So, the mind makes a false artifact, thinking that a lack of anything can have being. This leaves The Existent to have no opposite and no alternative. Parmenides said that 'Nothing' cannot even be meant.

Good for Parmenides, but I'll do my own thinking.

Beats me! Durability, a notion we're familiar with from advertisements on kitchenware. — Agent Smith

Missed this! :lol:

:smile:

Odd that you did not choose "mystery". Btw, did you have any interest in that paper? :lol: — chiknsld

On the one hand, the idea of collections is as non-mysterious as it gets. On the other hand, it fascinates me that a collection is something different from any of its members and this "something" is unstructured (because the structure is constituted by the relations of this "something" to its members, which are other "somethings"). Intuitively I would expect that the "something" (quality) of the collection somehow subsumes the "somethings" (qualities) of its members, because structurally the collection is made up of its members and relations between objects are established by properties of the objects (and simultaneously, properties of the objects are established by the relations, as neither objects nor relations between them come first in a timeless reality). The qualities seem mysterious and ineffable but are inseparable from the relations in which they stand.

As for the paper by Sean Carroll, I once thought of the idea that a soul could be made of unknown particles/fields that normally interact very weakly with known particles/fields, and that's why physicists have not noticed them yet, but the interaction could be significantly amplified in certain complex objects such as a human brain. Again, the amplified influence of the unknown particles/fields would escape our attention, this time because due to the sheer messy complexity of the brain we would not know whether its behavior is completely caused by known particles/fields. The mechanism of amplification would be resonance between the soul and the brain. I don't know if it's possible, the amplification would have to be huge.

On the one hand, the idea of collections is as non-mysterious as it gets. — litewave

Ah, very interesting. :)

I once thought of the idea that a soul could be made of unknown particles/fields that normally interact very weakly with known particles/fields, and that's why physicists have not noticed them yet, but the interaction could be significantly amplified in certain complex objects such as a human brain. — litewave

Yes, this idea seems to be floating around in the ether right now.

Existence is energy and its modes of being. The more scientific question is not where did existence come from, but where did the constitutions of energy, that is atoms, come from? We can deduce back to a point in time known as a singularity, where all energy in the KNOWN universe started to expand. What was before this, is really the job of the particle physicists to compute.

If we ran a simulation of our universe it might be proven that it is a CYCLICAL event. That time is perpetual. That this energy and that energy comes from some other energy. There are principles in science that point to this 1. Conservation of energy principle. 2. Expanding and contracting energies of the universe. 3. Impossibility of absolute zero.

So we might be able to know where atoms (and their parts) originate through simulation, and we'd know whether time is perpetual or not through simulation.

We are probably even thinking about this wrong, "where do things come from if they come from themselves?" Huh? It seems language is causing this linguistic problem when talking about causality and ontology.

Here is an account of simulation theory - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wrhDaM4C5c

Existence is energy and its modes of being. The more scientific question is not where did existence come from, but where did the constitutions of energy, that is atoms, come from? We can deduce back to a point in time known as a singularity, where all energy in the KNOWN universe started to expand. What was before this, is really the job of the particle physicists to compute.

If we ran a simulation of our universe it might be proven that it is a CYCLICAL event. That time is perpetual. That this energy and that energy comes from some other energy. There are principles in science that point to this 1. Conservation of energy principle. 2. Expanding and contracting energies of the universe. 3. Impossibility of absolute zero.

So we might be able to know where atoms (and their parts) originate through simulation, and we'd know whether time is perpetual or not through simulation.

We are probably even thinking about this wrong, "where do things come from if they come from themselves?" Huh? It seems language is causing this linguistic problem when talking about causality and ontology. — Josh Alfred

It does not seem that we are eternal. We seem to have a static starting point. There is no proof that we come from anything. In fact the only thing that supports such fanciful ideas is our inception within the womb of the mother.

The easy assumption is that the universe is eternal, but we can never escape the fact that nothingness should actually exist and thus there is a mystery that needs to be revealed to us. Our life is a striving to discover this mystery.