But what's the relationship between the block universe (a physical model) and the metaphysical interpretation of time? — Echarmion

Yes, that is a question that is often glossed over. Scientists in particular often implicitly assume the stance of scientific realism when talking about time, i.e. that all and only those things that are posited by our best scientific theories are real (or something like this) - which is natural, since methodological realism, which we assume when doing science, and metaphysical realism are easily confused. But whatever the merits of this position, it is a philosophical position and must be acknowledged and defended as such.

It is uncontroversial that physics in general, and relativistic physics in particular does not endorse presentism or the A series. But what conclusions are we warranted to make from that fact?

To my limited understanding, Einstein based his theory of Relativity on the idea that we live in a block universe. — christian2017

No, relativity does not assume any of the questions that are at issue, such as whether the present is in some sense more "real" than the past or the future, or whether past, present and future tenses are objective properties and not merely indexical. Some argue that relativity makes anything but the block universe untenable, but not because that is already assumed by the theory.

To be clear, "block universe" in this context is not merely a visualization of the spacetime continuum (in Newtonian physics you can also visualize the space and time dimensions as a single block). Here it is a synonym for the B-theory of time or for eternalism, which are metaphysical positions.

I've presented a thought experiment where a million people use a closed timelike curve to all travel to different times. As far as I understand things, these types of thought experiments are generally taken by physicists to entail eternalism, assuming GR is true enough that closed timelike curves are actually possible. — Douglas Alan

You have to be careful when you say "different times," unless they are all on the same worldline, which is not the case here. From what I gather (and I have to admit, I hadn't encountered this type of objection before; the most common objections from relativistic physics have to do with the relativity of simultaneity in Minkowski spacetime), closed time-like curves and some other other topologies that are theoretically allowed by GR are a prima facie problem for presentism because they cannot be foliated (i.e. you cannot slice spacetime along constant-time hypersurfaces). And even if we stay with one worldline, closed time seems to imply that there can be no objective "pastness" and "futureness," as the traditional A-theory requires. But it is still possible to recover a local surrogate of presentism even in a spacetime with time loops - see for instance Steven Savitt, Time Travel and Becoming (2005) and Phil Dowe, A and B Theories of Closed Time (2017). A more common response for a presentist though is to deny that such non-foliable spacetimes are (meta)physically possible, and that is a defensible position, since we don't know for a fact that they are.

Outside of closed time-like curves though GR - specifically, the GR of our universe - is said by some to be more hospitable to presentism than generic SR because its symmetries naturally lend themselves to defining special reference frames and privileged observers (e.g. the rest frame of local matter or the CMB), and those are said to be good candidates for defining objective now. (I don't think I buy this argument myself.)

I went to a Philosophy conference at MIT filled to the brim with professional philosophers. In one of the talks, the moving spotlight theory was given a quick refutation as part of the argument. Here's a longer discussion. Though this author actually defends the moving spotlight theory as not being incompatible with Special Relativity:

https://web.mit.edu/bskow/www/research/timeinrelativity.pdf

There was Q&A after the talk. Not a single philosopher spoke up to question the implicit eternalism that was presented, nor to support the moving spotlight theory. My natural conclusion is that eternalism is not hugely controversial. Or at least not amongst the philosophers who might come to MIT for a conference. — Douglas Alan

There is some truth to this, but if you haven't yet surveyed the extensive literature on the subject, then perhaps the review articles that I posted at the top will go some way towards disabusing you of the notion that this is a settled issue in philosophy.

Dean Zimmerman writes: "The A‐theory is almost certainly a minority view among contemporary philosophers with an opinion about the metaphysics of time." (He frames presentism as a variety of the A theory.) "Nevertheless, it has many defenders—Ian Hinckfuss, J. R. Lucas, E. J. Lowe, John Bigelow, Trenton Merricks, Ned Markosian, Thomas Crisp, Quentin Smith, Craig Bourne, Bradley Monton, Ross Cameron, William Lane Craig, Storrs McGall, Peter Ludlow, George Schlesinger, Robert M. Adams, Peter Forrest, and Nicholas Maxwell, to name a few." He notes further:

Although it seems that most philosophers who take a position on the matter are B‐theorists, nevertheless, A-theorists have made up a significant proportion of the metaphysicians actually working on the A‐theory–B‐theory debate during the past ten or fifteen years. We A‐theorists might be inclined to explain this as a case in which the balance of opinion among the experts diverges from that of the hoi polloi. There is an alternative explanation, however. I have the impression that there is a much larger proportion of incompatibilists (about free will and determinism) among those actually writing on free will than among philosophers more generally. A similar phenomenon may be at work in both cases: The B‐theory and compatibilism are regarded as unproblematic, perhaps even obviously true, by a majority of philosophers; they seem hardly worth defending against the retrograde views of A‐theorists and incompatibilists. Philosophers sympathetic to A‐theories or incompatibilism, on the other hand, are more likely to be goaded into defending their views in print precisely because they feel their cherished doctrines are given short shrift by most philosophers. — Dean Zimmerman, Presentism and the Space‐Time Manifold[/url], The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (2011)

Laying my own cards on the table, I am not a proponent of either A- or B-theory, eternalism, presentism or possibilism; rather, I suspect that there isn't a substantive difference between them. But I've only dipped my toes into this subject on occasion, so I haven't made up my mind.

As for who is better equipped to address such questions, I don't consider philosophers better equipped than scientists. — Douglas Alan

I do, in general. For one thing, scientists rarely consider the same questions as philosophers. Their approach tends to be instrumentalist; excepting those few who work on foundations (which is widely considered to be a philosophical subject among scientists, and thus widely discouraged), they favor questions that can be resolved empirically, rather than through conceptual analysis or other approaches employed by philosophers. Nearly all the literature on this subject that I have come across was written by philosophers, many of whom understand the relevant science very well (for such general questions the scientific underpinnings aren't that difficult or esoteric). And scientists who do opine on philosophical questions are subject to the same competence limitations as other laymen.

This assertion is false in General Relativity. In GR, all of space-time exists forever. The past still exists and the future already exists. In GR time is kind of like space. My father died when I was young, but in GR, he's still there, just at a different location in time than I am. It's kind of like he's in California, only in time there's less freedom of movement than there is in space. So, while my father is alive and well in California (or actually 1969), I just can't get to California from where I am currently located.

In GR, I am not located below my feet or above my head, and likewise, I am not located before I was born or after I die. But I exist always between the bottom of my feet and below the top of my head and for the time between when I was born and before I die. — Douglas Alan

Let me be more clear with a more specific example. Let's say that we build or find a closed timelike loop. And now let's say that we have a million people traverse this timelike loop, but traverse it differently so that they all end up in different times in the past. And at each of these times, let's say that each of these million people is causally connected to billions of other people.

So, we now have a million different people who were here earlier today but are now spread across the past. Did they cease to exist? Or do only the locations surrounding these million people exist in spacetime? What about all the billions of people that are causally connected to them?

I'm sure that someone could come up with some crazy explanation for this which doesn't entail eternalism, but it sure to be ad hoc and completely violate Ockham’s razor. — Douglas Alan

I've presented a thought experiment where a million people use a closed timelike curve to all travel to different times. As far as I understand things, these types of thought experiments are generally taken by physicists to entail eternalism, assuming GR is true enough that closed timelike curves are actually possible.

Though even Special Relativity makes presentism difficult to defend. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more details.

I went to a Philosophy conference at MIT filled to the brim with professional philosophers. In one of the talks, the moving spotlight theory was given a quick refutation as part of the argument. Here's a longer discussion. Though this author actually defends the moving spotlight theory as not being incompatible with Special Relativity:

https://web.mit.edu/bskow/www/research/timeinrelativity.pdf

There was Q&A after the talk. Not a single philosopher spoke up to question the implicit eternalism that was presented, nor to support the moving spotlight theory. My natural conclusion is that eternalism is not hugely controversial. Or at least not amongst the philosophers who might come to MIT for a conference.

In any case, eternalism is a simple and natural explanation for what happens in the thought experiment. It is also in my experience how virtually all scientists who talk about GR, talk about GR.

I consider eternalism prima facie true, assuming the thought experiment is actually possible.

I think that anyone who wants to reject eternalism without rejecting the possibility of this thought experiment has a lot of work to do! And I find it highly improbable that whatever theory is presented as an alternative would be widely accepted as more likely.

As for who is better equipped to address such questions, I don't consider philosophers better equipped than scientists. Particle physicists used to consider virtual particles just a mathematical convenience, rather than virtual particles being real. Now virtual particles are universally accepted as real. I don't consider philosophers to be better equipped than particle physicists to determine the metaphysical status of virtual particles wrt existence, and in the unlikely case that philosophers come to a different conclusion than physicists on this issue, I would most likely side with the physicists. — Douglas Alan

If the rare earth hypothesis is correct, it means that intelligent life like us is extremely rare. If that's true, we inhabit a very special place in this universe. Since out current sample size of "intelligent life like us" is 1, we have no reason to assume we're in such a special place. The mediocrity principle implies that we should regard our habitable situation as "average". The rare earth hypothesis violates that. It claims our habitable conditions are/were exceptionally NOT average. Is there a good justification for this? — RogueAI

Our habitable conditions may be "average" in some sense, but certainly not with respect to their habitability! Your framing of the problem is absurd: we are not dropped into a random spot in the universe, or else we would have found ourselves floating in empty space.

I did watch a documentary about the camps and it didn't appear that their culture was being extinguished, but rather that education was aimed at integrating them into a Chinese ideology. — Punshhh

That's the official line. Was that a Chinese documentary that you watched?

In order to talk about "balancing" moral actions, you need to somehow quantify the moral weight, or worth of actions, to be able to compare, add and subtract these quantities and to evaluate their cumulative magnitude. This basically describes a metric over the set of moral actions. I am not sure why you object to this characterization.

Anyway, my objection is not that your proposal has the structure of a metric - after all, any theory has a structure of one sort or another, and there is nothing inherently wrong with a metric structure. My objection, or rather my query is very simple: Why this theory? It has some intuitive appeal, but it also has objectionable implications. Is there something about this theory that makes the price worth paying? I suspect that you may be led by implicit assumptions (namely, that there must be something like a metric of moral worth) or seduced by the elegance and simplicity of this theory. I may be wrong, but so far you have shed little light on your motivations.

That is exactly right. — CommonSense

You have a tendency of taking words out of context and using them inappropriately. Stop that. Your comment, while expressing an agreement, has nothing to do with what I actually wrote.

None of what I said was intended to follow mathematical rules. The terms were meant in a broad sense, to illustrate my points. — DingoJones

That may not have been your intention, but that is what it amounts to. Even if you say that this moral arithmetic is loose, it still has the approximate structure of an arithmetic. And my question still stands: why? You admit that this model has unpalatable consequences, such as paying forward for bad deeds*, as @BitconnectCarlos pointed out - that certainly doesn't seem right. So what's the attraction of the model? Does mathematical neatness overcome moral reservations?

* Actually, "paying forward" is a known psychological phenomenon: we tend to give ourselves more license after we do good deeds, especially those that are costly and demanding. But while this may be an unconscious tendency, when we become conscious of it, we usually recognize its moral faultiness.

That's not traveling; that's waiting. — Douglas Alan

Time travel is nothing more nor less than waiting. You are perhaps led astray by conventional word associations: waiting feels passive, while traveling feels active. But once you build or find your time machine/closed time-like curve, all you need and can do in order to complete your journey through time is what all of us do all of the time: wait, let the time pass. And if the spacetime topology happens to have a certain exotic configuration, then your waiting may take you to places unexpected.

But all this is an unnecessary complication, because, whatever the topology of your worldline, you still exist/existed/will exist on the points of that worldline. And the question remains: do all of those points exist? Or does only one moving point exist? Or a growing segment? Is there a fact of the matter about which of these points are in the past and which are in the future? These are metaphysical questions (or perhaps, as some argue, language questions), which physics is not equipped to address.

Let's consider intellectual validation a subset of social validation, and social validation a necessary precursor to survival. If an arguer seeks intellectual validation in a rational discussion, aren't those efforts to argue automatically rendered irrational, because the desire for acceptance is an animalistic feature? — even

That's a problematic reasoning. You can by the same token reduce everything to "animalistic features" - we are animals, after all; we are also physical bodies, so you could reduce everything to "physical features" - and so on. I am not denying the validity of such reductions, but the conclusion that you draw from this move is what is problematic.

PS This is actually a variation on Stove's Worst Argument in the World:

We can know things only
* as they are related to us
* under our forms of perception and understanding
* insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes,
etc.
So,
we cannot know things as they are in themselves. — James Franklin, Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World (2002)

Here you could restate your argument thus:

Our motivations are, in the final analysis, produced by our evolved biological faculties; therefore our motivations are irrational.

The first part is not terribly problematic; it is therefore that does not follow.

This assumes a scalar metric of moral action that accumulates and follows the usual arithmetic rules. Why assume that?

That is my point. That is the essence of nothing. That is the the logical basis of the conclusion all will be as if it never was. — CommonSense

Well, your point, as in the point of this thread, is rather elusive. But as to a more specific point that I was addressing, it is simply wrong. It is wrong to say of someone who has died that she has no past, for example - in the same way that it is wrong to say "The present king of France is bald." If you say "Albertine has no past," this can be interpreted as a conjunction:

1. There is one and only one x such as x is Albertine.
2. For every x that is Albertine, x has no past.

But if Albertine is dead, then (1) is false, which makes "Albertine has no past" false (as well as "Albertine has a past," of course).

The problem with most words is that they are consciously or unconsciously "tensed". If you look at the mereological existence of someone who is conscious the word exists is used by me as equivalent to not conscious - conscious - not conscious. Someone who does not exist, is not conscious, does not have a past that is their past, a past they are aware of. — CommonSense

I think I am getting a handle on this confusing bit that recurs in your posts. The problem here is even more basic than tensed predicates. You cannot predicate anything in the absence of an entity to which the predicate would attach. You cannot describe someone who does not exist as having no past, because you cannot describe someone who does not exist at all.

My argument is that it is far more rational to believe in the possibility (not certainty) of a non-physical existence after physical death than it is to make something out of nothing - to argue for existential meaning in a purely physical existence. — CommonSense

I carefully explain the reasoning behind this conclusion in the Something Out of Nothing book — CommonSense

When even after two pages of discussion you have failed to so much as hint at such an argument (beyond the tired old Pascal's Wager), I don't think I want to invest my time into reading your book.

Yes it does. Or at least it does as interpreted by physicists who specialize in GR. E.g. Hawking and Smolin. — Douglas Alan

If Hawking and Smolin subscribe to eternalism, and I don't know if they do, that is on them and not on GR. GR has nothing to say on the question of existence, it is not a metaphysical theory.

Also GR allows for "closed timelike loops" which let you travel into the past. You can't travel to something that doesn't exist. — Douglas Alan

This is a red herring. In any theory of spacetime you can travel to the future by the normal means, that is by waiting for it to actualize, but that doesn't imply that the future exists.

This assertion is false in General Relativity. In GR, all of space-time exists forever. — Douglas Alan

GR does not imply this. You are thinking of eternalism, which is a metaphysical view. GR does not imply it any more than Newtonian mechanics does. GR (or rather SR) constrains to some extent alternative views.

From a purely rational basis it seems to me that there are two most probable consequences of physical death (1) that there is nothing and all (including our past) will be as if it never was and (2) that there is a life after physical death. Since if 1 is true there will be no positive or negative consequences to physical death, living for the possibility that 2 is true is the logical choice. Therefore we should live the most positive physical life possible, not based on the humanistic myth that physical life has existential meaning, but rather on the possibility that there is a non-physical life after physical death that gives meaning to both our physical and non-physical lives. We will know if 2 is true after our physical death, if 1 is true we will never know because the question will die with us. — CommonSense

I think this is the clearest statement of your thesis (excluding the odd bit about "as if it never was," which is what I picked up on initially, but I guess it's not that important). But this is just a variation on Pascal's Wager (as it is usually interpreted when read out of context). And as with the Wager, this argument is ineffective when deployed against a skeptic or agnostic, one who is not at least biased towards a particular kind of afterlife belief.

I can entertain a nominal possibility of an afterlife of some kind. But what will this afterlife be like? How will the choices that I make in this life affect that hypothesized afterlife? I have no idea. There is nothing that I could use to inform a guess, let alone formulate a theory. I could propose radically different afterlife scenarios, and none of them will be any more probable than the others, as far as I am concerned. Therefore, the mere possibility of afterlife cannot influence my thinking and decision-making in any way whatsoever. It is completely irrelevant to my (actual) life.

If you're just going to look at it from a marxist perspective then aren't all employers parasites? — BitconnectCarlos

But of course, that is one of the ideas that is lurking in the background: the unearned privilege of the upper classes. You don't need this to be speechified in the movie, nor do you need the director explain it to you afterwards. One doesn't come to a movie an innocent bank sheet; we have all been exposed to such ideas; whatever your particular take on them, you can at least recognize the obvious cues.

But there are also more subtle (well, actually, not that subtle), non-verbal cues that communicate the idea of the innocent parasitism of the rich that puts one in mind of Wells's Eloi.

Rather than Sam Harris (who, to be honest, isn't much of a philosopher), I would recommend Daniel Dennett as an eloquent proponent of an "illusionist" take on consciousness and free will. But keep in mind, the view is fairly nuanced and cannot be summarized in one word; you will need to do a little reading (or listening).

When someone named Bill is born he exists. If there is no non-physical life after physical death, after the physical death of Bill he does not exist. After his physical death those who are alive can search the entire physical universe, but they will never find Bill. Bill has no present and no future, simply because Bill does not exist. What is usually missed is that in addition to no future, Bill has no past because Bill does not exist. — CommonSense

I still don't understand what you are trying to get at here. Granted, one can only predicate things about something or someone that exists. But what does this have to do with the search for meaning? Bill may or may not find his life meaningful while he is alive. After Bill dies, or before Bill is born, there is no sense in talking about the meaning of his life, except in the past or future tense. So what? (By the way, do you also require that Bill must have an eternal pre-life, as well as an eternal after-life in order for his life to have a meaning?)

Everything is either fascist or potentially fascist, if you play fast and loose with words and entertain far-fetched scenarios. Dogs are fascist. Ice skaters are fascist.

Based on this line of thinking, any philosophy, group, or "tribe" which is predicated on it could potentially lead to fascism or fascist-like behavior, what are your thoughts? — IvoryBlackBishop

Yeah, slippery slope-type arguments are dumb.

Weird, I could swear that that paper was from 2002 or earlier, as I clearly remember referencing it in a college paper I wrote in early 2002. — Pfhorrest

You may have read an arXiv preprint. Ladyman also cites an earlier date for the Mathematical Universe paper, following its arXiv entry.

But in my journeys, I haven't noticed many philosophers who champion Modal Realism. — Douglas Alan

At a guess, there are probably even fewer philosophers who accept MUH (which Tegmark himself readily acknowledges), and Tegmark is probably its only champion so far.

As for why MUH would be incompatible with phenomenal consciousness, as I already stated, I believe it to be a category mistake to assert that phenomenal consciousness is purely mathematical. Clearly Tegmark disagrees with me. I suspect, however, that most philosophers would agree with me. — Douglas Alan

As I said, most philosophers would share your reservations about MUH, but not necessarily for that reason (the more common criticisms would be the same ones that are leveled against structural realism). Some, like Dennett, just don't accord "phenomenal consciousness" the kind of autonomous metaphysical status that philosophers like Searle, Nagel and Chalmers think it ought to have.

If there is existing Philosophical literature that addresses any of this, I would be greatly interested — Douglas Alan

Here you go:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&cites=6942634181980308378

These are the Google Scholar cites for his original paper The Mathematical Universe (2008). And these are the cites for the book Our Mathematical Universe (2014):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3221947870983275224

You can add to these the cites for the 2003 paper Parallel Universes, which is perhaps the first publication where he broached the idea (the "mathematical universe" would be what he calls "Level IV universe" in that paper):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11792485456341973819

Some of the links are spurious, and many cites are not from philosophical literature, but you can still find what you are looking for in these three lists. For example, Ladyman discusses Tegmark's view in his SEP entry on Structural Realism.


By the way, you can include a quote from someone's post by selecting the text and clicking on the quote prompt.

I DO realise its a bit silly to argue over definitions, but when people do so through the filter of their belief or agenda it forces a response. — DingoJones

Really? Someone being wrong on the Internet forces you to respond, even though you realize all along that you are being silly? That's pretty sad, not being able to exercise your agency and do what you think is right because of some idiot.

I think you are conflating two different senses of counterfactual:

1. (adjective) Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case

2. (noun) A counterfactual conditional statement

A counterfactual as I understand it is a statement with a FALSE antecedent and TRUE consequent. — Nonsense

Not necessarily. Let's take your example: If I was lizard then I would like flies

A = I am a lizard
B = I like flies
C = A -> B (your example above)

Here both A and B are counterfactual, and therefore false. However, C - the counterfactual conditional statement - is true (at least that's the conventional interpretation).

Are you sure it was "Contemporary Philosophy"? Newton and Leibniz aren't exactly contemporary...

Yikes. I don't think I can stomach any more of this. Is there an English translation?

How did Archimedes calculate pi? I thought he used the method of exhaustion - increasing the number of sides of a polygon and doing the necessary division. — TheMadFool

Interestingly, that same method of inscribing or circumscribing polygons was used to prove some results in my integral calculus class. So there is a little truth to the hyperbole in the OP :)

By the middle of the 1st Century BCE, the Roman had tightened their grip on the old Greek and Hellenistic empires, and the mathematical revolution of the Greeks ground to halt — storyofmathematics.com on Roman mathematics

That's an odd claim. I don't know much about the history of mathematics, but even I have heard of Alexandrian mathematicians who thrived well into the ADs, such as Diophantus (he of Diophantine equations) and Hypatia (who is pictured on our site's favicon).

Argument here is hopeless. Is there a real, live physicist who will enter the discussion and untangle this mess? — jgill

I'm not a physicist, I just play one on TV :) (Undergrad degree several decades old.) But what mess do you need untangled? Not the mess in MU's head, I hope, because that would be, as you say, hopeless - and in any event, that would require a specialist from a different field of study...

There exists a relatively non-weird take on backward causation: Laws of physics are time-reversible; if you are physicalist who believes that physics exhausts all the truths about the world, then you have to conclude that causation, if there is such a thing, is time-symmetric. It is no less true to say that the future causes the past than it is to say that the past causes the future.

(Of course, as is usual with philosophy, not everyone is a physicalist, and even among physicalists there are different takes on causation, so that the above line of reasoning will not satisfy everyone, or even most.)

Introducing numbers already imposes discreteness. Numbers are for measuring, they cannot constitute a truly continuous line. — aletheist

You are reading more into what @fdrake proposed than there is. He didn't say anything about numbers constituting a line; on the contrary, he was going with your paradigm of continuous line figures - nothing else. And he was trying to show how, with assumptions that seem reasonable even in that paradigm, you still end up with a system that is isomorphic to the set construction. (Surely, we can still talk about the lengths of those line figures? Those are all the numbers that we need to get going.) I am not sure whether it can actually work out that way, but that was the idea, if I understand him correctly.

If you automatically designate as a "crank" anyone who expresses this idea, that if it looks like and acts like a wave, then it is a wave, and a wave by definition, requires a medium, you'll never find a non-crank who could explain this idea. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are right: this isn't even cranky, this is just stupid. But I didn't say that only a crank could defend the idea that waves and fields require a medium: on the contrary, I was looking for an intelligent explanation. And I have found some some, such as McMullin's paper.

I acknowledge that historically, it made sense to think that way. Waves transmit influence, they cause action at a distance. It makes intuitive sense to think that matter is required to transmit action: you want to move something - you push it, poke it with a stick or throw a rock at it; even a monkey understands that much. Hume defined a cause in accordance with contemporary understanding as "an object precedent and contiguous to another." Of course, Newton's gravitational interaction violated this "law of causality" quite spectacularly, and indeed this issue vexed him and those who followed.

Found this paper, gives some historical perspective on the issue:

The term, ‘‘field,’’ made its first appearance in physics as a technical term in the mid-nineteenth century. But the notion of what later came to be called a field had been a long time in gestation. Early discussions of magnetism and of the cause of the ocean tides had long ago suggested the idea of a ‘‘zone of influence’’ surrounding certain bodies. Johannes Kepler’s mathematical rendering of the orbital motion of Mars encouraged him to formulate what he called ‘‘a true theory of gravity’’ involving the notion of attraction. Isaac Newton went on to construct an eminently effective dynamics, with attraction as its primary example of force. Was his a field theory? Historians of science disagree. Much depends on whether a theory consistent with the notion of action at a distance ought qualify as a ‘‘field’’ theory. Roger Boscovich and Immanuel Kant later took the Newtonian concept of attraction in new directions. It was left to Michael Faraday to propose the ‘‘physical existence’’ of lines of force and to James Clerk Maxwell to add as criterion the presence of energy as the ontological basis for a full-blown ‘‘field theory’’ of electromagnetic phenomena. — Ernan McMullin, The Origins of the Field Concept in Physics (2002)

What is the medium through which probability waves in QM travel?

How about it, physicist out there? Clarify the idea that MU advances? Waves in fields create particles? Good luck with the metaphysics of fields. — jgill

To me it seems like a quaint prejudice to insist that anything that is wave-like requires a medium. Maybe there is something to the idea; I wish there were some non-cranks here who could explain this point of view. Technically, a (physical) field is just a distribution of physical values in space - nothing less, nothing more. Why would some additional stuff smeared over space be required?

Are you vandalizing Wikipedia now? Seriously, unless you are very knowledgeable about the subject (which, no offense, you are not), don't touch anything.

I would love to hear also how I can understand "organism qua organism" better? Perhaps you can start by explaining what "organism qua organism" means to you? — Barry Z

Oh, I don't mean anything different than what you mean: a particular kind of object in the world, an entity that, using certain diagnostic criteria, can be distinguished from other, non-living entities. The precise definition doesn't matter. My point was to contrast this perspective with that of Descartes' cogito or with later thinkers' reasoning that seeks to privilege the experience of self as the most certain knowledge that you can have. By contrast, if you consider organisms the way you consider everything else out there in the world, it is not at all clear why you would want privilege them in your epistemological scheme. They certainly don't seem to be the most basic or the most intelligible things in the world (people can't even agree as to what they are, exactly).

Perhaps instead of just telling me of my deficiencies in understanding natural sciences you can explain what made you reach that conclusion? — Barry Z

Sorry to be abrupt, but it's not like you are breaking new ground here. Origin of life research has been under way for close to a century, and there are plenty of sources available to an interested layperson, from online articles and videos to books for any educational level. If the topic interests you, why not read up on it? I am not saying that science has all the answers, but it can do a lot better than the sort of armchair reasoning that you present here.

Off the top of my head, I could point to your implicit assumption that the first organism was similar to one of the presently existing organisms, and that it popped out fully formed, all at once. No one really thinks that that is how first life started. But the more glaring problems with your thesis are even more basic flaws of reasoning.

You are equivocating between two senses of random. One sense is the one with which you start when you mention physics and chemistry: here random means purposeless, unintentional. In this sense, almost everything in the universe is random (aka natural), as far as we can tell. But then, when you talk about DNA "being produced by random process," your sense of random shifts towards unorganized, patternless, chaotic. The impressively large numbers that you cite are produced using the assumption of a very simple combinatorial process, which of course is not how even the simplest physics and chemistry works.

You wouldn't say of stars, planets, mountains and rivers - or even of the dirt under your feet - that they were produced by a process resembling "a tornado in a junkyard" (to use Hoyle's infamous metaphor)? Then why would you propose such a "theory" for the formation of first DNA?

Note that what we've been discussing is not metaphysics - it is just basic science and basic reasoning.

But let's say that you are right in a sense, and that the formation of life by natural means is an extremely unlikely event, given generic conditions on Earth or in the universe at large (although the fact that the first life on Earth seems to have appeared almost as soon as its surface cooled off and stabilized enough to allow even the barest possibility of life kind of suggests otherwise). What conclusion does this warrant?

https://youtu.be/KdocQHsPCNM?t=174

"A force, of some kind," you say. What kind of force? A forcey-force? Is this what you call metaphysics?