Very Early Thought

[Ian Beardsley]

O.K. guys this must actually be the story. Only with the advent of civilization did man after a while make religion to keep order in the cities, or something like that. But the point I would like to make is that the pure unadultered mind was capable of understanding the nature of nature, from earth to the far reaches of the universe without any technology what so ever. Think about it. We happen to be warm when the sun is out, therefore it is fire. With intuition alone we know the further a fire the smaller and dimmer it is, thus we conlclude the stars are distant suns. Also given the moon and sun are round we conclude so is the earth, and that it is very large because it appears flat. Furthermore it can easily be noticed that as I walk and pass a tree, it seems to move in the opposite direction. Therefore the earth is rotating because the moon seems to move around the earth on a daily basis. The problem, however, must arise for all however, how did something arise from nothing uncaused as it had to at some point, or, if something had always been there, how? Thus there is plenty of mystery going on here to keep us wondering forever what actually did happen, if anything at all. :wave:

[slimshady2357]

The problem, however, must arise for all however, how did something arise from nothing uncaused as it had to at some point, or, if something had always been there, how? Thus there is plenty of mystery going on here to keep us wondering forever what actually did happen, if anything at all. :wave:

I agree that this seems to be the most fundamental problem, or at least it is for me. After a few years of philosophy classes and many long nights thinking and discussing the various subject matters with a friend, I came to the conclusion that the question that will always be there is: Why is there something rather than nothing? I think "how did something arise from nothing uncaused as it had to at some point, or, if something had always been there, how?" is just another form of the same kind of thing I mean when I ask 'Why is there something, rather than nothing?"

Sometimes I hear people say, in response to questions about what caused the Big Bang, something like "Well physicists now think that vacuum fluctuations could explain the Big Bang and how we got something from nothing. But to me, this only pushes the question back another level. Why are vacuum fluctuations possible? Where did the potential for virtual particles to appear, or any vacuum fluctuations, come from?

Answering that question of 'Why is there anything?' seems to almost have a Godel-like problem to it, how can we answer such a question about the whole system, from within the system? It seems to me you'd need to get outside the system, into a 'bigger' one, to be able to see the answer.

And then you would only have the same problem from within the new, 'larger', system to confront..... a never-ending spiral, even assuming you could get into 'larger' and 'larger' systems to 'see' the answer for the 'smaller' system.

edited to add:

I don't meant to say that this question IS unanswerable, only that I can't see a way of answering it that wouldn't spawn a new, similar, question. A sort of meta-analysis of all possible kinds of answers leads me to believe there is no satisfactory answer possible. Again, this is limited by what I can conceive and I don't fool myself into taking the stance that I am certainly correct, I just can't see any way out.

Maybe this thread should be moved to Philosophy, or maybe someone should contribute a more scientific response to the OP.

Adam

[copiae]

O.K. guys this must actually be the story. Only with the advent of civilization did man after a while make religion to keep order in the cities, or something like that.


I am curious as to why you would think this.



But the point I would like to make is that the pure unadultered mind was capable of understanding the nature of nature, from earth to the far reaches of the universe without any technology what so ever. Think about it. We happen to be warm when the sun is out, therefore it is fire.


Hrm. Are you still talking about primitive mankind here? Coz they believed all sorts of things about what the Sun was (and what fire was, for that matter).

Also, if we followed your reasoning, seeing as they would presumably be much more familiar with the sun than with fire... Why would they not see fire as a piece of the sun, instead?


With intuition alone we know the further a fire the smaller and dimmer it is, thus we conlclude the stars are distant suns.Also given the moon and sun are round we conclude so is the earth, and that it is very large because it appears flat. Furthermore it can easily be noticed that as I walk and pass a tree, it seems to move in the opposite direction. Therefore the earth is rotating because the moon seems to move around the earth on a daily basis.


You have given explanations for certain events, but why would these explanations be intuitive without the framework of theories we have that support them - the state of our primitive ancestors, presumably?



The problem, however, must arise for all however, how did something arise from nothing uncaused as it had to at some point, or, if something had always been there, how? Thus there is plenty of mystery going on here to keep us wondering forever what actually did happen, if anything at all. :wave:

There are many answers for this question - however, how satisfying these answers may be is another story altogether!

[JoeP]

But you can never get outside the system you're in to a point where there's "nothing". There's always the universe you started from, even if you're contemplating it from a distance.

I'd like to phrase the question this way: "Is it possible for there to be nothing?" I've no idea if there are any sensible answers to this. But what would it mean? No observers to see the nothing, or contemplate it. If there's "nothing" somewhere outside our universe, does that make any sense at all? Why should it make sense for there to have been "nothing" "before" the universe? That makes assumptions about time, the future not really existing.

One of the scientific angles goes back to this quantum foam: it is impossible for there to be nothing. You always have vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations.

So there you have it:Nothing is impossible

"In the beginning there was nothing. Then God created light. There was still nothing, but He could see it."

[viscousmemories]

I agree with Adam that the problem seems unsolvable. But then again up until a few weeks ago I would've said it's impossible for us to know what a planet outside the reach of a probe is made of, and now I know otherwise. :)

Joe, "Nothing is impossible" is a brilliant twist on that tired cliche. Two thumbs up!

[The Lone Ranger]

O.K. guys this must actually be the story. Only with the advent of civilization did man after a while make religion to keep order in the cities, or something like that.
With respect, I don't see that this must be the case. Why is "civilization" necessary for the existence of religious belief? Are you making a distinction between superstitious beliefs and organized religion?

Maybe Og the Caveman saw a bolt of lightning strike a tree and speculated that an angry god was responsible. Surely, you don't need any kind of civilization for religious beliefs to exist. Granted, organized religion is a spectacularly effective tool for keeping the masses under control (as Napoleon is reputed to have claimed), and so it's not hard to see why rulers would have a vested interest in promoting organized religion.


But the point I would like to make is that the pure unadultered mind was capable of understanding the nature of nature, from earth to the far reaches of the universe without any technology what so ever.
I'd certainly agree that we can learn a lot through the use of our unaided senses and our minds. But our sensory impressions can certainly mislead us (more on that in a bit), and there are lots of things out there that we'd know nothing at all about without technological tools.

Consider the microscope. Until its invention, few people seriously considered the notion that there are living beings too small to be seen with the naked eye -- and no one could have proved it. What's more, until the discovery of "germs," we could have no working theory of what causes disease. The "germ theory of disease" simply wasn't possible (not in any remotely complete sense anyway) until the microscope demonstrated the existence of bacteria (and later, viruses).

At the opposite scale, we couldn't possibly know about the existence of such fascinating things as quasars and pulsars without some very fancy technology, since there are none that are visible to the naked eye.

The basic point is that there's a lot about our Universe and how it functions that we couldn't possibly know and probably wouldn't even suspect were it not for all sorts of neat technological gadgets that let us detect things that our unaided senses cannot.


Think about it. We happen to be warm when the sun is out, therefore it is fire.
Um, no. The Sun is not fire. It shines because of nuclear fusion a process that's entirely unrelated to chemical combustion. This is a good example of how uninformed "common sense" can lead to quite erroneous conclusions.


With intuition alone we know the further a fire the smaller and dimmer it is, thus we conlclude the stars are distant suns.
I'm not sure I understand how "intuition" plays a role here. We know that glowing objects appear smaller and dimmer with distance through direct observation, not intuition.

Of course, from that observation one can make the intuitive leap that maybe the stars are actually distant suns. Though some people had toyed with this idea at least as far back as Ancient Greece, it's hardly something that can be conclusively proved without the technology to make some reasonable estimates of their distance. After all, it's entirely plausible to a naive observer that the stars are not distant suns at all, but much closer and dimmer objects. (Some Native Americans speculated that people lived in the sky, and that the stars we see were their campfires.)


Also given the moon and sun are round we conclude so is the earth, and that it is very large because it appears flat.
Without an understanding of gravity and how it pulls all sufficiently large objects into spherical shapes, I don't see how it's at all clear that simply because the Sun and Moon happen to be round that the Earth must be as well. Two data points are not enough to establish a trend.

I think it's poor logic to assume that the Earth must be round just because the Sun and Moon happen to be. By that reasoning, there must be no ringed planets, because neither the Sun nor the Moon -- nor the Earth, for that matter -- have visible rings, and until the invention of the telescope, Saturn's were invisible. One needn't infer that the Earth is round, because there are plenty of lines of evidence to convince even the most unsophisticated observer that the Earth is indeed round. History books often erroneously claim that Columbus set sail to prove the Earth is round, but that's nonsense. Every educated person of his day was well-aware that the Earth is round.

Ancient Greeks noted that the Earth always casts a circular shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, which demonstrates that it's round. Eratosthenes of Alexandria (died circa 194 BCE) not only demonstrated that the Earth is round, but measured its circumference to within a few miles of the currently-accepted figure. (Imagine how well he'd have done if he'd had access to instruments more sophisticated than a straight stick and a well shaft!)

Anyone living near the coast has probably noted that ships appear to sink gradually beneath the horizon as they sail away, and rise above it as they sail toward you. That is, observers have long known that as a ship comes toward you, first you see the masts rise above the horizon, then the sails, then the superstructure, and finally the hull rises into view. This wouldn't be the case if the Earth was flat -- a ship sailing away from you would simply grow smaller and smaller until it could not longer be seen; it wouldn't sink beneath the horizon.


Furthermore it can easily be noticed that as I walk and pass a tree, it seems to move in the opposite direction. Therefore the earth is rotating because the moon seems to move around the earth on a daily basis.
An equally plausible explanation to a naive observer is that the Moon really does revolve around the Earth. Your conclusion, it seems to me, is only obvious with the advantage of hindsight.


Cheers,

Michael

[Ian Beardsley]

[QUOTE=Ian Beardsley]O.K. guys this must actually be the story. Only with the advent of civilization did man after a while make religion to keep order in the cities, or something like that.


I am curious as to why you would think this.


I was thinking this because it seems with organized religion we got a lot of wild and weird ideas about the universe probably to try and re-affirm what they were pushing on people. I think that may have been the case because it is seems to me it may be intuitive to deduce the truth. Afterall, the ancient Greeks were not technological but, for instance not only did they know the earth was round long before columbus, but had calculated its circumference by looking at the shadows cast by a stick at two different locations.
Ian