Articulated Nothingness

[mico saudad]

Some very good thoughts here. Thank you all for taking the time to post them!

I see this as a nonsensical goal becausethe explanation which you are developing is not for an objective reality, but rather a subjective perception of reality which is already subject to "human limits of comprehension". You cannot exceed the limits of your own comprehension, except in some manner which is incomprehensible by nature.

I grant you that creating such an explanation is merely an exercise in creating one of many logical possibilities. But the reality I'm proposing actually is about objective reality and *not* a subjective perception. Why must we assume that the nature of the universe is beyond our comprehension or ability to observe? It is possible that the universe is so, but not necessarily.

I have a problem with your assumption that "zero" is equal to "nothing".

If you have two possessions and you give two away, then you have no possessions. You own nothing. I don't think there's a problem with zero meaning nothing. The larger problem is in the assumption that 'nothingness' obeys the laws of mathematics. It's a big assumption.

Let's talk about entropic systems. In the context of AN entropy makes sense - a stably articulated nothingess would consistently decline towards dearticulation whenever possible.

I have other problems. You have time as a factor without explaining its nature; and since it is an integral part of your theory, to explain it by means of the same theory would be circular logic.

This is a really good point and something that I had/have to sit and ponder over. I cannot use time as a means of justifying the number of articulations that come in and out of existence. Rather what could be imagined is more like what you suggest below: that there is no moment of articulation or dearticulation and that the infinite number of these articulations occurs simultaneously and are everlasting - and remember that you can't use waveform addition to homogenize this condition anymore than I can use time to subdivide it. But as soon as you are part of the articulation those rules change to fit the particular articulation. This is a good point that I will have to consider.

You assume that a more complex articulation would take longer to "dearticulate" than a very simple one, but what says that the basic fabric of the universe has limited processing power? It might take me half an hour to solve a complex equation to figure out the path a body would take in a gravity well, but the gravity itself just happens. Unless time is a factor in your equation, then there is no moment of articulation or of dearticulation, and they are effectively simultaneous (and everlasting).

This is another good point, but this one is easier to explain. It's not just complexity that stabilizes an articulation, but certain features. Time and space are two of them. Given an articulation that employs spatial separation within a temporal framework, the concept of stability can emerge from the everlasting nothingness you imagine.

I would be careful if I were you to take quantum physics with a heavy grain of salt.

To say that everything it says it suspect is like not trusting Newtonian physics to explain the motion of a cannonball. Quantum physics has been amazingly successful and is perhaps the model that explains that largest chunk of our existence with the greatest precision of all known scientific theories.
About my assertion regarding particles coming in and out of existence: with particle colliders we can see particles coming in and out of existence. There is a medical technique called PET where the patient swallows a probe containing a positron emitter. Electrons collide with positrons and two photons emerge that are picked up by the instrument. You can argue by saying that they are both different manifestations of the same thing (like strings for example) and that would be something that I couldn't argue against.

I'm saddened to find more and more that the Matrix is proving to be a source of pseudo-philosophy quotations for my generation...But I don't expect people to actually sit down and think things through any real portion of the time, at least not when it comes to anything even remotely abstract...I'll call you agnostic too, whether you like it or not. And I think I'd be accurate in doing so...No, really, I was all about this shit when I was sixteen. It's not a philosophy. It's an enjoyable, dissociative fixation. Don't bother trying to articulate your nothingness, it's probably much more enjoyable before you do.

It would be difficult to be more arrogant and condescending without actually addressing the merits of the argument. For the record I am agnostic I also think that it is the only logical state to assume, but I would never condescend to tell anyone what their view of reality is or isn't. Doesn't that violate our apparently shared view that no human has a claim on ultimate truth? Furthermore I think many many people 'sit down and think things through'. I think many people would take offense at your suggestion that somehow you are more scholarly than the rest of us (as if to imply that you are more correct). And then there's the 'I used to do what you're doing now before I grew up'. I'm 29, so either I'm intellectually inferior to your 17 year old self or you might have come on a little strong and overly dismissive. Which do you think it is?

As for articulated nothingness... the problem with nihilism is that it is neither defensible or assailable. Look at it this way: If what we percieve as something... is actually nothing... then neither word has any actual meaning.

Nihlism is no more defensible or assailable than any other assumption. If you assume the assumption the universe doesn't exist, then you can assail the argument's validity from within. If you don't make the assumption that one is required to make, then you are just standing on the platform describing what the outside of the train looks like. Once the argument is coherent it may be just one train among many, and I'll grant you that no one can tell you which one goes to the right place. The problem is, and this is the real reason that I'm spending time on this, is that there are many such trains that I've ridden in that are very seductive and misleading and take people to places I don't agree with. Sometimes building such a sound construct is less about whether or not it represents ultimate truth and more about whether or not it prevents others from claiming it.

Adding mathematical figures into the matter doesn't exactly help you--if anything, it makes your argument all the more pretentious.

I disagree. I think that a + b = 0 is a very simple and easy way to grasp the concept of how nothingness can be articulated into local realities. I don't think I've been pretentious. In fact I've gone out of my way to say that I respect everyone else's viewpoint and that I know I don't claim any dominion on truth.

If the universe doesn't exist, there's nothing there -not- to exist. It's a position without any sort of ground or foothold.

This is true unless you make the assumptions I asked you to make in the description. There is no argument in the universe that does not require one to make assumptions.

...Excellent description of quantum fluctuations...

Your description is exactly what i was talking about how in our universe we know things pop in and out of existence. I agree with you wholeheartedly that quantum physics is limited and will definitely be encompassed in a much more coherent physical model (I think calling it crap goes a little too far because it has proven amazingly useful for an amazing number of things and it has met every challenge to amazing precision except gravity.)
For the purposes of my argument it doesn't really matter whether or not it is accurate, because our articulation has it's own rules that the phenomenon described by quantum physics attempts to explain. There may be some residual or orderly articulations/dearticulations that occur within our articulation, but outside our universe the rules of physics as we observe do not apply. So it wouldn't have to behave exactly according to quantum physics as we know it.

[Adam!]

I agree with you wholeheartedly that quantum physics is limited and will definitely be encompassed in a much more coherent physical model (I think calling it crap goes a little too far because it has proven amazingly useful for an amazing number of things and it has met every challenge to amazing precision except gravity.)

Quantum Physics does a great job as a mathematical model whose predictions corroborate empirical observations. My complaint is that many of it's assumptions (which most people take as gospel) are not falsifiable. F'rinstance, Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle defines a strict barrier to what scientists can empirically observe. Any assumptions made about the underlying mechanics of the universe below that threshold can not be tested. Some researchers have decided that the best way to stir up interest in what their doing / get grants is basically making shit up. So there is the theory that virtual particles are matter borrowed from parallel dimensions; there is the theory of zero point energy; finally, there is a whole whack of theory devoted to quarks, their colors, their spins, and their rest masses. These theories all have an innate intestability. Quarks come with the kludge that we can never observe them. Quarks are purely a mathematical explanation of the nature of the elementary particles, and a massively complex one at that. Lastly, I question the predictive powers of a system who's constants change to match observation. Look at proton decay: they've never seen one decay, so the constants that predict how long protons live for keep getting larger and larger. For about ten years they kept "finding" new quarks to "fit" the model of quantum chromodynamics. What this really means is that the equations didn't work very well, so they modified them to fit observations better, creating a new set of quarks in the process.

To me a lot of quantum physics sounds like witchcraft. And the fact that people read Popular Science magazines, believe it and think "Wow, the universe sure is a complex place" drives people farther and farther away from any kind of unified theory.

[the Jazz]

I think we're all familliar with Karl Popper's falsificationism. It is the standard definition of science given by a philosopher. And we've probably all read Carl Sagan's final book too.

Sorry, but I'm not, and I haven't.

Abecedarian, I'm going to stick to my guns regarding zero and nothing. Sure, you can use the mathematical equation 2 - 2 = 0 to represent the removal of something from something, resulting in nothing, but the representation is not the process. Zero on a number line or a coordinate axis is not equal to nothing. The idea itself that substance can come to exist from nothingness, by means of separating it from its fundamental opposite substance, is a very interesting idea, but I think bringing in mathematics just confuses the situation. Especially since mathematics was developed by people to deal with reality as we percieve it.

I think it makes more sense when pondering an irrational question to look for an irrational answer. The experience known in philosophy as "transcendence" is the kind of irrational answer I prefer.

High five, Puce.

[mico saudad]

I'm going a little off topic but this has been fun to talk about, so...

Quantum Physics does a great job as a mathematical model whose predictions corroborate empirical observations.

Isn't that pretty much all you can ask a scientific model to do?

My complaint is that many of it's assumptions (which most people take as gospel) are not falsifiable. F'rinstance, Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle defines a strict barrier to what scientists can empirically observe. Any assumptions made about the underlying mechanics of the universe below that threshold can not be tested. Some researchers have decided that the best way to stir up interest in what their doing / get grants is basically making shit up.

Yes this is a problem in many scientific fields. There was a guy who recently got busted for taking a magic marker to a mouse and claiming it was some sort of graft. Apparently he didn't think that other people might check out his work. Dumbass. In physics it's sometimes harder to tell good science from bad science for exactly the reason you're talking about. I don't think that means that quantum physics is bad, it just means that quantum physicists have to ratchet up the whole 'jury by peer review' part of their field.

Quarks come with the kludge that we can never observe them. Quarks are purely a mathematical explanation of the nature of the elementary particles

Well for that matter all of physics is merely a mathematical explanation of some phenomenon. The only reason that Newtonian physics seems to make more 'sense' to us is because we've evolved under selective pressure to intuitively understand how objects move as they're thrown at us .

So I don't think you have to 'see' something to be able to establish that it is very likely that it exists. Scientists have never actually 'seen' an electron but many successful technologies are based on purely mathematical predictions that they do exist and how they behave under different conditions.

In that same light scientists actually have evidence that quarks exist that could be considered as strong as evidence for electrons when they were in their infancy of discovery. There is a technique called 'deep inelastic scattering' where the outcome would be one way if a proton was a large ball and would yield a different result if the proton contained point charges within it. These experiments suggest that protons contain point charges within them.

But even if they are wrong and there are no such things as quarks, scientists once believed all sorts of 'stupid' things because they were the current model and had no better model in place. All of those scientists know that their models had weaknesses just like we knew ours have weaknesses, but they only had what they had. Do you really think that the process is as broken as you seem to suggest?

To me a lot of quantum physics sounds like witchcraft. And the fact that people read Popular Science magazines, believe it and think "Wow, the universe sure is a complex place" drives people farther and farther away from any kind of unified theory.

Who was it that said that any technology sufficiently advanced would appear like magic to someone from a less advanced society? I think that the sophistication of a lot of the mathematics used in modern physics relegates the rest of us to outsiders whose only meager perception of what is really going on relies on the ability of physicists to Feynmenize their work for us.

[mico saudad]

Thanks again for the comments!

Abecedarian, I'm going to stick to my guns regarding zero and nothing. Sure, you can use the mathematical equation 2 - 2 = 0 to represent the removal of something from something, resulting in nothing, but the representation is not the process. Zero on a number line or a coordinate axis is not equal to nothing. The idea itself that substance can come to exist from nothingness, by means of separating it from its fundamental opposite substance, is a very interesting idea, but I think bringing in mathematics just confuses the situation. Especially since mathematics was developed by people to deal with reality as we percieve it.

Stick to your guns. I would expect no less from intelligent thoughtful people.

Just to clarify though I'm not merely talking about separating things from their fundamental opposites as a means of creating the universe. There is no way to stably articulate anything using only an articulation of addition and subtraction.

Another thought: we developed math to describe reality as we perceive it, doesn't that mean that on some level the universe at least appears to behave in a mathematical way? Is it to much of a stretch to assume that if the universe appears to behave in a way consistent with our mathematical models it is possibly because it does behave in a mathematical way?

I think it makes more sense when pondering an irrational question to look for an irrational answer. The experience known in philosophy as "transcendence" is the kind of irrational answer I prefer.

Again, fair enough for your cosmological search, but the particular question I'm looking to answer is not irrational.

[HeuristicsInc]

Who was it that said that any technology sufficiently advanced would appear like magic to someone from a less advanced society?

Arthur C. Clarke.
Remember, folks, let's not be haughty and dismissive of others' beliefs/philosophies. I've seen a bit too much of that in this thread.
-bill

[sparks]

When you start your work by assuming that everything is nothing, you've removed any possible basis of study and in doing so produced nothing but obvious, innate contradiction, upon which you then proceed to pride yourself. I'm sure you have fun in the process.

Anything beyond that is semantic. The theory, if it can be called a theory, takes a good matter for discussion and then removes the actual matter, leaving nothing but endless discussion and a lot of pretentious ornamentation. Which is heaven, if you're hopelessly bored and think you've got a penchant for philosophy.

To be honest, though, I can't even look at the poll without stifling a giggle. The whole picture of it is pretty hilarious to me--a poll, briefly outlining these massive approaches to a massive subject, capped off with a choice that just happens to be the same as the thread topic, followed by a detailed (if aimless) explanation of the principle's platform. And I say all this while overlooking your quotation of a film-that-shall-not-be-named. But the whole approach, the facade of balanced discussion: "Say, would you like your sandwich there... or this DELICIOUS board of wood? Because, you know, I'm all about the board. Let's talk about wood..." But it's a bad analogy, I admit--because in this case, what you're suggesting isn't even an alternative. It's not even coherent, except in its basic rejection of the question it chooses to answer.

Naturally, I don't mind adding fuel to the fire, but that doesn't mean I'm going to take it easy on you. I know you're very excited about your pet, but keep in mind how easy it is to be (and how many people have been) incredibly impressed by a rhetorical philosophy that reinforces a charismatic notion such as the unreality of reality.

[Hoblit]

people, PEOPLE...God created all of this. Thats all you need to know. Besides, it's easier than all of this stuff ya'll be talkin' about

[sparks]

It's true, and I can prove it.

Jesus + Cold Air = Copper - Education

It's all about the triangles. Triangles are math and math can't lie.

[Adam!]

'deep inelastic scattering'

Neat. I'll read up on that.

My problem is that I have the romantic notion that the universe is actually a very simple place. It always gets me in trouble.

[sparks]

As simple as you want it to be.

Rather than wave my dick around profoundly while proclaiming nothing exists, I find it much more appropriate to believe in my immediate perceptions are the only reality. Sure, it's a little hackneyed, sure you can't argue it or refute it. It's a self-contained truth. After all, how else do you define existence except by what can be perceived, in one way or another?

And so I say: God? Well, that'll be a hell of a thing. Let me see it and I'll believe. Won't be all that different than just dying, since I'll be, well, dead, right? Won't be around to notice the difference between heaven and a big blank. Until then, no ill-tempered sky-hippies for me, thanks. And no spoon-bending pseudointellectuals, either.

[Adam!]

Three seperate posts that say nothing new but were obviously written to get a reaction

Are you done rephrasing things you already said, but this time with taunts added in? If no, about how many more posts like this can we expect?

EDIT: Originally I thought you were posting in this thread a lot get people riled up. Then I noticed that you made nearly 20 posts in 90 minutes this morning, which made me realize that you were probably posting a lot because you were posting a lot. Still, there's only so many times I can read the same SomethingAwful joke over and over again before I start to question your motives.

[sparks]

One condescending post that does nothing but ignore those on-topic statements actually made.

I'm sorry, isn't that what this whole thread is about? Rephrasing ourselves? I thought it was some sort of rhetorical exercise.

The incindiary bits of my last post weren't really supposed to be the focus, anyway. I'd say most of it was in earnest, accusations of philosophical dick-waving aside. And I fail to see how everything I've said has been meant to egg on a reaction, simply because I happened to weave childish taunts into my otherwise-honest statements.

I do apologise, though, if my words were insufficiently relevant to have earned your "Worth Posting" sticker.


Edit: Finally read your edit. Yeah, I was pitifully bored last night. My posts to the other now-popular thread in this forum were a lot more inane and spammy. *shame*

[mico saudad]

Who was it that said that any technology sufficiently advanced would appear like magic to someone from a less advanced society?

Arthur C. Clarke.
Remember, folks, let's not be haughty and dismissive of others' beliefs/philosophies. I've seen a bit too much of that in this thread.
-bill

I totally didn't mean that in a dismissive way of his belief that a lot of physics feels like witchcraft. What I meant by that was that some of it is voodoo and some of it is so complex that it just seems that way.

[Kapitano]

I think we're all familliar with Karl Popper's falsificationism. It is the standard definition of science given by a philosopher. And we've probably all read Carl Sagan's final book too.

Sorry, but I'm not, and I haven't.

Alright, here goes.

Popper's big idea is that hypotheses - suggestions about how the universe works - can come from anywhere. Religious revelation, word association, instinct, or making analogies.

Science involves asking, "If the hypothesis were true, what could never happen?". If someone comes up with the hypothesis that sound travels through air, then a loudspeaker playing music in a room with no air should be inaudible, if you're sitting in the next room.

Therefore if you put a loudspeaking into a vaccum, play Johnny Cashpoint's latest album though it at top volume, and can hear it...then the hypothesis is untrue.

Of course, the sound might be reaching you in other ways - maybe through the floor. So you pad the floor with soft foam rubber, make sure the room isn't soundproofed, check that there really is no air in there, and try to eliminate any ways the sound could reach you without passing through air.

If you do this several times, and other people do their version of your experiment, and you all hear no music, then the hypothesis becomes a theory, because it hasn't been disproven.

Theories can of course still be disproved, which leads them to being abandoned or modified. Often they are modified by being incorporated into other, larger theories, as when Newton's laws were shown to be a special case of Einstein's system.

This is Falsificationism. The idea that you don't use experiment to prove that theories (or hypotheses) are true. You use experiments to try to prove them false. And if you fail to do that, you can provisionally call the theory true.

As for Carl Sagan, he's the one who who said in his final book 'The Demon Haunted World', that if you can't disprove an idea it's not science, it's philosophy. As it happens I think he was wrong - most philosophy doesn't deal in unmeasurable phenomena or unrefutable speculation.

If it did, the majority of hypotheses put forward by philosophers would not have been refuted, by later philosophers and scientists.

[sparks]

I would suggest that the biggest distinction between tangibly measurable theories and philosophical theories is that the latter tend to be based on impractically general statements.

There are a lot of philosophical theories that simply can't be refuted, except by analysis for self-contradiction (which can only "disprove" a theory if absolutely verifiable--subjective assessments of contradiction that are popular in philosophical debate aren't enough, you actually need something basic and solid to base the claim upon). Usually, there isn't enough basis to provide an argument of self-contradiction, so plenty of totally implausible philosophical theories can't be refuted.

For example, the statement that God existed -before- time is (by my assessment) an obvious contradiction, because to say that anything existed "before" chronology could be a tool of measurement nullifies your statement. Of course, there are other ways of phrasing this theory, so there are lots of ways to approach this topic--so many, in fact, that it becomes totally unmanageable. Logic as we tend to use it has its foundation in words, and words are only representative of the ideals we're trying to apply to the logic, so you've automatically got a big margin of meaning to deal with.

Before I get off topic, I'll make what I'm trying to say clear: philosophy, too, is a word. And as such, it can describe (even accurately) many diverse things. Obviously, some of them have a means by which to be disproven, whether logically or experimentally. At the same time, a great deal of philosophical theories lie beyond any form of measurement due to the extent of claims. Most religious philosophy would fall into this second category.

Or so I see it. I think this boundary is why most discussions of creation and other absolutely huge philosophical subjects quickly revert into word-sparring and an unreasonably heavy dependence upon the meaning of the words used.

As it happens I think he was wrong - most philosophy doesn't deal in unmeasurable phenomena or unrefutable speculation.

I like where you're going with this, but I won't back you up on the "most" statement. I'd have to say the majority of philosophy is insufficiently tangible to measure as potentially false by either literal or logical experiment. Lots of people try, and they tend to become entwined with words and their meanings--even the most intelligent, most famous philosophers have this failing, I think.

But discussion of "most" is probably not beneficial to the argument. I think it suffices to say that if even some forms of philosophy are too grand to measure, what we wind up dealing with are two separate subjects existing under the single banner of "philosophy": those that are within the reach of examination, and those that are beyond it. I don't think people pay enough attention to this distinction, if that helps to clarify my statments on the logical benefits of agnosticism.

[mico saudad]

As for Carl Sagan, he's the one who who said in his final book 'The Demon Haunted World', that if you can't disprove an idea it's not science, it's philosophy. As it happens I think he was wrong - most philosophy doesn't deal in unmeasurable phenomena or unrefutable speculation. If it did, the majority of hypotheses put forward by philosophers would not have been refuted, by later philosophers and scientists.

The ability to refute previous work isn't necessarily evidence for a process of objective falsification. Theology is often refuted by later authorities to adjust to social conditions and political realities but that doesn't mean that the early ideas are shown to be false or that the new ideas are true in any inherent sense.

My current opinion is that philosophical constructs are not nearly measurable enough to allow true falsification, and what convinces me of this is the pluralism you find in philosophy regarding any important subject matter. In science this is not the case. You do not get two separate results when you ask the same question.

Not that I'm overly knocking philosophers because if you asked science any philosophical question you wouldn't even get a single answer let alone multiple answers.

[HeuristicsInc]

Who was it that said that any technology sufficiently advanced would appear like magic to someone from a less advanced society?

Arthur C. Clarke.
Remember, folks, let's not be haughty and dismissive of others' beliefs/philosophies. I've seen a bit too much of that in this thread.
-bill

I totally didn't mean that in a dismissive way of his belief that a lot of physics feels like witchcraft. What I meant by that was that some of it is voodoo and some of it is so complex that it just seems that way.

Hmm, those were two unrelated statements. If I remember correctly, you were one of the more respectful debaters

Maybe I should have added an extra blank line or something... hmmmmm
-bill

[sparks]

I make everyone look like a respectful debater. That's my job.