One more comment then I’ll leave your thread alone. Don’t want you to think I’m either a Hindu or off my rocker.
The question doesn’t really work. A scientific answer to how something comes from nothing isn’t going to happen, because that is just not how cause and effect works. Mathematically the inquiry falls apart, because the fundamental premise of the question is:
0 != 0
In other words, it violates the Identity principle, and good luck getting a mathematical system to hold together without Identity!
But the last statement reveals the next logical move you can make if you are still not satisfied with the answer. Think about it. The question causes you to combine incompatible categories like nothing/everything, resort to effects with a nil cause or else infinitely existing, causeless effects, or revoke Identity in your math. Might as well suck it up and move into non-duality.
That’s what the Hindu philosophy is describing. Using non-duality you can resolve the contradiction of nothing/something by basically revoking the distinction altogether. So I’m not saying that is The Answer to your question, but an example of non-duality.
That answer ultimately won’t make sense either though. I’ll keep an open mind, but I doubt any approach will make sense- you have to tear down the way we think to get to the answer. Might as well get out the bong and the sitar if you need to press this one.
This isn’t really true…though I can’t claim to understand either the surface theory OR the deeper math. My limited understanding is this…if you can heat up space trillions of degrees it will have a similar effect to super heating water, though on a vaster scale. Essentially, space itself will rapidly expand and a new universe will bud off in the same way our own universe formed. This will create the super hot early stages of a universe, with the rapid expansion of space and will lead to the early super massive and very short lived suns, which, when they die via hyper novas, will create all of the heavier atoms, which will form the basis for new suns, which will create even heavier particles (through nuclear fusion), exactly as they were formed in our own universe. Simmer for a few billion years (well, say, 14 an a bit) and voila! You see what we see today.
I admit freely that I don’t understand even the edges of the theory, and my own math is unfortunately no where near up to snuff to even take a shot at explaining that (I got as far as differential equations and college physics III, which was decades ago…and this stuff is light years beyond that). However, what I do know that the math exists, and the theories exist. Whether they are right or will ever be proven is another matter, but your statement that science doesn’t have an answer or the mathmatics to describe how something (i.e. the universe) could come from nothing is not true.
Well… you seem to be describing the generation of a universe from space that is heated up trillions of degrees, instead of nothing. Maybe the theory is that this yields ‘bonus’ mass and space, beyond the input… Well that isn’t clear, and it doesn’t get to the root origin of everything.
My Hindu quote mentioned a ‘Day of Brahm’, in that the creation of a universe is something that happens regularly as part of a cycle.
The Absolute is apparently a concept/the reality behind all the Days of Brahm, the genuine ‘origin of everything’. So we aren’t quite talking about the same thing.
Of course from a non-dualistic perspective, what’s the difference
I doubt I could keep pace with Einstein in the math either.
If you admit that math can find a way to go on without Identity, than it could be said that a transition into non-duality could remain scientific, though there would be plenty of critics.
It would be interesting if this got the same results as the kind of math you are describing. Doesn’t ‘your’ math have some special qualities that allow it to describe some rather unusual phenomena? What are its weird compromises?
God always being there is not exactly a great answer either. For one thing, why did God wait an infinite amount of time to create the universe? Was he contemplating his navel? Playing solitaire? Waiting for Godot?
If the net amount of energy in the universe is zero, and if particles spring out of nothingness thanks to Heisenberg, a universe arising out of nothing is nearly inevitable. Even more so if there is a meta-universe.
And the difference between our absurdity and your absurdity is that our absurdity doesn’t care about our sex lives.
I think there is no point trying to understand what we will never experience. Maybe someone has already figured it out but the answer was over looked because of it’s simplicity. And so what if you figure the answer out. What will you be able to change and how will it effect the people living on earth. All in all you have around 80 years to live. Spend it wisely.
I’ve always been a fan of the virtual particle theory. Virtual particles spontaneously form out of nothingness and quickly retreat back into nothingness, but for a brief instant they do exist. That means they can collide with each other causing little itty bitty explosions. The size of these explosions is determined by how big a vaccuum you have. Therefore, an arbitrarily large vaccuum could generate an explosion on the magnitude of the big bang.
For a long time I never put much thought into it beyond that because it doesn’t really help with the “beating heart” model of the universe, that starts with a big bang, ends in a big crunch, and that big crunch is the big bang for the next iteration of the universe. That model is self-contained.
But recently it’s been explained that there will be no big crunch. Instead, the universe will go through a long, boring heat death, where everything is driven apart to basically infinity. From what I’ve seen on those “fun with science” type shows, dark energy won’t stop with forcing galaxies apart, but rather everything gets forced apart, down to even atoms. Whatever, that detail isn’t important.
What is interesting to me is that the end state of the universe is now projected to be an arbitrarily large vaccuum of nothingness. Well, that takes me right back to my favorite teen years theory of virtual particle collisions. A new flavor of the “beating heart” model of an ever-recycling universe, only now it looks a little different in my imagination.
Actually I believe it’s worse than this, and have argued such on this board (I didn’t convince anybody, but what the hey) - I think it’s literally conceptually impossible for God to have existed for an infinite amount of time prior to the present. Very succinctly the argument is that infinity is not actually a number, despite popular conception. Less succinctly the argument is that it’s impossible to have a time after an infinite amount of time - to be after it, the prior block of time must have run to conclusion, and if it did it must be finite. Less abstractly, this God person is supposed to be conscious and have perfect memory - so I should be able to ask it how many days it remembers having happened, and get an answer. A day is not some abstract nothing; it has a start and an end and distinct events in it and distinct memories associated with it. So, since God remembers everything, he should be able to state a number of how many days he remembers. But with the proposed model of an infinite past, this and other basic concepts break down.
This is my general response to Try2B Comprehensive’s ‘duality conundrum’; that 0 = -1 + 1, and you can at least theoretically get something from nothing if you also get an antisomething too.
This is interesting because in one of his books I remember Carl Sagan very off handedly mentioning among a list of logical fallacies: accepting that an infinite amount of time may come to pass, without acknowledging that an infinite amount of time may have passed already or that a universe may have no end, but must have a beginning. I just went “huh” and didn’t really question this (a lapse of logic in itself), but now I’m really having a hard time getting my head around this.
p.s. the expected answer to your logic, I suppose, is that while it is conceptually impossible for your puny mind (which processes thoughts sequentially, and takes a non zero length of time to calculate) to handle, God could remember an infinite number of distinct days, and could honestly answer that an infinite amount of time has passed during his existence.
This sounds too similar to Zeno’s paradox to be compelling.
“All of them.” And not sarcastically, either. If we buy into the idea that time started at the beginning of the universe, there was no time before then. So god would be able to enumerate all days without paradox. No time <> infinite time.
I’m an atheist, but I’m guessing the idea is that god was the sum totality of formless void who caused the universe to explode into existence. There is no more validity to asking “when” he did this than there is asking where the earth starts along its surface. The event itself marks time zero.
I think that if Carl Sagan said that a double-ended infinity is possible, he was wrong. Or you were misreading him. Whichever.
Infinite means “without end” - it isn’t a number, it describes the behavior of a process. (Specifically, a process that doesn’t end.) So, if you’re counting up the positive integers, since you never will reach an end to them, they are said to go ‘to infinity’, or with the somewhat deceptive term “there are an infinite number of them”.
The other thing to remember is that infinities always have a starting point, from which you begin doing your process that repeats forever without end. You start at 1 and count up, forever. Or you start at 5 and count up, forever. But you have to start somewhere.
(Both these facts are very apparent at the first point that you actually encounter the infinity symbol in an actual math equation, which is limits - but these facts apply to all infinities.)
So. If you ever think you’ve found a two-ended infinity, it’s actually two separate infinities running in opposite directions from a start point in the middle: counting up forever from zero, and counting down into the negatives forever from zero. But the key here is that whenever you’re iterating through an infinite series, you’re starting at a finite starting point and counting towards the infinties. You never count up from the negatives like …-2, -1, 0, 1, 2… - that’s impossible, which is to say conceptually impossible. It’s not just that we’re mere humans who have to stop before we finish. It’s that it’s literally an abuse of the concepts and symbology. It’s like adding one and two to get twelve, because 1 + 2 = 12 by putting the digits side by side.
So. What are the possible timelines? Time can be either finite or infinite, but if it’s infinite, then like all infinities it must be starting at some point and then running interminably afterwards. And, being time, it seems very, very likely that it’s running from the past to the future, and growing on the ‘future’ end - that is, that time will just keep going and going like the energizer bunny. Presuming that time is flowing as linearly as it appears to be, then it must have started at some finite point in the past, based on the fact that infinities always grow from a point.
Now to get esoteric: if time is not flowing linearly forward, there are other possibilities; it could be flowing in reverse, having started at some fixed point in the future and getting longer into the past, or it could be doing something cockeyed and growing in a way that appears to grow at both ends sumultaneously (like the series 0, 1, -2, 3, -4, 5, -6, 7, -8…). Mathematically, either of these is a valid infinite series that extends infinitely in the negative direction, into the ‘past’.
The problem with this, of course, is that infinities aren’t numbers, they’re construction techniques. They’re a trend. At any given point in the process of constructing your series, you have never finished doing so ('cause it never ends), and at any given point during the construction the length of the series is still finite. You can never finish constructing an infinite series - by definition!
So. back to timelines. An infinite future timeline is no big deal; you presume that one end of the series is “the beginning of time”, and the other end is “now”, and as time “passes”, the series of days passed just keeps getting longer without end -though at any given time, only a finite number of days has passed between the beginning and now. This complies nicely with the definition and rules of infinities.
But what about these other timelines? In them, time is not growing in the direction we’re sensing it; it’s more like all of history is a book, which some author is writing in reverse, or adding bits to both ends a little bit here, then a little bit there, indefinitely. Presuming we don’t mind being characters in a book, this is mostly alright too, but let’s notice three things about the scenario:
Causality is screwed, because effects are “written” before their prior causes, as the timeline is extended ever futher into the past.
The past is not fixed; it changes as the timeline grows further into the past.
The writer never finishes, and the pastward timeline is never infinitely long! Those are both axiomatically true by the rules of infinities, because infinities are processes of unending growth, not actual numbers in the sense of quantities.
So, the long and short of it is that God cannot remember an infinite number of past days, by definition! Even if the timeline is growing into the past, which we’ll note would require some kind of metatime in which this could take place since the growth is ongoing and independent of our perception of time, at any given point in that metatime only a finite number of days have been ‘written’. And of course what days God remembers would vary depending on how much “metatime” has passed to allow the past to grow; at one point in the metatime he wouldn’t remember a week prior, because the past was only three days long, but if he waits until some more “metatime” has passed, he would remember a week prior, because the past would have grown to meet it. Note that this happens without time in the present passing; so in the same present time the answer to the question “how many days do you remember” would literally change without (normal-)time passing!
To help clarify this, it would be like an author writing successive prequels to a book. As he added things in the prequels, it would change the truth value of various statements the characters might have made in ‘later’ books. “I never have killed anyone,” the author might have had a character say in book 0, and at that point it was true, but then in book -3 the author goes and has the character kill somebody - meaning that either the character was (suddenly) lying in book 0 - or that the author is going to have to go change the content of book 0 the way Tolkein altered the scene with Gollum in the Hobbit.
Of course, with this God thing, asking him how many days he remembers is like asking that character, “How many prequels have you been in?” It is a question that is guaranteed to be without an accurate single answer as long as prequels keep being written. And note that the answer is never “an infinite number”, because at any point only a finite number of books have been written.
So, to sum up, negatively infinite timelines are basically a continuity nightmare - and one that ensures that causality isn’t real. And note that under every negative timeline, there is an underlying positive timeline for that negative timeline to be growing in.
I have two responsese to this:
Yeah yeah, the “we can’t think of an answer, but we’re going to pretend there is one that you’re too dumb to figure out.” God of the Mental Gaps - such impressive argument. :rolleyes:
But, infinity isn’t a number. It’s a description of the behavior of a process as the iterations get large. So if God says he remembers an infinite number of days, he’s literally speaking gibberish. And the fact that most people don’t understand math well enough to realise it’s gibberish doesn’t change the fact that it’s gibberish.
It’s not really similar to Zeno’s paradox. There are differences, ones that matter.
I got no problem with a negatively finite timeline - obviously. The question, though, is whether God experienced his time as a void, or did anything during it (like say causing the universe to explode into existence.)
Wait, did I use the word “time” there? Yeah, I did. 'Cause to experience something or do something, time has to be passing. (Or some sort of metatime, whichever.) Regardless, prior to any of that stuff happening or God doing anything, there has to be a timeline that it’s taking place in, and that timeline must have had a start prior to any action happening at all.
That’s a rather dualistic answer. Good going. Though I don’t know that it shuts down my theory. It isn’t every day I invent some math, let alone cosmological science.
If you’ll let go of your idea that 0 = -1 + 1 for a minute, revisit the idea that 0 != 0 again. At first glance, it looks like ‘nothing’ isn’t nothing at all. But rather, something. So the question of the OP basically returns an error in this view.
so… make the move to (mathematical) non-duality by revoking identity (see, you aren’t breaking any math rules in this milieu. 0 is free to != 0). It can be done, but has serious consequences as far as I can tell.
Remember, Identity is the axiom that x = x. Without it, no variable is (necessarily) itself. The only way to make sense then is to allow but one variable. Whoops! You can’t do any operations! The whole of your mathematical system becomes as follows:
A
(or in mathspeak, ‘there exists A’)
That’s it. Kind of shoots something coming from nothing, no? Since all there is, mathematically, is A, ‘nothing’ is never in play, and so obviously the/a universe can not spring from it.
The OP wants an answer that doesn’t involve religion, yet indulges in the fairy tale of ‘nothing’! AFAIK there are no examples of ‘nothing’. Besides that, the whole concept is theoretically challenged. Paradoxically so, I’m afraid. It has a real bad case of not being real. So we shouldn’t ‘believe’ in ‘nothing’ in the first place.
Can’t I simultaneously count both ways from zero? Mathematics obviously has no conceptual problem with a double ended infinite timeline, I drew hundreds of them in math class.
An infinite timeline that extends in both directions is no big deal either, you just have to forget the possibility of a “beginning of time”. If the only point on the series that you fix is the present, I don’t see why it’s fundamentally impossible to count infinitely in both directions. You are saying an infinite past is impossible when a “beginning of time” is designated. Of course this statement is sound, but it’s not the only statement that can be constructed.
Well off the bat 3) can be crossed out, as it isn’t unique to the infinite past, if you accept an infinite future, you’re swallowing this pill anyhow. Re 1), I don’t think that causality is necessarily screwed. “Writing” the past should be no different from “writing” the future, I think. You take all the information about every atom in the universe at a given time, and extrapolate all their positions one instant later (or before). Re 2), I would say that the past doesn’t exactly change, it is added to, but in a way that doesn’t conflict with the past already established. The same way we see the future.
Clarification: an imperfect author would make that mistake. An imperfect author would also be hard pressed to write an infinite number of sequels without committing a causal error.
I’ll admit I’m hard pressed to makes sense of this. I think that we’re getting too far into the realm of arguing by analogy anyhow. Still, I’ll add that perhaps the experience of infinity is different for a being with say, the ability to think and experience with no time passing.
I don’t agree. Just look at a Cartesian coordinate, you have an infinite negative and positive timeline, without a need for another timeline “for that negative timeline to be growing in”. Seems almost nonsensical to me.
That was my exact point in the other thread. It seems to me that people who say “you can’t have time stretching back to infinity, because we could never arrive at the present” are treating the negative-infinite-time concept by first assuming that there was a beginning and then thinking the concept says that beginning was infinitely long ago.
I don’t see a logical problem with NO beginning, just time stretching back infinitely, any more than I see a problem with a beginning and then an infinite stretch into the future. Or, for that matter, an infinite spatial dimension that goes both directions.
I didn’t say that either. I simply suggested religious people (I should qualify that by saying “most” religious people, to appease the pedants) don’t believe God came in to existence from nothing. To come in to existence suggests that at some point, you didn’t exist. If God has always existed, there was no point where he “came in to existence”.
God is not subject to the bounds of time. He exists outside of time.
Atheists love to use creative definitions for the word “nothing”, so please tell me what you mean by “nothing”. Nothing, as in, what rocks dream of? Or nothing, as in, an entity with zero net energy but capable of quantum fluctuations?
But God still understands time. I’m not saying a supposed god couldn’t wait forever, I’m just wondering why he waited forever. And to get things down to reasonable time frames like billions of years, why, if he created our universe 14 billion years ago, didn’t he create us on a planet circling one of the earlier stars? Why wait nearly 10 billion years to create our Sun? If we were living in a young universe your creation story would be a lot more convincing. Perhaps he did create the universe for his chosen people - who have gone to bliss in heaven 12 billion years ago. We’re just living in the refuse of a universe he no longer cares about. Makes more sense than the traditional story. Maybe that God actually showed up for his people, unlike yours.
My definition has nothing to do with atheism and everything to do with physics. I have no real idea of why the universe abhors a true vacuum. But there is evidence - the Casmir Effect - that the quantum foam idea is correct.
