The blind ghost

[dantana]

I think it was Aristotle that had the quote "nothing is what rocks dream about" and evangelicals quote this often. I don't think the lack of subjective experiences would classify as nothing. The physical matter that previously was a living organism is still something. Similar to a jpeg image stored on a computer. Is the image something? Is the image turned to nothing when the hard drive is wiped?

Good questions Rivendale. Like Albert E. I'm confident the moon is still there even when I'm not looking at it. I'm pretty sure the guy walking down the street talking to himself still does it even when I'm not just driving by.

My comment was a feeble attempt to come up with an example of pure nothing. It was a mild poke at Gadianton and Drw, who have spent a lot of time trying to explain to me how existence is not at odds with physicalism based existence theory. (pbet) The theory that existence can and did arrive from nothing. I am about fifty percent certain that I am maybe not understanding them.

Anyway, There must be some irony floating around here somewhere as I'm attempting to use cause and effect logic to argue how cause and effect science can't explain how existence came to be. So, I reckon it must be something other... than pbet. Maybe, idealism based existence theory. (Ibet) - Which is different from Deity based existence theory. (dbet)

[Res Ipsa]

We seem to have individual consciousnesses now, though. I'm not aware of any universal awareness. Perhaps Buddhists would say that's my big problem.

Currently my individual awareness, whatever exactly it is, is supported by hardware that is distinct from my awareness. Some of that distinct hardware is stuff in my own brain, and its distinction from my awareness is like the distinction between book and story. A lot of the interface between my awareness and the rest of the world is distinct from my awareness in more obvious ways; I'd count the light waves that get absorbed in my retinas as part of that more-obviously-distinct interface.

Where exactly the line gets drawn between what is and is not "my awareness" is a tricky question. It's surely not a sharp line in any case, but some kind of fuzzily gradual transition between me and not-me. Surprisingly similar trickiness is involved, however, in deciding where the borders of anything lie, between it and the rest of the universe.

An electron is surrounded by a cloud of vacuum polarisation; if you can only resolve the cloud so precisely, then the inner core of the cloud that lies within your resolution radius is indistinguishable, as far as you're concerned, from the electron itself. In the end the only consistent conclusion is to accept that "the electron" includes whatever part of the polarisation cloud that cannot be resolved. So if you ask what even an electron is, where it stops and the rest of the universe starts, then the answer depends on the resolution scale that you have in mind when you ask your question.

This is part of the concept called "renormalisation" in quantum field theory. The idea itself is maybe not so hard to grasp but understanding why we really have to apply it even to elementary particles is harder—I'm not happy with my own understanding of that. Anyway, if the frontier between "this electron" and "not this electron" is that subtle an issue, then no wonder the frontier between "me" and "not-me" is kind of hard to define. Nonetheless electrons exist, and so do I. The borders can be drawn in some way, or perhaps in a range of ways that are appropriate in a range of contexts. There are such things as individual things, even though all things connect.

Thanks for that, PG. I really like the way you put that. I'm convinced that the boundary between me and not me is very fuzzy. So fuzzy that I might just be all fuzz.

[Res Ipsa]

Anyone up for a little science fiction? Or, as some would probably say, science fantasy.

Physicalism posits that particles rule. Particles and forces are all that really matter and the phenomenon of consciousness is just a result of the mindless interaction of particles. All quite maybe true, but - if particles are eternal, and how could they not be? I mean, I understand that particles have been shown to pop into existence in a vacuum, (maybe they are just coming from somewhere currently un-measurable). Anyway, it is just so hard to grasp the concept that particles/existence popped into existence from non-existence. (This doesn't mean I'm saying God did it)

The way I make it work is fairly simple, conceptually. If reality existed in a higher state, a more ordered state, like, say, the fourth dimension everything that existed was already there. If that extra-dimensional state suffered a vacuum decay and collapsed into a third dimensional state, from our perspective we’d be seeing a huge explosion and particles popping into existence from nowhere. This collapsing 4th dimensional ‘floodwater’ of energy and matter would most likely account for why the universe is expanding and increasing in size, not to mention accounting for the ‘dark energy’ that scientists know exists but can’t find. The size of our universe is much larger than what the size of a fourth dimensional universe would look like, and the ledgers will still balance out once the collapse of the fourth dimension is complete - it just hasn’t finished flooding into the third dimension, yet.

- Doc

This sounds like the universe of the Three Body Problem.

[Res Ipsa]

Well, as host of this thread, I feel like a - thanks guys for the posts, is seriously inadequate. But, I got nothing right now. Anyway, thank you Gadianton, Physics Guy and Rivendale!

Fascinating stuff. Thanks to the contributors and to you, danatana, for starting the ball rolling.

PG, you seem to me to have a real knack for explaining hard to grasp physics concepts to us lay folks. I really appreciate the time you take to do it for us.

[Res Ipsa]

I think it was Aristotle that had the quote "nothing is what rocks dream about" and evangelicals quote this often. I don't think the lack of subjective experiences would classify as nothing. The physical matter that previously was a living organism is still something. Similar to a jpeg image stored on a computer. Is the image something? Is the image turned to nothing when the hard drive is wiped?

Good questions Rivendale. Like Albert E. I'm confident the moon is still there even when I'm not looking at it. I'm pretty sure the guy walking down the street talking to himself still does it even when I'm not just driving by.

My comment was a feeble attempt to come up with an example of pure nothing. It was a mild poke at Gadianton and Drw, who have spent a lot of time trying to explain to me how existence is not at odds with physicalism based existence theory. (pbet) The theory that existence can and did arrive from nothing. I am about fifty percent certain that I am maybe not understanding them.

Anyway, There must be some irony floating around here somewhere as I'm attempting to use cause and effect logic to argue how cause and effect science can't explain how existence came to be. So, I reckon it must be something other... than pbet. Maybe, idealism based existence theory. (Ibet) - Which is different from Deity based existence theory. (dbet)

The main thing I took away from Krauss's book was that what I think of as nothing (the complete absence of something) may not actually exist. Weird to wrap my brain around.

[Gadianton]

(pbet) The theory that existence can and did arrive from nothing

I'm actually saying that "nothing" in this case is a nonsensical black box. A word without a clear meaning. In particular, I believe that while "nothing" as in "the empty set" in logic is a simple and clear idea, there is no intrinsic connection between that and the real world. There is no reason to think "the empty set" has any real-world meaning.

If having nothing is simpler than having something, then having fewer things is simpler than having many things. In that case, wouldn't it be simpler if we had 8 planets instead of 9?

In crude analogical thinking, I can conceive of "the empty set" in regard to dodo birds. That works because we know its physically possible. I can't conceive of "the empty set" in regard to "all matter" because as far as I know, it's not physically possible --- conservation of (mass-)energy (as PG discussed).

Why should anything exist at all? why should there be matter rather than nothing? Isn't nothing simpler? Again, that's like asking aprori why there should be 9 planets instead of 8, wouldn't 8 be simpler in terms of an idealized null set?

[Physics Guy]

One would surely be simpler than three, yet all the kinds of particles that we think of as composing matter (all the fundamental fermions) come in three versions, differing only in mass. So there are electrons, which we all know and love, but also muons, which are exactly like electrons except some 200 times more massive, and also tauons, which are nearly 4000 times more massive than electrons but otherwise again identical. The “up” and “down” quarks that make up protons and neutrons (along with a lot of, um, glue) also each have two heavier siblings, with the whimsical names “charm”, “strange”, “top”, and “bottom”.

When the muon was first discovered I.I. Rabi asked, “Who ordered that?” because it was like discovering an unexpected ingredient on your pizza. The higher generations of particles (as they are called) are all rapidly unstable, so they play no significant role in normal matter. Conceivably they are somehow important in some astrophysical phenomena; maybe they made a difference in the early universe; but it’s hard to see any kind of purpose in their existence.

We are pretty sure that there is no fourth generation of particles at any mass scale low enough that we could detect them. To this day there is no good explanation for why we have two extra heavier copies of all these particles. It seems pointless and arbitrary. Maybe God just wanted to put William of Ockham in his place.

[Physics Guy]

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

So perhaps even the dream of a stone is not exactly nothing.

Space is never strictly empty in the way we normally think of emptiness. Even when there are no particles at all, there are still those bustling point charges in their correlated distribution of plus and minus, as well as the zero-point static of electromagnetic waves.

Moreover space and time themselves are in some sense somethings. They can do things besides just sitting there being empty. There can be waves in space itself, such that everything stretches and squishes a bit, first one way, then the other, in a ripple that speeds along at the speed of light. These are the gravitational waves that were predicted long ago by Einstein and finally detected just a few years ago, by using laser interferometry to measure the slight variations of distance between different places as the wave passes through.

Gravitational waves are emitted by accelerating masses, so technically we can all emit some extremely faint ones just by doing jumping jacks. It takes something like two black holes colliding to generate gravitational waves strong enough for us to detect them from light-years away. It turns out, however, that black holes do collide a few times a year or so, somewhere among the zillions of galaxies that we can see, and we have now detected quite a few such events by their gravitational waves.

[Rivendale]

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

So perhaps even the dream of a stone is not exactly nothing.

Space is never strictly empty in the way we normally think of emptiness. Even when there are no particles at all, there are still those bustling point charges in their correlated distribution of plus and minus, as well as the zero-point static of electromagnetic waves.

Moreover space and time themselves are in some sense somethings. They can do things besides just sitting there being empty. There can be waves in space itself, such that everything stretches and squishes a bit, first one way, then the other, in a ripple that speeds along at the speed of light. These are the gravitational waves that were predicted long ago by Einstein and finally detected just a few years ago, by using laser interferometry to measure the slight variations of distance between different places as the wave passes through.

Gravitational waves are emitted by accelerating masses, so technically we can all emit some extremely faint ones just by doing jumping jacks. It takes something like two black holes colliding to generate gravitational waves strong enough for us to detect them from light-years away. It turns out, however, that black holes do collide a few times a year or so, somewhere among the zillions of galaxies that we can see, and we have now detected quite a few such events by their gravitational waves.

Don't forget those black holes colliding created a audible detection. Not through sound but through space distortion. Your eardrums would actually hear it.

[dantana]

(pbet) The theory that existence can and did arrive from nothing

I'm actually saying that "nothing" in this case is a nonsensical black box. A word without a clear meaning. In particular, I believe that while "nothing" as in "the empty set" in logic is a simple and clear idea, there is no intrinsic connection between that and the real world. There is no reason to think "the empty set" has any real-world meaning.

If having nothing is simpler than having something, then having fewer things is simpler than having many things. In that case, wouldn't it be simpler if we had 8 planets instead of 9?

In crude analogical thinking, I can conceive of "the empty set" in regard to dodo birds. That works because we know its physically possible. I can't conceive of "the empty set" in regard to "all matter" because as far as I know, it's not physically possible --- conservation of (mass-)energy (as PG discussed).

Why should anything exist at all? why should there be matter rather than nothing? Isn't nothing simpler? Again, that's like asking aprori why there should be 9 planets instead of 8, wouldn't 8 be simpler in terms of an idealized null set?

I'm reading the wiki on 'nothing' just now, and this is going to take some time. My first un-thorough thought though is to instead use the term 'not being' and to have it apply as thought experiment for the purposes of our discussion.