Cosmology

[desiresjab]

If we were created we could be called artificial from the perspective of the creator.

Yes indeed.

At this point a created universe like ours "seems," so much more likely than a randomly generated one that it is frustrating to make so little progress demonstrating it.

One has to suspect that even without a God or conscious sub atomic particles to assist it, mankind is on the road to immortality. Lifespans will grow longer. Then man will learn how to prolong a cyber essence indefinitely which can synthesize experience.

We were born too soon. It may only be later generations which get in on the immortality act of science and mankind. People of the future would hate to be born right now. How much would you have hated living in pre civil war America, even? Not even knowing there were other galaxies; Not even knowing the age of the world; Not even knowing the age of the universe; Not even knowing how to hygienically dispose of your feces en masse; Only having conquered darkness with whale oil; Advanced transportation was a good horse and buggy.

But worse than all of the above were the backwards notions on everything from race relations to religion to education one would have encountered. A sense of mystery was still there surrounding such phenomena as the pyramids. But when you look at their overall understanding and overall standard of living & development, one wipes one's brow that it was them and not us. For we could easily have been born into a more ignorant and backwards time.

That is exactly how men in the future will see it, and how they will see us. "No thanks," would be their reply to living in our era of backward ignorance. They themselves will live thousands of years, or longer, and be able to do things now considered worthy of only pure fantasy fiction.

[YesNo]

I suspect there is also a way, say through Plotinus's creative contemplation, for creation to occur without it being artificial. It is not really a making of something.

[desiresjab]

I suspect there is also a way, say through Plotinus's creative contemplation, for creation to occur without it being artificial. It is not really a making of something.

A willful creator is more likely than random interaction of "unbiased," particles. If we allow highly biased particles in our universe, then we are already half admitting that there was some kind of "help," beyond randomness assisting on the job of creating life and matter, making it somewhat easier and somewhat speedier to have these things.

I believe trouble comes when one tries to shut out any kind of bias. Particles that were not biased toward anything would never do a thing that was permanent. Particles of the universe seem biased already, just by the fact that we have something rather than nothing at all.

That is the trouble, I believe, with shutting bias out, or trying to--it is unrealistic, particles of the universe are already biased.

Without bias, not enough time has passed for this universe to be here, it seems to me. Totally without bias, I do not see how a universe of particles could get built or stay built, especially in a mere 13.72 billion years. The harder I look at it the more obvious it seems that there had to have been help from some kind of bias for it to get done in that amount of time across that amount of space.

Do you see how much more likely it is on a strictly probabalistic basis?

Is carbon really unbiased? I do not think so.

[desiresjab]

For that amount of organization (the universe and us) to get done across that amount of space and time (13.72 billion years), there had to have been bias, I believe.

Stated differently, as three facts: (1) Even the small corner of the universe we are familiar with is quite vast, but still finite; (2) 13.72 billion years is a puny amount of time; (3) we are quite complex. The three facts do not go together, but there they are, and here we are.

One must admit, 13.72 billion years is very little time for unbiased matter to get down to the randomly occurring business of creating life and consciousness in all its complexity, is all I am saying in this post and the last, I am not sure how well.

[desiresjab]

What more of Plotinus's creative contemplation can you say? I expect that is what God did. But we are still artificial, aren't we?

[desiresjab]

The way we are using the term unbiased, neon and argon would be unbiased particles. Unbiased particles have no proclivity to mix with anything. In reality, most of the elements of our chemistry are gregarious and biased against non-interaction, as we know from high school. Our philosophical contention is that if elements did not "like," to socialize, there certainly would not have been time for complex life to develop already. Particles come pre-made with the proclivity to socialize. They did not have to come that way. It did not have to be that way, but it is. By and large, particles are quite gregarious. Now how could anyone refer to that as unbiased?

I have to wonder what other proclivities particles might come with.

[desiresjab]

Self organization might be another proclivity of particles.

[desiresjab]

Whoops, wrong thread!

[YesNo]

I don't think particles are unbiased, that is totally random, either. There is an idea of something having a "disposition" to behave one way or the other. It is different than being deterministic.

I don't know much about Plotinus. I am reading some of him now at http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/index.htm There is also a survey article at SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/ I found out about Plotinus (and Whitehead) by reading Shimon Malin's "Nature Loves to Hide". Malin is a physicist writing about the quantum collapse of the wave function. His book is one of the clearest I have read about quantum physics.

[desiresjab]

I can't get my head around random anymore, either.

Disposition is a very good word in this context. One might even put in a little work describing exactly what disposition entails. The universe and matter only have to possess disposition for randomness to be escorted from the cosmological party.

One cannot deny the value of the concept of randomness, however. It has proven of immense scientific value and will probably continue to do so. A more refined concept which has figured out how to acknowledge the influence of disposition would probably be part of the new paradigm.

[YesNo]

The main benefit of random seems to me to be for statistical work. I don't think reality has anything random in it. Much of what we don't know, like will the market go up or down on Monday, depends on a lot of choices people make, not something random. We just don't know and so think of it as random, or unknown but maybe predictable to some extent.

[desiresjab]

The dispositions of various types of matter towards one another could be much different, it seems. Most matter could have the disposition of noble gases, an unwillingness to mix.

But since the general disposition of matter is to mix, that already does not seem neutral to me. Neutrality is needed if one is going to tout matter and the creation of life as having happened at random. We should have known that easily. What took us so long? We would not be here to figure things out in a universe where matter was more noble. We should have cut to the chase. We are here; the universe is not noble; the universe cannot be neutral; the universe is already out of neutral and in gear.

[desiresjab]

I will try to investigate whether a created universe is more probable than an accidental one. Please bear in mind the subject is a difficult one for me where solid purchases are rare. Sometimes it consists merely of fleeting epiphanies so brief that details escape before words can cage them. If it sometimes seems as if I do not know what I am talking about, it is because I usually do not know. I have intuitions, which I am trying to organize usefully. On some days we will likely need our micrometers to search for any progress that might have been made.

Now it is true that most blades of grass and most trees and most flowers are not planned. But this is not "as," true if a partially obscured "disposition," is at work in grass and trees and flowers, and for that matter, stars.

One of the first things we need to do is dehumanize our terms. Disposition needs to become proclivity, propensity or potential. We do not at this time need to posit that matter has any kind of inherent consciousness. That would only give us something else to defend. If we arrive at it in our deductions and musings, that is another matter.

It is not a one post job. Let this far serve as an introduction. Now I have to walk up to the lookout with my binoculars.

[YesNo]

I think the kalam cosmological argument that William Lane Craig promotes is a valid argument. This is a rational proof that the universe had a personal Creator. Where it can be challenged is in the second premise claiming that the universe had a beginning. If the universe actually had a beginning, that is, something like the Big Bang actually happened, then the kalam cosmological argument would be a proof for the existence of God. It is based on Al-Kindi and Al-Ghazali philosophies which are based on Plotinus and Plato.

[desiresjab]

Since I am trying to "prove," or disprove the existence of God myself, I am interested in any other proofs. Your references were not clear to me. Do you have a link?

My first effort will simply be to try and demonstrate that a created universe is more likely than a random one. By created, one is allowed to mean anything but random.

I just lost a long post I cannot seem to recover. Dang it! That is the advantage of little bits.