Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote: 1. The universe is everything that exists

2. All effects must be preceded by a cause.

I concede that these are unverifiable assumptions although I claim to make a good case for them. My philosophy must be read with these assumptions accepted but I don't require anybody to believe them. However understanding what I'm banging on about does require the reader to suspend such disbelief and follow the argument AS IF the assumptions were true. I'm buggered if I can see how a cosmological paradigm could be arrived at any other way but I do NOT claim to be the custodian of an ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

Okay all good so far.

Point one is nothing more than a definition. In practice what we take to be the Universe is everything that appears to exist. Did you have a chance to peek at that YouTube account of the BB by Krause BTW?

Can I take it then the evidence which has led science to the BB can probably be dismissed as 'yet another fucking appearance-saving cosmology", which of necessity transgresses point 2?
That being the case you would also have to rely on a third assumption; uniformitarianism.
I think the BB is such a unique event that the proponents of it would have to agree that the moment of (ahem) "creation" for want of a better word, would also involve the creation of the laws of physics themselves, as, were such laws to be in place for all time (uniformly) such a thing could not take place.

On the other hand, as we do not have any other example of a universe coming into being, we have nothing to compare it with.
Although by its very nature the idea that the universe begins at all is an unique event, the condition of existence of what might be "before". However all the empirical evidence, as we speak, point to the BB, and from that you have to conclude that TIME did not exist until the BB. This allows point 2. but that too, with the birth of existence, means the birth of the laws of nature and time.

I'll read on

Obvious Leo wrote: The universe is that which IS HAPPENING all around you and all you need to do is understand the tense of the verb.

Yes!

And I think our experience within it is like a flash of color and movement on a screen. We make of it what we will. We may try to pin it down. But it's all energy... and we are just passing through and in and out. It seems that everything for each of us is contained in each of our moments... which we may bask and revel in or not. There is no bigger game plan or story beyond that (from my perspective) because each moment is so complete in itself. If we don't realize that... and if we're "waiting" for something more... that will simply be what our experience is about.

(That's how it seems to me.)

Lacewing wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote: The universe is that which IS HAPPENING all around you and all you need to do is understand the tense of the verb.

Yes!

And I think our experience within it is like a flash of color and movement on a screen. We make of it what we will. We may try to pin it down. But it's all energy... and we are just passing through and in and out. It seems that everything for each of us is contained in each of our moments... which we may bask and revel in or not. There is no bigger game plan or story beyond that (from my perspective) because each moment is so complete in itself. If we don't realize that... and if we're "waiting" for something more... that will simply be what our experience is about.

(That's how it seems to me.)

Yes!

And I think our experience of it is defined by language because we think in language and everything we know is derived directly or indirectly through language.

Modern science removes the observer from the observed leaving us footloose and fancy-free but with no ties to reality.

cladking wrote:
Modern science removes the observer from the observed leaving us footloose and fancy-free but with no ties to reality.

Of course we're tied to reality by the effect of reality on experiment but this is usually expressed in models which are misunderstood as reality itself. The effect of reality on experiment is a highly tenuous tie to reality if you think about it. Variables are isolated in the lab which is sterile and inert. "Reality" derived in this manner is highly one dimensional and then it's "modeled" which removes it entirely from the real world.

It's no wonder we're stuck.

Obvious Leo wrote: 1. The universe is everything that exists

2. All effects must be preceded by a cause.

I concede that these are unverifiable assumptions although I claim to make a good case for them. My philosophy must be read with these assumptions accepted but I don't require anybody to believe them. However understanding what I'm banging on about does require the reader to suspend such disbelief and follow the argument AS IF the assumptions were true. I'm buggered if I can see how a cosmological paradigm could be arrived at any other way but I do NOT claim to be the custodian of an ABSOLUTE TRUTH.

On 1.,

If the universe is everything that exists, should this not require "knowing" this 'everything' before being capable of commenting on it?

On 2.,

This begs of 'time' in your interpretation. This is a dynamic interpretation. But it ignores the static factors. That is, taking the universe as a whole including time itself, the 'state' of the universe can be derived from some other 'state' too. But if all of totality is included in this "universe", with respect to its 'state', it has to be understood that it's 'cause' must be indeterminate. I prefer a minimalist procedure rather than trying to attempt to argue from infinity as you can argue from a localized experience of understanding the concepts of at least a something and a nothing. You can also argue this using an infinity of things and a nothing too. But without the contrast, I'm not sure how you can proceed.

One of the things you desire to 'prove' is the very things you suppose here. In this second point, it is that 'time' is all there is. This is implicit in your assumption of cause and effect. You need to find a way to establish what anything in particular is in our world without assuming anything more than these premises. But you can't. I believe that you'd be better off if you at least drop the second assumption and then restate the first to include absolutely everything which includes even what is not true first.

I approach this with nothingness precisely because nothingness also includes an infinity, something which you even appeal to. And then, using the fact of us as being 'observers' who experience reality, this asserts that at least something exists. This leads to contradiction to which is absolved through dimensioning (finding 'places' to supply resolution to contradiction). Note that I speak of 'places' in quotes because these don't have to be literal places as we understand them but simply virtual, if need be. They can also include time as a dimensional 'place'.

Necessity is the mother of our deductions. Since Existence has no opposite, then there can’t even be any bits or spacers of NonExistence anywhere within Existence, much less outside of or before; therefore there is Unity, as everything within able to influence anything else.

Within this Unity, there is multiplicity generated by the Unity, as another necessity, for Stillness is apparently prohibited, for everything goes onward, as we see.

The base monads need (necessity) have only themselves making up themselves, that is, no further parts, in order to be Fundamental, which is why they have no beginning, as "ungenerated and deathless", unbreakable and thus unmakable, existing with no alternative.

They generate, informationally, more and more complexity, the only direction in which they can go (necessity), even perhaps effectively getting into all the constructs that are stable and so can go forward at that level, such as with protons, these higher arrangements becoming the basis for even greater complexity systems, as Leo’s series of nested dolls.

This needs be done as time goes along through each transformation/change/cycle (each ‘now’), given that time is quantized and discrete. That this is a brute force kind of exploration is evidenced by the incredible amount of time that it took for our solar system and us mammals to arrive on the scene, yet such a ‘method’ of no prediction and no design will find workable solutions, whereas foreseeing everything appears to be mathematically impossible.

All is what it is, of necessity, and it is now and we are here.

PoeticUniverse wrote:Necessity is the mother of our deductions. Since Existence has no opposite, then there can’t even be any bits or spacers of NonExistence anywhere within Existence, much less outside of or before; therefore there is Unity, as everything within able to influence anything else.

Let's just begin with the term "exist". This is derived from "ex-", meaning outside of and "is(t)", meaning what is as a thing. So it originally referred to that which lies outside of what 'is', and often referred to the objective world distinctly separate from one's self.

Understanding how the ancients interpreted things in original philosophies, it was interpreted that if one were to begin with anything we have and divide it infinitely, we achieve a 'point which has no space'. [Euclid, for example] In this idea it proposes that while it may seem conflicting, each of anything is derived as a set of these points as defined in a consecutive link. Thus a line was described as a succession of points.

A 'unit' to them was an arbitrary concept that could be merely defined as some line (whether straight or not) of these succession of points.

So I disagree with you presuming that non-existence lacks meaning because it verbally opposes what we are forced to describe reality as by virtue of our language alone. In fact, even considering Leo's 'time-only' world, if the future is not already occurring, this 'future' is yet to be existing and so does NOT exist relative to us living through it locally (like a point). Yet relative to nature as a whole, all times are 'known' with respect to it and so we 'say' that even that which doesn't exist still 'exists' within nature as a whole too. You may not like the wording and could opt to use something else instead. I prefer to use logical universals or forms instead as they encompass the ideas without prejudicing them to anything specific.

Scott Mayers wrote:Let's just begin with the term "exist". This is derived from "ex-", meaning outside of and "is(t)", meaning what is as a thing. So it originally referred to that which lies outside of what 'is', and often referred to the objective world distinctly separate from one's self.

Well, we are in existence, too, as arrangements that can operate as seemingly separate from what out brains paint as an outside.

Scott Mayers wrote:Understanding how the ancients interpreted things in original philosophies, it was interpreted that if one were to begin with anything we have and divide it infinitely, we achieve a 'point which has no space'. [Euclid, for example] In this idea it proposes that while it may seem conflicting, each of anything is derived as a set of these points as defined in a consecutive link. Thus a line was described as a succession of points.

Well, conceptually and mathematically, but not physically, since nature is quantized, so there is a limit which is nearly point like but finite.

Scott Mayers wrote:A 'unit' to them was an arbitrary concept that could be merely defined as some line (whether straight or not) of these succession of points.

And lines made for planes, and planes for cubes.

Scott Mayers wrote:So I disagree with you presuming that non-existence lacks meaning because it verbally opposes what we are forced to describe reality as by virtue of our language alone. In fact, even considering Leo's 'time-only' world, if the future is not already occurring, this 'future' is yet to be existing and so does NOT exist relative to us living through it locally (like a point). Yet relative to nature as a whole, all times are 'known' with respect to it and so we 'say' that even that which doesn't exist still 'exists' within nature as a whole too.

This is eternalism almost.

Scott Mayers wrote:You may not like the wording and could opt to use something else instead. I prefer to use logical universals or forms instead as they encompass the ideas without prejudicing them to anything specific.

I'll try, but it may alter your meaning, but hopefully not.

What is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no true ‘nonexistence’, as there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.

Scott Mayers wrote:
So I disagree with you presuming that non-existence lacks meaning because it verbally opposes what we are forced to describe reality as by virtue of our language alone. In fact, even considering Leo's 'time-only' world, if the future is not already occurring, this 'future' is yet to be existing and so does NOT exist relative to us living through it locally (like a point). Yet relative to nature as a whole, all times are 'known' with respect to it and so we 'say' that even that which doesn't exist still 'exists' within nature as a whole too. You may not like the wording and could opt to use something else instead. I prefer to use logical universals or forms instead as they encompass the ideas without prejudicing them to anything specific.

I believe my disagreement here is much deeper than mere semantics. The future is necessarily amorphous from all possible perspectives because it is never set. There may be no unit of time short enough to say nothing occurs within it and it would be far shorter than people imagine if it does exist (something on the order of 1 x 10 ^ -100,000,000 sec or less). This is about as big as "infinity" gets in the real world.

Everything that will exist already exists in some form just as everything which has existed still exists. But we'll never know what will exist until it becomes "now" and we still will observe only the tiniest piece of everything.

cladking wrote:Everything that will exist already exists in some form

In a potential way or actually?

cladking wrote:just as everything which has existed still exists.

Do the exact arrangements still exist or just their base constituents that are now in other arrangements?

PoeticUniverse wrote:

Scott Mayers wrote:Let's just begin with the term "exist". This is derived from "ex-", meaning outside of and "is(t)", meaning what is as a thing. So it originally referred to that which lies outside of what 'is', and often referred to the objective world distinctly separate from one's self.

Well, we are in existence, too, as arrangements that can operate as seemingly separate from what out brains paint as an outside.

I think that the intent was to include the person perceiving as a function of existence too. But it removes the perspective of reality of 'existence' to be a product of something perceived from the perspective from outside rather than from our 'solipsistic' perspective.

Scott Mayers wrote:Understanding how the ancients interpreted things in original philosophies, it was interpreted that if one were to begin with anything we have and divide it infinitely, we achieve a 'point which has no space'. [Euclid, for example] In this idea it proposes that while it may seem conflicting, each of anything is derived as a set of these points as defined in a consecutive link. Thus a line was described as a succession of points.

Well, conceptually and mathematically, but not physically, since nature is quantized, so there is a limit which is nearly point like but finite.

This only naively accepts that matter is all that 'matters' and ignores the space it occupies. Yet even matter is described as "that which occupies space". You are thus blind to the same naive assumption of the ancients who perceived that the air was not 'real' simply because we could see through it. They called this magical essence, "spirit". They also originally thought of water as somehow less real too since as a liquid, it lacked form or shape. Do you not see how this is the same anthropomorphic biased interpretation that you and Leo presume about space itself? Space may be 'fluid', but it is still a real essence that without, not even matter could mean anything.

As to math, the abstraction confuses you as you interpret the symbolism of math as what math represents and not the semantic meaning of things like numbers.

Scott Mayers wrote:A 'unit' to them was an arbitrary concept that could be merely defined as some line (whether straight or not) of these succession of points.

And lines made for planes, and planes for cubes.

Yes.

Scott Mayers wrote:So I disagree with you presuming that non-existence lacks meaning because it verbally opposes what we are forced to describe reality as by virtue of our language alone. In fact, even considering Leo's 'time-only' world, if the future is not already occurring, this 'future' is yet to be existing and so does NOT exist relative to us living through it locally (like a point). Yet relative to nature as a whole, all times are 'known' with respect to it and so we 'say' that even that which doesn't exist still 'exists' within nature as a whole too.

This is eternalism almost.

Scott Mayers wrote:You may not like the wording and could opt to use something else instead. I prefer to use logical universals or forms instead as they encompass the ideas without prejudicing them to anything specific.

I'll try, but it may alter your meaning, but hopefully not.

What is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no true ‘nonexistence’, as there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.

If you take your words by this, then you should either interpret everything as possible regardless of how absurd it could be because no such thing could be contained or described as "non-existing". But then you end up where I already interpret totality as a whole as containing everything including the absurd or 'unreal'. That is, everything in totality is 'true' somewhere but not within any one universe.

Hobbes' Choice wrote: Point one is nothing more than a definition. In practice what we take to be the Universe is everything that appears to exist.

Quite so. The Universe is everything that exists is simply a statement of definition but it's worth pointing out that it's the opposite statement of definition from that which Newton proceeded and only one of us can be right. However if we accept that the first law is a statement of metaphysical first principle then there follow a number of significant follow up statements which we can deduce from it.

1. If the universe is everything that exists then nothing exists external to it and thus it had no beginning. Ex nihilo, nihil fit. The universe has always existed and is thus eternal.

2. The verb "exists" in this statement is a verb in the present tense, which means we can simply rephrase our definitional statement as "The universe is that which is existing". This defines the universe as an event rather than as a place and the notion of the event implies both a past and future tense to the verb "to exist". The universe is a PROCESS. Thus we deduce that the universe has always existed and will always continue to exist but the notion of its "state of existence" is only meaningful in the nexus between these two verb tenses, the moment Now. Therefore this is a simple statement of presentism.

3. Newton's assumption of a law-derived universe is inapplicable in an eternal process model because no explanation for the origin of such laws is possible, so this model defines the universe as SELF-CAUSAL. This Spinozan notion of immanent cause means simply that the past MAKES the present and the present MAKES the future, a self-evident statement of the nature of determinism which conflicts with Newton's understanding of the concept. Newton adhered to the Platonist principle of transcendent cause, a principle which contradicts the definitional proposition.

4. This model of reality demands an acceptance of the notion that the arrow of time is likewise an ontologicallky valid concept and that time, change and causality are simply three different ways of saying the same thing, namely that the universe is simply that which is continually re-making itself. I've occasionally used the word "continuously" in this context but I'll have to stop doing so because the philosophy of the quantum, as illustrated by Zeno, requires that this process cannot be continuous but must proceed in discrete and quantised steps. It is from this that I derive my concept of the universe as a computer, the "it from bit" entity of Wheeler's dream, and the speed of light as the processing speed of this computer.

5. This processing speed is the most inconstant speed in the universe, because it is variable all the way down to the Planck scale because of gravity, and it for this reason that the eternal universe is the only coherent narrative for quantum gravity.

Essentially the rest of my philosophy is simply a matter of fleshing out the story and filling in the gaps but I do not gild the lily when I say that this more coherent narrative is not only more consistent with the evidence but it also makes EVERY SINGLE paradox and counter-intuitive conclusion which derives from the spacetime narrative simply vanish. We have a statement of definition from which we can logically deduce a meta-law of causality and this is all that is needed to account for ALL of the observable phenomena in the universe. The manner in which these observable phenomena manifest themselves to the observer is not specified by reality but is specified by the observer, a simple Kantian statement which any philosophy undergraduate would be expected to understand.

We imagine that we observe reality but this assumption is illusory. What we observe is simply INFORMATION being projected through time to our senses from events which occurred in our past. It is from this information that we compile our own subjective narrative of the world, which in modern neuroscience is known as our "cognitive map". Because humans have evolved the gift of complex language this map is not only subjective but inter-subjective, which means we all compile essentially the same narrative of the world through the mechanisms of learning from each other. This is both a blessing and a curse because it greatly enhances our ability to comprehend the world around us but it inexorably draws us into the hazards of confirmation bias and group-think. The unexamined mind is a loose cannon which careers through its journey of existence at the whim of the inter-subjective fashion of the day mistaking it for truth.

This is what happened to physics when it decided to ontologise its toolkit.

Hobbes' Choice wrote: Can I take it then the evidence which has led science to the BB can probably be dismissed as 'yet another fucking appearance-saving cosmology",

No. The evidence which supports the BB is overwhelming under either the created universe or the eternal universe paradigms. However the way in which this evidence is interpreted is vastly different. For instance, instead of expanding our universe is merely aging, just like the rest of us.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:I think the BB is such a unique event that the proponents of it would have to agree that the moment of (ahem) "creation" for want of a better word, would also involve the creation of the laws of physics themselves, as, were such laws to be in place for all time (uniformly) such a thing could not take place.

I agree. A created universe implies a law-mandated reality whereas an eternal universe is self-causal. These are two entirely different ways of defining determinism which are mutually exclusive. One of them must be false, and my seven year old grandson could tell you which one is bullshit because he knows better than anybody that the future is a blank slate on which the story of reality is yet to be written. The world is his oyster.

Lacewing wrote: because each moment is so complete in itself

This is the most profound truth which can be drawn from Einstein's GR. Each moment NOW exists solely in its own temporal referential frame and when this simple truth is extrapolated down to the Planck scale we can then deduce that the smallest possible unit of physical reality is not a "thing" but a time interval.

cladking wrote: Modern science removes the observer from the observed leaving us footloose and fancy-free but with no ties to reality.

Precisely. Physics places the observer external to his observation without realising that the observer observes his world from the inside looking out, which means by looking BACKWARDS down the arrow of time. The problem of the observer has ALWAYS been the stumbling block for physics and every physicist knows it. They just don't get the bit about the cognitive map because they simply ignore what's going on in the other sciences. They don't understand self-causal determinism either because linear determinism is hard-wired into the methodology of their discipline.

On the point of 'quantum', this is a measure still in practice only as measures based on statistical measures. But the measures of these may also be a result of local cycles that are limited by the speed of light. I use strings of spirals to explain this. If given a fixed 'speed' (whether a vector straight line or non-vector curves), since the speed is fixed, even if strings representing space itself 'moving' in spirals, as it moves from the centers outwards, the speed limit should always form spirals that have a unique form that represent fixed (quantized) relationships between each successive curve moving outwards.
Note that I only created this as a quick example and so it is not necessarily perfectly representing what nature would create. But this represents how as this spiral expands outwards towards straight lines eventually, there is quantized relationships between the strings.

What is 'quantized' in nature is NOT to mean that a fixed perfectly solid material exists such that it has no further difference in sizes smaller than it. You guys seem to perceive the quantum as a 'thing' when it is a literal "number" that mathematically maps to a measured phenomena. For instance, orbitals are 'quantized'. The photon is quantized by measure of the wave having a fixed relationship to the speed of light. These are NOT the same thing as a fixed smallest unit of matter or things as changing as time itself. There is no such thing as a fixed smallest unit of time, for instance.