Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

apeiron

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/...ion-event.html

But anyway here is a summary...

And here are two of those papers...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4096v4.pdf

ThomasT

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.

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.

Thanks for the links.

jambaugh

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.
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.)

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.

1. Physics & Thermodynamics
2. Chemistry & Condensed matter physics
3. Self-organizing systems (specialized chemistry pre-biology, non-equilibrium thermo.?)
4. Biology
5. Behavioral (animal) Psychology
6. 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 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.

alt

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

Thanks for the pep talk alt.

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.

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

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...l/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/...108.1791v3.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...nformation.pdf

Some mathematical biologists have been arguing this for a long time of course....

http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Life-It.../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....

On the common trick of simply assuming the incomputability of vagueness to be computable "somehow" - given infinite material resources....

On computability acting as a downward constraint on incomputability so as to produce a "well-formed" universe....

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

" ... the past of an inflationary model is a matter of speculation ..."

apeiron

...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.

alt

Pep talk ? Was just trying to bring the conversation down to my level :-)

'bout the same here - except that I wouldn't call myself panicky.

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 ..

alt

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 ?

ThomasT

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.

ThomasT

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.

Maui

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.

apeiron

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.

Maui

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.

apeiron

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.

Maui

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?