Your conception of nothing still implicitly includes something you didn't discuss, namely *time*.
Rather than focusing on the *nihilo* in *ex nihilo*, here I'd like to focus on the *ex*. Normally when we say B was created *from* A, we mean that at some point in time A existed and was then changed into B at some future point in time. If, however, we postulate that nothingness means no time, then the *ex* in *ex nihilo* must in a sense be metaphorical.
In fact the basic General Relativistic account of the universe does in fact look like this. The universe is a 4-dimensional spacetime manifold with a singularity corresponding the the big bang, asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole. The universe itself is (eternally) formally caused by God, who remember is outside the universe, hence outside time, in the realm of forms. Asking about the first cause of the universe makes no sense since the notional of first cause only makes sense within time, hence within the universe.
I'm not sure who to reconcile this "General Relativist" account with you "Quantum mechanical" account, but then we don't know who to fully reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
More creation stories, from various cultures line up. More than most people would imagine. As you mentioned, they just use different languages. It sounds like a bunch of different cultures describing the same events but with different terminology, relationally.
I used to read about theoretical physics all the time, but stopped once I realized that most of the research was literally people being paid to disprove God. It was no longer interesting, because it was too agenda driven. Every time there is a contradiction, or a roadblock, people just make up new shit.
Modern physics starts to sound like COVID-19 masking logic. You absolutely have to wear a mask *it's a hard-fast rule* -- unless you're sitting down in a restaurant. You know, because, SARS-CoV-2 only infects people while standing, or something like that. Of course, if you question that logic, you're ostracized. Because you're not supposed to ask questions. That's not science.
What happened to *real* science, where people are trying to figure out how things work? I guess there's not enough money in that...
Plato's unwritten doctrine sounds like Vedantic thought, even down to 'shruti' which means, 'what is heard'.
The ultimate Anode, or origin of All is his 'One'. The Indefinite Dyad would equate to Vedic terms Purusha and Prakriti, generally termed pure Essence and Substance. Nothing exists without One developing 'Essence' first, pure potentiality from which form or matter (Prakriti) manifests. Guénon describes it well in Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta (but it comes up in many of his books).
Plato based his work on Pythagoras, who was taught by the Phoenicians, a form of Brahmin (I heard but haven't confirmed 'Pythagoras' was originally 'Pita Gurus'. (Father gurus.)
Unfortunately the irony is cruel- we must overcome the ego (Mary Magdalen the prostitute or maker of this physical world) to open the 'right side' of the mind (The Virgin Mary) to truly see the other worlds. This meditative principle is found in all the worlds religions.
Mer chant is the song of the sea; the Holy See claims the whole Sea, sea or Mary/Mar being the esoteric name for truth and the medium from which all is derived first by conception.
Materia Prima in an alchemic sense is the result of the biblical 'Fall.' The lack or privation is the creature operating on ego only, what Iain McGilchrist calls the the left brain.
He tries to keep the right side open using poetry, nature and artistic pursuits as one must to maintain a balanced mind.
All-left-brain, all-the-time will destroy itself. Parables in the bible refer to the necessity of meditation but it has been corrupted by left brain thought. This is long enough so no details but there are many!
'Evil' is just live backwards which is what we've been doing to build and maintain crazy clown world. Superstition needs to bow down and back away slowly now. Or meet a more vicious end, idk.
There is no vacuum. Space IS infinite potential and it is electric. Stars are 'born in a Z-pinch' involving electro-magnetism for example... The Big Bang NEVER HAPPENED.
'Nothing' or 'taking no thought' (meditation) brings EVERYthing- that is, the right brain or Spirit to balance the animal body left brain ego to create Divinity in Man.
To get above time and achieve 'eternal life', Brahma or "Christ" consciousness one must meditate without distraction, not think themselves in to a walking pretzel.
That's enough autism for now, must be time for lunch. Cheerio.
Hellenic and Nordic Gods defeat the Giants which crated it. Giants appear as Nephilim in Christianity and may well have existed.
Because we exist, IMO, we cannot imagine nothing that doesn't have something in it.
Hindus imagine reality as teh intersection of opposite forces, hot and cold : war and peace : ect.
Brahma creates worlds, their men and their Gods and Siva will destroy them when Vishnu finds them unworthy, both God eminating from sleeping Vishnu when He awakes in the stars. There is also an egg genisis, with a vibrating center and layers, and others. Some regard theology as a branch of literature. les Borges imagined Tlon, in which science is a branch of psychology!
Maybe it is.
Physics imagines aboslute forces and their relation to each other via behaviour. Extending this into thermodynamics and chemistry we have Ideal Standard States as universal references because they don't exist. Reality required an "activity coefficient" and these things do act upon one another yileidng predicative results.
Clausewitz imagined absolute poles that could be defined becasue they don't exist between which reality does exist. Total War, for instance, is throwing everything a state has onto the battlefield with no consideration of maintaining that effort for another day even if victorious. (not a good idea)
Of course, Clausewtiz would say all this is just theory thinking. Ha!
When asked what was "waving" in Schrodinger's Equations, Born proposed it was a probabilty of finding an electron in that state : a sort of desnity mostly, IMO, because it was the best anyone had. ANd, it works! But remeber that the Hamiltonian Operator was concocted for fluid wave oscillating, not probability. Dirc's matrix algebra apporach actaully makes more intuitive sense and is kind of fun up to maybe 3 atoms : molecular orbital theory.
When experimental evidence contradicts, Bohr gave us Complementarity to get around its meaning, IMO, that we still really don't know, which is where I started.
Ha!
Yes, a high probility for one thing does imply that the other isn't impossible. Complementarity seems to say that both were possible from conception of the analysis. Freezing temperatures are not impossible this time of year because freezing temperatures are possible to begin with. If they weren't, we wouldn't worry about it.
I think there will always be a mystery in it.
Every day, we open a new box, Schrodigner's Cat awakens too, liing on the bed, until one day, he isn't.
George Boole may have anticipated Langan regarding the importance of nothingness. Check out these remarks from "Logic and Reasoning" (1855?) --
I am not sure that we can picture to ourselves absolute non-existence, the non-existence not only of the eternal world, but of ourselves, — of the ego and the non-ego together. And yet the *intellectual* ideas of existence and non-existence are seen to form the basis of all our formal thought, and to determine its processes, — for they not only are the ground of the laws of those direct operations to which our finite conceptions are subject, and which we can perform without stepping beyond the finite, but they are the sources of the logical relations which I have termed the categories of quantity and which determine a priori the possible forms of all inference.
Alright... Take #2. Hopefully I am using the Quantifiers properly this time! :"P
""Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory""
This is just : For Every "~A", "B" is the Case.
A = Forbidden, B = Compulsory
So if we check the negation, it would read as follows:
For SOME "A", "~B" is the Case.
Rewriting it:
For SOME "Forbiddens", "not Compulsory" is the case.
Elongated form:
There are some Forbiddens, for which it is the case that they are not Compulsory.
Turning this into Understandable, Human Language:
""Somethings that are Forbidden, are not Compulsory.""
Quick CHECK:
Well, intuitively there are restrictions and taboos in the various Nomic principles ("Laws" of Logic, Quantifiers for Formal Language, etc) we use in things like Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, etc. These "Forbiddens" however are not adhered to (and need not be as many have shown in their works) to "still do their jobs". This demonstrates (by counterexample) the truth of the negation.
In Classical Normative Ethics for example, the starting restriction /"forbidden" is that ethical statements MUST BE propositional, and have truth valences that are definite. This however is not compulsory/"mandatory" when doing Normative ethics, since you can adopt something like Non-cognitivism when it comes to your Meta-ethical stance.
Maybe I just have more nous for this (heh), but I think Langan et al are wrong in their conception of nothingness. Absolute, true nothingness means there is *nothing* there. Not just a lack of restraints on potentiality, but a lack of potentiality as well.
Creation ex nihilo & creation ex chaos are thus still different concepts, though possibly God made chaos ex nihilo, and from there the rest of creation:
"In the beginning God created the heavens & the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."
This becomes something like this...
"When time began, God created the heavens & the universe. Now the universe was without Aristotelian form & lacking in any actuality, not even light, and God was superior to & separate from the chaos."
> But…. the contemporary materialist would then immediately be forced to explain why the universe created by the Big Bang came out so fine-tuned for life.
I don't see why this would need to be explained. It's just the way it is. *However*, what needs to be explained is how was it 'decided' which of the many universes would come into being. Consider: it didn't have to be this one, we could just as easily have lived in a Minecraft-world. Why this Universe, with these laws, when there are infinite possiblities? And just so we're clear: "collapse of the wave function" is itself the product of the collapse of the wave function. :) The decision to decide randomly has to be decided upon before it is acted upon. ;)
> the distinction between “creation ex nihilo” and “creation from chaos” dissolves
While I can't vouch, this is *probably* true. After all, the defining feature of "nihil" is that there's nothing to it - no order, no structure, no nothing. And clearly things can be created "out" of it. So, since definitions and properties align, nihil and chaos are probably the same thing.
Unbound telesis or chaos or pure potentiality is not nothing though, it is if nothing else the potential for a thing and hence not an absolute negation of things as would be required for creation ex nihilo to be a valid descriptor.
Incidentally, what do you think of the idea that all minds are in reality a simple temporary process of disassociation in one great overreaching mind? My awareness that I am is the same as your awareness that you are and all that. It's an idea that has come up in a number of esoteric traditions independently and the idea seems to have a lot of merit to it imo.
"" Everything not forbidden is compulsory "" -> Gell-Man's Totalitarian Principle.
The implication is as follows:
"" IF something is Compulsory THEN it is not forbidden ""
The negation would be:
"" Something is Compulsory AND it is forbidden ""
So... basically "can we find something out there which is Forbidden AND Compulsory?". The answer to this is... YES.
Namely, those Consistent Formal Systems in which "arithmetic can be carried out".
Any such system By Necessity (i.e. "Compulsion") cannot prove whether *some* sentences are True or False. These sentences are (valence-wise) "Forbidden" for evaluation.
Your conception of nothing still implicitly includes something you didn't discuss, namely *time*.
Rather than focusing on the *nihilo* in *ex nihilo*, here I'd like to focus on the *ex*. Normally when we say B was created *from* A, we mean that at some point in time A existed and was then changed into B at some future point in time. If, however, we postulate that nothingness means no time, then the *ex* in *ex nihilo* must in a sense be metaphorical.
In fact the basic General Relativistic account of the universe does in fact look like this. The universe is a 4-dimensional spacetime manifold with a singularity corresponding the the big bang, asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole. The universe itself is (eternally) formally caused by God, who remember is outside the universe, hence outside time, in the realm of forms. Asking about the first cause of the universe makes no sense since the notional of first cause only makes sense within time, hence within the universe.
I'm not sure who to reconcile this "General Relativist" account with you "Quantum mechanical" account, but then we don't know who to fully reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
This is a great read!
More creation stories, from various cultures line up. More than most people would imagine. As you mentioned, they just use different languages. It sounds like a bunch of different cultures describing the same events but with different terminology, relationally.
I used to read about theoretical physics all the time, but stopped once I realized that most of the research was literally people being paid to disprove God. It was no longer interesting, because it was too agenda driven. Every time there is a contradiction, or a roadblock, people just make up new shit.
Modern physics starts to sound like COVID-19 masking logic. You absolutely have to wear a mask *it's a hard-fast rule* -- unless you're sitting down in a restaurant. You know, because, SARS-CoV-2 only infects people while standing, or something like that. Of course, if you question that logic, you're ostracized. Because you're not supposed to ask questions. That's not science.
What happened to *real* science, where people are trying to figure out how things work? I guess there's not enough money in that...
Plato's unwritten doctrine sounds like Vedantic thought, even down to 'shruti' which means, 'what is heard'.
The ultimate Anode, or origin of All is his 'One'. The Indefinite Dyad would equate to Vedic terms Purusha and Prakriti, generally termed pure Essence and Substance. Nothing exists without One developing 'Essence' first, pure potentiality from which form or matter (Prakriti) manifests. Guénon describes it well in Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta (but it comes up in many of his books).
Plato based his work on Pythagoras, who was taught by the Phoenicians, a form of Brahmin (I heard but haven't confirmed 'Pythagoras' was originally 'Pita Gurus'. (Father gurus.)
Unfortunately the irony is cruel- we must overcome the ego (Mary Magdalen the prostitute or maker of this physical world) to open the 'right side' of the mind (The Virgin Mary) to truly see the other worlds. This meditative principle is found in all the worlds religions.
Mer chant is the song of the sea; the Holy See claims the whole Sea, sea or Mary/Mar being the esoteric name for truth and the medium from which all is derived first by conception.
Materia Prima in an alchemic sense is the result of the biblical 'Fall.' The lack or privation is the creature operating on ego only, what Iain McGilchrist calls the the left brain.
He tries to keep the right side open using poetry, nature and artistic pursuits as one must to maintain a balanced mind.
All-left-brain, all-the-time will destroy itself. Parables in the bible refer to the necessity of meditation but it has been corrupted by left brain thought. This is long enough so no details but there are many!
'Evil' is just live backwards which is what we've been doing to build and maintain crazy clown world. Superstition needs to bow down and back away slowly now. Or meet a more vicious end, idk.
There is no vacuum. Space IS infinite potential and it is electric. Stars are 'born in a Z-pinch' involving electro-magnetism for example... The Big Bang NEVER HAPPENED.
'Nothing' or 'taking no thought' (meditation) brings EVERYthing- that is, the right brain or Spirit to balance the animal body left brain ego to create Divinity in Man.
To get above time and achieve 'eternal life', Brahma or "Christ" consciousness one must meditate without distraction, not think themselves in to a walking pretzel.
That's enough autism for now, must be time for lunch. Cheerio.
Hellenic and Nordic Gods defeat the Giants which crated it. Giants appear as Nephilim in Christianity and may well have existed.
Because we exist, IMO, we cannot imagine nothing that doesn't have something in it.
Hindus imagine reality as teh intersection of opposite forces, hot and cold : war and peace : ect.
Brahma creates worlds, their men and their Gods and Siva will destroy them when Vishnu finds them unworthy, both God eminating from sleeping Vishnu when He awakes in the stars. There is also an egg genisis, with a vibrating center and layers, and others. Some regard theology as a branch of literature. les Borges imagined Tlon, in which science is a branch of psychology!
Maybe it is.
Physics imagines aboslute forces and their relation to each other via behaviour. Extending this into thermodynamics and chemistry we have Ideal Standard States as universal references because they don't exist. Reality required an "activity coefficient" and these things do act upon one another yileidng predicative results.
Clausewitz imagined absolute poles that could be defined becasue they don't exist between which reality does exist. Total War, for instance, is throwing everything a state has onto the battlefield with no consideration of maintaining that effort for another day even if victorious. (not a good idea)
Of course, Clausewtiz would say all this is just theory thinking. Ha!
When asked what was "waving" in Schrodinger's Equations, Born proposed it was a probabilty of finding an electron in that state : a sort of desnity mostly, IMO, because it was the best anyone had. ANd, it works! But remeber that the Hamiltonian Operator was concocted for fluid wave oscillating, not probability. Dirc's matrix algebra apporach actaully makes more intuitive sense and is kind of fun up to maybe 3 atoms : molecular orbital theory.
When experimental evidence contradicts, Bohr gave us Complementarity to get around its meaning, IMO, that we still really don't know, which is where I started.
Ha!
Yes, a high probility for one thing does imply that the other isn't impossible. Complementarity seems to say that both were possible from conception of the analysis. Freezing temperatures are not impossible this time of year because freezing temperatures are possible to begin with. If they weren't, we wouldn't worry about it.
I think there will always be a mystery in it.
Every day, we open a new box, Schrodigner's Cat awakens too, liing on the bed, until one day, he isn't.
Then, what happens to the box?
Ha!
George Boole may have anticipated Langan regarding the importance of nothingness. Check out these remarks from "Logic and Reasoning" (1855?) --
I am not sure that we can picture to ourselves absolute non-existence, the non-existence not only of the eternal world, but of ourselves, — of the ego and the non-ego together. And yet the *intellectual* ideas of existence and non-existence are seen to form the basis of all our formal thought, and to determine its processes, — for they not only are the ground of the laws of those direct operations to which our finite conceptions are subject, and which we can perform without stepping beyond the finite, but they are the sources of the logical relations which I have termed the categories of quantity and which determine a priori the possible forms of all inference.
Am I the only one who immediately notes that another name for Prima Acta and Prima Potentia are Logos (Law) and Chaos?
Alright... Take #2. Hopefully I am using the Quantifiers properly this time! :"P
""Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory""
This is just : For Every "~A", "B" is the Case.
A = Forbidden, B = Compulsory
So if we check the negation, it would read as follows:
For SOME "A", "~B" is the Case.
Rewriting it:
For SOME "Forbiddens", "not Compulsory" is the case.
Elongated form:
There are some Forbiddens, for which it is the case that they are not Compulsory.
Turning this into Understandable, Human Language:
""Somethings that are Forbidden, are not Compulsory.""
Quick CHECK:
Well, intuitively there are restrictions and taboos in the various Nomic principles ("Laws" of Logic, Quantifiers for Formal Language, etc) we use in things like Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, etc. These "Forbiddens" however are not adhered to (and need not be as many have shown in their works) to "still do their jobs". This demonstrates (by counterexample) the truth of the negation.
In Classical Normative Ethics for example, the starting restriction /"forbidden" is that ethical statements MUST BE propositional, and have truth valences that are definite. This however is not compulsory/"mandatory" when doing Normative ethics, since you can adopt something like Non-cognitivism when it comes to your Meta-ethical stance.
Maybe I just have more nous for this (heh), but I think Langan et al are wrong in their conception of nothingness. Absolute, true nothingness means there is *nothing* there. Not just a lack of restraints on potentiality, but a lack of potentiality as well.
Creation ex nihilo & creation ex chaos are thus still different concepts, though possibly God made chaos ex nihilo, and from there the rest of creation:
"In the beginning God created the heavens & the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."
This becomes something like this...
"When time began, God created the heavens & the universe. Now the universe was without Aristotelian form & lacking in any actuality, not even light, and God was superior to & separate from the chaos."
> But…. the contemporary materialist would then immediately be forced to explain why the universe created by the Big Bang came out so fine-tuned for life.
I don't see why this would need to be explained. It's just the way it is. *However*, what needs to be explained is how was it 'decided' which of the many universes would come into being. Consider: it didn't have to be this one, we could just as easily have lived in a Minecraft-world. Why this Universe, with these laws, when there are infinite possiblities? And just so we're clear: "collapse of the wave function" is itself the product of the collapse of the wave function. :) The decision to decide randomly has to be decided upon before it is acted upon. ;)
> the distinction between “creation ex nihilo” and “creation from chaos” dissolves
While I can't vouch, this is *probably* true. After all, the defining feature of "nihil" is that there's nothing to it - no order, no structure, no nothing. And clearly things can be created "out" of it. So, since definitions and properties align, nihil and chaos are probably the same thing.
Is not “potentiality” a “thing”?
If it is, then you don’t have “nothing”
Unbound telesis or chaos or pure potentiality is not nothing though, it is if nothing else the potential for a thing and hence not an absolute negation of things as would be required for creation ex nihilo to be a valid descriptor.
Incidentally, what do you think of the idea that all minds are in reality a simple temporary process of disassociation in one great overreaching mind? My awareness that I am is the same as your awareness that you are and all that. It's an idea that has come up in a number of esoteric traditions independently and the idea seems to have a lot of merit to it imo.
"" Everything not forbidden is compulsory "" -> Gell-Man's Totalitarian Principle.
The implication is as follows:
"" IF something is Compulsory THEN it is not forbidden ""
The negation would be:
"" Something is Compulsory AND it is forbidden ""
So... basically "can we find something out there which is Forbidden AND Compulsory?". The answer to this is... YES.
Namely, those Consistent Formal Systems in which "arithmetic can be carried out".
Any such system By Necessity (i.e. "Compulsion") cannot prove whether *some* sentences are True or False. These sentences are (valence-wise) "Forbidden" for evaluation.
Good effort my friend, but Mr Gödel says "Nope".
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/