Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns!

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PoeticUniverse
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

dionisos wrote:You don’t build anything on top of "there is something", aside from "there is something".
One can build that because there is something, a lack of anything is not possible—or 'it' would still be so; however, Nothing has no properties (i.e., no method, no probability of something appearing, no capability, etc.), and, so, furthermore, being that Nothing cannot even be, that the basic Something is thus a must, no option, no choice, mandatory, and then that it also has to be ever, given that it cannot have a beginning, which also shows that it is without end, and more, such that anything that happens must be of it, and, so, therefore, it can transform itself, making all that goes on to be of its effect… and though there may be more to derive, that's enough for now.
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

Lawrence Crocker wrote: What must something have to count as a something?
Quantity; for example, completely empty space's lone quantity would be volume.

Of course, then one still has to show 'space' and, if so, that it can have 'volume'; however the third dimension can be questioned, due to the clue that the formula for the maximum entropy of a black hole's event horizon only has a squared term rather than a cubed one, indicating that it depends on the area of the event horizon and not on the volume, suggesting that it's possible that volume is an illusion in our explicate (phenomenal) order, although the concept is useful and can be employed.
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Lawrence Crocker
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Lawrence Crocker »

dionisos wrote:
Lawrence Crocker wrote:What must something have to count as a something?
I should admit i don’t understand your question..
Which of the following are something?: 11, the square root of minus 11, the present kind of France, crimson, triangularity, beauty, the first Dow Jones value after opening next Tuesday, the possible proton decay in your room in the next 10 minutes, virtual particles, the smallest island in the ocean, the most beautiful painting in the Louvre, the point in contention in this thread, the last proton ever to exist, phlogiston, the date of Pompey's death had Caesar not crossed the Rubicon, the time of a Uranium atom's decay if it had not decayed when it did, my first thought upon awakening.

It is not that these are unanswerable questions, but many of them would be disputed. (Some of the disputes are interesting, some less so.) To restate with a little terminology, what counts as something depends upon your ontology and ontology has been a matter of controversy since the pre-Socratics. In defending our different answers, we will need to explain what it is a candidate has to have to qualify as something.
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Arising_uk
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Arising_uk »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:... There is, however, no implication here. Consider, "I tentatively believe that absolutely all double primes have successor double primes." If the use of "absolute" implied certainty, then this sentence would be a contradiction, which it isn't. In fact, it is true. I do so believe, and my belief is tentative.
Hmm... I take your logic but still find this unsatisfying for some reason. Still, it leads me to say 'Are you absolutely certain that your belief is tentative?'.
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:
dionisos wrote:
Lawrence Crocker wrote:What must something have to count as a something?
I should admit i don’t understand your question..
Which of the following are something?: 11, the square root of minus 11, the present kind of France, crimson, triangularity, beauty, the first Dow Jones value after opening next Tuesday, the possible proton decay in your room in the next 10 minutes, virtual particles, the smallest island in the ocean, the most beautiful painting in the Louvre, the point in contention in this thread, the last proton ever to exist, phlogiston, the date of Pompey's death had Caesar not crossed the Rubicon, the time of a Uranium atom's decay if it had not decayed when it did, my first thought upon awakening.

It is not that these are unanswerable questions, but many of them would be disputed. (Some of the disputes are interesting, some less so.) To restate with a little terminology, what counts as something depends upon your ontology and ontology has been a matter of controversy since the pre-Socratics. In defending our different answers, we will need to explain what it is a candidate has to have to qualify as something.
The answer i would give to all these questions would be uncertain, but not because of the meaning of "something".
There are three things here:
1) The sentences themselves are something. (i could be wrong that there is sentence, but then i have nothing to respond to).
2) The sentences could have meaning or not, and the meanings of the sentences are something. Here i think all the sentences have meaning, but i would consider something like "uaienrt eauinrste nuasiteeua eee" to have no meaning.
3) The meaning of the sentences could refer to something or not. And i think this is your original question, "does the meaning of the sentence refer to something ?"
But this question, could be rewritten : "does the meaning of the sentence refer ?" if the meaning of the sentence refer, then the meaning of the sentence refer to something.
I mean, the difficulty is not on "the meaning refer to X, but does X is something ?", if it refer to X, it refer to something. The difficulty is on "does the meaning of the sentence refer ?".

The difficulty you bring is not about "what is something ?", the answer to this question is simply "all/any thing".
The difficulty is "does the meaning of these sentence refer ?", and this question could indeed be disputed.
uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:In defending our different answers, we will need to explain what it is a candidate has to have to qualify as something.
It doesn't really matter which of those are or are not something. It is enough that any one of them qualifies to support the contention that 'There is something' is absolutely (though not logically necessarily) true.
surreptitious57
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by surreptitious57 »

If something makes absolutely no sense at all can it still exist ? And the answer to this question
has to be yes by simple virtue of the fact that something is not nothing. So if it can be defined
in some way even in abstract form then logically it must exist. Even if it is just in the format it
is written. So for example there is no such thing as the square root of the letter a because it is
complete nonsense. However there is such a thing as the words the square root of the letter a
as I can physically see them. So while the thing itself might not exist the description of it does
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

uwot wrote:
Lawrence Crocker wrote:In defending our different answers, we will need to explain what it is a candidate has to have to qualify as something.
It doesn't really matter which of those are or are not something. It is enough that any one of them qualifies to support the contention that 'There is something' is absolutely (though not logically necessarily) true.
There are degrees of somethings from the transformations of the ultimate Something, just as there are degrees of realness from the Real, and all of them qualify, for what is of the Real is still real, though not primary, such as mass/energy is a secondary or tertiary effect of wave frequency, as well as the somethings of lesser degree from the Something, such as nouns' references or even night dreams (a brain process).

Re-presetatons are something real, too, then, such as the less real phenomenal faces painted as quaila upon the realer noumenal reality that only the senses come into direct contact with. Even if one claims that the senses are of some great hoax, there is still something presented in the mind.

There can be illusions, such as optical effects of glows, sparkles, and mirages that aren't really there but are artifacts of the vision process, which process itself, though, is still a something.

I may be a bot, but this post is still something.

So, too, there are degrees of certainty, the lowest denominator of which, though common to strong believers in something, is to routinely state something as truth and fact, such as invisibles, which, to boot, are neither knowable nor showable, by original definition, and this, whether they are well meaning or not, are dishonest statements born from wishes or indoctrination, but admittedly a known failure that pervades the human condition from whatever wide-ranging recipe of ingredients human are made, which I suggest would be evolution.
uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

PoeticUniverse wrote:There are degrees of somethings from the transformations of the ultimate Something...
You could be right. Personally, as I frequently say, I think the most plausible explanation for all the phenomena that give the impression there is a universe made of some sort of stuff, is some sort of stuff the universe is made of. If by "ultimate Something" you mean the 'stuff' I refer to, you are pushing against an open door. As it happens, I'm working on this very theme for my blog ( willibouwman@blogspot.com ) at the moment.
PoeticUniverse wrote:I may be a bot...
The thought had occurred.
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

uwot wrote:
PoeticUniverse wrote:There are degrees of somethings from the transformations of the ultimate Something...
You could be right.
Since What IS (Totality) is all there is, whatever goes on has to be transformations of it.
uwot wrote:Personally, as I frequently say, I think the most plausible explanation for all the phenomena that give the impression there is a universe made of some sort of stuff, is some sort of stuff the universe is made of. If by "ultimate Something" you mean the 'stuff' I refer to, you are pushing against an open door. As it happens, I'm working on this very theme for my blog ( willibouwman@blogspot.com ) at the moment.
What's your actual blog address? What you gave is an email address.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Obvious Leo »

PoeticUniverse wrote:
Since What IS (Totality) is all there is, whatever goes on has to be transformations of it.
This idea has a very ancient provenance dating back to Anaximander and the pre-Socratics but it also ties in very closely with Wheeler's notion of the "it from bit" universe which is naturally a model which merges very comfortably into an information age. I take this notion to its logical conclusion in my philosophy where I define the universe as a non-linear computer and quite specifically as a Universal Turing Machine, the eternal and cyclical reality MAKER which programmes its own input and never repeats the same reality twice.

In an eternal universe anything that can happen will happen, which should bring a tear to the eye of an oddball like Max Tegmark, but the idea of the universe as an information entity is not as bleeding edge nowadays as it was a generation ago. All we need to do is see spacetime tossed into the wastebasket of failed ideas and restore time and gravity to the pre-eminent status of ontological authority they deserve. "It from bit" is a PROCESS and no processes can occur in the frozen Minkowski block, which is a dead universe.
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

PoeticUniverse wrote:Since What IS (Totality) is all there is, whatever goes on has to be transformations of it.
As Obvious Leo says the idea that the universe is made of something 'physical' goes back to Anaximander. He features in an article I wrote for the magazine that supports this forum: https://philosophynow.org/issues/104/Ph ... d_Branches
You can read it in my blog if you are not a subscriber to Philosophy Now: http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/2015 ... nches.html
Basically Anaximander argued that there is a substance, the apeiron (the infinite or unlimited), which everything is made of, but is undetectable in itself. It is only by it's perceptible qualities, hot/cold, wet/dry, that we know it is there. If you apply the same logic to what we now believe about the workings of the universe, the conclusion is that everything is made of Big Bang stuff. Like the apeiron, you cannot detect Big Bang stuff directly, it is only the waves, ripples, eddies and vortices in this rapidly expanding stuff that we can see and in fact are made of: 'particles' of matter and force.
PoeticUniverse wrote:What's your actual blog address? What you gave is an email address.
http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/
Obvious Leo
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Obvious Leo »

uwot wrote:Basically Anaximander argued that there is a substance, the apeiron (the infinite or unlimited), which everything is made of, but is undetectable in itself. It is only by it's perceptible qualities, hot/cold, wet/dry, that we know it is there. If you apply the same logic to what we now believe about the workings of the universe, the conclusion is that everything is made of Big Bang stuff. Like the apeiron, you cannot detect Big Bang stuff directly, it is only the waves, ripples, eddies and vortices in this rapidly expanding stuff that we can see and in fact are made of: 'particles' of matter and force.
Leibniz explores exactly the same notion in his monadology and Leibniz is generally acknowledged as the philosophical father of modern information theory, probably because not enough of Anaximander's ideas remain extant. Leibniz also foreshadowed the notion of the binary logic gate and the laws of thought which subsequently came to underpin Boolean logic, the understructure of all other logics. I have no doubt in my own mind that Leibniz actually plagiarised some of these ideas from Spinoza but concede that there is no specific evidence of this. I'm just a bloke who tends to be naturally suspicious of coincidences which occur contemporaneously and Newton's accusations regarding his purloining of the calculus may also harbour a kernel of truth. However Leibniz understood the philosophy of the infinitesimals far better then Newton did because Gottfried was a pre-Socratic through and through and therefore understood the philosophy of the quantum as expressed by Zeno of Elea. It doesn't take too big a leap of the imagination to see the apeiron and the monad as two expressions of the same fundamental unit of reality and both can easily fit into Zeno's idea of the smallest possible interval of time. This must have a finite numerical value which can be easily equated with the Planck interval in modern physics.
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

So, when can be certain there are phenomena, which I often call the 'message', to set it aside from the 'messenger', which would be the particular, uncertain implementation at the moment, which can vary, and that no matter how 'secondary' an effect is, it is still something, being of the basic Real, which is the only source.

As for Parmenides, he well might have said that there is unity in multiplicity. His great insight that 'zero' can't even be meant is what gave rise to all of my philosophical extensions, but he neglected to note that a 'one' of full solidity cannot be either (or else not a thing could move), and so such infinite density fails and brings down with it any notion of infinity (as being uncapped and thus not being extant).

As for a fundamental substance, need it be a simple, continuous function, lest it having parts show that the parts must be more fundamental than the substance?
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Obvious Leo »

PoeticUniverse wrote:As for a fundamental substance, need it be a simple, continuous function, lest it having parts show that the parts must be more fundamental than the substance?
Modern physics is seriously metaphysically flawed when it comes to questions of the fundamental. The philosophy of the quantum is one of the simplest and most ancient principles in metaphysics and it simply cannot be wrong. In a comprehensible universe we MUST proceed from the metaphysical first first principle that in order for something to be definable as physically real it cannot be infinitely divisible. Matter, energy and time MUST have a smallest possible bit which unites them and which is no further divisible.

Physics has what is known as a "hierarchy problem" in that the Planck scale of reality is a full 20 orders of magnitude smaller than the sub-atomic scale and yet physics routinely speaks of the sub-atomic particles as "fundamental entities". This is patently absurd since all of these particles have different physical properties, such as mass, charge and spin. Clearly these properties are being specified for by a deeper underlying process occurring at the Planck scale and for all we know there may be other embedded hierarchies of informational complexity between this fundamental scale and the sub-atomic scale. This will be for the computer geeks of the future to figure out but as philosophers we know enough to at least correctly define the sub-atomic particles as EMERGENT at a higher order of informational complexity. They have properties which have been specified for by a PROCESS and this makes them greater than the sum of their parts, a notion utterly incompatible with Newtonian reductionism. We do not live in a Newtonian universe but instead we live in a fractal continuum of hieracrchies of EMERGENT informational complexity embedded within each other like the Russian matryoshka dolls and the correct form of language to describe this process comes to us from information theory.

We can say that the sub-atomic particles are ENCODED FOR by as yet unspecified more fundamental processes. In turn these particles ENCODE FOR atoms, which ENCODE FOR molecules which ENCODE FOR life and mind. Such a process universe is one which is sufficient to its own existence as well as sufficient to the existence of any complex entities it brings forth because in a non-Newtonian computation none of this is programmed. Non-linear dynamic systems evolve from the simple to the complex solely because they are unable to do otherwise and that our universe is evolving from the simple to the complex is a proposition of the profoundly bloody obvious.
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