Putting aside the term God, would you agree?

[Segev Moran]

"Everything is connected to everything" doesn't explain your assumptions.

When I "look at the structure of everything I experience," I notice that very few things have a single cause... so why do you assume that everything does?

Can you give me an example of something with multiple causes?

 

[Polymath257]

I think you are mixing not knowing the cause to un-caused.
It kind of resembles to not knowing hence god...
Our entire universe is assumed to be a closed system. meaning that the energy it holds is bound to it.
There is nothing new in this universe.
you assume that everything just popped into existence without nothing causing it, yeah?
I find it quite weird

First, discovering that certain events are uncaused is quite different than simply not knowing a cause for them. There are actually ways to test if causality is functioning and there are experiments that show not everything is caused.

When you describe things as 'popping' into existence, you are already assuming a time before the pop. And that is simply not the case. Whenever there has been time, there has been matter and energy (as well as space). Causality, such as it exists, is a property of the universe.

 

[Segev Moran]

Indeed. I realize that you want to perceive one as existing, but that is really very arbitrary, to the point of serious hubris even.




I think that I do indeed. I just don't think it is at all convincing.



No, not at all.

That is just undue extrapolation of expectations that arise from the neurological nature of humans into a scope that does not has any apparent reason to sustain those expectations.

If you will note i clearly was talking about the human POV.
I didn't say how things are experience outside the universe

 

[Polymath257]

Can you give me an example of something with multiple causes?

Almost everything at the macroscopic level has multiple causes. In fact, I would challenge you to find anything macroscopic that only has a single cause.

 

[Polymath257]

Please elaborate

The 'singularity' that most people talk about when mentioning the Big bang is not an event--it is not part of spacetime. In fact, it is *defined* by the fact that spacetime cannot be extended that far. It is more an absence that it is a presence: the inability to extend time past a certain value.

 

[Polymath257]

Look at the structure of everything we experience.
Everything is connected to everything.
As an example:

BB -> Formation of matter -> formation of stars -> formation of galaxies -> formation of systems -> formation of earth -> formation of the moon -> formation of seasons -> formation of climate -> formation of life conditions -> formation of life -> formation of plants -> formation of complex life -> formation of mammals -> formation of humans

There is an obvious order of events. there could be millions of events in between that caused "splits" in the chain, but without a doubt our entire universe can be literally drawn in a clear order of formation.

this is of course just an example to explain my point.

No, that is an ordering of very broad occurrences that happened over very large distances, not single events. So, the formation of a galaxy in one place will not be causally connected to the formation of a galaxy at a place distant from the first. The individual stars that form are not causally linked to each other. Etc.

You are focusing on *one* chain among a great many that exist. There is no reason to assume the different chains all link up to a single precursor.

 

[Polymath257]

True... yet we know that the entire universe (as we know it) came from one nanometer (much smaller actually ) point (just as an example), wouldn't you say something made this energy be?

The observable universe was once much more compressed than it is now, yes.

But, again, to say there was something that 'made this energy be' implies the existence of time before that energy existed. But, by all accounts, energy existed whenever there was time. That means that the energy, like time itself, cannot have a cause.

 

[viole]

As i see it, the way to refute it is to show one thing that is causeless.
Not even in reality, but as a Mathematical form.

Absurd, since the very claim of a first cause is based on the predicate of a causeless thing, namely the first one. So, it is logically incoherent to deny it by showing something that it actually expects.

And that is also incoherent in general, since it is possible to have causal sequences that have no initial cause, and yet they are all caused.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Skwim]

I'm a bit late in arriving at your thread, so if my comments have already been made please disregard them.

This question is mostly to people who lack the belief in God (Mono).

Let's put aside for a second the term God and all the ways people try and define this god.

Would you agree that there must be an initial cause to everything?

Yup.

I mean that from our human POV, we today know that time had a starting point, this means that (from our POV) there was a point in our history when time "stood still". We can refer to this idea as an eternity (again, only from our POV as we don't really know what happened before that).

I would say time "didn't exist," but for the sake of your argument, okay.

Also, there has to be an event (or something else ) that started the whole process of reality. even if you somehow believe that reality started itself, this means that some sort of "reality version" existed before our reality, we can refer to this as the initial state of existence.

This means that eventually, going back chronically (events wise), there must be an initiator (regardless of what that initiator is) that was there without being initiated in the first place.

A first cause of our universe, okay.

So we can assume regardless of our belief that there was an initial event that was "placed" in what we can only describe as eternity as we have no understanding of time before our time.

Can't assume that at all. "Placed" implies something aside from and before the initial event. We would need some very good evidence before asserting such a thing. Whatcha got?

We can also have the understanding that this thing, contained within it all our reality, meaning the universe as we know it emerged from that same initiator causing our reality to become what it is.

What "thing" is this? The mysterious placer? And to assert that this "thing" contained within it all our reality is too much of a leap over a lot of necessary prerequisite evidence.

So sorry, I can't go along with your scenario here.

.

 

[exchemist]

I think you are mixing not knowing the cause to un-caused.
It kind of resembles to not knowing hence god...
Our entire universe is assumed to be a closed system. meaning that the energy it holds is bound to it.
There is nothing new in this universe.
you assume that everything just popped into existence without nothing causing it, yeah?
I find it quite weird

I am saying it could have been like that. We don't know, because there is no evidence either way. I am reminded of a discussion Polymath and I had on this forum some months ago, centred around the idea in modern physics that there are some uncaused processes.

The classic example is radioactive decay. Atoms of a radioisotope decay randomly, at a rate proportional to their number and characteristic of that isotope. There is no mechanism known for what makes a given atom decay at a given moment. There is no pattern that so much as hints at the presence of any mechanism. Applying Ockham's Razor, they are treated as uncaused events. The spontaneous emission process in decay of excited states of an atom is similar. Here, there is an immediate cause, in that according to QED the emission is stimulated by vacuum fluctuations in the EM field. But those fluctuations are themselves uncaused. They just, er, happen, from time to time.

Now, you may say, "But everything has a cause, so there must be one. We just haven't found it yet". And you might one day be shown to be right. But, as far as science goes, there is no reason to take as axiomatic "everything must have a cause". And, as there is no evidence for any cause, Ockham's Razor wins and we say, "According to our current model, there are uncaused events in physics".

 

[Polymath257]

I am saying it could have been like that. We don't know, because there is no evidence either way. I am reminded of a discussion Polymath and I had on this forum some months ago, centred around the idea in modern physics that there are some uncaused processes.

The classic example is radioactive decay. Atoms of a radioisotope decay randomly, at a rate proportional to their number and characteristic of that isotope. There is no mechanism known for what makes a given atom decay at a given moment. There is no pattern that so much as hints at the presence of any mechanism. Applying Ockham's Razor, they are treated as uncaused events. The spontaneous emission process in decay of excited states of an atom is similar. Here, there is an immediate cause, in that according to QFT the emission is stimulated by vacuum fluctuations in the EM field. But those fluctuations are themselves uncaused. They just, er, happen, from time to time.

Now, you may say, "But everything has a cause, so there must be one. We just haven't found it yet". And you might one day be shown to be right. But, as far as science goes, there is no reason to take as axiomatic "everything must have a cause". And, as there is no evidence for any cause, Ockham's Razor wins and we say, "According to our current model, there are uncaused events in physics".

I'll go one step farther. The best description of the universe we have, quantum mechanics, is inherently a non-causal theory. That alone gives us a *very* good reason to suspect that some things are uncaused. That QM has made predictions that violate our ideas about causality *and* those predictions have been shown to be correct via observation, gives us much more reason to think that many events are uncaused.

But, to go further, the very existence of causes, in and of itself, places limits on how distant events can be correlated. Examples of this are known as Bell's inequalities and Legget inequalities. And those inequallities have been shown to be violated in the real world. That gives us *strong* evidence that the specific events probed for those inequalities are, in fact, uncaused.

To go deeper would require a very precise definition of what it means to be 'caused'. But the actual observations strongly point to the lack of causality in some situations.

Now, at the macroscopic level, we get causality by averaging the randomness at the lower levels. As an example, if you flip a coin, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a head. There is essentially no predictability in that result. But, if you flip a million coins, you can say with good certainty that between 498,000 and 502,000 will be heads. That becomes predictability and thereby causality.

 

[Nakosis]

This question is mostly to people who lack the belief in God (Mono).

Let's put aside for a second the term God and all the ways people try and define this god.

Would you agree that there must be an initial cause to everything?
I mean that from our human POV, we today know that time had a starting point, this means that (from our POV) there was a point in our history when time "stood still". We can refer to this idea as an eternity (again, only from our POV as we don't really know what happened before that).

Also, there has to be an event (or something else ) that started the whole process of reality. even if you somehow believe that reality started itself, this means that some sort of "reality version" existed before our reality, we can refer to this as the initial state of existence.

This means that eventually, going back chronically (events wise), there must be an initiator (regardless of what that initiator is) that was there without being initiated in the first place.

So we can assume regardless of our belief that there was an initial event that was "placed" in what we can only describe as eternity as we have no understanding of time before our time.

We can also have the understanding that this thing, contained within it all our reality, meaning the universe as we know it emerged from that same initiator causing our reality to become what it is.

Thoughts?

I don't think we know enough to reach any conclusions about the beginning of the universe. Our perspective, our entire sense of existence is based on the idea that every beginning has a cause. So here's a beginning looking for a cause. Maybe the universe is an exception to this.

Was there something before our universe existed? Who knows. If there was, we may never find any evidence of it in our current universe.

I guess this leaves a person free to create whatever narrative about the beginning of the universe that suits their fancy. It's unlikely that anyone will ever be able to prove your narrative wrong... or right for that matter.

What would I agree on? I'd agree we don't know, probably will never know. Maybe it's fun to speculate but I wouldn't put a lot of stock into any of it.

 

[Koldo]

That's not a good analogy i think.

Think of it like so:

You have a video with 1000 frames. you play it in a loop.

now lets assume for this example, that the smallest time unit is 1 second.

you play the film in 10 FPS.

this means that the entire film is 100 seconds long.
now assume you play it in 100 fps... the events (frames) of the film are the same.. all the events in the film still take place, but not it all happens in 10th if the time.. each second now becomes much dense.

Now lets say you play this film in a speed of 1000 FPS. this means that in the smallest time unit, the entire events of the film exist. this means everything exists in the same time.

In our POV time is not relevant here.. the film is in a "freeze" state where everything happens in the same point.
For someone with a different POV of timem that for example can see 1ms instead of 1s, the film seems to move in a different "time frame"..
Hope this didn't confuse you even more

It didn't confuse me. I just have no idea how it relates to my post. Perception of time is irrelevant to my post.

 

[exchemist]

I'll go one step farther. The best description of the universe we have, quantum mechanics, is inherently a non-causal theory. That alone gives us a *very* good reason to suspect that some things are uncaused. That QM has made predictions that violate our ideas about causality *and* those predictions have been shown to be correct via observation, gives us much more reason to think that many events are uncaused.

But, to go further, the very existence of causes, in and of itself, places limits on how distant events can be correlated. Examples of this are known as Bell's inequalities and Legget inequalities. And those inequallities have been shown to be violated in the real world. That gives us *strong* evidence that the specific events probed for those inequalities are, in fact, uncaused.

To go deeper would require a very precise definition of what it means to be 'caused'. But the actual observations strongly point to the lack of causality in some situations.

Now, at the macroscopic level, we get causality by averaging the randomness at the lower levels. As an example, if you flip a coin, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a head. There is essentially no predictability in that result. But, if you flip a million coins, you can say with good certainty that between 498,000 and 502,000 will be heads. That becomes predictability and thereby causality.

Your last paragraph touches on one of the most long-lasting insights I think I had from my time at university: that order emerges, spontaneously, from disorder. This is the awe-inspiring message of statistical mechanics. I find it still a slightly mysterious and marvellous feature of the physical world that this is so.

 

[blü 2]

Would you agree that there must be an initial cause to everything?

I define a cause as a movement of energy from a region of higher to a region of lower energy, and an effect as the change that results.

So I'm drawn to the hypothesis that mass-energy (or some equivalent of it) is what exists, and that the physical phenomena of our universe, including the dimensions, are qualities or by-products of it. Thus time exists because mass-energy does, not vice versa, and mass-energy's existence is simply a datum, not itself a caused phenomenon.

The old argument from 'first cause' always had many failings, not least the egregious non-sequitur that the first cause must be God. These days it has the further problem that in quantum physics we find innumerable phenomena that are not 'caused' in classical terms, such as the spontaneous formation and instant mutual annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs (whence the Casimir effect) or the emission of any particular particle in the course of radioactive decay. These have instead to be described in terms of statistics within parameters.

While it's not clear that the Casimir effect has any relevant consequences in human terms, radioactive decay certainly can.

 

[stvdv]

Would you agree that there must be an initial cause to everything?

We, as humans, are very limited. Compared to us humans the universe is quite unlimited.

Limited beings will never be able to understand the unlimited, and the initial cause is even further away from us.

Only when we lose our body attachment/identification and merge in the universe, we will not be able to say anything valuable about this,

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Can you give me an example of something with multiple causes?

The classic example is a pencil:

I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read | Leonard E. Read

... but just about anything would do. I can't think of a single thing that only has one cause. Can you?

 

[LuisDantas]

If you will note i clearly was talking about the human POV.
I didn't say how things are experience outside the universe

I thought you meant to discuss the origin of existence instead.

 

[David T]

The jury is still out so no, I don't agree.

This book gives a possible explanation...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss/dp/1471112683

Laughed at in science as much as intelligent design.

 

[David T]

This question is mostly to people who lack the belief in God (Mono).

Let's put aside for a second the term God and all the ways people try and define this god.

Would you agree that there must be an initial cause to everything?
I mean that from our human POV, we today know that time had a starting point, this means that (from our POV) there was a point in our history when time "stood still". We can refer to this idea as an eternity (again, only from our POV as we don't really know what happened before that).

Also, there has to be an event (or something else ) that started the whole process of reality. even if you somehow believe that reality started itself, this means that some sort of "reality version" existed before our reality, we can refer to this as the initial state of existence.

This means that eventually, going back chronically (events wise), there must be an initiator (regardless of what that initiator is) that was there without being initiated in the first place.

So we can assume regardless of our belief that there was an initial event that was "placed" in what we can only describe as eternity as we have no understanding of time before our time.

We can also have the understanding that this thing, contained within it all our reality, meaning the universe as we know it emerged from that same initiator causing our reality to become what it is.

Thoughts?

You Make some sense if realty is a something. But to determine it you would have to be free from it outside of it.

If, while you are in it, and make a claim about it, as if you are independent from it thats a personal psychological issue and a troubling mental disorder called NORMAL!

So are you saying you are "normal"? In this type of discussion "normal" debates with itself a variety of views it has of reality as it is standing outside reality!

Normal seems pretty cuccoo to me but hey i am wierd....