Memories of the 28th Century

I was looking for something interesting to write about. After discarding current events and such, I started looking for unanswered questions that I might be able to help with. The unanswered scientific questions are the same old, and some things were included because the writer hadn't been paying attention, or because the article was not up to date. Then I switched to Philosophical questions. Some of the questions were the same. But a few are different.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because it is there. This is something that even the Gods would have trouble with, because is completely subjective. What is something to one person (or God) could be nothing to another.

2. Is our universe real?
This question is absurd. The universe is clearly as real as anything can be. A better question would be: Could the universe be an illusion or a computer program or some other thing that makes it appears as it does? All of our checks for reality indicate that the universe is “real”, but that may simply be an illusion, or it could be one of the effects of the computer program that runs the simulation. This question also is tied into the later question as to whether we can experience objectivity.

3. Do we have free will?
I went into this recently, and the answer is no, but that assumes that physics is right as we understand things at present. But there is no doubt that our actions and everything else is determined by a chain of cause and effect that goes back at least as far as the Big Bang. But that also means that we can't tell whether we are making a decision or not, because all possibilities happen, but they happen in parallel universes, so that we cannot detect any, except what we do. Which means that we effectively have free will, because all possibilities are explored by the many versions of us in the infinite branches of the Multiverse.

4. Does God exist?
Many Gods and Goddesses exist. Is there any real question about this? I think that it is more a matter of definition.

5. Is there life after death?
This is something else that ties into the matter of objectivity. There are many reports that indicate that an Afterlife exists, but it cannot be demonstrated objectively. Does a trip to Heaven and back exists, if only one individual experiences it? The rest of us will find out when the time comes.

6. Can you really experience anything objectively?
This is an easy one. No, we cannot experience anything objectively, but who cares? Let's consider this from the perspective of Quantum mechanics in which the act of observing has some effect on the thing observed. If that is the case, then the observer can't be considered separately from what is observed, but that doesn't mean that the observer creates the thing observed, only that there is a relationship between the two.

7. What is the best moral system?
I suppose that this is a meaningful question to some philosophers, but I regard it as nothing. I regard moral systems to be collections of opinions that are more subjective than are our views of the universe.

8. What are numbers?
This is a much easier question than the author makes it out to be. Numbers, as we understand them, are parts of a semiotic system for expressing quantities. An equally good question is: Do words (or letters) exist? And the answer to that is “Of course they exist”, just as much as anything in the universe exists.


Those are what the author of that article thought of, but I think that it would be a good idea to attack the question of consciousness, and a discussion of what consciousness is answers some of the other questions. We humans have a concept of what it is, but other animals also have some consciousness. It may not be important, and it may be a purely physical characteristic of animals. In part it may be our genes taking action by letting our conscious minds know something that is going on. I usually prefer to think of consciousness as being like a Graphical User Interface (GUI) on a computer. The real work is going on in the background, and we don't have to be aware of a lot that goes on in our brains (the computer processor). Not long ago a researcher found that apparently decisions were made in the brain before the consciousness came to any conclusion, and that the real computer is not what we notice. If our minds are like computers, then that may be why some people find it easy to conceive of the universe as a simulation, and what we experience is a filtered version of the universe. We see a limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum, as one example.

Another unanswered question is: Is it possible to go from one branch of the multiverse to another? Theory says that there is no communication between different universes, but experience may say otherwise, and that is a possible explanation for some strange things that have happened. It could also be that Everett simply didn't want communication between them, because it is logically messy. Something from a different universe would effectively be an uncaused cause in a different universe.

Do you have unanswered questions? If so, then please let me know.




The questions are from
http://io9.com/5945801/8-philosophic...ll-never-solve