So the idea that science 'reveals' a universe that exists or would exist just as if there was nobody observing it, is a falsehood in its own right. — Wayfarer

The telescope, a scientific instrument, yes? it reveals things that never were seen by any human, yes? So what are you talking about? Don't make me lay out the metes and bounds of your thinking for you.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that some kind of creative intelligence is responsible for big bang. — jellyfish

This is just the human ego (separate self with free-will) illusion projecting itself onto existence. Destroy your own ego illusion and the god illusion will disappear along with it.

Intelligence does not exist. Can not exist. What we think of intelligence is actually just another pattern, which is one with all the other patterns in and of the ultimate pattern. All necessarily: eternally one, eternally ordered, eternally causal, and eternally omnipresent.

Free-will begets something coming from nothing and therefore a god cannot have it anymore then a human can. Starting points are illusions of ignorance of previous causality within the eternal chain. Whether that starting point is the big bang OR a choice in the mind of god.

The god idea does not solve the 'starting point' problem. It simply pushes it back one step and hides it behind a deeply rooted illusion.

Then it causes religion to form. Little ego's (humans) that want the big ego (god) to save it. The little ego can never be saved, only destroyed. Eternal bliss is on the other side.

Vaccum is a term used in science for pragmatic purposes. We are talking metaphysics here not science. Same way mathematicians play with the term zero, even though it only exists in the mind. — OmniscientNihilist

Yes, indeed the metaphysical nothing is not to be confused with the physicist's nothing. In your court now: please define your nothing. (See if you can get around the no-thing (gerund, from v. "to noth") of the nothing (noun?).) — timw

I do not see where you responded. My bad if I missed it - please direct me to it. Or if you haven't, please define your "nothing" now.

I contend that the 'fine tuning' argument undermines this view, because in order for there to be atoms, there first had to be stars - so the causal chain that created the circumstances for life had to start before there was even matter; so, not an accident, not meaningfully the outcome of chance. — Wayfarer

Stars do not create matter, they simply create higher elements from lower elements through fusion caused by lots of gravity. Lower elements like hydrogen atoms get "crushed" together creating more complex atoms like carbon needed for human life.

Even atoms were formed from something deeper, and so on, but eventually you must necessarily hit something eternal and omnipresent, which is here now, that I AM.

something eternal and omnipresent, which is here now, that I AM. — OmniscientNihilist

The timeless 'is' is necessarily all possible events in all possible universes because there cannot be any direction imparted to what has no start. So, it is at least an 'it', but not necessarily an 'I' of mind.

'It' is not optional, but mandatory, of necessity, for the non-alternative of it, as 'Nothing', cannot have beingness, so that takes care of why it has to be.

So, it is at least an 'it', but not necessarily an 'I' of mind. — PoeticUniverse

It's self refuting to claim "I dont exist". Therefore you must claim "I exist". And anything that currently actually exists must necessarily be eternal, and omnipresent. I AM GOD.

But reasoning to this conclusion is not required. It can simply be known immediately and directly omnisciently. I AM THAT I AM.

And anything that currently actually exists must necessarily be eternal, and omnipresent. — OmniscientNihilist

As for me, as 'I', I am necessarily an expression of the overall 'it' and, as such, have what 'it' has.

I am more interested herein in explaining the one and only 'it' as All there is and have supplied the philosophical reasons for the how and the why of it, we then hardly needing to worry about the what of what has to be.

I am more interested herein in explaining the one and only 'it' — PoeticUniverse

explaining the 'it' is mental masturbation. you are not separate from it, there is no need to look outward and do science to know "it". look within and there it is. here it is. it is you. i am it.

explaining the 'it' — OmniscientNihilist

It's merely the outline of the TOE, if anyone is interested in that. Ah, what an orgasm!

look within and there it is. here it is. it is you. i am it. — OmniscientNihilist

Yes, indeed.

It's merely the outline of the TOE — PoeticUniverse

TOE is the mind trying to play god. Trying to gain false omniscience. The mind can never have omniscience, it comes from directly from consciousness to consciousness.

The mind can never have omniscience, it comes from directly from consciousness to consciousness. — OmniscientNihilist

We are that which is All, as you said.

The mind looking with the eyes sees only the universe.

Bypass both and look directly with consciousness. and know yourself omnisciently.

Bypass both and look directly with consciousness. and know yourself omnisciently. — OmniscientNihilist

In conscious life all is known: I am the holistic unity of the One as well as the linear multiplicity of the details.

Maybe the causa sui is we, as Fitche thought. And as he rejected the thing in itself, can we then abandone the idea of space-time and say matter moves mysteriously without it? For is consciousness can come from a brain, then why can't water suddenly stand up and talk? Not the right chemicals?

For is consciousness can come from a brain, then why can't water suddenly stand up and talk? — Gregory

consciousenss cannot come from brain because something cannot come from nothing. so either consciousness is eternal or it doesnt exist. to say it doesnt exist is self refuting, your using it to say it. therefore it must be eternal. so birth and death are illusions and only apply to the body.

and lack of memory of the past does not prove non existence of self but only non existence of memory now. therefore i have no proof i did not exist 1000000 years ago

Intelligence does not exist. — OmniscientNihilist

Stop telling on yourself already. :eyes:

intelligence and knowledge, neither are real.

taking two unknown things and comparing them is not real knowledge. but that is the only knowledge the mind has.

the mind is nothing but a reflection of the unknown.

reflecting and comparing the unknown will never make it known

watch "intelligence" and you will see its nothing but a recording then used as a map to avoid pain and attain pleasure

I missed the part where brains were nothing.

Perhaps we should all put a little hatch in our skull, to use the empty space for a handy storage compartment.

...

To say concousness cannot be caused by brains because it cannot come from nothing is incoherent. Brains aren't nothing. There is no cause which is nothing. The entire point of giving any causal account is that something is involved in producing something else--i.e. to claim a causality is to assert something came for something else.

To say concousness cannot be caused by brains because it cannot come from nothing is incoherent. Brains aren't nothing. — TheWillowOfDarkness

the brain producing consciousness is like a hat producing a rabbit. where is the magic wand?

matter cannot produce spirit and spirit cannot produce matter

the brain cannot create consciousness and god cannot create a universe

two totally different fundamental substances

and even if they werent what would the brain make consciousness from? what did god make the universe from? spare parts they had lying around? haha

whatever substance exists must exist eternally

causality (motion) must also be eternal

There is no cause which is nothing. The entire point of giving any causal account is that something is involved in producing something else--i.e. to claim a causality is to assert something came for something else. — TheWillowOfDarkness

:up:

two totally different substsances — OmniscientNihilist

Using his "nonexistent intelligence", Spinoza demonstrates that your statement is wholly incoherent. (vide Ethics Ip13-14) :victory:

to claim a causality is to assert something came for something else. — TheWillowOfDarkness

causality only moves things that already exist, it cannot produce something new

its related to motion not substance

and since motion cannot come from stillness and we currently have motion then it must be eternal

Not a worry here, since conscious instances are just another state of matter.

There are states of the brain interact with other states (bodies, the environment, etc.) to produce states of consciousness. Causality is functioning like anything else where interacting states produce a new state.

The states in question are just brains and instances of conscious experience, rather than say a germ and an illness or carbon under heat and pressure forming diamond.

Causality is not any sort of acting entity. It's a reference to what various states are doing and what results from their interaction.

Not a worry here, since conscious instances are just another state of matter. — TheWillowOfDarkness

abracadabra poof the rabbit comes from the hat

you just need the right incantation or magic wand and the rabbit can come from the hat

not to worry

if we just arrange the hats in the right order the rabbits will come! haha

either your using magical thinking or your doing something else and claiming all matter is conscious. either way is flawed.

mental gymnastics to avoid the paradigm shift. just like they did with the geocentric solar system

if one atom is not conscious then no arrangement of them will ever produce it

and if one atom is conscious then they all are

and we havent even got into the fact that there is no direct evidence for matter in the first place, only qualia. haha

Neither, I'm saying there specific states of matter which are conscious experiences. There's no need for all states of matter to be conscious.

All that's required is some states of matter (conscious experiences) be caused. No magic wand or hat. Just states of matter producing different outcomes. Sometimes we get diamonds, other times we get states of conscious experience.

There is no "evidence" for matter for a very good reason: it's not an emprical state we might observe. It's a logical/metaphysical category.

Sometimes we get diamonds, other times we get states of conscious experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

false analogy.

what is a diamond, is it atoms? then its nothing but cold dead dark matter. is it a bright and shiny thing? then its consciousness. decide which. and pick one. both are fundamentally different and neither are remotely compatible with each other.

you try and blur the subject by analogizing to another thing you have blurred. but i see through your tricks. your spinning around in circles of illusion and im standing outside the illusion looking at it and laughing.

Nope.

A diamond is a diamond. Atoms are just some material states. They are not them all. And although a diamond may involve atoms, it is not just atoms. It has its own particular existence beyond just any of its atoms.

Let's look at what it means for "something" to come from "nothing".

We need to clarify some matters here, especially what a thing is and how we might best think about what nothing is.

A thing, or something, is, strictly speaking, some thing in the world. If we are to speak carefully, we should avoid ever calling fundamental reality--what some call the world--a thing. It isn't a thing-in-the-world among other things. Basketballs and rivers are things. The whole of everything taken altogether at once cannot be pointed to like things can.

What we normally call a thing is nothing more than a state of affairs in the world that our minds draw a line around and consider as one unified object separate from other objects. It has nothing to do with how reality is in itself, but rather is an artifact of the way our brains organize perception with a high-level description that makes navigating the world and communicating more manageable. A tiger is not really separate from its environment and no two tigers are exactly alike, but to have to specify the entire state of the universe at a subatomic level every time we want to scream "TIGER!" would be terribly impractical. So we classify, we group, we carve up, and so on. But all of this is merely a convenience. Such objects are not real. These lines we draw in the world and the labels we assign to them are not in the world itself. There are an infinite number of arbitrary ways we could conceivably carve up the world, with many intersecting boundaries, at least one such "object" for every possible combination of one or more particles.

Things, understood in this way, being just states of affairs in the world, just temporary and contingent arrangements, might be said to be created and destroyed. Let's use wax as a metaphor for a fundamental, irreducible substance. I know it is, in fact, reducible. But let's pretend it isn't. For our purposes, it is bedrock ontological bottom. We can take this wax and shape it in many different ways. We can make it into a bunch of cubes. We can smoosh the cubes together and make a dinosaur sculpture. In this way, we might say that we have "created" a dinosaur. But this is all something happening in the way we think about the world. What is new is the activation of an object recognition circuit in our brains that at some point suddenly recognizes the shape of a dinosaur and says, "There's a dinosaur!" But has any fundamentally, rock-bottom-reality been created? No. No matter what you do with the wax, which is what is really real here, the wax is conserved. And the wax is what "occupies" that form, what gives it being. It is that which finds itself in the form of a dinosaur. The dinosaur doesn't find itself as anything. It isn't real in-itself, apart from our seeing at such. This is not to say that the wax understands itself to be a dinosaur either, only that it is that which is "there" in the dinosaur, holding that form.

But now let's expose a problem with wax as a way of thinking about the fundamental substance. Obviously, wax is actually a form of something more fundamental, just a way of arranging particles. Not only that, but when we think of wax, when we think of forming it, there is always something that is not wax, namely the space around it. The wax is differentiated from something. Only in this way is it possible for it to have any form at all. In order for something to have form, there must be something to which it can be compared, something to which it is related.

Ultimately, everything is one. This is the guiding principle of advances in physical theory, which proceeds unification by unification. The closer you get to rock-bottom fundamentals, the fewer different kinds of things there are. Seemingly different things are reduced to something common. Also, great philosophers like Spinoza persuasively argued this point. Unlike things cannot interact. In order for things to interact, they must ultimately be made of the same stuff, or be part of the same reality.

Any time you see distinctions at all, it means you are not yet at rock bottom. The things distinguished must be different forms of a deeper reality. Empty space, what we normally think of as nothing, is actually something. And the "empty" space of modern physical theory is anything but empty. In Einstein's theory, it bends. It has its own degrees of freedom. In quantum field theory, "empty" space is full of "vacuum fluctuations", of virtual particles and the like. And so-called "empty" space is what we distinguish matter from. It is the background against which we see the figure. Also, consider that even classical space has such features as dimensions and differentiable points. Spatiality is a kind of differentiation. We are talking about structure and order here. Can true nothingness have any structure? Can anything be said about its features? Physical space can have all sorts of different structures, including different topologies.

It is hard to think of empty space as "something" partly because of how we think of what it means for something to exist. The word exist means to stand forth. Material things stand forth, or protrude, in the world. Space doesn't.

Think of this another way. Imagine a blank computer screen, all black pixels. Now lets draw a white figure on it with white pixels. The black pixels, in fact, are something, are a state of affairs. And there is something which is non-black.

Imagine Conway's game of life with white pixels being "on" or "alive" and black pixels being "off" or "dead". You could invert the world and it would be functionally indistinguishable.

Let's get to the ultimate point of all this. When you are at true rock-bottom, nothing can be said. There is nothing to compare ultimate reality with. It isn't related to anything else. There is nothing outside it. It doesn't have form. It isn't a state of affairs in the world. There is no background against which to see it. It isn't a something in relation to a nothing, nor is it a nothing in relation to a something from which it is distinct.

Whatever is ultimately real is eternal, is permanent, always-already-the-case. It cannot be created or destroyed. It isn't self-caused. Such would be absurd. Such would be like saying it is reducible to itself or that it stands under itself or prior to itself. Reality-in-itself is necessarily beyond time and space, these being modes of differentiation that apply only to what is differentiable, which is never rock-bottom.

Fundamental reality, regardless of its nature, whether it really is true nothingness, will always look like nothing, as nothing can be said of it. It is impossible to notice. This is taking the idea of a fish not noticing the water all the way. Even water for a fish is different from something, the fish being one such thing from it can be distinguished. And fish can discover the water-air boundary. But reality isn't different from anything. No such comparisons can be made. There is something outside the water, namely air, rocks, et cetera. But there is nothing outside reality.

Reality is omnisymmetric. What do I mean by that? Symmetry is present anywhere something can be transformed in a way that doesn't change it. For example, a perfect circle, when rotated in two dimensions around its center, is exactly the same after the rotation. No difference. A truly bilaterally symmetrical shape can be flipped left to right without changing it. In such cases, there is no sense in saying that it even has an orientation where it is symmetric. It is pointless to specify the rotational angle of a perfect circle, or the left-right orientation of an upright isosceles triangle.

All form is asymmetry. All form is information. All information is difference. Everything that is noticeable, everything measurable, is difference, is variance, is information. But that which is always conserved is invariant, is symmetric. What is most fundamentally real must be in all ways invariant, indifferentiable, beyond all informational distinction.

This looks an awful lot like nothing. But consider that even if it has some inner nature, we could never point to that. We couldn't put language to it. We couldn't measure it.

If everything were truly made of wax, there would be nothing that is non-wax. All we could detect would be variations within the wax, but never the wax. The wax would have no boundaries. Nothing would be non-wax. Obviously, wax here is a poor analogy, as everything we imagine when thinking of it involves ways in which we differentiate it from other things in our experience.



Here is the essential thing to understand:

0 = -1 + 1

This is all conservation laws in a nutshell. And is tautologous. It is pointless to say that -1 + 1 came from zero or that zero caused it. There is no arrow here. There is only equivalency, or really, identity. It is just another way of saying "0 = 0" or "1-1 = 1-1".

When you understand all this, it is not suprising that in physics we have all these symmetries, all these invariances, all these conservation laws, and such things as Noether's Theorem. And what do they tell us? It is not said or understood enough, but the quantity conserved is zero.

Consider conservation of momentum. No matter what happens in a system, the total momentum of all the objects in it stays the same. Momentum can be transferred from one billiard ball to another, but total momentum in any given direction remains always the same. But can't we say that the whole system has a nonzero momentum? We can, but only if we compare it to things outside that system, in which case we are now considering a larger whole system, which itself has no changing momentum unless we compare to a further "outside", in which case we are then once again considering a larger system, ad infinitum. And when we talk about everything, or ultimate reality, well, there is clearly nothing else to compare it to. It can't be moving relative to anything. It is meaningless to talk about it as having momentum. So what's the total momentum? Necessarily, it is either zero or undefined, however you like to think about it.

Total energy bound up in matter as mass is exactly canceled by its negative gravitational potential energy. Total energy is zero. What is conserved always is zero.



Fundamental reality is conserved. All "thingness" belongs to things-in-the-world, not the world itself (conceived as ultimate reality). The world cannot be created either by anything else (there is nothing else) or by itself, as it can't stand prior to itself to create itself. It just is. But it also seems exactly to be what is probably best thought of as nothing, which is the most natural and expected situation of all, one that calls for no explanation. Only differences from nothingness call out for explanation, making us ask why there is something rather than nothing.

The world, or reality, ultimately, is not different from the indifferentiable. When we say something is created from nothing, that something is differentiable from that state of affairs that we wrongly call nothing, that blackness we imagine prior to the spark or whatever that is thought to have arisen. The two, what we think of as nothing and what we think of as something, are able to be found to be different. So neither of them can be rock-bottom.

People often ask why there is something rather than nothing. I say that the solution to this mystery is to grasp that there in fact isn't something rather than nothing (the true nothing). No true, irreducible asymmetries have emerged. Whatever it is that we are experiencing, the null ultimate reality is conserved. The puzzle then is to grapple with how then we come to experience difference. I suspect that it is a kind of illusion that has to do with perspective and partial apprehension of reality. Reality-in-itself, in toto, involves complete cancellation of all differences. It is omnisymmetric perfection. And it is our own true nature and ground. We are reality experiencing itself as us. When we ask what we are, and we really point that question all the way to its ultimate destination, that destination must be the ultimate ground of being, ultimate reality.

There is only substance (in Spinoza's sense) and its modifications. That which goes through the changes, or in other words, that which remains the same throughout the modifications, or that which is really real, or that to which all is reducible, is that which experiences being all things. And there is only one such fundamental ground, one experiencer, one ultimate destination of all self-referential pointings or askings. States of affairs don't experience themselves. That which has states of affairs is what experiences them.

That to which the "I" thought, for all, ultimately refers, is the one fundamental reality, the one substance, the one experiencer, the one true identity, that which remains the same through all changes, and which ultimately, is beyond all change. Call it nothingness. Call it God. Call it Self. Call it No-Self. Call it I am. Call it Apeiron. Call it whatever you want. It is not created. And there is nothing apart from it that can be regarded as its creation. It is neither effect nor cause. There is no before or after it. There is no above or below it. It is neither subject nor object. It is neither here nor there, though it is everywhere present to itself.

I don't think this is what most people imagine when they think of God, nor is it what people imagine when they think of nothingness or of self or as that which preceded the Big Bang or stands under things now. And realizing that you, yes you, are identical with this, is no haven for you as a person. It isn't a soul. What is conserved is not your identity as a person, not this finite, temporary, relative state of affairs, this thing you normally think of as yourself and the memories that are part of it. So there is nothing like a traditional religious comfort to be found in this idea. But you are secure in a sense. That which you really are, that which is prior to all modification, is indeed permanent. You, the true you, can't be separated from reality. You are reality. You are all of it. You are everyone. You cannot die. What you normally mistakenly take yourself to be, however, is bounded in time and space, and it is a mistake to take it as yourself. But that ultimate reality which you are, when taken in-itself, in toto, is also that which we find to be indistinguishable from nothing. So "all is one Self" and "all is no-self" are really not different. What you really are is what we can't avoid equating with nothingness. Atman is Brahman. And Brahman is no-self. The Ultimate is beyond subject and object, here and there, something and nothing (taken conventionally).



So, with lots of qualifications, yes, you are immortal, you are God, you are all that is, you are free (not constrained by anything outside, there being no outside), and so on. But all of this is transcendent in the Kantian sense. All that you see out in the world, secondary to the principle of individuation, including your thoughts, body, sensorium, memories, and so on, is doomed to die (in the sense of being time-limited). It is a world of woe as long as you identify with the things in it. You would be wise to cease to exclusively identify yourself with any of it, with anything that has a beginning and an end in time. Realize that you transcend all of it and you shall know eternal life, not as a human, but as that which has mistaken itself for one of its many forms. To know the truth, go inward, toward that which is behind perception, to the noumenal ground, not toward the outer phenomena, or the wall of the cave. Withdraw your identification from this form. As a wise man once said:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break in nor steal.

if you examine every single property you use to define an atom or diamond you will see every single one of them is either imaginary or an aspect of qualia. and both are aspects of consciousness itself.

think about an atom or diamond and its an object in your mind which is consciousness. look at an atom or a diamond and you will be seeing qualia, which is consciousness

Let's look at what it means for "something" to come from "nothing". — petrichor

looks like you did some real fancy mental gymnastics there to try and prove something that i already know is absolutely impossible.

knowledge cannot refute absolute truth. something cannot come from nothing. end of story.

instead of building knoweldge from assumptions build it instead from absolute truth. and then you will really get somewhere

That's why you realise no state is given by the definition of a form. Definitions of properties are indeed imaginary.

They are also necessary, since definitions don't change.

All together incapable of giving existence, since that depends upon whether or not a being exists (states of consciousness included).