I also think those points would have to be dimensionless
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- They are indeed.
Things that can affect change without changing would truly be word salad, if not for the fact that a person can act without being caused to. I’m not sure I’ll ever be convinced that AI can do this no matter how convincing it sounds.
- I agree.
- #3 - I say these are the Impossibles: Easter Bunnies, Santa Claus, Married Batchelors, etc.
- #4 - Absolute Space, Absolute Time, and the Set of all Real Numbers. [All three “exist” as abstract nouns, but not as concrete nouns.
- #2 - ***Dimensionless points of mass" which have no life, true atoms that have no parts. These are things which can effect change, but not without changing in the process.
- #1 Dimensionless things and subsets of dimensionless thingshave life but no mass, Yahweh, Angels, and Demons. These are things which effect change, but unlikely without undergoing some change in the process,
- There probablly ought to be a #5 between #1 and #2.
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I asked ChatGPT about 2-dimemsional particles, and thought this was a pretty good explanation about them:
It’s important to note that while 2-dimensional particles are a useful mathematical construct, they do not exist as physical objects in our world. All particles in our world have some physical extent in all three dimensions of space, and cannot be truly confined to a single plane.
Asking ChatGPT about which prominent physicists believe quantity is an illusion yielded this noteworthy result:
The idea that quantity is an illusion is associated with the physicist Julian Barbour. Barbour is a proponent of a theory called “shape dynamics,” which suggests that the universe is fundamentally about relationships and shapes, rather than quantities or numbers. In this view, quantities like time, mass, and energy are not fundamental aspects of the universe, but are instead emergent properties that arise from the underlying shapes and relationships between objects.
Barbour’s ideas have been influential in some areas of theoretical physics, particularly in approaches that seek to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. However, it’s important to note that his views are not universally accepted, and many physicists would argue that quantities like time and mass are indeed fundamental aspects of the universe.
@Christy talk about a difference of worldviews
Not necessarily. Have you read in the Aquinas thread? There’s an argument that just because there is no beginning in time doesn’t mean that God didn’t create it all from nothing.
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I asked ChatGPT for an essay on the Hebrew grammar of Genesis 1:1-3, figuring that if anything could stump it, it would be ancient languages.
It wrote a darned good essay covering arguments from several different directions (though to a large degree it boils down to how to translate the Hebrew word/letter ‘waw’) and citing a number of scholars. It was a bit scary how deep and thoroughly it examined the subject.
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The statement “The universe could create itself from nothing” is incoherent. Whatever “universe” means in that sentence would have to exist in order to do anything, so one of the things it can’t do is create itself since it would already exist. In every case, those asserting this claim use the term “nothing,” but it turns out to be something after all. Krauss, for example, assumes that there already exist space, energy, and universal gravitation and then suggests that these might be able to produce the universe we now observe. That doesn’t come within miles of being creation out of nothing.
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That image is generally fine, with the physics being pretty well understood the further to the right you go.
If you look for inflation on that particular diagram, they note that inflation stops after like 10 to the negative 32nd power of seconds after the universe had some sort of beginning. It is also worth noting that the physics before that, which they call the Grand Unification Theory era is entirely theoretical and doesn’t currently enjoy any empirical evidence that I’m aware of.
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How is that not just rephrasing the question? or just a tautology?
One can only say that “nothing cannot exist” is that there is something rather than nothing; if there were nothing there would be no one to say anything about it.
So there can’t be nothing, and there can’t be an infinite array of somethings?
I’d say that whether or not there can be an infinite number of universes depends on initial conditions, if that term can have any real meaning if something has always existed.
It is a simple tautology. Being is and nonbeing is not. An infinite being, but not an infinite number of things.
As far as initial conditions, the most interesting counter example I’ve seen to the cosmological argument, acknowledged an infinite quantity cannot be formed through consecutive addition, but then asked why an infinite set of past events can’t exist as a brute fact to which present events are added.
[quote=“Jay313, post:46, topic:51191”]
Good point: if one kind of infinity is possible, why not another? Is it a matter of types of infinities?
I think there are different way of something being “beyond [one’s] paygrade”. Here’s the thing: if God is Creator, then it stands to reason that there was never a time when He wasn’t creating. Since God is eternal not just forwards but backwards, then in traveling backwards one may find the beginning of this creation but will never find a time without any creation(s).
Imagine eternity as a place that contains our timeline. From that perspective, creation isn’t starting something and letting it run, it’s imprinting a line all at once; from eternity, the entire line is present. And the thing about a plane is you can draw as many lines in it as you wish. At that point I would invoke something my older brother the mathematician said to my younger brother the mathematician once, and the younger enthusiastically agreed: “Any number between two and infinity is ridiculous”. I don’t remember the context (which was probably beyond me) but I think it applies here: given that God is Creator, what reason could there possibly be that He stopped with just the heavens and the Earth? [assuming for the sake of the discussion that “the heavens” is in the spiritual sense and thus there are two lines already on the plane of eternity]
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The points may proceed to infinity, and may be represented as symbolically infinite, but there cannot be an actual infinite number of points in space.
I can’t recall which cosmologist talked about this (I want to say Mitchio Kaku though technically he isn’t a cosmologist; the main idea I think is Penrose), but one was holding forth on the eventual final ‘death’ of this universe where all matter has decayed and there’s nothing left but wandering photons. The idea was that once there is no matter then there is correspondingly no metric for size, so the universe would “forget” that it was vastly extensive and cold and so could act as though it had no dimensions, which would pack all those photons into a singularity – which existence doesn’t tolerate, so it would erupt into a new Big Bang. My thought after pondering that several times was this: if the universe can “forget” that it’s vast, what prevents it from “forgetting” that it is a single universe – and thus erupt in not just one, but a whole multitude of new “Bangs”?
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Or what happens to an individual who wonders if he/she is the infinite being, and the world then starts to behave as if they are at the center of it?
Do they treat other people like they don’t exist, or do they…?
Or if as Hegel said, the goal of history (this life) was for reason to become conscious of itself?
Yeah… now you can better appreciate why I am so bound to the Word. It’s like a Noah’s Ark for me. Plus there is the perfect doctrine of God not knowing what it is to be alone, until he became that in the person of Jesus Christ.
Wouldn’t that depend on how “caused” is defined, sort of like the question of how “nothing” is defined, i.e. if there is no matter and energy but there are laws which would govern them if there were, is that “nothing”? Similarly, if there are laws of the universe that require QM fluctuations, are they not then caused?
If God is infinite, and has ‘always’ (a slippery term for matters of eternity) been Creator, why can’t an infinite number of things exist?
Now that’s crazy – they had no competent cosmologists, so what were they doing making a pronouncement on the matter at all?
To the contrary, if there can be nothing that is self-creating, or to use a more theological term, self-generating, then there can be nothing at all. There are two logical options: either the universe has always existed, or something that is not the universe caused the universe. If it has always existed then it is self-generating; if it was caused by something that is not the universe then that thing that is not the universe is self-generating.
There’s a long panel discussion on what nothing is, on YouTube, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the panel – found it:
It’s got a rather impressive panel.
That’s just repeating the assertion, it doesn’t address the question of why.