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We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

backreaction.blogspot.com

321–330 of 610 posts

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#321
post #93

If we will never know, then there should be some kind of proof that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable, sort of like Godel's theory of incompleteness. But there is none, so the affirmation is incorrect: We don't know if we will never know.

Proof requires axioms, and the universe hints towards what they are but isn’t explicit. Per thermododynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning.

You got the direction backwards. Increase in entropy means that the farther back you go in time, the less information the universe has in it in some sense. The initial state of the universe would therefore be very simple, having low entropy. If the state were simple enough, then in principle, we could figure it out in exact detail. The thing that thermodynamics says is unknowable is the distant future of the universe. We can predict that it will be dark and cold and empty and sparsely filled with ever-more red-shifted radiation, but it's impossible, even in principle, to know the details of exactly where each individual particle in going to end up.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#322
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you mean by "simplicity" when you wrote: > She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. The point of my example is to show that you don't add unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you think that weather and plasma physics are examples of "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the same category of complexity as the one every scientist will argue aga…

You're not adding the complexity, it's out there. One would hope we're aiming at modelling nature. The human body is incredibly complex and making simple theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it. ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The ideas we use to communicate the program are simple enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural ne…

As I say, you're using the words "complex" and "simple" in a fundamentally different way than Sabine (and most every scientist) is using them.

For science and scientists, it's the complexity/simplicity of the rules that matters.

You're arguing against a point Sabine doesn't make.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#323
Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits by John D Barrow — rest in peace — is an excellent book about the aspects of the Universe we can never know. For example, the visible Universe and whether constants are constant.

When this blogger starts by pushing back on philosophers, I think they may mean scientists like Barrow, which is a shame because he makes for very compelling reading. In fact, have I not seen warnings here, from reputable posters, about this Backreaction blog?

In any case, I recommend the ahem “philosophy” book heartily.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did the creator come to be.. Time, and causuality, is a construct inside of our universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking which way is down when you are in outer space..

If you can’t use the concept of causality outside of the universe, then the idea that there’s a creator outside of the universe who caused the universe is already out of bounds.

> who caused the universe is already out of bounds.

"caused" can mean a different thing. Imagine causualty in a 3d FPS video game, and the creation of the game itself. Though they are similar in semantics, one is different from the other.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence otherwise it would by definition just be a type of science. It would be the study of God via experimentation, accumulation of evidence, and logical extrapolation. There are religious folks that are big on logical deduction and extrapolation but they all start with terribly unlikely axioms pulled straight out of their ass or equally made up fictions r…

> Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence There is evidence backed belief in the unseen, and there is blind faith. So your claim that by definition faith is without evidence is not correct. Secondly, even science needs to accept certain axioms as a given so that we can build upon them. Scientism is believing that the only way to arrive at truth is through experimentation, which is a false…

It took him 8 minutes to actually set himself up to actually start talking and the first thing that came out of Dr Ali's mouth is a lie. He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't true. It's a gross reduction. I'm 8 minutes in and your speaker's only substantial point is a lie.

Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists being bigots, random comparison of atheism to antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books and speak well while being absolutely committed to falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as a human being. The forms are there but not the substance.

People have been declaring society was going to hell in a hand basket for at least the last several thousand years and were we really going to hell we should have long since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores and forms is unable to see the value in change. They perceive only the losses and never the gains.

Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we create to explain our world our rooted in our essential nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a natural law and produce something better than ourselves to defend it.

If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our minds.

The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and a need to work beside others of our own species as complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and predict their behavior works well turned inward.

We perceive the difference between a desired state and a present state even if its not actually physically painful as suffering and produce a society where at least an in group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but also because we live not in the world but in our own heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in part of the blight we have brought about which we must perceive again with the same internal tools we use to experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self mutilation.

For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition morality would seem to come naturally even if the end results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods. Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical because empathy came millions of years before your particular species of god.

13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then helpfully debunked.

Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather than a description of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner rabbits will on average breed over time leading to browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.

At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they don't kill women and children. Notably given the religious make up of American leaders these actions were largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God. This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that point seems pretty important to him.

At this point it looks like its important to him to establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity > Godless.

Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of life while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely.

If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself.

I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions.

May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#326

I honestly never cared for Hossenfelder's science communication. She's far too dismissive and dishonest in representing theoretical views she disagrees with. And I don't necessarily have the physics understanding to pick these biases out too easily. I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his podcasts, which happens quite frequently.

I enjoy it. There are a lot of communicators who shy away from giving their own opinion about anything that isn't the overwhelming consensus. They might be wrong after all. It is refreshing to have somebody actually disagree with something and then back it up.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, it makes a ton of sense to ask such a question. The underlying assumption to the question is why only one thing is allowed to be uncreated .. ? Are there others like them, much like here on Earth where we have many authors writing many books? The Bible doesn't answer those at all, it starts in media res (despite its first three words!) (I have other complaints about such a God but)

The Bible very explicitly teaches that there are no other gods. Here is one passage among many. Isaiah 44:6-8 ESV Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. [7] Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will hap…

In other places, it says pretty explicitly that there are other gods:

Pslams 95:3 ESV

For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

Psalms 97:7 ESV

All worshipers of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless idols; worship him, all you gods!

Deuteronomy 32:8 NRSV (less henotheistic in other translatins)

When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods;

And there are others. We know pretty clearly from historical sources that the early Jews were henotheistic (recognized the existence of other gods, but only worshipped YHWH), and that is preserved in the oldest parts of the Old Testament. Even Genesis often uses a plural when God talks about his works - today that is often explained as talking about himself and the angels or even the holy trinity, but it is very likely it originally referred to the god of Israel and the other (lesser) gods in the heavens.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#328
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the Big Bang and evidence of inflation and the CMB. There is a lot of credible evidence that our universe had a definite beginning.

Note that I wasn't arguing against the big bang, or even cosmology itself. I was only pointing out that the concept of God doesn't add anything to the conversation. It's also important to note that the big bang theory completely leaves open the question of what there was in the tiny tiny universe before inflation. Basically, the current BBT describes how the universe evolved starting from some time t=t0 + 10^-36 seco…

I was just suggesting a reason why the solid state theory of the cosmos fell out of favor - evidence to the contrary.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if "people" are limited by resources, say if someone need an LHC to verify something..what really is the difference...?

The difference is not only in whether they are verifiable, whether they are verified, but also whether things which are produced from them actually seem to work. Religious claims fail at all three: they are not verifiable, they have not been verified, and they don’t seem to work.

Moving goalposts much?

> which are produced from them actually seem to work.

Oh yea, religeious things also seem to work. For example, prayers and other religeous offerings. That is how these things survive so long.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#330

“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.

“Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.” — James Leans
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