What is meant by that is that consciousness in species become clever enough to evolve from type 0 ( Kardashev Scale ) and if you were to do a search of the short story by Asimov which I mentioned, you would have gotten the clarity you required to understand my argument.
That is what “dominant” means: consciousness evolves to the point where it can dictate the next cycle.
Absolutely not – I’ve said repeatedly that it might well be that there is no explanation.
My point is purely that that isn’t an explanation.
Put it this way: when we didn’t know why the sky is blue, we could have speculated that there was no reason for it. And that’s perfectly valid to speculate – it could have been right.
However, it’s not actually an explanation, and we can see that by the fact it doesn’t allow us to make any predictions or inferences. It’s not coming to a greater understanding, it’s speculating that maybe no understanding is possible.
That’s not what I mean.
I mean: if the universe can just exist as a brute fact, then maybe it will cease to exist tomorrow as a brute fact – no internal physics required.
Just as with positing that the sky is blue for no reason, we would have no basis for saying it won’t be green tomorrow. (apart from induction of course, but we can also imply induction to the universe’s existence)
It might cease to exist tomorrow as a brute fact even if it doesn’t exist as a brute fact. Or it might be destroyed by a transcendent, supernatural intelligence even if it wasn’t created by a transcendent, supernatural intelligence. Origins do not necessarily restrict possible ends.
Okay, but who claimed that “the universe’s origin is inexplicable” explains the origin of the universe?
Which might be true, and we might even have a good reason to believe that it’s true. As an example, it might be that when the inflaton field decayed all information about its earlier state was lost.
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Where is this argument? I don’t recall seeing this.
I know you made some claims in a table which I spoke to. Do you mean those?
Of course. I didn’t claim any necessity either way.
Well famously Betrand Russell, but I was just referring to it as a common talking point.
Which again I’ve said, multiple times. It may be that no understanding will ever be possible. But that is not in itself an understanding. An understanding can be used to make predictions and/or inferences.
I am not sure that we disagree here but there is a difference between a) we don’t understand why the speed of light is C b) and the speed of light is C and there is no reason that it is C and not some other value.
The intuitive view is that everthing is divisible, everything has a starting point and everything has a prior cause but those things may not be true about the foundations of the Universe.
To me “brute facts” are somewhat relative. We take X as a brute fact for now, but later explain X in terms of Y. But Y is a “brute fact pattern” — also for now.
Personally I can’t make sense of an escape from brute fact in general. The nomological deductive method works from a “law” that is “just how things are.” Sometimes we find a more general law, a more general brute fact, that engulfs a small law. But that’s it.
To me it’s even humorously mad to demand a “final and total explanation.” But of course “God” is often the “Face” painted on the object of this desire. Nevermind that “God” as a highly complex object is less explicable and more mysterious than what this “God” explains.
Of course the point is to “sterilize” the situation. For this “God” cares about us. The world is “made for us.” While it’s easy to mock this meme ( and I sometimes do mock this meme), it is pragmatically powerful, possibly outperforming rival memes. Theism might be a good “tool,” even if it is “irrational” relative to a more technical rationality.
I like the pragmatist insight in this. An explanation is not a piece of pure representation. It is a tool that proves itself in an organism’s “physical” struggle with its environment.
We can view science as a search for “buttons and levers.” In some cases, we just don’t in fact look for a button or lever. We don’t see the profit in it. We leave this or that feature “alone” as simply imposed on us.
I don’t see how one could prove that no button or lever is there to be found.
This touches on Hume of course. “Induction” is “irrational” relative to a Euclidean vision of rationality. Yet we are “insane” if we don’t share in the usual expectation of the persistence of patterns. Still, theoretically I can “see” that “the uniformity of nature” is just “lived” as an unproved “axiom.”
That the universe has always existed as a belief held by some will not slow down the variety of perspectives and endeavors to try to explain empirically what the universe was like at some stage in its evolution, or what it will be like in the future.
Every hour spent here is an hour lost in the cosmology department.
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I think the idea that it is just infinite and has no beginning doesn’t explain much to linear creatures who only understand things in terms of starting and stopping, but it is one possibility. I mean for all we know time and the inception of the universe is in a loop rather than a straight line. In that case, there is no end or beginning.
I would agree that it’s a waste to debate it as if it can be proven by the small swaths of data we have. Or to give it as if it is an answer rather than a speculation.
Don’t worry, the university will always exist.
Well it’s “linear creatures” advocating for it also.
TBH this reminds me a bit of the theist who makes all kinds of confident proclamations about God’s nature (beyond the words of the bible) but anyone pointing out inconsistencies or apparently immoral behaviour gets handwaved with “How can a mere human understand an infinite god?”
If a mere finite being can advocate for a position, another finite being can point out issues with it.
Sure, of course it’s a possibility, I’ve been very clear on that.
The issue here IMO is the implicit assumption that getting rid of a first cause does something, explanatory-wise. There’s no reason for why so many atheist channels are not only taking this position, but spending a lot of time trying to defend it.
The Universe could not exist any other way.
That bang could be just one of countless others, with some might be bigger than the one called the ‘big bang’.
By the way, just like the Unvierse never began It also is not expanding.
Yes, that answered just how ridiculous and nonsensical your answer is. If we already know those things are born, then they could not have always been here, obviously.
But it is most of the so-called “atheists” and “theists” who both very foolishly ‘try to’ claim that the Universe began at a start point.
In fact, there is only one option, as the other one is both logically and physically impossible.
There is.
Nothingness is coherent, but as there is a thing with coherence, ‘nothingness’ is an impossibility, both theoretically and empirically.
Why must the universe, if being born from a cause, be from the point of nothing?
There may have been life before the universe, and the universe was caused by something that had existed for an X period of time, with a Y advancement.
I prefer ancient-life, to God, as the cause of the universe.
In my opinion, the order probably isn’t nothing to universe, but nothing, to the most simple life, and somewhere down the line, the universe.
But the Universe being born is an absolute impossibility.
Unless you’re Lawrence Krauss, then nothing is existent and something does come from nothing. He has a description for this quantum vacuum: unstable.
Yes, this business about what constitutes “nothing” is tricky. There are plenty of configurations of the universe which are probably coterminous with a kind of nothing (compared to what?) but it isn’t an absolute nothing our intuition might demand.
Why is a quantum vaccum more akin to nothing than a universe filled with matter? It’s all just fluctuations of somekind or another.
Because QV is a logical term for a space we imagine to be stripped of all tangible and perceptible things.
As you said “nothing” is tricky.
I’ve often seen the problem of “why fleeces” (why something that is this way, as opposed to any other) the “problem of quiddity.” What explains the particular, contingent “whatness” of the world.
This is what Aristotle is focused on, since he assumes the universe is eternal and so he does not think he needs an explanation for why anything exists.
With later Islamic and Christian thought, you get a clearer distinction between what a thing is (essence, quiddity) and that it is (existence). This makes for two quite different questions. We have to explain the contingent whatness of that which exists, but also the existence of that which is contingent. So it is two different problems.
The eternal universe resolves neither, since the the cosmos would at least appear to be contingent (or at least it isn’t obviously otherwise).
As a side note, I see “therefore God,” all the time and it’s a pet peeve. No doubt, there are many bad arguments to the existence of God from the problems of quiddity and existence. However, I find that refusing to grant an opponent even basic grammatical correctness in their conclusion a little much (a bit like US Republicans calling the Democratic party the “Democrat” party, and odd linguistic tick).
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