Greta wrote:Atreyu, we will continue to chip away at this question. At present we have postulated back to one Planck time after the big bang/bounce/grow. It would seem that the key to this quest is to learn about the preceeding Planck time. The LHC might help as it creates states of matter that we've never seen before.
I was thinking about biocentrism this morning on the dog walk (as one does). I rather like Lee Smolin's biological universe hypothesis, breeding via black holes.
I see no problem with attempting to understand that which we may never understand. Apart from enjoying the bone-headed courage of lost causes, the world would be poorer if everyone was sensible. I'd rather intellectual and other resources go into esoteric science than many other funding areas.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I agree. There's nothing wrong with pondering the question. All I was saying was that the
most likely scenario is that the Universe never had a beginning, but rather always existed. And I based that in part on the fact that we have
no logical explanation for how it could have begun. But certainly there could be value in pondering how Something could have come from Nothing. I was just positing that in the midst of this intellectual exercise we must acknowledge that it's likely a moot point.
A good philosopher will point out, when asked "When did the Universe begin? ", that it might not have, therefore the question might not be apropos. We really don't know if the Universe had a beginning. Upon considering the question further, a good philosopher will then consider which of the two positions is most likely --- 1) that the Universe began, or 2) that the Universe always existed.
At first glance, it would appear that it could go either way, and we'd almost have to say something like '50-50' if asked the likelihood of either possibility. We know option #2 is a distinct possibility, since we know that our entire cognition of time is completely subjective, but we also know that option #1 is also a valid possibility --- there may be some truth in our basic cognition of time, and indeed it's quite possible that the Universe began somehow. With no evidence possible either way, all our reason tells us is that it could be either one, but there is no way of saying which is the most likely.
But I posited that Option #2 was the "correct" one, philosophically speaking. A good philosopher will lean towards the Universe having no beginning, and if pressed will say something like it "
probably" always existed. And I based that on the following two grounds:
1) Practicality. Occam's razor. There is no need to explain how the Universe began if it never did. Therefore, even attempting to do is a basic error. And this is not a "cop out", as the whole point of explanations is to make the Universe understandable and coherent. So while we certainly will have to admit that we cannot understand how the Universe could have always been, it still leaves us with a more solid, simple, and coherent understanding of the Universe than when we try to explain something as inexplicable, and possibly as irrelevant, as how Something came from Nothing. It's a much easier, if still daunting, task, to explain how things
came to be the way they are, than it is to explain how
anything came to be in the first place.
2) (and this was the point of my last post) The fact that we cannot explain adequately,
at all, how in the world the Universe
could have begun. A good philosopher will take note of all the feeble and inadequate attempts at this endeavor, throughout all of human history, and including all of modern science, and consider that
the reason for this could likely be that indeed there was no beginning at all.
A good philosopher always takes note of the inexplicable, for his task to is conquer it. And he often sees that the way to conquer it is not by finally explaining the inexplicable -- something no man before him has ever done -- but rather by showing that the inexplicable has only reared its ugly head due to false assumptions and false questions, false propositions, much like the inexplicability that arises when a child cannot understand how in the world Santa Claus could possibly make it around the world in one night. I'm sure we all remember asking ourselves that question as children. And we all came up with a myriad of explanations --- multiple santa clauses, helpers, logical use of time zones and travel routes, etc, etc --- because there
had to be a way for him to do it, because it was done. It
had to be explained. Only later did we realize why our explanations were so inexplicable and unsatisfying -- because they were based on a false premise in the first place.
There really was no Santa Clause. The explanation we
could not consider at the time, because it would have been
too unpleasant.
I appeal to you that the same is true in this case, my fellow philosophers. Our "Beginning of the Universe" is our Santa Clause, and all of the myriad of
wild and speculative theories you see concerning how this Beginning could have been, are just as illogical as the theory of multiple santa clauses around the world. No, the solution is the same as before. There is no Santa Clause, no "Beginning", no matter how uncomfortable that may make us feel, hence the apparent inexplicability in the first place. And inexplicabilities like this arise because the human mind is trying to uphold something
it knows it shouldn't....