On 07 May 2012, at 15:42, Pierz wrote:
The question, "Why is there anything at all?" used to do my head in
when I was a kid. I can still sometimes get into kind of head-
exploding moment sometimes thinking about it. Russell's answer to me
remains the most satisfying, even though in a sense it is a non-
answer, a simple ackowledgement that there is no logical reason why
there has to be a cause of 'everything' even though everything may
have a cause. Krauss's argument - I admit I haven't read the book
(yet), so I am speaking of what I understand rhe hist of his
argument to be - may be interesting physics/cosmology, but I agree
with the critics that it doesn't really get to the bottom of the
proverbial 'turtle stack', and it shouldn't claim to, because such a
bottom turtle is in principle impossible.
John Clarke claims that a 'nothing' that contains the laws of
quantum mechanics and the potential to produce time, space and
matter is a very pitiful something if it is a something at all. But
I think it sneaks a lot more into its pitiful somethingness than at
first meets the eye. Not only the laws of quantum mechanics, but the
laws of logic and mathematics without which quantum mechanics could
not be formulated or expressed - as Bruno woukd be quick to point
out. I really must read the book to understand how this vacuum can
be unstable in the absence of time -
The problem is that physicists have not yet succeed in marrying QM and
GR, which is needed to get a quantum theory of space-time. You can bet
on strings or on loop gravity though, or on the Dewitt-Wheeler
equation, which, actually make physical time vanishing completely from
the big picture. It is an internal parameter only.
doesn't stability or instability depend on time by implying the
possibility or otherwise of change? But even accepting this it seems
to me that in order to reason about the properties of this vacuum
(e.g., its instability or otherwise) means that the vacuum must
exist. Getting what seems like extremely close to non-existence is
still a million miles (actually an infinite distance) from actual
non-existence, because what defines the distinction between non-
existence and existence is not anything to do with being extremely
minimal. An extremely small number, say 10 to the -100000, is
extremely minimal, but still not zero, and still an infinite
distance, in a sense, from zero.
Krauss's argument may satisfy the cosmologist's desire to see the
cause of the universe reduced to something extremely simple, but it
does not satisfy the wondering child or philosopher who is
thunderstruck by the strangeness of there being any existence at
all, however simple or rudimentary its origins. It's wrong to say
such a child or philosopher is caught in a pointless mind loop
trying asking how something that does not even have the potential to
produce anything can, nevertheless, produce something. Of course
that is absurd. The question in my mind as a wondering child was
never 'How did the nothing that must have come before the universe
produce the universe?' It was my mind chasing the chain of causation
of things and realizing that, whatever that chain looked like, I
could never trace it all the way back to absolute nothing - so why
this mysterious beingness? The fact is it's beyond reason. Call it a
gift or a miracle and you're as close to it as anything. God is no
answer, mind you - he's just another spurious bottom turtle. God,
laws of quantum mechanics: it's just different attempts to stop the
rot of infinite regress, hammer in a wedge somewhere and say
"Because". Why do the law of quantum physics exist? Because. Why
does God, the UD, the Buddhist void exist? Because.
It is different for the UD. Its existence is a theorem in any theory
of everything, like this one:
classical logic +
0 ≠ s(x)
s(x) = s(y) -> x = y
x+0 = x
x+s(y) = s(x+y)
x*0=0
x*s(y)=(x*y)+x
or in this one:
Kxy = x
Sxyz = xz(yz)
As for the remark about nothingness having only one way of being and
there being a lot more ways of existing, it's cute, but it's
sophistry. Non-being is not a countable way of being.
I agree.
It's the absence of being - obviously - so can't be presented as one
among a myriad of possible configurations of the universe.
It that exists. Exactly.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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