Comments by "Chef Chaudard" (@chefchaudard3580) on "Rationality Rules"
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@stavroskanias5314 It may be the case the universe never started and always existed. It is, in fact, intuitively, the best explanation, as "nothing" cannot exist, by definition.
But, you know, as Neil De Grasse Tyson put it "the Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you", and intuition is probably not the best tool.
Leibniz does not answer the question either, as mentioned in the video, as it is still "Why was there gods or God instead of nothing?"
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@reasonandsciencecatsboardcom
1. Either the universe is eternal, or it began from nothing by nothing, or it was created by a creator.
...or it was created by several things, or something
2. The universe is not past eternal.
Prove that it cannot be.
3. The present moment cannot be reached by adding individual events together from eternity.
It can. If every moment is separated by 0 second, you can be at any time in 0 second, even if there is an infinite past time. It can be the case for what was "before" the beginning of our space/time universe.
4. The second law of thermodynamics refutes the hypothesis of an eternal universe.
This law applies to our instantiation of the universe, i.e. space/time. Not necessarily what was before it (if "before" means anything) or outside of it
5. The universe cannot start from nothing.
Prove it. See 2. above.
6. Viirtual particles do not come from nothing. They depend on a quantum vacuum, a state with the lowest possible energy.
And? It is irrelevant to the question of "why is there something rather than nothing".
"7. Where did THAT energy come from ?"
Don't know.
"8. The universe had a beginning, therefore a cause"
Or several causes...
"9. That cause must be timeless, spaceless, and personal. We call it God."
That cause, or these causes, must only be sufficient to cause an universe into being. Your qualifiers are non sequitur. Call this cause(s) God or gods if you want.
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@reasonandsciencecatsboardcom Bwaahahaha!
You don't demonstrate why an infinite regress is impossible.
On the contrary, you say yourself " In that case, another contingent physical cause would have had to trigger the Big Bang or further back, a cosmos, multiverses, etc, leading to an infinite regress."
Yes, that's it!
"If it were impersonal, it would have to be of physical substance, space, time, and matter, or abstract numbers and math. There could be no physical being beyond our universe or a greater Cosmos."
We agree, I would say that concepts like "numbers and maths" probably cannot cause anything, and there is probably more than "space, time and matter", like energy, forces, black matter,... and some unknown things to be discovered in the universe and the cosmos, but OK, that will do for now.
"In state/state causation one state of affairs causes another state of affairs to exist. It faces the same problem. "
Which "same problem"? I see no problem with what you said so far, we mostly agree!
" This causation is like a frozen pond where there would be a tree trunk resting on the top of that pond, and the frozen pond is causing the rest of the tree trunk, but that could not trigger a change from one state into another but would remain static, from eternity. And a state - state causation would also have to be physical. "
What is that gibberish supposed to demonstrate? If anything caused the Big Bang, it may have been caused itself by some other things, which themselves were caused by other things, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Thats what we see in our universe, physical things trigger new things, it is not "static" in any way. So, what's your point?
The rest is just non sequitur, special pleading and false dichotomy. So, better stick with the (flawed) premise before moving on.
And you don't rule out the possibility of several causes. Why not 2 gods? A bunch of gods? An infinite number of gods?
You demonstrated you can't answer that, so I understand you prefer to run away...
Bye!
(edited for minor corrections)
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@reasonandsciencecatsboardcom time is made of moments. In our space/time universe, the minimum duration between each moment corresponds to Planck's constant. You cannot go from an infinite regress up to now, at least in theory. That's what you mean.
But nothing says that Planck's constant applied to what was 'before' the Big Bang. We don't even know if time existed, or if it behaved the same. More on that later.
Suppose that Planck's constant was reduced down to zero, duration between every moment was then zero second, and you could go from -100 seconds to now in 0 *100 seconds, zero seconds.
Same for 1 million seconds, an infinite number of seconds.
It was possible to go from anytime to anytime in, literally, zero second.
I don't mean that it was the case, I mean that it is an option that contradicts you.
Other options, as mentioned above, are that time did not exist at all, there is no infinite regress in that case. Or time behaved differently. Or time has other properties we don't know about.
In any case, an infinite regress is possible.
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@reasonandsciencecatsboardcom Heat death will not cause the universe to "die". If scientists are right, space and time will still exist. Forever.
"The sequence of motion cannot extend infinitely." That, my friend, is what you have to DEMONSTRATE since the first message! You keep repeating that, but it does not make it more true!
YOU HAVE to PROVE that an infinite regress is impossible. Otherwise, causation CAN extend infinitely, because, as long as there is time, there is causation.
"Why can't the past be infinite? If the past is infinitely old, then getting from the past to the present would be like trying to arrive at the surface from a hole infinitely deep—from a bottomless pit."
I DEMONSTRATED a way past can be infinite. It is up there! Repeating the same thing does nothing to disprove what I demonstrated. My demonstration still stands, your statement is proven to be false! Infinite regress IS possible.
(Edited for clarity)
"It is impossible to complete an infinite series by addition." And you cannot countdown to the start in an infinite regress. Infinities have no ends, it is the very definition of an infinite.
Past infinite means just that: it never started. When defined as an infinite regress, you can "substract" time from now, you'll never reach the beginning. Never.
There is NO POINT IN THE PAST when you can say "there is an infinite period of time between then and now". So, you DEMONSTRATE NOTHING with your supposed analogy, just that infinities are infinite, which is kind of moot.
And you still don't rule out the possibility of several causes. Why not 2 gods? A bunch of gods? An infinite number of gods?
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Well, logic is used in mathematics. Maths is just a tool that uses logic.
So, it is possible to predict that something exists using logic, through maths eventually.
So, in theory, we could potentially logically build a model of the universe through logic, and it may include God, or gods, or whatever else.
The issue with the God or gods as defined by the theists is that, by definition, it can be an explanation for anything, from the existence of a fart up to the Universe, making the claim unfalsifiable.
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@stefankuhne6103 " Do you have an example of something being proven to exist by logic alone?", Well, humans and animals do that since they exist: this grass is moving, there is a lion smell in the air: logical conclusion 1, there is a predator in the grass waiting for me. Logical conclusion 2: run away!
Logic is just a process that links existing information, being observational, presupposed or hypothetical, to new information. Logic is just a process applied to information. We agree. But logic can gives you new information.
For an argument to be "sound" (it gives you new information that complies with reality), it must be "valid" (follow logic), and based on"true" premises.
It may be the case that, in the future, we find premises that are "true", that lead us to the existence of a God, or gods (or some other model). Through mathematics eventually, as there are just, as mentioned, logical tools
And we agree, the Kalam is probably not the best argument. Its premises are flawed, and even the logic needs some arm twist, like the "Grim Reaper Messenger" argument or the "perfect being" to fit logical requirements. In short: when trying to demonstrate the existence of God, the Kalam is flawed at every step.
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@josiahz21 heroes are people that do "extraordinary good" things. But there are all mere humans, with flaws, misconceptions , preconceived ideas. We are all the product of our time, the culture, civilization we live in, and our self.
I find it strange that, for many people, a hero should be perfect in every aspect of his life (And sometimes, it is even contradictory: how can you save the world and babysitting at the same time?)
Accepting that somebody can be heroic on something, and bad on others, should not prevent us from considering him as a hero.
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@skrm5311 "I know I am replying very late, I was caught up in something so sorry for that."
No worry, the Universe can wait for you, or me ;o)
"So your theory is that outside big bang it's a eternal, infinite world which is always there. And from that our universe came from and we don't know the laws of physics outside the big bang."
That's it!
"Now only saying we don't know, won't throw out God from the equation."
Sure. It throws actually nothing and let everything open.
"Because one doesn't know how God does things in laws of physics terms, but one can say God created the big bang. "
Yes, or that several gods did it. Or some unknown natural process that includes no god at all. I would go for two gods, who fought together and killed each other. Our space/time universe being their remains. This one sounds good, don't you think?
"As I heard from Jordan Peterson lecture, if two allegedly different things has zero percent in differences i.e 100% percent correlated then we are talking about one thing, another way to say is, they aren't two things, but one thing. "
Yes. But I can't see how it could answer the question about what was before the Big Bang. You can make up any explanation, based on our current knowledge of physics or not, our intuition or wild imagination, we currently have no way to know if one is right. So, stating that the universe was created is not a given , as I demonstrated that an infinite regress IS possible.
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@skrm5311
"So the point is, as the atheists alleged to theists that they worship the God of the gaps, this carbon dating proved that atheists also worship the world of unknowns.Although atheists allegations were never proven."
Atheist "worship" nothing, they acknowledge the existence of things, like anybody else. There is no "atheist allegation". Atheist lack a belief in God or gods, they "alledge" nothing, they simply don't accept that gods exist until such a statement is backed up with convicing evidence.
"So in short, after already seeing the history, one smart person would be delusional or gone crazy to follow the mistakes of the history unless there is no unknowns."
Sorry, I can't understand what you try to say.
"And lastly if our universe doesn't existed before then it either pop into existence or by other mechanisms without unknowns otherwise leads to unsolvable infinite regression or it was the GOD."
I don't understand where you go with that.
Our universe poping into existence: Intuitively, nothing can come from nothing (the absence of anything). "Nothing" cannot exist. So, intuitively, "something" must exist.
That "something" must have existed for all time. It does not say, however, what this "something" is. So, an infinite regress is the most likely explanation.
But, knowing that using our intuition is a bad way to really understand things, I will stay with "I don't know anything about what is/was outside our space/time universe. And nobody knows. It can be, litterally, anything. We don't even know if "is/was" means something outside our space/time universe."
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@andrewliggitt universe is driven by very basic laws and constants. Planets, stars, galaxies are subject to gravity and electro forces. They react exactly as they should and we can predict their behaviour, as far as we can measure the forces in play and calculate their effect.
If an intelligent force was driving them, they would have either an unpredictable behaviour, or a complex one that cannot come from blind forces.
The limited number of forces and constants make that our universe is consistant and a chaos at the same time. The mix of those forces is enough to aggregate gases into stars, that arrange into galaxies, those stars creating complex chemicals, for example.
The best analogy I could use is coffee and milk. If you pour some milk in your coffee, you end up with a brown mix where coffee and milk are evenly distributed. That's entropy.
But for a moment, you obtained complex moving 3D shapes in your cup with subtle coffee and milk ratios variations, changing constantly, so complex that we cannot really model them .
And that with only 2 chemicals and gravity.
Try that with some more forces, and you obtain our universe, and life.
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@curiousguy978 I agree that, intuitiveley, if past is infinite, there is no "first cause", though we may discover that infinites don't work the way we think and that there is a "kind" of "first" or "last" in infinites (there are already with some infinites that tend to some limit).
However, I don't understand why you think past cannot be infinite? You can have a "now " and "here" even if time and space are infinite? 4887 is before 4888 and after 4886, and nowhere else, in the infinite of numbers. And some models have our space time universe infinite, with us being where we are, no problem.
Then, your paradox is not one: the reality is that our space/time IS finite and started with the Big Bang. We know nothing of the reality of "before" the Big Bang. We don't even know if "before the Big Bang" means something, if "time" existed at some point or what other dimensions may have existed.
Finally, no "first messenger" is required for an infinite past to be possible. I see no problem in having causes traced back infinitely and no "first cause". Every "step" being the consequences of the previous "step", ad infinitum, like every number is equal to the previous one + 1.
Infinites are counterintuitive, and basing a reasoning on intuition when speaking of physics looks suspiscious to me.
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@curiousguy978 Titling your answer was a good idea.
Logically
I disagree with your "today seems to be the end of time...". Intuitiveley, we know there will be a tomorrow, and a day after. It has been that way for billions of years, we take it for granted, science also, and some models have time infinite in the future. Scientific method, based on observable facts from where models are derived, strongly disagree with you
Nothing says that past time "cannot ellapse". No scientific model or mathematical demonstration. Grim Reaper, or Grim Messenger, try to disprove infinites, based on the lack of a starting point and the impossibility of a first cause. But it does not prove infinite impossible if no first cause is required in the first place, or "first cause" is not related to a single "natural" moment. You'll have to demontrate that.
Secondly
You are conflating an infinite and physical rules. Time being infinite or not, rules are that we cannot jump in time, or swap moments (or I did not make myself clear, sorry).
Where your idea that an infinite, to exist, need all its elements to exist at one point comes from? Our scientific models are descriptive. If, one day, it is demonstrated that time is infinite in the future, then we'll not have to wait an eternity to declare it infinite.
And, as a side note, WE experience time as past, present and future, but nothing says that all moments don't exist outside of what we can experience.
Scientifically
I fully agree with you that we are talking of things we know very few about. The only issue is that, if I am happy to say that "we don't know, so far", some, like this CC guy RR is responding to, pretend to know what caused the Big Bang. For bad reasons. This is, after all, the reason why RR made his videos in the first place, and why we comment.
Rationally
Your chicken and egg is a poor analogy. Chicken evolved from animals we would not call chicken. Same for eggs. It proves exactly the opposite of what you want to say: in the chain of animals that led to the chicken, there is not an animal that was obviously not a chicken giving birth to what is obviously a chicken. We would have to arbitrary decide where, at some point, the father was not a chicken, and the son is. But, in reality, there would be very few differences between the father and the son. No more than for you with your father.
There is no "first chicken", there is only a line of animals, all slightly different from the previous one, that end up with what we call "a chicken". And, in fact, egg predate the chicken. Chicken ancestors, we would not call them chickens, were born from eggs.
So, maybe, like for the chicken, there is no "first cause", just causes after another, ruled by some unknown cosmical physical law. All turtles down. Or, as cause needs time, and time before the Big Bang may not have existed, no cause at all.
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@curiousguy978 1 - "Your phrase “there ‘will be’ a tomorrow” confirms that tomorrow doesn’t yet exist so I would say by definition we have reached the end of time in the present. "
I demonstrated that: all scientific models, and our intuitition, shows that "now" is just a moment in the timeline. Everything shows that there will be a tomorrow and a day after. Are we sure? Yes, as sure as we can be. That's part of the presuppositions used in the scientific method, that time behaves the same way now as it will in the future and was in the past in our universe. Until it ceases to exist, eventually.
2 - "If you are saying time already exists in the future, the you’ll need to demonstrate that. "
No, I don't assert that. It is just a possibility you did not rule out.
3 -" If you are saying time existed before [the Big Bang], I’ll ask that you demonstrate that as" well.
I assert nothing: read my message again, time may have not existed "before" the "Big Bang". It is you, who assert that time can't be infinite, to demonstrate your point. My point is: we don't know, either time did not exist, or it existed, was infinite, or had a start... or something else. I would be happy enough if you admit that you don't know either.
4 - "Grimm messenger and reaper actually disprove causal infinities. "
No, they don't. GM and GR disprove the existence of a "first" in an infinite. I already granted that: it is the very definition of an infinite that there is no "start" or "end".
5 - "It’s pretty obvious that effects need causes so it makes perfect sense to say something outside the chain of cause and effect was the first cause."
It does not "make perfect sense". That's my point. I see no reason why there could not be a chain of causes with no "first cause", of moments without a "first moment". GR nor GM demonstrate that. Your "perfect sense" makes no sense when applied to infinites, or, at least, it is not enough to demonstrate that, as my intuition says the opposite.
I don't have to prove that. Again, I don't say that it is true, what I say is that you don't rule that out. Be aware that, by definition, there is no "first moment" in an infinite past time. There is no "first cause" either. So, you cannot disprove an infinite past through that, no more that tangent of 90° being infinite and having no actual value disproves the existence of right angles.
6 - "On the secondly part, you are swapping causal finitism for effect finitism..."
No. I disagree on the necessity of a "first cause", not on causes in general (for the sake of the argument). You have to demonstrate that a "first cause" is required.
Regarding the rest of the comments, I'll be very brief: "so either the universe sprang into existence from nothing by nothing and without a cause, or it sprang into existence from nothing by something with a cause. ".
False dichotomy. Physicits work on many other models, and there maybe a bunch of unknown reasons.
The rest will be addressed when you have demonstrated that a "first cause" is required, or gave up. And "it makes sense" is not an answer when talking of infinites. Mathematicians dedicated their lives on the subject, so the "perfect sense" of a layman, even as smart as you, is not sufficient.
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@curiousguy978 I thank you also for the chat. It forced me to put in writings my thoughts, and make them (hopefully) understandable.
1 & 2 - I made my point clear here. For me, an infinite is an infinite, elapsed or not. We agree we disagree :-)
4 -I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If you take an infinity of dominos, you don't need a "first domino" to fall for the "second one" to fall. It's a nonsense. All dominos fall because of the previous one.
5 - There is something in the video that contradicts you : at 5:08 RR gives sources from Pruss telling when causal finitism is supported. One of them is 2) "when a segment of time is not infinitely divisible". This is more or less the case in our space/time universe, because of Planck's constant. But nothing says it was the case "before" the Big Bang if we assume time existed.
To simplify, if you imagine time made of an infinite number of moments, duration between every moment being infinitely short, you can go from -infinite to now in litteraly no time
So much for "It's logical to say that without beginnings or ends, infinities can't elapse, that past time by definition has elapsed, so past time can't be infinite. "
Your "alarm bell" rings immediately, if it makes sense :-), as an infinite amount of time has elapsed in an infinitely short time.
That is also the reply to [noticed you skipped over addressing elapsing time vs. elapsing infinities]. Sorry, I thought it was answered in the video.
6 - I already addressed that point: it is up to you to demonstrate your point. I make no claim, I just point out flaws (as RR in the video, incidently). If a competing hypothesis is as likely as yours, it means that you demonstrated nothing. As I still see no reason why "causes" can't go to infinity, and neither the GR or GM demonstrate that for ALL possible infinite times (see the video and my point above), you are left with at least one competing hypothesis. It does not make this hypothesis true, but I believe it to be sound. It means you have to find a demonstration that covers ALL kinds of infinites.
Rest -"It's a dichotomy because there is no third option. Believing the universe sprang from nothing and/or for no reason is one option. Believing it came from something and/or for some reason is the only other...".
What you said was "so either the universe sprang into existence from nothing by nothing and without a cause, or it sprang into existence from nothing by something with a cause." which is different. Maybe a typo. Whatever.
I propose "The Cosmos always existed, because "nothing" cannot exist. As the cosmos is all what was, is and will be, by definition, cosmos ever existed. There is no time, no dimension when/where the cosmos did not exist. Our space time universe is either the cosmos, and "before" the universe makes no sense, or it is born from some existing stuff and there not "from nothing".
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