As we know energy can not be created or destroyed, but simply re-used. So one wonders how it could possibly be that energy itself even exists at all. it's really quite the puzzle.. — Albert Keirkenhaur

Does physics say the Big Bang started in a high state of energy or a maximum Planck-scale state of quantum uncertainty?

Once the uncertainty started to sort itself into the complementary things of a fundamental action happening in a spacetime - a classical kind of realm with a thermally-cooling "contents" in a thermally-spreading "container" - then we could of course talk about one aspect of this system as being the energy, the matter, the negenentropy, etc. But that is a retrospective view from the point of view of classical ontology. And can such concepts be secure in talking about the "time" when everything was maximally quantum?

The Big Bang was apparently a singularity - a planck-length point of existence that contained anything and everything that could have ever became. And this absurdly dense point of existence existed for an unimaginably short amount of time before the obvious onset of creation. My damn laptop is dying and I don't have a proper charger, so this hopefully isn't my first and last discussion.

The Big Bang was apparently a singularity - a planck-length point of existence that contained anything and everything that could have ever became. — Albert Keirkenhaur

That is a common misconception - that the Big Bang starts from some particular point of spacetime and then expands to fill the whole of that spacetime.

Instead, the Big Bang is itself the development of spacetime and so where it all "starts from" is not a location but instead a scale - the Planck scale.

The question then is what kind of thing is the Planck scale?

And it is as this point you have to think beyond familiar classical concepts like spacetime and energy density. Quantum theory says at the Planck scale, these two things are at unity in some way that adds up to the most radical kind of uncertainty about anything existing.

How is it that matter and space itself exist when the absence of anything could have more than easily sufficed? — Albert Keirkenhaur

How do you know the absence of anything could have been sufficient? It's certainly conceivable that the various things in the world are contingent, but it's not straightforward to say that this makes them actually metaphysically contingent, or that the simpler methods of existing are not necessary.

Personally I think that the only necessary constraint is the complete lack of necessary constraints, i.e. radical contingency, and an evolution of systems-within-constraints allows the emergence of stability.

Personally I think that the only necessary constraint is the complete lack of necessary constraints, i.e. radical contingency, and an evolution of systems-within-constraints allows the emergence of stability. — darthbarracuda

This is close to my view also. There is no God's eye view, or view from nowhere, from which general statements of natural necessity can be disclosed as being, indeed, necessary; and, even if there were such a point of view, it would be unintelligible to us. The only rules of metaphysical necessity (such as the "laws of nature" that are disclosed through the practices of empirical natural sciences, or the contingent social rules that constitue social institutions and human artifacts) merely reflect the outside constraints from which within-the-system necessities (e.g. the essential properties of the objects that are constituted within those specific domains) arise. This doesn't prevent the rules (or "laws") themselves from being contingent at a higher level, as, for instance, the laws of physics known to us empirically might be, as resulting, maybe, from the breaking of symmetries within early-universe state-superpositions (through the process quantum cosmologists refer to as "decoherence".)

Hence, I tend to think that the very same normative rule, or "law of nature", that can be viewed as a posteriori necessary from within some specific domain of scientific inquiry (or within some socially instituted region of the human world) -- as this rule governs the behaviors or norms of the relevant objects and determines what is essential to them -- can also be viewed as contingent a priori from without the system (i.e. from the place where the external constraints are seen as sustaining the existence of the system), or from the point of view of the people who freely institute the social practices.

The logic that seems to govern the formation of the elements, and the combination of elements to form compounds, seems to be very strictly invariant. Can we conceive any systematic way in which reality might have been totally different, with a whole range of totally different elements, and hence compounds?

Perhaps there might have been no gravity, and therefore no formation of stars and planets, solar systems and galaxies; meaning that no elements (at least beyond hydrogen?) would have formed either. But to reiterate the question, given that we imagine that gravity would exist in all possible worlds; is it actually possible that the elements might have different?

In regard to db's and PN's belief in "radical contingency" would this mean that whether anything exists at all is also radically contingent? In any case nothing is not really nothing, right? It is not the complete absence we usually try to imagine, but rather the absence of anything we could know about; even though we try to grasp it by referring to it as "quantum foam" or whatever.

"That's really helpful."

In regard to db's and PN's belief in "radical contingency" would this mean that whether anything exists at all is also radically contingent? In any case nothing is not really nothing, right? It is not the complete absence we usually try to imagine, but rather the absence of anything we could know about; even though we try to grasp it by referring to it as "quantum foam" or whatever. — John

Just about the opposite. The point of radical contingency is logic (or "laws") do not constrain the world. States of the world are defined in-themsleves, so possible presence can't be discounted by how some instances of the world might be. We might wake tomorrow to find "different laws" in place-- nearby masses might start repelling each other; we could find ourselves floating off into space tomorrow morning.

Such alternative possibilities bring specific aspects to the world. If we know nearby masses repel each other, then it precludes the gravity we know and we understand something about how the alternative world works. A state of existence which is an absence is defined.

So "nothing existing at all" amounts to the absence of any other state someone might think of. It's itself, an existing absence and is knowable to us-- though never actually known using its presence because it has no people within it.

While the existence of anything is radical contingent, existence is necessary. One of the possibilities is actualised and so there is always something which may be known.

]The logic that seems to govern the formation of the elements, and the combination of elements to form compounds, seems to be very strictly invariant. Can we conceive any systematic way in which reality might have been totally different, with a whole range of totally different elements, and hence compounds?

Perhaps there might have been no gravity, and therefore no formation of stars and planets, solar systems and galaxies; meaning that no elements (at least beyond hydrogen?) would have formed either. But to reiterate the question, given that we imagine that gravity would exist in all possible worlds; is it actually possible that the elements might have different? — John

This is rejected under radical contingency. Formation of elements is a question of the elements themselves. No element necessarily behaves or is formed in a particular way. Tomorrow, we might wake up to pure gold running from our noses. Radical contingency means not just that our world needn't be, but that any part of our world needn't work the way it does now. The only restriction is logical contradiction and incoherence.

We might have had no gravity, but had planets in a different way. Perhaps all sort of various elements might have appeared at the centre of existing individual planets which had "popped into being." Maybe all the complex elements were part of the planet all along. It's entirely possible the compounds and elements could have been different.

it's really quite the puzzle. — "Albert

Just as well we've come along to think about it! Otherwise what a terrible waste it would have been.

Quantum theory says at the Planck scale, these two things are at unity in some way that adds up to the most radical kind of uncertainty about anything existing. — Apokrisis

Hey, thanks for clearing that up. I'll sleep better tonight.

An anecdote. It is probably known to you that the scientist who published the original paper on the Big Bang - he called it the 'primeval atom' - was a Belgian Jesuit by the name of George Lemaître. His paper was hardly noticed, because it has been published in an obscure journal, but when the idea started to become known, it was resisted by many scientists. And one of the reasons it was resisted was because it seemed too much like 'creation ex nihilo'. The proposition that the whole vast universe could have expanded from a single point, in a single instant, seemed, to them, suspiciously close to 'divine creation'.

So much so, in fact, that the then Pope siezed upon the idea, and wanted to use it in support of Catholic apologetics. However this idea was resisted, by none other than Lemaître himself:

Lemaître was determined to discourage the Pope from making proclamations about cosmology, partly to halt the embarrassment that was being caused to supporters of the Big Bang, but also to avoid any potential difficulties for the Church. ...Lemaître contacted Daniel O'Connell, director of the Vatican Observatory and the Pope's science advisor, and suggested that together they try to persuade the Pope to keep quiet on cosmology. The Pope was surprisingly compliant and agreed to the request–the Big Bang would no longer be a matter suitable for Papal addresses. ...

It was Lemaître's firm belief that scientific endeavour should stand isolated from the religious realm. With specific regard to his Big Bang theory, he commented: 'As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question.' Lemaître had always been careful to keep his parallel careers in cosmology and theology on separate tracks, in the belief that one led him to a clearer comprehension of the material world, while the other led to a greater understanding of the spiritual realm.... Not surprisingly, he was frustrated and annoyed by the Pope's deliberate mixing of theology and cosmology. One student who saw Lemaître upon his return from hearing the Pope's address to the Academy recalled him 'storming into class...his usual jocularity entirely missing'.

Simon Singh (2010). Big Bang. HarperCollins UK. p. 362pp.

(Mind you, he should consider himself lucky that he was not Tielhard du Chardin.)

The logic that seems to govern the formation of the elements, and the combination of elements to form compounds, seems to be very strictly invariant. Can we conceive any systematic way in which reality might have been totally different, with a whole range of totally different elements, and hence compounds? — John

You may very well be right. The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for the 12 fermions (and the force mediating bosons) that make up the stuff that we can see in the universe. But those particles may have supersymmetric partners that differ from them in mass and that we haven't (yet) observed. Can they make up atoms, life forms, etc.? We don't know. Whatever the case may be, my point is philosophical, or conceptual, rather than empirical/speculative. If the "fundamental" laws of physics preclude the 12 elementary fermions that we know of from having unseen supersymmetric partners, or those partners making up interesting (or living) bits of stuff, that would be a contingent fact from the point of view articulated in the Standard Model. Is there a fundamental model that describes "reality" at a more fundamental level than the Standard Model does, and such that the laws that it articulates are necessary in some absolute fashion?

If this were the case, that would still not matter much, from my point of view, because such a model would not really describe "reality" in its entirety, but rather physical matter. There is more to reality than the matter that makes us (and our surroundings) up. What makes things the sorts of things that they are isn't just their material constituents but also their relationships to other things and the surrounding constraints that govern those relational properties. So, unless one is a crude reductionist, there isn't a fundamental level of description of "reality" such that the constitutive laws at this level might be necessary, absolutely.

In regard to db's and PN's belief in "radical contingency" would this mean that whether anything exists at all is also radically contingent? In any case nothing is not really nothing, right? It is not the complete absence we usually try to imagine, but rather the absence of anything we could know about; even though we try to grasp it by referring to it as "quantum foam" or whatever.

I don't very much like the label "radical contingency", myself. I would prefer "relative contingency". From some level of description, some laws can be seem as necessary, and from another level, be seen as contingent. This relativity is similar (and closely related) to the relativity that attends to Aristotle's distinction of matter and form. The wooden plank is (part of) the matter of the house, but the wooden plank also has matter and form on its own. Matter and form are formal concepts, so there need not be a fundamental level of pure matter, or "fundamental" laws governing it.

That's really not helpful.

Ehh, given Pierre's clarification, don't worry about it. He's not arguing radical contingency-- more like a "fuzzy" metaphysic dependent on what exactly you are interested in.

I'm talking about something else entirely.

We might wake tomorrow to find "different laws" in place-- nearby masses might start repelling each other; we could find ourselves floating off into space tomorrow morning — TheWillowOfDarkness

Look, I get that such things are logically possible, and they might even be physically possible; but then again they might not be. The physical is either genuinely invariant or it isn't really, and only seems to us to be so. We actually have no way of knowing one way or the other. Plausibility would seem to be on the side of invariance.

In any case, my question was whether we can imagine a whole systematic invariance of a different kind such that we would have ended up with an entirely different kind of world in every detail, right down to the elements and their compounds, that are supposed by contemporary science to be the constituents of all things.If the story told by current cosmology is correct then the universe has behaved invariantly (at large scales at least) since the Big Bang. If the so-called laws of nature could change at any moment, then they could have changed and then changed back again innumerable times between the Big bang and now; which would mean that the whole story, including the Big Bang would have no foundation at all.

If this were the case, that would still not matter much, from my point of view, because such a model would not really describe "reality" in its entirety, but rather physical matter. — Pierre-Normand

Thanks for your well thought answer Pierre. I have really only one question regarding what you wrote:the current view of science is that everything real is either matter/ energy or some function of matter/energy. So, if the matter/energy is necessarily combined in the ways it has been (of course with local variations due to asymmetries) to make up the elements, and determinism is really the case, then every single thing and event would then seem to be radically necessary. Of course, if determinism is not the case and causality is ontologically and/or metaphysically, and not merely epistemically, probabilistic then the way everything is would still be necessary, but only within certain parameters.

Willow, you often seem to be "talking about something else entirely", and it makes much of what you write hard to understand (for me at least). Perhaps if you slowed down a little and spent more time on your expression and spelling, it might make it easier to see where you're coming from. Just a friendly suggestion...

Ah, I see what you mean.

How the universe works could have changed back and forth any number of times. Under radical contingency, what defines each state is the state itself, not any principle or story. Anything could have happened at any time. This is what makes racial contingency different to other approaches. There is no principle or story which sets what the world "must be."

The Big Bang has no foundation. We can't tell how the world might have been different in the times we haven't observed. For all we know the universe might have collapsed back and then exploded again within the given time interval. Maybe it did so eleventy billion times. If no trace was left, we won't know about it. So long as a event fits with what we have observed, any past event might have been.

A foundation is irrelevant. Theories work on the basis of being consistent with actual observed states, not what possibly could have happened. Necessity and possibility are meaningless within the context of saying whether a theory works or not.

Theories also work insofar as they fit the observed world. Let's say gravity reversed direction for a time. Our observed world shows that it must have all come back together again to a form which fits with the story of the Big Bang and its "invariant law" of gravity (assuming it doesn't get falsified).

The trouble with the "invariant" stories is not their accuracy. Most are accurate to point-- even spontaneous generation of maggots, which fits if all you've observed is a clean steak and a maggot ridden steak. It's how "invariant" stories close off possibility which is the problem, how they specify the world "must work" one particular way without taking into consideration what happens in the world.

That's right, God might really have become incarnate and Christ might really have risen from the dead. There might have really been all the Gods of all the cultures, There could be an afterlife ( and maybe only if you believe it), some parts of reality might never change for all eternity; anything at all becomes possible with radical contingency. Everything everyone dreams or imagines might be creating alternative realities at every moment. To go for radical contingency is to throw most of human discourse in the dustbin; history loses all its sense, because even the past might change.

I think the first scientist I saw on tv was Fred Hoyle, arguing against the Big Bang, when I was a child. The Big Bang is a theory that has risen to prominence in my lifetime, and certainly looks convincing to me. But for people who are babies now, and their babies, a quite different theory may well stand in its place. So to me the 'radical contingency' extends to whether one can build a metaphysics from the intellectual foundations of such theories. Others are welcome, but for me it will be the expenditure of fine-sounding rhetoric on passing historically-situated notions.

Indeed.

God and Christ are possible states of the world. Most "supernatural" beliefs are. All most do is propose an existing force which acts upon the world in powerful ways. Even afterlives (really, they are just more life in a different place) are possible.

But this does this mean they are actual? You act like these possibilities amount to some justification to say a claim is true. As if, for example, the fact that Zeus is a possible state means we cannot be steadfast in pointing out our observed world falsifies the presence of Zeus?

If Zeus is defined as a powerful being sitting at the top of a mountain, and we find nothing at the top of that mountain, that form of Zeus is shown not to exist. The fact Zeus was possible does nothing to help the claim he exists. Just because something is possible doesn't make it true. The same applies to any "absurd" belief.

To go for radical contingency is to throw most of human discourse in the dustbin; history loses all its sense, because even the past might change. — John

Only if you make the mistake of equating possibility with actuality. No history is lost because that something might have happened doesn't mean it did. The only human discourse lost is essentialism-- that some logical principle dictates the world must be a certain form.

You are missing the point. If radical contingency were actually the case, then anything might actually have happened, as well as could happen in the future. Nothing rules it out. All the words in all the books that we rely on for our sense of history might have actually changed; and our memories might be so faulty that we haven't noticed. I am not talking about mere logical possibility here, either. Logical possibility is really nothing of much consequence at all. There is no logical preclusion that anything at all that is not logically self-contradictory could have happened. I am convinced that you still don't get the distinction that I am aiming at, the distinction between substantive, actual or physical, and merely logical, possibility.

If radical contingency were the case you could have no warrant at all for thinking that you could even know what "passing historically-situated notions" either are or have been.

I agree. What you say about radical contingency is true: anything in the world might have been at anytime. Nothing is ruled out bar logical contradiction. Logic precludes nothing-- that's the point. If you want to describe the world, you have to do it in terms of the states themselves, not what supposedly "must be" because of how we think the world works at one time.

The point is there is no such thing as "substantive, actual or physical" possibility. It's all logical.

To say I might turn into a tiger tomorrow involves the world no more or less than saying the sun will rise. Both are just states of the world which express a particular logical meaning. "Actual possibility" is just an attempt to restrict our understanding of what's possible to a particular theory we have. It's to misunderstand that justification of claims is given by possibility.

Why is it absurd to think I could turn into a tiger? Not because it's impossible. The reason we reject such a proposition is because it doesn't fit with what we observed humans do. In the actual world, we've not documented cases of a human turning into a tiger, so we (rightly) dismiss the idea humans will.

The possibility it might occur just doesn't have anything to do with the justification for rejecting the idea.

I'm kinda a newbie to this forum and philosophy in general, so i'm not well versed in the ''big boy words'' yet haha. The reason I claimed it would have been much easier for there to have been nothing, is because the very thing you need for any existence of any kind is space. And energy has to be the prerequisite to space in order for space-time to have expanded. And while my laptop was dead last night, I was thinking ''the Bootes supervoid in the bootes constellation is a completely empty pocket of space, with very little atoms and maybe a few galaxies if that. This thousands-upon-thousands of light year wide void is generally considered massive.'' How weird right? We just gave the identity ''massive'' to a region of no structure. Whereas if we have Big Ben, you see that it is indeed a massive tower. A tower that occupies space and region. And as for the ''day zero'' of the universe, I thought about how simple occupiable space itself requires three obvious things. Depth, length, and width - aka the three dimensions. And these all require something... depth requires length. Length requires width. Width requires length. And all of these together require energy- perhaps a wicked terrifying amount, in order to somehow ''open'' the nothingness and allow the existence of these things and other things.

The reason I claimed it would have been much easier for there to have been nothing, is because the very thing you need for any existence of any kind is space. — Albert Keirkenhaur

The big bang theory is a consequence of space-time conception. If you separate space from time in this way, the big bang no longer makes sense.

Thanks for your well thought answer Pierre. I have really only one question regarding what you wrote:the current view of science is that everything real is either matter/ energy or some function of matter/energy. So, if the matter/energy is necessarily combined in the ways it has been (of course with local variations due to asymmetries) to make up the elements, and determinism is really the case, then every single thing and event would then seem to be radically necessary. Of course, if determinism is not the case and causality is ontologically and/or metaphysically, and not merely epistemically, probabilistic then the way everything is would still be necessary, but only within certain parameters. — John

That's a good question; or rather a good challenge to my view. I think what's required for the validity of the inference you are trying to make, from (1) the putative ultimate necessity of the laws that govern the behavior of 'matter', to (2) universal determinism (modulo quantum indeterminacy) is some thesis regarding the (alleged) supervenience of higher level properties over low level physical ('material') properties. Supervenience has been used by some analytic philosophers (such as Jaegwon Kim) -- who strive to "naturalize" metaphysics and the philosophy of mind -- in order to salvage physicalism from the failure of nomological reductionism. I think this appeal to supervenience fails (see John Haugeland's two papers on supervenience reprinted in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, and also Davis Wiggins' comment on supervenience in Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism) but I must give more thought to this issue in order to relate it more closely to the topic of ultimate necessity/contingency that we were discussing. I'll come back to it when I can.

If radical contingency were the case you could have no warrant at all for thinking that you could even know what "passing historically-situated notions" either are or have been. — John

You're going to have to be a bit less pithy for me to understand you. What Bernard Williams meant by 'radical contingency' in (the history of) ethics, for instance, was just the sort of idea I was trying to represent as 'passing historically-situated notions'. Why would radical contingency forbid me to speak in such terms? Is there some current specialised use of the term that I'm ignorant of?

It seems to be that what you are referring to here is the idea of the "supervenience" of something like a speculative higher order 'what is the case', operating in terms of kinds of causation, which governs the lower order 'what is the case' of the observed behavior of particulars and their regular correlations.

This certainly seems to be an idea which is inherent in the human psyche if the expression of it in all its diverse forms across history and different cultures is any indication. The modern scientific incarnation of this idea is the Laws of Nature. The idea is that there is an over-arching way in which nature is that may or may not be exhaustively discoverable.That said, certainly seems that the appearance of that idea in one form or another across many, or even most or all, human cultures does not constitute proof that it must be so; it certainly seems that is that such a thing could never be proven.

So, my point was only that it would seem to be a possibility that nature is a certain immutable way and that no matter how diverse the expressions of nature are, they must, of necessity, always be in accordance with that immutable nature. It also seems possible that given that immutability, either determinism or indeterminism might be the case. That immutability does not rule out indeterminism, because it might be an immutable fact of nature that an element of true randomness is always at work. It is also a possibility that there is no underlying immutability in nature, of course. We can only speculate, and acknowledge that, so far as we are able to imagine, one or the other of these possibilities might be the 'higher case', and that it is not a question which is definitely decidable by reason; whether deductive, inductive or abductive. In fact, among those kinds of logics, it is only deductions that are definitely decidable.

So, what I expressed in the passage you responded to was just the idea that necessity in the hard sense would seem to me to logically follow, if there were immutable laws of nature and if determinism were the case, and that necessity in a softer sense would still obtain if there were immutable laws and indeterminism were the case.

I am not sure the radical contingency Willow and I were discussing is even a coherent idea. Willow's assertion was that what we think of as the laws of Nature might change at any time, and that anything at all, no matter how bizarre, might suddenly happen. If something like this did happen and it was observed, we might think, it would be considered to be a miracle that contravened the laws of Nature. Meillassoux argues for the possibility of this kind of thing and calls it 'radical contingency'. Though he seems to be arguing that something like this could happen in future, not in the past and certainly not that it might already have happened innumerable times, and could even be happening as we speak.

So,if radical contingency were the case this would mean that there are really no laws of nature at all , and it would mean that things just happen to behave the way they seem to for no reason at all. If this were true then the only necessity, as Meillassoux argues in After Finitude would be contingency. But, then we would have no way of knowing how often nature changes its behavior radically. If nature is not necessarily stable at all, then all the words in all the texts from what we think is history might be changing all the time, and our memories might be changing all the time, and even the past itself might change. In that case we could have no warrant to claim anything at all about anything at all; that was the kind of point I was making. I hope this clarifies it.

So,if radical contingency were the case this would mean that there are really no laws of nature at all , and it would mean that things just happen to behave the way they seem to for no reason at all. If this were true then the only necessity, as Meillassoux argues in After Finitude would be contingency. But, then we would have no way of knowing how often nature changes its behavior radically. If nature is not necessarily stable at all, then all the words in all the texts from what we think is history might be changing all the time, and our memories might be changing all the time, and even the past itself might change. In that case we could have no warrant to claim anything at all about anything at all; that was the kind of point I was making. I hope this clarifies it. — John

Behaviour isn't radical contingency. That anything might happen doesn't say anything about what exists-- we can't use it as warrant for knowledge. Knowledge is NOT formed by a warrant saying: "Anything else is impossible."

Nature is perfectly stable, within each state itself. That's how we know. In the awareness the sun rises, we know about the sun rising. Radical contingency is not a challenge to knowledge. It's a refutation of the idea states of the world (and so knowledge of them) are derived from outside the state itself.

No, all that is immediately and directly known is one moment of perception, The actuality of the synthesis,which we call experience, that is built up from remembered moments of perception is dependent upon the reliability and stability of memory. And the purported fact that things continue to be themselves from one moment of perception to the next is reliant on the assumption that the basic nature of the things remains the same; that is that nature and the regularities we believe it displays are both stable and actual in ways that are not merely dependent on our memories; that is that they are not merely mentally generated chimerical appearances.