Something Instead of Nothing

So is the Sun the things that are destroyed in it? What is the “it” in which they are destroyed?
The Sun, surely?

Ironically, it is within stars like the Sun that all chemical elements are created.

Every single thing that you might consider to be a thing that would be destroyed by the Sun is historically a product of stars like the Sun.

Is not, also, “destruction” a form of “creation” - albeit a creation of something with more entropy?
Consider the “conservation of energy” that dictates that the energy taken to destroy is equally given off in another form such as light and heat. The light and heat at least are the Sun, surely? It’s all some existent matter and energy behaving in some way or other, no matter how relatively violently and impermanently.

Great reply because it makes it even more interesting for me, I stick with my discovery. Because listen, what gets destroyed the most in the Sun is hydrogen right? And hydrogen isn’t made in the Sun it is what the Sun is made of when a cold cloud collapses.

So the sun is the thing that wrecks the stufflings of which it is made but then …it makes carbon and oxygen because of where it dies and reincarnates into a red giant where all the heavier elements get prepared to get spat out into space when it dies for good and a neutron corpse star remain which is a thing … because… it is totally still and dead.

So when the un-thing or nothingness dies it becomes things.

Still, an understanding of somethingness involves somehow connecting the dots between what some insist was nothing at all exploding into existence into everything there is evolving over billions of years into matter mindful enough to speculate about the meaning of it all here and now.

Then the part where my somethingness topples over into the abyss that some insist is nothing at all, but: But the stuff we started out as.

And how preposterous does that sound?

I’m trying to imagine the star that you came from. This and how star stuff can somehow evolve into pussy.

Or, for that matter, dickheads. :-"

Nothing having ever evolved doesn’t sound like a fairy tale stories. This sounds like relative facts. But still a source upon if we throw again a book at someone like the road to evolution or something. Than there might possibly only one sort of element people are forgetting in the mind. Carbon.

Tell us about Carbon.
Remind me I need to watch the video about how life came out of minerals.

If Serendipper sees this please repost.

Oh this a grande point.

Has not the mind already existed throughout life so much so that only one material based rock can exist and not another? No. Although within the psyche pain still hurts doesn’t it? For have not individualism put into affect acknowledgement of a precursor to date existence back through time. Where if time is hidden, and or if time doesn’t exist nothingness, nothingness exists in it’s place. Time maybe stood still for a moment for a sum amount of people yet out of something that happened and was going to already happen. Relative reasons as to why time evolves and suppose space were to do the same. Not evolve or evolve. Material matter of which we are not all inherently always apart of witnessing daily. Something instead of nothing is constantly happening.

Oh just precursors barbarian. Matter. Matter substance in general, as distinct from mind, body and spirit.

I think matter has spirit
Carbon has spirit “6”

There’s carbon in mindless matter and carbon in the matter that possess minds. Minds able to employ that carbon [and lots of others elements] to [eventually] create computers and internet forums like this one.

And some trace that all the way back to the Big Bang and to stars that exploded. Explosions that spewed out all the somethingness that turned into this.

And these facts are all relative to whatever brought into the existence that very first somethingness of all. Was it nothingness? And, if so, how does the mindful matter of infinitesimally tiny and insignificant mere mortals on this infinitesimally tiny and insignificant rock in this infinitesimally tiny and insignificant solar system in this infinitesimally tiny and insignificant galaxy in what may well be this infinitesimally and tiny and insignificant universe come to grips with that?

What can we really, really, really know about it?

Before, one by one, we tumble over into the abyss that may well literally become nothing at all for “I”. If only for all of eternity.

So, clearly, only the Kids among us really know what’s going on. :wink:

But the universe is nothing…a big nothing.
It only appears to be something, like an inkblot.
It only appears to be going somewhere, like a rat race.
The universe is almost entirely empty space.
And full space is almost entirely empty space.
Backwards and forwards in time, inside and outside in space, the universe is infinitely regressive and divisible, there’s no origin, destination or substance.
It doesn’t repeat itself, so much as it rhymes.
A septillion years from now, the universe will be totally unrecognizable, and a septillion years from then, more unrecognizable still.
And so we are but a means to an alien end.
Our universe is the multiverse, in that it is transformative.
It’s a chameleon, a shapeshifter.

How is this possible?

Sure, I get that. But the matter we see is a result of the space that isn’t empty.

And physicists will tell you that empty space is really filled with particles and waves.

@gib

Because something in the hard sense of the word, means finitely regressive and divisible, which the cosmos doesn’t appear to be.
A first cause and final effect, which’s absent.
An unchanging pattern and/or substance underpinning change, which’s missing.

The particles and waves themselves are almost entirely empty space.

Ah, the universe itself is not a thing. I could hop on board with that (maybe), but it must be filled with things.

(what does finitely regressive mean?)

You have to insert ‘almost’, don’t you? If I mark a dot on a piece of paper, I can say the paper is almost completely unmarked. But I can’t draw the conclusion there is no mark.

However much of ‘something’ there is is a relative matter. If space is infinite, you could say that even a single particle is plenty of stuff… or next to infinitesimal… depending on how far you want to zoom out.

But in all seriousness, I’ve just never quite understood how people can jump to the conclusion that the universe is nothing based on ‘almost’ nothing, or signs of nothing, or a philosophy of balance or opposing forces–at least, as if they themselves understood what they were talking about. It does seem like a ‘jump’ to me–like there isn’t quite enough to draw that conclusion deductively. If the universe really was absolute nothing, we wouldn’t be here even to say it’s absolute nothing.

And then the gap between believing that, in your head, this might be true and demonstrating to yourself and to others that it is in fact true for all of us.

What my mind is never able to quite wrap itself around here is in grappling with the universe in a universe where there are no conscious minds around to do so.

Imagaine for example that human minds are the only minds that exist in the universe. Imagine as well that the Big One hurtles down from space next month and obliterates all human minds. In a universe where there is no God.

The universe still exists [supposedly] but there is no matter around to be cognizant of it.

Still more bizarre [for me] is in imagining a universe where even our own conscious minds are only cognizant of that which they could only ever have been cognizant of. Our awareness of the universe, in other words, is not something that we choose autonomously to be cognizant of. It is just another manifestation of the immutable laws of matter.

Is there another universe we could have been aware of?

Perhaps the only thing that is immutable is the production of consciousness itself, and once there, it will only be aware of whatever’s real.

Well, in a wholly determined universe, even this exchange that we are having would seem to be unfolding only as it ever could have.

In the only universe that ever could have been.

And that would be linked necessarily to whatever or whoever brought into existence the existence of existence itself.

But how on earth would any particular one of us go about the task of either verifying it or falsifying it?

Human consciousness is often tricked into believing things are one way when in fact they are not that way at all. Optical illusions for example, or the world of magic. Or dreams. You may have a dream in which you are discussing the nature of the universe with another. In the dream, your “I” seems to be calling the shots. But it is really only the brain creating all of it.

Whatever that means.

True, but we can still have the exchange and find meaning in it.

^ See, right there! ^ Anytime one talks about the “existence of existence,” one ought to pause. The existence of existence? That’s like saying the redness of red, or the softness of softness. Existence doesn’t have existence, it is existence. Ergo, nothing brought it into existence. It always was.

Dunno

I still don’t get why “I” can’t just be the subjective way of experiencing the brain–of what it’s like being the brain. Why do we have to experience our choices as necessary in order them to be so?

But we are having this exchange and it is unfolding as it is only because it could not not have existed and could not have unfolded other than as it has. This frame of mind is then either in sync with a wholly determined universe or it is not.

After all, you could dream of having an exchange with someone. And it all seems to be real in the dream. How then is the experience of dreaming this different from the experience you are having now? Given what may or may not be the ontological reality embedded in the relationship between the laws of matter and human consciousness.

And how is “meaning” here not but one more manifestation of that which can only ever be if mind is but more matter being only what matter can ever be?

Though I’ll be the first to admit that my thinking here may well be flawed.

Red and soft exist only because existence itself exist. And only because matter evolved into mind such that “red” and “soft” can be discussed here at all.

What would red and soft be in a completely mindless universe?

And what of those astrophysicists who argue that everything that exists burst into existence re the Big Bang out of nothing at all. Or is it argued here that back then nothing at all is what existed.

How is all of this not a prodoundly problematic mystery?

bbc.com/earth/story/20141106 … ist-at-all

Your own frame of mind here seems to be conveying something that you have absolutely no capacity to demonstrate is “in fact” true. Others will even go so far as to suggest that what we think of as reality is only a manifestation of one or another Sim world. Or that it is all entirely solipsistic. Relevant only given the assumption that God is the hub in the reality wheel here.

It would seem [to me] that the distinction between subjective and objective reality in a wholly determined universe is necessarily an illusion that matter has somehow been able to evolve into such that the brain becomes this truly extraordinary matter able to reflect on itself as matter reflecting on itself as matter able to make such a distinction at all.

The part here that always seems to escape my own capacity to understand is the argument of the compatibilists.

To speak of mindful matter creating something like an automobile engine entirely out of mindless matter only because it was never able not to do so is, well, how the fuck does the human mind wrap itself around that given all of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” going all the way back to whatever or whoever is behind the existence of existence itself.

Knowledge that may well be beyond the capacity of the human brain/mind to grasp at all.

All of these are excellent philosophical question, Biggy. If anyone understands the futility in answering them definitively, it would be you. But I don’t think this proves the inherent paradoxical nature of reality as much as the inherent paradoxical nature of the questions (or our thoughts about them). As far as I’m concerned, there are conceivable scenarios we can entertain which could qualify as answers to these questions… just not definitively (because we can’t prove any of this). For example, you say:

…which is true, but you know as well as anyone that this possibility has never stopped you from having a meaningful discussion with people in the past. Life goes on despite the vexation of these questions.

We apprehend meaning in the moment. It’s true that we can always reflect on meaning and question whether it actually means anything at all, but there’s a reason these exchanges work. While engaged in an exchange, we apprehend meaning, and it’s that apprehension which perpetuates the exchange, which keeps us moving forward. If meaning was, in fact, vacuous, this would not be possible.

For example, if I ask you “what’s 4 plus 6?” you are able to says “10” only because you apprehend the meaning of “4” and “6”. 4 means “there are four things” and 6 means “there are six things” and 4 + 6 means “you have 4 things coupled with 6 things.” ← That means there are 10 things all together.

^ You see how meaning is the fuel that keeps thought, and thus exchanges, moving.

^ But all this could be a grand chimera, right?–maybe a simple discussion of what 4 plus 6 equals is, in reality, rambling nonsense, and we’re only determined to think it’s not–but you can only take that seriously when you’re not in the moment. When you are in the moment–actually think “what’s 4 plus 6?”–you patently see that it’s not.

Well, my point was that redness doesn’t have redness, it isn’t given redness, it is redness. Existence isn’t given existence. Things are given existence, brought into existence. Existence is just the word we use to refer to the being of all things. The being of things wasn’t given being itself.

I’m not a Big Bang denier–I’ll go along with the idea that some huge explosion occurred roughly 13 billion years ago–but I would just caution anyone who wants to talk about existence “coming into” existence at that point. If there was a “before” prior to the Big Bang, then time could not have begun with the Big Bang, and that means there must have been existence before the Big Bang (even if empty). If there was no “before” then time has a beginning, but there was no “coming into” existence since that implies time before.

People can believe all sorts of things. My interest here is not in proving the reality of any theory or possible scenario. I just try to take your paradoxical conundrums and see if I can make sense of them.

The what now?

First of all, you can’t have an illusion without subjectivity. Subjectivity just means: how things seem from a first person point of view. The creation of the illusion (if we’re calling it that) is subjectivity.

But that doesn’t really address my point. I was asking why we assume that if we are fully determined, we would necessarily feel determined. I mean, without having to posit that the brain has to supplement the experience of freedom to its already rich repertoire of experiences. It’s like asking: how does the brain create the experience of pain without including the aspect of the wetness of the neurons underlying the experience of pain? Not everything about the physical infrastructure that underlies our experiences necessarily has to be made a part of our experience. As far as I’m concerned, what we call “freedom of choice” is not an illusory “thing” that we experience in addition to all our other experience, but an omission on the part of our brains. The brain omits to add to our experiences the fact of our being determined. So we don’t feel determined. We might then infer that we are free in the sense of being able to violate the laws of nature (or that the laws of nature don’t apply to us) but this is an ordinary run-of-the-mill philosophical mistake, not an insoluble paradox of our existence.