Chewy, meaty & philosophical... Here?

[Gatogateau]

37 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Where did the singularity come from?

;-).

Yup, thank yooouuuuuu.  What was before the Big Bang and what caused it and why? Perhaps the Initial Singularity? And what was before that? What caused it? Why?

Staying on topic-ish... Was it looooooove? And for the god=love folks, if god/love created everything (like the Initial Singularity), where did god come from?

 

[Ted McGregor]

5 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

You are in a hole. Stop digging.

Calm down, Maddy. No need to press intellectual insults.

You KNOW that, if our Sun would not have been, born these elements would have remained a gascloud  like we observe in the Horse Nebulae. The sun's fusion was required to get the elements to us, after it came to be and pressed out the released material during it's birth into the coalescing clouds you described.

We are BOTH right in this. Settle for that ..

Edited September 15, 2020 by TDD123

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Gatogateau said:

56 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Where did the singularity come from?

;-).

Yup, thank yooouuuuuu.  What was before the Big Bang and what caused it and why? Perhaps the Initial Singularity? And what was before that? What caused it? Why?

Staying on topic-ish... Was it looooooove? And for the god=love folks, if god/love created everything (like the Initial Singularity), where did god come from?

Well I don't think the human mind can actually comprehend the notion of infinity -- it is not a linear concept as you describe...moving along a line until we find a first cause.

[Orwar]

10 hours ago, Akane Nacht said:

That's probably because it's rather complicated to follow, and the average person doesn't sit down to read the Upanishads all that often (if ever) and even then usually in translation.

   Which is all well and good - it would be unreasonable to expect all people to read all works of philosophy, especially in their original languages. But, to adhere to a tidbit of philosophy to which you have no other context just becomes awkward.

   Take Carpe Diem, for example. To translate those two words isn't very difficult, and to project meaning onto them isn't any difficult, and to use the phrase to promote just about any philosophical perspective isn't any difficult. But what exactly was Horace trying to say when he wrote those words? Who was he, and what was his perspective on life?

   Horace was a classical cynic, a concept which I dare say most people today will misunderstand because the meaning of cynicism has changed since the Hellenic period. Whilst there are many ways in which the philosophy could be presented, a brief summary of some of the cornerstones are:

• The goal (and thus, purpose) of life is eudaimonia (happiness).
• The path to eudaimonia is achieved through self-sufficiency, to be indifferent of lucid human emotions (including love).
• Rejection of wealth, fame, and power - asceticism - is the most virtuous path to eudaimonia.
• Rejection of shame, social convention, and law.

   One of the most popular stories wherein the virtues of classical cynicism is displayed, is the meeting of Diogenes of Sinope and Alexander the Great. Alexander sought out Diogenes to ask him to impart some of his wisdom on him, and offered Diogenes 'anything he desires' - which, coming from Alexander the Great, is a pretty generous offer. Diogenes at the time lived in a barrel in the marketplace, owned no clothes, and was known to urinate on people to express his disdain, and when Alexander made his offer, he asked Alexander to 'move aside, you're standing in my sunshine'. Whether or not this is historically true, the story pretty much embodies the 'ultimate expression of cynicism'. 

   So when we read Horace's Odes:

Quote

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum. Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

   Which in English translates as:

Quote

Ask not (it is forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonian seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow even as little as you may.

   So whilst the concept of 'living in the moment' does strike true, and that it is for the sake of eudaimonia (i.e. happiness), it does not imply 'treat yourself', or 'submit to your emotional fancies', but to reject everything material and emotional, and to be at peace within yourself. Also that life is short and fickle, we're all going to die, and you're not to be bothered by it.

   People who tattoo 'Carpe Diem' on their skin, who aren't ready to piss on people who displease them, are no better than the morons who tattoo Chinese symbols on their body without realising they've carved 'Shrimp Soup' onto their buttock. The misanthrope in me would rather see that these people never find love or happiness, so that they may never breed and raise more idiots into our society. 

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, TDD123 said:

13 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

grew in complexity

I know that is a hot topic among atheists and religious people, but I THINK if one searches scientifically for a reason one has to end up with the scientifically known forces of nature ( gravity, weak / strong force, nuclear fusion ). In simple ( because I am simple ) word : energy.

"I don't know" would be the most sincerest answer.

How would energy relate to complexity?

[Ted McGregor]

3 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

How would energy relate to complexity?

Complexity is what we observe. Energy is, what I THINK, required.

No. The energy does not have a name nor is it a being, in my regard.

I don't know what caused this complexity.

I AM gratefull it did..

Edited September 15, 2020 by TDD123

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 minutes ago, TDD123 said:

Calm down, Maddy. No need to press intellectual insults.

You KNOW that, if our Sun would not have been born these elements would have remained a gascloud only like we observe in the Horse Nebulae. The sun's fusion was required to get the elements to us, after it came to be and pressed out the released material during it's birth into the coalescing clouds you described.

We are BOTH right in this. Settle for that ..

Nope, our Sun has yet to spew out the heavy elements we're made of. That will come at the end of its life. We and our Sun are the stuff of OTHER stars. Your push against Luna was to suggest that we have no "connection" beyond our solar system. Whether you look at this physically (as I do) or spiritually (as I don't), it all traces back to a singularity. Your line of demarcation is both arbitrary and incorrect.

Edited September 15, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[Gatogateau]

3 minutes ago, Orwar said:

The misanthrope in me would rather see that these people never find love or happiness, so that they may never breed and raise more idiots into our society. 

Ah, one logic flaw in an otherwise fine comment (excellent summation of Cynicism, the original meaning). In this statement (above), you are equating finding love and happiness with breeding of more humans. Considering divorce rates and population booms in certain sectors of the world population, I'd say that love and happiness have very little to do with procreation, of idiots or others. Besides if the "shrimp soup" folk stop existing, who/what would you laugh at (referring to your sig line)?

[Ted McGregor]

11 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Your push against Luna .

I never even touched her.

11 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

 Your decision to draw a line of demarcation was both arbitrary and incorrect.

You do KNOW I'm not a moderator here nor a judge in any form ?

 

ETA : Yeah, you are right about the elements which were farted from elsewhere and are oh so connected in the solitude that is happening around them and us.

 I stand corrected. You have won 10 internets. I loose the nothing I had.

Edited September 15, 2020 by TDD123

[Luna Bliss]

Oh it could be a mistake to imagine a reason or purpose for the complexity of life, but that doesn't stop me from wondering...….   

[Luna Bliss]

[Orwar]

1 minute ago, Gatogateau said:

In this statement (above), you are equating finding love and happiness with breeding of more humans.

   Not necessarily, no. But I would argue that the norm is that people make babies with people they have love for. That doesn't mean that all people who love someone make babies with them, or that there aren't people who make babies without love. Again though, the definitions would need to be established first.

4 minutes ago, Gatogateau said:

Considering divorce rates and population booms in certain sectors of the world population, I'd say that love and happiness have very little to do with procreation, of idiots or others.

   You do have a point, but, I feel you aren't being misanthropic enough in that analysis. People in 'the west' also used to spawn children in great numbers, because the infancy mortality was so high that to maximise the chances of one's genes making it to adulthood, one would have to bake a few extra biscuits. Then we were introduced to the concept of microbiology, better medicines and the correlations of health and hygiene, and whilst there was an initial boom as the old convention still hung over us, we adapted to produce fewer children within a few generations. Many of the places in the world where such concepts are still new or spotty are where much of the global population boom is happening, and in our rather half-arsed attempt of supplying medicine and healthcare supplies to these parts of the world we've merely turned it into a cruelly drawn-out joke which only increases the demand for supplies. We've stepped in and blindsided the process of natural selection, upped growth, often whilst not doing nearly enough to provide stability and sustainability. But look at how 'good' we're being. 

11 minutes ago, Gatogateau said:

Besides if the "shrimp soup" folk stop existing, who/what would you laugh at (referring to your sig line)?

   There's no shortage of people to laugh at. Vegans, Christians, well any religious people to be honest, designers, artists, Americans, people who consume avocados and/or bananas, people who cultivate almonds in California, self-help philosophers, influencers, politicians who put a punitive tax on plastic bags to promote the use of paper bags - or worse, textile bags - that have an even larger environmental impact than the alternative, people who purchase imported dairy goods from Finland, people who purchase imported meat products from Germany, Poland, Brazil, or New Zealand, people who consume red onions produced in Egypt, people who import soy from southern France to 'produce Swedish tofu', people who purchase 'oat milk' (that isn't a thing to begin with) from companies partially owned by the Chinese government ... And on the list goes. Don't worry, we live in a hilarious world! 

[Gatogateau]

Let's see if I can get this right, I'm still operating on my first cup of coffee and no food yet (strange day) and I look to Maddy to set me straight.

I lean my hand on my wooden desk. I do not fall through the desk. And yet:

If you zoom in on the area where my hand "meets" the desk, say to be able to discern femtometers, then you will see a lot of empty space, and you will not be able to tell which empty space belongs to my hand or to the desk. There is no difference, no big warning sign of "my hand stops here!" There is a lot of "nothing" between atomic bits.

If that is true (and it is), then why doesn't my hand fall through the damned desk? If "solid" is a mirage...? Well, it is due to electromagnetism, flashing push-pulls between photons, the photons of my hand vs the photons of this desk. Of course photons are just little packets of light and are massless... :::head starting to hurt, slurps more coffee:::

As above, so below, as the saying goes... And space (the big space up there :::points up:::) is just chocked full of nothing. The whole enchilada of everything is this one huge nothing, but is it? What is that nothing? Does it have borders? Does it have a type of consciousness or awareness? 

(And none of this proves, or disproves, the existence of a creative force behind it all...)

Edited September 15, 2020 by Gatogateau
wordy word words

[Ted McGregor]

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

3 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate

I wonder why they grow in complexity when they could have just as easily....not.  Do you have any ideas on this interesting phenomenon?

I'm imagining Madelaine is contemplating this, or hoping, but why do think,  @TDD123 ,  that the basic elements of existence grew in complexity when they could have just as easily stayed simple?

The rise of increasing complexity has been a stumbling block for believers of "intelligent design". They'll claim that increasing complexity violates the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, which requires that everything tend towards disorder. While that's true for the entirety of any closed system, the law says nothing about the inner workings of those systems. So long as a closed system has some initial energy, it is entirely legal for that energy to drive increased complexity in subsets of the system.

The singularity of the Big Bang contained more than enough energy to drive the nuclear processes that formed quarks from strings, neutrons and protons from quarks, then atoms and eventually molecules. At each of those steps, the increased complexity of the new building block was made possible by the enormous energy available at the beginning. Though all that energy started out in one place (which maybe shouldn't be called a place, since it had no size), it expanded unevenly. In those regions of the universe lucky enough to coalesce, there is still plenty of leftover energy to drive the fight against entropy. Most of the universe is already where the rest of the universe is headed, a cold, blank void.

We have a pretty good understanding of the creation of hydrogen and the gravitational coalescence of that into stars, from which are produced the heavy elements that form planets and us. We also know that our planet is bathed in energy from the Sun, enough to overcome entropy in endless ways. The trick now is to understand the ways that produced the complexity of "life" here. You said...

"the basic elements of existence grew in complexity when they could have just as easily stayed simple?"

This exposes the unavoidable problem we face in trying to understand entropy. The increasing complexity of the things we see actually IS the easiest way. Nuclear and chemical systems generally "prefer" the lowest energy state (that entropy thing). But if you toss a bunch of energy at them, they can be "forced" to a very energetic form of chaos that "settles" into a less energetic form of complexity. This is a vast oversimplification of the enormous diversity of nuclear and chemical processes at work, but it gets at the basic idea.

On a macro scale, evolution well explains that a billion years of wandering aimlessly can explain the myriad creatures we know about. What's still eluding us is the first few steps, during which some form of self replication "happened" into existence. When I was young, that was thought to be the "missing link" from inorganic to organic. Now, though we still don't know just what that link is, there seems to be evidence that there might be more than one. Similarly, we once thought that structures like eyes were a one off development. Now we see evidence of such structures arising, vanishing, arising again, vanishing again, and arising in quite separate regions of the world, independently.

I have hope that we'll eventually figure this stuff out. Though the day-to-day advance of our understanding of this seems like a drunkard's walk, the overall trend has been forward, and accelerating.

Back to the larger topic philosophical scope...

I am not spiritual, yet I do experience the feelings of connectedness described by spiritual people. I like to imagine that feeling emanating from the big bang. But, I don't imagine it in the way that spiritual people do. I do not believe in some cosmic thread binding all things here and now. Rather, I think of the entire chain of events, from the Big Bang to me typing at the keyboard, trading energy for complexity as the whole circus slowly winds down. I like to think I have feelings of connectedness and a sense of wonder because those ancients before me who thought as I do were better able to survive than those that didn't. That doesn't mean we're all cosmically connected, just that wondering about it makes us better survivors.

And so... here we are, the survivors, wondering about it all.

Edited September 15, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[Gatogateau]

9 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I am not spiritual, yet I do experience the feelings of connectedness described by spiritual people. I like to imagine that feeling emanating from the big bang. But, I don't imagine it in the way that spiritual people do. I do not believe in some cosmic thread binding all things here and now. Rather, I think of the entire chain of events, from the Big Bang to me typing at the keyboard, trading energy for complexity as the whole circus slowly winds down. I like to think I have feelings of connectedness and a sense of wonder because those ancients before me who thought as I do were better able to survive than those that didn't. That doesn't mean we're all cosmically connected, just that wondering about it makes us better survivors.

(emphasis mine, above) And yet, Maddy, I would say that everything you wrote above (and previously) does mean we are all cosmically connected! With or without a notion of a god (or gods), the connection is kind of irrefutable.

[BelindaN]

I'm beginning to warm to this discussion, but I need more time, which I'll get tomorrow in bed.

[Gatogateau]

btw @Orwar my  response (above) to your post was a sincere laugh response, and not a scorn laugh. I'm so tired of the over-use of scorn laughs, as they have made real laughs (as in laughing WITH you and not AT you) have to be flagged, like this. 

Several people have "pet peeved" about this, too.

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 minutes ago, Gatogateau said:

(emphasis mine, above) And yet, Maddy, I would say that everything you wrote above (and previously) does mean we are all cosmically connected! With or without a notion of a god (or gods), the connection is kind of irrefutable.

If you mean that we are all descended from that singularity 13.7 billion years ago, sure. If you mean that something I do or think, here and now, has an effect in some remote place, perhaps halfway across the observable universe, or that something you think, absent my knowledge of it (from your writing it here) has an effect on me, here and now? That's not my current belief.

[Gatogateau]

1 minute ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you mean that we are all descended from that singularity 13.7 billion years ago, sure. If you mean that something I do or think, here and now, has an effect in some remote place, perhaps halfway across the observable universe, or that something you think, absent my knowledge of it (from your writing it here) has an effect on me, here and now? That's not my current belief.

Ha! What you don't know, absent your knowledge, was that I was over here in New England thinking and thinking and projecting REALLY hard so that you would write that paragraph just as you did!

(prove I didn't!)

[BelindaN]

It's the Matrix. It isn't real.

None of it.

Edited September 15, 2020 by BelindaN

[Ted McGregor]

Oh Lord Random. How you failed me.

Sprouted from the filthiest of black holes imaginable.

To leave me here.With them. To perish.

How cruel is your gift.

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 minute ago, Gatogateau said:

Ha! What you don't know, absent your knowledge, was that I was over here in New England thinking and thinking and projecting REALLY hard so that you would write that paragraph just as you did!

(prove I didn't!)

And you are my alt.

(Prove you aren't.)

[Ted McGregor]

3 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

And you are my alt.

(Prove you aren't.)

I KNOW she isn't ..

[Gatogateau]

Just now, Madelaine McMasters said:

And you are my alt.

(Prove you aren't.)

Why would I want to disprove this fact? Going back into the ancient history of the Forum, I believe at one point in time it was well known that there were only two people posting the whole time: me and Pep. (And I once "won" a write like Pep challenge and threw shadow on even whether Pep was a separate entity.) 

The best arguments (as in debates) are the ones in which I win, and I am legion.