robheus

This doesn't contain anything sensible to react on.

Abiogenenesis does not "appear to be impossible" the only thing that may seem near to impossible is to explore the events that lead up to the formation of the first life, since we have only partial knowledge about the conditions on earth billions of years ago. The "God did it" hypothese does not explain one single fact, it is in fact not more mysterious or explenataory as saying as "matter did it". But any scientists would reject that as an explenation since it is already assumed that any actual mechanism of line of development which leads from chemical evolution to biological evolution, must be understood in the terms of material development, however when almost all the details of that process are unknown, we don't know much. However at least some details might be partially correct. Evolution on the other hand has massive evidence, and already refutes the idea that God created unchangeable species, as species DO change over long evolutionary periods.

So, this means, where there is a particle there is a field, and where there is a field, there must be a particle. And it also means, before baryogenesis, during inflation, there were particles too. Is that correct?

I think you need to define more clearly what you mean with "parallel" universe and "outside the universe". For example, the theory of inflation accomodates us to infer that: 1. There is more of the same universe as we can currently observe outside of our horizon 2. That there might be an infinite number of such inflating universe "bubbles" which can have distinct physical featueres and are seperated by domain walls. In the interpretation of quantum physics the "many worlds" hypothesis suggests that any time an "observation" is made (collapse of the wave function) a new universe is born, with all the other possible outcomes. In M theory (the 11-th dimensional theory, of which the 5 existing string theories are different aspects) there can be many branes, and each brane can have a different universe. What these theories have in common is that at least in the topological sense they are connected in at least one point, although in M theory in a higher dimension. Apart from that is the abstract possibility of a "parallel universe" in the sense a different universe but which does not have any common point in all of space time with ours. So there are no spacetime relations between any point in the spacetime of that universe and ours. Such an universe should be rejected since there is no way this can make sense. It can be thought of in the philosophical sense as a "possible world". There is no way we can talk about it, since there is even in principle no way of how we can have any knowledge about it. It makes no sense to talk about it.

Here is a somewhat larger expostition to this topic. The basic question in the OP was: what are the reason an atheist is not believing in a God. First I'd like to state that it is not a matter of belief. I think my position towards this, is not a matter of belief but coherent logic, and that any argument I know of that pre-supposes that the logic is wrong, is either refutable or flat out wrong. Second, I do not necessarily posit myself as an atheist, since an atheist is just reasoning from the other position, it is positing itself as the opposite of theism. However, I commit myself to the worldview of materialism, which is an outlook on reality that reality is in primary sense material existence, and in which the mental or consciousness is a secondary feature of reality. In this worldview it would be non-sensical to ask where does matter come from, since matter is the substance and ground of all there is. There positively is matter instead of not. Since matter is one undivided substance you can not really divide it up into seperate pieces without running into contradictions. For instance in dividing up the world into physical reality and mental states and consciousness, the problem always is where to place a dividing line, since either you end up having mental states and consciousness, but not being able to explain how you move your lips and produce sounds and movements of your limbs, either you end up explaining how chemical substances in living organisms and organs like brains can produce poems, make music and have dreams, and such. Matter is always in motion (change) and spacetime are the modes of existence of matter. Matter is infinite, and neither creatable or destructable (which does not contradict that mass can be converted to energy and vice versa, since both are forms of matter). The idea of God - in contrast to that of materialism - is that matter is not eternal, and the universe as a whole supposedly had a beginning, and that beginning supposedly was God. God then is only consciousness (or spirit, immaterial). So, theism takes as the ground that there is an (eternal, infinite or timeless) higher being. The world itself is then pictured as just degrading matter. No new qualities are being brought into the world (it all started out perfectly, but then degrades, and new qualities never form). The refutation of this idea and this position is that placing God outside the universe, outside of space and time, realy make it a nothing, and secondly, the trouble of defining such being as conscioussness is problematic, since (before creation) outside God there is nothing, and so there is no distinction between God and not-God. For human beings however, the faculty of consciousness, and to distinguish I from not-I, can only be made because there are distinct people, which have their nature outside of them, and which makes it possible to distinguish between "I" and "not-I". I am a distinct object from for example the apple I eat, the chair I sit on, and so on, and they are objects to me, and I am an object to these objects, which means there are objective relations between me and objects outside of me. For the higher being, no such objective relations exist, and hence no objective existence can be assumed. So this makes God only as an imagined being, and not a real phenomena of the world.

Turtles all the way up and turtles all the way down....

The reason you can not delete your post is, because it would then be nothing, but nothing can not exist, or can it? What you say is that even when you try to imagine there being nothing, there is still the "I" imagining that, which you can not get rid of. But what does that make you conclude then?

In addition to this, below I have copied an article on this debate between formal logic and dialectics, which shows a more elaborated discussion on this topic. Source: dialectics vs. formal logic

I do not disagree with the outlook that aristotelean logic has it's merits and field of application, which neither is denied by dialectics, since it does not realy replaces or refutes ordinary logic, but merely ammends it or complements it. The examples I show, manifest that there are in reality no strict dividing lines between A and not-A. For example (although we have not yet a real model of how this process went on) a strict dividing line between non-living matter and the first living organism is impossible to make. Abiogenenesis supposes that before the first living cell was there, there were precursors to live, but where in that process from chemical tranformations and chemical evolution can we say that a living organism was formed?

As I understand it (at least that is what susskind tells in online lectures of stanford university) there is no such thing as a "fundamental particle" in the traditional (classical) sense as something that can not be divided up into smaller parts. What in modern physics is considered to be an elementary or fundamental particle is the aspect that if you add a minimal quantum of energy, it's exciting state becomes clearly visible. Therefore a macroscopic object like a football isn't a fundamental particle, because adding a quantum of energy gives it such a relative small amount of energy that it forms a near continuum, while for a proton you can clearly see a different energy level from the ground state. So wether something is a fundamental particle has to do with the particle spectrum of excitation states. EDIT: and in so far this explenation is correct, the fundamentall-ness of a particle isn't realy a boolean value (it is either or it is not) but is some continuüm, some phsyical objects are more fundamental or elementary then others, and there is a range of them which show a very distinct spectrum for the first excitation state in the spectrum that one can consider them fundamental. And of course, if string theory is correct, the fundamental objects are not the particles, but strings and branes.

Thanks for this post. But I think I miss a lot of knowledge to make much sense of this, and perhaps I should investigate the basic concepts of quantum field theory and the mathematics involved more thoroughly to understand this a bit better. Any hints for some online resources (documents or lectures) that gives me more clues to quantum field theory? I have been following some video lectures from Stanford university on these kind of subjects and also some lectures of Feynmann, which helped me a lot in understanding quantum electro dynamics. Unrelated to my OP I have a more philosophical question. What is the ontological status of a field, and what I mean is, in what sense does a field exist apart from particles. Isn't it the case that the field always implies particles must exist and vice versa? What would it mean if the universe consisted wholely of fields only (as was supposedly the case before baryogenenesis), since without particles interacting with the field, in what way does the field itself exist? As I understand it in physics matter is described in terms of spacetime and vice versa, so matter does not exist apart from spacetime, nor does spacetime exist apart from matter. Wouldn't this also imply that fields presuppose particles exist and vice versa?

Please read some of the stuff I posted in this topic, which might resolve the issue. There is a difference in determinate nothing and nothing in general or abstract (indeterminate nothing as opposed to indeterminate being). They are two different concepts.

The base for logic for almost 2000 years has been the logic of aristotle, which works on the principle of logical identity. "Classical reasoning assumes the principle of logical identity: A = A or A is not non-A". When dealing with abstract things, like in mathematics or formal reasoning, this kind of logic works quite well. But it can be shown that for any real situation (examples will be given below) this identity just does not work right. The reason for that is that in the real world, everything develops and even things which seem (temporarily) to be static, at the micro level changes occur always and everywhere. So this means that any real thing we can think of, the identity A=A simply can not hold, because it would mean that A never changes, while we have to admit that change occur everywhere and all time. Atoms and molecules vibrate and in the nucleus the proton changes into a neutron and back into a proton trillions of times per second due to the strong force, etc. At the deepest level, in quantum physics, we can simply deduce that it is even impossible to state that some thing is identical to itself at any given moment, because that would involve the impossibility of detecting all the properties of some microscopic system in all details at the same time, which the uncertainty relationship simply does not allow us. Which means, everything is always in a state of flux, at any moment in time. At the other end of the spectum, at the most wide macroscopic level, it can be deduced also that what we get there is simply being, which is absolute, but then being is not more nor less then nothing, or put in other terms, the universe as a whole can not be distinguished from nothing. For these reasons, and when we want to deal with the real world instead of the abstract world of formal reasoning and mathematics, a different kind of logic is needed, based on the identity of indentity and non-identity, which is dialectics, most profoundly developed by Hegel. Some examples: 1. Living and non-living In many cases we have no trouble in distinguishing living from dead or non-living, but then any medicist can tell you that the precise moment of death is less trivial. Should a virus be called a living organism or not? When is a living organism considered to be a living creature, and for example, at what stage in the development of a human being can we call it a human being? All this cases show that the exact dividing line between living and non-living is less then trivial. 2. I and not-I Where can we draw the line between I and not-I? Is my body part of the I? Does the air in my longues belong to I, and if not, where precisely do the air molecules or the food molecules digested become part of my body? 3. Human and non-human Where is the dividing line between human and non-human. Suppose we set up a colony on Mars, which stay there permanently. After couple of thousand years, mutations caused them to be unable to interbread with humans from earth. Are they no longer human beings? Where exactly in our ancestry line did we become human? Etc. Hegel for beginners.

Some profound thoughts on this by Hegel who (when contemplating about with what philosophy should begin) starts out philosophy with the Doctrine of Being, and works out other concepts from that.<br>It turns out that Being is Absolute, but also (since it is indeterminate) it is also not unequal to Nothing. Both have their truth in a higher unity, which is Becoming.<br>Post in other topic about the same subject Thinking needs to start from something, and the most fundamental you can think of, without requiring any other concept is Being, and because it is the ground, it is Absolute. Nothing more is needed. See my previous post (the link to a post in another topic about the same subject) on how all concept naturally arrive from that. Adding God to the arena helps nothing,

A video in which Webster Tarpley exposes the "Elite's plan for Global Extermination". In particular he criticizes John P. Holdren (science advisor under Obama) for having genocidal politics. My take on this: I think this is a very good exposition on the malthusian political ideas in general, and what is wrong with it. As he sets out, there is no "population bomb" since in many parts of the world, the population is declining (but on the other hand, africa, latin america and india and other countries are still growing fastly, but that growth will decline too some later time). The problem is not that there are "too many people" but that there is "underproduction" ie. many people are poor and lack the most basic needs. (btw. currently the problem of obesitas is causing more victims as hunger, so it's not about a scarcity in absolute terms but relative terms, and the problem is social inequality). The resources we have are finite, that is correct, but that is always determined by the technology.

But all we can ever test for is to see how matter interacts and transforms. Nothing, literarlly nothing, does not contain any being, it is not equal to empty space or zero energy, and it is neither equal to quantum fuctuations, which btw. presuppose space time. The truth of this is independend of how the real world, the universe behaves, as it is just a matter of defining terms. We can not make up terms and use it in inapplicable contexts.

The problem - again - you run into is that you try to reflect on "nothing" as something seperate from being. But they are not seperate, they form a logical unity, which is becoming. Because in becoming you can easily see that being and nothing spontaneously pass over into the other. Becoming is therefore the truth, and being nor nothing have seperate truth. Or, as Hegel has said about it:

This is a rather theoretical question, but is it possible in physics to have a description of reality which does not consist of particles but only fields. Or are fields always defined in such a way that particles must exist? The problem I think is that at the very fundamental level of physics, we have matter/particles defined in terms of spacetime, and spacetime defined in terms of matter/particles. You can not define one without the other. To measure something in empty space is impossible, and likewise, to define particles without spacetime is also impossible.

I am asking myself why so many people talk about 'creation of the universe' as if that would be some unique moment in the history of the universe in which the universe somehow 'began' to exist. But such a beginning (a begin from literally nothing) is an impossibility, and the best guesses we can make is to built it on known quantum mechanics theories and pre-existing space time. And probably, instead of 'universe' we should say 'observable universe' since we can make no prior assumptions about how large the universe in total really is. We just assume that space time has no boundary or edges.

great. thanks.

Is there someone capable enough of telling in laymen's terms how particles interact with the Higgs field which causes them to acquire the property we call mass? As we know how inertia works and from relativity, we know that no forces act on a mass when not in a gravity field and uniform, linear motion. Only the change of motion requires a force. Does the existence of the Higgs field somehow means that there is some absolute frame of reference? (could we in theory measure our speed relative to the higgsfield?). In what way is the Higgs field not an ether theorie, since that was ruled out by the Michelson-Morely experiment. EDIT: in some communications the Higgs mechanism was popularly described as going through a sirope, but this anology is of course inadeqate, because it would slow down particles. But particles in a vacuum having uniform, linear speed, are not slowed down. So I guess you could not detect the absolute speed relative to the Higgs field. EDIT(2): Is the Higgs field in any way related to dark energy, or are that comletely different concepts? Can a Higgs field be a candidate for the inflaton, the inlfation field?

Then it can be stated that is the worldview of solipsism, and nobody can take that serious.

Looks like you describe an inexisting world. Which is clearly not the case. Nothing is just the opposite of something, and since both are indeterminate both are still nothing. They are - in this unity - not seperated, but united in becoming and ceasing to be.

Yes, sure. God exists outside the universe. To me that is saying that God does not exist, because anything that exists, exists in space and time. The only other possibility is that we can give relative meaning to the domain of abstract things, like mathematical constructs. They too don't live in ordinary space time.