Philosophy Now Forum

What Exists, Via Necessity

(Please review and dissect.)

0. What the heck am I doing here, thrust into life, uninformed of its essence, having to mostly deal with existence, day in and day out?

So it is that you have noted the necessity of this situation of our human condition, for that’s how it is, plus it’s also our nature to wonder about the essence of existence from time to time, as probably our most often asked question.

What a dilemma!

In a Theory of Everything forum long ago, in the 9th century, Abunasr Farabi wrote:

Vague and unrefined did the secrets of existence remain.
Unpierced did that highly revered pearl remain.
Each person said something according to his reason.
Yet untold did the point which was of essence remain.

And Abulhasan Kharquani replied in the forum in the 11th century (the internet was slow in those days):

The primordial secrets neither you know nor I.
The words of the puzzle neither you can read nor I.
Your discourse and mine are behind the curtain.
When the curtain falls, neither you remain nor I.

Omar Khayyam wondered and wrote of the human condition,

The sphere upon which mortals come and go,
Has no end nor beginning that we know;
And none there is to tell us in plain truth:
Whence do we come and whither do we go.
— Ahmad Saidi's version

and concluded, eventually, after coming full circle from his deconstructions of religious myth-takes,

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and -- sans End!
— FitzGerald’s version

which philosophy I agree with, although,

The search for the ultimate truth sublime
Of all that is leads us wise through its clime,
Within and without, is a swelling quest;
For then we know ourselves for the first time.
(— Austin, hereafter non attributed)

but, still, to some lessor event, compared to long ago,

No one has plumbed the Secret Depths of Truth—
The jewel eludes e’en the wisest sleuth;
Thus we hear wishes turned to beliefs’ lore,
Yet none can say “It’s this, and here’s the proof”.
— Austin’s re-transmogrification of Omar


1. We have experiences; thus there is something.

I, of the endless forms most beautiful,
Am stunned that my glass to the brim is full,
Life’s wine coursing through me, as ‘magical’,
On this lovely, rolling sphere so bountiful.

1a. If a lack of anything was ever, it would ever ‘be’ so.

1b. Nonexistence cannot be; it has no properties.

1ba. Existence has no opposite, as necessity.

1bb. If one still says that nonexistence can be productive then that capability is something, and not nonexistence.

Nonexistence can’t be, nor even be meant;
So it is that existence must be here;
There’s no other option, by necessity,
And thus herein these pages we learn its ways.

1c. There must be an objective, real basis, for there can be no true paradoxes, such as how could something be, for it already is.

1d. Allah did it.

We can’t just layer on, non sequitur, that it is a Person. Best to stick only to the truth that we have so far that something exists. We can only refer to it as What IS or the Basis.


2. Experiences demonstrate a pattern of happenings/events.

2a. We have senses; thus it is proved that there is something physical outside of us for our senses to take in.

2aa. Examples: Our sense of smell begins wth molecule shapes; our sense of sound begins with air vibrations.


3. The physical Basis of Existence is not contingent on anything else, or it wouldn’t be the Basis; thus, the Basis does not depend on anything else, making it ‘ever’.

3a. The Basis is simple and non composite, for it cannot depend on its parts for being. Whatever depends on something else cannot be Fundamental/First.

3aa. It is not makable, for it has no parts for it to be made of/from.

3aab. It is ever; it never became; it just is, unchangeable. There can be no higher dimension in which it can be built or changed in time, as that leads to a regress. Whatever has a beginning is not the Basis.

3ab. It is not breakable, for its has no parts to be broken into.

3aba. It is ever; it never goes away; it just is, unchangeable.

3b. The Basis is made of itself as existence itself, for lack of anything specific to call it. We might call it energy.

3ba. There isn’t anything more fundamental to compare it to.

3c. It is not embedded in some larger extent (space) nor in some longer duration (time), for there isn’t anything outside of or before the Basis (or it wouldn’t be the Basis, anyway).

3d. The Basis has no choice but to be; no option whatsoever. It cannot not be. There is no ‘luck’ to it; it is ever in the right place at the right time, place and time being of emergent features to us.

3da. There is no point at which any set direction or design could have been imparted to it; so, its form and what it does must be of necessity.

3e. The Basis, being non composite, cannot be a system or a mind. Thus, progression/transformation is expected to be slow, and its accomplishments turn out to be numbingly slow to us.

3ea. It appears that all that happens could not have been foreseen.

3eaa. Brute force is all that’s left.

3eaaa. Arrangements have come to be a workable universe, to us.

3f. High complexity arrives much later / far upward of the fundamental Basis. Proof: It took billions of years for life and us to form. This long yardstick sticks in the throat, and yet it is so.

3fa. Evidently, there are no short cuts of ‘magic’; natural processes have to churn, and even with the right conditions, plus evolution, they still have to churn, requiring optimal conditions, such as near extinctions at the right time. If they fail, to us, well, there are always other planets that might bear life.

3fb. If one Big Bang doesn’t amount to anything workable, then, since there can be one Bang there can be another.

3g. It is an error to not accept that what we have could just be so, requiring that some way Larger Existence needs be responsible for our lessor existence, and that the larger Existence can just be, throwing away this golden template after only one usage, suddenly no longer requiring a LARGER for the Larger to come from. This error is called “begging the question” by posing an even larger question pretending to be an answer.

3ga. There isn’t much worse than the religious who dishonestly state things as if they are truth and fact, given that ‘faith’ is an honest word, but worse there is, indeed, when such as what they state from page one of the Bible is outright wrong, for man was not made as is, immutable, a few thousand years ago, but evolved, from one tree of life, with the species having not been made separately, plus Earth is not the center of All, as fixed, nor is the sky a dome, and more.

3gb. I don’t state that there is no ‘God’ for sure, as that would be dishonest, but rather say that that it’s not established and so I don’t have anything to work with. ‘Faith’ doesn’t provide anything, as its definition honestly indicates. I have provided reasons why a Supernatural isn’t likely, and another reason is upcoming.

3h. What we have as life in the world is neither the best nor the worst that could be, but a workable average of features that cannot all be maximized. Read a big city newspaper if you dare.

3ha. Example: We survived not in spite of our violence but because of it. Even our cooperation was born out of the need to better our hunts or wars. If we could just erase our aggressive tendencies then perhaps some of our zest for life would disappear, too, as a side effect. Many things are interwoven, and at least there is somewhat of a balance, even if it is a shaky one.

3i. We have not been around that long, and may not last, but what we see is what we got and have, and that’s it. If only there was some ‘magic’ to be applied at large by some Intangible to make it better.

3ia. There can’t be extra-, super-, intangible, etc., for they would still have to speak the language of the tangible and exchange energy with it.

3j. The eternalness of the Basis is not in time, such as that it has no earliest event/memory in an endless regression, but is timeless, full, all-at-once, and unchanging at large. Evidently, and surely, there can be perturbations within in.

3k. Nor is it infinite in the sense that it has a spacial ever going on that can be capped as complete, but is spaceless, having but its relations via its arrangements providing a self-made scale.


4. The Basis encompasses a lot, not a little. Proof: the Universe is incredibly large, containing seemingly near endless amounts of stuff.

4a. This ‘extravagance’ of material needs be, of necessity, as all aspects of the Basis have to be, to some extent, at least.

4aa. There is no difficulty for humongous amounts of stuff to be.


5. What is in the Universe spans a great range from the larger to the smaller, relative to us who are near the mid-point, more or less.

5a. Some aggregates in the Universe are quite large, such as stars, their size apparently limited to some certain possible size just before they would have to collapse into a black hole.

5b. The smallest that we can hope to measure—the Planck length, is indeed very minuscule to us.

5c. It’s as if the near endless largest and the near infinitesimal smallest provide for a finite unity at their center, but this is only a speculation to be worked on.


6. All that is and all that goes on is of the Basis, and this is probably why we’re curious as to its nature. Some may be disappointed in not finding a great complexity sitting there.

6a. Still, in a way, the simple Basis can be thought of as great, although it is small and has to be existent, and so it didn’t win a contest or earn its place. It’s in the only place at the only time, and even this as a base existent without space or time. Nevertheless, it is great in its own forced way because everything of its higher arrangements is of/from it.


7. Events keep on going on, at least so far, with no stops or repeating loops that we can detect.

7a. The only constant of the Basis is that it makes for change in appearances. It’s stillness is apparently not possible.

7aa. Time shows as change in appearances in the order of succession.

7ab. Space shows as order of coexistent appearances in relation to one another.


8. All that happens of the Basis is as real as the Basis, for there is only the Basis.

8a. We can assign degrees to denote what is more and more higher as more and more complex, sometimes calling these properties emergent, but at the end of the day what is of the Real is real, too, for it happens, and this is even if the happenings are a re-presentatation, such as via the brain, which is actually the only ‘via’, anyway.


9. There is consistency in nature’s development, and in ours, too, in going from the simpler to the more complex.

9a. We see that a few simple, lowest, atomic elements form right away, and protons make for stars, which produce the rest of the lower atomic elements, and, when stars explode, produce the higher elements, which coalesce into molecules and planets, on some of which primitive cells develop, and can come life, which can then evolve, etc.

We’re constructed from the stuff of stars’ grand,
Through life’s history recorded in strands
Of DNA, both recent and older,
The parts conducting, to play as a band.

Bio-electric-chemicals grow,
Through metabolism, through our road show,
Experiences and inclinations
Forming the life expression that we know.

All’s thanks to Death’s prolonged sifting of ‘dies’,
Of the rest from the best, silly from wise,
The pointless from the pointed—selection.
Oh, through ink-black rivers we had to rise!

Life’s birthright, long signed by time, dust, and death,
Doth also serve, for the Earth’s living quests,
As an epitaph: RIP; time wears,
The tips of the strands rip, tear; dust is left.

9b. In us, our neural networks vote for what thoughts and actions become, from what we have become up to that moment.


10. There can be no such events as ‘random’, that is, outputs of changes in appearances becoming not of anything, that is, without regard to what is there, as input, that is, coming, rather, from Nothing.

10a. The determinism of what must be related to what or what must affect what is the price paid for consistency, and so “whatever will be will be” in nature and us. As much as it has a bad taste, that’s the only way it can be, given that there can no ‘random’, plus that if there were a ‘random’ it wouldn’t help, and would actually hurt. The will cannot be free of itself.

10aa. True that quantum measurements are indeterminate, such that we must resort to probability; however, what really happens or is the state that we can’t get at or measure is still of determinism.

10b. What good is the necessarily determined life which can be no other way?

We still get to experience it, plus our consistency gives us a fine start on our continuance/survival; however, we can’t really yet layer on motive to What IS.

10c. Why do humans express themselves in a spectrum from the very good to very bad, and in-between, plus with so much apparent nonsense?

They have to reflect the wide ranging ingredients of the human recipe. Call it ‘diversity’.

10d. What about that they could have and should have done better in some way?

They didn’t or won’t or can’t, and that is the proof that there are no ‘ifs’; the actuality at the time trumps all ‘ifs’, just as it did for us when we indulged in some excesses earlier in life.

What if Hitler had won WWII? He didn’t, and could not have, given the actual circumstances.

10e. We impose local boundaries or try to experiment in isolation in order to get some ideas of local cause and effect, which is fine for what it does, but all that goes on is rather a continuation/transformation of What IS as the Basis. It’s not like anything else can stick its nose into things, but if you really want that then it’s just another input.


11. An ongoing identity to that which appears to continue in its semblance is provided by the mind; in actuality, things, and even us, are not identical moment to moment, with little deaths of parts and little birth additions of parts happening all the time, as atoms coming and going.

11a. The big death differs only in degree; our atoms may go on to constitute new life of whatever level or end up only as dust. That’s the zen of now and then and when.


12. All we ever ‘see’ is the inside of the mind, which is, of course, a process of the brain called ‘consciousness’.

12a. How could there be a brain process producing consciousness from correlated neural substrates of material?

Well, there is, and we can stop consciousness via anesthesia to the brain cells. It’s not a ‘hard’ problem, for surely the brain understands its own invented symbolic language, the only representation it (as being us) ever ‘sees’. Consciousness is the brain’s perception of itself.

Consciousness mediates thoughts versus outcomes,
And is distributed all over the body,
From the nerve spindles to the spine to the brain—
A way to actionize before moving.

Conscious Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of our lives playing in our minds,
Granting us a sobering distance from it.


13. Ha, thirteen is unlucky. Actually, I’m reserving this spot for future developments.


14. What’s a best guess for the actual implementation scheme behind the phenomenal messages that we get, meaning what is the messenger as the noumena?

14a. You are noting that our map is not guaranteed to be the actual territory, although the brain’s fine painting upon that part of reality coming into the senses must have some amount of best-can-do faithful rendering, although it adds things on for usefulness. Sensing waves may be useful for bats but for us turning a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum wave frequencies into the visible colors seems to serve better that us seeing the jumble and noise of all sorts of waves to then take more time to sort out as to what’s what.

14b. Our instruments detects wider spectrum than we can, but, still, we have to made guesses about the nature of reality’s workings that are not fully informed, as we cannot fully get to the noumenal.

14c. Some might say that the message, say, of music, contains its essence, and that who cares if its implementation is of a live band, a radio, or an mp3 player.

Well, it’s true that an implementation that doesn’t really make a difference is really no difference, but if we can guess at the nature of the Basis some more, given the constraints of necessity that we’ve already identified, then, well, that’s at least something to do, and it might get somewhere all the way someday.

14d. What if we’ve run out of the primal necessities and get to the point that we only exist because this universe, out of many, is suitable for us to have formed?

Could be, and then that’s that, all we are all the more afar from utilizing more necessity, stranded from knowing all, not that we can know all even if this is the only Universe; however, if there has to be a multiverse then there is the necessity that any and all variations must come to pass, so that would be knowledge; however, the multiverse is hard to get at, and all we have going for it is to look at the fossil Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) for indications of baby bubble universes bumping.

14e. OK, we can always come up with something, maybe someday, but what good is the understanding that we can’t completely know everything?

Well, even that tells us something—that we can hardly be blamed for not knowing.

Cripes, how do you keep obtaining truths even when all seems to be lost?

That’s the power of philosophy.


15. Fine. What’s a best guess for how the Basis works?

15a. We have found discreteness in nature, which is called the ‘quantum’, more or less, which disproves any notion of real continuity or continuous motion, but the quantum march on and can serve as an approximation of continuity. Zeno showed all this with his paradoxes based on continuity. The universe is digital, not analog.

15b. So, Relativity’s continuum emerges at large numbers, but its assumption of continuity is probably what causes some of it solution to go to infinity, which shows the incompleteness of it. This is not terrible, but helpful or us to join it with quantum mechanics, in the form of quantum gravity, but this hasn’t been done yet, so we’ll continue to guess.

15c. Couldn’t there be both of the whole and of the particulars, such as our left and right brain hemispheres represent?

Sure, as multiplicity in unity, such as a grouping order within a symmetry, for the Basis is a whole and complete and yet internally there is change/transformation.

15d. The particulars are relational to one another, and that’s all there is. Everything else such as space or spacetime, charge, time, motion, and whatnot would be a consequence of the relations, some more directly and some more emergently at much higher levels of complexity.

15e. What else besides the guess of particulars doing something as a default necessity?

There is the guess of the only other default that something like ‘possibility’ or ‘capability’ is fundamental, granting anything and everything, given the necessity of the fundamental having no set direction (thus it being everything), which we might even combine with the particulars arranging into anything, too.

Plus, we’d have to dispense with something substantially actual as being ever, replacing it something more nebulous like potential or possibility. We’ll have to see as we go along through some musty corridors and dark alleys.

I’ll follow every single avenue,
Whether it’s brightly lit or a dark alley,
Exploring one-ways, no-ways, and dead-ends,
Until cornered where the truth is hiding.

15f. Continuing, I rely on Carlos Rovelli and others who, in the quest for quantum gravity, have revisited some things, putting them in italics…

In order to have a concrete example of a system of classical point particles, the substantivalist will argue that these particles occupy points in absolute space, and that the distances between these spatial points induce distances between the particles. The particles therefore possess their distance relations by virtue of the geometrical relations antecedently present in the space in which they are contained.

By contrast, the relationist will hold that the particles possess distances with respect to each other directly, i.e. without the intervention of an underlying space, and that Newtonian space only furnishes a mathematical representation of these physical distance relations.

In the case of field theories, the relationist has to assume that elementary field-parts possess spatial relations with respect to each other, and that there are coincidence relations between the parts of different fields. It has to be noted that this characterization lacks bite if no restrictions are imposed on what counts as a physical field. For example, if the metrical field of special relativity were accepted as a bona-fide physical field, the above characterization would qualify special relativity as a fully relational theory; and a similar manoeuvre could be performed in the case of Newtonian theory.

Newton’s absolute space or Minkowski spacetime would become physical systems themselves, so that the state of the world would become fully describable in terms of relations between physical systems. But this is clearly not what the relationist intends: for him Newtonian absolute space or Minkowski absolute spacetime are very different from physical systems.

Leibniz already provided a criterion here, by stipulating that physical ‘‘substances’’ should not only act but should also be acted upon — his relationism is meant to be about the relations between such substances. Newtonian space and Minkowski spacetime clearly are no substances in Leibniz’s sense, since they constitute an inert background that cannot be changed. This obviates the just-mentioned strategy by means of which classical mechanics or special relativity could be construed as relational.

However, in the general theory of relativity the metrical field does become dynamical, so that within this theory the state of the universe may be considered as completely specified by the coincidence relations between physical systems.

The plausibility of this viewpoint obviously depends on whether one is prepared to go along with accepting the metrical field as a physical system that is on a par with the matter fields. If one does, general relativity appears as the vindication of relationalism. If one does not, general relativity appears as not amiable to relationalism after all: the theory allows possible universes in which there are no matter fields, so that in those universes there is only empty spacetime.

It follows that in general relativity spacetime cannot be reduced to matter fields and their relations — at least not always. This may be taken as a vindication of substantivalism with respect to space and time. However, within the context of general relativity the difference between these two options might be considered slight and first of all semantical, depending as it does on whether we consider the metrical field as a physical field or not.

Rovelli infers that as a consequence space and time have disappeared from physics. What he means is that space and time no longer enter as independent entities, on top of what is already determined by all the coincidence relations between the dynamical fields. The spacetime structure is already present in the structure of the fields and their interrelations.

Reality keeps itself in place. Objects interact with other objects, and this is reality. Reality is the net of these interactions. We do not need an external entity to hold this net. We do not need Space, to hold the universe. Maybe the Copernican revolution is finally being completed.

The picture of a Universe changing from one global instant to the next is incompatible with what we know about the world.
GR inherits from SR the melting of space and time into spacetime. Therefore the relational nature of space revealed by GR extends to time as well.

It follows that in GR there is no background spacetime and therefore in particular no time along which things happen. GR teaches us that we must abandon the idea that the flow of time is an ultimate aspect of reality. The best description we can give of the world is not in terms of time evolution. The dynamics of GR itself cannot be cleanly described in terms of evolution in time.

Proper time S depends on the gravitational field, which is influenced by the interaction with many systems. Typically, harmonic oscillations are isochronous in S. Therefore, S like the distance d described in the previous section, is just an observable feature of the gravitational field, which is particularly convenient to use as a stable reference in our environment, when describing the motion of objects assuming the gravitational field fixed. The dynamics of the gravitational field itself, on the other hand, cannot be naturally described in terms of evolution in any well-defined preferred time variable.

Temporality is an artifact of our largely incomplete knowledge of the state of the world, not an ultimate property of reality.

There you have it, more or less, to keep it humble and simple.


Since we all become of this universe
Should we not ask who we are, whence we come?
Insight clefts night’s skirt with its radiance:
The Theory of Everything shines through!

Down… where the mind whirls round and round,
As the ear draws forth the echoing sound,
As the eye sees the light, and of the dark the fright—
We brave the crypt of cause in the depths of night,

Beyond all death, despair, love, and sorrow,
Past yesterday, today, and tomorrow…
To the fathoms of the cryptic,
Where substance slept with arithmetic,

Toward the spark yet nursed by embers,
To the first and last the Cosmos remembers—
To seek the gem that shines—the wealth of mines,
The jewels so treasured by thee and thine.

We guide thee; we must carry thee;
We’re illumination beside thee.
Fear not the proof—
It’s the beauty of the truth.

You do not just live and love; you are life and love.
They do not flee on, just ahead, unreachable,
Leaving you but to lean and drink their wind.
You are the universe turned around to view itself.

Zest, desire, caring, and other feelings sweet
Are your lightning feet for triumphant feats.
All manner of shapes haunt the wilds of the mind,
Just waiting and asking to be tamed as sane.

You’re the golden chalice to the wine that flows;
Drink, drink!
You’re the live, resultant existence that knows.
Think, think!

Thoughts fly in the mind like birds wing the wind;
Imagination is the atmosphere wherein ideas are born
And borne on the waves of the sea in which one sees,
Thereupon sprouting from the wings into actions seized.

All from stardust begins and ends in thee.
The mighty wrecks of the elements are strewn
Across the universe like chaff from the harvest,
Much of the Cosmos still a vast wasteland.

The timeless-formless contains every path,
Though as useless as a library of All books;
For its sum of information is zero,
But one of these possible avenues became ours.

In succession due does the large give way and rule
To the ever smaller, the tiny, the minuscule,
And onto the negligibly insufficient ‘awol’
Of not really much of anything there at all.

We are as beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again by its means—
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though frames of time that quench life’s thirst.

Oh, that which ‘IS’ the near imperishable,
Its flame of beauty still inextinguishable,
Deathless, ne’er created, ungenerated,
Forever celebrated as immutable!

We have often asked why some space exists,
Why it permits the countless to briefly persist
On Mother Earth, nourished under Father Sky—
All of those finite sparks that light and die.

And well before that, once upon a storied time,
We simply made it all up, with tales and rhyme,
In place of any physical observations
Or of any revealing experimentations.

Now, the surprise: Existence trumps essence!
Essence pales, in stature, to existence,
Even before we know it, which now we do;
‘Twas what had to be; life eclipses knowing.

Essence’s knowing is anti-climax;
It wasn’t fancy and complicated,
Nor could it have been—it was the simplest.
‘Hereabouts’ is where the excitement is.

A purpose?

There is nothing external to What IS to assign it purpose. Purpose is thus local and self-assigned by local processes, and from there it can’t extend to be known in non-connected places afar, much less be reported beyond the All.

scottchat: We exist, that is proof of first cause. Since we know the first cause exists and since it is the first cause by definition it cannot have beginning. Not only do we exist but everything around us exists and came from a first cause which I choose to call the creative force in an attempt not to hark back to an omnipotent being. The fact that we are here is scientific proof of the creative force and is therefore not based on faith.

First, I’ll put some of my own interpretation, since it helps me sort out my theory, yet your ‘creative’ aspect won’t suffer.

Since Nothing or Nonexistence cannot be, much less be productive, What IS is all there, in its existence, as a done deal, and all there is, as ever, by necessity, since it can’t have an opposite. This kind of ‘eternity’ that I call ‘ever’ is not in the sense that it has no earliest event or ‘memory’, causing a regression problem of there being no ‘earliest’, but in the sense of it being timeless and unchanging as a whole, but with, obviously, transformations/rearrangements within it, for there is no other source for change.

So, just as it couldn’t have come from Nothing, it doesn’t go along creating more things, ex nilhilo, step by step, as from more and more Nothing. It just is, and was never created or begun. It is, still, the source of all that goes on, and in that sense it is still creative, as in arranging into us.

We are already as a part of What IS, with no part that isn’t, so, it it’s not like we are not it and apart from it and thus it has to use us for it to sense or feel. It’s as some might say that “We are the universe come to life”. So, we are it and it is us, with no ‘trying’ for that to be, as if it had a ‘drive’ or a mind.

Questions:

Positor:
That Nothing cannot Be is clearly true by definition,
But ruling out false Somethings is a tougher proposition.

It’s either an Everything, where anything goes,
Or the only default monad, to choose as ToEs.

Are Nature's laws the only ones that Logic can permit?
Is this great teeming universe the only perfect fit?

No, since by varying many of the parameters keyed,
Although not by a whole lot, other forms might be.

Does every counterfactual state involve a contradiction?
Can we invoke Equations to distinguish fact from fiction?

I’ve left out how something ‘ever’, never made,
Can be a feat accomplished, as already made.
(But this is covered since something has to be.)

If Being is a partless One, can it beget a Many?
And how can Time and Change affect us, if there isn't any?

The objective world simply is, it does not happen.
Only to the gaze of my consciousness,
crawling upward along the life line of my body,
does a section of this world come to life
as a fleeting image in space
which continuously changes in time.
— Wehl


sponge: Well, since you asked I did notice you dismiss consciousness as a product of the brain when I don't think that's yet proved or accepted as a fact. I don't argue about our consciousness being a result of brain function but that isn't quite the same thing as a 'product' of brain function.

Close enough for government work, as they say, as result or product or a process, getting consciousness to happen, but at least we have it surrounded, as needing the brain, which is good enough.

The easy problem of consciousness:


1. All one ever 'sees' is the the brain's renderings.

2. The brain processes incoming information upwards/sidewards/feedback through its various lower and successively higher modules, via its own invented symbolic language (via evolution), ending with a result something like quailia or such as its unified result.

3. Surely the brain understands its own internal language and expresses it accordingly in what we call consciousness/globally, the brain merely perceiving itself.

4. So there is no hard problem. It's all of the processing and of the cascade of internal symbols unto the highest symbol of a result as quail or whatnot, the brain well knowing its own notation, making 'us' to be the brain.

(5. The physical gives rise to both the mental and the non-mental, if we wish such a classification, but really there's no brain-body problem because the brain is an organ of the body too.)


sponge: By your own argument, you say that, although colour and sound are the result of brain function, the fact that we are given senses to take in the light/sound waves must mean that there is something out there to be sensed.

Why could this argument not apply to consciousness itself, with brain function designed to respond in some way to 'something out there' which produces consciousness?

Anything's possible, but I'll use probability/logic to guess that experiences are made in the brain so they play a big role in the becoming aware of them in consciousness.


Another loop hole:

On life becoming:

A multiverse is such as anything and everything possible goes, obviating the fine-tuning problem by rendering many outcomes, if that way is the only way.

The one universe type leaves open its doings, somewhat, to our guesses, but must also be able to produce an arrangement for life, among others, if it is the only universe.

That life is even possible, by either way, suggests that somehow the capability for life to form is a necessity, but why? Why should the capability for life have not been impossible?

Is it that complexity will always necessarily become from any necessarily simple, non composite ingredients, and that the paces of complexity will always be capable of forming life when the right conditions arrive, as they must, eventually, although not at all quickly, as we note for our reality, it having taken billions of years?

But, then, still, there is always the need for stars to form to make the atomic elements, which requires gravity, too, with the stars having to last long enough for life to form. So, then, gravity needs be a necessity for some reason, such as its negative potential energy having to balance the positive kinetic energy of matter as some kind of conservation requirement.

Well, life is here, as 50-80 million species, plus plant life, and so it was 'easy', on Earth, given 4.1 billion years or whatever, plus one day, which is today, and thus it was inherent all along, as potential. A whole lot of humongous non-life of dust and rocks in space must have been inherent, too, by necessity. I asked my friend at NASA why there is so much stuff out there in the universe, and he said it was so there would be inertia. He's going to be working on Jupiter, which he also said, so I guess I'll have to wait for him to get back to find out more.


Positor: How can place and time – and all the heterogeneous "stuff" we experience – emerge from something non-composite? If the Basis contains the 'seeds' of all this diverse material, surely it must be somehow heterogeneous (composite) itself?

Elemental things have to be something with no internal structure and no components, so they cannot have any parts, which is what makes them basic and fundamental. They could be called monads/bits/energy-points, etc.


Emergence

Almost everything in this universe is emergent. There can be no higher, external program for life, consciousness, fundamental particles, or even space and time, because it’s already understood how these higher features emerge from simpler things.

From these ever changing, simple energy points or bits, patterns emerge, stabilize, as emergence, and so forth, making most of reality to be layers of emergences. As each level of interaction, processing, or computation inserts itself as a reality, another level of features can emerge beyond it. This is not a purposeful process toward any goal or meaning; it’s of an underlying tendency for the simpler to become more complex. All processing realities work ‘creatively’ by generating emergence.

What can emerge from a cloud of homogenous gas as it forms a solar system is a vast array of complex structures, including all of human achievement!

As we go up through the levels, similar things of a type are less and less the same. Protons are more interchangeable than carbon atoms, and so forth. Higher level emergences are much more fragile. We can be infected by viruses; protons can’t.

Properties of more elemental things such as protons are more stable as made from computations/processes being repeated many times over, each time yielding the same measurable result because both the inputs (quarks and more?) and processes are completely interchangeable. The same for electrons. Of course, then they can do the emergent thing and form atoms.

There are other clues, too, for the emergence nature of space and time. Relativity has shown that the speed of light is a more basic concept than space and time, since the latter two must adjust to keep the speed of light constant no matter the observer’s speed. QM non-locality indicates the primacy of information over space. The holographic principle indicates that information is probably primary over an extra dimension of space, but this isn’t so firm. Time emerges locally since simultaneity is relative, which I redundantly add.

String theory is very dependent on space and quantum mechanics is dependent on time. New versions will force them to be independent of space and time, known as background independent, in order to get to quantum gravity.


Positor: Accomplishments, progression and transformation are forms of change; and if the Basis encompasses all existence, such change must be inherent in the Basis itself.

Yes, difference is key, and so now we know that it is a necessity for Something basic/elemental to ever be in flux as change/difference, such as it being energy, or whatever, but energy is often suggested as not only having change but somehow being change. Or one could also look at it as qubits of information that can be 0, 1, or both. It hardly matters, for energy has been shown to be equivalent to information. At any rate, the nature of these elementals is fixed and unchanging, for they are timeless, which also obviates debates about cause, for cause can only occur in time. Time becomes of the elemental states’ contents changing in relation to one another.

To see the fundamental as it really is, without our interpretations, without emergences, would be as a meaningless jumble of not even noise.


Positor: If it could not have been foreseen (even with perfect knowledge of prior conditions?), it seems that what the Basis 'does' must be contingent, not necessary.

Well, 'foreseen' to me is such that an All-Mighty could do, but 'necessity' is what could be no other way, not contingent onanything, such as if there is only one default or as in determinism.


Positor: Is "brute force" a property of the Basis, or is it something separate?

'Brute force' is having no plan imparted from there being no outside or before the Basis/All. In photosynthesis, electrons follow every possible path, and by this achieve a 95% efficiency, as a brute force happening, given no foreseeing.


More on Consciousness

Consciousness is dependent on the ability to process information, and so it can only exist in process type realities, meaning those with emergence of higher and higher cascades of complexities that have inputs and outputs, which types are can also called computable, meaning as/of an information process.

Survival is what evolution is all about and intelligence enhances survivability, and so consciousness evolved to enhance intelligence by monitoring and modeling it.

Consciousness, then, is different from intelligence because it has an internal focus, it adding the ability to analyze the intelligence system’s internals, and is such of a self-referential loop through which any intelligent entity monitors its goings on, this being akin to the brain receiving itself.

Still, though, aside from intense learning, such as how to drive or entering unmapped areas, the conscious mind trots along behind, post rationalizing actions. (By the time 'we' know or sense anything, it is in the past, the processing of it already a done deal.)


Wrap up of emergence:

The basis for emergent features is contained within What IS, given that’s all there is, and so What IS cannot be contingent on any provided laws; therefore the source of the emergences can be observed and explained from within. What IS, then, runs on itself. There can be no completed infinities, so infinity is impossible; therefore, What IS, must by definition have no external context.

Mathematical and physics laws do not have prior existences. They are collections of simple processes and repeated events. The laws of thermodynamics emerge, rather than attach themselves as a given, from reality simply based on the statistical mechanics of the movement of gas molecules.

What is truly embodied are/is basic non-emergent features, which thus have to be of necessity, such as that there is no alternative to existence and that the truly basic cannot have parts, which is a forcing, default situation, and is also the best way I can put it. It is simplicity itself and thus not all that interesting.

What becomes interesting is that “More is different”, due to the relations of connections. One energy point or one neuron can’t do a darn thing.


The Speed of Light

The speed of light can’t change because it is of the elemental Planck quantum, the fastest that a bit/energy-level can flip/change in a ‘before to an ‘after’, and so the speed of light limit means that we cannot interact in ‘real time’ with parts of the universe much further away than the moon, but, truly, there is no ‘real time’ interaction but only near to that, effectively, at close range. While the sun is as it was eight minutes ago and the as it was a second or two ago, our soda can is as it was a few hundred milliseconds ago, meaning that all that is sensed/known is of the past; events are all done by the time they register.

By necessity, there are basic monads or quantums, whatever they actually are as existences dependent only on themselves, as discrete, granting no true continuum, but only an approximation of one, and so their small but real amount of finiteness makes it necessary that everything cannot happen all at once, given that there must be an interval. Things process/compute themselves a ‘jillion’ times a second, which is very fast, and so the speed of light is a quick speed, relative to our psychological time. In sum, the speed of light is the speed at which results can be made and so it is the top speed at which things can happen and get reported. Gravity can slow it down, though, along with other interactions, perhaps.

There can be no continua because there can be no infinities, such as the infinitely divisible physical. Necessity strikes again!


More questions:

sponge: Either way, consciousness is still an open-ended question to work on.

Either way, we may, if we're still around, evolve to undreamed of heights, since the universe has trillions of years left. We are among the first of the pioneers, as an original, unaugmented 'wildlife'. 90+ percent of the planets that will form are yet to do so.

Philosophers already verge an an extra level of consciousness when they can spectate at a second level, such as "How do you feel about the way you feel?" or "What are your beliefs about your beliefs."

In the future there will be super-consciousness capabilities, such as "How do feel about how you feel about the way you feel?"

We're not going to become gods but will be way, way up there.

sponge: I can't just choose what my logic tells me, I want proof!

You'll have to choose, if you do, what your estimated probabilities tell you. 'Proof' is that the All has to run by itself, with no outside impetus possible, and another, different, 'proof' is that what is here now existent in the high level was inherent in the simpler, lower phase.

Happy choosing!

True existence versus a faux existence that is still something, plus the be-all and end-all of Everything

Perhaps ‘existence’ can be defined a bit differently from ‘something’, as kind of a subset of ‘something’ of a false existence.

After we hopefully read Krauss’s ‘A Universe from Nothing’, we sadly come away with the physicist’s Nothing as referred to as the quantum foam (something), the vacuum (that isn’t empty), or the zero-point-energy (that indeed has energy), but it leaves intact that Nothing cannot be.

This quantum foam, as I’ll refer to it, is always there, ever as something basic, jittery, non-zero, and indefinite, because QM must be fuzzy, and certainly it cannot go to zero (which is like an unreachable boundary as a non-existent absolute, so to speak), plus that ‘zero’ is a definite number/state. We are also thankful that Nothing cannot arise, for then nothing would happen from then on, not that our existence isn’t but much ado about nothing.

The quantum foam, though, doesn’t seem to contain any information/processing as it just sits there as the something/sum-thing of everything, and some might even claim that everything and nothing have the same information content, namely zero.

True existence would seem to be that which can persist somewhat, and even go on, as a process/computation. With the understanding that what is physical is informational, and vice-versa, we might newly and more narrowly define ‘existence’ as the ability to process information or, identically, as computation, this requiring that the physical/info relates to and interacts with other info/physical, for example, these interacting/relating qubits/quantums providing for the emergence of a local time, and then more, unto what we have.

We might even see true existence itself, then, as an emergence, it not being fundamental but of the processes of information interacting. Of course, we are dancing close to the edge of reason here, for existence becomes tenuous and evaporates as all emergent properties must do when we look at them too closely from so far away.

Isolated or unrelating qubits/particles/quantums popping in and out of the quantum foam wouldn’t seem to be able to do anything on their own, and so we might say that they don’t truly have existence by our new definition, since existence then only appears as a feature of reality once interactions occur, it having no real meaning otherwise, being faux.

So, Descartes amended: “I process, therefore I exist.”

Now you have to explain why there should be information and why it should compute as an information process.

How the heck should I know!

Well, guess.

I can’t truly say ‘necessity’, but can speculate that perhaps things could not be any other way—that a quntum/qubit is the most basic thing which has no cause but just is, having to consist of only itself.

Was information created during inflation?

Cripes, why are you asking me? Do I look like Guth?

It’s your theory.

Yes, but I get hints from all over, too, and they didn’t say.

How does the encoding of complex emergences work?

Do you think I know everything about computation! Yes, I worked at IBM but I took a lot of long lunches.

How do processes run on themselves without a substrate to run on?

Oh, man, the stress of hard information backed by electric signals versus soft information based only on itself; I’m going off to jump into the ocean. Give me some easier questions.

So, the fake nothingness is merely absence of of an information process, as the absence of space and time that emerge from information and information processing?

Yes, it’s as the quantum foam, a timeless, dimensionless sea of quantum fluctuations. It’s is kind of a shade of a nebulous sub-existence, of hazy, independent things that are always popping in and out at the Planck level, virtually, this being the natural state of ‘next to nothingness’, as the necessarily simple basis, since an absolute nothingness is not capable of existing—as an impossible Heisenberg non certainty of uncertainty. Sorry,that the best I can do; I’m only human.

Could a fluctuation in the quantum foam, a Planck bubble, become another big bang?

Yes, but I hope it doesn’t happen around here, but, thankfully, the probability is very low, but not zero.

How come there has to be a quantum foam?

Um, hubba-hubba, come on!

Necessity is the Mother of All, isn’t it?

Oh, yeah; I forgot. There has to be something; it isn’t optional. Any regression must ultimately reverse back towards simpler and final ‘causes’ that are uncaused, and so this ‘something’ is not prescriptive or directional.

Are we in a simulation?

Not that again! Well, I just read that we should look for glitches to find out, but I’m sticking with Planck sized quantum bits as qubits as a kind of noise.

Noise can do something?

A qubit flipping or changing in some way might impact upon its neighbors, beginning a processes of information changing itself and its surroundings by changing the relationships between units of information, as the most basic events we can conceive of, the events leading to other events and thus setting up a system of causality, of which emergences become.

Really?

Maybe.

I’ll bite.

A fundamental quantum/bit can only change once per Planck time, which change/flip is instantaneous, the new state lasting a Planck time before the next flip can occur, not that it takes time but that it sort of does since something is happening.

I see, almost.

Therefore, things experience time ticking along in Planck times or multiples of them. By observing information from many sources we develop the feeling of an irreversible time flowing. The universe is flooded with information about changes that happened in other places all the way back to the big bang.

What was before the big bang?

Oh, cripes! It’s foam all the way down, but there’s no real foam, per say.

What!

The so-called ‘foam’ consists of Planck level entities popping in and out of their faux existence, but it is these short lived entities that exist briefly rather than the foam itself, which could be described better as having the potential to cause existence.

Aha, I always thought about Fundamental Possibility/Potential, for it requires nothing else; just the same to support it!

Time, space, stuff, change, and form are real-ized from
The Fundamental Possibility,
Becoming the penultimate reality,
One possible from the probabilities.

Our reality comes not from Nothing,
But exists always as possibility,
One that amounts to something workable,
Among all in superposition.

No form of a penultimate realness
Could exist alone before the rest, since
Everything is quantum-there-all-at-once;
For what could make the choice among many?

Nor comes it from an absolute Nothing,
Since there can be no such ‘thing’ at all,
So, since either way is impossible,
Fundamental Possibility IS.

So, all this is due to Ron Janec?

Well, yes and no, for all is of determinism, but Ron hinted at more than nothing but less than existence if reality had a beginning, which got me thinking, as what we both had to do, given what/who we’ve become.

There still has to be a something; no choice, with no beginning.

Yes, so we didn’t give him otherwise, but he didn’t mention it that way, but as more like “before existence”, and so we’ve given him the false not-quite-existence that doesn’t do anything as before the more-true-existence that does something, making for the real existence to sort of have a beginning.

Have you ever considered a career in politics?

No, for I like universals over arbitrary instances of any old narrative, among so many narratives would do just the same, and I shy away from the ‘many blood-sucking insects’ as poli-tics.

Now what?

We wait for the Universe to give us replies in the form of post responses, and in the meanwhile we go have a good time somewhere around here.

Where is ‘here’?

I’m off duty, but you could start a thread; however, ‘here’ will probably end up being somewhere in the netherworld of the quantum foam that doesn’t have a ‘where’ or a ‘when’, from which we are here now and now here, at our emergent level, from a timeless nowhen in the middle of nowhere.

Life is a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows,
Stretched in time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.

Perhaps I'll try wading through your post in full later, but for now I'll just ask, "what necessity"?

‘’Necessity’, here, for something/existence, which there is, indeed, due to us having experiences, is what couldn’t be any other way, for there is no ‘otherwise’ of a contrast class of nonexistence or non being, indicating that existence can’t have a ‘coming from’ the impossible nonexistence that has no properties and so cannot even be meant, much less be productive; thus making existence/something with no opposite and no ‘coming from’ having to be ‘ever’ as ‘timeless’ with no beginning, as causeless, and so it’s there/here without an option not to be, as the only default.

I say ‘ever’ and ‘timeless’ and ‘no beginning’ rather than just ‘eternal’ to mean that its ‘eternalism' is of the nature of an ‘is’ as in a present tense as an unchanging whole at large as a complete done deal rather than a history of development with an impossible ‘no earliest event’ or as a Being with no earliest recollection in an an impossible infinite memory, as that kind of ‘eternal’ is set in time, whereas the fundamental Something, being all there is, doesn’t have any higher dimension above it in which it’s nature could be changed or built, because then, if we allow this extension, and thus, will then need more, by more dimensions, then an infinite regress ensues.

So, then, the timeless aspect is another necessity, and one that is more like a proof to the truth we already had that something had to be. Yes, it’s a bit hard to say, and perhaps someone can improve on my semantics all around.

Just to be sure and safe from those who still say that a lack of anything could have ‘been’, we can grant it merely for sake of argument to see where it goes, and it goes to be that then there still would ’be’ a lack of anything.

A subsequent necessity, then, is that this Something cannot depend on anything but itself, and so it is simple and non composite, this again being only what it could be, with no further parts to depend on, of course. Some see it as the quantum foam that must jitter because a QM zero cannot be since that would be a definite number and QM must be indefinite and fuzzy, or something like that.

That there should be many of these interchangeable monads rather than just one is hard to show, although we already know from the extravagant size of the universe that stuff is easy to come by, making for a known truth without (even needing) a proof, as can often happen through logic, but we still like proofs.

So, then, it is that the ‘simple’, at perhaps the Planck scale, necessarily gives rise to the more and more complex, as emergences, at least in our universe, because it has to, since it does, indicating that processes are going on, some of which take billions of years, further indicating that there are no short cuts to the necessary churning of the process.

Other necessities, in addition to Something, no beginnings and ends, no Nothing, no systems as fundamental, are the impossibility of infinite extents, no ‘random’ outputs from nothing (no inputs), and probably no stillness, since our reality is seen to be ever changing, not getting stuck or going into a loop.

Why not simply say what Exists via Necessity exists BY necessity from an ingrown toenail to a multiverse...but then I was always and proudly remain a philosophical troglodyte.

Something ever; Nothing never!

‘Nothing’ is the lack of anything at all, which cannot have being, since it cannot be. Can two things at least be separated by some small amount of Nothing? No, for then they would be adjacent, since Nothing cannot be (as a spacer). ‘Something’ then, is all in touch with itself, as a whole at large, as might be called continuous (as a further interpretation), even though the apparently lowest Planck sizes within it are discrete (a paradox?).

‘Something’ is of the one thing as it nature of which it can only be, given nothing else beyond it to prescribe its nature. The expression of the basic ‘Something’, which we might call ‘Existence’, is, as we can see, of all kinds of emergences of composite complexities, from quarks and leptons on up through protons to stars to atomic elements to molecules to cells to life to higher lie with brains and consciousness.


Method?

Is the Existence from Something there all at once, as in the timeless eternalism of the block universe, with extant future and past, or is it as in presentism as progressing in time as made anew at every basic ‘now’ from the inputs of the ‘previous now’ that get wholly consumed, with the past all gone and the future not there yet?

In light of the above, how would we classify an information process of qubits that compute Existence?


Information as basic?

Noting an article about the proof of non-locality, one could figure that information has primacy over space.

The information stored in a highly entangled quantum system cannot be accessed/known by interacting with but its individual parts because that information is not stored in the individual parts at all, but only in the correlations among the parts, as relational.

Thus, a quantum bit becomes entangled with its neighbors, and then this grouping gets entangled with another such grouping, and so on, this becoming the stitching/sewing of reality into a fabric as an informational process that serves as a spatial continuity.

The Searchers/Philosophers/Scientists

The young philosopher, born in a cave, remains nameless, for I’m making her up, but she duly represents us all. She feels the dirt on the warm floor and thereby infers the existence of the Earth and its beginning as two pieces of dust sticking together, as well as the sun and all of the universe that must be out there to back it up, unto the basic something having to be ‘ever’.

Well, it might not have been that easy, but answers do come to those who seek, braving the devouring flames consuming their myths from the solutions to the perilous ponderings. The side-quests along the way taking them to many daring adventures, through dimly lit avenues, dark-alleys, dead-ends, one-way streets, and even one-way dead-ends, on which journey they risk never feeling the same again, after the unexpected truth is cornered.

We are the universe come to life, made in its image, of multiplicity within unity, with one holistic brain hemisphere operating in parallel, it joined to the other hemisphere of sequential detail, the holistic side as a floodlight of attention illuminating the whole scene at once, connected to the the detail side which is a spotlight of attention moving linearly through the scene, the two alternating their cyclic reign, as the yin in the yang and the yang in the yin, making for a rounded life.

And now it seems the philosophical universe, as us, has slain blame and shame, those evil stepchildren of the notion of totally free will, for we dared to fight the dragon in its den, where fixed will emerged as pretty much victorious, minimizing, evening out, or crushing ‘randomness’, but we are still delighted to have found another of the great revelations sought, never fearing, as seekers, the universal acid that must ever escape from Pandora’a Box of Truths and eat through our folk wisdom, wishes, and hopes.

We, too, have banished the possibility of Nothing’s existence, as in ‘it’ giving rise to anything, leaving in its wake the Eternal ‘IS’ that has no more choice in being here than we do, for the whole and the parts are in the same boat; yet, ’tis more than that, for we are a part of the ‘IS’ come to life as the ship that sails on the winds of time.

Gone, as well, ‘God’, the Imaginary Fellow cursed for nought, as it turns out, as well as the exposed imposter, ‘Infinity’, who pretended to be an uncapped extent extant all at once, plus, most likely, ‘Stillness’ squashed, which can never conquer change, and so, rather ironically, finally rests in peace, and, finally, the non ‘Beginning’ and ‘End’ of what IS—and its stuff shown to be uncreateable and unbreakable.

And long since have we learned of the greatest thought that anyone ever had, that of Evolution working via natural selection, resulting in endless forms most beautiful, their changes slowly accumulated from one stable platform to the next, sifting out the best from the rest, the wise from the silly, and the pointed from the pointless.

And another notions quashed, too, that of the brain process of consciousness being claimed to suddenly become something in itself floating free around the Cosmos as stand-alone Consciousness, as if a word taken alone from its definition could grant this power such as was also attempted as ‘infinity’. Consciousness helps to visualize action scenarios before committing to them, it extending all the way from the brain to the nerve spindles.

Ah, philosophers, thinkers, and scientists, you are the triad of wise men who heralded the birth of the Age of Revelations and the Downfall of Fantasy, this done whether you like or not what’s being shown to be true.

What, though, is the pleasure to this universal play that we must act out, ever thrust onto the stage, blind to the script, living joyfully through the ups of the highest peaks and painfully in the downs of the lowest valleys?

It is experience, perhaps, that is the reward, for now we as the Cosmos have gained it, be it though we are ever as tourists along for the ride, since we we see is always the past, yet the view is awesome.

What to do? Well, we don’t ever ‘do’; it’s the reverse, the Cosmos does us. We don’t come into the Cosmos; we are of it.

So, the time is ever the present now, with neither a past imperfect nor a future tense, and the place is always right here, right now.

The constraints upon what exists and the implications:

We as life are close to the midpoint of the largest and the smallest that we can surmise, though a bit more so, with a mote of dust being right at the midpoint, and bacteria a bit less so; thus, it appears that the largest-smallest range was conducive to all living entities (and near living ones, without considering bio nano-machines), making it seem to be a necessity.

The material that forms the universe in its massive range is more than just abundant but has an incredibly extravagant amount, to us, making it that there’s no shortage to this stuff, as if even that it’s so easy to come by that any amount of it can be, yet the power/energy behind our amount is what it is now, which isn’t to say that it couldn’t increase, such as that which allows the expansions of the universe as the fuel that ever seems to keep on giving, all this amount of stuff appearing to be of necessity, granting life to at least appear in some places such as our solar system’s Earth. We can conclude that the potential for life was inherent all along.

We wonder about the nature of the basic, minuscule, elementary material, and surely we have gotten down through a few levels of it, if not the bottom, unto quarks and leptons.

It suffices for now, though, as enough to know that the complex composites form from the simpler and simpler, so, it isn’t justified to look in the completely opposite direction to posit as a template that some much higher complexities make for the lessor ones, on and and on, and up and up, infinitum.

Nor could there be infinite levels downward; so, there must a basic simple-as-can-get physical, material something. this is not to say that it is solid in the sense we think it is, as it may still be ‘solid’ in the way that energy/forces make it as such, effectively.

Some people may want one last, bottom something that forms material from whatnot, as if it is a ‘what’ that is not a ‘what’, thus having material be secondary, but then the ‘whatnot’ can make only the tiniest of things, which is fine, though it seems to be an extra step. Either way, this ultimate basic is still the simplest something, since it can’t be composite, and so I’d still count it as physical, so there goes the ‘whatnot’ of it.

It’s likely that the ‘whatnot’ is by human nature seen to be some ultimate Mind of an infinite, all powerful, all-seeing system of the utmost complexity and intelligence. I don’t see the sense in claiming that a much lesser thing can’t just be, as some kind of a ‘problem’, while a much larger thing suddenly has no problem at all in being (and makes for the lesser, as if this sequence is some kind of a rule, but then the great rule is discarded after only one use).

That it has some simple, brute force way of forming an upward cascade of composites is not to be denied, though, and the presumption is sustained that it has no ready-made, instant prescription for making life because billions upon billions of years have gone by before it could do so. Thus, it is also a necessity for suns as stars to have enough of this long time to form, as well as for some of them to last long enough for life to arrive in its numbingly slow way (to us).

Take a certain, massive cloud of stardust that has potential to make a solar system such as ours and then about nine billion years later human life on it can come about on a planet, given perhaps millions of the right conditions to coincide.

Life is what it is, then, as it is, and on Earth there are 50-80 million species, in one whole tree of life, all of these going ons of all the varied forms of life seemingly necessary, with one of them wondering “what exists” at a basic level.

So, what exists at the lowest level needs be the ultimate simplicity, and so that’s all there was way, way back. What complexities come to be as arrangements in our future ought to be much higher than now, and there might even become some leaps and bounds, now and then, over the old glacial pace, due either to “gathering enough steam” for more emergences or us making improvements to nature ourselves, or both. So, look to the future for the more fantastic, not the past.

I’ve sketched a universe evolving in time, as opposed to Relativity’s all-done, timeless, static universe of ultimate precision of full and complete pre-determination made instantaneously based on the exact initial conditions at the Big Bang.

If I can truly demolish a part of Relativity, and borrow from Quantum Mechanics, there will not only still be an evolution in time, but a slight amount of indefiniteness to add to cause determining effect, which will still ‘determine’ a future very much correlated to the past, but as a future that could have been a bit different, according to how the probabilities are, overall.

Note that neither our own consistency nor that of the universe at large is in any way made more as being ‘free will’ by ‘random’ happenings, but that these harm both the notions of fixed will and free will, plus I still don’t fathom how outputs can arrive from Nothing, as ‘random’, for what made them not appear versus when and where they did appear.

..thanks for your prolific brain diariah!

You can easily cut 99% away of all this nonsense and babble.