promethean75 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 30, 2021 5:18 pm
"What is this force which initiates the big bang instantaneously from a body at rest or materiality into movement?"
That's a question scientists can't ax, but one philosophers love to convince you they know the answer to. What I like to do is hit philosophers with the same kind of questions they believe are answered by positing 'god', about the nature of 'god' itself. Things like 'where did 'god' come from', to which they answer 'it always was', and then I hit em with this: 'what is it about 'god' that makes it causeless, that can't also be about the universe, which you claim needs a cause.' What I'm tryna do here is make it difficult to talk about what this 'god' is if it is explained and described to be something separate from the universe. For one thing, to do so - speak of this 'god' as a transcendent subject - would be to immerse oneself completely in metaphysical speculation... and in doing this, can cannot know they are going in the right direction (due to the nature of metaphysical speculation itself). If they can't know the right direction, they can't know the wrong direction, either.
But as it stands, the available data collected by cosmologists, in being compared and contrasted to other possible explanations for the same phenomena, suggests the big bang model as the most accurate. But it's not without problems. It's just with less problems than other competing theories. Empirical evidence aside, there are glaring, common sense problems, intuited problems, that are philosophical by venue, but without risking metaphysical hypothesis. Obviously, how can something come from nothing? Remember you can't check this question by positing 'god', because the same question can be axed about it, and you've taken two steps back.
Now I'm no physicist, but if you are axing me, I answer thusly: there is always something, nature, and the only 'divine' characteristic of this nature is that it is eternal. Other than this, there is no transcendental purpose to its existence, and it exists as a perfect, causally air-tight machine that works with absolute necessity. No accidents, no chaos, no beginning and no end. These concepts are confused and muddled... forms of what spinoza called inadequate knowledge, but they are necessary nonetheless because of the kinds of creatures we are (emotional and experiential knowledge, while incomplete, is 'built in' our nature). It takes a great degree of a priori reasoning to clear these inadequate ideas of the mind and arrive at a true conception of what nature (god) is and how it works.
"Also, If the universe is infinite, what is "now?" Does now "exist"? How do you define "now" in an infinite universe?"
This is a strange question and I'm not sure how to answer it. I'd therefore like to run what I call the 'wittgensteinean what-would-it-look-like-to-be-wrong' test, to check it out.
Suppose you were watching a movie that began at some point and will end in the future... but you started watching it in the middle, and you don't know when it will end. The movie is finite, meaning it had a beginning and will have an end.
If I were to ax you the same question you axed me, above, how would you answer? That is, if I were to ask you to describe what, and how, your experience of a 'now' would be like, would the fact that the movie was finite, make your answer any different?
Wouldn't you just answer 'this present moment', regardless of at what point you began watching, and whether or not you know when it will end?
'do not look behind the word. Look at the way we use the word in our everyday lives' - fictitious wittgenstein quote from a movie
But it's something he would certainly say.
So I'm thinking that your question is bordering on nonsensical if you are axing it with a philosophical tone. 'the present moment' is the answer... but you have to stop your line of questioning there and think only about how we use the word 'now' in everyday speech. Other, more technical uses of the word 'now'... say as to represent a point on a line in mathematical terms, engenders a different kind of use of the word, and the meaning of it here is determined by a different kind of language-game evoking different kinds of possible meaning.
The biggest problem of philosophy is producing a kind of cross-contamination of language games... forcing words that have family-resemblance into unusual contexts in which our understanding of the word becomes confounded. You can recognize this on a case-by-case basis by axing the right kind of questions about that particular use of language.
Philosophy doesn't solve anything, nor does it produce knowledge. These are for the natural sciences. Rather what it does is seek to clarify concepts and analyze language. Imagine if half the questions axed by the philosophers of old, weren't even real questions.
Always ax: 'what would it look like if I was wrong'.... and half of your questions would disappear into thin air when you realized you wouldn't notice a difference.
