@fmf saidYour quote left off the part of my post where that answer was.
No. I simply asked you a question about the bit I quoted. I haven't "missed" anything. And, by the way, if you are going to sidestep my question, then so be it.
So yeah, you missed it. Clearly.
If you don't get it, then so be it.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidIf you were an eternal being and made a kitchen cabinet, would that kitchen cabinet be eternal just because you are?
If God can be eternal, why not the universe itself?
Or was God born?
Created/not created. I remember Robbie Carrobie would always argue that Jesus was not God because Jesus was created. Another example of the argument being nullified by the given. Bad given, bad argument.
This has almost nothing to do with your argument, it just reminded me of Robbie.
My problem is that your argument doesn't follow.
You could say If God can be eternal, why not man himself? That error is more clear, yet it is the same error.
@suzianne saidI don't believe the universe was created, it has always existed.
If you were an eternal being and made a kitchen cabinet, would that kitchen cabinet be eternal just because you are?
Created/not created. I remember Robbie Carrobie would always argue that Jesus was not God because Jesus was created. Another example of the argument being nullified by the given. Bad given, bad argument.
This has almost nothing to do with your argumen ...[text shortened]... say If God can be eternal, why not man himself? That error is more clear, yet it is the same error.
Therefore, the kitchen cabinet was preassembled and didn't require anybody to put it together.
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-Removed-Inquiries like this can go quite deep.
We could apply some kind of anthropic principle and say, well, if the universe did not exist, then there would be no one around to note the fact. Not very deep.
Another way of looking at things, perhaps: Without a universe there is neither time nor space around. Almost by definition a universe is some kind of spacetime realm containing physical things that interact. Thus there is, literally, no time for a universe to not exist. You blink, you miss it, and there is another universe around for awhile. Deeper?
Yet another thought: The very idea of existence is inextricably coupled with the idea of a universe. Where something exists, it must be in a universe; and where nothing exists, there is no universe. One may just as well ask "Why does existence exist?" Deeper still?
Going deeper, we alight upon paradoxes. If there's only nonexistence, then we could say that nonexistence, as a state of "not-being," is a kind of thing that exists. If there does not exist any existence, then there exists only nonexistence! This is a contradiction.
As a matter of fact the only way to circumvent contradiction, as far as I can tell, is to accept that existence is the default state of reality. The only state. Existence pervades all.
But what is the essence of existence? Is there an essence? A stuff making it up? Not necessarily. An idea such as 1+1=2 exists, and it's made of nothing physical. But the idea that 1+1=2, one might say, requires a consciousness to think it up and be "aware" of it. Otherwise it's not really a thing that exists in any meaningful way.
Of course, a consciousness itself is a thing made up of ideas entirely. If 1+1=2 requires a consciousness to "breathe life into it," then what breathes life into the consciousness itself? For all intents and purposes 1+1=2 is as much a tiny bit of consciousness as the consciousness of a bird or a human.
And physics has its own problems. What is an electron? Quantum mechanics characterizes an electron, and all particles, as probability clouds, but that's not really getting to the core of the matter (pun intended). If an electron cannot be split in two, then it's some kind of whole, but what comprises this whole? Is an electron really any more "solid" than 1+1=2? An electron is as much an idea as 1+1=2 is an idea: an abstraction that plays according to certain physical rules, which in turn are wholly expressible with mathematics. Getting the bends yet?
So I'll lay my cards on the table. Everything we sense has no true physical essence. There are constructs, like stars, planets, mountains, houses, and flowers, but they are not solid. Solidity and the physical are illusion. We perceive things like houses and flowers as being physical things, but unless we want play an eternal game of breaking particles down into ever smaller particles, never getting to the bottom because a fraction of something is still something, we must embrace the idea of physicality being illusory.
The idea I subscribe to is ancient and called panpsychism. The basis of reality is consciousness, or awareness. Ideas are the "essence" of existence, and insofar as ideas cannot be destroyed, existence is the default state of reality as a whole. This is not to say nonexistence is a meaningless concept. One can smash the house or uproot the flower, and so make them no longer extant; however, the same cannot be done at the scale of all reality.
In the parlance of modern panpsychist thought, the universe, the multiverse—all reality—is the "actualization of potentiality." Anything that can ever conceivably be, and any event that can conceivably occur, will be or occur. It renders ideas like simulated universes moot, because a simulated universe would be just as "solid" and "real" as one that exists outside a computer. Contrasts, such as between light and dark, or silence and sound, are what imbue all reality with structure for senses to perceive. None of the ideas on your screen could be conveyed without a perceptible contrast between text and background.
The physical is an emergent property of consciousness, not the other way around. I think of consciousness as using physical constructs, given form by the aforementioned contrasts between opposite states like light and dark, as a means of processing more complex ideas and storing information. Living in a state of delusion, in the Buddhist sense, we sit on solid-seeming chairs and fancy that we physical beings are cleverly using mathematics—the nonphysical—to reveal and better understand facets of our perceived reality, but we physical beings could just as well be viewed as the tools of inchoate streams and eddies of consciousness ordering itself to achieve a greater awareness. In a play on Descartes, "I am, therefore I think."
This is as deep as I go tonight.
@soothfast saidAnd this is why I went into the science of psychology rather than the opium den of philosophy.
Inquiries like this can go quite deep.
We could apply some kind of anthropic principle and say, well, if the universe did not exist, then there would be no one around to note the fact. Not very deep.
Another way of looking at things, perhaps: Without a universe there is neither time nor space around. Almost by definition a universe is some kind of spacetime realm c ...[text shortened]... r awareness. In a play on Descartes, "I am, therefore I think."
This is as deep as I go tonight.
@ghost-of-a-duke saidI haven't believed in the "steady state" universe since I was briefly exposed to it in school. If there's one constant in the observable universe, it's change. Change usually has a direction, foreward or back, and since entropy rules, back isn't the usual direction of change.
I don't believe the universe was created, it has always existed.
Therefore, the kitchen cabinet was preassembled and didn't require anybody to put it together.
@suzianne saidIf I may, let me expand on this.
I haven't believed in the "steady state" universe since I was briefly exposed to it in school. If there's one constant in the observable universe, it's change. Change usually has a direction, foreward or back, and since entropy rules, back isn't the usual direction of change.
Cosmologists talk of an eventual "heat death" of the universe, after all the black holes have evaporated and all the stars go nova and are so far away from each other that the ejected material cannot coalesce to form new stars or planets. Once the lights (stars) start to go out, all energy in the universe will have been spent and the universe will be cold and devoid of energy. If the universe has "always existed", then presumably, this "heat death" would have already occurred and we wouldn't be here to talk about it. The mere existence of red shift should be convincing enough that the universe has not "always been here".
@suzianne saidEternity consists of an endless series of 'big bangs' and 'big crunches.'
If I may, let me expand on this.
Cosmologists talk of an eventual "heat death" of the universe, after all the black holes have evaporated and all the stars go nova and are so far away from each other that the ejected material cannot coalesce to form new stars or planets. Once the lights (stars) start to go out, all energy in the universe will have been spent and the univ ...[text shortened]... ere existence of red shift should be convincing enough that the universe has not "always been here".