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Is the Universe infinite, a hypersphere, or something else?


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1 hour ago, Relic said:

That's interesting, and I'm curious to know why that is. If you'd like can you share your view on that?

Personally, the more I learn the more I'm convinced that we are living on a quark within a cell within the stomach lining of a galactic space goat, or something equally ridiculous. The larger our universe gets, the less "greater" meaning our lives have, imho. 

I believe much the same as you, but those same things that reduce "greater" meaning for you, increase it for me.  

It is kind of difficult for me to put into words without writing pages on what I believe and why I believe it... but I'll try to summarize at a fundamental level.  One major precept is that the only possible way for our (observable) universe to exist, is that if everything is precisely the way it is.  If just one of the fundamental constants, or magnitude of one of the fundamental forces, were changed by the most minuscule amount imaginable, nothing would be here.  Matter as we know it wouldn't exist.  Life as we understand it wouldn't exist.  

Another precept is that when you consider the universe on a grand scale, on a scale of the size of the universe itself... we are so minuscule and insignificant that it is no different than if we didn't exist at all.  Yet here we are.  On a galactic scale, we may not be much different than a colony of bacteria living out our lifecycle in a petri dish, but yet we are part of a greater whole.  Even on the grandest scales, if you look at galaxy distribuion, there is a structure to that.  There is always a structure and order to things regardless of the scale or frame of reference you are looking from (and particularly strange order when you get down into quantum sizes)... and I find that to be amazing and awe-inspiring.

Time limits me from posting more at the moment, but for me, all this stuff points to the fact that the omniverse (or whatever the word would be for 'not just our observable universe but everything in existence') isn't just a happy accident.  It all points to a larger order, perhaps infinitely so.  I suppose that's my "higher power".  I don't pretend to know what exactly that is, but I have a strong faith that it is there, whatever it is.

As to my time here on this tiny rock, I am a practicing Christian.  Partly because that was the religion I was raised with (and yeah I was that kid in church asking the preacher all the tough questions, rarely answered to my satisfaction), and partly because I've found that my life is better and I am a happier person when I do my best to model my behaviors after the teachings of Jesus.  I check a lot of the old testament particularly at the door, although there is much wisdom and truth to be found there as well.  Do I believe in the common notion of the afterlife (heaven, hell, the Big Judgement, and all that)?  Nah.  I don't really believe we retain consciousness after death... but I'd be pleasantly surprised if we did. :) 

 

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On 5/9/2017 at 6:00 AM, Relic said:

My question, with all due respect, is ho wyou can watch the video you linked and still believe in an all knowing all loving higher power. 

The only problematic part of your sentence is "all loving" -- everything else is fully consistent with the nature of the universe as we currently understand it and, for the reasons that Ded As Ned points out, may in fact be the most likely state of events. There are alternative possibilities the most famous of which is the anthropic principle, but they have severe problems of their own and actually become less plausible the more structure unrelated to the existence of humanity is discovered.

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Order is order. It doesn't really matter if it is the smallish concentric spheres of Dante with God (l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle) being something like both the infinity and the centre beyond the last sphere or the multi/universe of modern mathematical physics. Which is more precisely mathematically described than the medieval one, so in some ways more orderly although not a simple set of spheres.

Even without fine-tuning one either believes that such (mathematically rather precise over 10^30 or what orders of magnitude) order can arise spontaneously or it cannot. If it cannot one has the core of a theistic argument. And spontaneously does not mean with all the fantastically precise "laws of nature" already in place. Because these laws also have to come from somewhere (that's why a "bubbling" quantum vacuum state with all the laws in place does not count as "nothing" in a philosophical sense).

Or one basically denies that there could be an ultimate explanation for them. One can do that (and I admit that I tended myself to a similar position) but it is hard to deny that this is simply a denial of further explanation and also the denial of the principle and methodology (seeking ever further more general or "deeper" explanations) that led us to engage in cosmology (or science in general) in the first place.

As for mind boggling hugeness and apparent pointlessness: This would actually fit with the God who denied to debate Job with arguments but instead bragged about how he had made the world and sea monsters and angels and stuff and Job should shut up because he had not been around "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" and could hardly fathom what it involved.

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1 hour ago, Mikael said:

How is "the universe came from nothing" a larger leap than "God came from nothing"?

I don't believe we can truly conceive "nothing".  When I think about the idea of "nothing" I picture a blackness.  But even that is "something".  I imagine most people's efforts to imagine "nothing" give similar results.

Therefore, we have a very hard time actually believing nothing can exist.  It is an interesting conundrum.

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It would be a completely different leap. A closer leap would be: The material universe has always been there.

That's what Aristotle thought and most medieval theologician-philosophers agreed that it was a possibility; therefore most of their theistic arguments did not assume or argue that the world has a beginning in time; while the "kalam"-Argument from medieval islamic philosophy does argue for such a beginning in time, none of Aquinas "five ways" uses that.

But both claims, that the universe came from nothing and that it has always been there are highly dubious because for all we know at least the subsystems of the universe we encounter are not necessary existents, that is, it is possible that they do not exist. So we need an argument how and why the universe as a whole can be so different from its smaller parts. And we witness that these subsystems change, come and go. And never does something come from nothing. So again, we need a pretty good argument why the whole universe should be completely different in these two respects from its subsystems. I am not aware of any such arguments (maybe there are some by Spinoza or other pantheistic thinkers) and I don't see how one could make one in a physicalist/materialist way.

With God it is different. We cannot argue from subsystems of the universe (or the whole) about what God is or is not because one main point of the traditional theistic arguments is that God *is* in many respects completely different from creation. He is not just another thing in the universe but the ground of being, being itself, unchanging, necessary whatever. Another main point of all those arguments is that to reach explanative and causal "closure" we need something that is a necessary existent (and has all these other attributes) because only in such a fashion can the causal and similar regresses be stopped. For such a being the question where it came from does not even make sense. It only shows that the one who asked has not grasped what necessary existent means.

With "order" it is slightly different. There are cases of order arising from apparently less order (as long as there is enough disorder elsewhere to keep in line with thermodynamics). But I doubt that there is order arising from complete chaos, partly because I don't know how to understand complete chaos. If there arises a particle pair or a universe or whatnot from some quantum foam, there is quantum foam and there are more or less precise mathematical laws of physics that make it possible that something more stable or orderly arises from some quantum vacuum. So it is not chaos or nothing but a state that already has quite a bit of order to it.

Of course one can criticize such arguments in many ways. (Or claim that something with the divine attributes is incoherent, impossible etc.) But everybody who claims that these arguments are obviously question begging because "whence God?" is just the same question as "whence the material universe?" has not understood the arguments in the first place.

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On 2017-5-6 at 7:23 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

"Something else" is a really safe bet.  I have to wonder whether we aren't all simulations in God's version of "Sim Universe 6.5".  

Why would you wonder that? This is pretty much exactly what the universe is, assuming the existence of God. God creating the universe and God imagining the universe as a simulation are exactly the same thing.

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12 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Why would you wonder that? This is pretty much exactly what the universe is, assuming the existence of God. God creating the universe and God imagining the universe as a simulation are exactly the same thing.

Not necessarily -- or at least not with the meaning of the word simulation usually used in the simulation argument. Thinking of it in terms of video games, there are two types of simulation, but the second one can be extremely varied so I will give three examples:

1) The ancestor simulation from Bostrom's argument. That is, a faithful reproduction of human history where if you happened to land in, say, the Middle Ages, life would most likely be nasty, brutish and short.

2a) A setting inspired by human history, but with significant, deliberate deviations in terms of the underlying physical laws (e.g. magic, non-human humanoids, warp drives, hit points, etc.) as in most video games.

2b) Something almost wholly alien. That is, a setting with intelligent beings, but ones which barely resemble the creator(s).

Most religions with a God fall somewhere between 2a and 2b.

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1 hour ago, Altherion said:

Not necessarily -- or at least not with the meaning of the word simulation usually used in the simulation argument. Thinking of it in terms of video games, there are two types of simulation, but the second one can be extremely varied so I will give three examples:

1) The ancestor simulation from Bostrom's argument. That is, a faithful reproduction of human history where if you happened to land in, say, the Middle Ages, life would most likely be nasty, brutish and short.

2a) A setting inspired by human history, but with significant, deliberate deviations in terms of the underlying physical laws (e.g. magic, non-human humanoids, warp drives, hit points, etc.) as in most video games.

2b) Something almost wholly alien. That is, a setting with intelligent beings, but ones which barely resemble the creator(s).

Most religions with a God fall somewhere between 2a and 2b.

Where does the simulation that is in the form of a dream fit in? Since that's more like what God's simulation would be, rather than a computer programme.

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4 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Where does the simulation that is in the form of a dream fit in? Since that's more like what God's simulation would be, rather than a computer programme.

If the dream is like a human dream, probably somewhere between 2a and 2b as most dreams are at least a little bit different from reality.

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21 minutes ago, Altherion said:

If the dream is like a human dream, probably somewhere between 2a and 2b as most dreams are at least a little bit different from reality.

Assuming an omnipotent God, as religion does, then God's dream is like a human dream to the extent that a human's dream is like an amoeba dream.

Note that the universe as simulation would probably have to be of the imagination / dream type as there is some evidence that some of the [quantum] physics of our universe is not computable, at least not with computational methodology that we know about.

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59 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Assuming an omnipotent God, as religion does, then God's dream is like a human dream to the extent that a human's dream is like an amoeba dream.

In that case, it's definitely 2b and much stranger than anything we've created in video games so far. However, if it is the kind of God that made man in His own image, it might not be that strange.

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16 minutes ago, Altherion said:

In that case, it's definitely 2b and much stranger than anything we've created in video games so far. However, if it is the kind of God that made man in His own image, it might not be that strange.

Despite materialist interpretations of the Bible, this is a metaphysical / spiritual statement, not one relating to the [simulated] physical appearance of humans. 

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6 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Despite materialist interpretations of the Bible, this is a metaphysical / spiritual statement, not one relating to the [simulated] physical appearance of humans. 

Sure, but it still implies a much closer relationship between humanity and God than, say, between an amoeba and a human being.

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On 20/05/2017 at 1:46 AM, Jo498 said:

For such a being the question where it came from does not even make sense. It only shows that the one who asked has not grasped what necessary existent means.

Why can't the universe itself be necessary existent? And even allowing for a necessary existent outside the universe, why assume it's a sentient being?

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8 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Assuming an omnipotent God, as religion does, then God's dream is like a human dream to the extent that a human's dream is like an amoeba dream.

Note that the universe as simulation would probably have to be of the imagination / dream type as there is some evidence that some of the [quantum] physics of our universe is not computable, at least not with computational methodology that we know about.

Theologically what constitutes "omnipotence" is debatable.  FYI.

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5 hours ago, felice said:

Why can't the universe itself be necessary existent? And even allowing for a necessary existent outside the universe, why assume it's a sentient being?

It could be. But one cannot simply assume that but rather needed arguments. It would be a non-trivial step in any case and it would need a pretty good argument because the "universe as a whole" would than be different from its apparently non-necessary subsystems. I am not sure but I think that one would get closer to what is usually called pantheism (identifying the universe and God, Spinoza's formula "deus sive natura"), that is the universe would assume some divine features. I don't really see how one could vamp up contemporary reductionist materialism in a way to get a necessary existing universe while still keeping the main tenets of materialism. Of course some of the difficulty also stems from understanding what necessary existent is supposed to mean.

The probably best and maybe only generally agreed upon sort of necessity we understand is mathematical and logical necessity. So there has been the idea that one could try to show that the actual universe needs to have the exact mathematical law structure it has because otherwise it would be inconsistent, basically a self-contradiction. But this would still not show that it is a necessary existent. (One can only use contradictions to show that something can NOT exist, one can obviously not use the fact that something is free of contradiction to show that it must exist.) That's probably another reason why some people toy around with "ultra-multiverses" where all possible consistent mathematical structures are somehow realized, so then it would not be miraculous that our particular structure is as well. Of course this still does not answer the question why there exists anything at all rather than nothing.

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10 hours ago, Altherion said:

Not necessarily -- or at least not with the meaning of the word simulation usually used in the simulation argument. Thinking of it in terms of video games, there are two types of simulation, but the second one can be extremely varied so I will give three examples:

1) The ancestor simulation from Bostrom's argument. That is, a faithful reproduction of human history where if you happened to land in, say, the Middle Ages, life would most likely be nasty, brutish and short.

2a) A setting inspired by human history, but with significant, deliberate deviations in terms of the underlying physical laws (e.g. magic, non-human humanoids, warp drives, hit points, etc.) as in most video games.

2b) Something almost wholly alien. That is, a setting with intelligent beings, but ones which barely resemble the creator(s).

Most religions with a God fall somewhere between 2a and 2b.

Would 1) not be better called the "production" of human history? Because a faithful reproduction is a reproduction of something else. But if all our experiences are a "simulation" there is no need at all for some archetype or "original" that is reproduced.

According to my understanding of theism the "God's dream" metapher means only that creation is constantly in need of being "held up in existence" by God. But on the other hand God obviously delegates quite a bit of work to the creatures, i.e. animals naturally make more animals, God does not let new animals pop out of thin air. I'd also say that "simulation" is a misleading metaphor for theism because while holding that experienced and material reality is not the whole of what there is and that in some sense there is a "higher" reality (God, angels, heavens etc.) it does usually not hold that "normal" reality is unreal. It is not ultimate but it is quite real and important otherwise God should not have bothered with creating it in the first place).

Furthermore, I think, that most religions would have to include option 1) Because they would not deny our ordinary experiences although again they would claim that they are not exhaustive and there is much more "out there".

Some mystics might disagree. PK Dick in his religious phase apparently entertained the idea that we were really still living in the 1st century, a few decades after Christ, but deceived (by the devil?) that almost 2000 years had passed so we would despair of Christ's second coming. But I think that standard doctrine in christianity holds that history is real (in fact, it is a major point of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that God is acting in history and real historical event have "eternal" relevance). It also holds that science and scientific findings are generally not wrong although they are not all there is to know and do not reveal the whole of reality.

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