Can something happen without anything else causing it?
This is a concept that has been discussed for a long time ; you are in good company contemplating this fundamental paradox.
@eierschaukeln@kbin.earth !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
I’ll try to bridge science, philosophy and spirituality, as I usually do. To me, there aren’t clear boundaries between them bc, to me, they’re highly complementary: Science offers the skeptical-empirical rigor and materiality, Philosophy offers the paradoxical questioning and Spirituality emerges from subjectively perceiving the previous two.
I start with the hypothesis that the universe always existed. In such a case, the Big Bang isn’t the beginning: rather, it’d be some kind of cyclical cosmic phenomenon where matter and/or the fabric of spacetime continuum collapse (due to expansion) only to explode and expand again. This would respect the Laws of Thermodynamics (and Lavoisier Principle) because there’s no energy nor mass being created nor destroyed, just transformed, endlessly. Big Crunch deserves mention bc it’s exactly what it’s about.
There’s also the controversial theory of Zero-sum, where the universe doesn’t actually exist. It may sound crazy (We are existent… or are we? Vsauce song starts playing), but it would also respect the aforementioned laws: there’s no need of creation or destruction if the overall sum of everything equals to a round nought.
We could also mention the Multiverse theory, String (M-Theory), and Big Bounce. In such a scenario, this universe is just one of countless universes, so the factor sparking it into existence would be outside it, thus outside (beyond) space and time.
The latter takes us into philosophy, the Aristotle’s Prime Mover. It could be seen as the “thing” beyond this universe, except that it isn’t a “thing” because it has no “thingness”, but this lack of “thingness” would imply non-existence, except that it’s not something nonexistent either. Here is where human language struggles to define it: language requires “thingness” and temporality, yet the Prime Mover has neither (and it isn’t an “it” so it could “have”).
This takes us to spirituality. Many religions oversimplify this as “creator deity(ies)”, and many (if not all) religions tend to give it agency and shape. While I do have some religiosity (Luciferianism) and tendency of personification (e.g. Lilith as both a red-haired woman and an owl), I also hold the belief that cosmic forces have no particular form, it’s just me trying to give some Order to Chaos… And that’s what the whole existence seems to be about: Ordo ab Chao, a cosmic, eternal tug-of-war where it’s guaranteed that the “sparks” of cosmic order will eventually decay back to a soup of primordial chaos, only to the very chaotic nature of this soup to emerge order again. It’s akin to a Double Pendulum, where sometimes the apparent rhythmic motion vanishes into chaotic motion just for the rhythm to unexpectedly reappear later, but it’s just the Cosmos: endless and uncaring about lifeforms, for life is just stardust.
I could explain more, but I’m limited to 3000 chars so I must end: Cosmos always existed and never existed.
Good text 👍 Faster to read through than it looks. The result probably is that we just don’t exist 🙂
Even the standard formulation of newtonian dynamics admits nondeterminism. (This requires a non-Lipschitz setup to work; and in any case it doesn’t describe the world we live in. Also it’s a mathematical description, not the real thing.)
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Technically, yes.
Norton’s dome - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton’s_dome
There are some good videos out there that can explain it a bit better than this
Wow, I’d never heard of that.
I wonder if there’s a quantum mechanical equivalent you could make. This has the loophole that we don’t live in a purely Newtonian universe.
Many of the interpretations of quantum mechanics are nondeterministic.
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Relational quantum mechanics interprets particles as taking on discrete states at random whenever they interact with another particle, but only in relation to what they interact with and not in relation to anything else. That means particles don’t have absolute properties, like, if you measure its spin to be +1/2, this is not an absolute property, but a property that exists only relative to you/your measuring device. Each interaction leads to particles taking on definite states randomly according to the statistics predicted by quantum theory, but only in relation to things participating in those interactions.
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Time-symmetric interpretations explain violations of Bell inequalities through rejecting a fundamental arrow of time. Without it, there’s no reason to evolve the state vector in a single time-direction. It thus adopts the Two-State Vector Formalism which evolves it in both directions simultaneously. When you do this, you find it places enough constructs on the particles give you absolutely deterministic values called weak values, but these weak values are not what you directly measure. What you directly measure are the “strong” values. You can interpret it such that every time two particles interact, they take on “strong” values randomly according to a rule called the Aharonov-Bergmann-Lebowitz rule. This makes time-symmetric interpretations local realist but not local deterministic, as it can explain violations of Bell inequalities through local information stored in the particles, but that local information still only statistically determines what you observe.
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Objective collapse models are not really interpretations but new models because they can’t universally reproduce the mathematics of quantum theory, but some serious physicists have explored them as possibilities and they are also fundamentally random. You assume that particles literally spread out as waves until some threshold is met then they collapse down randomly into classical particles. The reason this can’t reproduce the mathematics of quantum theory is because this implies quantum effects cannot be scaled beyond whatever that threshold is, but no such threshold exists in traditional quantum mechanics, so such a theory must necessarily deviate from its predictions at that threshold. However, it is very hard to scale quantum effects to large scales, so if you place the threshold high enough, you can’t practically distinguish it from traditional quantum mechanics.
I think a lot of proponents of objective collapse would pick a bone with that, haha, although it’s really just semantics. They are proposing extra dynamics that we don’t understand and can’t yet measure.
Relational quantum mechanics interprets particles as taking on discrete states at random whenever they interact with another particle, but only in relation to what they interact with and not in relation to anything else
What’s the definition of interact here? Does it have an arbitrary cutoff like in objective collapse? You can make a non-separable state as big as you want.
This is also the first I’ve heard anything about time-symmetric interpretations. That sounds pretty fascinating. Does it not have experimenter “free will”, or do they sidestep the no-go theorems some other way?
So saying we stick with objective collapse or multiple worlds, what I mean is, could you define a non-Lipschitz continuous potential well (for example) that leads to multiple solutions to a wave equation given the same boundary?
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It appears that every action is a reaction (or to use the more customary terminology, every action is an effect of some number of causes, and is in turn a cause for some number of effects).
However, it must either be the case that there was a first action, which would necessarily be an uncaused effect, or that time is either a loop or is infinite in extent, such that there is no beginning and thus no need for an uncaused effect.
And none of those possibilities is really intellectually satisfying, so it’s an open question (which doesn’t stop people from insisting on the nominal truth of one or another of them).
And even with the loop or eternal universe, you can ask where it came from. Like why is it there, and not nothing?
Thanks for putting so much effort in your answer. If you think about it, it’s kinda scuffed and you either end with existence is not possible or there was an action that was not caused by one. Just like you said.
This is the kind of paradox that leads us (I mean humans more generally) to look for some fundamental assumption we’re making about time that will turn out to be wrong. I assume that’s true although I wonder whether it’s literally impossible for us to even imagine how time “truly” works, let alone measure it.
Are we looking at the physical universe, or are looking at psychology, or philosophy contexts?
All of them
Yes and maybe not then. Look at Newton’s law, even it deals with psychology if not physical action and realize that we (under some theories) have free will to make the actions that will cause those. So something will happen to make you (or someone else) do an action and even if you (or they) don’t like it it happened. You can look at it from 1000 angles but either way someone with that personality would make it happen that way.
So gotta just accept, it is what it is, try and make it better and I hope it works out. Mean unless you can see the future and change things, we all are who we are, may. It be worth knowing or hanging out with but somebody probably made something you don’t want to happen, happen. C’est la vie.
That strongly depends on your reference frame. As in, what system are you looking at? Where are you drawing your box? If your box is around the entire universe, then yes, every action is a reaction stemming from the big bang, with very few notable exceptions pertaining to black holes that I wont go into.
However, if your reference frame is a hand and a ball, then the hand pushing the ball is an original action, the ball moving its reaction.
What do you mean about the black holes?
It’s also worth noting, I think, that the universe might be spatially infinite, which makes “box” a funny way of saying it.
Only the second time is a re-action.
Why did the first thing happen on its own though?
