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Why does anything exist?

alwaysasking.com

221–230 of 233 posts

Re: Why does anything exist?

#221

Often modern rational people are not aware they've surrendered their experience of meaning to the theory of evolution, where in the old days it was surrendered to religion. Often you hear modern skeptics speak like, we do things to preserve the self, or to preserve the "race". Theories of evolving are not the same as truths of meaning. Even though in many senses religion was more restrictive, in the search for meanin…

Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact, you can see it happening.

Both and. Same with physics.

They are theoretical approximations of the truth.

They are true because they work, the times they don't we keep adjusting it.

However they both don't explain all of reality, especially not human meaning seeking, so what I'm saying is we shouldnt be trying to solve the problem of meaning with a model for explaining a biological phenomenon.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#222
post #217
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), y…

Well, it's not difficult for me to grasp that I have a subjective experience. It just is. And it's not that I'm self-aware about it; it seems extremely reasonable to empathize that animals without any self-consciousness or self-awareness also have a subjective experience. But it just doesn't follow from anything. We can talk all day about intelligence, computation, and sensory input, even recursive or internal sensory input (e.g. sensing thought). But it does not explain why I have an experience, and why a highly-predictive neural network does not. Or if it does, how the hell does it?

Re: Why does anything exist?

#223
post #222
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), y…

Well, it's not difficult for me to grasp that I have a subjective experience. It just is . And it's not that I'm self-aware about it; it seems extremely reasonable to empathize that animals without any self-consciousness or self-awareness also have a subjective experience. But it just doesn't follow from anything. We can talk all day about intelligence, computation, and sensory input, even recursive or internal senso…

I'm not sure what exactly you think needs explaining. By "difficult to graps", I mean "difficult to graps that there is nothing magical going on". An AI neural network is quite dissimilar from the structures in our brain, so I wouldn't draw any conclusion from that. But I also don't see what would prevent a sufficiently large, multi-layered and recursively wired neural network to have perceptions comparable to what we experience as our consciousness.

When I instrospect my mind, everything there is, is a perception. A perception of a feeling, of an emotion, of a thought, of a recollection, of the texture of an experience ("qualia"), and of course of sensory perceptions. There is never anything that is not a perception. And a perception is just some set of information, the content of the perception.

For any given perception, it is easy to imagine that it can be represented in the brain, with its 100 billion neurons and 1000 trillion synapses, also since the carried signals and states aren't necessarily binary. It is not the case that our perceptions are more complex or more differentiatied that what could physically be represented in our brains. Our perceptory repertoire is rather finite, when you think about it. Furthermore, it is easy to imagine that our internal meta-perceptions of perceptions would arise from corresponding recursively superimposed structures and/or recursive processing in the brain.

The question is, what else, other than all those perceptions we have ("experiences"), is there in consciousness that would require explanation? I haven't been able come up with anything missing. I'd go even further and claim that there can't be anything else that we could notice or observe, since anything we observe would just be additional content of our perceptions.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#224

> The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us As a Hindu I find this baffling. For the Hindu there is a consistency across science and religion, and sometimes the line between the two isn't clear. They work together harmoniously to form my worldview. Based on the cursory information I have about the author's background, I am assuming he was exposed to Wes…

What did I just read? You just adapted(and adopted) some random currently known physics fact with your version of God.

This is Hindu metaphysics. Modern physics is simply rediscovering what has already been known in Hinduism.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call change is the concept impermanence in buddhism. You had an insight into impermanence.

-- To further your point - The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1994) - Narrated by Leonard Cohen is excellent peek into the word of Bardo -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg8ikDKL_zs

Thanks listening now :)

Re: Why does anything exist?

#226
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, but we don't really know if the universe is God using this infinite regress definition. The cool part about this definition of God, is that it necessitates the existence by definition, and gives a falsifiable hypothesis. Continuing with this definition, current cosmological theories would then imply that the Big Bang is God. Though this explanation of the beginning of everything leaves me unsatisfi…

Defining God to be whatever is assumed to be necessary is the opposite of a falsifiable hypothesis. You say we are stuck with logical deductions, but the thing about them is that they are no more true than are their premises, so analytical metaphysics grounds out in a personal and subjective choice of axioms (subjective in the sense that no-one else is logically compelled to accept them.)

I think if we found the beginning causal chain, then that would be falsifiable... theoretically.

Assuming God = Beginning of the causal chain, Finding this prime mover becomes a tangible physical hypothesis.

I don't think most religious people would agree with this definition of God though.

Also, if the information needed to confirm the beginning of the causal chain is locked behind an Event Horizon, then I don't know what to conclude about this.

I think it's possible to build a model in our slice of the universe that can let us peer beyond such limitations. But I can't be sure.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-- To further your point - The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1994) - Narrated by Leonard Cohen is excellent peek into the word of Bardo -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg8ikDKL_zs

Thanks listening now :)

-- curious if you enjoyed it? =) --

Re: Why does anything exist?

#228
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining God to be whatever is assumed to be necessary is the opposite of a falsifiable hypothesis. You say we are stuck with logical deductions, but the thing about them is that they are no more true than are their premises, so analytical metaphysics grounds out in a personal and subjective choice of axioms (subjective in the sense that no-one else is logically compelled to accept them.)

I think if we found the beginning causal chain, then that would be falsifiable... theoretically. Assuming God = Beginning of the causal chain, Finding this prime mover becomes a tangible physical hypothesis. I don't think most religious people would agree with this definition of God though. Also, if the information needed to confirm the beginning of the causal chain is locked behind an Event Horizon, then I don't kno…

My apologies; I misunderstood your previous post. Nevertheless, let's suppose there is a falsifiable prime mover, and we have somehow discovered it. Being falsifiable, however, means we can ask what made it true rather than false, so the regression does not stop.

Rather ironically, the "there must be a prime mover" argument for God can only avoid being blatantly arbitrary, tendentious and self-serving by saying God had no choice in anything, which is definitely not what most religious people want to believe.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation. How do you know this?

How do we know anything, and how do we deem the human mind a suitable tool for ascertaining the result? At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.

Fine, but don't go into conversation and state your object of faith is a fact.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow. I interpret "there is" and "something" as quantifications, not predicates. What would be the predicate here? The general notion of existence, at least in natural language, seems to be a shorthand for quantification or negation. I'm not sure what it would mean for "existence" to exist, short of adopting Platonism or some bizarre metaphysical system. The "something rather than nothing" question,…

Experience exists. Whether the contents of the experience are "real" or "not real", it is not coherent to claim that there is truly nothing at all -- what could even cause one to come to that conclusion if there's nothing at all? Platonism is one of the few (only?) games in town in terms of potential ability to furnish answers here (a Popperian scientific method has well-defined boundaries on the scope of explanatory…

Well, I can't engage "Experience exists" because I don't treat "exists" as a predicate, as I stated earlier. What you seem to be asserting as straightforwardly true looks to me more like a malformed sentence. Yes, words and concepts arise in our language and are metaphysically constrained by reality. However, it seems to be quite a departure from this milquetoast linguistic fact to assume that natural language would, could, or even should map to the structure of reality—especially with respect to heavyweight "existence" claims—in any meaningful way.

I adopt ontological anti-realism and do not stray into "existence" claims because they simply raise too many methodological issues. The quotes here are important because I don't have an intuitive understanding of what people mean when they say "exists" in the first place.

You could rephrase "Experience exists" as "Humans experience" or "I experience," which is analogous to Cogito in Cogito, ergo sum but without the ergo sum. There's a subject and a predicate already, and "exists" adds nothing.

If you want to make substantive claims about what does or doesn't exist, your views are subject to relatively straightforward reductio ad absurdums. This is demonstrated pretty clearly in On What There Is.

> Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?

"Something" = quantifier, "nothing" = quantifier, existential "is" = quantifier. Again, I would insist on a predicate here.

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