If black holes have an opposite that emits matter, would it have to be expelled within this universe? Could black holes be redistributing our universe?
Because uncaused causes are something. They are not nothing.
So what? Time T: Nothing. Time T+1: Something uncaused happened. Yes, at Time T+1 there’s something, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t nothing at time T.
Nothing has no time, so how can it progress to the point of causing something?
I’m gonna go back to staring at my navel…
But this is the same as saying that something existed before anything existed. At Time T, there was nothing, including no Time T. Otherwise you have the paradox of trying to answer how long Time T was when it was before time began.
I think people are over thinking nothing. Even things of full stuff can have pockets of nothing.
If you disagree then please tell me what’s south of the south pole?
Nothing is the absence of something.
Now the origin of the universe is tricky. If the primordial void (the nothing of origin) is unstable why would one universe be the death of it? It has no rules. Ending is a rule based. It could spawn an infinite number of universes. Anything you could say would be true somewhere.
Maybe everything happens. Like a cosmic rule 34. There is a universe of it. No exceptions.
That would have some interesting implications. It’d mean there’s universes with actual gods, and completely atheistic universes. There could be universes much like the primordial void where anything can happen or the laws of physics randomly shift. There could be delicious universes composed of a single jelly donut.
There would be universes where last tuesdayism was really true.
Cosmic rule 34.
No. Nothing is the absense of everything.
Anyone want to take a shot at defining how you would distinguish between a state of nothingness that existed before the universe began and a state of nothingness that didn’t exist at all?
There wasn’t a state of nothingness before the universe (as I understand current cosmology)…but instead infinite density and mass at a single point (singularity). So, assuming I have that right, what existed before our universe was the opposite of nothingness.
-XT
I am not a physicist so I hope you bear with me as I haven’t even got a cite.
I read somewhere that a Quantum experiment that involved shooting a particle through a choice of two gaps showed that the same particle went through the two gaps simulteoniously and so existed in two different places at the same time.
If I have got this right and not received a garbled account of the experiment wouldn’t this be a contradiction?
Also in a multi verse couldn’t what are pseudo sciences in our own universe such as Astrology actually be genuine sciences in alternative existances?
Where for example electrical current is actually angels running along a wire, and if Mars is occluding Virgo(Whatever that means) when there is a new moon then the No.27 bus will be ten minutes late on its third route run?
I’ve taken trivial examples to illustrate my point just in case anyone thinks that I actually belive in Alchemy and such in our own local universe.
I’ll just add a different point that is relevant to a post much further down thread.
Nothingness is not just an absence of matter and energy but an absence of those things plus an absence of time/space and physical laws.
Time T: Nothing makes no sense. If there is nothing, how could there be a Time T? It also carries the weird implication that something preceded the universe, because the universe’s first instant was 1 added to something.
That’s simply undefined. Like, what is the value of X when X = Y/0? The answer isn’t nothing. The answer is that division by zero is undefined. There are no points on the sphere that are south of the south pole, just as there are no solutions to a mathematical singularity. “South of the south pole” is just a meaningless phrase, just like “ten divided by zero” is a meaningless phrase.
Nothingness, as you correctly point out, is the absence of everything — including properties like existence. There is no way to describe a state of nothingness from which a universe can emerge, since nothingness doesn’t even have the potential for such a thing to occur.
A singularity is undefined. It is a formal mathematical term, meaning a mathematical statement with no solution. Because of that, we know nothing about what was happening inside the singularity. If there was activity (changes of state taking place) of any kind, then there was time already underway. Sometimes, it seems like well intentioned (I’m sure) scientists just keep pushing the problem back further and further, like adding more and more turtles to the stack of turtles holding up the earth. From what did the singularity emerge? Nothing? Not possible. There would have been not even the potential for the singularity to emerge. Some other universe or “brane”? Fine. Then the question simply moves back to those. From what did they emerge? And so on.
It’s what scientists thought at first. But as Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Eventually, they understood that light behaves like a wave as well as a particle, and that waves were behaving appropriately in the slit experiement.
And an absence of any potential for those ever to exist.
Some people say that the Universe is just a random quantum fluctuation, preceded by nothing. But whatever allowed the Universe to appear is not nothing. “Nothing” wouldn’t allow for random quantum fluctuations.
Exactly.
No, it isn’t. To be more southerly than is just a binary relation. X is more southerly of Y (Sxy) iff the latitude of X is less than the latitude of Y (lat(x)<lat(y)) (using the convention that latitudes in the southern hemisphere start at 0 deg at the Equator and decrease to -90 deg at the South Pole)
Then the answer to what is south of the South Pole is nothing, or in FOPL:
SPx = x is a terrestrial South Pole
Sxy = x is more southerly of y
Ax = universal quantification over x
Ex = existential quantification over x
(Ex)(Ay)(Az)[(SPy <==> y=x) & ~Szx)
As for this “It’s undefined, like Y/0” horseshit, see what I said above about quasi-mysticism masquerading as mathematical rigor.
I agree. The universe didn’t emerge from nothingness because that implies that nothingness has some kind of existence. The universe just started without any precedent to cause it.
Dude, don’t blame me. Here’s what I was responding to:
Rather obviously, this is talking about the possibility of “Nothing” having preceded the universe, from which my Time T and Time T+1 example directly arises.
Now, if you talk about there being a ‘Nothing’ in some relevent sense for which time does not exist, and then even discuss the possibility of it changing into something else ‘later’…to my perception, that’s a nonsensical situation. If there is no time, there is no change, and there is no ‘before’ or ‘later’. So, necessarily, to talk about “before the universe was created”, you must have some way to distingush between that state and the current one, and that difference is clearly temporal…at least for some definition of “time”.
Now, you can claim with some justification that time started with the big bang - but that would exclude the possibility of Nothing existing prior to the universe, not because it couldn’t engender the universe, but instead because there’s nowhere on the timeline to push in the pin labeled “at this time there was Nothing”. If you do (even for the sake of discussion) allow for the possibility of a state of Nothingness to have ever existed, then you are clearly making a time for it to do so - even if it’s not in the same ‘scope’ or context as the time we know it.
For an example of different temporal contexts, if I have a VHS tape, it contains within it its own ‘time’, with each frame following one after the other in turn. That would be analagous to the fact that the universe appears to contain its own ‘time’ which came into existence along with the matter, as part of the universe itself. If the tape itself is existing in a space where time passes, then that space’s time is entirely independent of the tape’s internal time.
Now, the question becomes, where did the tape itself come from? There is the possibility that, if there is a context from which the tape can be viewed externally, that in that context, there was first Nothing, and then, ex nihilo and for no reason, the tape (containing within it its own internal time context) suddenly sprang into being. And there’s nothing about Nothing that precludes that from having happened, because it’s quite easy to postulate a creation event that isn’t dependent in the slightest way on the context in which it occurs. You know, uncaused causes and all that.
These are two different statements:
(1) There is nothing south of the south pole
and
(2) South of the south pole is a meaningless phrase
Both those statements are true. The second statement is a reasonable inference to draw from the first.
Suppose, for example, someone said, “This year, for vacation, I’m going to a place south of the south pole.” No meaning is conveyed about where they are going. A phrase that conveys no meaning is meaningless.
There is no quasi-mysticism. It’s just a matter of syntax.
As for your FOPL:
SPx = x is a terrestrial South Pole
Sxy = x is more southerly of y
Ax = universal quantification over x
Ex = existential quantification over x
(Ex)(Ay)(Az)[(SPy <==> y=x) & ~Szx)
I know that ASCII can be difficult in conveying logical phrases, but here is how I read your statement:
There exists an x for every y and for every z, where a South Pole named y biconditionally implies that y and x are the same and z is not more southerly than x.
Obviously, you must have meant something else, because that doesn’t make much sense. Can you write it out in plain English? Or else define your operators? What, for example does “[” mean when there is no corresponding “]”? For that matter, what does it mean anyway? Is your y=x a binary predicate? If so, then SPy is the same as SPx. All you need to say is x=y <-> (SPy = SPx). You seem to be asserting that there is no z south of y and no z south of x. But that’s not a proof; it’s a premise.
Do you have a response that is more cogent and scholarly than “horseshit”?
That is an excellent post. The tape is a good analogy. So is the metaphor of sticking a pin into a “point before time”. Obviously — and pardon the horseshit — the phrase “point before time” is meaningless. This is because time is tied irrevocably to two things in particular: (1) rate and distance; and (2) space.
Your observation about things changing (and therefore time existing) refers to number (1), where time is equal to distance divided by rate. General relativity refers to number (2), where Einstein says basically that there is no such thing as space or time, but that there is only spacetime.
Setting aside number (2) for now, the problem with the Big Bang starting the cosmic clock, so to speak, is that we don’t (and can’t) know what, if anything, was happening within the singularity. The singularity was smaller than an atom, but it was not infinitely small. There could have been activity of some kind within it, and if there was, then there was time — time in the sense of changes, or as yet undefined particles moving around at some rate (forcing there to be time).
Now, it is important to understand that at this point, this is an epistemic question, not a metaphysical question. In other words, it’s just a matter of our level of knowledge, and not a matter of something that must be a particular way and cannot be some other way.
This issue is important because, for all we know (again, an epistemic question) the singularity was around for a long time. Trillions of years, for all we know. Or perhaps it existed only a few nanoseconds. Who knows. (No one.)
It is also important to realize that the singularity had potential for change. That’s what the Big Bang was — a change in the state of the singularity. And that brings us to Einstein’s view. If the singularity were in a state without time, then it was also without space. In fairness, however, Einstein might have held that his first postulate (physical law is everywhere the same) did not apply to the singularity, in which case all bets are off.
So the question isn’t really “What was before the Big Bang?” That’s easy. The singularity was before the Big Bang. The question is “What was before the singularity?” If the answer is “nothing”, then it can mean one of two things: (1) there was no existence of any kind before the singularity existed, or (2) there was a void (which is not nothing). The only way it can mean number (2) is if there is equivocation afoot.
It is then easy to say simply that “The singularity always existed”. But “always” has no more meaning in that context than “nothing”. It isn’t only the theist who tries to load the deck with marked cards and tricks. My car has “always” run dependably, but only since it was built.
How does that make any difference? If you have something there then it isn’t the absence of everything. Instances of somethings are included in the group of everything.
(1’) There is no person who is the present King of France
does not in any way suggest
(2’) ‘The present King of France’ is a meaningless phrase.
Like cmyk, you are hereby assigned to read W.V.O. Quine’s “On What There Is” (link appears upthread)
The biconditional above is just the standard logical formulation of “the (one and only) F” (a/k/a Russellian definite description). It is derived as follows:
(Ex)Fx … There exists (at least one) thing which is F
(Ax)(Ay) (Fx & Fy) ==> x=y … If x and y are both F, they are the same thing (which is equivalent to saying there is at most one thing which is F)
Thus, the combination of these two statements would yield: There is at least one thing and at most one thing which is F.
This combination gives:
(Ex)(Ay)(Fx & (Fy ==> x=y))
There exists a thing x which is F and if y is also F, y=x. However, if y=x, then we know Fy, because Fx and x=y. So, we can streamline it further:
(Ex)(Ay)(Fx & (Fy <==> x=y))
Because we have universally quantified over y, one of the instantiations of the sentence is
(Ex)(Fx & (Fx <==> x=x)) which allows us to drop the first Fx. So, finally to analyze “The F exists” we can use
(Ex)(Ay)(Fy <==> y=x)
Let Fx = x is a terrestrial South Pole, then we have
There exists an x such that for all y, y is a terrestrial South Pole if and only if y=x.
Notice on negation of the sentence, we get this
(Ax)(Ey)((Fy & y=/=x) v (~Fy & y=x))
This sentence says
For all x, there exists a y different from x which is also an F (there is more than one thing which is F) or there exists a y which is x, but which is not F (there are no things which are F).
This, of course, is just the negation of the sentence “There is exactly one thing F.” I.e., There are either more than one F things or there are no F things.
Horseshit is a much-beloved term of philosophers. I think I heard it from the prof at least once per quarter in all of my classes (and not always about something I was saying! Sometimes about philosophers, with books and endowed chairs!). So, truth be told, it is a pretty scholarly epithet, in my opinion. Harry Frankfurt had a bestselling book about a very closely related term.
This completes the proof.