Existence, nothingness, the universe: I don't understand them...

[Note: Most or all of the theories, terms and questions below are not original and have been thought and discussed before. I apologize for any boredom I might cause.]

A clever dead greek named Socrates liked to convey compelling information using written conversations between two or more participants. Seems a good idea to me, seeing as some of’em dead greeks said some pretty cool stuff. I’ll limit myself to one participant talking to himself, like a crazy person. I’ll start by paraphrasing more recently diceased frenchman thinker Descartes:

**I think, therefore I am. **

You are? You mean you exist? Maybe not even you. Something exists? There is thinking, therefore there is existence?

In that case, why does anything exist?

*Well, maybe the question “why” itself is erroneous when applied to existence as a whole. Maybe our brains deceive us into thinking that question actually makes sense instead of just being some meaningless chaos with an interrogation point in front of it.

Maybe “Why” is only valid when applied to finite slices of time where one discrete event causes another. I throw a ball made of a gazillian particles and therefore, as seconds go by, each particle’s state and position changes adequately, as seems to be the rule 'round this here corner of the U-Verse we been able t’observe. If I don’t throw the ball, the particles are still doing their stuff, some of it appears to be done faster or slower depending on temperature is all. No particle ever fully stops as far as we can tell. If it moves only a fraction of a nanometer every trillion years, it’s still moving. Just, perhaps, not moving in a detectable fashion in our timescale.*

In which case one should say the Big Bang “occurs” or “is occurring” instead of “occurred”. Perhaps the Big Bang has always been occurring and will always be occurring and doing so in an exponential fashion such that, to us, the moment the size of the universe equaled that of the smallest particle we’re able to measure would mark the start of the Big Bang. Before then, there was nothing…which doesn’t really make sense at all, unless it’s all because of magic.

*No, it seems more reasonable that the absence of everything, total nothingness or total immobility (and the whole heat-death of the universe) is just an illusion. It also seems that movement will never cease either, instead taking place on a different time-scale. We can hardly imagine each electron only completing an orbit in trillions of years, or a trillion time that, ad infinitum but it could happen.

The alternative is a critical point at which the universe has expanded so much that it now, following whatever laws of physics are applicable at that scale*, starts contracting in a “Big Crunch”, implying an infinity of subsequent implosions and explosions by that same logic. A cycle without beginning nor end, both of which would imply nothingness at the extreme: a sort of giant balloon inflating and deflating according to magical rules.*

Would the deflating mirror the inflating exactly and the next “Big Bang” produce the exact same universe, ad infinitum or will each be slightly different, reaching for a state of equilibrium? How harmonious and symmetrical are the laws of physics as a they govern all scales? This theory calls for limits, and therefore, a finite number of laws of physics between the two critical points at which the universe reverses movement. If time is not absolute and is related to the expansion, will there be two moments at those two points, where time stands still? How does that make sense?
Well, I think that’s enough questions for one thread. I hope this wasn’t too tedious a read and I look forward to your opinions and theories if you have any.

*Think newtonian Vs. Quantum physics when it comes to different scales; Perhaps there are more outside our range of observation: the infrareds and ultraviolets of our knowledge-assisted minds. I’m sure we’re not done being surprised by what rules we uncover.

Many views but no answers. I am puzzled. I was expecting my spontaneous ramblings to be full of errors and flaws of logic that would be easy for anyone to point out.

Clearly, I’m doing something wrong. Either the format, the tone or the breadth of the topic is inadequate. Surely it can’t be that boring? Ahem, don’t answer that last one :slight_smile:

Anyways, just giving this a second shot, I don’t want to build myself glass castle theories and not have people throw some stones at them to see how easily they’ll break.

Somebody start throwing!

Well, you understand them a little, they don’t understand you at all.

Okay: 42

You need not understand them, my child. You need merely [give me your money] meditate upon the sublimity that is the All. In the contemplation of the koan [all of it, all liquid assets] you will free the mad monkey that is your mind from its attachment to [PayPal is fine, certified check preferred] the Western obsession with logic and analysis. All is One, all is Illusion. Follow the Eightfold Path [me, your wife, set it up] in your thoughts and actions and you will achieve Enlightenment.

– Master Subriminar

No one knows. It sucks, but that’s the truth.

I guess your familiar with Bentov’s theories, however I understand modern thinking is the universe will continue to expand indefinitely ?

It’s all there in that one phrase. Without thought nothing exists. Thoughts are very important. Use them wisely.

Right. The Universe did not exist for the ~13.7 billion years prior to thought. In fact, it only began to exist last Thursday. Or, it might just be our thoughts telling us they are the most important things ever. They’re quite proud of themselves.

I think, therefore I am The Eggman. Goo Goo Ga Joob, Mrs. Robinson.

Ah, no, I’m not familiar with anything I didn’t learn in high school, magazine articles and documentaries.

I am astonished that nobody poked holes in my offhand speculation actually. I know nobody has the ultimate answers but I figured that people with more knowledge of physics or logic would have enough to work with to theorize as to the likelihood or unlikelihood of each claim and errors of perception or logic.

I don’t want to sound like an idiot next time I’m dating a female physicist.

That is not what the phrase means. If you don’t think, you(as an individual with self-awareness) don’t exist. The rest of the universe, on the other hand, will continue on whether you are there to think about it or not.

Wait, is that what it means? I always thought it meant that thinking is evidence of existence, not a prerequisite. “I [know that] I think, therefore [I conclude that] I am.”

Here’s how it works.

You can think, “I think, therefore I am”, right?

If you can think “I think, therfore I am” but you don’t actually exist, then what in the hell is it that thought the thought?

Even if the “I” that thought the thought turns out to be something completely different than what you conventionally think of as “I”, there has to be something thinking the thought, or imagining it thinks the thought, or tricking itself into thinking it thought the thought, otherwise there’d be, duh, nothing.

The fact that there exists something that even has the illusion that it is capable of thinking “I think, therefore I am” proves that something must exist, because if something didn’t exist to have the thought, then the thought wouldn’t exist.

Our human existance is pretty atypical of the universe. Look around and 99.99999999% of the universe is millions of cubic light years of vacuum with the odd fusion reactor and black hole thrown in, with a tiny tiny sprinkling of dust, like the one we call “Earth”. The universe doesn’t make sense when you look at it up close, because our brains weren’t designed to understand the universe, they were designed to find the right combinations of chemicals on the African Savanna, and either run away from those chemicals, or eat them, or fuck them. Pretty weird, it only seems normal to us because we’re used to it.

I think you mean Plato, as Socrates himself didn’t write anything. How much of the teachings of Socrates that we know from Plato’s dialogues represents what Socrates himself actually said, and how much is Plato’s invention? Anybody’s guess, really.

Anyway, for the rest, I got nuttin’.

Stupid contemporary greeks, interacting and making me look bad…

That’s what I thought.

The ‘big crunch’ is not going to happen (at least given what we know today). In fact, the universe is going to slowly expand forever. Eventually, the stars will burn out. We are headed towards a universe filled with black holes and collapsed dead stars, and eventually through proton decay and hawking radiation a universe containing nothing but elementary particles with vast spaces between them.

Won’t that be fun?

Elementary particles that are still moving and interacting with each other?

If so, how is that different from the universe today? Isn’t everything made of elementary particles with vast spaces between them?

There’s vast spaces and then there’s VAST SPACES. In the future Sam describes matter would be so attentuated that most particles would go millions or billions of years without encountering another particle to interact with.