Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

[apeiron]

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]

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.

 

[phoenix:\\]

Better question to ask is, "how", not "why", because really, no one knows why.

 

[apeiron]

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/

 

[chiro]

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.

 

[bohm2]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[alt]

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]

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]

...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]

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]

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!

 

[bohm2]

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]

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 realize 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

 

[alt]

?

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]

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.

 

[bohm2]

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

 

[alt]

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]

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]

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.

 

[sigurdW]

Not bad but I am allergic to Hegel ;)

This thread concentrates on the "nothing" so let's check its opposite:

1 Everything is everything else taken together.
2 Then everything else, taken together with everything, is more than everything.
3 But nothing is more than itself ;)

PS Is the conclusion then that there is something wrong with everything?

 

[sigurdW]

The reasoning of Hegel is as follows, and he uses as the two opposing categories of thought the terms "Being" and "Nothing". Firstly they are understood as opposing entities, that is being is not-nothing and nothing is not-being. But secondly, since nothing is further determined by these terms, they are also the same, that is, the same lack of determination. But that does not mean they can not be distinguished from one another.

Let me see if I can get this in other words. Suppose we take two abstract notions, A and B.
Then A is not B and B is not A.

But because there is no more determination, A and B are in fact the same, since the only thing that we described that each is the negate of the other, but there is no further distinction that can be made then that, and in that negation we could just as well have interchanged A and B, and the meaning would be the same.

You are saying that A and B are complementary to each other: A is everything that is not B, and B is everything that is not A.
But hey! Nothing is the same as everything else! Meaning that there is no object that is identical to what is NOT the object!

 

[apeiron]

You are saying that A and B are complementary to each other: A is everything that is not B, and B is everything that is not A.
But hey! Nothing is the same as everything else! Meaning that there is no object that is identical to what is NOT the object!

Your comment is unclear to me (and Robheusd was making good points in my view).

So if we are talking about the dichotomy of being~nothing, then these are complementary universal categories, not two kinds of material object. So what exactly do you mean here?

 

[sigurdW]

Your comment is unclear to me (and Robheusd was making good points in my view).

So if we are talking about the dichotomy of being~nothing, then these are complementary universal categories, not two kinds of material object. So what exactly do you mean here?

Is this quote from robheusd clear to you?

"Suppose we take two abstract notions, A and B.
Then A is not B and B is not A.

But because there is no more determination, A and B are in fact the same,"

Compare it with this quote from sigurdV

"You are saying that A and B are complementary to each other: A is everything that is not B, and B is everything that is not A.
But hey! Nothing is the same as everything else! Meaning that there is no object that is identical to what is NOT the object!"

Do you see the underlined similarities?

1 A and B
2 A relates to B as B relates to A

In the red argument the third underlining means: A=B
and in the blue: A is not identical to B

Meaning: Hegel thinks he can get away with using a sentence that has two interpretations !

The logical truth is: IF (A and B) and ( A is not B,and B is not A) THEN it is not the case that (A=B)

 

[apeiron]

Meaning: Hegel thinks he can get away with using a sentence that has two interpretations !

The logical truth is: IF (A and B) and ( A is not B,and B is not A) THEN it is not the case that (A=B)

No, what is really being said is that A and B can only have definite meanings in terms of each other. So where you have a superficial polarity, there must in fact be a more fundamental unity as each abstraction needs the other to "exist".

Being only makes sense in the context of nothing, and vice versa.

And to make this "logical", you then have to take a developmental view of things. Divisions arise out of unity. So both being and nothing must emerge via opposition from some common ground of rawer possibility.

A does equal B - or rather A becomes indistinguishable from B - when both are reduced to the more primitive state of C.

As Hegel puts it...
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl083.htm

Becoming is the unseparatedness of being and nothing, not the unity which abstracts from being and nothing; but as the unity of being and nothing it is this determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing. But in so far as being and nothing, each unseparated from its other, is, each is not. They are therefore in this unity but only as vanishing, sublated moments.