Eh. I'm having trouble swallowing this. It just fails to answer the question for me. "Why not!" doesn't mean anything more to me than "I don't know!".
The answer, "why not", indicates that the question itself (why does the universe exist?) was misguided, that the question isn't "why does the universe exist?", but rather "why
shouldn't the universe exist?" "It exists because it
can" might seem like a crazy reason for there to be a universe in the first place, but it's the only one we've got.
Sherlock Holmes said:
when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
Sovram said:
The qualification for existence, in this case, is logical consistence -- incidentally it feels like we've been using this a bit fuzzily. What does it mean? Immediately I think of conditions like "causality must be respected/preserved", "the world's natural laws must not be violated", et cetera.
I'll admit, I don't know for sure what exactly
could possibly be, but intuitively it seems to me like those conditions would be part of a natural law set, and hence they may or may not hold, depending on the possible world.
"Our understanding of our world's natural law set is incomplete. I propose that all possible gods which do not violate, have not violated, and will not violate our set of natural laws exist. This explains why our world exists AND the whole of human religion." I know, it's a bit of a stretch and likely has more assumptions (that I can't detect), but it feels like the same thing, and it answers two questions! :D
Not... really...
If a bunch of possible gods exist somewhere and created our universe, then there is a larger universe in which these gods live, which must have a cause for existence, as well as the gods themselves must have a cause for existence. God never answered the question of why the universe exists.
Secondly, the question "why does the whole of human religion exist?" is not a question that needs answering. It just seems natural that through the course of history a species evolving intelligence will begin to search for deeper truths to the universe, and superstition will arise. If the gods can't interact with the universe (thereby violating natural laws), then they're not connected with human religions anyway.
Well, that's kind of a can of worms. I was reading something the other day which suggested that nothingness can't actually be nothingness without somethingness ... a bit of a yin yang thing. Kind of interesting. Anyway, no, I don't think possibilities can exist within nothingness. Actually, someone (in the same thread) suggested that you could enumerate the natural numbers with the empty set, e.g. {0}; {{0}}; {{{0}}, {{0}}} ... but this presupposes logic, or at the very least, sets -- which aren't nothingness. Here's a quote:
That same compulsion to define nothing along with 'something' (however incorporeal logic as a 'something' is) attracts me to the Eastern philosophies of pratitya samutpada, or interdependent co-arising, where the basis of reality are mutually interdependent opposites which generate each other. Eastern philosophies take this a further step and suppose that logic exists as a function of consciousness and conclude thereby that consciousness + nothing forms the basis of reality.
Here's the thread.
I disagree that logic is something that needs to be presupposed (and sets are a consequence of logic). There is no possible world where logic does not hold. Sure, you need a world to
apply logic, but that doesn't say you need a world for there to
be logic.
I mean, I see what you're getting at here, but it doesn't that powerful to me! It might explain "why do we have these laws?" -- well, we have these because the other worlds don't. But it doesn't explain to me how, which seems like the bigger and more important question. Insert noncommittal grunt here.
If you ask yourself the question "how did the universe come about existing?", I think the only possible answer that follows from causality is that it never didn't exist. A causal chain must be infinite in length.
In a sense, I suppose?? I guess I just have an apathy about it. My "truth" describes our world. I think it boils down to whether we should pursue truth for the sake of truth or for application (not necessarily practical!). If the deepest truth, i.e. that which describes ALL worlds (because it seems to me if each world has a truth, then surely there must be a description of what all of these worlds in turn exist within??)(Not necessarily. All worlds are completely separated, detached from each other. Coexisting within something larger would violate this. It may be hard to imagine intuitively, but as far as I can see is not logically contradictive.), can't actually be processed or understood in an appropriate context (since we are restricted to our own world), it seems ... pointless.
I don't think I understand. What about possible worlds can't be processed or understood? Why should we pursue truth only for application rather than for the sake of truth? Even if we can't use it, if we can find a way to figure out with certainty that an infinite number of other worlds exist, that seems pretty cool!
Oh, definitely. I'm not technically a mathematician (at least, not yet), but I'm passingly familiar with Cantor and his work with the infinite. Just very basic concepts with infinity. Infinite series and the like.
Okay, so we agree that it is at least in theory possible for an infinite number of worlds to exist?
If I had to explain Platonism (since I'm not much of a philosopher), I'd say that it's basically that our world is populated with images of Forms, which are the most perfect and truest representations of concepts. What we know as cows are actually imperfect models of the Cow Form, that is ethereal and hanging out somewhere in the heavens or something like that.
The more I think about it, it does seem like Platonism describes pretty well how I think. I do think forms exist in some sense, as they are the very language of conscious thought. I don't think it applies to cows, though. All Life is, by nature, chaotic, constantly changing. So when we think of cows, our mental Form should integrate this unstable nature of the Life Form, which the Cow Form inherits. But that's all garble. Intuitively, I don't think Platonism is totally necessary for possible worlds.
And I'm passing familiar with fractals too, yes. Actually, I'm reading a book on chaos right now and much has been devoted to the subject. Kind of familiar with the Sierpienski (sp?) gasket, Mengel (sp?) sponge, Cantor middle third set, etc.
Great, so I draw the analogy of a fractal for something that can be perfectly described but not fully "contained". We know how to describe the "Highest Truth" of the fractal, which means we can pin down
exactly what the fractal is, without being able to contain the entirety of the fractal's details (as such would require an infinite amount of precision).
Explain to me where you get this visualisation of this "logical consistence function". I don't see where this image is coming from! Of course "y = x^2" seems very simple to verify, but "logical consistence" seems much more complicated, and my intuition tells me that it couldn't really be encoded in a finite way. It kind of feels like, "This is the 'hexagon function', which tells you if a shape is a hexagon or not. If it is, the graph is all filled in." It seems very simple, but there are a lot of details that you're cheating your way out of by encoding it in "is it a hexagon or not". Does this make sense? I think I might just be misinterpreting you.
Okay, this might not be making sense to me, and I might be misinterpreting you, or you might be misinterpreting me because I carelessly misused the word "function". A graph that is completely filled in at every possible point is obviously not a function. But the mathematical description of such a graph (the graph of logical consistence) would be:
x = x; x:
R
y = y; y:
R
z = z; z:
R
. . .
var(n) = var(n); var(n):
R
Each point on the graph in this case would signify a possible world. The variables might be universal constants, or they might be (mutually non contradictory) natural laws, in which case they would be boolean values rather than real numbers. The variables could be anything, as long as they don't refer to the same thing as another variable.
