to represent history or gradients.
So classical wave mechanics has been a useful mental concept for modelling material reality. But note that soliton modelling and superconductor modelling from condensed matter physics are now also common mental concepts being employed in fundamental physics, along with network theory (as in loop quantum gravity).
And also, the essence of a "field" in any of these descriptions is that it preserves locality. Whereas QM creates a problem in that regard.
Fields are just another modelling concept. They have the advantage in that they are both local and global, so do offer a holistic approach.
They are the only consistent model of reality there is.
A field can define a space by filling it, while locally specifying its material content. Local particles can be described as excitations and so given a contextual definition. Etc.
No, a field doesn't fill space, space is relative and e.g. the gravitational field defines space-time as per GR. Fields define and make up spacetime
So if reality is holistic and systematic in its causality, we should expect a field ontology to be good at capturing that essential local~global organisation.
My long standing gripe with causality has always been that it's a secondary(derivative) concept(like matter, space and time). You are looking for the organizing principles where they don't exist.
Of course, like any analogy, there are then shortcomings. Fields have no memory, no persistence. All is flux. So it is hard to represent history or gradients.
Memory is a secondary, emergent concept as well(a property of the field?). Classical realism of objects as a fundamental characteristic of reality has been dead for a while.
And also, the essence of a "field" in any of these descriptions is that it preserves locality. Whereas QM creates a problem in that regard.
QFT doesn't pressupose realism, so no problem in that respect with QM.
apeiron
Dec19-11, 04:14 PM
Classical wave mechanics had some success in mimicing reality. But it's still a spectacular failure at high speeds, energies and small scales. Philosophically, it's dead.
QFT doesn't pressupose realism, so no problem in that respect with QM.
But what is a "relativistic quantum field" then? We have various formal descriptions for making calculations, but no single mental image of what we are talking about.
If you are talking classically, then you can claim that particles are just local excitations. But what you are talking about with QFT is precisely what people complain they cannot imagine in terms of "just waves", or "just particles" either.
So your use of the word "field" here is a placeholder for that hoped-for deeper appreciation of what may be the ontological reality. And as such, it does not actually rule out a more particle-based approach as you want to claim.
For example this is a good discussion of the problems for both camps: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/#Ont
Many of the creators of QFT can be found in one of the two camps regarding the question whether particles or fields should be given priority in understanding QFT. While Dirac, the later Heisenberg, Feynman, and Wheeler opted in favor of particles, Pauli, the early Heisenberg, Tomonaga and Schwinger put fields first (see Landsman 1996). Today, there are a number of arguments which prepare the ground for a proper discussion beyond mere preferences...
So even quantum field theory is not with any certainty a "field theory".
And then there is the issue of what a quantum gravity theory would be. Would it look even less like a classical notion of a field (as with a spin foam, or a string condensate, or whatever)?
So OK, you can call the ultimate concept of reality "a field". But how are you actually now defining a field? What does the word mean concretely here?
If we cannot spell this out, then the concept is simply a placeholder and carries no ontological weight. It becomes another way of saying "we don't know". Or perhaps, we don't know, but we are sure it means particles are not real, locality isn't fundamental, etc. :smile:
But what is a "relativistic quantum field" then? We have various formal descriptions for making calculations, but no single mental image of what we are talking about.
If we leave physics and return to philosophy - fields would be the Ultimate Reality as far as we know(and probably can know). That which exists and is real in the sense that it's the substrate of being.
If you are talking classically, then you can claim that particles are just local excitations. But what you are talking about with QFT is precisely what people complain they cannot imagine in terms of "just waves", or "just particles" either.
So your use of the word "field" here is a placeholder for that hoped-for deeper appreciation of what may be the ontological reality. And as such, it does not actually rule out a more particle-based approach as you want to claim.
For example this is a good discussion of the problems for both camps: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/#Ont
That is a good article and it very well portraits why a particle explnation of QFT is untenable.
And then there is the issue of what a quantum gravity theory would be. Would it look even less like a classical notion of a field (as with a spin foam, or a string condensate, or whatever)?
To my knowledge - all appraoches of QG involve a variant of emergence/symmetry breaking.
So OK, you can call the ultimate concept of reality "a field". But how are you actually now defining a field? What does the word mean concretely here?
If we cannot spell this out, then the concept is simply a placeholder and carries no ontological weight. It becomes another way of saying "we don't know". Or perhaps, we don't know, but we are sure it means particles are not real, locality isn't fundamental, etc. :smile:
I won't let you push me off the cliff on this :tongue:(there's literature about Wheeler's beliefs, Bohm's beliefs, etc. on this issue in particular, they wrote extensively and would be more appropriate for a forum with more relaxed rules, i'd rather keep my points at their maximum). Otherwise, the field ontology is the triumph of human thought over reality(don\t ask if they are different, i don't know)
apeiron
Dec19-11, 05:08 PM
If we leave physics and return to philosophy - fields would be the Ultimate Reality as far as we know(and probably can know). That which exists and is real in the sense that it's the substrate of being.
My argument here is that when examined closely, the notion of a "field" has long become a notion about a simple potential - ie: a vagueness.
The substrate of being now has properties such as "infinite degrees of freedom", which then get "collapsed" due to the emergence of global constraints.
To my knowledge - all appraoches of QG involve a variant of emergence/symmetry breaking.
Precisely. They presume a fundamental unoriented potential, a vagueness, and then the actual world emerges via symmetry breaking.
So this is no longer a "field" concept, because fields are what emerge. But an unlimited potential of infinite dimensions is perhaps a little "field-like" when we try to imagine it. It is an uber-field possibly.
But by definition, a vagueness lacks locality and other definite features. These actual properties of fields have to emerge via development, or symmetry breaking.
I think a lot of this hinges on what the wave function means. Given Bell's and now PBR, it seems that our best model of "reality" at least at the microscale can no longer be directly interpretable as a local beable. If one wants to use some dualistic "cut" as in Copenhagen, there are difficulties as Maudlin points out:
The reason that this problem does not come up in practice is because the ‘standard’ interpretation is a legacy of the Copenhagen view, and the Copenhagen view does not postulate wavefunction monism. Copenhagenism insisted on the necessity of having a classical description somewhere, the description of the ‘measurement situation’: the infamous Copenhagen ‘cut’ was exactly between a quantum realm and a classical realm. And the classical description would, of course, be in terms of local beables, so there is no problem applying a spacetime transformation to it. Within this sort of a dualistic picture the problem of spacetime transformations of the wavefunction can be approached. The problem, of course, is that this sort of dualistic ontology is impossible to take seriously: no one ever thought that there were really two different sorts of physical systems, the classical and the quantum, that somehow interact. If that were the view, then the ‘cut’ would be a matter of physical fact: somewhere the classical and quantum bits of ontology would actually meet. Furthermore, it is evident that the ‘classical objects’, measuring apparatus and so on, are composed out of ‘quantum stuff’ (electrons, protons, and so on), so this cannot really be a dualistic ontology. In the confused morass of Copenhagenism, the observation that the ‘cut’ could, For All Practical Purposes, be moved about at will within a large range was taken to show that the cut itself corresponded not to a physical fact but to a convention, or something like that. But if the theory can be formulated without a cut at all, let it be so formulated. Having removed the cut and put everything in the quantum ontology, one would evidently remove all the local beables, and all the problems we have been discussing would return.
And the problem is also nobody seems to know the meaning of this larger space (3N dimensions)where the wave function lives. But it is at clearly at odds with the local classical field as Einstein notes:
It is further characteristic of these physical objects that they are thought of as arranged in a space-time continuum. An essential aspect of this arrangement of things in physics is that they lay claim, at a certain time, to an existence independent of one another, provided these objects ‘are situated in different parts of space’. Unless one makes this kind of assumption about the independence of the existence (the ‘being-thus’) of objects which are far apart from one another in space—which stems in the first place from everyday thinking— physical thinking in the familiar sense would not be possible. It is also hard to see any way of formulating and testing the laws of physics unless one makes a clear distinction of this kind. This principle has been carried to extremes in the field theory by localizing the elementary objects on which it is based and which exist independently of each other, as well as the elementary laws which have been postulated for it, in the infinitely small (four-dimensional) elements of space.
Thus, "Einstein notes that in classical field theory all of the beables are local, and local in the strongest sense: the entire physical situation is nothing but the sum of the physical situations in the infinitely small regions of space-time."
apeiron
Dec19-11, 10:34 PM
I think a lot of this hinges on what the wave function means. Given Bell's and now PBR, it seems that our best model of "reality" at least at the microscale can no longer be directly interpretable as a local beable. If one wants to use some dualistic "cut" as in Copenhagen, there are difficulties as Maudlin points out:
This is again re-stating the fact that locality is not fundamental and at best an emergent feature of reality. So now we move on to consider what is fundamental, and how things like locality might emerge?
Or should we instead keep going back to try to make locality work?
The conversation keeps returning to a point where you are either presuming "something exists fundamentally" or that "everything is emergent".
What is it, in the face of a good understanding of QM, that maintains a faith in the first option?
My argument here is that when examined closely, the notion of a "field" has long become a notion about a simple potential - ie: a vagueness.
The substrate of being now has properties such as "infinite degrees of freedom", which then get "collapsed" due to the emergence of global constraints.
Modern physics - turning physicists into philosophers and (at least some) philosophsers into physicists. I'm lovin' it :biggrin:
Precisely. They presume a fundamental unoriented potential, a vagueness, and then the actual world emerges via symmetry breaking.
So this is no longer a "field" concept, because fields are what emerge. But an unlimited potential of infinite dimensions is perhaps a little "field-like" when we try to imagine it. It is an uber-field possibly.
I would not say that it's easy to categorize fields as either real or unreal. There are good arguments that they are both(at the same time). Again, classical baggage(concepts) seem to stand in the way of a better understanding.
But by definition, a vagueness lacks locality and other definite features. These actual properties of fields have to emerge via development, or symmetry breaking.
I applauded you earlier in another thread about introducing ancient thinkers into the discussion with vagueness and potential development(vaguely resembles a wavefunction evolution and 'collapse').
apeiron
Dec20-11, 03:26 AM
I think a lot of this hinges on what the wave function means.
Further, if you were reading that Kastner paper on a possibilist transactional interpretation of QM, you will have noted that it too takes an "everything emerges from potential" approach to ontology.
Shimony (2009) has similarly suggested that relativistic spacetime can be considered as a domain of actuality emergent from a quantum level of possibilities:
“There may indeed be “peaceful coexistence” between Quantum nonlocality and Relativistic locality, but it may have less to do with signaling than with the ontology of the quantum state. Heisenberg's view of the mode of reality of the quantum state was ... that it is potentiality as contrasted with actuality. This distinction is successful in making a number of features of quantum mechanics intuitively plausible — indefiniteness of properties, complementarity, indeterminacy of measurement outcomes, and objective probability. But now something can be added, at least as a conjecture: that the domain governed by Relativistic locality is the domain of actuality, while potentialities have careers in space-time (if that word is appropriate) which modify and even violate the restrictions that space-time structure imposes upon actual events....” (2009, Section 7, item 2.)
Shimony goes on to note the challenges in providing an account of the emergence of actuality from potentiality, which amounts to ‘collapse.’ PTI suggests that transactions are the vehicle for this process ; and therefore at least part of it must involve processes and entities transcending the spacetime construct.
What is it, in the face of a good understanding of QM, that maintains a faith in the first option?
Our observations - you, me, the beauty of nature, love, the relentless human spirit for understanding how things work...
It's obvious at this point that the inner workings of reality are inaccessible to us, things happen, what the heck(ice-cream still tastes good, cold beer too)
I enjoyed reading Kastner's paper but I don't know exactly why but I just don't buy the whole concept of a 'collapse' process. I think any theory that has collapse in it, just seems wrong. I really found the video below (including a double-slit type of experiment) really useful in getting a "picture" of what may be happening. Still, the major problem is the wave can't be that type of guiding wave (e.g. existing in our familiar space-time). But at least, one can get an intuitive sense of how emergence of our familiar space-time may come from this configuration space stuff (whatever it is). Of course, the problem is that a direct mapping from configuration space to the more familiar space-time can't be done in any unique way, as others have argued, because when one tries to do it, the structure of the 3-N space can underwrite more than one set of emergent 3-spaces.The MWI doesn't have a problem with this view because they argue that more than one set of emergent 3-spaces exist at the same time. But I just don't buy MWI, either. But I still like the picture of those silicone drops in the video being our familiar objects in space-time whereas "below" there is some other stuff that defies locality/separability (something unlike the guiding wave depicted in Couder experiments). This is in line with some of Bohm's metaphysics which I'm biased toward.
W9yWv5dqSKk
One paper tries to get a wave to exist in the physical space we are familiar but the model seems really complicated:
This is admittedly a complicated, ugly, and highly contrived theory. (And although it is straightforward to generalize from 2 particles moving in 1 spatial dimension to N particles moving in 3 spatial dimensions, the complexity and ugliness in that more serious context is surely much worse!)...
It is sometimes raised as an objection against pilot-wave theory that, in the theory, the wave function causally influences the particles, but the particles exert no influences back on the wave. (This, it is apparently thought, suggests that the particles are some kind of mere epiphenomenon, which might as well be dropped-a bizarre suggestion, for anyone who understands the crucial role the particles play in making the theory empirically adequate, but still a suggestion one hears sometimes.) To whatever extent one takes such an objection seriously, then, it is of interest to point out its inapplicability to the pilot-wave theory (of exclusively local beables) sketched here: each particle’s motion is dictated just by its own associated pilot-wave field, but the evolution of each pilot-wave field is influenced by all the other particles. Not only, then, do the particles influence the pilot-wave fields, but the particles can quite reasonably be understood as (indirectly) affecting each other (through the various fields). Perhaps those who dislike the causality posited by the usual pilot-wave theory, then, will find the theory sketched here more tolerable...
The theory presented in Section III contains an infinite number of interacting fields on physical space and causal influences from particles onto the fields associated with other particles – but is mathematically equivalent to standard pilot-wave theory in which there is just one wave, on configuration space, and no causation from the particles onto the pilot-wave.
The Theory of (Exclusively) Local Beables
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0909/0909.4553v3.pdf
Edit: I thought I'd mention that Bohm (at least in his metaphysics) didn't appear to believe in the "reality" of particles:
We have frequently been asked the question “Didn’t Bohm believe that there was an actual classical point-like particle following these quantum trajectories?" The answer is a definite No! For Bohm there was no solid 'particle' either, but instead, at the fundamental level, there was a basic process or activity which left a ‘track’ in, say, a bubble chamber. Thus the track could be explained by the enfolding and unfolding of an invariant form in the overall underlying process.
Zeno Paradox for Bohmian Trajectories: The Unfolding of the Metatron
http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson/ZenoPaper.pdf
ryan7585
Jan2-12, 08:31 AM
In that sense, what you are describing is a justification or reasoning for nihilism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism), as the discussion about "something vs. nothing" eventually leads towards existential nihilism in the form of a logical conclusion of the argument being presented: if everything is nothing, no thing can have inherent meaning.
It is ultimately, from my perspective, a discussion about what the difference is between ideas and reality.
Nihilism is so ridiculous to me... Regardless of whether everything is nothing, we all have an objective experience which is affected in definite ways by how we interact. A search for "inherant meaning" will ALWAYS yield fruitless results. But contextual meaning can be found in absolutely everything in the universe. It is our experience of it which gives it meaning
How is this not obvious?
Here’s some interesting arguments against the probabilistic argument presented in original post:
Van Inwagen, while not himself a cosmologist, addresses a cosmological question. He proposes to answer the question that is “supposed to be the most profound and difficult of all questions”: “Why is there anything at all?” The argument is elaborate, so I shall jump to the essential step. Van Inwagen presents the premises that there is only one possible world in which there are no beings but there are infinitely many possible worlds in which there are beings. The latter is arrived at by arguing that there are many ways for beings to be but only one way for them not to be. He then urges that the probability of being actual for each possible universe is the same. (I set aside the problem that this instantly conflicts with the requirement that probability measures normalize to unity.) It now follows that the probability “of there being nothing is 0.” It is “as improbable as anything can be” . Hence, no doubt, we are to infer that there being anything at all is as probable as anything can be. Van Inwagen prudently admits that he is “unhappy about the argument...No doubt there is something wrong with it...but I should like to be told what it is”. What is wrong is that it is an instance of the inductive disjunctive fallacy. Our background assumptions are near vacuous and provide completely neutral support for the actuality of each possible world; therefore, they provide completely neutral support for any disjunction of these possibilities. What van Inwagen has done is to represent this neutrality incorrectly by a widely spread probability measure, thereby committing himself fallaciously to the conclusion that a disjunction of all but one of them is strongly supported.
Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/cosmic_confusion_final.pdf
If one applies probabilities thoughtlessly, one might try to represent the state of complete ignorance by a broadly spread probability distribution over the outcomes. Then the probability of the disjunction can be brought close to unity merely by adding more outcomes. Hence one would infer fallaciously to near certainty for a sufficiently large contingent disjunction of outcomes over which we are individually in complete ignorance. The fallacy is surprisingly widespread. A striking example is supplied by van Inwagen [1996] in answer to the cosmic question “Why is there anything at all?” There is, he asserts, one way for no thing to be, but infinitely many ways for different things to be. Distributing probabilities over these outcomes fairly uniformly, we infer that the disjunction representing the infinitely many ways things can be must attract all the probability mass so that we assign probability one to it.
Challenges to Bayesian Confirmation Theory
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Challenges_final.pdf
Zinkernagel summarizes this:
From the perspective of Norton’s critique, it is not hard to see what is wrong with the analogy. When you win the lottery ticket it may be reasonable to infer that other people bought a ticket but, in any case, the very idea of winning a lottery presupposes that other tickets exist and that the winning ticket has been drawn more or less randomly from the collection of tickets. By contrast, our universe being the way it is (“winning the lottery”) does not presuppose that other universes (with different properties) exist-our evidence is simply neutral in this respect. Furthermore, we have no a priori right to presuppose that the values of the parameters characterizing our universe are bestowed on it by some random process-and so no right to presuppose a probability distribution (uniform or otherwise) of the outcomes. Therefore, a judgment of what is natural to infer from our universe being as it is (with us in it) hangs in the air.
Some trends in the philosophy of physics
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8761/
apeiron
Feb18-12, 06:20 PM
Here’s some interesting arguments against the probabilistic argument presented in original post:
Excellent references for the points made earlier in this thread. Norton skewers Inwagen very nicely.
What Norton calls complete neutrality is of course what Peirce means by vagueness. A realm of pure possibility without any constraints. And so a realm to which the principle of contradiction (ie: of crisp disjunctions) fails to apply.
Bayesian reasoning has to guess at the constraints that might apply to shape pure possibility into some more definite distribution. And where such reasoning goes wrong is when it does not realise this is what it is doing.
It is the same mistake as in trying to apply set theory. Set theory has to presume some global state of constraint to apply to a distribution. Yet vagueness, or neutrality, is something different - it is the truly and profoundly unlimited. There are no constraints by definition. So a larger model of logic is needed to deal with the case - one such as Peircean logic that includes abductive leaps to get things started. And then semiotic constraints where - invoking final cause - it is not local change that is the isssue, but the emergence eventually of limits to change, to the expression of raw possibility.
So Norton provides an argument against all attempts on the "why anything?" question based on conventional probablity approaches - ones that have to already presume constraints on raw possibility. A vagueness doesn't have countable states, not even an infinity of them, as this would already give it something definite, something crisply developed. You have to step back further to a higher level of modelling, one like Peircean semiosis which has that "extra hidden dimension" Norton mentions.
But then of course once armed with the Peircean view, you can start to say something positive about the "why anything?" question.
As I stressed in post #139 - http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3665001&postcount=139 - once you take a view of probability spaces as things that develop, rather than simply exist, then the correct foundational dichotomy of vague~crisp comes into sight. Instead of trying to contrast the likelihood of nothing vs something, we are now talking about the likelihood of the vague yielding the definite. And how that then compares with the universe as we observe its developmental history.
apeiron
Feb21-12, 04:02 AM
A few more contemporary references which demonstrate that logical and statistical arguments cannot solve this. A deeper view of causal process is needed.
This takes a Zeno type approach in which time sliced infinitely fine means there is no longer a "first moment" and so a universe can be considered self-causing....
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/smith_reason_universe_exists.htm
Then this one points out the Zeno-ic flaws in this idea....
http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=could%20the%20universe%20cause%20itself%20to%20e xist%20willimam%20f%20vallicella&source=web&cd=4&sqi=2&ved=0CEYQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lastseminary.com%2Fcosmologic al-argument%2FCould%2520the%2520Universe%2520Cause%25 20itself%2520to%2520Exist.pdf&ei=ePJDT_ihLJGiiAeYoc2mCg&usg=AFQjCNHZMeLvW84iV2uxicZeMaYiJzUUfg
[link fixed hopefully - google Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist? William F. Vallicella otherwise]
(And of course, the Planck scale already creates scientific problems for such approaches - time cannot be sliced infinitely thin.)
Then this is a somewhat useful taxonomy of approaches....that of course fails to mention any Peircean or systems thinking :smile:
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/downloads/skeptic13-2_Kuhn.pdf
wuliheron
Feb21-12, 07:47 AM
Logically the entire argument is meaningless. We define something in terms of nothing and vice versa. Its like north and south, up and down, top and bottom. They're just descriptions we use and there are plenty of things we can say don't exist as well as plenty that do. The idea that you can have nothing without having something is an assumption that just doesn't make logical sense. We have both things that exist and don't exist and you can ask why we have both, but then the answer just comes back to because that is how we define them.
Like a little kid laying in bed contemplating infinity we can go round and round with such thoughts all day long and get nowhere. That's the only thing about this entire subject that is demonstrable. That instead of being the "ultimate" question, its just a waste of time.
apeiron
Feb21-12, 01:51 PM
Logically the entire argument is meaningless. We define something in terms of nothing and vice versa. Its like north and south, up and down, top and bottom.
But that has been one of the important questions raised. Is nothingness actually complementary to somethingness? Is it a well-formed concept in the first place?
As has been mentioned often enough, some-things and no-things are both about the counting of things. And an absence of things still leaves the issue of the empty space that is left behind as itself a kind of thing. This was the null set problem - the implication still of a container even when it contains nothing.
And even before that, if we imagine subtracting away the existence of all things, that still leaves their possibility, which again is a kind of thingness. Certainly something more than absolute nothingness.
So I believe you end up having to accept a quite different metaphysical dichotomy of vague~crisp as the most fundamental description of degrees of existence and non-existence. Which has its profound implications as explored by Anaximander and Peirce to name a couple of philosophers.
Like a little kid laying in bed contemplating infinity we can go round and round with such thoughts all day long and get nowhere. That's the only thing about this entire subject that is demonstrable. That instead of being the "ultimate" question, its just a waste of time.
It is hardly meaningless to demonstrate there are lines of argument that don't wash. And it is hardly meaningless to expose some assumptions that were being thoughtlessly made. And it is hardly meaningless if a question leads you towards subtler concepts.
wuliheron
Feb21-12, 06:00 PM
But that has been one of the important questions raised. Is nothingness actually complementary to somethingness? Is it a well-formed concept in the first place?
As has been mentioned often enough, some-things and no-things are both about the counting of things. And an absence of things still leaves the issue of the empty space that is left behind as itself a kind of thing. This was the null set problem - the implication still of a container even when it contains nothing.
And even before that, if we imagine subtracting away the existence of all things, that still leaves their possibility, which again is a kind of thingness. Certainly something more than absolute nothingness.
So I believe you end up having to accept a quite different metaphysical dichotomy of vague~crisp as the most fundamental description of degrees of existence and non-existence. Which has its profound implications as explored by Anaximander and Peirce to name a couple of philosophers.
I'd have to say what is demonstrable trumps concepts any day. I'm aware of things that exist and I'm aware of things that don't exist. I don't have a freight train in my living room, but I do have a couch. To me that's not a question of what is crisp or vague, its a demonstrable fact and the context and content are specific. The more specific I make them, the more demonstrable it becomes, while the less specific the less demonstrable. Its not so much an issue of what is vague or crisp, but what is demonstrable.
It is hardly meaningless to demonstrate there are lines of argument that don't wash. And it is hardly meaningless to expose some assumptions that were being thoughtlessly made. And it is hardly meaningless if a question leads you towards subtler concepts.
Debating concepts that are not demonstrable is the equivalent of reciting nonsense poetry. It might have some psychological or mystical benefit, but it is otherwise demonstrably meaningless. Reasoning begins with what is demonstrable and without that all you've got is something at best self-consistent.
apeiron
Feb21-12, 06:58 PM
Its not so much an issue of what is vague or crisp, but what is demonstrable.
But this rather mixes up epistemology and ontology then.
Quite clearly, the modelling relationship is founded on our ideas in interaction with our impressions. Or more formally, as in the scientific method, the interaction between concepts and measurements, qualities and quantities.
And we want both those things to be as crisp as possible, not vague.
So a concept like "god" is not a lot of use because the definition is so murky, the ways to "demonstrate" the value of the idea so unfocused.
But other concepts, such as sofa and freight train, are quite crisply defined.
OK, there is some modern furniture you might look at and question whether it really counts as a sofa. Or you might be in a student flat where the "sofa" is an old matress. So on closer examination, all our concepts in fact are somewhat epistemically vague at the fringes - but we can fix that by adding further information, creating a crisper constraint.
Armed with a formal concept (information on formal cause, and also final cause because a key to sofa is "something a few people can comfortably sit on") you can then measure your world in terms of the concept. You can look around and justify an object as a sofa and not something else with crisp certitude.
So you can see that your argument here is not against vague~crisp as an ontic story at all. You are just again asserting the conventional fact that epistemic modelling is working best when it is least vague - when we have developed the crisp concepts that in turn enable the crisp measurements that allow us make our definite claims.
The "why anything" question is important because it makes us confront our established ideas. We have to get back in behind the shop-front of our conventional epistemology.
There is a real intellectual challenge here of course. How do we have a crisp model of vagueness? That seems a self-defeating project.
But again, there is no actual problem if we keep the distinction between ontology and epistemology clear. We can have a crisp model of something that is actually vague.
Debating concepts that are not demonstrable is the equivalent of reciting nonsense poetry. It might have some psychological or mystical benefit, but it is otherwise demonstrably meaningless. Reasoning begins with what is demonstrable and without that all you've got is something at best self-consistent.
You really are sounding like Samuel Johnson, stomping around, kicking stones, and proclaiming "I refute it thus". :smile:
But yes, I already agree that concepts need to be demonstrable. However what is it about vagueness that is not demonstrable (once you have found its correct complementary partner, crispness)?
Nothing and something are claimed to be demonstrable states of affairs. Except - as is the subject of this thread - the problem is that what you have to show people is some container that is empty of objects. So this is only about localised absence not global or total nullity.
And likewise, we can point to epistemic vagueness without much trouble, as in the sorites paradox. At what point do a few grains of wheat become a pile, or a lack of hair make a person officially bald?
So there is nothing that you have said which rules out vagueness as a demonstrable concept. You have given no reasons why we cannot define it, and measure the world in those terms.
There is of course a lack of a generally agreed model of vagueness. Which is why this is a metaphysics rather than a science thread.
But to give you an idea of what I have in mind, you can consider the phenomenon of critical opalescence - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_opalescence - that exact point where a gas and liquid are in scalefree balance so that you can't really say (that is demonstrate via measurement) whether you actually have a gas or liquid. The law of the excluded middle no longer applies crisply to this situation.
wuliheron
Feb21-12, 08:52 PM
For me ontology is just an epistemological idea. We make it all up as we go along. Rules evolve, definitions change, etc. What is vague and what is crisp only have meaning in specific contexts and then the meaning changes with use. Classical Chinese doesn't have a verb "to be" and the Navajo language doesn't even have a future tense. The more we try to ontologize our language the less demonstrable it becomes.
Thus the "why anything" question only exists as an extreme expression of our compulsive desire to ontologize everything and to deny the evidence of our senses and awareness. Of what Heraclitus described as the flux and what Taoists sometimes call the novelty of each breath, each moment, each freight train and couch. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:
Home
Accept and you become whole,
Bend and you straighten,
Empty and you fill,
Decay and you renew,
Want and you acquire,
Fulfill and you become confused.
The sage accepts the world
As the world accepts the Way;
He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify himself, so is recognized,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not pride himself, so endures,
Does not contend, so none contend against him.
The ancients said, "Accept and you become whole",
Once whole, the world is as your home.
If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick. Ask him how to discern between vague and crisp and he'll likely hit you again.
apeiron
Feb21-12, 10:09 PM
For me ontology is just an epistemological idea. We make it all up as we go along.
This sounds like a contradiction if you have just been demanding that concepts be crisply demonstrable. We don't just to get to make things up. We have to show that they work.
What is vague and what is crisp only have meaning in specific contexts and then the meaning changes with use. Classical Chinese doesn't have a verb "to be" and the Navajo language doesn't even have a future tense. The more we try to ontologize our language the less demonstrable it becomes.
Well yes, but we were talking about a philosophical approach to answering basic questions about reality. So instead of classical chinese or Navajo - languages which work in some particular historical social context - we are considering what is right as philosophy.
Talking about everyday usages of words or habits of grammar is a diversion here.
Thus the "why anything" question only exists as an extreme expression of our compulsive desire to ontologize everything and to deny the evidence of our senses and awareness.
You are just making rhetorical and emotional arguments, not reasoned ones.
What you call compulsive, others could call systematic. What you call denying the evidence of our senses and awareness, others would see as properly examining it.
No one is forcing you to do metaphysics here. But if you want to force others to stop, you have to produce some actual reasons why it is bad (in other words, you have to do some metaphysics to counter metaphysics, ah well :rolleyes:).
Of what Heraclitus described as the flux and what Taoists sometimes call the novelty of each breath, each moment, each freight train and couch. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:
OK, you believe the Eastern way is not to strive in a false and individualistic way but to dissolve back into the unity of the cosmos. Yeah, been there, done that. As a kid I had zen (and judo) training from a Buddhist monk. But I sat there thinking this is stupid letting mosquitoes whine their way towards me in circles and just trying to "omm" their biting presence away.
So I'm happy that it is a notion of life that appeals to some - just like any faith. However I had no problem making a different choice.
Besides, you know from eastern philosophy such as the I Ching and dependent co-arising just how close the parallels are to the kind of systems causality I am talking about here.
The real difference lies in the question of whether what emerges also subsides, or whether what emerges is set upon an ever rising path. The Eastern answer, on the whole, is that what is "right" is a return to the apeiron, the vague. While the Western answer is that individuals should be self-actualising Nietzchian supermen that transcend all limits.
Modern big bang cosmology suggests the real ontological answer here is "both". The universe emerges as a crisp act of individuation - a definite something where there was once only a vaguer "nothing". And yet also the ultimate fate of the universe is the cold fizzle of an infinitely large heat death. A very crisp outcome, yet one that is actually as near a "return to nothingness" as possible. We will all be very zen in the long run. :wink:
Now we shouldn't entangle the beliefs of faith with the answers of metaphysics. But you can appreciate that even your faith-based criticisms are not accurate about what has actually been said.
If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick. Ask him how to discern between vague and crisp and he'll likely hit you again.
My zen master was rather more easy going I guess. He saw the mediation wasn't going down so well so he stuck with the judo. (He could have been a complete fake of course, his life story was a little too fantastic.)
But anyway, in case you are unfamiliar with some of the parallels that exist in the world's various philosophies, here is one passage (sorry, I can't remember where I cut this from though)...
In Theogony the initial state of the universe,or the origin (arche) is Chaos, a gaping void (abyss) considered as a divine primordial condition, from which appeared everything that exists. Then came Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Love). Hesiod made an abstraction because his original chaos is something completely indefinite.[6] In the Orphic cosmogony the unageing Chronos produced Aither and Chaos and made a silvery egg in divine Aither. From it appeared the bisexual god Phanes who is the creator of the world.[7]
Some similar ideas appear in the Hindu cosmology which is similar to the Vedic. In the beginning there was nothing in the universe but only darkness and the divine essence who removed the darkness and created the primordial waters. His seed produced the universal germ (Hiranyagarbha), from which everything else appeared.[8]
In the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish the universe was in a formless state and is described as a watery chaos. From it emerged two primary gods,one male Apsu and one female Tiamat and a third deity who is the maker Mummu and his power is necessary to get the job of birth.[9]. In Genesis the primordial world is described as a watery chaos and the earth "without form and void". The spirit of the god moved upon the dark face of the waters and created light.[10]
And some more bits and pieces just to show that this is a recurring theme. Tao, Brahman, Apeiron, Hyle, Quintessence, Bosenazelo, Hunabku, Manitu, Orenda, Wakonda, Wakan, Mana, Ain Soph, Central Monad, there are countless words that dance around a definition of the formless fundamental essence...
Anaximander says that the source and element of all beings[2] is the apeiron, or the Limitless/ Boundary-less/ Without-Definition. Apeiron is therefore the Hellenic equivalent of the Dao of Laozi on the Sinic side. From the apeiron come all the heavens and all that is in the cosmos.
http://www.lawrencechin2011.com/HTcontribution1-philosophy.htm
Ein Sof (or Ayn Sof) in the Kabbalah, is understood as the Deity prior to His self-manifestation in the production of the world, probably derived from Ibn Gabirol's term, "the Endless One" (she-en lo tiklah). Ein Sof may be translated as "no end," "unending," "there is no end," or Infinite.
Ein Sof is the divine origin of all created existence, in contrast to the Ein (or Ayn), which is infinite no-thingness. It was first used by Azriel ben Menahem, who, sharing the Neoplatonic view that God can have no desire, thought, word, or action, emphasized by it the negation of any attribute.
The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the Indefinite” or “the Unlimited” (to apeiron).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
In Mahâyâna Buddhism śûnyatâ refers first of all to the fact that all things come into being in “interdependent origination” (Sanskrit: pratîtya-samutpâda; Japanese: engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit: svabhâva). This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-self” or “non-ego” (Sanskrit: anâtman; Japanese: muga). All beings, including the ego, are interconnected and in flux.
The doctrine of Akasa, or space, as the origin of all things, came rather late in the history of Upanisadic thought. Also in Greek philosophy, the concept of space as the arche of things appeared very late. With Thales, Anaximenes, Heracleitus and Empedocles we meet the conceptions of water, air, fire, and earth, either individually or collectively. It is only when we come to the time of Philolaus that we get to the notion of space as the arche of all things. The first four elements, namely Prthivi, Ap, Tejas and Vayu are more or less tangible; but for Akasa to be regarded as the origin of all things requires a higher philosophical imagination.
These concepts of these two mystics, behad of Kabir and nirbayalu of Kudaluresa, would remind a student of Greek philosophy of the Apeiron of Anaximander against the Peras of Pythagoras. The Peras is a small conception, but the Apeiron brings us quite near to the infinitude that is portrayed in the manifestations of the sublime. The experience of the sublime seems to be almost transcendent and baffling even for the imagination to reach. Anaximander, therefore, regarded the Apeiron as his most fundamental category. It is this aspect of the element of Divinity in all cases of Infinitude which is at the basis of the behad of Kabir and nirbayalu of the Kannada mystic.
It is a long journey from sima to asima, from had to behad, from bayalu to nirbayalu, from peras to apeiron, from space to spacelessness. The concept of Akasa takes one ultimately to nirakasa, the spaceless.
http://www.ignca.nic.in/ps_05013.htm
ThomasT
Feb22-12, 03:08 AM
... we were talking about a philosophical approach to answering basic questions about reality.Ok, so for us pedestrians, can you or bohm2 (et al.) synopsize what you think is the best approach in as few words as possible?
The way I see it, the general approach of science (ie., somewhat controlled observation) with philosophy sorting out the meanings of various mathematical expressions designed to describe and predict scientific observations is a pretty good approach.
And from that stuff one can make objectively demonstrated, statistically based inferences/assumptions about more fundamental, ie., underlying, reality.
And of course I don't have any response to the question of why there's anything at all.
One thing to consider that in order to define anything you need to also define its complement.
This might be used to explain why something exists by relating to what else would exist if it wasn't that 'something'.
ThomasT
Feb22-12, 03:54 AM
One thing to consider that in order to define anything you need to also define its complement.I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?
This might be used to explain why something exists by relating to what else would exist if it wasn't that 'something'.Well, I think that defining or explaining why anything at all exists leads eventually to an objectively nondemonstrable assumption. We can, for example, assume that there are fundamental dynamical mechanisms/laws, whatever. But where/how did those originate? It's, imho, an unanswerable question.
I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?
You describe it in the context of a notion of 'everything'. Doing this helps you relate concepts to one another by talking about them in the context of something synonymous with 'all that can be'.
Well, I think that defining or explaining why anything at all exists leads eventually to an objectively nondemonstrable assumption. We can, for example, assume that there are fundamental dynamical mechanisms/laws, whatever. But where/how did those originate? It's, imho, an unanswerable question.
Well again it can help by considering what else is 'possible' because the comparison to other such things can give the impetus for hypothesizing why something is 'as it is'.
As an example with cosmology we know from research that if the constants were even slightly different we wouldn't have the kind of universe that we have now in its current form.
This is an example of what I mean: you consider what "isn't" observed and compare it to situations that 'could be possible' in the context of some universal domain.
The actual universal domain is not trivial, but we can start with domains that are small enough to be able to consider with our minds yet large enough that they provide enough variability to consider enough of a general set of circumstances with enough variation.
What I mean by this is, is that this thinking gives us a reference point. When we discover something, what happens is that we study something, get relationships (maybe even down to a specific mathematical form) and then from that we wonder 'why is this the way it is?' by trying to consider what we have studied in a more or less isolated state.
By considering what we have found against a more general class of cases, what we do then is to say "Well this is the way it is and upon comparing it to these other cases, it makes sense that this is the way it is due to blah blah blah"
apeiron
Feb22-12, 04:28 AM
Ok, so for us pedestrians, can you or bohm2 (et al.) synopsize what you think is the best approach in as few words as possible?
If you are talking about "what is philosophy's method" I don't see it as any different from science in essence. You observe. You generalise. You then see with more clarity and can go round the loop again.
So philosophy is the rough cut. And also the exploration of a bunch of approaches. Then science is the refinement of some particular model that is useful in some way. After that comes technology, application.
So far as the particular point about the use of language goes, everyday language is obviously going to be hit and miss when it comes to talk about fundamental reality. It would be the extremely rough cut.
Philosophy would then focus on the rational clarification of useful concepts, and science would pair those concepts with a prescribed method of measurement (a way to quantify a qualitative term).
So metaphysics invented pairings like discrete~continuous, stasis~flux, chance~necessity and many more. Science then uses them. Vague~crisp just seems to be one of the less familiar dichotomies.
apeiron
Feb22-12, 04:36 AM
I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?
But a tree is not metaphysically fundamental. And indeed, we are proving that fact precisely because we can't think of "not-tree" as indicating anything in particular. Pretty much everything is not-tree.
So this is the power of the method. Only a limited number of complementaries function as complementary. And it is why it was possible for the ancient greeks to make so much rapid progress once they got the knack of what to do. (Socratic dialog, law of the excluded middle, the basics of philosophical thought.)
Ultimate question: Why anything at all?
Indeed. And after 194 posts and a kaleidoscope of thought, thinkers (here and referenced) etc, it does not seem we are one jot closer to any semblance of an answer to the question posed in the OP title.
The aporia remains - looms larger in fact ..
apeiron
Feb22-12, 06:11 AM
This paper is good on the parallels between the ancient Eastern and Western views on cosmo-genesis.
Revisiting Ancient Linguistic Worldview: East vs. West; Dao vs. Logos Jia Yuxin Jia Xuelai
http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/2008v17n4/07%20Jia%20Yuixn%20&%20Jia%20Xuelai.pdf
Then, ontologically, what is Dao? According to Lao Zi, Dao is neither being nor beinglessness. It is both being and beingless. It exists as the transcendental Nothingness. However, it is also a unique form of existence and Lao Zi also indicates that the Dao is an objective entity just as the ancient Western philosophers believe the absolute beginning of the world is Apeiron (water, vapor, fire, or chaos).
As a ‘thing’ Tao is vague and unclear;
Unclear and vague, yet within it is a symbol;
Vague and unclear, yet within it is a thing;
Obscure and dark, yet within it is an essence.
Its essence is truly authentic and within it is what is reliable. (Lao Tzu, Chap. 21)
Very interestingly, cosmo-genetically, the creation and formation of the world in the East somehow follows almost similar process as it is believed in the West. The following model may justify this statement:
East：Nameless ( Dao as transcendent and objective entity ) Name / Language
Heaven (or God) and Earth
West：Apeiron (water, vapor, fire, or chaos) / Logos (God /Word) the universe
However, differences exist. Dao or the nameless existed before the action of Name. Name comes from and after Dao.
I disagree with some of the detail of their characterisation of the Apeiron here. The Dao also has some critical differences in that while Lao Zi stresses the way things remain co-mingled (as in Yin-Yang), the key to Anaximander's cosmo-genesis is the fact that the polarities are moved far apart (and then mix).
However, the idea that the Dao is followed by the Name is indeed something crucial missing from Anaximander's scheme (and was somewhat corrected by Heraclitus' equivalent of Dao~Name in his dichotomy of Primal Fire~Logos).
In modern language, this translates into local degrees of freedom and global constraints. Or initiating conditions and boundary conditions.
And it is a way to think about a self-causing universe - one where in the beginning there is just naked potential (dao, primal fire, apeiron, unlimited degrees of freedom), and then design is called forth from that potential by the system's own future. The Name, Logos, or other terms to describe the future crisp limits of the system which can act backwards/downward as final/formal cause.
This can easily sound mystical. But quantum cosmology is already leading us down this very path of thought. If we talk of a quantum event, its causes are contextual, nonlocal, even retrocausal.
So if we view the big bang as a quantum event, and that this was also some form of collapse of a potential (the "collapse" being the obvious contentious issue in current quantum metaphysics), then what caused the collapse? It has to be in the future of the event. The universe has to be retrospectively fixed in some sense by what it became.
It is a grand sum over histories view in other words. Anything was possible. But just one thing was the least mean path of that infinite potential. And so you have a structured universe bootstrapping out of raw indeterminacy.
jambaugh
Feb22-12, 06:57 AM
Ultimate question: Why anything at all?
Indeed. And after 194 posts and a kaleidoscope of thought, thinkers (here and referenced) etc, it does not seem we are one jot closer to any semblance of an answer to the question posed in the OP title.
That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"
You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
It may be instructive to try to explain the form of existence such as is done in physics but there are limits there.
Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event. Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject. Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
Premise:The "why" question is valid i.e. there is a God ; Conclusion:There is a God. (Personally I am agnostic in that I believe this is a question of faith not deduction.)
I think it is instructive to consider for the moment the mundane topic of interval notation in mathematics. I can represent a bound interval a \le x < b with the notation x\in [a,b). We then extend this bit of language to include unbounded sets by defining a symbol \infty as a place-holder for the absence of a bound. x \in [a,\infty) \equiv a\le x < \infty \equiv a \le x.
And even express: x \in \mathbb{R} =(-\infty,\infty).
But we may then make the error of objectifying this null symbol as if it represented an actual real number. "There must be a number \infty"! This symbol isn't something (in this context) it is a place-holder for nothing when we use a language format which requires this be made explicit.
Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.
We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.
wuliheron
Feb22-12, 08:39 AM
Apeiron, I think you have the wrong idea. I am a Pragmatic Taoist, not a mystic, and I would never bring up mysticism in a science forum without expressly calling attention to the fact it is mysticism. Pragmatic Taoism has a lot in common with Philosophical Taoism and Zen, but without all the mysticism. Its not that I have anything against mysticism, it's just not who I am. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Zen, but that's not my problem and it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
When I talk about something being demonstrable I mean that quite literally. A Zen master hitting a student over the head is attempting to prompt them to become more spontaneous. Enlightenment or some sort of mystical experience might be their ultimate goal, but such things are only achieved through spontaneity and, at best, the master can help the student to open the door.
For me spontaneity is the key to awareness which is necessary for discerning what is demonstrable. Its no more mystical then the fact you are more aware and capable of reasoning when awake then asleep. I'd suggest you re-read my post and ask your questions again.
apeiron
Feb22-12, 01:33 PM
For me spontaneity is the key to awareness which is necessary for discerning what is demonstrable. Its no more mystical then the fact you are more aware and capable of reasoning when awake then asleep.
This is a view of epistemology which I believe is quite wrong. All perception is modelling, never direct experience. The zen idea is mystical for claiming otherwise. You can whack yourself over the head as much as you please, but it won't change things.
apeiron
Feb22-12, 02:42 PM
That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"
[list=1]
Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.
Reductionists want to reduce all these sources of causality to just the question of effective cause. Though they also need some kind of local material stuff - a substance - that can carry this effective cause as a property or force.
The "why anything" question then leads to a further problem of first cause - primum movens. And a reductionist will read this as the call to find some ultimate kind of effective cause (such as a creating god).
But the point of having a more complex model of causality such as Aristotle's is that primum movens can also be a complicated "four causes" story. As some of the arguments presented in the thread illustrate.
You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.
A holistic view would agree that all causes would have to be internal to "existence". A world would have to be ultimately self-causing - and this is a problem!
But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.
This is in turn what leads to the necessity for a vague~crisp distinction. It underpins a view of holistic causality in which a process can arise from "nothing".
Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event.
Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause. And it is easy to supply examples which make it seem obvious the world is just blindly materialistic, absent of purpose, goals, will or meanings, and only humans are different in this regard.
But science still finds it hard not to frame its laws of nature in teleological fashion (thou shalt evolve, thou shalt dissipate, thou shalt gravitate, thou shalt follow the least mean path.)
And a systems thinker will argue that the correct approach to human purpose and meaning is to generalise it. You can "water it down" so that you have a hierarchy of final cause such as
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or in more colloquial language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}. See for example - http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/189/283
I mentioned already the connection between the problem of final cause and the problem of wavefunction collapse. It was not accident that early interpretations wanted to put the cause in the mind of the human observer, more recent ones are trying to put it out in a thermal environment or invoking retrocausality from future constraints.
So this is a very live subject even in science.
The thing to beware of is not turning final cause into another super-species of effective cause. It can't be merely "triggering event" seen on a larger scale (which is the kind of notion of a blue touch paper God you have in mind). It has to be something else, otherwise there is no need to distinguish it as a further aspect of causality.
So final cause needs to be identified with global constraints, downwards causality - some way in which the ends do justify the means.
I would agree that this is the least well developed part of our ideas about causality as yet. But that is what makes it interesting I guess. And asking the "why anything" question is particularly instructive in this regard.
Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject.
Exactly, we must dichotomise to clarify. To be able to model causality, we must divide it suitably.
And here there may actually be novel metaphysics. The greeks did divide things into chance and necessity. But we know that randomness and determinism are still problematic concepts in science. What is a fluctuation really?
There is a general distinction of reality into its local degrees of freedom and global constraints that seems to work. But the story does not seem quite in focus yet.
Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
Yes, because they are actually just attempts to use the notion of effective cause to explain everything.
Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.
We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.
Correct. Even in metaphysics, we are constructing models of causality. We are breaking things down in ways that seem to work, seem to be true, but we must bear in mind that they still are just models and so may bear secret traces of their makers.
The great yawning silence and banging of heads on tables that usually greets the "why anything" question is the sound of people confronting the limitations of their conceptual tools.
Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.
wuliheron
Feb22-12, 04:42 PM
This is a view of epistemology which I believe is quite wrong. All perception is modelling, never direct experience. The zen idea is mystical for claiming otherwise. You can whack yourself over the head as much as you please, but it won't change things.
I agree it is modeling, but the issue is how spontaneous is the modeling. The less spontaneous the more abstract it becomes and the less aware.
I often compare it to learning how to play the piano. At first you have to study different things, but eventually the idea is to play more spontaneously. Either one without the other makes for a bad pianist.
apeiron
Feb22-12, 04:55 PM
I agree it is modeling, but the issue is how spontaneous is the modeling. The less spontaneous the more abstract it becomes and the less aware.
I often compare it to learning how to play the piano. At first you have to study different things, but eventually the idea is to play more spontaneously. Either one without the other makes for a bad pianist.
This is crazy. You are advising us to be unthinking as philosophers or scientists, to just act out of acquired habit.
There is a reason why Greek philosophy was eventually so fruitful, Eastern philosophy rather less so.
You are welcome to an opinion, to a position of faith or mysticism, but if you want to argue for something as an alternative way to do philosophy, you should move it to a separate thread.
Your pianist analogy is all muddled anyway. Practice allows for the unthinking, but the whole point then is to clear the way for continued thinking at a higher level of organisation. I can cite the relevant literature from creativity studies and neuroscience if you choose to open a separate thread.
wuliheron
Feb22-12, 05:36 PM
This is crazy. You are advising us to be unthinking as philosophers or scientists, to just act out of acquired habit.
There is a reason why Greek philosophy was eventually so fruitful, Eastern philosophy rather less so.
You are welcome to an opinion, to a position of faith or mysticism, but if you want to argue for something as an alternative way to do philosophy, you should move it to a separate thread.
Your pianist analogy is all muddled anyway. Practice allows for the unthinking, but the whole point then is to clear the way for continued thinking at a higher level of organisation. I can cite the relevant literature from creativity studies and neuroscience if you choose to open a separate thread.
I never said we should just act out of acquired habit, and it is you who keeps trying to change the subject with these straw man arguments against everything I say and now even biased statements against Asian philosophy.
That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"
You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
It may be instructive to try to explain the form of existence such as is done in physics but there are limits there.
Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event. Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject. Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
Premise:The "why" question is valid i.e. there is a God ; Conclusion:There is a God. (Personally I am agnostic in that I believe this is a question of faith not deduction.)
I think it is instructive to consider for the moment the mundane topic of interval notation in mathematics. I can represent a bound interval a \le x < b with the notation x\in [a,b). We then extend this bit of language to include unbounded sets by defining a symbol \infty as a place-holder for the absence of a bound. x \in [a,\infty) \equiv a\le x < \infty \equiv a \le x.
And even express: x \in \mathbb{R} =(-\infty,\infty).
But we may then make the error of objectifying this null symbol as if it represented an actual real number. "There must be a number \infty"! This symbol isn't something (in this context) it is a place-holder for nothing when we use a language format which requires this be made explicit.
Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.
We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.
Thanks for the interesting and informative response. Re your (3) ..
But the term 'accidental' is itself as circular. In essence, it means 'an event' - cause of which is unknown (to you or me). But cause nonetheless. Bringing it back to the same questioin.
Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.
Reductionists want to reduce all these sources of causality to just the question of effective cause. Though they also need some kind of local material stuff - a substance - that can carry this effective cause as a property or force.
The "why anything" question then leads to a further problem of first cause - primum movens. And a reductionist will read this as the call to find some ultimate kind of effective cause (such as a creating god).
But the point of having a more complex model of causality such as Aristotle's is that primum movens can also be a complicated "four causes" story. As some of the arguments presented in the thread illustrate.
Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.
A holistic view would agree that all causes would have to be internal to "existence". A world would have to be ultimately self-causing - and this is a problem!
But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.
This is in turn what leads to the necessity for a vague~crisp distinction. It underpins a view of holistic causality in which a process can arise from "nothing".
Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause. And it is easy to supply examples which make it seem obvious the world is just blindly materialistic, absent of purpose, goals, will or meanings, and only humans are different in this regard.
But science still finds it hard not to frame its laws of nature in teleological fashion (thou shalt evolve, thou shalt dissipate, thou shalt gravitate, thou shalt follow the least mean path.)
And a systems thinker will argue that the correct approach to human purpose and meaning is to generalise it. You can "water it down" so that you have a hierarchy of final cause such as
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or in more colloquial language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}. See for example - http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/189/283
I mentioned already the connection between the problem of final cause and the problem of wavefunction collapse. It was not accident that early interpretations wanted to put the cause in the mind of the human observer, more recent ones are trying to put it out in a thermal environment or invoking retrocausality from future constraints.
So this is a very live subject even in science.
The thing to beware of is not turning final cause into another super-species of effective cause. It can't be merely "triggering event" seen on a larger scale (which is the kind of notion of a blue touch paper God you have in mind). It has to be something else, otherwise there is no need to distinguish it as a further aspect of causality.
So final cause needs to be identified with global constraints, downwards causality - some way in which the ends do justify the means.
I would agree that this is the least well developed part of our ideas about causality as yet. But that is what makes it interesting I guess. And asking the "why anything" question is particularly instructive in this regard.
Exactly, we must dichotomise to clarify. To be able to model causality, we must divide it suitably.
And here there may actually be novel metaphysics. The greeks did divide things into chance and necessity. But we know that randomness and determinism are still problematic concepts in science. What is a fluctuation really?
There is a general distinction of reality into its local degrees of freedom and global constraints that seems to work. But the story does not seem quite in focus yet.
Yes, because they are actually just attempts to use the notion of effective cause to explain everything.
Correct. Even in metaphysics, we are constructing models of causality. We are breaking things down in ways that seem to work, seem to be true, but we must bear in mind that they still are just models and so may bear secret traces of their makers.
The great yawning silence and banging of heads on tables that usually greets the "why anything" question is the sound of people confronting the limitations of their conceptual tools.
Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.
Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.
A great question (why anything at all) - quite so.
And, having forced yourself to find and employ those better conceptual tools, as you admirably do here, what have YOU constructed with them ?
apeiron
Feb23-12, 06:43 PM
A new review paper from Smolin gives an idea about how philosophically-minded physicists are thinking about the "why anything" problem of cosmogenesis.
A perspective on the landscape problem, Lee Smolin, 15 Feb 2012
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3373.pdf
Using the arguments of Peirce and others (Wheeler, Dirac), Smolin says the landscape problem of string theory is in fact a general issue for any approach to a theory of everything (ToE) because the questions of development and evolution always break into two parts - the material basis for change (the local degrees of freedom) and then the global constraints that pick out some particular outcome from those degrees of freedom.
So the fact that string theory ended up with an open-ended infinity of possible solutions is no surprise. The problem next is to identify the separate dynamical principle that might break this unlimited symmetry.
Here Smolin attempts to put this systems view of causality centre-stage...
But the strongest reason to expect the landscape problem is not an anomaly of string theory is that it has deep historical roots, which I sketch in the next section. It might have been anticipated a long time ago-and indeed it was. These historical roots of the landscape problem suggest that the landscape problem was bound to occur as physics progressed. As I will argue, it is an inevitable consequence of the general form we have assumed for physical theories since Newtonian mechanics.
He then introduces the idea that laws, that is global constraints, have to evolve. They have a history of development and were not crisply "there" at the beginning...
...Dirac had proposed that laws of physics may evolve:
At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus, we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the eoch, instead of as holding uniformly throught space-time[22].
...When logical implication is insufficient, the explanation must be found in causal processes acting over time. This was understood clearly more than a century ago by Charles Sanders Pierce, the founder of the school of philosophy called American pragmatism:
To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to
be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution[23].
Then Smolin makes an insightful point about the "first moment" for any developing system being organised by its constraints.
Time=0 is the singularity (unlimited possibility) and so constraints can't even begin to be present until some fraction of time has gone by. The constraints must lie in the future of what exists (even if by the tiniest fraction).
This is crucial to the point of the "why anything" question of whether the existence of things is caused from the outside (as by some earlier effective cause such as a creating god), or whether existence can be self-causing, bootstrapping out of unlimited potential.
Well in fact Smolin equivocates on this. He allows that the constraints might be present at t=0. But then his further comments on the dynamical emergence of constraints are a strong argument for the "shortly after" alternative.....
We can also apply Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason to the problem of the selection of the initial conditions of the universe. It is a fact that in general relativity - and presumably in any field theory of gravitation - there are an infinite number of solutions of the field equations which have an initial singularity. To apply general relativity to cosmology, it is then necessary to give the initial conditions at - or shortly after- the singularity. The choice of initial conditions requires explanation. If we are optimistic and believe all questions about the universe are answerable, then that explanation must satisfy the principle of sufficient reason. If no sufficient reason can be given within a given theory, then that theory must be wrong.
Then for me Smolin goes astray because he argues that evolutionary stories are simply historical (which is in fact quite true of the evolutionary part of evo-devo - selection is contingent - but not necessarily of the developmental part, as development show a mathematical regularity in its self-organisation.)....
What kind of explanations can count as sufficient reason for a law or theory? As I argued before, two general kinds of explanations that could be advanced to account for a state of affairs. Reasons can be logical or they can be historical. They both may serve, but they have very different consequences for the methodology of science. This is because logical explanations can be complete while our knowledge of the past is always incomplete.
This then leads Smolin to the perhaps unnecessarily pessimistic view that....
...in some circumstances, the demand for sufficient reason must result in a confession of ignorance, when causal chains are pushed back into the past to the point where our present knowledge of the past ends. This is better then proclaiming first movers or initial states which are not subject to further explanation in terms of their pasts, and so cannot be further improved as our observations of the past improve.
Then Smolin swings back to the failure of the reductionist Newtonian paradigm...
Because this framework has been so successful when applied to the small subsystems of the universe, it appears almost obvious that when we come to the task of developing a cosmological theory, we should just scale it up to include the whole universe in the state space, C. However, as successful as it has been, this schema for physical theories cannot be applied to the universe as a whole. There are several distinct reasons for this...
...Any theory formulated in the Newtonian paradigm will have an infinite number of solutions. But, the universe is unique-so only one cosmological history is physically real. The Newtonian paradigmis then very extravagant when applied to cosmology because it not only makes predictions about the future of the one real universe, it offers predictions for an infinite number of universes which are never realized. The Newtonian paradigm cannot explain why the one solution that is realized is picked out from the infinite number of possibilities...
...One way to express the cosmological fallacy is through the following cosmological dilemma. The Newtonian paradigm expresses the forms of all the laws we know which have been thought of as exact. Nonetheless, every law formulated and verified within the Newtonian paradigm can only apply to a bounded domain and hence is approximate.
The rest of the paper then goes off into a recap of the familiar bounce and eternal inflation stories that Smolin's Darwinian perspective - the old-hat Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s - favours.
As said, a properly modern evo-devo approach would put the focus squarely on the issue of the development of constraints rather than the secondary matter of the evolution of constraints.
But still the paper shows that Smolin continues to lead the charge when it comes to thinking about how to think about the scientific modelling of cosmogenesis. How to answer the "why anything" question with a response other than "just because". :wink:
jambaugh
Feb23-12, 07:47 PM
Thanks for the interesting and informative response. Re your (3) ..
But the term 'accidental' is itself as circular. In essence, it means 'an event' - cause of which is unknown (to you or me). But cause nonetheless. Bringing it back to the same questioin.
Not circular and not about known or unknown cause. It is used to qualify absence of purposeful intent. A raindrop may cause a pebble to fall instigating an avalanche. Or I may decide to set one off just as my enemy is passing the road beneath. One event is accidental the other intentional. It isn't an issue of cause or lack of cause but intent or lack of intent.
A believer in an omnipotent, omniscient God would reject the possibility of accidental events all together (every leaf that falls, etc.) But they cannot then, after the fact, reverse the implication, saying the impossibility of accidental events proves God's existence. That is indeed circular, the two assertions being equivalent.
If however you begin with the possibility (as in lack of asserted impossibility) of both accidental and purposeful causes and ask the question the it may be valid to inductively argue the existence of God from the existence of life, if one can show it it too improbable, even in the scale of the size and age of the universe, to be accidental. Valid in form but not, I believe valid under analysis. I've seen such arguments but they typically misrepresent physical assumptions (most often misapplying thermodynamic principles).
I stray from the point here but only as a demonstration of the use of "accidental" in a context.
The question is though 'how do you define intent?'
Do you think that there is a possibility that our actions are actually 'controlled' to some degree where we think otherwise?
In other words: is the feeling of 'free-will' masking an underlying hidden order?
I do like how you have made your internal thoughts highly concise on these forums and I thought it would be important to have a discussion on how you define 'accidental' vs 'intentional' in a more refined matter (i.e. mathematical).
Is the 'intentional' (like human intent) purely probabilistic while the accidental being completely deterministic (which may no doubt be chaotic)?
How are you willing to explicitly qualify the argument for the intentional being purely probabilistic and the 'accidental' being somewhat more deterministic if this is the case?
The reason I bring this up is because of our narrow scope of looking at things at human beings. Many people can't even deal with systems with more than say 10 variables and thats for a complex system! A lot of the general population finds it hard to deal with more than 5!
If we have a system involving millions if not billions (probably a dozen more orders of magnitude higher than that), then with our limited capacity it would make sense that we use a probabilistic framework since it reduces the system to a level that is able to grasped with our minds at this current time.
Pythagorean said this in another thread (I'll dig it up if you want) stating that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Determinism and probability are not incompatible with one another" and in the context of the above statement I have no doubt that his statement is correct.
jambaugh
Feb23-12, 09:12 PM
Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.
As a matter of semantics Aristotle's αἴτιον can be translated as "cause" but I prefer a narrower definition of the common word. Rather αἴτιον="the why of something".
I also find this breakdown overly objective. (deterministic) Cause should not be ascribed to objects but to events. That being my position, I see "material cause" losing equal status with the other types. Rather than parsing the causes of a bridge, one would consider the cause for the event of its coming into existence or its sustained existence. "final" or "telelogical" cause then might be ascribed to its creation, or even if a "natural" bridge created accidentally, ascribed to its maintenance. This is clear when the bridge is used as a bridge and not when you so label a tree fallen over a stream absent its utility.
As to formal cause, I'm not sure that applies outside an ontological bias, except in the modified phenomenological form I described as "explanitory". Constraints on phenomena we think of as natural laws, e.g. conservation laws, relativity principles, thermodynamic laws, and such.
Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.
I shy from the term "reality" except as an object model we use... i.e. it is a mereological bundle, or rather it is a collection of mereological bundles these being the objects of reality bundling the categorical phenomena we observe. Stepping aside of the loaded word "reality", and replacing it with "actuality" (that which happens), I'm not "rejecting" actively so much as narrowing the semantics of the word "cause" as I'm using it. This semantic bias comes from how the term is used in physics.
But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.
Here, you're extending semantically the term. A holistic process view may assert emergence of higher order phenomena but it still resides in the same causal framework as the pre-emergent world. We can speak of caustic soda causing a change of pH without invalidating the level of (effective) causation below the point of emergence (chemistry) which "caustic" and "pH" have been given meaning. There is still the interaction of the fundamental particles and forces at work. Likewise up the emergent chain to bridges and murder's weapons. One cannot ascribe meaning to a weapon based on the configuration of atoms, rather its teleological purpose defines it. It none the less obeys the same fundamental physical laws, cause and effect, as does any elementary particle in physics. The hand that bludgeons the brain is applying a force, the entropy of the brain is being (fatally) increased, the heat engine of the victim's body is being permanently interrupted, etc.
Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause.
There is a middle ground. One can be a reductionist about "effective cause" while understanding and giving full weight to emergence. Chemistry isn't just physics, biology isn't just chemistry, and willful action (teleological cause) is not just biology. Yet each level emerges from and has effective cause wholly within the other. I can believe love as a phenomenon has no mystical component beyond the material phenomena physicists study and yet understand that reducing love to a series of particle interactions is totally meaningless,... and of course still believe in love itself.
And also don't confuse a semantic misalignment with a disagreement in opinion. Don't label someone a reductionist because they mean something different than you do when they use a particular word.
...
Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.
Well. I don't always see it so forcing people. I can see possibly the merit as with e.g. paradoxes in physics, to emphasize and make explicit conceptual errors. But I have more often seen such being used by the questioner to excuse their rejection of the effort to understand. Rather than clarifying the question they reject belief in the process of questioning and take the pat answer, e.g. mysticism.
There is a middle ground. One can be a reductionist about "effective cause" while understanding and giving full weight to emergence. Chemistry isn't just physics, biology isn't just chemistry, and willful action (teleological cause) is not just biology. Yet each level emerges from and has effective cause wholly within the other. I can believe love as a phenomenon has no mystical component beyond the material phenomena physicists study and yet understand that reducing love to a series of particle interactions is totally meaningless,... and of course still believe in love itself.
I find this topic both interesting and confusing. A reductionist can always argue that the reason why full reduction (really unification) is not possible at present is because the "foundational" branch (e.g. physics) is not yet complete. Or due to our own cognitive limitations ( limitation of observer). Here's the basic argument:
Where there is discontinuity in microscopic behavior associated with precisely specifiable macroscopic parameters, emergent properties of the system are clearly implicated, unless we can get an equally elegant resulting theory by complicating the dispositional structure of the already accepted inventory of basic properties...such hidden-micro-dispositions theories are indeed always available. Assuming sharply discontinuous patterns of effects within complex systems, we could conclude that the microphysical entities have otherwise latent dispositions towards effects within macroscopically complex contexts alongside the dispositions which are continuously manifested in (nearly) all contexts. The observed difference would be a result of the manifestation of these latent dispositions.
Thus, a reductionist can claim that because we still lack these micro-dispositions (e.g. physics is not completed) strong emergence with its dualist flavour is really an illusion.
Emergent Properties
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/
But others suspect that the non-locality and non-separability/contextuality implied by Bell's, Kochen–Specker (KS) theorem, etc. can be interpreted as a good argument for strong emergence and bi-directional causality as argued here:
The classical picture offered a compelling presumption in favour of the claim that causation is strictly bottom up-that the causal powers of whole systems reside entirely in the causal powers of parts. This thesis is central to most arguments for reductionism. It contends that all physically significant processes are due to causal powers of the smallest parts acting individually on one another. If this were right, then any emergent or systemic properties must either be powerless epiphenomena or else violate basic microphysical laws. But the way in which the classical picture breaks down undermines this connection and the reductionist argument that employs it. If microphysical systems can have properties not possessed by individual parts, then so might any system composed of such parts...
Were the physical world completely governed by local processes, the reductionist might well argue that each biological system is made up of the microphysical parts that interact, perhaps stochastically, but with things that exist in microscopic local regions; so the biological can only be epiphenomena of local microphysical processes occurring in tiny regions. Biology reduces to molecular biology, which reduces in turn to microphysics. But the Bell arguments completely overturn this conception.
For whom the Bell arguments toll
http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/H/James.A.Hawthorne-1/Hawthorne--For_Whom_the_Bell_Arguments_Toll.pdf
jambaugh
Feb24-12, 08:57 PM
I find this topic both interesting and confusing. A reductionist can always argue that the reason why full reduction (really unification) is not possible at present is because the "foundational" branch (e.g. physics) is not yet complete. Or due to our own cognitive limitations ( limitation of observer).
Again I suggest a third road. It is a matter of complementarity of observables. E.g. the biological definition of "alive" for Schrodinger's cat is complementary to observing superpositions of "cat states" (which would entail statistical experiments on large numbers of identically prepared cats, which in turn would need to be cooled to near absolute zero.)
The physics can be complete (q-complete i.e. maximal) but micro-scale complementarity can also manifest on the macro-scale. I think this may be a fundamental aspect of emergence.
Thus, a reductionist can claim that because we still lack these micro-dispositions (e.g. physics is not completed) strong emergence with its dualist flavour is really an illusion.
But others suspect that the non-locality and non-separability/contextuality implied by Bell's, Kochen–Specker (KS) theorem, etc. can be interpreted as a good argument for strong emergence and bi-directional causality as argued here:
Don't get me started on Bell, EPR and non-locality. Non-separability yes, but locality in the premise of Bell's derivation is simply a means to assure a reasonable assumption of non-causal interaction between measurement processes. Focusing too much on this causation business (typically due to improper reification of the system representation) distracts from the real implications of QM entanglement.
It is again an issue of complementarity. Here it is between the observed q-correlation we define as "entanglement" and the separation of the composite system into a specific pair of component systems.
This discussion has me thinking then... of the possibility of putting some rigor into some definitions in the emergence camp by invoking complementarity. Hmmm....
apeiron
Feb24-12, 09:20 PM
I stray from the point here but only as a demonstration of the use of "accidental" in a context.
The issue of spontaneous vs purposeful action is in fact very on point when it comes to "why anything" cosmogenesis.
The world seems full of spontaneous happenings. Quantum fluctuations for a start.
The reductionist model of causality finds them difficult to explain. If every event must have a prior cause, then nothing can be chance, everything must be determined. Spontaneity would have to be an illusion due to our lack of knowledge of the "hidden variables".
But a systems model of causality puts it the other way round. The difficult lies more in preventing spontaneity. :smile:
The presumption is that reality begins with a potential - a set of degrees of freedom. And then constraints are imposed on this generalised freedom so as to limit its actions to more determinate paths. Dynamism begins unbound, going off in all directions (and so failing to show any particular direction). Constraints then organise this world so that the intrinsic spontaneity is channeled. It is still fundamentally there, but starts to behave in predictable fashion.
It is rather like the way a car engine explodes a gas vapour in all directions, but all the energy gets constrained to have a definite direction.
In QM language, you have indeterminacy and then the addition of constraints that "collapse" that indeterminacy - or more properly, restrict it below some chosen epistemic threshold.
We can then take this basic model of spontaneous action - uncaused fluctuations in a state of unformed potential - as the vague ground out of which a universe could develop.
Here is Peirce outlining his own philosophy on this back in 1891....
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/brier/mysticism.pdf
I may mention that my chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology. This theory is that the evolution of the world is hyperbolic, that is, proceeds from one state of things in the infinite past, to a different state of things in the infinite future.
The state of things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu,21 the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity.
Between these, we have on our side a state of things in which there is some absolute spontaneity counter to all law, and some degree of conformity to law, which is constantly on the increase owing to the growth of habit.(Vol. 8, p. 317)
Don't get me started on Bell, EPR and non-locality. Non-separability yes, but locality in the premise of Bell's derivation is simply a means to assure a reasonable assumption of non-causal interaction between measurement processes. Focusing too much on this causation business (typically due to improper reification of the system representation) distracts from the real implications of QM entanglement.
I'm not sure I understand but non-separability arguably has the same consequences as predictions of QM depend on the 3N-dimensional space that get lost in the 3-dimensional representation (e.g. information about correlations among different parts of the system, that are experimentally observed are left out):
Not all the relevant information about the sub-system is contained in its density operator (obtained by partial tracing). A fraction of this information is missing, and it is contained only in the state vector of the overall system. Any separate description of parts, and then any dual description of parts and whole, then looks artificial. As a consequence, the concept of inter-level causation looks nonsensical in the highly holistic domain described by quantum mechanics. Since there is no way to separate the states of the parts from the state of the whole, it sounds absurd to call one the cause and the other the effect, as if they were two different things.
Downward Causation without Foundations
http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/DownwardCausationDraft.pdf
apeiron
Feb24-12, 09:24 PM
This discussion has me thinking then... of the possibility of putting some rigor into some definitions in the emergence camp by invoking complementarity. Hmmm....
Indeed this is fundamental in my view. It is the absolute key. And there is never a post where I'm not saying this. :tongue2:
Not circular and not about known or unknown cause. It is used to qualify absence of purposeful intent. A raindrop may cause a pebble to fall instigating an avalanche. Or I may decide to set one off just as my enemy is passing the road beneath. One event is accidental the other intentional. It isn't an issue of cause or lack of cause but intent or lack of intent.
Ok - let's go with 'intent or lack of intent', and extrapolate your examples.
A raindrop may cause a pebble to fall instigating an avalanche .. (lack of intent) then the rescue services swing into gear to save lives (intent).
I may decide to set one (avalanche) off just as my enemy is passing the road beneath .. (intent) because an accidental fire (lack of intent) is burning my food supply and I will most likely starve otherwise.
Both cases are legitimate. Intent from lack of intent. Lack of intent from intent.
If you accept the scientific position, can you really ascribe any special quality to your intentions ? Are they not a result of natural forces - merely an extension of the same principals that govern the raindrop causing the pebble to fall, causing the avalanche ?
Is there something special about our intentions ? Intelligence perhaps ? Caused by an unintentional, unintelligent Big Bang (no God) ? Or was it intelligent and intentional (God) ? Or don't we know, are not sure ? Bringing it back to the ultimate question - why anything at all.
A believer in an omnipotent, omniscient God would reject the possibility of accidental events all together (every leaf that falls, etc.) But they cannot then, after the fact, reverse the implication, saying the impossibility of accidental events proves God's existence. That is indeed circular, the two assertions being equivalent.
Yes, I don't disagree. 'God / not God' is not the intent (lol) of my involvement here.
If however you begin with the possibility (as in lack of asserted impossibility) of both accidental and purposeful causes and ask the question the it may be valid to inductively argue the existence of God from the existence of life, if one can show it it too improbable, even in the scale of the size and age of the universe, to be accidental. Valid in form but not, I believe valid under analysis. I've seen such arguments but they typically misrepresent physical assumptions (most often misapplying thermodynamic principles).
I stray from the point here but only as a demonstration of the use of "accidental" in a context.
I personally think that the word 'accidental' and it's fluid use thereof, goes to the heart of the context, and the point (the OP) of this thread.
apeiron
Feb25-12, 05:57 AM
Downward Causation without Foundations
http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/DownwardCausationDraft.pdf
Thanks for the pointer to that paper. Another good exposition of the systems perspective.
I agree with pretty much all Bitbol's approach except that I think he needs to add the notion of the epistemic cut to extend causality to semiotically-organised systems.
His focus is on instances where there is downward effective cause (rather than just downward constraint). For a system to actually choose its state in this fashion, it needs some kind of internal machinery of control.
But otherwise, it is nice to see a systems take on QM, and then the generalisation of that view of causality.
ThomasT
Feb26-12, 01:41 AM
The issue of spontaneous vs purposeful action is in fact very on point when it comes to "why anything" cosmogenesis.
The world seems full of spontaneous happenings. Quantum fluctuations for a start.
The reductionist model of causality finds them difficult to explain.Doesn't the word spontaneous refer to unpredictable events? Aren't they called spontaneous because we can't predict or precisely explain them? Nevertheless, even so called spontaneous events are differentiated wrt, and predictable within certain bounds, wrt certain antecedent conditions, even wrt quantum experiments.
If every event must have a prior cause, then nothing can be chance, everything must be determined. Spontaneity would have to be an illusion due to our lack of knowledge of the "hidden variables".Determinism is an assumption. If one assumes it, then lack of explanatory or predictive ability is due to ignorance.
The assumption of indeterminacy doesn't seem to fit with our observations of the basically orderly, and predictable, evolution of the world, the universe.
But a systems model of causality puts it the other way round. The difficult lies more in preventing spontaneity. :smile:
The presumption is that reality begins with a potential - a set of degrees of freedom.
And then constraints are imposed on this generalised freedom so as to limit its actions to more determinate paths.Degrees of freedom wrt what? Where do the constraints come from?
In a certain view, it (everything, anything) starts with (is ultimately attributable to) a fundamental wave dynamic ... something that the behavior of any and all disturbances in any and all media at any scale have in common.
This fundamental wave dynamic is what constrains the evolution of the whole and determines the emergence of discernibly bounded systems (ie., particles and objects).
Dynamism begins unbound, going off in all directions (and so failing to show any particular direction). Constraints then organise this world so that the intrinsic spontaneity is channeled. It is still fundamentally there, but starts to behave in predictable fashion.In a certain view, a fundamental dynamics determines the bounds and possible evolution. Spontaneity isn't, in this view, intrinsic or fundamental. It just refers to our ignorance.
Why not assume a fundamental wave dynamic and see where it leads?
And by the way thanks for your and others' replies to my previous questions/comments.
Q_Goest
Feb26-12, 09:00 AM
I'm not sure I understand but non-separability arguably has the same consequences as predictions of QM depend on the 3N-dimensional space that get lost in the 3-dimensional representation (e.g. information about correlations among different parts of the system, that are experimentally observed are left out):
Downward Causation without Foundations
http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/DownwardCausationDraft.pdf
Hi Bohm. I glaced through Bitbol's paper and it seems like another of his I'd read entitiled "Ontology, Matter and Emergence" where he seems to try to blur the concepts of upward versus downward causation. This attempt to blur upwards versus downwards causations always bothered me regarding his work. So since you seem familiar with it, I'd like your opinion of what he's saying.
His discussion on the non-separability of quantum systems that you picked out is interesting though. Does Bitbol recognize and acknowledge the separability of classical systems? By separability I'm refering to what I would consider the very mainstream view as described by Karakostas (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2152/) "Forms of Quantum Nonseparability and Related Philosophical Consequences" for example:
The foregoing concise analysis delimits the fact, upon which the whole classical physics is founded, that any compound physical system of a classical universe can be conceive of as consisting of separable, distint parts interacting by means of forces, which are encoded in the Hamiltonian function of the overall system, and that, if the full Hamiltonian is known, maximal knowedge of the values of the physical quantities pertaining to each of these parts yields an exhaustive knowledge of the whole compound system. In other words, classical physics obeys a separability principal that can be expressed schematically as follows:
Separability Principal: The states of any spatio-temporally separated subsystems S1, S2, ... SN of a coumpound system S are individually well defined and the states of the compound system are wholly and completely determined by them and their physical interactions including their spatio-temporal relations...
I see Bitbol refers to the concept of Humphreys regarding the fusion of properties and seems to limit this fusion of properties to non-separable QM systems which seems very reasonable.
Do you think Bitbol's conception of downward causation in classical physics (or lack thereof) mirror's Bedau's (http://people.reed.edu/~mab/publications/papers/principia.pdf) conception of it, which is to say macro to micro causation is false? Is Bedau limiting the concept of downward causation (or "fusion" of properties) to non-separable systems?
apeiron
Feb26-12, 06:28 PM
Doesn't the word spontaneous refer to unpredictable events? Aren't they called spontaneous because we can't predict or precisely explain them? Nevertheless, even so called spontaneous events are differentiated wrt, and predictable within certain bounds, wrt certain antecedent conditions, even wrt quantum experiments.
Determinism is an assumption. If one assumes it, then lack of explanatory or predictive ability is due to ignorance.
Yes, that is the question here. We have the phenomenon - spontaneous events. Then we make our models about "what is really going on"
The usual model is reductionist. Because we "know" all events are fundamentally deterministic/local/atomistic/mechanical/monistic/etc, then spontaneity is really just an epistemic issue. We only lack the hidden detail of the micro-causes.
But logically, we can also take a Heraclitean or process view of reality. Determinism/etc is emergent. All is fundamentally flux and regularity arises as a restriction on this inherent dynamism.
So you can have the same observation - some spontaneous looking event - and explain it either as secretly deterministic or instead what happens due to a lack of constraints.
I realise you don't believe QM nonlocality is a genuine issue. But for those that do, a systems view of spontaneous events now fits the evidence much better.
Bitbol's paper is an example of that approach.
Do you think Bitbol's conception of downward causation in classical physics (or lack thereof) mirror's Bedau's (http://people.reed.edu/~mab/publications/papers/principia.pdf) conception of it, which is to say macro to micro causation is false? Is Bedau limiting the concept of downward causation (or "fusion" of properties) to non-separable systems?
Yes, I think he would agree with Bedau. I interpreted him as arguing that higher-level facts or events constrain/modify or form a context for the lower level stuff, so they are not independent of the higher level, so the whole notion of upward/downward causation is misconceived especially since he also argues that while lower-level facts or events are necessary they aren't sufficient for higher-level ones. I think Bedau takes the same position? So it's all contextual. He does offer an interesting argument against panpsychism in this paper below and argues that his model can circumvent the mind-body problem without leading to panpsychism but I don't understand his argument. Maybe someone who does can explain it to me?
This possibility of “downward causation” from experience to physiology could be taken by some as mere evidence that concious experience emerges from a neurophysiological basis in the “strongest” sense of the concept of emergence, as opposed to “weak” emergence (Bedau, 1997). But suppose we add a further constraint. Suppose we adopt a very strict criterion of emergence. Galen Strawson recently submitted this type of criterion : “For any feature of E (anything that is considered to be Emergent from the Basis B), there must be something about B and B alone in virtue of which E emerges, and which is sufficient for E” (Strawson, 2006). The problem is that, as I have suggested more and more insistantly, there is nothing specific about functions, neural tissues, or molecular structures in virtue of which conscious experience should emerge. Any loose talk of emergence of consciousness from brain processes in the name of mere correlations, or even mere experiments of mutual triggering, then appears to be ruled out by this strong criterion. From the latter negative statements, Strawson infers that conscious experience is nothing emergent at all. Combining this inference with a materialistic monistic principle, he concludes in favor of panpsychism, or rather pan-experientialism. But, then, his problem is to explain how micro-experiences “add up” to full-fledged human consciousness. Moreover, it is not easier to understand why and how an atom has elementary experience than to understand why and how a living human brain has an elaborated consciousness. Ascribing micro-experiences to atoms just seems an ad hoc additional postulate about matter. So, at this point, we are still completely stuck, with no idea whatsoever about how to handle the “hard problem” of the origin of conscious experience in an objectified nature.
Is Consciousness primary?
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf
ThomasT
Feb26-12, 11:52 PM
The usual model is reductionist. Because we "know" all events are fundamentally deterministic/local/atomistic/mechanical/monistic/etc, then spontaneity is really just an epistemic issue. We only lack the hidden detail of the micro-causes.This is the way I currently view it. With the reduction being toward ever more general, ie., fundamental, dynamics. In this view, the microcosmos isn't any more fundamental than the macrocosmos, because ontology isn't what's fundamental. Dynamics is.
But logically, we can also take a Heraclitean or process view of reality. Determinism/etc is emergent. All is fundamentally flux and regularity arises as a restriction on this inherent dynamism.If there's an inherent or fundamental dynamic, then determinism is fundamental, not emergent.
I realise you don't believe QM nonlocality is a genuine issue.I think it depends on how one defines quantum nonlocality.
But for those that do, a systems view of spontaneous events now fits the evidence much better.There's absolutely no physical evidence supporting the assumption of nonlocality. It's just based on interpretation. Anyway, I am an admitted ignorant pedestrian wrt these considerations, but I don't think it should be considered a great mystery that we can't predict certain phenomena. What is actually happening in the underlying reality is, of course, a mystery. But the fact that modern science, barely 100 years old, still can't predict lots of stuff isn't, to me, very surprising or even important.
That is, I don't think that some complicated systems view, or whatever, is necessary to establish the fact of our relative ignorance wrt a definitive qualitative apprehension of underlying ontologies and processes.
And thanks for your, and others', feedback to what must seem like a very simplistic view and questions ... from me.
apeiron
Feb27-12, 02:33 AM
Do you think Bitbol's conception of downward causation in classical physics (or lack thereof) mirror's Bedau's (http://people.reed.edu/~mab/publications/papers/principia.pdf) conception of it, which is to say macro to micro causation is false?
No, Bitbol politely makes it clear he rejects Bedau's approach.
But at the end of the day, according to its best supporter, it appears that “weak emergence is (nothing but) a proper subset of nominal emergence”...
...No genuine (upward or downward) causation, and ontologically little more than nominal emergence: This is the disappointing outcome of research developed under a substantialist construal of the basic elements.
Is there any alternative left? I think there is, provided the substantialist presupposition is dropped at every single level of description.
So the problem with Bedau's analysis - why it is a straw man argument - is that the systems view takes the micro-level as also to be emergent. Substantial cause (material/efficient cause) is itself something that arises and is not fundamental.
There just is no local ontic stuff that has intrinsic properties as Bedau assumes. Yes we can model reality in this fashion for epistemic convenience. But what is really going on is that downwards constraints are limiting local degrees of freedom so as to shape up a realm of local actions.
Bedau does not even seem to understand that this is the systems viewpoint. So his whole argument is based on a wrong analysis. It is quite irrelevant to the modelling of strong emergence. Bitbol by contrast begins by treating local material causes as downwardly emergent.
Setting aside any conceptual trick such as hidden variables, the so-called elementary particles have to be treated as non-individuals, as mere units of a limited set of “sorts,” and thus as formal rather than substantial entities. This becomes even clearer in Quantum Field Theory, where cardinals of subsets of particles are in one-to-one correspondence with quantized modes of excitation of fields (Teller 1995). Accordingly, particles are de facto treated as patterns or configurations, rather than as substantial entities (Bickhard and Campbell 2000). The analysis of a level of organization in terms of structures, patterns, and topological configurations imposes itself throughout the scale of levels, even at the lower accessible level (Campbell and Bickard 2009). The first asymmetry of the standard picture disappears thus.
Q_Goest
Feb27-12, 06:58 AM
Yes, I think he would agree with Bedau. I interpreted him as arguing that higher-level facts or events constrain/modify or form a context for the lower level stuff, so they are not independent of the higher level, so the whole notion of upward/downward causation is misconceived especially since he also argues that while lower-level facts or events are necessary they aren't sufficient for higher-level ones. I think Bedau takes the same position?
If he suggests that the lower level facts are insufficient to define higher levels, then at least if he's talking about classical physics, then he would disagree with Bedau. I would agree with apeiron, Bitbol probably rejects what Bedau has argued regarding weak emergence. I'm just not sure. He certainly notes the nonseparability of quantum mechanical systems and his argument regarding the 'fusion' of properties seems on par with other well accepted concepts of quantum mechanics. I just don't see a clearly defined treatment in his paper of the separability of classical physics.
If Bitbol wants to suggest that lower level facts are necessary but insufficient to define higher level facts, then at least for classical phenomena such as weather systems, the N body problem, etc... he would also need to reject the separability principal. See for example Kronz "Emergence and Quantum Mechanics". But the separability principal is clearly correct. It is used to derive all manner of higher level laws and is taught in one form or another in all college and universitiy courses on classical physics. Classical physics is separable.
Q_Goest
Feb27-12, 07:14 AM
Bitbol by contrast begins by treating local material causes as downwardly emergent.
Setting aside any conceptual trick such as hidden variables, the so-called elementary particles have to be treated as non-individuals, as mere units of a limited set of “sorts,” and thus as formal rather than substantial entities. This becomes even clearer in Quantum Field Theory, where cardinals of subsets of particles are in one-to-one correspondence with quantized modes of excitation of fields (Teller 1995). Accordingly, particles are de facto treated as patterns or configurations, rather than as substantial entities (Bickhard and Campbell 2000). The analysis of a level of organization in terms of structures, patterns, and topological configurations imposes itself throughout the scale of levels, even at the lower accessible level (Campbell and Bickard 2009). The first asymmetry of the standard picture disappears thus.
Bitbol is clearly talking about quantum mechanics here which is non-separable. I still don't see Bitbol making a distinction between separability and non seprable systems.
Also, the term "constraint" is used in physics and science every day, and it means just what you say, "constraints are limiting local degrees of freedom so as to shape up a realm of local actions." A simple example: we create a free body diagram of something, and those constraints are the known local efficient causal actions acting at some point on the boundary which provide the necessary knowledge about the system as it is exposed to other elements in the world. Sperry's classic wheel rolling down a hill can be used as an example, where the wheel interacts with the ground, there is a constraint or boundary condition so we know how the wheel interacts with the ground. Similarly, a point inside the wheel is constrained by it's location in the wheel and the geometry of the wheel. Constraints don't pose a downward control over anything, they are simply locally efficient causes. At least, that's the concept as taught in college and university which is clearly not downward causation.
ThomasT
Feb27-12, 07:33 AM
Bitbol is clearly talking about quantum mechanics here which is non-separable. I still don't see Bitbol making a distinction between separability and non seprable systems.
Also, the term "constraint" is used in physics and science every day, and it means just what you say, "constraints are limiting local degrees of freedom so as to shape up a realm of local actions." A simple example: we create a free body diagram of something, and those constraints are the known local efficient causal actions acting at some point on the boundary which provide the necessary knowledge about the system as it is exposed to other elements in the world. Sperry's classic wheel rolling down a hill can be used as an example, where the wheel interacts with the ground, there is a constraint or boundary condition so we know how the wheel interacts with the ground. Similarly, a point inside the wheel is constrained by it's location in the wheel and the geometry of the wheel. Constraints don't pose a downward control over anything, they are simply locally efficient causes. At least, that's the concept as taught in college and university which is clearly not downward causation.Constraints, ie., limitations wrt degrees of freedom of evolution, can also be a function of a fundamental dynamic, and bounded systems emerging from that fundamental dynamic. Can't they?
Q_Goest
Feb27-12, 08:25 AM
Constraints, ie., limitations wrt degrees of freedom of evolution, can also be a function of a fundamental dynamic, and bounded systems emerging from that fundamental dynamic. Can't they?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I know some folks such as Alwyn Scott ("Reductionism Revisited") for example, try to suggest that these constraints are more than locally efficient causes - that because of the system being nonlinear and highly dynamic, Scott contends that these 'constraints' actually interact with a given system such that they influence what occurs locally.
Although Scott doesn't use some of the common terminology used in fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, he does discuss such phenomena at length. Two terms I'd like to introduce which are common to the fluid systems and thermodynamic systems Scott discusses are:
"control volume" which is a volume of space within which something happens
"control surface" which is the two dimensional surface surrounding the control volume.
Scott suggests that for a given control volume within a nonlinear system, the locally efficient causes acting across the control surface might result in there being more than one possible outcome within the control volume. Scott contends that what happens nonlocally will affect the outcome within that control volume. Scott refers to "constraints" in the same way apeiron uses the term. Scott claims it is these constraints which force the control volume to come up 'heads' in one case and 'tails' in another so to speak and what causes it to come up heads or tails doesn't depend on locally efficient causes acting at the control surface. Scott's mantra is "nonlinear phenomena are those for which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
I actually think Scott's paper is a good one for understanding what might possibly be construed as downward causation because it's much more clearly written I think, than stuff by philosophers such as Bitbol. At least Scott is a scientist and brings that with him in his writing. Nevertheless, I disagree with Scott's conclusions since they would require the nonseparability of classical physics, his views disagree with mainstream science on local causation, and he also misquotes Emmeche regarding downward causation. So there are a lot of problems with his paper and it isn't highly referenced.
ThomasT
Feb27-12, 10:31 AM
Constraints, ie., limitations wrt degrees of freedom of evolution, can also be a function of a fundamental dynamic, and bounded systems emerging from that fundamental dynamic. Can't they?
I'm not sure what you mean by that.What is it that you're not sure about the meaning of?
Q_Goest
Feb27-12, 11:26 AM
Constraints, ie., limitations wrt degrees of freedom of evolution, can also be a function of a fundamental dynamic, and bounded systems emerging from that fundamental dynamic. Can't they?
What is it that you're not sure about the meaning of?
Evolution: I assume you mean the time evolution of a system?
What is a dynamic and what makes a dynamic fundamental?
Do you mean: Constraints are limitations imposed on a system? Certainly, we can say that constraints limit the degrees of freedom of a system. Those are not the meanings implied by Alwyn Scott and apeiron for example.
ThomasT
Feb27-12, 12:24 PM
Evolution: I assume you mean the time evolution of a system?
What is a dynamic and what makes a dynamic fundamental?For example, the propagation of a disturbance in a medium. Any medium. It seems to me that there is a general quality wrt this that holds for all disturbances in all media wrt all scales. There's a simple mathematical equation that describes this. And, I wonder if this might be a fundamental dynamic.
Do you mean: Constraints are limitations imposed on a system? Certainly, we can say that constraints limit the degrees of freedom of a system. Those are not the meanings implied by Alwyn Scott and apeiron for example.I mean that any constraints that arise and exist, ie., emergent and bounded, ie., persistent systems/ojects, are a function of inumerable iterations of, and adherence to, the fundamental wave dynamic.
Q_Goest
Feb27-12, 02:02 PM
I don’t know if I’d call the propogation of a disturbance in a medium a “fundamental dynamic” but certainly I understand what you mean. Propogation of pressure waves in a fluid (liquid or gas) or the propogation of sound waves through solid objects are well understood and the propogation of a wave of some kind through a medium seems to be fundamental with the exception of radiation which propogates through a vacuum. So if something propogates without the need for a medium, would we say that propogation through a medium is a dynamic but not a fundamental one?
Regardless, the disturbance and subsequent propogation in a medium and the equations that we use to describe the complex wave interactions that are set up fall into the category of weak emergence as defined by Bedau for example. For there to be some kind of downward causation, we would need to say that the propogation of causes is necessary but insufficient to determine how that propogation persists in that medium. Robert Bishop (apeiron pointed to his paper earlier) for example, suggests that the propogation of intermolecular forces, including heat transfer and gravitational fields, are necessary but insufficient to describe Rayleigh Benard convection, especially Benard cells. The constraining condition for this type of convection has a temperature or heat flux on two sets of parallel plates with a fluid between them. The constraints then must somehow add to the phenomena in a way which is above and beyond what can be described assuming only local intermolecular forces are causing the cells to set up. Clearly, we don’t need to add anything else to study the phenomena and Bishop doesn’t offer any suggestion as to what should be added. So Bishop for example, would disagree with you that the “constraints that arise and exist, ie., emergent and bounded, ie., persistent systems/objects, are a function of inumerable iterations of, and adherence to, the fundamental wave dynamic” because Bishop would say the wave dynamic is necessary but insufficient to determine the phenomena of Rayleigh Benard convection. Clearly, Bishop is out on a limb with this.
apeiron
Feb27-12, 02:09 PM
But the separability principal is clearly correct. It is used to derive all manner of higher level laws and is taught in one form or another in all college and universitiy courses on classical physics. Classical physics is separable.
The separability issue here comes at the level of models of causality itself, not simply state descriptions of objects.
So the systems claim is that objects separate into local and global kinds of cause. You have upward constructing degrees of freedom and downward forming global constraints.
The matching reductionist claim would be that there is only upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. Everything reduces to material/efficient cause. So all that happens at higher levels is the emergence of larger scales of material causality - new kinds of composite substances with their new kinds of properties (like liquidity).
In hierarchy theory, the difference is reflected in the distinction between subsumptive and compositional hierarchies - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy#Containment_hierarchy
Classical physics deals with the systems aspect of causality in an opaque way. It separates what is going on into initiating conditions and dynamical laws. So you have the local atoms and their global organising constraints. But both these necessary aspects of a system just "exist" in unexplained fashion. They don't develop into a persisting relationship, as argued by a systems view based on an interaction between what has become separated.
At the "fundamental" level, the classical view seems to treat both initiating conditions and laws as ontic - the fundamental laws of nature really exist (somewhere, in the mind of god perhaps, or Platonically). But then taking the compositional view of hierarchical complexity, the initiating conditions and dynamic laws for higher levels of objects becomes merely epistemic - a convenient descriptive impression rather than a reality.
A systems view is instead - according to some current developments - pansemiotic because it argues that even the fundamental level of existence is "ontically epistemic", in the sense used by Peirce and others (Bitbol, for instance, is developing on the autopoiesis of Varela). Nothing actually "exists". Everything has to emerge via development (that is via the hierarchical separation that allows dichotomistic interaction).
The further levels of organisation then occur via subsumptive interpolation - they develop nested within the whole, not constructed as another level upon some prior foundation.
Again, this shows how in the systems view, things are certainly separated (dichotomised) and yet also inseparable (they continue to dynamically interact).
Classical physics works because the universe has grown so large and cold as a system that its scales have become semiotically isolate. An atom is so different in scale from what it constructs that its emergent nature becomes a coarse grain irrelevance.
Perturbations that cross these chasms of scale are always possible. An atom can spontaneously decay. Which could be a surprise to what it forms. It could disrupt some biological object like a microtubule. Likewise, a cosmic ray might strike from the other direction of scale.
But generally, the differences in scale are so great that the classical view can treat a system like a microtubule as being composed of solid material/efficient causes - and in equally uncomplicated fashion, decomposable back into them. Any laws created to describe microtubule behaviour are just emergent descriptions, epistemic glosses, so can be discarded at no cost to the ultimate laws of nature. Nothing valuable is being chucked out.
So there are two models of nature, and of causality here. One to deal more simply with developed systems (like a cold, large, old universe). But a broader view of causality, of nature, is needed to talk about the development of systems - such as we were doing here with the OP, the emergence of the universe as an "object".
Classical physics is already known to break down at the extremes of scale - the global scale of GR and the local scale of QM. So I don't see why we should be constrained by classical notions of causality in this discussion.
Pythagorean
Feb27-12, 02:10 PM
"Propagation of a wave through a medium" is maybe too specific, but the basic concept of energy transfer is at the root of all dynamics. I suppose in the case of electromagnetic radiation, one could argue that space is the medium.
If he suggests that the lower level facts are insufficient to define higher levels, then at least if he's talking about classical physics, then he would disagree with Bedau. I would agree with apeiron, Bitbol probably rejects what Bedau has argued regarding weak emergence.
Sorry, you guys are right. I should have read the Bedau paper more closely.
This is the way I currently view it. With the reduction being toward ever more general, ie., fundamental, dynamics. In this view, the microcosmos isn't any more fundamental than the macrocosmos, because ontology isn't what's fundamental. Dynamics is.
If there's an inherent or fundamental dynamic, then determinism is fundamental, not emergent.
I think it depends on how one defines quantum nonlocality.
There's absolutely no physical evidence supporting the assumption of nonlocality. It's just based on interpretation. Anyway, I am an admitted ignorant pedestrian wrt these considerations, but I don't think it should be considered a great mystery that we can't predict certain phenomena. What is actually happening in the underlying reality is, of course, a mystery. But the fact that modern science, barely 100 years old, still can't predict lots of stuff isn't, to me, very surprising or even important.
That is, I don't think that some complicated systems view, or whatever, is necessary to establish the fact of our relative ignorance wrt a definitive qualitative apprehension of underlying ontologies and processes.
And thanks for your, and others', feedback to what must seem like a very simplistic view and questions ... from me.
Ignorant pedestrian ? Simplistic ? At least you are able to offer your view, and it is readily understood - not wrapped in ever increasing cycles of complexity that gets no one any closer to anything of substance . Oh, and BTW, an admission of ignorance puts you way ahead than some others.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex.
It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
(Albert Einstein)
ThomasT
Feb28-12, 11:56 PM
Evolution: I assume you mean the time evolution of a system?Yes.
What is a dynamic ...Eg., an expanding wavefront/waveshell. Disturbances tend to move omnidirectionally away from their source unless somehow constrained.
... and what makes a dynamic fundamental?Some behavioral characteristic that's operational on the very largest to the very smallest scale. A dynamic that pervades and permeates the whole of reality.
Do you mean: Constraints are limitations imposed on a system?The dynamic, eg. an expanding wavefront/waveshell -- ie., the tendency for disturbances to move omnidirectionally away from their source, defines certain constraints or limitations on possible degrees of freedom. Then there's the consideration of the topology of the medium in which the disturbance is propagating, which entails more constraints. Then there's the consideration of interaction with other disturbances, which entails more constraints. Then there's the emergence of more or less persistent, bounded complex wave structures (ie., particulate matter), and the emergence of a hierarchy of particulate media.
And wrt all media, the tendency for disturbances to propagate omnidirectionally (ie., in the 'direction' of a presumed universal isotropic expansion), is evident.
Certainly, we can say that constraints limit the degrees of freedom of a system. Those are not the meanings implied by Alwyn Scott and apeiron for example.I'll have to look this up.
ThomasT
Feb29-12, 12:31 AM
I don’t know if I’d call the propogation of a disturbance in a medium a “fundamental dynamic” but certainly I understand what you mean.Suppose it's refined to refer to the tendency of all disturbances to propagate omnidirectionally away from their source?
... if something propogates without the need for a medium, would we say that propogation through a medium is a dynamic but not a fundamental one?I'm not aware of any mediumless propagation. That is, while I realize that, eg., no electromagnetic medium has been detected, it nonetheless seems, from the observation that em radiation seems to behave very much like radiating wavefronts in water and air, more reasonable to assume that light is propagating in some sort of medium, as opposed to propagating in ... nothing.
Wrt your question, refer to the preceding statement. Does the tendency of disturbances to propagate omnidirectionally away from their sources seem like it might be called a fundamental dynamic?
Regardless, the disturbance and subsequent propogation in a medium and the equations that we use to describe the complex wave interactions that are set up fall into the category of weak emergence as defined by Bedau for example.Yes, any interactions, topological anomalies, etc. would entail emergent (higher order systems, scale/regime specific interactional/organizational rules, ie., scale/regime specific dynamical tendencies) behavior. But the fundamental dynamic, the tendency for any disturbance in any medium to propagate omnidirectionally away from its source, would still ultimately determine this. Which is not to say that the behavior of emergent systems could ever actually be calculated via this fundamental dynamic. It's a, more or less, metaphysical view, an unfalsifiable assumption. But, nonetheless, one based on observation of the way the world actually behaves. And assuming it would solve a few otherwise somewhat perplexing problems ... such as the arrow of time, the apparent very large scale isotropic expansion of the universe, etc.
As to whether such an assumption would answer the question "why anything at all?", I don't think so, because it leaves open the question of "why is there a fundamental dynamic?".
I have to look up what you said about Bishop and Rayleigh Benard convection, etc.
ThomasT
Feb29-12, 02:11 AM
By the way, I apologize for my questions/statements in that I don't want to derail the ongoing discussion -- which discussion would certainly facilitate improvement wrt one's command of concepts and considerations that it has involved.
apeiron
Feb29-12, 04:35 AM
If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick.
Seems you may have been right on that! :rolleyes:
Then on the street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist scholar who had been introduced to me once at a cocktail party as an authority on mystical matters. After a little chitchat, I asked him -- perhaps, in retrospect, a bit precipitately -- why there is something rather than nothing. He tried to bop me on the head. He must have thought it was a Zen koan.
http://dbanach.com/holt.htm
apeiron
Feb29-12, 04:59 AM
The "why anything" question has extra force if cosmology can show the universe/multiverse/whatever in fact had a beginning. If reality was simply past-eternal, there would be more reason to shrug a shoulder over its "cause". But if reality once "wasn't" in some scientifically-supported sense, then the "why anything" question obviously becomes more pressing.
Alex Vilenkin continues to pursue the relevants proofs to show reality (at least in the crisply developed way we we know it) can't be past-eternal. The New Scientist covered (pay-walled) his most recent talk - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474.400-why-physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event.html
But anyway here is a summary...
Vilenkin discussed three models for an eternal universe in his presentation, describing why each cannot deliver on what it promises. The first is Alan Guth’s eternal inflation model which proposes eternally inflating bubble universes within a multiverse that stretches both forward and backward in time. In 2003 Vilenkin and Guth discovered that the math for this model will not work because it violates the Hubble constant. Speaking of the inflationary multiverse, Vilenkin said ―it can’t possibly be eternal in the past,‖ and that ―there must be some kind of boundary.
The second cosmological model was the cyclical model, which proposes that the universe goes through an eternal series of contractions and expansions – our Big Bang being the latest contraction in an eternal series. Vilenkin shows that this model cannot extend infinitely into the past either because disorder would accumulate with each cycle. If the universe has been going through this process eternally, we should find ourselves in a universe that is completely disordered and dead. We do not, hence a cyclical universe cannot extend infinitely into the past.
The final cosmological model Vilenkin deconstructed is the cosmic egg model. On this model the universe exists eternally in a steady state, but then it ―cracked‖ resulting in the Big Bang. The problem with this model is that quantum instabilities would not allow the ―egg to remain in a steady state for an infinite amount of time. It would be forced to collapse after a finite amount of time, and thus cannot be eternal.
And here are two of those papers...
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4096v4.pdf
ThomasT
Feb29-12, 06:51 AM
The "why anything" question has extra force if cosmology can show the universe/multiverse/whatever in fact had a beginning.I don't see how it can ever, definitively, show this. It seems to me that this sort of consideration is always going to depend on unfalsifiable assumptions. Not to say that they might not be very good assumptions based on all the currently available evidence, but unfalsifiable nonetheless.
But I do very much like your statement, in a previous post, that considering/discussing the thread question can have lots of positive effects wrt the depth and breadth, the sophistication, of the concepts held and presented by those doing the considering/discussing.
If reality was simply past-eternal, there would be more reason to shrug a shoulder over its "cause". But if reality once "wasn't" in some scientifically-supported sense, then the "why anything" question obviously becomes more pressing.Well, yes. But I don't see how science can ever support or falsify the assumption that before some prior time there wasn't ... anything.
Alex Vilenkin continues to pursue the relevant proofs to show reality (at least in the crisply developed way we we know it) can't be past-eternal. The New Scientist covered (pay-walled) his most recent talk - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474.400-why-physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event.html
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4096v4.pdfThanks for the links.
jambaugh
Feb29-12, 06:54 AM
Ok - let's go with 'intent or lack of intent', and extrapolate your examples.[...]
Both cases are legitimate. Intent from lack of intent. Lack of intent from intent.
If you accept the scientific position, can you really ascribe any special quality to your intentions ? Are they not a result of natural forces - merely an extension of the same principals that govern the raindrop causing the pebble to fall, causing the avalanche ?
You are here mixing causation and intention. (I state what we both understand for clarity).
I see no paradox nor contradiction here. Indeed for intention to manifest and have meaning one's actions need to be able to cause the effect which is the intended goal... at least in so far as it can significantly increase the likelihood of the desired outcome. Indeed for will to exist and have meaning there must be a mechanism of observation, modeling of cause and effect to predict, and power to act.
But there is a part of your examples which I think misses the mark. A spontaneous event may trigger the activity of an intention but the intention may previously exist. The rescue squad were trained and prepared and positions before the avalanche occurred. One may argue that the intention preceded the instigating trigger. Intent needn't invoke omnipotence and must if it is to be actualized account for and react to circumstance.
Is there something special about our intentions ? Intelligence perhaps ? Caused by an unintentional, unintelligent Big Bang (no God) ? Or was it intelligent and intentional (God) ? Or don't we know, are not sure ? Bringing it back to the ultimate question - why anything at all.
Yes intent requires some form of "intelligence" in so far as it must invoke expectations of effects of acts. It is an emergent property of living organisms. Now we can speak loosely of intent on a somewhat lower level and get into a very grey area. We often speak of the purpose of say the shape of a finch's beak or some other genetic characteristic of an organism. Here we are at a level of "quasi-intent" where there is no mind (one may assume for arguments sake) behind the design but there is information processing in the biology of genetic reproduction and evolution. The beak shape is in one sense accidental an in another sense purposeful. We need a distinction in the language to handle this level. Say "quasi-purpose" and "quasi-intent".
It is instructive to look at the thermodynamic environment in which we see life existing. We have Earth sitting with a high temperature sun nearby and a low temperature universe into which to radiate. We thus have a large flux of (Helmholtz) free energy through the system. This allows the emergence of spontaneous self organizing systems. It feeds heat engines which power refrigeration effects (formation of intricate crystalline structures, distillations of fresh water, chemical separation of elements, salt flats and ore deposits, ....)
Self organizing systems have an emergent causal structure. In the presence of free-energy flux they cause replication of their organized structure. No intent here but a different level of description for cause and effect. We see growth of crystals and quasi-crystals, propagation of defects in these, and similar condensed matter phenomena.
It is not so much as a specific organized outcome is caused as that over time and many random accidental effects, those which further the organization, are selected out as more resilient against reversal. (the clump of atoms which accidentally land in alignment with the crystalline structure are less likely to re-dissolve by better transmitting heat into the crystal and down to the cold point where it began to form.)
Within this sea of self organizing systems one presumes organisms emerged able to encode and replicate information about how it behaves physically. Now one has a new level of causation where the genetic structure causes the behavior and the behavior is selected for survival. One has "quasi-purpose" and "quasi-intent" in the form of selection from large numbers of variation for most favorable traits. It is the proverbial billions of monkeys tapping on typewriters except that those who fail to type something sensible get culled.
There are two more points of emergence, the first brings about intentional purposeful behavior. From flatworms to lions, tigers, and bears you have an organ dedicated to perception of the environment and triggering actions base on environmental cues. You have a rudimentary mind which encodes not just behavior but perception. In there somewhere must be a modeling function adapting a predictive mechanism, i.e. learning and changing behavior based on experience. These entities can be said to hold intent. The lion is indeed trying to eat me and the flatworm is in fact intending to move and find food.
At some level, possibly the lion, possibly only bigger brained animals such as primates and some others, possibly only the human mind, there is conscious intention. Instead of only learning cause and effect from our experience in a reactive way, we abstract and hypothesize constructing theories of how the world works and so extrapolating upon experience. I've certainly seen examples of parrots and chimps doing this but not universally, only specific trained examples. I suspect they are at the cusp where such emergent behavior is possible but exceptional among individuals.
(By the same token I've seen humans who seem incapable of anything other than reactive "animal" behavior.)
I personally think that the word 'accidental' and it's fluid use thereof, goes to the heart of the context, and the point (the OP) of this thread.
Hmmm... 'accidental' and also 'spontaneous' with some "accidental" confusion of the two meanings.
Identifying levels we may ask at what levels the meanings of words like "spontaneous" and "accidental" change their definition.
Physics & Thermodynamics
Chemistry & Condensed matter physics
Self-organizing systems (specialized chemistry pre-biology, non-equilibrium thermo.?)
Biology
Behavioral (animal) Psychology
Human Psychology/Philosophy of Thought (including epistemology, logic, etc and the philosophy of science including this list.)
Does that sound about right?
I'd say questions of intent and purpose don't have any meaning below the level of Biology and should be "quasi-" qualified at the level of biology. And then we can distinguish forms of intent at the last two levels e.g. the distinction between first and second degree murder and manslaughter. (conscious intent, reactive intent, no intent but responsibility for causation).
One may ask how 'spontaneous' is defined at the base level vs. 2nd and 3rd levels. In classical physics there is no 'spontaneous' and we have a clockwork determinism between past and future states of reality. Quantum mechanics modifies the issue a bit and there are arguments about interpretation but we can qualify e.g. spontaneous vs. stimulated emission. There is room for invoking the term and giving it meaning. Note however that at the next level spontaneous is quite distinctly meaningful. We can speak, even in the classical domain, of spontaneous reactions, such as condensation or :wink: spontaneous human combustion ;). We understand when speaking of this at the level of chemistry that we are speaking of random external causation and not the type of indeterminate causality invoked when considering quantum physics. It changes further at higher levels. Certain self organization phenomena are "inevitable" with spontaneous time of instigation. That's true even of critical phenomena in chemistry/condensed matter physics where phase changes are the rule and super-critical phases are exceptional.
This is how I see the meanings of the words parsed at different levels. Well I'm talked out and I've got to get ready for school. I apologize for being long winded.
... I apologize for being long winded.
Not at all. Thank you for your informative and 'to the point' reply. I will read it with much interest and might have some further comments / questions later, if that's OK
ThomasT
Feb29-12, 08:10 AM
Ignorant pedestrian ? Simplistic ? At least you are able to offer your view, and it is readily understood - not wrapped in ever increasing cycles of complexity that gets no one any closer to anything of substance . Oh, and BTW, an admission of ignorance puts you way ahead than some others.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex.
It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
(Albert Einstein)
Thanks for the pep talk alt. :smile:
Truth be told, the reason I try so hard to simplify things is that I'm not capable of navigating through complexity. I'm a panicky guy. Keep it simple ... please. :smile:
And now I think I should just fade once again into the background and let the more informed members, you included, continue with the discussion.
apeiron
Feb29-12, 04:37 PM
It is not so much as a specific organized outcome is caused as that over time and many random accidental effects, those which further the organization, are selected out as more resilient against reversal. (the clump of atoms which accidentally land in alignment with the crystalline structure are less likely to re-dissolve by better transmitting heat into the crystal and down to the cold point where it began to form.)
Descriptions of worlds constructed in purely bottom-up fashion are all very well, but they remain vulnerable to the realisation that worlds are fundamentally incomputable.
Here is a recent paper on the incomputability issue and its connection to the "why anything" question -
INCOMPUTABILITY IN NATURE Barry Cooper, Piergiorgio Odifreddiy
To what extent is incomputability relevant to the material Universe? We look
at ways in which this question might be answered, and the extent to which the
theory of computability, which grew out of the work of G¬odel, Church, Kleene
and Turing, can contribute to a clear resolution of the current confusion.
http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~pmt6sbc/preprints/co.pdf
(A gloss just appeared in Nature - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/482465a.html)
Cooper is talking about how systems self-organise out of vagueness and the need for a new view of mathematics to be able to model that. Maths is based on notions of definability and rigidity - the basis of reductionist computability - and yet we know this is an unreal idealisation (useful, sure enough, but metaphysically untrue).
I think Cooper offers another good way of looking at the question of the self-creation of the universe. We can say it is about the emergence of computability! In the beginning was vagueness - the incomputable. And then by way of a self-organising phase transition, this gave birth to all that was computable.
This is a very "material" or thermodynamic way at looking at maths. The usual approach to maths is immaterial - unconstrained by material limits. Like Bedau arguing for weak emergence, infinite computation is presumed. Big calculations are fine - even if they are so big that they would quickly bust the limits of any material attempts to compute them.
But many are starting now to object to this unrealistic view of computation - the kind that seem happy with non-linear terms that expand faster than the underlying computation that is hoping to keep up with them. If you presume infinite computational resources, then the distinction between polynomial time and exponential time just ceases to be a problem so far as you are concerned.
See these papers questioning such blythe reasoning....
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity - Scott Aaronson
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1108/1108.1791v3.pdf
The implications of a holographic universe for quantum information science and the nature of physical law - P.C.W. Davies
http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/Holographic%20universe%20and%20information.pdf
Some mathematical biologists have been arguing this for a long time of course....
http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Life-Itself-Robert-Rosen/dp/023110510X
But Cooper shows how mathematicians are facing up again to the deep issue of incomputability and its implications for how we even conceive reality (and its origination).
On the incomputability of global constraints....
At the same time, new science is often based on situations where the traditional reductions are no longer adequate (chaos theory being particularly relevant here). As one observes a rushing stream, one is aware that the dynamics of the individual units of flow are well understood. But the relationship between this and the continually evolving forms manifest in the streams surface is not just too complex to analyse Ñ it seems to depend on globally emerging relationships not derivable from the local analysis.
On the common trick of simply assuming the incomputability of vagueness to be computable "somehow" - given infinite material resources....
Quantum indeterminacy presents little problem for such an outlook. One either expects an improved scientific description of the Universe in more classical terms, or, more commonly, one takes quantum randomness as a given, and superimposes more traditional certainties on top of that.
The latter perspective is also common to world views that make no assumptions about discreteness. It has the advantage (for the Laplacian in quantum clothing) of incorporating incomputability in the particular form of randomness, without any need for any theory of incomputability. The origins of incomputability in mathematics may be theoretical, but not in the real world, the view is.
On computability acting as a downward constraint on incomputability so as to produce a "well-formed" universe....
Our basic premise, nothing new philosophically, is that existence takes the most general form allowed by considerations of internal consistency. Where that consistency is governed by the mathematics of the universe within which that existence has a meaning.
The mathematics leads to other scientiÞcally appropriate predictions. In particular, there is the question of how the laws of nature immanently arise, how they collapse near the big bang singularity, and what the model says about the occurrence or otherwise of such a singularity.
What we have in the Turing universe are not just invariant individuals, but a rich infrastructure of more general Turing definable relations. These relations grow out of the structure, and constrain it, in much the same sort of organic way that the forms observable in our rushing stream appear to. These relations operate at a universal level.
The similarities of Cooper's arguments with those of Peirce, or the pre-geometry of Wheeler, are obvious. But the computability question, coupled with the emerging information theoretic view of reality that we see both in holographic approaches to cosmology and dissipative structure approaches in material descriptions generally, offer a new paradigm for tackling the "why anything" question.
ThomasT
Feb29-12, 10:44 PM
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
" ... the past of an inflationary model is a matter of speculation ..."
apeiron
Feb29-12, 11:57 PM
" ... the past of an inflationary model is a matter of speculation ..."
...and Vilenkin et al are offering tighter constraints on that speculation.
So if you want to argue that the universe/multiverse is past-eternal, you now have to give arguments against the reasonableness of their averaged expansion condition.
Thanks for the pep talk alt. :smile:
Pep talk ? Was just trying to bring the conversation down to my level :-)
Truth be told, the reason I try so hard to simplify things is that I'm not capable of navigating through complexity. I'm a panicky guy. Keep it simple ... please. :smile:
'bout the same here - except that I wouldn't call myself panicky.
And now I think I should just fade once again into the background and let the more informed members, you included, continue with the discussion.
Me ? Informed ? Lol :-)
I feel like fading into the background all the time, but I'm informed with a propensity to ask the odd question. These couple of lines from Oliver Goldsmith ring in my ears occasionally;
Deign on the passing world to turn your eyes
And pause a while, from letters to be wise ..
Oh, and BTW Thomas, earlier on, you said ..
Some behavioral characteristic that's operational on the very largest to the very smallest scale. A dynamic that pervades and permeates the whole of reality.
Can you expand on that at all ?
...and Vilenkin et al are offering tighter constraints on that speculation.
So if you want to argue that the universe/multiverse is past-eternal, you now have to give arguments against the reasonableness of their averaged expansion condition.A good point, imho. Sorting the out the most reasonable constructions wrt extant physical evidence and standard logic is a formidable task ... which supports your point that consideration of the OP should probably facilitate the emergence of more sophisticated answers to the question, even if no definitive ones ... and in the process maybe better ways of thinking about our world, our universe, emerge.
Oh, and BTW Thomas, earlier on, you said ..
Some behavioral characteristic that's operational on the very largest to the very smallest scale. A dynamic that pervades and permeates the whole of reality.
Can you expand on that at all ?I did that in a couple of previous posts. I don't want to hijack the thread. If you can't find the relevant posts, then PM me and we can hash it out.
Until science can explain in a non-ambiguous manner the solidity of matter, the question in the OP will remain unanswerable. That would entain a model that's not based on non-existing virtual photons(the mainstream view) as the mediators of the electromagnetic force. This is a crippled model and doesn't give much of a clue what matter is and what anything is. Can anyone provide an adequate or semi-adequate answer to the question what matter is? No.
I guess this concludes the thread, unless some breakthrough can shed more light on what matter is.
Until science can explain in a non-ambiguous manner the solidity of matter, the question in the OP will remain unanswerable. That would entain a model that's not based on non-existing virtual photons(the mainstream view) as the mediators of the electromagnetic force. This is a crippled model and doesn't give much of a clue what matter is and what anything is. Can anyone provide an adequate or semi-adequate answer to the question what matter is? No.
I guess this concludes the thread, unless some breakthrough can shed more light on what matter is.
Well we have the Pauli exclusion principle, which is in turn based on symmetry arguments. So that is a pretty "solid" and unambiguous explanation.
Maths tells us why there must be both fermions and bosons, at least as potentialities, if there are any material fields at all.
Now why there should be material fields is another matter - it is the "why anything" question again. But material fields are not very "solid" things themselves, are they?
So the solidity of matter is another emergent property arising from symmetries and their breaking. Rather than being a barrier to the discussion, it seems a big clue to our answer.
Well we have the Pauli exclusion principle, which is in turn based on symmetry arguments. So that is a pretty "solid" and unambiguous explanation.
Not really. Electromagnetism(the Coulomb repulsion) works at 'large scales' compared to the PEP, if i remember correctly the electromagnetic force begins to act in between 2 'solid' surfaces at distances around 10^-8 m. which is quite big quantum mechanically. I stand by my words, there is NO adequate classical explanation for the solidity of matter at this time. There is a model that generates predictions based on mathematical entities for which existence there is only partial, after-the-fact circumstantial evidence. I think everyone recognizes that whatever causes the repulsion between 'solids' is not the non-real(or not really real) virtual photons but 'something(force?)' that cannot be framed in a classical manner. Hence the question will remain unanswerable.
I am not quilified to generalize this, but matter is a special kind of force(one that has a few special features), hence why everything found in reality can(hopefully) be modelled as an interaction between the 4 fundamental forces. If anyone wants to challenge this, i'd be more than happy to learn what else on top of the 4 forces and their intercations exists in nature.
I stand by my words, there is NO adequate classical explanation for the solidity of matter at this time. There is a model that generates predictions based on mathematical entities for which existence there is only partial, after-the-fact circumstantial evidence. I think everyone recognizes that whatever causes the repulsion between 'solids' is not the non-real(or not really real) virtual photons but 'something(force?)' that cannot be framed in a classical manner. Hence the question will remain unanswerable.
Err, all knowledge is just models surely? All we are ever going to have is our mental concepts, never the Kantian "thing in itself".
Solidity is a psychological-level concept - a useful idea to organise our impressions at the scale of everyday human life. But it falls apart very quickly as we change our scale of observation.
Virtual particles are an example of a useful concept at a different scale. It is an idea that generates predictions and is confirmed by measurements. Protesting it is "too unreal" is to make the mistake that any concept could ever be real, rather than just a useful mental abstraction used to organise our experience.
Virtual particles are an example of a useful concept at a different scale. It is an idea that generates predictions and is confirmed by measurements. Protesting it is "too unreal" is to make the mistake that any concept could ever be real, rather than just a useful mental abstraction used to organise our experience.
I agree with this but if we are supposed to apply the rigor you mention above to the question in the opening post, the question becomes "why 'this useful mental abstraction' at all"? Doesn't it?
I agree with this but if we are supposed to apply the rigor you mention above to the question in the opening post, the question becomes "why 'this useful mental abstraction' at all"? Doesn't it?
Yes, this is all about examining our concepts more carefully - I think I've said that a lot here. And as an ultimate challenge, it would require us to go the deepest.
So even if we know there can be no final certain answer, this is the reason for taking the question seriously - for what it can reveal about the way we think, the kind of assumptions we have been making without really realising it.
One of the big ones - or so I have argued - is that causation is all bottom-up (I instead argue the systems view on causality).
Another big one is that reality has crisp existence (I instead argue the Peircean view that it self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis).
Vagueness and downward causality are themselves "just concepts". And for the everyday purposes of scientists - scientists who mostly want to build bigger and better machines - they may not even seem very useful concepts.
In the biological and psychological sciences, by contrast, these new concept do appear much more promising. Indeed, they seem essential. And the same has been true for philosophers ever since philosophy began.
I probably agree with you in that I like to have a proper visual or kinesthetic sense of any concept I employ. I want to be able to have a strong impression of vagueness or constraint as some actual "thing" that I can picture vividly, and so play about with, imagine how it works and reacts.
It is just like visualising particles as little balls richochetting about. Strong imagery is useful to actually think. But that says more about our shortcomings as thinking animals (although it is also our advantage, as wouldn't a computer like to be able to do likewise?).
Anyway, the goal of maths and philosophy is to create useful mental abstractions - ideas so generalised that all particular visualisable detail has been washed away. The detail then becomes something the model, based on abstract concepts, predicts and measures. The detail becomes the actual variables we plug back into the general equations.
The great scientists of course have always been good at concretely visualising things - and then throwing all that away to produce the bare mathematical description. Force may be imagined as a bunch of little solid pushes and pulls, tugs and nudges. Then it gets reduced to a capital F in some formula - a symbol standing for something we know how to measure, and relate to other kinds of measurements in a useful fashion.
Great post Apeiron.
Just to add what you said, what I imagine will happen more in the future (as is happening now) is that mathematics will end up being one of our 'primary' senses in the way that seeing and hearing are senses.
Rather than replacing our natural senses it will strengthen the others and provide a more advanced way to make sense of the world by providing a new kind of intuition about things.
With regards to how we think, a lot of this in my view partially boils down to language and by looking at a dictionary that includes every term created in every language, you basically get a snapshot of how people think and also what they are thinking. By looking at the evolution of language, you can infer what changes have been going on in terms of thinking by looking at what words and terms have been created at what particular time and place.
To mathematics fills a void that regular language can not: it is both very specific and very broad, almost paradoxical in a way. Not only can it provide an exact description of something with relation to some kind of quantity, but it can be used to describe an absolute vastness of possibility with the most compact representation.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that later it is highly possible that this will be the paradigm for all communication: instead of having a language with words like 'cat', we will have some kind of mathematical representation: maybe a pictorial representation of a geometric object that represents the signal space for what a cat is.
I'm not saying it will happen ten years, a hundred years or even a thousand years from now, but the idea of having a language and method of communication that moves concepts from one person or thing (like a computer) to another in the way that absolute definition certainty is guaranteed with a minimal redundant form of the information is not, at least to me, that far fetched.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that later it is highly possible that this will be the paradigm for all communication: instead of having a language with words like 'cat', we will have some kind of mathematical representation: maybe a pictorial representation of a geometric object that represents the signal space for what a cat is.
I know what you mean and I think it is happening already. When I see a cat, especially at the moment when it is nagging to be fed, or scratching a hole in the flower bed, I do think "well, I'm looking at a dissipative structure right there."
The cat can be visualised quite easily as a particular instance of a "geometrical notion" that is extremely general. But also, not part of regular language as yet. :wink:
The difference is traditional geometry is more about the representation of objects than processes. Even a topological vision of a cat would still reduce it to some kind of object (a torus if we just consider the body with its gut as the hole?).
So a big part of what a systems approach says is missing from maths is a representation of pure process. Even the current dynamical models in maths are based on object thinking - one definite state mapping timelessly onto the next definite state. Likewise, the concept of a number is just a something that exists, not something which emerges as some kind of development.
A process-based view may not even be possible, but it is worth investigating.
As an aside, there are people who are trying to rethink maths in a deep way. There is Benioff who is asking what happens when we try to build maths from a quantum foundation. And Davies asks what happens when we limit maths to only what is materially possible.
See - http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/Holographic%20universe%20and%20information.pdf
There is no reason the coming century won't produce conceptual revolutions to match the ones of the last. Though personally I think biology, thermodynamics, and the other sciences of complexity, are where the action will be at.
I probably agree with you in that I like to have a proper visual or kinesthetic sense of any concept I employ. I want to be able to have a strong impression of vagueness or constraint as some actual "thing" that I can picture vividly, and so play about with, imagine how it works and reacts. It is just like visualising particles as little balls richochetting about. Strong imagery is useful to actually think. But that says more about our shortcomings as thinking animals (although it is also our advantage, as wouldn't a computer like to be able to do likewise?).
It could be some animal inhereted shortcoming indeed, but delving deeper requires an explanation of the fundamentals -- the pre-existing factors that serve to bring forth the emergence of what you call a crisp reality. Something clearly must pre-exist and pre-date the apparent classical world. Extremely short-lived virtual photons aren't adequate explanations for the world we observe. Referring to matter as a special kind of force or peculiar type of energy does not disspell the confusion about what it is that we mean by something as common and simple-looking as 'matter'. People and scientists in general are left with the only option of referring to 'matter' as that which is observed, touched, handled, etc., but an enquiry into its nature quickly reveals that we are failing as a species to know the ABC of the surrounding world. The only reason why relatively few people discuss this dramatic failure is that few people population-wise are aware of this fact. Getting back to the inital idea - we are not in a particularly good position to claim we adequately know what it is that exists or what pre-existed it. This(and similar scientific or should i say philosophical models) are a castle in the sky and will be so unless people discovered the fundaments of reality, which are now largely missing(i would guess that every BA physicist and above knows this quite well).
Anyway, the goal of maths and philosophy is to create useful mental abstractions - ideas so generalised that all particular visualisable detail has been washed away. The detail then becomes something the model, based on abstract concepts, predicts and measures. The detail becomes the actual variables we plug back into the general equations.
The role of philosophy is to inquire into the nature and validity of the premises and assumptions made by mathematicians. In that regard, philosophy will always disagree with 'shut up and calculate' approaches to understanding reality.
The great scientists of course have always been good at concretely visualising things - and then throwing all that away to produce the bare mathematical description. Force may be imagined as a bunch of little solid pushes and pulls, tugs and nudges. Then it gets reduced to a capital F in some formula - a symbol standing for something we know how to measure, and relate to other kinds of measurements in a useful fashion.
Between the formula and observation, there must be a something that pre-exists and we can define and represent spatially. Do you know how to represent spatially the so called building blocks of the world - the non-spatially extended point 'particles' or the virtual particles that mediate the forces between 'them' which make up this, er... world?
To mathematics fills a void that regular language can not: it is both very specific and very broad, almost paradoxical in a way.
Sure, mathematics carries no human baggage and doesn't differentiate betweent objects and events, whereas humans are stumped when forced to consider them on equal footing.
apeiron
Mar10-12, 06:21 PM
Between the formula and observation, there must be a something that pre-exists and we can define and represent spatially. Do you know how to represent spatially the so called building blocks of the world - the non-spatially extended point 'particles' or the virtual particles that mediate the forces between 'them' which make up this, er... world?
This is trivial if you take a constraints acting downwards on degrees of freedom approach.
What exists at some "location" is infinite possibility. Constraints then limit that freedom so that it has some distinct identity (it is this, and thus not that). So particles exist as the residual degrees of freedom once all other freedoms have been removed from some locale.
The void is then those locales where even more degrees of freedom have been suppressed.
But constraint does have its limits. By observation in our universe, we know that there is a planck scale uncertainty. You cannot constrain local freedoms better than that. So beyond that limit, you have still a seething mass with its unlimited degrees of freedom.
Virtual particles model that situation. We don't have to think of them as some kind of ontological particles - little scraps of stuff that pre-exist classical existence. They are instead just the degrees of freedom that are unsuppressed because constraint has limits to its reach.
It is kinda like talking about the bubbles of air trapped in swiss cheese. Do the bubbles "spatially pre-exist" or are we just talking about the local limit of a process - the cheese that forms the bubble-shaped boundaries?
Nano-Passion
Mar11-12, 12:18 PM
Though personally I think biology, thermodynamics, and the other sciences of complexity, are where the action will be at.
Interesting view. Why?
apeiron
Mar11-12, 03:16 PM
Interesting view. Why?
Because complexity forces you to face up to the issue of modelling process and development. And the lessons learnt there should allow people to see how even the simple is also a result of process and development (rather than merely existing in an uncaused, unexplained, fashion).
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 04:08 PM
“Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.”
A very basic statement is: Something is.
Its denial is self contradictory: Nothing is.
The conclusion is: There could not have been nothing at all.
apeiron
Mar11-12, 04:19 PM
A very basic statement is: Something is.
Its denial is self contradictory: Nothing is.
The conclusion is: There could not have been nothing at all.
The question is about potentiality rather than actuality. We know something exists of course. But can we rule out the potentiality that nothing could have existed instead?
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 04:46 PM
The question is about potentiality rather than actuality. We know something exists of course. But can we rule out the potentiality that nothing could have existed instead?
Look again!
A very basic statement is: Something was.
Its denial is self contradictory: Nothing was.
The conclusion is: There never was nothing.
There is no,there was no, there will be no state of existence corresponding to nothing!
Again: To be is to be a someting, therefore a nothing cant ever be!
Pythagorean
Mar11-12, 04:48 PM
is nothing existing distinguishable from a universe in complete equilibrium?
apeiron
Mar11-12, 04:56 PM
Look again!
A very basic statement is: Something was.
Its denial is self contradictory: Nothing was.
The conclusion is: There never was nothing.
There is no,there was no, there will be no state of existence corresponding to nothing!
Again: To be is to be a someting, therefore a nothing cant ever be!
How do you know something was?
All we can be certain of is that something is. We can't have the same certainty that there was never a nothingness in the past, nor even that there won't be a nothingness in the future.
So your first premise fails.
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 05:03 PM
How do you know something was?
All we can be certain of is that something is. We can't have the same certainty that there was never a nothingness in the past, nor even that there won't be a nothingness in the future.
So your first premise fails.
I can be sure because the negation of the first premise is self contradictory!
Therefore the premise is true.
apeiron
Mar11-12, 05:05 PM
is nothing existing distinguishable from a universe in complete equilibrium?
An equilibrium does seem a more fundamental concept than a void. As nothing of note happening would be even less than nothing of note existing.
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 05:17 PM
is nothing existing distinguishable from a universe in complete equilibrium?
Im just a poor logician so I dont understand how you check that a universe IS in complete equilibrium!
Is it done from the inside? Then it seems to me your presence would disturb the equilibrium.
apeiron
Mar11-12, 05:39 PM
I can be sure because the negation of the first premise is self contradictory!
Therefore the premise is true.
In what way is "nothing was" self-contradictory? And in what way is nothing the proper negation of something?
A lot more work has to be done here than can be achieved by your quick syllogism.
As has been discussed in this thread, nothingness should more properly be paired to some notion of everythingness (if not-nothing, then everything).
And the idea of nothingness is indeed self-contradictory if it requires any sense of a definite place where things are then definitely absent (because a definite place is not "nothing").
So for these reasons, we come back to the deeper - non-contradictory - notions of the potential and the actual. We get in behind arguments that depend on the law of the excluded middle to consider instead the development of crisp somethingness out of indeterminant vagueness.
A definite nothingness is self-contradictory, I agree, because to be definite requires at least the context that allows that judgement. So it can't exist before, during or after anything.
But an indefinite nothingness seems a different matter. And it also happens to be indistinguishable from an indefinite everythingness. Which has important implications. All is still possible when nothing has yet happened.
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 06:33 PM
In what way is "nothing was" self-contradictory? And in what way is nothing the proper negation of something?
You cant be serious!
Do you deny that Nothing and Something negate each other?
Then how do you convince anyone that there is something?
apeiron
Mar11-12, 06:43 PM
You cant be serious!
Do you deny that Nothing and Something negate each other?
Then how do you convince anyone that there is something?
The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.
So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 07:23 PM
The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.
So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.
By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things",
So "nothing" and "something" negates each other.
I think the concepts "nothing" and "something" are basic...
Deny that they negate each other and you cannot prove there is something...
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 07:38 PM
The negation, or logical complement, of the existence of some things would be the lack of existence of some things, not the existence of no things.
So the proper negation of the existence of no things would be the existence of every thing(s). If one claims that A = an absolute limit on existence, then not-A would have to = absolutely unlimited existence.
What do you mean:the existence of no things.
Neither do I believe there exists a largest natural number,nor do I believe there are existing no things!
apeiron
Mar11-12, 07:38 PM
By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things",
See how you tried to slide from all to any just there.
A lack of particular things is not necessarily a general lack of things. Any does not mean every.
Some-thing talks about particular thingness. So it's rightful negation would be a lack of such particularity. And so a most generalised notion of thingness. Ie: a vagueness rather than a nothingness.
Pythagorean
Mar11-12, 07:40 PM
Im just a poor logician so I dont understand how you check that a universe IS in complete equilibrium!
Is it done from the inside? Then it seems to me your presence would disturb the equilibrium.
If there's an organism around to ask the question, then complete equilibrium does not exist.
sigurdW
Mar11-12, 08:36 PM
By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
so it negates the existence of ANY things.
By "something" we mean "ANY things"
See how you tried to slide from all to any just there.
A lack of particular things is not necessarily a general lack of things. Any does not mean every.
Some-thing talks about particular thingness. So it's rightful negation would be a lack of such particularity. And so a most generalised notion of thingness. Ie: a vagueness rather than a nothingness.
I see nothing really wrong in the definitions:
1 By "nothing" we mean the lack of existence of ALL things
2 By "something" we mean "ANY things"
And theres no sliding: By "something" we dont mean "ALL things"...
we mean any things selected from the set of ALL things.
You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things,
but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.
I wonder where the vocabulary you use comes from? Heidegger?
apeiron
Mar11-12, 09:01 PM
You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things,
but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.
Have you actually read the thread yet?
Nothingness cannot be defined in terms of the empty set because the set itself is a (general) kind of something. You can remove the contents one by one, but the very making of that claim then appeals to the something that exists - the context of the set which is becoming empty.
You don't seem to realise how you are jumping between generals and particulars here. The very fact that there seem to be "uncountably many" negations of the empty set shows that your point of view lacks sufficient generality to talk about the negation or logical complement of whatever it is you mean to talk about.
I can be sure because the negation of the first premise is self contradictory!
Therefore the premise is true.
In order to define nothing, you need to define its complement with respect to 'all that is'.
So in this regard, you need to know what nothing is to define what everything is which means that nothing in whatever form it is in needs to having some kind of interpretation in order to really and truly analyze what is being described and its implications.
jambaugh
Mar11-12, 09:57 PM
I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.
Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.
Pythagorean
Mar11-12, 11:07 PM
I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.
Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.
welcome to the philosophy forums...
Nano-Passion
Mar12-12, 01:10 AM
I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.
Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.
Philosophy helps to answer what physics doesn't. Kind of like how language completes mathematics. You can't do mathematics without language to put it in context. And I'm not saying philosophy aims for absolute truth either,there will always be competing schools of thoughts when there is this much complexity.
I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.
Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.
It would be handy for us to know what specific comments you are talking about.
My comment is simply saying that everything has a complement in some universal set. Using this we can say exactly what something is by comparing it to what it is not in some context which depends on the universal set.
If you can't take something and describe what it is not, then you don't have any boundaries in your definition and it won't make sense.
As a general rule in language, we need to define this boundary in whatever way we can and that means enough relativity to say what something is and what something is not.
Have you actually read the thread yet?
Nothingness cannot be defined in terms of the empty set because the set itself is a (general) kind of something. You can remove the contents one by one, but the very making of that claim then appeals to the something that exists - the context of the set which is becoming empty.
You don't seem to realise how you are jumping between generals and particulars here. The very fact that there seem to be "uncountably many" negations of the empty set shows that your point of view lacks sufficient generality to talk about the negation or logical complement of whatever it is you mean to talk about.
Earlier on in post #272 you said to sigurdW
A lot more work has to be done here than can be achieved by your quick syllogism.
But a lot more work has already been done - mainly by you. 285 posts, 18 pages ..
And where are we with it ?
OTOH, I found sigurdW's recent entry to this forum refreshing, and his quick syllogism quite appropriate. He said earlier;
You seem to think that to negate nothing we should claim the existence of ALL things, but it suffices to claim there is at least one thing. Theres uncountably many negations of nothing.
I found this as clear and understandable a statement as any in this thread. Yet you responded with the post in quotes above, particularly that which I've underlined, which seems to be some length of sliding on your part. General or particular things, they are still something.
Luigi Acerbi
Mar12-12, 08:08 AM
Another big one is that reality has crisp existence (I instead argue the Peircean view that it self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis).
This sentence - and other points you made in other posts - seem to summarize a lot of my thoughts on the subject.
I've been thinking for some time that reality might be better characterized as 'what remains after you set some constraints on everything [1] and then quotient everything else away'.
I am sloppily referring to a quotient operation in set theory (i.e. equivalence classes), but I could also be thinking in terms of probability distributions over states of the world given the constraints, from a Bayesian point of view.
This probability would represent not epistemic ignorance, but ontological indifference - I suppose quite similarly to the 'vagueness' you are referring to [2].
In this picture the focus shifts from 'things' to the constraints (which are relational, by the way), and I think it is not only a metaphysical issue but something to be taken into account when building a modern physical theory (some of these ideas are present in some works, but not so mainstream I'd say).
What the constraints are and where they come from deserves another discussion.
Anyhow, I am curious about 'the Peircean view that [reality] self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis', can you provide some specific references please? I was not aware of this at all.
Notes
[1] Everything is quite hard to pinpoint formally, so to imagine it you would define a pretty large universe of something-s (e.g. a space of operators) and work inside that. (There are many issues here though.)
[2] I appreciate that probability/set theory might not be the best frameworks since they are so intrinsically centered on things, but I do not know other ones at the moment...
Philosophy helps to answer what physics doesn't. Kind of like how language completes mathematics. You can't do mathematics without language to put it in context. And I'm not saying philosophy aims for absolute truth either,there will always be competing schools of thoughts when there is this much complexity.
I'm not sure if philosophy can really do that. I like this quote by M. Friedman on philosophy:
the philosophers of the modern tradition from Descartes are not best understood as attempting to stand outside the new science so as to show, from some mysterious point outside of sciences itself that our scientific knowledge somehow mirrors an independently existing reality. Rather, they start from the fact of modern scientific knowledge as a fixed point, as it were. Their problem is not so much to justify this knowledge from some 'higher' standpoint so as to articulate the new philosophical conceptions that are forced upon us by the new science. In Kant's words, mathematics and the science of nature stand in no need of philosophical inquiry for themselves, but for the sake of another science: metaphysics.
sigurdW
Mar12-12, 10:37 AM
Hi ALL! (pun intended)
I am a non academic non professional Philosopher of Logic willing to adress the topic of the thread!
The short answer is: Because something must be.
Proof:
Suppose nothing is
then nothing is something
and nothing is not!
The difficulty is in understanding that the proof wont get more valid by complicating it!
All we can do is to ensure that the logic used is not inconsistent.
Perhaps this is a huge and intricate task, but I deny that reading the whole thread will help :biggrin:
sigurdW
Mar12-12, 10:39 AM
I see here people trying to apply logic to as yet ill defined concepts and without any agreement on postulates.
Let me point out that logic can only take you from one logical predicate to another via implication. You will get no answers to the question of "why" this way. Deduction will only answer questions of the logical consistency and logical equivalence of sets of statements.
Let me point out that it is y o u r opinion!
sigurdW
Mar12-12, 11:01 AM
In order to define nothing, you need to define its complement with respect to 'all that is'.
So in this regard, you need to know what nothing is to define what everything is which means that nothing in whatever form it is in needs to having some kind of interpretation in order to really and truly analyze what is being described and its implications.
My view is that the concepts "Nothing" and "Something" are primitive.
Explication consists in the statement that they Negate each other.
To this a definition of Truth should be added together with the basic Laws of Logic
And perhaps we are done!
(BTW "Everything" seems to be what is neither nothing nor someting.)
I have some good news for you - since nothing cannot be, it follows that non-existence cannot be as well. We are all eternal! :tongue: :tongue: :tongue:
Proof:
Suppose non-existence
then nothing is something
and nothing is not!
Corrected for you
sigurdW
Mar12-12, 12:53 PM
I have some good news for you - since nothing cannot be, it follows that non-existence cannot be as well. We are all eternal! :tongue: :tongue: :tongue:
I didnt think you would notice :smile:
Death IS not: You will never notice you are dead.
to exist is but another word for to be..."exists" = "is"
I didnt think you would notice :smile:
Death IS not: You will never notice you are dead.
to exist is but another word for to be..."exists" = "is"
But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.
sigurdW
Mar12-12, 01:39 PM
But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.
Well I admit death is a subject that needs careful treatment but is this the proper place?
I gave the only answer there is on the topic question...
But your question is proper since it may point to an inconsistency in the logic used.
Otherwise the normal procedure is to try deriving a paradox,say by: This is not as it is!
But honestly I think a logic thread for such matters should be used.
Let us use "How to solve the Liar paradox" in Philosophy in General discussions in PF lounge
apeiron
Mar12-12, 06:38 PM
I've been thinking for some time that reality might be better characterized as 'what remains after you set some constraints on everything [1] and then quotient everything else away'.
Yes, the Peircean view in general is that reality self-organises. So you start with an infinite potential - unbounded dimensionality, unlimited degrees of freedom - and then this state evolves organising laws. At first, there might be many tentative species of constraint. But eventually things shake down to whatever most general state of constraint works over all. A sum over histories approach where most constraints will in fact cancel each other other, and what remains in the end is the "least mean path" set of laws.
So it is very like a Lie group/gauge symmetry approach in modern particle physics where particles are excitations in a quantum field and the properties of particles are the result of irreducible symmetries - localised constraints that exist/persist because they can't get cancelled away.
In this picture the focus shifts from 'things' to the constraints (which are relational, by the way), and I think it is not only a metaphysical issue but something to be taken into account when building a modern physical theory (some of these ideas are present in some works, but not so mainstream I'd say).
What the constraints are and where they come from deserves another discussion.
Yes, this requires a shift in thinking from reductionist metaphysics which wants to think of reality in terms of collections of objects. The whole notion of "thing" is jettisoned in favour of a relational view, a process view - the excitations in a field view.
So all this talk about some-thing, no-thing and every-thing is rather missing the point. A systems ontology sees objects as emergent regularities. And that in turn demands the interaction between global contexts and local potentials. Or in other words, between constraints and degrees of freedom.
"Things" are not fundamental! And so set theory is not a good reasoning tool here.
The analogy of whorls in a stream is useful. You can't scoop up these turbulent features in a bucket and make a enumerable collection of them. It turns out that the context of the stream was necessary to their existence.
Anyhow, I am curious about 'the Peircean view that [reality] self-organises out of vagueness via semiosis', can you provide some specific references please? I was not aware of this at all.
I did start this thread of sources on vagueness...
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514
As to Peircean scholarship, there is a ton of it. But also it can be quite daunting as it is a way of thinking that is quite unfamiliar to most unless they have studied systems science or hierarchy theory. And Peirce creates a lot of his own jargon. Plus he was half crazy - like Goedel, probably an occupational hazard. :smile:
His basic triadic system is outlined on this Wiki page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce) -
And for a taste of his own writing, here is a commentary on the structure of his cosmological argument....
Peirce's cosmology, or "mathematical metaphysics" (CP 6.213) aims to show "how law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy" (CP 1.407). The account, outlined in the accompanying chart, unfolds as follows.
“If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in order to account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in which the whole universe was non-existent, and therefore a state of absolute nothing.. . .But this is not the nothing of negation. . . . The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.”
Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily resulted.
“ . .I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom. That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness. (CP 6.215-219)”
Thus the principle that the logic of the universe is at least as sophisticated as our own -- that it therefore includes retroduction or abduction, the spontaneous form of inference that initiates a stream of inference -- leads us to an account of the first stirrings of determination in the utter indeterminacy of Nothing. This is the first appearance of a mode of positive possibility, different from the mere absence of determination that characterizes the initial zero-state.
“I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this or that sort -- that is, of some quality. Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality. (CP 6.220)”
The potentiality of a quality, in Peirce's metaphysics, is analogous to the Platonic Form or Idea, in that it is a timeless, self-subsisting possibility that serves as the metaphysical ground of the world of actual existence.
“The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed. (CP 6.194)”
http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/
Luigi Acerbi
Mar13-12, 06:17 PM
Thanks Apeiron for the reply - I need some time to read everything, including your other thread about Vagueness.
I skimmed through it, and some parts are serendipitously close to a post about the emergence of the laws of physics and their co-evolution with the universe (linked to Davies, Wheeler, etc.) I had half-written and I wanted to submit to this forum - at this point I am not sure I need to post it any more.
apeiron
Mar13-12, 07:07 PM
I skimmed through it, and some parts are serendipitously close to a post about the emergence of the laws of physics and their co-evolution with the universe (linked to Davies, Wheeler, etc.) I had half-written and I wanted to submit to this forum - at this point I am not sure I need to post it any more.
Sure, post! This is a hot topic as I think Davies is adding another dimension to the debate now because he is making a strong case that holographic limits on information point to a new materialistic conception of the laws of nature.
The universe is not "computing with infinite means" and so this greatly restricts the kinds of laws it can have.
By contrast, most cosmological modelling still presumes that existence is unlimited. As with Tegmark's multiverse, the string Landscape, or the Many Worlds interpretation of QM, anything seems possible because there are no material limits to constrain what exists in "lawful" fashion.
One face of the "why anything.." question is the corollary "...when there could have been nothing." But just as much of an issue is "why just something when there could have been everything?".
The shift Davies is making is from laws as creating cause - things need to be made to happen otherwise they just wouldn't - to laws as restrictions. That is, the problem is how to limit the apparent fecundity of reality to some rational sub-set. Why instead of potential primal chaos have we ended up with a rather orderly, law-bound, universe?
Either this is just an anthropic fluke (the prevailing religion of cosmology based on the belief that reality computes with infinite means). Or it might just be that only one stable, persisting and self-consistent outcome was possible.
The second view does not necessarily rule out multiverses of course. The "one solution" might be broad enough to include something like Linde's eternal inflation scenario or whatever. So our own existence in a branchlet does become anthropic luck.
But it would still be a new direction of thought (or rather, a return to older ones like Peirce, Hegel, and even Anaximander) to argue that the laws of nature are materially constrained and not free to be just anything.
At the other end of the scale, as with Wheeler pre-geometry or current loop approaches to extracting regular spacetime from quantum foams, the thinking is the same.
If we start with unlimited degrees of freedom and let constraints on those freedoms spontaneously emerge to create lawful order, then was there only ever just one solution possible?
But I have noticed quite a few people's deaths. This is rigorous enough for me as a confirmation that death is/exists. Death is one of those very few things that you are 100% certain that exists.
I think though, he was saying something to the effect that one never knows that onesself is dead. Which makes sense.
I have some good news for you - since nothing cannot be, it follows that non-existence cannot be as well. We are all eternal! :tongue: :tongue: :tongue:
So, why anything at all ?
So, why anything at all ?
Why anything exists at all is a somewhat religious question and i am afraid can only be 'answered' within the bounds of religion, i.e. not here.
apeiron
Mar14-12, 08:41 PM
My view is that the concepts "Nothing" and "Something" are primitive.
Rather than something, Hegel suggests that a better primitive is being.
That works for me too as it is a proper generalisation - a universal category rather than some local particular. And as such, it quite directly invokes its dichotomistic "other". Which is what makes it a well-formed idea in metaphysics.
So to even want to have a word that denotes the general state or condition of being, there must be the antithetical possibility of non-being.
Hegel then unites the two in the third category of becoming in this fashion...
“Being” seems to be both “immediate” and simple, but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only meaningful in opposition to another concept, “nothing.” In fact, the attempt to think “being” as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept “nothing,” has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that it effectively becomes nothing. That is, on reflection it is grasped as having passed over into its “negation” .
Thus, while “being” and “nothing” seem both absolutely distinct and opposed, from another point of view they appear the same as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, “becoming,” which seems to save thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts:
“becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” since when something “becomes” it passes, as it were, between nothingness and being.
That is, when something becomes it seems to possess aspects of both being and nothingness, and it is in this sense that the third category of such triads can be understood as containing the first two as sublated “moments.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
There is a clever idea in there.
In this view, nothingness comes into definite existence along with being. So being is whatever becomes, and in so doing, what it did not become also now distinctly "exists" as non-being.
In this fashion, non-being gets granted an absolute kind of non-existence. It is not just defined by an absence of things (like the empty set approach), but by the now demonstrable absence of a generalised thingness (ie: being).
And you need there to actually be being for this to happen. If there was no something, there would also be no true nothingness!
So you can see how the usual forms of logical argument such as syllogistic reasoning do not work at the highest levels of metaphysics.
Like Hegel, Peirce and others, we need to step up a level to logic capable of self-referentiality - one where there is a further dimension of becoming or development, and where the law of the excluded middle does not (yet) apply.
So to be clear, the conclusion here is that rather than the existence of something excluding even the possibility of nothing, it is the existence of something that guarantees non-existence is also in fact quite actual - that is, actually and demonstrably non-existent. :smile:
Equally, before being became actual, non-being was not actual either. Both shared equal status as mere possiblia - inhabitants of the realm of vagueness, the general ground of becoming.
Why anything exists at all is a somewhat religious question and i am afraid can only be 'answered' within the bounds of religion, i.e. not here.
I don't recall having seen a palitable answer within the bounds of any religion, either.
But it is interesting to see that scientists don't proffer a view either. Nor for that matter, have the best philosophers, the deepest thinkers, come up with a hint of an answer, no matter the the complexity of material offered.
I don't think any progress has been made on this question in the last 2,500 years.
No critisism intended of course - I don't have a clue either.
But it certainly IS the ultimate question.
steve watson
Mar16-12, 05:35 PM
Looking for an answer to the question "why there is anything rather than nothing" is, in the strictest sense, a nonsensical question. Observe that merely asking the question "why there is anything" always perceive (recognizes) there is something to begin with. Except for sentient beings of whom "why" questions can be asked, only "what" and "how" questions are relevant to things (and processes) that exist in the universe.
apeiron
Mar16-12, 07:05 PM
Looking for an answer to the question "why there is anything rather than nothing" is, in the strictest sense, a nonsensical question. Observe that merely asking the question "why there is anything" always perceive (recognizes) there is something to begin with. Except for sentient beings of whom "why" questions can be asked, only "what" and "how" questions are relevant to things (and processes) that exist in the universe.
You may not have read the thread yet. :smile:
In the broad view taken by metaphysics, and holistic modelling in science, there are four "why" questions when it comes to causality. And one of these is final cause - for what pupose, for what ultimate goal?
Final cause usually gets subsumbed (concealed?) in natural laws or qualitative concepts. For example, the second law of thermodynamics. Or the principle of adaptive fit in evolutionary theory. These allow us to answer why things are as they are in a teleological sense.
Of course, the logical positivist approach to philosophy of science leads people to claim that there is only teleology as epistemology, not teleology as ontology. But that is just a useful belief to simplify modelling IMO.
The "why anything" question serves to return us to the fundamentals of causation and its modelling. So we need to be willing to challenge our "simple and convenient" causal or logical beliefs. Not just reassert them.
As for your general argument - there is always going to be something, never nothing - well I agree. And that is what then leads to a metaphysics that proposes a further fundamental dimension of development, the trajectory from the vague to the crisp.
As Hegel says, nothingness is a crisp concept so can only exist in emergent, contingent, fashion. It is the "everything that is not". And so it cannot itself "be" until there is also the "everything that is".
steve watson
Mar16-12, 07:15 PM
But regardless of what others say, or have said, and regardless of how chic it may be to salley forth into the unknowable, it is still nonesensical, because the answer to the "final cause" is unknowable. But not because it is beyond that which is capable of being "known", but only because it is a nonsensical endeavor.
I hope my response does not sound flippant, I simply wante to make my retort crisp.
Also, Hegel confuses "nothing" with "something". "Nothing" is not and never can be "something".
apeiron
Mar16-12, 07:55 PM
But regardless of what others say, or have said, and regardless of how chic it may be to salley forth into the unknowable, it is still nonesensical, because the answer to the "final cause" is unknowable.
That is your claim. I don't see any argument supporting it.
From what little you have said so far, you seem to have a deep misunderstanding about knowledge anyway. The mainstream view of epistemology is that we only model reality, we never know it in any direct or true fashion.
As Einstein (with Infeld, in their book, The Evolution of Physics) said: "Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."
But what makes the difference between sense and nonsense in science (and, in the long run, metaphysics) is that our freely invented models are constrained by the act of measurement. So to be reasonable, a belief needs to be testable, confirmable.
So you could attack approaches to the "why anything" question on those grounds. That would be an epistemically valid approach.
But to attack something as "chic" shows that you are not really suggesting anything so serious here.
Also, Hegel confuses "nothing" with "something". "Nothing" is not and never can be "something".
Err, no, that's not what he said.
steve watson
Mar16-12, 10:14 PM
Well, I only used the word "chic" to point out that lots of theories and/or notions have been in vogue and then repudiated.
I am not so concerned about "the mainstream view" of epistemology or metaphysics (those branches of philosophy have been in their graves decades).
My point focued on the notion of asking the questions "why 'something' exists rather than "nothing". If those words have any meaning, then unless your a mystic looking for mystical answers, the question is nonesensical. Call me any names you may please, but it is a fruitless and irrational question to ask, save your fancy theories and mathematics.
Paulibus
Mar17-12, 12:49 AM
"Why anything at all?" The answer to this question is so simple: because Nothing ain't perfect. Anybody here ever heard of topological imperfections?
If those words have any meaning, then unless your a mystic looking for mystical answers, the question is nonesensical. Call me any names you may please, but it is a fruitless and irrational question to ask, save your fancy theories and mathematics.
The beginning is nonsensical, not the question. These are 2 different things. Philosphers and philosophers of science however aren't tied to what seems to make general sense to the wider audiences. The question is valid, even if you cannot answer it.
Nano-Passion
Mar17-12, 03:54 PM
"Why anything at all?" The answer to this question is so simple: because Nothing ain't perfect. Anybody here ever heard of topological imperfections?
No, go on.
Paulibus
Mar18-12, 03:23 AM
I’ll do just that, assuming you were serious, Nano-Passion!
In physics, “Nothing” is synonymous with the Vacuum (of Quantum Mechanics) and
perfection is often associated with exact, unbroken, symmetries. One might therefore start to model an ideal, perfect Nothing by describing its exact symmetries. Rather like describing an ideal, perfect crystal by noting its symmetries — translational, rotational etc. But there’s no such thing as a perfect crystal. Real crystals are finite., with boundaries. And they’re often crammed with one, two and three dimensional topological defects (vacancies, dislocations, disclinations, stacking faults etc.) To an extent that they present an almost biological complexity.
I sometimes speculate about Nothing, bearing in mind that: There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact.
My (amateur philosophical?) speculations run along the following lines: Now that we know that gravity is but Riemannian deviations from the (perfection?) of Euclidean geometry, one might guess that there’s no such thing as a perfect Nothing (spacetime with perfect geometry), and that the Something we live in is just REAL Nothing, crammed with tiny topological defects in the geometry of space-time that we describe as various particles and waves. Like real crystalline stuff but , as far as we can tell, continuous rather than discrete.
Which brings to me to a remark of the cosmologist, John Peacock, who said:
It is perhaps just as well that the average taxpayer, who funds research in physics, is unaware of the trouble we have in understanding even nothing at all.
G.S.RAMYA
Mar18-12, 04:01 AM
Why anything at all, why the universe is the way it is...? If the universe is not the way it is we would have not been here to ask why!!
wuliheron
Mar18-12, 05:18 AM
Why anything at all, why the universe is the way it is...? If the universe is not the way it is we would have not been here to ask why!!
Or if it were different someone else might be asking the same question. In fact, for all I know there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite variety of sentient beings all asking the same stupid question at this very moment.
Or if it were different someone else might be asking the same question. In fact, for all I know there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite variety of sentient beings all asking the same stupid question at this very moment.
If an infinite (or thereabouts) number of sentient beings were asking the same question, would it, they, be stupid ?
And even if stupid, it is still a valid question to ask. Many questions are stupid, but legitimate.
The beginning is nonsensical, not the question. These are 2 different things. Philosphers and philosophers of science however aren't tied to what seems to make general sense to the wider audiences. The question is valid, even if you cannot answer it.
Agree entirely. One things for sure, if you never ask it, there's no chance of an answer. At least this way, you try.
apeiron
Mar19-12, 05:54 AM
Some have criticized this argument because it's not a "causal" explannation. Elliot Sober, however, argues that scientists do accept other "equilibrium explanations":
Returning to this earlier comment, Sober's actual paper - http://fitelson.org/woodward/sober_ee.pdf - is worth reading as another example of the argument for downwards-acting global constraints causation.
Sober uses as his example Fisher's evolutionary explanation for why sex ratios would tend to a 1:1 equilbrium regardless of initial conditions. So his point is that there are "why" explanations that are in general impervious to the micro-causal history. As a dynamical attractor, the system just ends up at the equilibrium point when released from any point in a phase space.
...when the equilibrium is a global one - an event can be explained in the face of considerable ignorance of the actual forces and initial conditions that in fact caused the system to be in its equilibrium state. In this circumstance, we are, in one natural sense, ignorant of the event's cause, but explanation is possible nonetheless.
So applying this to worlds as a whole - the why anything? question here - they could be causally explained in terms of the global constraints that they satisfy. The particular history of local effective causes becomes irrelevant. It is not going to change the outcome. And Sober argues that even if you had exact knowledge of the path taken, you would still know less than if you could see the general reasons why some particular equilbrium outcome had to be!
Nano-Passion
Mar19-12, 08:34 PM
I’ll do just that, assuming you were serious, Nano-Passion!
In physics, “Nothing” is synonymous with the Vacuum (of Quantum Mechanics) and
perfection is often associated with exact, unbroken, symmetries. One might therefore start to model an ideal, perfect Nothing by describing its exact symmetries. Rather like describing an ideal, perfect crystal by noting its symmetries — translational, rotational etc. But there’s no such thing as a perfect crystal. Real crystals are finite., with boundaries. And they’re often crammed with one, two and three dimensional topological defects (vacancies, dislocations, disclinations, stacking faults etc.) To an extent that they present an almost biological complexity.
I sometimes speculate about Nothing, bearing in mind that:
My (amateur philosophical?) speculations run along the following lines: Now that we know that gravity is but Riemannian deviations from the (perfection?) of Euclidean geometry, one might guess that there’s no such thing as a perfect Nothing (spacetime with perfect geometry), and that the Something we live in is just REAL Nothing, crammed with tiny topological defects in the geometry of space-time that we describe as various particles and waves. Like real crystalline stuff but , as far as we can tell, continuous rather than discrete.
Which brings to me to a remark of the cosmologist, John Peacock, who said:
Hm, I always thought that physicists state that empty space isn't empty at all, and therefore is something. Space, having properties and all, can't really be named "nothing."
I always think of nothing as something that would hypothetically exist outside of space. But since nothing can exist outside of space, I don't know if there can even be "nothing." Though, there is a theory that says that the universe started from the collision of two branes. So I guess some posit that there is space outside of our universe. So then, where is nothing??
sigurdW
Mar19-12, 08:42 PM
So then, where is nothing??
Nowhere, and nowhen.
sigurdW
Mar20-12, 09:21 AM
My point focued on the notion of asking the question "why 'something' exists rather than nothing" have any meaning, then ... the question is non sensical.
No! The Question has an answer!
As you yourself pointed out:
"Nothing" is not and never can be "something".
Therefore the answer is: Because something had to be!
sigurdW
Mar20-12, 09:36 AM
The mainstream view of epistemology is that we only model reality, we never know it in any direct or true fashion.
Interesting! How is this mainstream view proven or shown to be true?
Must there not be something we know in a direct fashion in our looking at the model of ourselves looking at the model of reality?
Hm, I always thought that physicists state that empty space isn't empty at all, and therefore is something. Space, having properties and all, can't really be named "nothing."
I always think of nothing as something that would hypothetically exist outside of space. But since nothing can exist outside of space, I don't know if there can even be "nothing." Though, there is a theory that says that the universe started from the collision of two branes. So I guess some posit that there is space outside of our universe. So then, where is nothing??
That ' collision of two branes' being the start of the universe, has always seemed rather flawed to me, for the natural question then, is where did the two branes come from ? They must have been something, therefore, not the beginning.
'Space outside our universe' is also just playing with the word imo (not saying YOU are playing with the word) for the immediate retort would be ALL space is the universe.
That ' collision of two branes' being the start of the universe, has always seemed rather flawed to me, for the natural question then, is where did the two branes come from ? They must have been something, therefore, not the beginning.
'Space outside our universe' is also just playing with the word imo (not saying YOU are playing with the word) for the immediate retort would be ALL space is the universe.
Personally I see this as more of a limitation of our ability to comprehend than anything else.
Mathematically we can use time to represent a form of a pattern or an attribute that gives constraints for something to evolve, but in terms of describing something whether it is structure, evolution of structure or any other relationships it's not required.
Could it be possible that everything existed simultaneously and that time is simply one way to organize what we are exposed to that constrains us to see the rest of the picture?
Mathematically in terms of describing any system, time does not only have to be linear but it doesn't need to be taken into account if we get knowledge of the state-space.
In order to explain the patterns that occur in our experience of the physical world (whether the experience is through us or some other apparatus) we introduce the concept of time to help make sense of things because it aids us in our goal.
But if you constrain yourself to think in terms of that constraint, then by that constraint you will be bound by and with your hammer, everything will look like a nail.
I always think of nothing as something that would hypothetically exist outside of space. But since nothing can exist outside of space, I don't know if there can even be "nothing." Though, there is a theory that says that the universe started from the collision of two branes. So I guess some posit that there is space outside of our universe. So then, where is nothing??
Gisin who has done experiments confirming Bell's has argued that in a sense quantum entaglement/correlations do suggest something like that:
To put the tension in other words: no story in space-time can tell us how non-local correlations happen, hence quantum correlations seem to emerge, somehow from outside space-time.Quantum nonlocality:How does nature perform the trick?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.1475.pdf
Yet, amazingly, quantum physics predicts entirely different kinds of correlations, called non-local correlations for reasons described below. Physics has a word for the cause of these non-local correlations: entanglement. But physics offers no story in space and time to explain or describe how these correlations happen. Hence, somehow, nonlocal correlations emerge from outside space-time (for an explanation of this provocative terminology see appendix A).
Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space-time? Nonlocality, free will and "no many-worlds"
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1011/1011.3440v1.pdf
Interestingly the philosopher Mcginn (as I posted before) has argued/speculated something similar with respect to the "non-spatiality" of mind/consciousness. It's very speculative but I do think he's arguing that there's something about spatiality that breaks down at some level but again this would still not be "nothing":
We need a conceptual breakthrough in the way we think about the medium in which material objects exist, and hence in our conception of material objects themselves. That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness. Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle.
We might be reminded at this point of the big bang. That notable occurrence can be regarded as presenting an inverse space problem. For, on received views, it was at the moment of the big bang that space itself came into existence, there being nothing spatial antecedently to that. But how does space come from non-space? What kind of 'explosion' could create space ab initio? And this problem offers an even closer structural parallel to the consciousness problem if we assume, as I would argue is plausible, that the big bang was not the beginning (temporally or explanatorily) of all existence. Some prior independent state of things must have led to that early cataclysm, and this sequence of events itself must have some intelligible explanation - just as there must be an explanation for the sequence that led from matter-in-space to consciousness. The brain puts into reverse, as it were, what the big bang initiated: it erases spatial dimensions rather than creating them. It undoes the work of creating space, swallowing down matter and spitting out consciousness. So, taking the very long view, the universe has gone through phases of space generation and (local) space annihilation; or at least, with respect to the latter, there have been operations on space that have generated a non-spatial being. This suggests the following heady speculation: that the origin of consciousness somehow draws upon those properties of the universe that antedate and explain the occurrence of the big bang. If we need a pre-spatial level of reality in order to account for the big bang, then it may be this very level that is exploited in the generation of consciousness. That is, assuming that remnants of the pre-big bang universe have persisted, it may be that these features of the universe are somehow involved in engineering the non-spatial phenomenon of consciousness. If so, consciousness turns out to be older than matter in space, at least as to its raw materials.
Consciousness and Space
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html
To consider "Why anything at all?", start with the opposite! "What if nothing?"
Let's start at a time, let's call it t(0) = 0s
If, at this time, nothing at all exists.
Then there is no reason for anything to exist after this time.
We are here now (evident), therefore this is an impossible condition. This statement also shows that there has never been a time = 0 where nothing exists.
Now let's consider a piece of space where nothing exists... The boundary around this "nothing" could be defined, giving "nothing" an attribute, like volume. Once it has an attribute, is it still nothing?
If not, this shows that "nothing" is not only an impossible scenario to the start of the universe, but also cannot exist.
Personally I see this as more of a limitation of our ability to comprehend than anything else.
Yes .. Why, are you aware of anyone that can comprehend without limitation ?
Mathematically we can use time to represent a form of a pattern or an attribute that gives constraints for something to evolve, but in terms of describing something whether it is structure, evolution of structure or any other relationships it's not required.
Not sure what you are saying here.
Could it be possible that everything existed simultaneously and that time is simply one way to organize what we are exposed to that constrains us to see the rest of the picture?
Mathematically in terms of describing any system, time does not only have to be linear but it doesn't need to be taken into account if we get knowledge of the state-space.
OK .. point to this thread ?
In order to explain the patterns that occur in our experience of the physical world (whether the experience is through us or some other apparatus) we introduce the concept of time to help make sense of things because it aids us in our goal.
Who introduces the concept of time ? We as intelligent, educated beings ? My dog has a concept of time (I'm sure she does). I don't think we make a choice and say "Aha - let's introduce time" if that's what you mean. Else, I'm not sure what you are saying here, either.
But if you constrain yourself to think in terms of that constraint, then by that constraint you will be bound by and with your hammer, everything will look like a nail.
Very true. But whether by choice or make up, we are constrained to some degree nonetheless, aren't we ? Or are you saying that there is the ability to think without any constaint whatsover ? In which case, you would be omnipotence - or close to it.
sigurdW
Mar23-12, 12:26 PM
To consider "Why anything at all?", start with the opposite! "What if nothing?"
Let's start at a time, let's call it t(0) = 0s
If, at this time, nothing at all exists.
Then there is no reason for anything to exist after this time.
We are here now (evident), therefore this is an impossible condition. This statement also shows that there has never been a time = 0 where nothing exists.
Now let's consider a piece of space where nothing exists... The boundary around this "nothing" could be defined, giving "nothing" an attribute, like volume. Once it has an attribute, is it still nothing?
If not, this shows that "nothing" is not only an impossible scenario to the start of the universe, but also cannot exist.
Yes...The argument is old...Parmenides was first to point out that nothing isnt something.
Very true. But whether by choice or make up, we are constrained to some degree nonetheless, aren't we ? Or are you saying that there is the ability to think without any constaint whatsover ? In which case, you would be omnipotence - or close to it.
I think I added a bit too much fluff to my post, but the main point I was trying to express is that the constraints we put as human beings on analyzing things is often very limited because it's hard to think in terms of constraints that are not manageable in an ability to analyze something in a way that is useful.
It reminds me of the changes that have taken place since GR and QM have come about: it's forcing the physicist and to some extent the layman to greatly expland the constraints we used to have for analyzing the world and when we don't do that, it means that we will be looking at the world as a nail and using our old hammer instead of perhaps treating it like a screw and using a screwdriver.
The idea I think we will move towards is not just remove constraints per se altogether, but to go to the constraints that are the most flexible and make sense. We as human beings currently need constraints to make things manageable in terms of proper comprehension and at least for the near future, I just don't see that changing.
But consider the developments in all of the areas of mathematics and the introduction of statistics: logic is showing us ways to find systems that make sense in terms of consistency, statistics can show us properties for general stochastic processes that don't blow up and make sense, analysis does the same thing but for systems that are deterministic (with convergence) and so on.
What I see happening (and it is starting to happen right now) is that all of these ideas will come together and the constraints will do two things: they will allow more flexibility and also that flexibility will be tamed by conditions that come from all areas of mathematics.
As an example it's like us going from analyzing rational numbers to real numbers however in doing so we also introduce the idea that we only want to deal with real numbers that are computable. By doing this we are increasing our flexibility, but we are taming this flexibility with something else.
So yeah I agree that we are always going to be constrained, but the key thing is to realize how these constraints will change and how we deal with removal of constraints in one aspect and an increase of constraints in another.
I'm not sure if this really confronts the question but I found it interesting:
In a deep sense, theories of causal responsibility start from perplexity that changes occur (why did something happen?), and their driving metaphysical question is the ancient question: Why is there something rather than nothing?...In contrast, the core concept behind causal significance is not production. Because production requires one thing to in some sense come “out of” another, production is asymmetric, directed, and naturally limited to local connection. If the deep structure of the natural world is a structure of natural constraint, then the logic of constraint leads to a focus on selective inclusion and exclusion rather than production.
Conceptualizing the world as the ultimate clique directs questioning toward the discovery of the secret character by which the world denies existence to so many things that could have been. The humble truth is that, for all we know, existence might be something toward which all things tend. If so, what requires metaphysical explanation might be why some things aren’t rather than why some things are. Perhaps the fact that new things can come into being is part of the noncontingent nature of the world, and perplexity should start at observation of how restrained these facts are in reality. Most possibilities do not occur....
One billiard ball hitting another is a paradigm case of one event causally producing another, and so “billiard ball causation” is not necessarily the best paradigm case of causal significance. A better paradigm case might be two entangled quantum particles. Two entangled particles are similar to two coins that must always be flipped together and that share a special constraint. Although each coin could land either heads up or tails up if it could be flipped separately, making for four possible joint states between them, because the two coins are entangled they share a constrained joint state in which each can land heads or tails only if the other one also does. So they could both be heads, or both be tails, but they could not come up one tails and the other heads. In this sense, the state of each has causal significance for the other, and their mutual causal significance excludes two possibilities. “Causal significance” names the presence of constraint between them, while not necessarily explaining the state of one by assigning responsibility or temporal precedence to the other.
A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World
http://www.sentimentaltoday.net/OUP/0195168143.Oxford.University.Press.USA.A.Place.for .Consciousness.Probing.the.Deep.Structure.of.the.N atural.World.Nov.2004.pdf
apeiron
Mar27-12, 06:32 PM
I'm not sure if this really confronts the question but I found it interesting:
Rosenberg does strip causation down to its basics - constraints in interaction with unlimited degrees of freedom. But then how well does he build back up to create a systems view again?
I think his approach falls apart on the usual panpsychic grounds. He wants to make some deep identification between the extrinsic properties of the material realm (charge, spin, mass, etc) and the intrinsic ones of the subjective realm (qualia, downward causation, etc).
So there is a collapse of scale, a collapse of distinctions. Micro or macro, it is all the same. And the gaps are papered over by the use of opaque abstractions, like Rosenberg's dichotomy of effective and receptive properties.
One sounds like what we are talking about when we speak of material cause, the other like what we mean by proto-mental action. And if you don't look too closely at the join, you might believe something was actually explained.
I would constrast this with pansemiosis where constraints are physically identified with information - and a theory about how information regulates dissipative actions.
So yes, we need to strip causation down to its simplest model. And this is very relevant to the "why anything?" question. As Rosenberg says, a constraints-based view makes you want to ask "why not everything?". Why is reality in fact so limited when undetermined possibility seems inherently unliimited?
But Rosenberg has the usual idea that consciousness is a general kind of thing, rather than a highly particular state of things. The standard categorical error that keeps sending folk down the cul de sac of panpsychism.
Pansemiosis argues instead that the general activity represented by "consciousness" (all the many levels of things that a brain and nervous system is doing) is instead semiosis. Which in turn is about the dissipation of gradients via structural information.
So in the end, it is stuff you can hope to point to and measure.
How would you measure something like receptivity in Rosenberg's scheme? Like qualia, it seems to be defined as an intrinsic property and so in principle unmeasurable?
Whovian
Mar29-12, 01:47 PM
I just feel like calling on the Anthropic Principle. Short answer: because we wouldn't be here to see the the something/nothing if there wasn't anything, so any universes with nothing are not observable, so asking if they exist is impossible to prove or disprove. :biggrin:
phoenix:\\
Mar29-12, 02:03 PM
Better question to ask is, "how", not "why", because really, no one knows why.
apeiron
Apr18-12, 03:45 AM
Why anything is becoming a fashionable question to be asking again....
A Yale conference last October - http://whyisthereanything.org/
Cosmos, logos, and the “why” of the universe… is a transdisciplinary inquiry into the origins and meaning of the cosmos, cross-fertilized by scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives centered on an exploration of the question most foundational to each: Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?
And the blog giving a sketch of proceedings - http://whyisthereanything.org/blog/?paged=2
Then more Templeton money paying for people to set up philosophy of cosmology programs - http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/news__events/news/philosophy_of_cosmology_-_new_field_of_study
In a new partnership between Oxford and Cambridge, researchers in physics and philosophy Simon Saunders, Joe Silk, and David Wallace at Oxford University, and John Barrow and Jeremy Butterfield at Cambridge, are to join researchers at a cluster of US universities including Columbia University, Yale University, and New York University, to establish the field of philosophy of cosmology as a new branch of philosophy of physics.
And the US branch home page - http://philocosmology.rutgers.edu/
Also there is Krauss's "big questions" project at Arizona - http://origins.asu.edu/
Better question to ask is, "how", not "why", because really, no one knows why.
I think you should combine the how and why by some kind of inference technique.
Understanding the realization of the known and observed 'how' with respect to the unrealized and unobserved 'how' can give real inferences on the 'why'.
When you look at something in complete isolation with respect to other potential possibilities that exist, then you have no point of reference and it's the same thing as a fish trying to figure out what water is.
And the blog giving a sketch of proceedings - http://whyisthereanything.org/blog/?paged=2
It's difficult to disagree with this point in that blog by Heller/Ellis:
Heller concluded by saying that if we truly tried to construct a physical model from absolute nothing, we would not be able to move one step forward. That’s why the “Why is the anything?” question is so persistent...we cannot get off the ground in explaining the universe if we start with nothing.
Though, again, I'm not sure this Platonic argument by Ellis (similar to Rickles) is particularly convincing (to me):
For instance, most scientists assume that a mathematical structure pre-exists the beginning of the physical universe; most physicists also seem to believe that the laws of physics pre-exist the universe. Ellis endorses a Platonic theory of mathematics. When we learn a mathematical truth, we’re discovering something that is independent of humanity. They exist in a Platonic world before the universe comes into existence. This, for Ellis, is the model for other pre-existing entities.
Personally, I think I lean towards the ideas of Gisin, Rovelli and even McGinn who have suggested that perhaps our conceptions of space-time are either only approximations or even perhaps misconceived/flawed or emergent from something more "fundamental" that defy spatio-temporality and yet we may never truly be able to fully understand it because of our own cognitive limitations (like all other animals) and this has little to do with some form of mind-independent mathematical Platonic realm/structure that pre-exists the physical universe.
I found this quote summarizing this idea interesting:
In sum, for the time being, it remains unclear how to spell out an ontology according to which spacetime emerges from a more fundamental level. As things stand, the supposed emergence concerns only descriptions, but not ontology: in the search for a theory of canonical QG, one can in one’s mathematical descriptions abstract from spacetime and seek to recover spatio-temporal notions at a less fundamental level of description (as within the semi-classical analysis of quantum geometrodynamics and LQG, see above). But it remains unclear how to transform this move in one’s mathematical descriptions into a cogent ontology of the physical domain according to which spacetime is not fundamental, but emerges from some entities outside spacetime (Hedrich forthcoming reaches a similar assessment).
A dilemma for the emergence of spacetime in canonical quantum gravity
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9074/
Quinzio
Apr24-12, 12:28 PM
I'd like to share my silly and irrelevant thoughts.
So far I have the impression that despite the impressive progresses made by science we understand next to nothing (sic!) about the universe around us. Maybe one day, somewhere, someone will have a deep understanding of all the universe. That entity will then find questions like "Why something ?" just meaningless.
Just like primitive men who interpreting the will of the gods looking at the animals guts, we ask our questions, unaware of the real answers.
Containment
Apr24-12, 12:48 PM
Seems to me like we are asking the wrong questions. It's like trying to figure out how a computer works by asking "how does a computer work?" Without first asking "What are the parts of a computer and how do they function?" In this case is it not true that everything under the stars must be included as the parts of something and thus the answer can not be fully understood until everything is? Or one might ask "Can you think of a better way to understand how a computer works without understanding each component?"
Does the question asked say more about the person who asks it then anything else?
apeiron
Apr25-12, 06:02 PM
I found this quote summarizing this idea interesting:
In sum, for the time being, it remains unclear how to spell out an ontology according to which spacetime emerges from a more fundamental level.
Again the authors only consider a bottom-up model of emergence - one which requires the local beables to crisply pre-exist. Emergence becomes just a suitable (re)arrangement of some set of atomistic parts (events, flashes, edges, etc).
This is trying to get a qualitative difference out of purely quantitative changes. Reductionism in a nutshell. And always doomed to disappoint. You need instead models of causality which allow the development of qualities of well.
In geometrodynamics, for instance, that emergent quality would be "generalised flatness" - flat and smoothly connected spacetime. And what would thus be constrained would be "foamy" curvature - a disconnected or vague roil.
Local beables could only definitely exist within the crisp context of a generalised flatness. The quantitative stuff - the countable atoms - are part of what emerges rather than the stuff that gets anything going.
So the authors ask the question of how can you assemble regular spacetime out of some kind of pre-existing, more fundamental, components. This is a notion of emergence that can only lead to infinite regress as you are left forever chasing the moment when the essential quality - of crisply existing - first makes it appearance.
You have to instead adopt a Hericlitean ontology of flux~logos. You start with a vagueness, a foam, an unbounded potential, an everythingness that is a nothingness. Then you ask the question of what limits it to being just a something. What constrains its dynamism so that there is a concrete world that persists?
apeiron
Apr25-12, 07:11 PM
A good paper on Peirce's approach to "why anything" from Eric Steinhart.
http://www.ericsteinhart.com/progress/peirce-evolution.pdf
There is no time in the original chaos: “Not only substances, but events, too, are
constituted by regularities. The flow of time, for example, in itself is a regularity. The
original chaos, therefore, where there was no regularity, was in effect a state of mere
indeterminacy, in which nothing existed or happened.”(1.411)
thoughtgaze
May12-12, 12:04 AM
I have the answer (i like to think i do).
Whether there is something or nothing depends on a state of perception. Something and nothing is relative. When you die, you experience 'nothing'. When you are alive, you experience 'something'. The factor a lot of us don't realize is that consciousness plays a fundamental part in defining reality to begin with. So something and nothing will obviously be in relation to the perceiver (alive) or nonperceiver (dead).
So in fact, there is both something AND nothing because the DEFINITION of something and nothing should be thought to be relative.
Paulibus
May13-12, 06:54 AM
The Gorilla in this room is like "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", namely
that "the dog did nothing in the night-time" which, as Sherlock Holmes remarked in his
Memoirs about investigating a murder in Silver Blaze, "was the curious incident".
In this long thread only Bohm2 seems to have noticed the Gorilla, namely that what we are must colour our perceptions:
....Personally, I think I lean towards the ideas of Gisin, Rovelli and even McGinn who have suggested that perhaps our conceptions of space-time are either only approximations or even perhaps misconceived/flawed or emergent from something more "fundamental" that defy spatio-temporality and yet we may never truly be able to fully understand it because of our own cognitive limitations (like all other animals) and this has little to do with some form of mind-independent mathematical Platonic realm/structure that pre-exists the physical universe.
Here, for instance, the gorilla is being ignored with talk of a familiar concept, flatness:
....In geometrodynamics, for instance, that emergent quality would be generalised flatness" - flat and smoothly connected spacetime. And what would thus be constrained would be "foamy" curvature - a disconnected or vague roil.
Local beables could only definitely exist within the crisp context of a generalised flatness. The quantitative stuff - the countable atoms - are part of what emerges rather than the stuff that gets anything going.
But the importance and primacy we accord to flatness may be because we are creatures who evolved on the locally flat surface of the round Earth. Flatness is only an invented concept suitable for use by sailors on calm seas and simplicity-seeking general relativists for describing local geometries.
This knowledge, that we are evolution-conditioned creatures, has been around for a century and a half, yet physicists and philosophers seem to argue while ignoring how such conditioning must limit our cognitive abilities and our ability to answer strange questions.
The Gorilla in this room is like "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", namely
that "the dog did nothing in the night-time" which, as Sherlock Holmes remarked in his
Memoirs about investigating a murder in Silver Blaze, "was the curious incident".
In this long thread only Bohm2 seems to have noticed the Gorilla, namely that what we are must colour our perceptions: ..
And you too now, it seems. So, with the gorrilla removed, and with your clear uncoloured perception, what do you see ?
apeiron
May13-12, 04:11 PM
But the importance and primacy we accord to flatness may be because we are creatures who evolved on the locally flat surface of the round Earth. Flatness is only an invented concept suitable for use by sailors on calm seas and simplicity-seeking general relativists for describing local geometries.
You have it entirely back to front if what I just said was that flatness was an emergent aspect of reality, not the kind of intrinsic property that most would take it to be from direct experience.
Paulibus
May14-12, 12:55 AM
...if what I just said... ???
I was commenting on your choice of subject, not on the difference between an emergent and an intrinsic property.
...with your clear uncoloured perception..
You flatter me. Thanks.
apeiron
May14-12, 05:46 AM
I was commenting on your choice of subject, not on the difference between an emergent and an intrinsic property.
So what is the cognitive bias you are claiming is the problem here if it is not the one that I was highlighting?
My argument was that the standard responses to the OP are indeed conditioned by a reductionist myopia. Are you agreeing or disagreeing about this?
Paulibus
May14-12, 08:27 AM
Apeiron -- you have me somewhat baffled. In your reply to my post you referred to your own post by saying "if what I just said was...etc." My puzzle is this: how can you, yourself, possibly not know what you said? If indeed you doubt the content of your own post, how ever am I to follow you, let alone respond about a "reductionist myopia"?
There's some awful misunderstanding developing here!
There was an interesting paper that came out today on the topic of this thread. I haven't had time to read it closely but it looks pretty interesting:
But this would all appear to present an impossible situation. How is there a universe when the seemingly two only options for its lifetime, finite or infinite, both result in contradiction?
Why there is something rather than nothing-The finite, infinite and eternal
http://lanl.arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1205/1205.2720.pdf
apeiron
May15-12, 03:55 AM
There was an interesting paper that came out today on the topic of this thread. I haven't had time to read it closely but it looks pretty interesting:
You know Lynds back story of course? - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/physics.html?pg=1&topic=physics&topic_set=
This latest paper is nothing special. Lynds makes a good case that nothingness is not possible (so agreement there). But then he jumps to the Parmenidian argument that because the universe cannot come from nothing, it must instead be eternal (not taking into account there are other alternatives to the "out of nothing" option).
Following that, he argues it cannot be eternal either as that would make development impossible - change cannot happen because it would have to get started at some first moment and any first moment is always infinitely in the past.
Again all very Parmenidian, although Lynds does not seem to realise it.
Anyway, his answer then is that time is cyclic and so existence can be both eternal and finite. Fine and dandy but while bounce cosmology is popular in some quarters, this ends up being about Lynds pushing his own theory -
On a Finite Universe with no Beginning or End
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0612/0612053.pdf
???
I was commenting on your choice of subject, not on the difference between an emergent and an intrinsic property.
You flatter me. Thanks.
Oh, I'm glad. But you missed this bit ..
what do you see ?
I asked because your post was styled along the lines of critisism of others short or coloured perception, and by inference, your perception was clearer. I could be wrong though.
Paulibus
May16-12, 08:14 AM
Since you insist, Alt, on knowing what it is that I see, I can only respond that it always is what I am looking at. Right now, it's a computer screen. A moment ago it was my pair of Wattled Cranes paddling around belly-deep in my dam
But recently it's been this thread, full of anthro'centric speculation about Why There is Anything at All. The recent interest in this ancient question, stimulated perhaps by the Templeton Foundation's cheeky injection of real cash money into the physics quest for something to do in these troubled times (see Peter Woit and John Horgan's illuminating comments on this subject), in my view generates a need to acknowledge more explicitly than is fashionable that there are limits to the kind of questions that are worth arguing about. Especially since many folk have ready-made answers for them; e.g. the Templeton Foundation, I'm sure, would favour a rationale: "God did it", for the question debated here.
My main point is that we've known for a century and a half that we surely share these limitations with all our fellow animals, to a degree that of course must vary from species to species. But we're not exempt from them, and it's time they were more often acknowledged.
For instance (I suspect) that my two Cranes don't care a toss for deep answers to difficult questions. Nor do (I guess) the other several million species of animals that share this planet with us. The thing that gives an unique edge to our physics, when it comes to answering questions about the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, is that physics demands an evidence-based rationale that we ape-animals seem uniquely able to bring to such puzzles with our elaborate descriptive languages. But physics is quite recent.
We shouldn't let reverence for great old folk like Parmenides et al. get in the way of seeking answers based on evidence. This how to avoid "reductionist myopia" (Pardon me, Apeiron), as well as anthro'centric hubris. And it's prudent to beware of the trouble Greek folk can stir up at even far-away places, like Wall Street, just at this time .
Trouble is, useful evidence has become vastly expensive and difficult to engineer over the last forty years or so. What to do?
Nevertheless: Viva physics, Viva.
My main point is that we've known for a century and a half that we surely share these limitations with all our fellow animals, to a degree that of course must vary from species to species. But we're not exempt from them, and it's time they were more often acknowledged.
I think this is an inescapable argument but many still question this premise of cognitive closure. I think, in part, it may be that it seems strange, for some, that we have enough understanding to kind of know our own cognitive limitations (that we can know that we will not know).
Cognitive closure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_closure_(philosophy)
The following PhD thesis, particularly Chapter 5 "Problems, Mysteries and the Limits of Science" discusses this topic:
Even if we could somehow predict which areas will remain forever unsolved by humans, this would still not constitute sufficient grounds to declare it a mystery, because the existence of a mystery is not contingent upon the exogenous factors, and incidental circumstances, which help determine the set of problems that humans happen to get round to solving in actuality. So, to declare failure (or in other words to assert that a given domain or problem is mysterious, in the absence of reasonable suggestion as to how to proceed further) is to merely offer ‘a judgement on the efforts made’ (Collins 2002, 132), rather than a factual proposition about some conclusion. It may be tempting to make an intuitive assumption that any given area in which humans have made no progress is just something that we were “never meant to know”, but such an assumption just constitutes a judgement or inference, and does not offer comparable closure.
Revised Kantian Naturalism: Cognition and the Limits of Inquiry
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/33046/1/2011RoxburghFCPhD.pdf
Since you insist, Alt, on knowing what it is that I see, I can only respond that it always is what I am looking at. Right now, it's a computer screen. A moment ago it was my pair of Wattled Cranes paddling around belly-deep in my dam
But recently it's been this thread, full of anthro'centric speculation about Why There is Anything at All. The recent interest in this ancient question, stimulated perhaps by the Templeton Foundation's cheeky injection of real cash money into the physics quest for something to do in these troubled times (see Peter Woit and John Horgan's illuminating comments on this subject), in my view generates a need to acknowledge more explicitly than is fashionable that there are limits to the kind of questions that are worth arguing about. Especially since many folk have ready-made answers for them; e.g. the Templeton Foundation, I'm sure, would favour a rationale: "God did it", for the question debated here.
My main point is that we've known for a century and a half that we surely share these limitations with all our fellow animals, to a degree that of course must vary from species to species. But we're not exempt from them, and it's time they were more often acknowledged.
For instance (I suspect) that my two Cranes don't care a toss for deep answers to difficult questions. Nor do (I guess) the other several million species of animals that share this planet with us. The thing that gives an unique edge to our physics, when it comes to answering questions about the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, is that physics demands an evidence-based rationale that we ape-animals seem uniquely able to bring to such puzzles with our elaborate descriptive languages. But physics is quite recent.
We shouldn't let reverence for great old folk like Parmenides et al. get in the way of seeking answers based on evidence. This how to avoid "reductionist myopia" (Pardon me, Apeiron), as well as anthro'centric hubris. And it's prudent to beware of the trouble Greek folk can stir up at even far-away places, like Wall Street, just at this time .
Trouble is, useful evidence has become vastly expensive and difficult to engineer over the last forty years or so. What to do?
Nevertheless: Viva physics, Viva.
I never insisted on much at all - I was merely seeking a conclusion to your ideas in your post 342, wherein you deigned to point out others colored perception, and I was also wondering if by inference, you considered your perception less colored - clearer.
Nevertheless, thanks for your, emm, interesting and florid response - itself quite colorful.
Incidently, the idea that the Greeks are causing trouble in Wall St just at this time, is IMO a convenient patsy for a far deeper malaise in Wall St and the world economy. Not that Greece isn't an economic basket case - it is and will suffer badly for a long time. But it is a mere Kalamata olive in a grove thereof.
apeiron
May16-12, 03:29 PM
Trouble is, useful evidence has become vastly expensive and difficult to engineer over the last forty years or so. What to do?
This is why it is worth looking again at the world about us - biology, thermodynamics, etc - and extrapolating from a more rounded view of the material world. Reductionists just extrapolate from a mechanical POV.
Paulibus
May17-12, 05:10 AM
Bohm2:Thanks for pointing me at Dr. Fiona Roxburgh's thesis. It'll take me a while to read, but I did like one of her innovations; the notion of a Regulative Boundary separating problems we can understand and hope to solve, and mysteries beyond our capacity to plumb and explain. I guess that all animals are constrained by such boundaries, some (say, small spiders) more than others (almost certainly, elephants) and that in our case the boundaries are to some degree happily rendered mobile and elastic by our evolution-conditioned ability to communicate effectively.
I liked also her quote of Chomsky:
....The modesty of Chomsky’s proposal is emphasised by assertions that the most basic capacities should be understood first, before we move on to trying to grasp the underlying structures of the more sophisticated or peripheral cognitive skills possessed by all (or even just some) humans.
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