doneitbefore:
After following JLN's suggestion, I
believe you will be saying that you agree with
nearly all of the posts, as well as the original thesis
.....or am I reading you incorrectly?
At any rate, welcome aboard!
doneitbefore:
After following JLN's suggestion, I
believe you will be saying that you agree with
nearly all of the posts, as well as the original thesis
.....or am I reading you incorrectly?
At any rate, welcome aboard!
doneitbefore:
After following JLN's suggestion, I
believe you will be saying that you agree with
nearly all of the posts, as well as the original thesis
.....or am I reading you incorrectly?
At any rate, welcome aboard!
I witnessed a vacuum today, it's loud, cleans things up, and causes me work! So i guess they do exist
alikimr is absolutely right. The main idea here is that it is impossible to get something from nothing. It is a proven fact. so there is no nothing because there cant be cause we have something. therefore NOTHING is something because it exists as nothing. Nothing is really an idea it cant exist as a state of matter when referring to the state of our universe.
I also think that there is no such thing as nothing. I guess this depends on what you mean by nothing.
I suspect that nothing and something are aspects of the same thing, just as cause and effect (talking about "creation") are two poles of a single process. Actually, there are no "causes" in the world, and as such there are no "effects". The conceptual set, cause and effect, are merely tools of thought, epistemological strategies sans ontological status. We see a phenomenon and ask for its "meaning," usually in terms of how it came about or why it exists. In order to answer that question, we frame or think of the phenomenon as an "effect" and then look for its "cause." One makes no sense without the other: they are, after all, a set. Notice that we THINK of causes as preceding effects (we call them "antecedent variables"). But phenomenologically we see and think of the "effect" first and then look for the cause afterwards. Historically, the "effect" precedes the "cause" but conceptually it is the opposite--if not, it would make no sense and serve no explanatory purpose. And if there are no causes and effects in nature--only in our heads--then a metaphysical deterministic ontological model of the universe makes little sense.
Well, cause and effect are how we think and it might not be how it actually "is", but that doesn't mean that it doesn't truly exist. I think it's a representation/mirror of the actual thing.
I'm confused.
Ray, your "confusion" is reasonable. I too sometimes wonder why, if mathematics is only our way of representing the world to ourselves rather than an objective language for describing nature AS IT IS, why math and Newtonian physics help us to engineer bridges that do not collapse. No doubt there must be SOME correspondence between our mathematical and Newtonian thinking about nature and the actual (I hate to say "objective") structure of nature itself. BUT that correspondence is probably only a matter of degree. Our engineering science works up to a point because of that degree of correspondence. Newton does not work when we position ourselves very close to nature, say at the level of quantum mechanics. At that distance a different paradigm is required for us to develop representations of subatomic reality that "work" for us.
Our models of the world and the world itself, whatever that means, are not to be confounded. Remember the old saying by the semanticists: the map is not the territory. An accurate map may help you to get around, but you cannot farm on it.
Ray & JLN:
JLN states that phenomenologically we see....(and ofcourse think)
of the effect first, and then look for its cause afterwards. Is this so unreasoable a sequence
as to question its viability?
Accordingly I am in full agreement with Ray when he says that after all, this is how we think, by obvious necessity.
I must take specific disagreement with your deliberate statement that "the effect
PREECEDES the cause"., JLN, ....and you know how much respect I have for your thinking .....but I do believe that although you can apply the meaning
that you wish to the words that you use, one cannot
change the "reality of sequence" so conveniently.
As you said in earlier discussions, you
are "unfortunately " at times in confrontation with logic
and ordinary rationality, ......but there has to be a
limit to the communication that such linguistic
liberties afford....with all due respect.
Alikimr, let's see if I can salvage my reputation. I was only stating that historically the mental process of explaining an event sees the effect preceding the cause. If you re-read my post you'll see that I have not suggested the absurdity that effects are understood as preceding causes. But we do find an "effect" first (an event to be explained) and look for its "cause" afterwards. We DO NOT, after all, see concrete causes and effects in experience. We THINK them as you note, and we think them because of their explanatory value. In our explanatory efforts we clearly think of causes preceding and determining effects. That's why we call causes the "antecedent determinants" of effects. By the way, I think I got this idea from Neitzsche.
If we want to explain something in terms of its functional significance we might ask what are its intended or unintended consequences. What is the function of the heart, for example (to pump blood around the body). In such a framework we are actually "explaining" (answering a question) in terms of something's effects rather than its causes. We could also ask what causes the heart to come into existence, and this would require an explanation in terms of the biological evolutionary career of that organ.
