Philosophy

[Tesserax]

I'm wondering if this section has philosophical debates or discussions much, and I haven't really seen any so far. So I was thinking it would be a good idea to have either a tab, or actually start talking about stuff.

The main thing is, a lot of the things I see in ROTW is debates, arguments, and while they are indeed in good nature, I'm sure everybody that takes part puts a little piece of them into every argument, and it can hurt when you get rebutted, even if you know it's all for fun.

So instead, we should probably have a proper discussion, throwing cool ideas and weird philosophies back and forth; Religion will mostly not be a part of it, at least not a discussion of its rules, traditions, and "worthiness", and instead will only be mentioned when discussing how a higher power as they are depicted could exist.

To start off, I will give an example:

Have you ever wondered how we came about? Being a Christian, I believe in God himself, but I do not necessarily believe that the Bible is a direct and literal record of what happened. So often I ponder, if God truly existed before the universe, and he has always existed, how?

We call "space" empty, but it isn't really. It is filled with exactly that; space. It is not tangible, yet it is there, space and time are always around us, but what about before? What about outside the boundaries of infinity? What about Him?

I believe Hawking did theorize or show how True Nothing, that is the absence of literally everything (space, time, matter, antimatter, etc.) can give birth to existence, but the question is, if there is truly Nothing there, how could it have happened? What could have made the Nothingness become... Something? Perhaps it was a god, maybe my God, and if so, how? Even if a God did exist in the True Nothingness to create everything today, how did He exist in the first place? How can a being have existed, have simply been, in the Nothing? There is only one logical answer: it is impossible.

Yet here we are, me typing this, you reading this however many hours, days, months or perhaps even years into the future. We are proof of this seemingly impossible concept, so what made this impossibility possible? And it is here that logic fails us, because now we tread in the realms of the unknown; there may be things we have not yet discovered, things that we do not know, things that may not make sense, but simply are true and must be accepted if we are to understand the great How.

Take a look around you. Look at every single thing, and realize that none of it, logically, should exist. Nothing existed in the first place. Nothing made anything exist. Yet somehow, Something came from Nothing. Realize how lucky we are to have existed, no matter how terrible our lives may be, existence is something impossible that has been achieved by unknown means, and is something that must be cherished.

Let that sink in, and have a great day :)

[Microcosm]

This sort of thing is really more of a scientific argument rather than philosophical.

Some people(including myself) believe it's quite possible that the macrocosm has always existed and merely regenerates itself with a big bang every once in a while. When I say "including myself," I really only mean I believe it's a great possibility that seems to make sense.

However, the philosophical argument(s) that nothing should be able to exist seem to make some degree of sense, but they can't really be validated. There could be some scientific explanation out there that we just haven't found yet, or maybe not.

The best thing we can do is keep growing as a civilization and conquer much of the Universe. That, to me, is one of the greatest goals of humanity. We are just on this small rock, but we can still decide what we believe to be inherently good, and, thus, we can decide what is the best or most rewarding thing of all. For me, a good candidate for that thing is conquering the Universe with our intelligence.

[ndrwmxwll]

thus i personally believe hawking's idealist theories of cosmology are simply wrong (especially concerning ex nihilo)

thats my answer to the problem

[Bleid]

Let that sink in, and have a great day :)

I tend to think about the origin of existence through thought experiment using the very fundamental logic systems that we as people have assumed.

I consider it like this, most times:

In a formal logic system, we have what are called Laws of Thought that are prerequisites to all other laws of logic.

Before things like De Morgan's Laws, Commutative laws, Laws of Tautology and so on and so forth, there's the laws of thought.

The laws of thought are axioms. The term axiom literally means they are taken without evidence as necessary truths. These are absolutely required to exist, otherwise, we could not even form the basis of mathematics, either. There needs to be some self-evident, assumed, starting position or we cannot get anything done with logic or math or reason.

Now, as a logician or student of logic would know, these rules also do not need to be proven within the system (because that, in and of itself, would be circular reasoning).
So now, consider these self-evident, necessary truths, the axioms, to be the fundamentals that hold our current understanding of reality together.
Alright, so fair enough, they're there and they're what we use to justify what we understand reality as, just as any physical laws or properties we might uncover.

Now consider if we impose the same questions on those alleged, "self-evident truths" and axioms. Let's ask what allowed them to be.

Well, considering they are the first, the original, the prime movers so to speak, they would have no "allowance into being."

So now let's consider if they were removed from existence themselves, for a moment.

The laws of thought being, in a practical phrasing:

1. Law of non-contradiction (Things can't both be true and false at once)
2. Law of identity (A thing is exactly itself, and nothing else)
3. Law of excluded-middle (Things are either the case, or they are not)

What if we get rid of 1? Now things can both exist and not exist at once.

What if we rid ourselves of 2? Now things are not necessarily equivalent to themselves (I don't know what exactly that would entail, either).

What if we lose 3? Now things have the option of being neither the case, nor not the case (neither true nor false) as well as being somehow a mixture of the two.

Losing any one of them makes our reality a very strange and different place.

However, lose them all, and there are absolutely no restrictions on what can be true and what can be false, and even the concepts of "true" and "false" themselves would be odd ideas if there are no restrictions on reality (true and false are also restrictions, keep in mind!)

So perhaps, the truth behind the nothingness bringing about a something is precisely this "lack of restriction" I just mentioned above. There is nothing imposed on nothingness, and hence, it could very well produce somethingness.

If we are to say that nothing CANNOT produce something, then we are imposing a RESTRICTION on the nothing
(how can nothing, where, "it" is that which has no properties whatsoever in our reality, have a restriction on its physical properties in our reality?)

Always a fun subject. :)

[Judean Zealot]

I believe Hawking did theorize or show how True Nothing, that is the absence of literally everything (space, time, matter, antimatter, etc.) can give birth to existence, but the question is, if there is truly Nothing there, how could it have happened? What could have made the Nothingness become... Something? Perhaps it was a god, maybe my God, and if so, how? Even if a God did exist in the True Nothingness to create everything today, how did He exist in the first place? How can a being have existed, have simply been, in the Nothing? There is only one logical answer: it is impossible.

Hawking knows nothing about metaphysics or cosmology, so invoking him here doesn't really further the idea much.

You also are making the error of not making a distinction between necessary and contingent existence (http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/the-cosmological-argument/the-argument-from-contingency/). When we talk of a "Nothingness" we only mean an absence of any contingent existence. That force which we call God, however, is Necessary existence (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/#3), and as such cannot possibly not exist.