wiscidea wrote:

Hello BL.

I'd like to ask a simple and direct question, which I'm sure you've answered on numerous occasions elsewhere. But I'm here, not elsewhere. Furthermore, I'm simply curious; I'm not interested in cracking open the old calculus textbooks to comprehend this. I'm looking for the sort of explanation that might appear on NOVA, public radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge, or Discover Magazine.

Anyway...

Can you clearly and directly, in the simplest terms possible, communicate a mathematical proof that there is nothing what-so-ever eternal? Please set aside all other portions of your thesis for a moment. Much hinges on this issue.

I personally believe the cosmos is eternal, primarily because it seems to make sense and there is no reason to believe otherwise. So if you want others to agree with you, you are going to have to present a clear and strong argument.

Thank you.

P.S. I believe part of the problem of your presentation is that you tossed a lot on the table for the discussion. It might be better to present each item separately -- given the diverse audience -- and then put it all together later.

Just finished lunch, so let's start with this.

First, let's isolate a particle, preferably a elementary particle...let's say a quark? Up quark? Down quark? Whatever floats your boat.

Simply by its existence however, it exhibits a number of causally effective forces and properties such as electric charge, gravitational pull (however negligible) through mass, spin, and color charge.

Without other particles around though it's probably not effecting much. Luckily in the universe that's almost never the case naturally (if not actually never) so let's just say there are two particles and they'll either start attracting or repelling each other and maybe forming bonds to form another type of particle altogether and their synergy adds properties upon those that they have individually.

Add movement onto that system and more particles and we see that every single event leads to more than one single effect indefinitely. This is including the entire concept of causal nodes which we will avoid for the sake of brevity at the moment.

So now we determine that through causation, the number of events is constantly increasing.

Predictive reverse engineering of events will thus reveal (through earlier observations of quantum events) that preceding generations of events will demonstrate calculable reduction in the amount of events. Regression equates to reduction and by calculating derivatives (remember calculus?) at any one point of observable causation (even in isolated branches) and you'll find no point where the slope is less than or equal to 0 (and thus far we don't see much of an approach to zero even in vacuums). The same applies to the initial event of the universe and since it shows already that the number of events continues to decrease at every generation and we cannot have negative events or even anti-events, we are logically forced into the conclusion that there must be an initial event.

Redfrog777 wrote:

BaiginLong;

“At this point, I don't see anyone else throwing the tizzy that you are. And what I address to one person is just toward that one person. That's regardless of whether or not it's publicly viewable. By your logic anything I say in public to someone else should be taken out of context in the idea that it's toward them in that particular discussion and scrutinized just because everyone else can hear it.”

At this point not that many folks are bothered to read this thread. Also the necessity to address the attitude is being taken up by a poster already.

Not at all taken out of context. But understand that it is going to be read by others and commented upon. The conversation is open to anyone and everyone, weather you like it or not. You would be wise to consider that in posting.

If you don’t like that people don’t see your point of view, or that folks consider your argument failed and flawed. Too bad, so sad, bye-bye. Nothing-personal dude.

But implying that others need to learn to read properly because they don’t agree with your assessments. Is going to get you called out………….

The problem with that is that he ADMITTED to not reading the first post, which just proves what I was saying about him and you have no grounds to criticize me legitimately with.

mainecaptain wrote:

This is a public forum, if you don't want answers from anyone other then whom you are addressing, this is not the place. We are all free to answer any post we desire.And we will.
It is not up to any of us to prove what you are saying or prove our point of view is better.

We all know our view is better.........for ourselves.

Good luck of whatever journey you are on.

Redfrog777 was attacking ad hominem without basis as I've demonstrated right now and within a debate such tactics hold no weight, so again going after the writer is not effective here. What I did was point out wiscidia's evident asking of questions I had addressed in the initial post.

wiscidea wrote:

It would appear that you've identified a singular event, not a singular cause.



Or... the universe just happened. Note that there is the cosmos, which might be eternal, and universes, which might pop into existence and eventually collapse.



No. You don't.



And thereby show that the cosmos itself might have simply popped into existence, independent of any Deity or other cause.



Yes. Stuff outside the brain affects stuff inside the brain.



You can muse about it, but your previous statements do no provide any explanation for Free Will. Stuff outside the brain affects stuff inside the brain. That's all you've shown. One might just as well say Free Will is an emergent property of matter. There is no need for a Deity who can create himself out of nothing to express himself through us, thus explaining Free Will.



Or people are hallucinating. And the similar experiences are a reflection of similar cultures, similar behavior, and similar underlying biology.

JUST noticed this one.

Well I dealt with the upper portion so let's go with the Free Will thing.

Stop looking at deity as a being and just as a force that fits the definition of powers requisite for what we would consider God-hood. It's beyond nature, it started the universe, and by the cross-compounding of effects through the sensitivity of complexity of nervous systems it can be considered as the source of Free Will or even Free Will itself. Without actually having a consciousness itself (but being Sentience by the same avenue as it is Free will) it basically manages to be God.

It's not about saying that "there's a God and that's how it should be," it's "hey, there's this conceptual force of self-causation and this is how it acts and if we look at the definition of God here...well we basically have it"

gillyflower wrote:

we see that every single event leads to more than one single effect indefinitely

So that answer is no, Wis, he can't.

stop looking at deity as a being and just as a force that fits the definition of powers requisite for what we would consider God-hood. It's beyond nature, it started the universe

You haven't proved that. You just believe in it. You are no more right or wrong than anyone else.

However, self-caused events occur in observable form have been recorded. Now some people can try and claim vacuum energy for those unknowns, but that's more or less just re-branding in an attempt to avoid the idea of something truly just coming from nothing.

johndavid23 wrote:

Your adherence to "big bang" theory is purely hypothetical:  I prefer quantum gravity theory.  Thus, the universe keeps recycling itself.  When gravity has attracted matter to that degree approaching "an initial event", it becomes a repulsive force - all those quarks, etc. bounce back into differentiation and recreate the infinite variety we call the universe.  Thus, there is no "initial event".

What this does to the concept of time is interesting.

One can posit units of consciousness on the order of the Planck constant, their intricacy is sometimes referred to as "Godhead".

The problem with that is that for a big crunch/bounce to happen, all greater repulsive forces or counter directional forces must be over ruled by attractive forces. All gravities require mass on some level and if the expansion of the universe is to be observed matter has already been spread out too thinly for such an event to realistically occur. Electromagnetic attraction wouldn't account for it as there's also electromagnetic repulsion, kinetic energy, thermal radiation, etc etc. Then you must also take into account the plasticity and elasticities of matter dissipation and the range at which gravities have effect. All this is already without such things as vacuum energy.

We'd reach an operative limit and have minor pulses of contraction/re-expansion at the borders, but nothing would indicate a Big Crunch/Bounce other than a psychological desire for an equal-opposite to the Big Bang.

Of course there's also the Big Freeze to worry about...but that's a different tangent altogether. (Self-causation/vacuum energy would be the likely counter-mechanic to total thermodynamic depletion.)


THEN you have to consider the actual causal models which show no progressive contractions whatsoever.