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Why does anything exist?

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Re: Why does anything exist?

#211

Post by booleandilemma »

hackerlight wrote: post #180
booleandilemma wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray of it into tiny pieces If you destroy every recording of Top Gun, it will cease to exist. > The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation Yes it does. And Top Gun didn't exist before 1986.

We stop knowing about it, but it still exists. It's just a number. You can't delete a number from existence, you can just delete your copy of it.

Numbers don't exist in the first place. It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure)

I've noticed people in this thread are getting actual, physical things confused with concepts and mental representations of things.

Confusing the map for the territory.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#212

Post by hackerlight »

booleandilemma wrote: post #211
hackerlight wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We stop knowing about it, but it still exists. It's just a number. You can't delete a number from existence, you can just delete your copy of it.

Numbers don't exist in the first place. It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure) I've noticed people in this thread are getting actual, physical things confused with concepts and mental representations of things. Confusing the map for the territory.

So you hold the Fictionalism view and reject Platonism. That's fine. This stuff has been debated ad nauseam and we're not going to break any new ground here.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/

> It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure)

I will mention that dogs are also a useful shared fiction. We assign the label dog to a perception of a configuration of atoms that we think satisfy the criteria for what a dog is. So I'd say that numbers are more like dogs than unicorns, in that they are an abstraction that is used by us in practice to map to perceptions of physical objects.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#213

Post by jesuslop »

jesuslop wrote: post #47

There is a known old argument in St. Anslem, Leibnitz and Gödel for that in a pantheistic picture. Gödel adopted higher order modal logic, and factors the question via the axiom 'if possible then actual' (god/reality existence). I'm now pleased to discover that in 2017 someone has went through the pains of porting the thing to a proof verifier, Isabelle/HOL (they start from Melvin Fitting reconstruction of the idea i…

EDIT: axiom -> lemma

Re: Why does anything exist?

#214

Post by sras-me »

jiggawatts wrote: post #121
jawns wrote: post #59

If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four s…

> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set). The movie doesn't cease to exist because you turned the television off, only the projection of it into those particular photons. Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray of it into tiny pieces, crush those pieces to powder, and melt the result into a formless goo. Movies are purely information, a sequence of bits. Thos…

>The Universe is "just" mathematics..

I have come to this conclusion as well. It came to be when I was looking at a fractal animation, and it appeared that things moved in it as if obeying some laws of physics.

I have expanded on this idea here, and have described a sort of thought expiriment where I try to "prove" this. You probably not want to read it. It is not very well written.

https://sras.me/the-root-of-all-existence.html

Later I came across Max Tegmark's paper, which describes the same thing..

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646.pdf

Re: Why does anything exist?

#215

Post by abudabi123 »

a_techwriter_00 wrote: post #150
logicchop wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably have to assume there is a necessary substrate. What else can you possibly think? Contingency means being contingent on something else. You could suppose that the "something else" is itself contingent, but then you have another contingency. At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent and that the rest of the stuff downstream turns on it bein…

Can the universe be infinite? Whatever layer of contingent substrate one finds, can't there be another one lurking behind it, just as contingent?

Roger Penrose suggests patterns before the "big bang" are observable is my interpretation of what was said between him and Melvin Bragg on a Youtube clip.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#216

Post by tablespoon »

voxl wrote: post #158
tablespoon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default instance of nothing: > Physics: No energy: the vacuum And not being aware of the difference can lead one to dumbly misunderstand the question with confidence (e.g. some physicist explaining how the universe could have arisen out of "nothing," when they're really explaining how it could have arisen out of a vacuum, which metaphysically is definitely a something )…

Can you, metaphysically, define nothing? I ask because I wager you can't, and I am highly suspect that metaphysics has philosophical value.

> Can you, metaphysically, define nothing? I ask because I wager you can't,

Are you saying that you can't define "absence"?

But asking me is silly and pointless: I'm no philosopher. And even if philosophers have trouble, that doesn't mean there's no merit to the concept: it just means its difficult.

> and I am highly suspect that metaphysics has philosophical value.

I'm pretty sure you meant the exact opposite of what you actually said, and I strongly suspect you're wrong.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#217

Post by layer8 »

saulpw wrote: post #204
layer8 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God is the universal wave function. I suspect that that's disingenious, because calling it "God" implies that you think it is actually in some way more than what the universal wave function is in physics. Because otherwise why would you have a problem with an atheist physisist who believes the wave function describes the universe, and there is not more to it than that mathematical desciption?

Because for some reason the universal wave function results in a subjective experience. If you can math that, I'll concede that Math = God.

How would “God” explain subjective experience? That just seems a stand-in for a non-explanation, a bit similar to how the terms “dark matter” and “dark energy” are used as stand-ins for as yet unexplained phenomena.

Personally, I see no problem with subjective experience. I believe what makes it difficult to grasp for a conscious subject is mostly the recursivity of it: You not only have an experience (perception), you also have an experience (perception) of having an experience. And those levels of experience each have a lot of texture/structure. This is probably evolutionary useful to have, and the (literally ;)) mind-boggling physical complexity of the brain certainly allows for it.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#218

Post by yusefnapora »

otikik wrote: post #205
eldenwrong wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything we can observe in this universe has a cause and effect. The first cause is God.

This has been discussed many times before. The problem is that "the first cause is God" is not based on anything. It is perfectly fine to ask "If everything has a cause, then what caused God?". Then there's two options. One is that it's "turtles all the way down" - God1 caused God. And God2 caused God1. And that goes on, forever. The other option is "God caused himself". Which is similar to being "the first cause", b…

The “god as first cause” argument feels like a stack overflow. It’s just what happens when you infinitely recurse a cause and effect chain. If you don’t want to spend rest of your life evaluating it, you eventually just give up and `throw new Exception(“a wizard did it”)`

Re: Why does anything exist?

#219

Post by booleandilemma »

hackerlight wrote: post #212
booleandilemma wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers don't exist in the first place. It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure) I've noticed people in this thread are getting actual, physical things confused with concepts and mental representations of things. Confusing the map for the territory.

So you hold the Fictionalism view and reject Platonism. That's fine. This stuff has been debated ad nauseam and we're not going to break any new ground here. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/ > It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure) I will mention that dogs are also a useful shared fiction. We assign the label dog to a perception of…

Thanks! I didn't have a word for this. I guess I'm a fictionalist :)

Re: Why does anything exist?

#220

Post by JoshCole »

Victerius wrote: post #2

Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's like asking what is P(A|A). The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked. [1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2] [2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something"…

Is this really a dismissal? You say "it is like asking what is P(A|A)" but that is just another notation for the logical proposition A.

Saying something is like someone asking questions about logical propositions generally isn't considered bad form: logic actually has more to recommend it than probability theory - logic is when probability theory suggests certainty and probability theory is what you get due to logic applied to hidden information. Logic is therefore always more certain and stable than probabilistic claims: it is what you have when certainty exists.

I don't find the statement which translates to it being like reasoning perfectly to be particularly strong as a dismissal. It doesn't even seem to merit the rank of disagreement - the article does go into discussion of logical propositions and has it very near the fundamentals. So saying it is like it is effectively just a repetition of what the article states, but using different words.

You appear to me to be stating premises within the text and implying that the existence of logical reasoning means you disagree, but that doesn't quite make sense to me. To dismiss the argument would require that you first disagree with it at least once, which you haven't done, and probably ought to have a stronger foundation that the rejection of logical relationships. After all, if you reject those, then you've also rejected probability theory - with it your reject observation, which is related to both logic and probability via sampling. The rejection on the basis of being like logic has corollaries of claiming to be both blind and incapable of coherent reasoning. This isn't a very strong basis for dismissal.

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