How can something come from nothing?

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn, I read what Fresco said in reply to your post. I hope you realize he is merely doing with the tenets of his cult what the Jehovah's Witnesses do with the tenets of theirs.

Gotta love the guy for being so devoted.

1 Reply

@ripple,

Seems familiar......hmmm?

Stop sniping my threads!

1 Reply

@mark noble,

Know 'Wish you were here', by Pink Floyd?
Two lost souls living in a fish-bowl?
Going over the same old ground - for fuckin infinity, and going nowhere, because they are trapped in a prism of eternal confusion, unable to bloody well expand their frikkin mindsets, due to the inevitable fact that they are limited to simplistic ideology and cultural dependence....

NOT, the actual lyrics... I elaborated, but......SO bloody WHAT?

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@ripple,

ripple wrote:

If something "happened" then something must have made this happen.

How do you know this premise is true?

ripple wrote:

So how can something come from nothing [...]?

One possible answer: Because nothingness is quantum-mechanically unstable. See Lawrence Krauss: A Universe from Nothing for a book-length account of how it might work.

Oh, and one more point:

ripple wrote:

(for example the creation of the universe)?

You better not postulate a god to remedy your dilemma. If it is true that nothing can come from nothing, then god has to come from something, either. Postulating a god does not solve the problem, it only kicks the can down the epidemiological road.

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@Thomas,

Right.

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@fresco,

Change whatever words you want.

If you sought to avoid pontificating, you failed.

Death cannot be simulated.

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@Frank Apisa,

It helps him feel deep.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Yup. That is something he seems always to be trying to do.

Never particularly successfully.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

Death cannot be simulated.

Yet you might consider what Buddhists mean by "egolessness" before dismissing that notion. And in case you hadn't noticed, "death of self" happens to you every time you sleep without dreaming.

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@fresco,

Fancy grown ups discussing whether something can come from nothing.

The mind boggles.

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@spendius,

Some of those grown ups are theoretical physicists who it seems are on the verge of overturning "Big Bang Theory" because they don't like the idea of "something from nothing". (recent BBC Horizon)

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@fresco,

Nah--they are squandering taxpayer's hard earned cash on boozing and shagging research assistants due to grabbing a usufruct on it by incantations which turn the head of politicians.

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@fresco,

Since I've yet to die or know anyone who has died and returned to life, I can't know what death is any more than a bunch of Buddhists can, but I'm fairly convinced it's nothing like sleep, and I don't believe that anyone can actually achieve a state of mind devoid of self.

You're free to believe such things of course.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Quote:
we are dealing with descriptions of reality

I merely point out that recent philosophers of language reject description as simply representational. Instead they argue that description is always contextually functional.

It does occur to me that descriptions may be representational in the sense that they "stand for" something or other, but they do not "simply" replicate them. Descriptions are always interpretative--as well as functional--efforts.

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@JLNobody,

Quote:

It does occur to me that descriptions may be representational in the sense that they "stand for" something or other, but they do not "simply" replicate them. Descriptions are always interpretative--as well as functional--efforts.

The move (after Heidegger) has been towards language as re-presentation (i.e re-experience generating). In this sense language evokes a cognitive experience not of the world but of a bi-directional interaction between observer and world.

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@fresco,

"Bi-directional," also in Meister Eckhart's sense that he sees God with the same eye that God sees him? Rolling Eyes

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@JLNobody,

Yes in that sense.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:
Re: fresco (Post 5208279)
Since I've yet to die or know anyone who has died and returned to life, I can't know what death is any more than a bunch of Buddhists can, but I'm fairly convinced it's nothing like sleep, and I don't believe that anyone can actually achieve a state of mind devoid of self.

You're free to believe such things of course.

--------------------------
Any more than which Buddhist?

I know it can be created, stasis mentality zero point.
I cannot know whether it is self inducable though.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

You are probably right that death is "nothing like sleep"; the latter is the way we spend most of our living time. But if you look at your conscious states (i.e., meditate) very attentively you will see that the feeling of self (of I-ness) is no more or less a feeling than any other; it is not awareness of a perceiving self behind perceptions and feelings. The problem is that when I say that "my" sense of agency or self is no more than one among a range of senses of the world I am compelled by the rules of grammar to use the subject-object structure (which inescapably implies an agent of experience). As Nietzsche put it grammar is the metaphysics of the masses.

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Quote:

Some of those grown ups are theoretical physicists who it seems are on the verge of overturning "Big Bang Theory" because they don't like the idea of "something from nothing".

Virtually all data by a train of probes making cosmological observations over the past two decades (I would draw attention especially to COBE and WMAP) has STRONGLY supported the BB theory even though the precision of some parameter values have been increase by several orders of magnitude! I would comment further on the statement but can’t think of a more appropriate adjective than hyperbole.

1 Reply

How can something come from nothing?

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