On Humans, Universes, Gods, and Existence
August 22, 2013 at 12:45 pm
(This post was last modified: August 22, 2013 at 1:04 pm by David Sims.)
I have the opinion that universes come into being by vacuum genesis, and that there is no reason to posit the existence of any conscious creative mechanism (e.g. gods). Empty space is an epiphenomena emerging from the natural flux of energy that constitutes the vacuum state. The random energy fluctuations occur along a Planck distribution of magnitude, and about one in 10^244 of them has a magnitude sufficient to trigger the natural process by which a new universe is made.
When one of those supremely rare vacuum fluctuations appears, the density of its equivalent mass causes the energy to become isolated behind a gravitationally induced event horizon. It becomes a little black hole. However, this black hole, formed from vacuum energy, doesn't emit any Hawking radiation. Instead, it obeys the uncertainty principle by detaching (and vanishing) from its progenitor spacetime. It still exists; it just no longer exists IN the universe where it formed.
Inside the isolated black hole, the energy occupies a metastable condition. Being singular internally and having no external relationships, it is more "certain" of its own state than the uncertainty principle allows it to be, and it decays, just like a radioactive nucleus does, from that state into another after a half-life of a few billion Planck times.
The decay involves a splitting of the energy into more than one distribution of force. In our universe, the unification force became divided into the strong force and the electroweak force. Once the split happens, it becomes possible for the energy to occupy a plurality of states, and the continuation of the original singular state is thus made very improbable: it falls like a stack of pennies a mile high.
Once the pluralization of the energy begins, it proceeds with a vengeance, with the result that a new universe inflates into being, with zero sums of energy being divided into both positive and negative quantities distributed among force-pole particles (quarks, electrons) and their associated force-carrying particles (gluons, photons).
Gravity, which had already brought the new universe into being, now plays an internal role in gathering up the force-pole particles into the lumpy clouds from which structures of matter will later appear.
There doesn't need to be any gods. Like the idea of a flat Earth, the god-idea is an atavistic error made by the primitive human mind, which has been kept largely uncorrected by civilized human cultures for reasons of politics and of profit.
I don't think that anyone need say how something may come from nothing, because nothing is an impossible condition: by definition, it never exists. Whatever exists isn't nothing. What nothing is, there is no such what.
The question of how something came from nothing is, itself, a misdirection and a waste of time to ask. Questions, themselves, exist as ideas. If you have a question, you already have something. And, since software implies hardware, a question implies the existence of a thinking being.
Existence exists whether questions or thinking beings do or not. But without existence, no questions and no thinking beings. Because—as I hope you will understand—the classical idea that existence itself is an alternative to any other possibility is wrong. Existence has no alternative.
(The statement "Existence exists" is the only non-trivial tautology, the only tautology that tells you implicitly more than it means explicitly. Usually, when you say "A is A," you don't mean that there is no such thing as a B. But in this instance, you do.)
Although existence exists, necessarily—because nothing, or non-existence, cannot exist—the default character of existence, what existence is like when it has no special reason to be any way at all, is something that you must discover empirically. The theoretical and experimental sciences most directly concerned with that discovery are quantum and particle physics.
Once you discover what the default character of existence is, you may wonder why existence has that default character instead of something else, but, wondering aside, the question has received its answer, and that answer will be the answer that any other thinking being (having the necessary scientific resources) will also discover, no matter where, no matter when, no matter which universe he happens to be in. So, while you may question why this and not something else, you might as well forget about alternative possible answers: there are none. There never will be any.
The "god hypothesis" isn't unique as a non-falsifiable proposition. There are many others you can invent that occupy that same category. The most relevant difference between the "god hypothesis" and most other non-falsifiable propositions is that billions of humans believe they have definite knowledge of a particular god, but when challenged to reveal their epistemology, they refer to such non-sharable intangibles as their feelings, their belief in the existence of places that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen, and what they might have heard the voices of invisible beings say that no other person heard. No theistic believer can actually prove to you that he isn't suffering from the mental disorder known as schizophrenia.
Furthermore, taking the monotheistic god-believers collectively, one quickly notices the lack of consensus about which god is "the one." At least, there are considerable differences among the supposedly well-informed theological opinions regarding the character, the history, the inclinations, and the commandments of the god. Either this god is falsely instructing most or all of those who believe in him, or else there is no such being and the frequently violent factionalism within the greater class is an easily understood result of clashes between its schizophrenic subgroups.
Although religious people frequently claim to recognize the fulfillment of prophecies, they almost always recognize them in hindsight, which is also the case for astrologers and other cheap mystics who strive to garner a credibility that they don't really deserve. When, upon a rare occasion, a religious person dares make a prophetic announcement in advance of its fulfillment, as William Miller did by predicting the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to occur in the year 1844, the result is some sort of Great Disappointment, which is subsequently explained away in later years as a "misinterpretation" of scripture, avoiding the idea that it might be, instead, a negative experimental result.
Whether all universes have starting points, I don't know, but this one seems to have had one. The manner of its ending is unclear, but the way it began has become reasonably well known.
When one of those supremely rare vacuum fluctuations appears, the density of its equivalent mass causes the energy to become isolated behind a gravitationally induced event horizon. It becomes a little black hole. However, this black hole, formed from vacuum energy, doesn't emit any Hawking radiation. Instead, it obeys the uncertainty principle by detaching (and vanishing) from its progenitor spacetime. It still exists; it just no longer exists IN the universe where it formed.
Inside the isolated black hole, the energy occupies a metastable condition. Being singular internally and having no external relationships, it is more "certain" of its own state than the uncertainty principle allows it to be, and it decays, just like a radioactive nucleus does, from that state into another after a half-life of a few billion Planck times.
The decay involves a splitting of the energy into more than one distribution of force. In our universe, the unification force became divided into the strong force and the electroweak force. Once the split happens, it becomes possible for the energy to occupy a plurality of states, and the continuation of the original singular state is thus made very improbable: it falls like a stack of pennies a mile high.
Once the pluralization of the energy begins, it proceeds with a vengeance, with the result that a new universe inflates into being, with zero sums of energy being divided into both positive and negative quantities distributed among force-pole particles (quarks, electrons) and their associated force-carrying particles (gluons, photons).
Gravity, which had already brought the new universe into being, now plays an internal role in gathering up the force-pole particles into the lumpy clouds from which structures of matter will later appear.
There doesn't need to be any gods. Like the idea of a flat Earth, the god-idea is an atavistic error made by the primitive human mind, which has been kept largely uncorrected by civilized human cultures for reasons of politics and of profit.
I don't think that anyone need say how something may come from nothing, because nothing is an impossible condition: by definition, it never exists. Whatever exists isn't nothing. What nothing is, there is no such what.
The question of how something came from nothing is, itself, a misdirection and a waste of time to ask. Questions, themselves, exist as ideas. If you have a question, you already have something. And, since software implies hardware, a question implies the existence of a thinking being.
Existence exists whether questions or thinking beings do or not. But without existence, no questions and no thinking beings. Because—as I hope you will understand—the classical idea that existence itself is an alternative to any other possibility is wrong. Existence has no alternative.
(The statement "Existence exists" is the only non-trivial tautology, the only tautology that tells you implicitly more than it means explicitly. Usually, when you say "A is A," you don't mean that there is no such thing as a B. But in this instance, you do.)
Although existence exists, necessarily—because nothing, or non-existence, cannot exist—the default character of existence, what existence is like when it has no special reason to be any way at all, is something that you must discover empirically. The theoretical and experimental sciences most directly concerned with that discovery are quantum and particle physics.
Once you discover what the default character of existence is, you may wonder why existence has that default character instead of something else, but, wondering aside, the question has received its answer, and that answer will be the answer that any other thinking being (having the necessary scientific resources) will also discover, no matter where, no matter when, no matter which universe he happens to be in. So, while you may question why this and not something else, you might as well forget about alternative possible answers: there are none. There never will be any.
The "god hypothesis" isn't unique as a non-falsifiable proposition. There are many others you can invent that occupy that same category. The most relevant difference between the "god hypothesis" and most other non-falsifiable propositions is that billions of humans believe they have definite knowledge of a particular god, but when challenged to reveal their epistemology, they refer to such non-sharable intangibles as their feelings, their belief in the existence of places that neither they nor anyone else has ever seen, and what they might have heard the voices of invisible beings say that no other person heard. No theistic believer can actually prove to you that he isn't suffering from the mental disorder known as schizophrenia.
Furthermore, taking the monotheistic god-believers collectively, one quickly notices the lack of consensus about which god is "the one." At least, there are considerable differences among the supposedly well-informed theological opinions regarding the character, the history, the inclinations, and the commandments of the god. Either this god is falsely instructing most or all of those who believe in him, or else there is no such being and the frequently violent factionalism within the greater class is an easily understood result of clashes between its schizophrenic subgroups.
Although religious people frequently claim to recognize the fulfillment of prophecies, they almost always recognize them in hindsight, which is also the case for astrologers and other cheap mystics who strive to garner a credibility that they don't really deserve. When, upon a rare occasion, a religious person dares make a prophetic announcement in advance of its fulfillment, as William Miller did by predicting the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to occur in the year 1844, the result is some sort of Great Disappointment, which is subsequently explained away in later years as a "misinterpretation" of scripture, avoiding the idea that it might be, instead, a negative experimental result.
Whether all universes have starting points, I don't know, but this one seems to have had one. The manner of its ending is unclear, but the way it began has become reasonably well known.
