Right, God and his talking dirt.
Related: the idea of the Big Bang was first thought of by the Catholic priest Monsignor Georges Lemaître. Many scientists at the time dismissed the Big Bang, saying it was an attempt to bring religious concepts into physics. Another tangent: Msgr. Lemaître was quite interested in computer programming, as computers started to be invented toward the end of his life.
> If you make the argument that a deity is its own creator and cause, that idea could be applied to the existing physical universe directly.
The big bang could be seen as the physical universe creating itself.
Of course you could also see it as created by God (I certainly do), but these two are pretty much your only options, and I don't think one of them is more or less valid than the other. And with God not being subject to the physical universe or its laws, from scientific viewpoint, it's irrelevant. It might as well be the universe creating itself. The difference exists only outside the reach of science.
Also, we have evidence the physical universe hasn't been around forever: the Big Bang.
That's not exact. The Big Bang model brings us really close to the start of the known universe, but it doesn't describe what happened before that - nor dictates that it was really the beginning; the mathematics collapse into a non-descriptive degenerate singularity that doesn't need to match reality anymore. By this model, it is possible that there was some physical process before it that caused it and has been going on forever.
Also, the Big Bang model doesn't preclude the existence of other universes far away that were created by the same process, that we simply can't reach because they're out of our scope of causality.
> God is outside of space and time, whereas the physical universe is inside of space and time
That's a cop-out. What does it mean to "exist" if it isn't related to space and time?
> The physical universe obeys the laws of physics and God doesn't. So just because God can do something doesn't mean the physical universe can.
What if the physical universe dictates the laws of physics? Then you don't need God as an entity to explain existence. Unless you want to call the physical universe "god", which is on itself a valid deistic proposition.
What about the topic of this post, the second law of thermodynamics?
>That's a cop-out.
In a way. It's a hypothetical answer to the question. But it also doesn't offer any proof or a way to test if it's true or not.
>What does it mean to "exist" if it isn't related to space and time?
I think to some degree it's a mystery. One analogy that can partially get there, is consider if we built a really powerful computer and simulated an AI person and world inside (assuming there's no soul, this seems plausibly possible). That person would just know the simulated space and time, and would think nothing else exists, but yet we exist. This isn't a full explanation because it would have the turtles all the way down problem, but I think it helps to conceptualize the idea of something outside of our space and time.
>What if the physical universe dictates the laws of physics?
Scientific progress seems to me to be finding more and more foundational phenomenon that are causing higher-level phenomenon. It seems strange that at some point things stop being caused and instead cause themselves, don't follow laws but instead create laws out of nothing. It just seems different to me than what we've observed so far.
>Unless you want to call the physical universe "god", which is on itself a valid deistic proposition.
I guess that sort of makes sense. But I think it makes more sense to divide it into the foundation cause, and everything that rippled out from that.
It might be a side-effect, an emergent property of a decaying universe initiated by the Big Bang. The process that generated the Bang may be unaffected by it, or it may be compensated by a stronger physical effect creating a big concentration of energy. (We know from Stephen Hawking that particles and anti-particles are created "ex nihilo" in the vacuum; this could be similar, but way bigger and uncommon).
> turtles all the way down problem
Why should that be a problem? Or, in any case, more of a problem that an entity without a cause of its own?
In any case, if we're going for 'there are things beyond our reach we'll never know about', I prefer to think that they work the same as the things we know about, e.g. my example of other universes created by the same process as ours. This follows the principle of relativity ("there are no privileged places in the universe"); and the alternative you suggest leads to imagining absolutely everything as possible, since there is and never will be a way to know it, so it's no better than fantasy.
> It seems strange that at some point things stop being caused and instead cause themselves, don't follow laws but instead create laws out of nothing
That's a common misconception. The universe never "follows" laws, not in the sense that we understand mathematical models (nor human laws, for that matter); it's the other way around. It exists in a certain way, and we "create" laws to describe patterns in what we observe. There is no guarantee that the universe is fully behaving in the way the law describes; the model can always have missing parts.
If the universe is its own cause, there would be no separation between 'creating' behaviour and 'following' behaviour. Those are just labels we assign to understand what we perceive as causality (a.k.a. predictable effects).
> guess that sort of makes sense. But I think it makes more sense to divide it into the foundation cause, and everything that rippled out from that.
Yeah, I agree it can make sense - from a linguistic analysis POV, just like the 'cause' and 'effect' I mentioned above.
The big problem with that approach is that we humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize phenomena, and we come from a culture with an imposing tradition of imbuing that 'ultimate cause' idea with the attributes of an old, wise, powerful mentor in the manner of the Elder guides of the tribe. Which is absolutely unjustified from a logical point, and only serves to muddle the dialog with people who can't avoid using those attributes. So, in terms of ontology and teleology, I find it better to conceive the universe as its own cause, in order to completely avoid that categorical error.
Reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain. If something is so unlikely, is it ok to assume it actually happened?
>Why should that be a problem? Or, in any case, more of a problem that an entity without a cause of its own?
If we say the current world is just a simulation in a different world, we haven't solved anything. We're back where we started: how did that world begin. There's been no change in the situation.
If we say the current world was created by an eternal being with no cause, then we're not back where we started.
> I prefer to think that they work the same as the things we know about
If we don't know what caused the big bang, then I don't think we can say how similarly or differently other things will happen.
>If the universe is its own cause, there would be no separation between 'creating' behaviour and 'following' behaviour. Those are just labels we assign to understand what we perceive as causality (a.k.a. predictable effects).
But when we look at the universe, it looks like there is following behavior. A tree's shape is caused by DNA and how the cells behave, and that's caused by proteins, caused by molecules, caused by chemical reactions, caused by the electron structure, caused by subatomic particles.
When I look at this, and with your idea that we should interpret things to behave similar to what we know, it seems to me that since these elements of the universe have a cause, every element of the universe has a cause.
>we humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize phenomena
Yeah, I agree we shouldn't assume God is like us. It's not possible for God to be an old guy sitting on a cloud if a cloud is something in the created universe and sitting is an action requiring time and space, and God is outside time and space.
On the other hand, isn't it possible that God created the universe so that it would end up being like this, with humans the way we are? And God might have wanted us to be like him in some ways (free will, the capacity to love).
To begin with, we have the (weak) anthropic principle saying that no matter how improbable the event is, the fact that we are here and can observe it is proof that it has happened. We may doubt how to explain it, but we cannot deny that it exists just because it seems improbable.
Furthermore, we know that brains are a result of evolutionary refinement through thousands million years of entities competing with each other for survival to replicate their specific form among uncountable variations. We also know that the Big Bang was a extremely homogeneous concentration of immense energy at a single point. Allowing that we are comparing between infinitesimal probabilities, which one sounds like having less complexity and thus being more likely to be created by a single effect?
> If we say the current world was created by an eternal being with no cause, then we're not back where we started.
A flawless argument. But this argument cannot differentiate whether this "eternal being without a cause" is the universe itself or something external to the universe; it applies equally to both posibilites.
> If we don't know what caused the big bang, then I don't think we can say how similarly or differently other things will happen.
Right, that's a fair point of view. But my main point was that if we don't know the cause of a phenomenon and have no way to figure it out, any hypothesis about it is indistinguishable from fantasy. The principle of relativity is a heuristic to avoid fantasizing, and at the same time avoids the mistake of reasoning from the hubris of thinking that we are somewhat special among all the things in the known universe. Although there is no rational way to confirm this heuristic, the fact that it is simpler and requires less assumptions makes it preferable for me.
> When I look at this, and with your idea that we should interpret things to behave similar to what we know, it seems to me that since these elements of the universe have a cause, every element of the universe has a cause.
Yes, but that is a property of your observations about the events that take place within your reach, not an inherent property of the universe itself. Differentiating causes and effects are concepts that you choose to separate for the benefit of your understanding. It does not imply anything about how the physical world behaves. And it doesn't rule out the alternative of seeing the tree shape, DNA, proteins, molecules, particles and quantum waveforms as ways to look from different angles at the same ongoing process ("existence") which is the cause of itself, and that is exactly how I see it.
> On the other hand, isn't it possible that God created the universe so that it would end up being like this, with humans the way we are? And God might have wanted us to be like him in some ways (free will, the capacity to love).
See what I said above about fantasies impossible to confirm or reject, and about the arrogance of reasoning from the axiom that we are special. I see no difference between affirming that we are made in God's likeness and affirming that we have created God in our image; the net effect is the same, as we cannot ultimately disprove either of the two positions.
I believe Michael Ende expressed it in the best possible way: when humans enter the realm of fantasy and nurture it to create imaginary realms, we can have the best experiences possible for humanity; but when we try to bring those fantasies into our world and pass them off as realities, they become lies, which start the process of destroying both our world and the world of fiction.
I understand very well that the intimate belief in the existence of a being superior to us, who cares for us and is able to explain away all the doubts that may arise, has no rational basis and is therefore impossible to reject by reasoning, just as the belief that such a being does not exist has exactly the same lack of a rational basis; but at least our thinking can act to recognise this irresoluble problem as a child of thought, without any basis in any observation we can potentially make.
* The brain is too complex to appear all at once, it had to come about by a series of steps (evolution).
* There is no cause and effect in the universe, everything happens as part of 1 action.
I think we can only identify the brain as complex once we divide the universe into a series of steps, and see that the brain takes a lot of steps.
> * There is no cause and effect in the universe, everything happens as part of 1 action.
I don't see the contradiction, mainly because I don't support the second sentence as is. The steps that take place during evolution may happen without anyone there to observe them, so they would exist even without a complex brain to observe them. I don't see the existence of these steps as a flaw in my argument that the universe is self-generating and self-sustaining.
Also, causes and effects being two sides of the same substrate is not the same as everything being a single action; a universe that transforms itself will have states (or configurations, or patterns, if you prefer) that are a direct consequence of its previous states, without those consequences being created by something different and external to that same universe; only by its current reality and its eternal state of change.
I often find that both religious people and scientific rationalists are unable to differentiate sufficiently between the behaviour of reality and the knowledge we have of the behaviour of reality, equating them as if they were one and the same thing. For me, the concepts of "cause" and "effect" sit squarely in the "knowledge about reality" part, so none of the features we intuit about them can contradict whatever is actually happening in the observable world. My view of these two concepts is compatible with "the previous" universe being cause of "the next" universe, without the need of any external influence nor any specific "starting point".
I'm enjoying this conversation a lot, but I don't know for how long we'll be able to keep posting on this thread, and I'm not sure I have much more to say. I have not tried to convince you of my point of view, as I'm pretty sure these are not beliefs that can be swayed by rational arguments, but are based on emotions linked to learned concepts. I have merely tried to present my understanding of the cosmos in a coherent discourse that does not coincide with the classical concepts of the origins of reality, in the hope that your view of them will provide me with new angles, which it has done.
I'll be watching the thread to see if you say anything else, but for my part I don't think I have much more to contribute, just going in circles around more and more detail about the same ideas.
How are the words “person”, “know” and “think” being used here? Are they labels for algorithms?
So, no, "know" and "think" are not labels for an algorithm, but labels for things that can happen inside brains, whether the brains be physical brains or virtual brains (using virtual particles instead of real particles). "person" is also not a label for an algorithm. I was a bit imprecise in my wording. It's debatable whether the virtual person could actually be referred to as a "person".
I believe nearly all propositions about people thinking are unintelligible.
I also believe propositions about going beyond the physical world are unintelligible.
If you’re taking about parts of software, I fail to see how you are not talking about algorithms. The use of the word “simulation” seems completely irrelevant to me.
> So, no, "know" and "think" are not labels for an algorithm, but labels for things that can happen inside brains,
Or are using the word “think” to identify some phenomena I can observe with a brain and a microscope?
Is human behavior governed purely by biological processes?
>Or are using the word “think” to identify some phenomena I can observe with a brain and a microscope?
Scientists have hooked up sensors to peoples' brains and sensed certain patterns of brain waves corresponding to certain thoughts.