The reason why these things appear to blend into each other is that we are lacking the capacity to distinguish them, our theories which deal with these actions are faulty, not because there is some ontic vagueness about them. The vagueness is epistemic. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm sure you're now about to reference the part of quantum theory which supports your assertions here. Any minute now...

To me, it appears to say that symmetry maths says that when every permutation is permitted, then none are omitted. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? If different permutations have the same outcome, how many different outcomes would you count?

So you just ignore the evidence of the Heat Death being all around us? And you ignore the fact that we can look out into the sky and see the start of the Universe because it takes billions of years for distant light to reach us? And you ignore the fact that we can create both the early and final states of the Universe to some degree in a particle collider or other experimental apparatus.

Is there no limit to your ability to ignore the observable so you can maintain your articles of faith? — apokrisis

Stating that the evidence isn't conclusive isn't the same as ignoring it. Yes 'heat death' is a possibility, certainly. A possibility that we don't actually even understand that well either.

We don't see the very start of the Universe. Our understanding of physics breaks down at that point. We see very close to it, and that's all assuming that the laws of physics remained the same through the 13.8 billion years going back. We infer this beginning and we may very well be wrong. We don't know yet. We probably never will.

No we cannot create the early and final state of the Universe within a part of the Universe. I think you realise that is absurd. We can create situations which may resemble particular situations from the early or final state of the Universe, however this is again to assume that the laws of physics which give rise to what we observe today were the same 13.8 billion years ago and would give rise to similar things. That, again, we do not know. It's certainly possible, but we don't know it.

The funny thing is that the story you always love to paint is just as much an article of faith as anything else. It too is just a story made up of a few facts we do have, which may be the wrong story. And you do defend it tooth and nail, and glee over how your opponents are crushed by it and so on so forth. The hilarious aspect is that you do not realise how much alike your opponents you yourself are.

Well either you believe in the relativity you advanced or you don't. Or is inconsistency OK in your metaphysics? [rhetorical question] — apokrisis

I think you should re-read the relativity I've advanced a little bit more carefully.

I think repetition and pattern don't really get to the essence of order. Repetition and pattern are only one kind of order, more specifically the order that arises by having separate things arranged in such and such a way. But, essentially, order is a determination. This means that absolute disorder or absolute chaos must be impossible, for it entails the absence of any determination, and the absence of any determination is just non-being, nothing.

You may think of absolute chaos as two balls moving in empty space absolutely chaotically, without any rhyme or purpose. But that too isn't absolute chaos, because the balls are still determined in-themselves as balls, and also in relation to one another. So all that we're dealing with in reality will be different degrees of order - we can never deal with infinite chaos, for such a thing is incoherent - the negation of all determinations is its own negation.

The table is black. There is order. The table is not white. This seems to be a negation, but every negation is ultimately an affirmation, for nobody actually saw a table that is 'not white'. They saw a table which has some determination with regards to color - but it wasn't the color they expected - so they say it's not white. This "not white" is an underhanded way of affirming its real color. Thus, there is no pure negation. Determination is always prior to negation. — Agustino

Well we have to be careful how we define those terms. Chaos and order are not opposite terms, since there is an asymmetry between the two. Chaos is a relative term. Something is chaotic in comparison to a higher degree of order. But absolute chaos, as I've mentioned in my first post in this thread, is incoherent. A minimum of order is always necessary. — Agustino

The point I'm advancing above is the same point Aristotle advanced. Namely that order and chaos aren't a symmetrical dichotomy the way you'd want them to be. They don't both arise from an X which is both ordered and chaotic. Rather the whole point is that order is primary and chaos is secondary and relative to order. This is what Aristotle sought to show with the primacy of act over potency and form over matter. The point being that your infinite potential - your vagueness from which everything emerges - is incoherent. Your vagueness by itself is inert - in fact, non-existant. There cannot be any such vagueness - nor, if there ever was such a vagueness - could anything ever "emerge" from it. But there is something. Hence why we need a First Cause, which is entirely act and not potency.

The very fact of determination would demand its dialectical "other" of indeterminancy. How could determination arise except as a departure from the undetermined? — apokrisis

Determination in the sense we're discussing it here does not "arise". Some degree of determinacy is properly basic, it is the first cause. This is the Aristotelian primacy of act over potency.

Indeterminacy is an epistemological concept that you've smuggled into ontology.

You have shown you get the logic. So be prepared to follow it through in every argument. If individuation is a thing, then so is vagueness. — apokrisis

I am absolutely prepared, I ask that you also be prepared to do the same.

I can't help it if your ability to imagine "absolute chaos" is so improverished. — apokrisis

It's not my ability to imagine "absolute chaos" that is defective, but rather that absolute chaos is a chimera - it doesn't and cannot exist.

That is what we should expect from an acceptance of dialectical reasoning. If what emerges is the opposition of two things - here, the necessary and the contingent, or purposeful creation vs meaningless existence - then the vagueness which spawned them must be a state where we can no longer tell the difference. The first cause must look as much like one as the other. The first action must be both deliberate and accidental - and so also, the least of either. — apokrisis

Dialectical reasoning as practiced by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle has nothing to do with this Hegelian version of dialectics that you're proposing here. The problem with Hegel is what the first trio critiqued way before him - he assumed that negation has an equal standing with determination, and that's false.

We now actually know that there is a "quantum Planck-scale" at which definite actions and definite accidents blur into each other indistinguishably. We can give a size to "a fundamental fluctuation". And this starting point is chimeric. It is as much the one thing as the other. And so really neither, if we are being honest. — apokrisis

Again this is just a rationalisation, the equations certainly don't "blur into each other". Furthermore, our physics breaks down when we reach the singularity. We just don't know what happens. You are speculating that a quantum fluctuation gets caught into the rapid inflationary period which effectively accounts for everything that exists in the Universe today. That's possible, but it still wouldn't account for the origin - why is there a fluctuation in the first place?

I only argue that the degree of order is that which is matched to the degree of disordering. Thermodynamics is all about balance and equilibrium. Surely you've heard that mentioned?

So human society is negentropy that is matched by its capacity for entropification. For every city built, a matching amount of frictional heat must be produced. There are no perpetual motion machines. — apokrisis

Yes, you're playing the same trick here that I've mentioned before. You're just telling me you solved the problem by restating it in different words. Our initial problem was why lower degrees of order statistically lead to higher degrees of order over time. Your answer is that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures which decrease their internal entropy while increasing the entropy of the external environment much more. See what you've done? You told me that the entropic gradient (ie lower degrees of order) is such that it will lead to the formation of negentropic structure (ie higher degrees of order). But you haven't answered the question - you just restated the problem under different terms. Now the question becomes why is it that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures? Why do negentropic structures maximise the degree of entropy? We're back to square 1.

What can I say? I thought you were a smarter fellow. But when you resort to arguments as weak as these, it just looks like you have run up the white flag. — apokrisis

I'm just pointing out that you making the dogmatic statements that you do make requires a much greater degree of certainty and evidence than we have available. If we can know how the Universe started 13.8 billion years ago, why can't we know what the weather will be like in 5 days? It's a bit far-fetched to claim we have such degree of certainty over billions of years based on data we extract today.

Science is explaining the emergence of order very nicely. The ancient metaphysics of a dialectically self-organising cosmos - metaphysical naturalism - is proving true. Exhibit A is the quantum fluctuation. Exhibit B is Big Bang cosmology. — apokrisis

Science is not in the business of "explaining" but rather establishing mechanisms via which order can arise. It cannot tell us why order arises in the first place. That's the business of meta-physics to decipher.

As for the ancient metaphysics of dialectically self-organising cosmos - metaphysical naturalism - that isn't an accurate portrayal at all. By many accounts, Aristotle was a metaphysical naturalist as well. He did not believe in a dialectically self-organising cosmos, but quite the contrary, he thought that act is prior to potency and there must be a First Cause which is actual and not merely potential.

If you want to keep doing metaphysics at this stage of human history, you've got to do a better job of keeping up with the play. The question about "first cause" goes beyond the dichotomous categories you thought were fundamental. — apokrisis

You have yet to show that the two dichotomous categories - act / potency or order / chaos - are really dichotomously symmetrical, because if they are not, then one of them has primacy over the other. Remember - my disagreement with you is not over your physics, but over your metaphysics, and your physics, whatever they are, have no bearing on these metaphysical issues we're discussing. I'm merely pointing out that your metaphysics is incoherent as it stands - it's self contradictory.

Your starting point - absolute vagueness - is a chimera of the intellect, it cannot be actual, it is actually impossible.

Huh? If different permutations have the same outcome, how many different outcomes would you count? — apokrisis

I don't see how that's relevant. I am asking you what you mean by this statement:

Symmetry maths says when every permutation is permitted, what emerges is the realisation that some arrangements can't be randomised out of existence. — apokrisis

Care to explain? For example, what does "arrangements" refer to, and what does "randomized out of existence" mean?

Are you saying, that in symmetry maths, when every possible combination is considered to be an ordered arrangement, then it is impossible that there is a random combination?

Teleological evolution seems a bit like predestination — jorndoe

Hi Jorndoe, I don't think teleological evolution is synonymous with pre-destination. Knowing the attributes of the elements in a system does not mean you will know how they interact against the environment or themselves. The outcome is uncertain, but a telological property could be argued to set some expectations for the outcome of the game. Maybe atoms will remain inanimate, or maybe the combination will spark into life and that life will grow into increasingly unpredictable things as the game evolves. God as a poet observer I find an interesting idea, but don't but forward an argument in support of it.

OK, so what if a semi-aware consciousness pervades all living things, and receives input from each entity's experiences — CasKev

CasKev, I think this is similar to what you were suggesting in this piece.

Yes, agreed. Without a teleological end that directs occurences towards the production of increasing complexity and order this would be impossible. — Agustino

Yes, without an imperative that affixes life to environment, a 'perfect' system would just as easily drift out of perfectness as it did into it. While the atoms would go on to rearrange themselves into other interesting combinations 'life' would have ended. Evolution suggests that the intrinsic movements of the evolving lifeform will somehow always match the changing environment, thus blindly - coincidentally perpetuating the populations - for over 3 billions years.

one of the frustrating things about this debate is that to even say there might be something other than chance behind it, is to then be categorised as creationist! — Wayfarer

Yes, rather than defending the obvious vulnerabilities in their own theory, believers in life arising from the random interaction of chemicals take the position that creationism is being argued and attack such a position, when creationism is clearly a subsequent step beyond the one being discussed.

Apokrisis has been going around saying our impulse to order here is to dissipate heat, to increase entropy. At the molecular level, under certain stable conditions (an energy source, heat bath) matter orders itself to dissipate more energy and this puts the upward trend of evolution of matter into motion. — Nils Loc

Yes, I think the contention is that life is handy for freeing trapped energy configurations that otherwise may take much longer to dissolve. To say that matter is ordering itself for the purpose of dissipating energy is like saying clouds are there so it can rain.

Without order, science and reasoned inference couldn't even get out of bed. The conceit of science is that it can or might explain that order, when it first must assume it, to do any work whatever. — Wayfarer

Well said.

We are all aware that there is a reason we don't walk off cliffs- to preserve our life. That the same 'life preservative' force pervades life at the organism level and not just the molecular or cellular level is outstanding. That an emergent phenomenon such as 'preservation of life' is repeating itself at each layer of complexity, regardless of the form that complexity is taking is something worthy of note.

In semiotic language this is a flashing signal that pervades the entire system regardless of how deep into it you delve.

Yes, it is a continuous exploration and experimentation via creative will. As we, and all life forms, are evolving we are learning and also trying out new things. When I learn to dance or a new Tai Chi form, or singing, or playing piano, I am actually experiment and training my whole body, all of my cellular intelligence, to do new things. This is the process of evolution. It is neither chaotic nor determined. It is exactly as we are experiencing it, a process of creative evolution. — Rich

Hey Rich, is this an argument of the telos as the fundamental element, arranging itself into surprising and unpredicted states as it emergences?

As a total aside, on Netflix you might be interested in 'Unacknowledged'.

Somewhat missing in these discussions is that science is the one that has demonstrated the Universe had a beginning. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. — apokrisis
Pulling the science thing out of the bag. There is no way anyone knows what happened when it happened before any recorded history. In fact, I dare say it is impossible to say what happened an hour ago. — Rich

I agree Rich. My brother made an interesting point only yesterday when he talked about the dots on a butterfly's wings. He said science looks at the dots and says they're there because they look like eyes and that scares away predators. But they have no way of knowing that. It is a story and in the absence of a better story it is adopted as the 'truth' by science - maybe not science on the cutting edge, but certainly the layers of believers beneath it.

There is a bit of an issue here. The mind is designing and initiating such experiments. There is creativity and intent introduced by experimenter. Such an experiment must spontaneously self-create. — Rich

Sure, this is similar thinking to Wayfarer when he said:
Without order, science and reasoned inference couldn't even get out of bed.

It is our own sense of directionality in life and purpose that makes us question if there is any directionality and purpose to life.

All of science is a demonstration of mindful intent and creativity.

The curious thing is that the notion of an ever existing designer is counter to the notion that existence requires a designer.

There is no way anyone knows what happened when it happened before any recorded history. In fact, I dare say it is impossible to say what happened an hour ago. — Rich

Don't confuzzle knowledge and certainty.
To know something you don't have to know that you know that something (ad infinitum?).
Seems a bit impoverished to turn to Last Thursdayism as an argumentative device. :)

Don't confuzzle knowledge and certainty. — jorndoe

In return don't confuse storytelling with science.

In return don't confuse storytelling with science. — Rich

(Y)

Since I just posted this elsewhere, here's a (really) brief summary:

• science is self-critical, model-disproof-seeking, bias-minimizing model → evidence convergence, where tentative hypotheses can be derived from the models;
  evidence, observation and experimental results accumulate, models converge thereupon;
  methodological;
  per se the most successful epistemic endeavor in all of human history

These days we have some pretty good cosmological models.
The methodologies carry no promise of omniscience.

Unfortunately, it has morphed into something entirely different due to the heavy influence of money in all forms. Text book science ceased to exist long ago. What is left is a huge industry codifying stories to please the benefactors.

One could discuss the probability of self-replicators in Conway's Game of Life with more certainty (or not...).

How many random starting configurations does it take to get this self-replicating machine (or a Universal Constructor)? Or is this something that necessarily requires an intelligent designer?

We don't know yet. We probably never will. — Agustino

Isn't it interesting how theists are quite happy to take so much of what they believe on faith and yet as soon as it is science, nothing ever meets their requirement of being "absolutely proven".

Shows both a personal inconsistency and a failure to understand the epistemic basis of science.

The funny thing is that the story you always love to paint is just as much an article of faith as anything else. It too is just a story made up of a few facts we do have, which may be the wrong story. — Agustino

So you are pointing out that science has facts. And facts can always be disputed. And somehow that is a "problem" for scientific inference. Therefore you conclude science is "no better than faith" - faith not even having facts.

You are a card.

Namely that order and chaos aren't a symmetrical dichotomy the way you'd want them to be. They don't both arise from an X which is both ordered and chaotic. Rather the whole point is that order is primary and chaos is secondary and relative to order. This is what Aristotle sought to show with the primacy of act over potency and form over matter. The point being that your infinite potential - your vagueness from which everything emerges - is incoherent. Your vagueness by itself is inert - in fact, non-existant. There cannot be any such vagueness - nor, if there ever was such a vagueness - could anything ever "emerge" from it. But there is something. Hence why we need a First Cause, which is entirely act and not potency. — Agustino

If order and chaos are a dichotomy, then the claim is that they arise from an "X" that is neither ordered, nor chaotic, as this X is a vagueness, and order and chaos - being a complementary pair of limits - are crisp or definite.

And putting your scholastic version of Aristotle aside for the moment, the modern physical view is that energy rather than matter enjoys primacy. What is fundamental is not inert prime matter but (quantum) action itself.

I am taking an emergence approach where both material cause and formal cause are .... causes. Neither is passive when it comes to individuation. Both are active players. And they form a complementary pair. Material cause has the mode that it comes to construct. Formal cause has the mode that it comes to constrain.

To argue against my position, you need to understand that passiveness or stability or limitation is what emerges at the end as the fundamentally dynamical becomes self-regulated or tamed.

The problem with Hegel is what the first trio critiqued way before him - he assumed that negation has an equal standing with determination, and that's false. — Agustino

Well we know from modern physics that Aristotle didn't work out so well in important respects. Starting from Galileo/Newton, it was shown that the world is not a story of things at passive rest and always needing to be pushed into motion. Inertial motion is instead the baseline condition.

So that switches things around. Action is basic. The interesting causal question becomes what negates or constrains this freedom to change?

Again this is just a rationalisation, the equations certainly don't "blur into each other". — Agustino

Of course it is a metaphysical rationalisation. The equations themselves would break down. The point is to explain why this is the case.

You are speculating that a quantum fluctuation gets caught into the rapid inflationary period which effectively accounts for everything that exists in the Universe today. That's possible, but it still wouldn't account for the origin - why is there a fluctuation in the first place? — Agustino

Again, I was laying the metaphysical ground for a general approach to "primal fluctuations", not speaking to any particular physical theory. I was talking about the maths of spontaneous symmetry breaking. That doesn't apply to a quantum mechanical model of the Big Bang, but it is hoped that it would be the basis of a quantum gravity theory.

Now the question becomes why is it that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures? — Agustino

It is not about being having a faster velocity but about producing a local acceleration. Subtle difference.

If we can know how the Universe started 13.8 billion years ago, why can't we know what the weather will be like in 5 days? — Agustino

Hmm. Do I really have to explain the difference between linear and non-linear calculations?

Remember - my disagreement with you is not over your physics, but over your metaphysics, and your physics, whatever they are, have no bearing on these metaphysical issues we're discussing. — Agustino

Science challenges some metaphysics and supports others. I've shown how the evidence conflicts with any metaphysics that presumes nature to be fundamentally passive or static. So you need instead a metaphysics - like Peirce - which speaks to the development of constraints on freedom.

Dialectical reasoning as practiced by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle has nothing to do with this Hegelian version of dialectics that you're proposing here. The problem with Hegel is what the first trio critiqued way before him - he assumed that negation has an equal standing with determination, and that's false. — Agustino

I don't believe this is correct. Socrates' method of dialectic consisted in showing what something (Justice, the Good, or whatever) cannot, contrary to what his interlocutors might think it is, be. This is done by revealing inconsistencies that negate the proposed definitions. It is really a logical practice of negation.

Hegel's idea that "Omnis determinatio est negatio" is acknowledged by Hegel to come form Spinoza. Consider this:

"With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive. it is obvious that matter in its totality, considered without limitation, can have no figure, and that figure applies only to finite and determinate bodies. For he who says that he apprehends a figure thereby means to indicate simply this, that he apprehends a determinate thing and the manner of its determination. This determination therefore does not pertain to the thing in regard to its being, on the contrary it is its non-being. So since figure is nothing but determination and determination is negation, figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said."

Excerpted from Spinoza's letter of June 2 1674 to Jarig Jelles as quoted in '“Omnis determinatio est negatio”: Determination,Negation, and Self-negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel' by Yitzhak Y. Melamed 

It is not a matter of negation being prior to determination or the opposite: determination just is negation; and identity consists in difference, just as difference consists in identity.

These days we have some pretty good cosmological models. — jorndoe

Which ones, for instance? The one that is said to only be able to account for 4% of what must be 'out there'? Or the one which posits infinite multiverses beyond any hope of detection? Or the one that posits infinite parallel worlds? Were any of them the ones you had in mind? (Incidentally, the word 'cosmos' originally meant 'ordered whole'. I think the fact that this definition is now contested, actually mitigates against your claim.)

****

There's always a huge amount of 'talking past' in regard to this particular question - it might be beneficial to reflect on why.

The 'seeker types' (of which I regard myself as one) are not especially interested in scientific accounts of the Universe. Might be, might not be. The reason they're drawn to philosophy is not necessarily to research the latest ideas on how matter is organised, or how life might have started in the biological sense. What they might be seeking in philosophy is more along the lines of principles to live by. Now, sure, scientific practice might provide some of those: scepticism, methodical rigour, questioning assumptions (all of which, incidentally, grew out of the Western philosophical tradition.) But the underlying assumption of science is that the Universe simply is, it has no inherent meaning, direction or purpose. So from the viewpoint of those seeking the ethical dimension through philosophy/s of various kinds, that's not especially useful. (Furthermore, the frequent assumption about 'directionless-ness' is that this is itself a scientifically-established fact, when I think that is highly contestable.)

I think among those who exemplify this kind of attitude to philosophy are, for example, Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Pierre Hadot (scholar and historian of philosophy) and more recently Jules Evans ('Philosophy for Life'). They are all about principles you live by, that are also in some sense embedded in the fabric of the cosmos - dharma, Tao and logos, being some key words associated with such an orientation. This approach wants to see philosophy as being 'love~wisdom', which is how it was originally defined. Wisdom has literally a sapiential element.

Whereas those of a more scientific bent are generally less interested in the first-person, experiential aspects of philosophy (might be, might not be). But in keeping with the grand theoretical projects of the European Enlightenment, they're broadly concerned with Capital P Progress, the development of science, understanding scientific and natural principles, and so on.

(That's not even taking into account religious apologists, of whom there aren't that many on this forum anyway, and leaving aside the fact that the 'seeker types' often appear to be religious apologists to the 'science-and-engineering' types.)

And the final thing that ought to be recalled is the fact of the so-called 'culture war'. Evolutionary theory is one of the especially-contested subjects in this matter, perhaps because it ultimately does bear upon humankind's account of itself, and is strongly ideological for that reason. This is especially so in the light of the divisive arguments between 'new atheism', on the one side, and mainly American Protestant fundamentalism, on the other. Again, not really much of that here on the forum, but there are often echoes of that conflict.

Just thought it might be useful to bring some of these points to the fore.

A confusion here is that the notion of entropy itself becomes relative at the Cosmic scale. So talking about life in terms of negentropy or dissipative structure is metaphysically straightforward. The local definitions are well defined against a cosmological backdrop. But when the conversation switches to the creation of existence itself - as has happened here - then the metaphysics becomes more subtle.

So a simple way to describe the Universe is that - entropically - it is digging the hole that it is falling into. Yes, we can say it is running down an entropy gradient - cooling. But it is doing this by expanding. It is dissipating its Big Bang energy into a heat sink it is creating.

The normal way to understand entropification is that energy or order is dispersed into the larger world via friction or disorder. The wider world grows messier, not larger. But the Universe instead stretches light by its expansion, redshifting its frequency and so lowering its relative temperature, or ability to do work.

The baseline condition of the Universe is adiabatic. It begins in thermal equlibrium and changes smoothly in a fashion that entropy - measured in terms of the indistinguishabilty or homogeneity of microstates - does not change its count. There is no entropy production, relatively speaking, due to the cooling/expansion.

Yet of course something is happening as we can see from wanting to say that the heat of the Universe diminishes in exact proportion to the increase in its spatial extent. There seems a conversion of something into something else in some sense.

That is why entropy accounting has switched to an information theoretic approach - the holographic information content of event horizons. You can track the progress of the Universe in terms of the current Hubble radius. The Heat Death is now defined by that radius arriving asymptomptically at a fixed steady state width. The quantum information content of the cosmic event horizon will arrive at it physical maximum.

So two take-homes.

The Universe is different in that, entropically, it is falling into a hole that it is digging. The creation event had to involve the discovery of the possibility of the making of a cosmic heat sink.

Then entropy counting is not a simple art when it comes to the holistic view of creation. It is no longer regular thermodynamics as taught to deal with Boltzmann ideal gases or other standard models of statistical mechanics.

Ordinary entropy modelling just presumes the existence of a heat sink. More advanced models (and metaphysics) is required to understand a self-organising cosmic heat sink.

Life fundamentally creates, and is negentropy, and only aims towards entropy in desperate, or unpraiseworthy states. Why isn't life here to save the world? It fits fine within your model, and is both physically, and emotionally how we operate, yo.

More advanced models (and metaphysics) is required to understand a self-organising cosmic heat sink. — apokrisis

But isn't your 'metaphysics' fundamentally a function of physics? There is no reason for life to evolve, save as a consequence of the working out of the inexorable laws of thermodynamics. What appears to be creativity, the exuberance of nature, some might say, is really an accidental by-product of an essentially mindless process.

Earlier in the thread, there was this exchange:

So the 'entropic' theory is this - according to thermodynamics life ought not to exist at all
— Wayfarer

Why do you persist in misrepresenting the science? Thermodynamics says life must exist if it raises the local rate of entropification.

Science has measured this claim and found it to be true. Stick a thermometer in the air, and yes - thanks to all this human "order" - the planet is warming nicely. :) — apokrisis

I challenged that point, on the grounds of it being cynical - no reply. So let me spell out what I think you're saying, and why I think it's cynical.

I think you're saying that anthropogenic global climate change, and the other consequences of massive population growth, might really result in the extinction of a large number of humans, or even the species - even the end of life on earth.

If that is so, then it illustrates the sense in which 'entropification' can be understood to be achieving its end - which is 'maximum entropy'.

Hence your remark about 'the planet warming nicely'.

True or false? Is that what you're driving at?

Entropy describes the inert, the dead matter, but life is the opposite. The universe began in a state of maximum order. We are trying to conqueror death in every moment. We're all born heroes, trying to save our worlds. Describe it in any terms you want to, that we're all going to die anyway has always been the nihilistic imposition on life. The hope, and the goal in every single moment, has always been that death is conquerable, even ultimately conquerable.

That death is inevitable, and unconquerable, eternal, and the ultimate reality is quitter talk.

But isn't your 'metaphysics' fundamentally a function of physics? — Wayfarer

It is fundamentally constrained by the physics that has resulted from the past 500 years in particular.

I hope you see the difference.

What appears to be creativity, the exuberance of nature, some might say, is really an accidental by-product of an essentially mindless process. — Wayfarer

Them's your words, not mine. No matter how regularly you try to insert them in my mouth.

I challenged that point, on the grounds of it being cynical - no reply. — Wayfarer

If you say something really dumb and ad hom that, its like a fart. It seems more polite to pretend you didn't go there.

True or false? Is that what you're driving at? — Wayfarer

As if you don't understand sarcasm. Nice one.

So it wasn't cynicism, but sarcasm.

No shit.

How could something always have existed? But on the other hand how could nothing have existed? If nothing existed, how did something come from nothing? Surely it relies on concepts humans are not currently capable of understanding.
— CasKev

Hi.

What if this involves the limits of human reason? What is it to understand something? Is it to have a feeling of satisfied curiosity? Is it the ability to do something new? What if some explanation made us feel good but didn't allow us to predict something new or change things somehow? (I just joined this forum because I didn't see anyone mention that kind of idea.)

Hi t0m, welcome to the forum. You are in good company. A lot of people on here love to do nothing more than talk about that exact type of thing.

Thanks for the kind welcome! This is a great thread. I read it all and just had to jump in.

Thanks t0m, we look forward to hearing your ideas.