Kevin's Watch

Skyweir wrote:Why aren’t my quotes working?

You used the wrong quotation marks. I fixed it.

WOW!! Thank you

You're welcome.

peter wrote:But I'm interested in this property of emergence. Tell me this; are there any examples of emergence (in the universe) that can be cited, that precede the emergence of life?

From
https://sciencing.com/emergent-properties-8232868.html

Neutralization reactions, for example, were used by the philosopher John S. Mill to describe situations where cause-and-effect principles for each of the parts involved in a reaction could not predict the outcome. To give a specific example: when hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide combine, the result is salt and water, a product not at all consistent with the effects of either a strong acidic or basic compound.

peter wrote:But can immaterial things have existence? My conscious mind is a case in point; it seems real enough to me - but I fully accept that thoughts that define it (in the way I perceive them, not just as spikes of electrical activity on an ECG) are immaterial and yet find it hard to accept they have no existence.

Seems to me this is proof that immaterial things exist.

peter wrote:And yet once having been acknowledged as having existence, the same rules must apply as to any other avatar of being; they can no more be pulled from absolute nothing anymore than can universes - and (change them as you might) no more can they ever again be consigned to the dustbin of history (by annihilation back into nothingness).

We have not yet established that universes cannot be pulled from absolute nothing, although my gut says no. I think there was always material. And maybe there was always immaterial.

It's an odd thing to talk about something coming from nothing. If nothing, including time, existed before the Big Bang, then there was never a time when nothing existed.

And I think the nature of infinite existence is particularly difficult for human minds to process and appreciate.

Excellent points.

I think the evidence provides that material (and the immaterial) have always existed and continue to exist in perpetuity

Fist and Faith wrote:It's an odd thing to talk about something coming from nothing. If nothing, including time, existed before the Big Bang, then there was never a time when nothing existed.

Stephen Hawking had something to do with this point of view; he said to ask what happened before the point of creation was as meaningless as to ask what is further south than the South Pole. For him (in a particular hypothesis he presented to, oddly, the Vatican I believe) the universe had no point at which it starts: rather the closer you go back to that point, the 'fuzzier' the concept of time gets, to the point where it has no meaning. The universe in this idea, is 'shuttlecock' shaped, with no starting point at all.

All of this was of course presented mathematically and for a time seemed to work the oracle, but I believe that the idea has of late come under some pretty heavy attack on the basis of some fairly fundamental flaws in the mathematics.

The implicit finality of the posited final frontier was never finite in its offer of infinity.