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Why did our universe begin? (Split from Atheist wins Nobel Prize thread)

bilby said:
...Using this heuristic, we can surmise that mathematics and the hard sciences - physics, chemistry, biology - are likely a good reflection of reality;
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Coherent laws of physics, mathematics, logic, etc. which frame reality are, themselves, primary facie evidence which suggests a Higher Order, design, teleology....

Science-is-not-only-compatible-with-spirituality-it-is-a-profound-source-of-spirituality..jpg
 
Lion IRC said:
bilby said:
...Using this heuristic, we can surmise that mathematics and the hard sciences - physics, chemistry, biology - are likely a good reflection of reality;
Click to expand...

Coherent laws of physics, mathematics, logic, etc. which frame reality are, themselves, primary facie evidence which suggests a Higher Order, design, teleology....

View attachment 31883
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I disagree. Systems can exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them. Therefore there need not be foreseen design intended to explain apparent design.

Also, the existence of rules also need not be evidence of intention for those rules. The fact is that we don’t know why those rules exist anymore than we would know why a putative god responsible for creating those rules would exist.

And as for the Sagan quote, spirituality is not the same thing as religion or theism, and I would be surprised if Carl intended that quote to be interpreted as such.
 
Tigers! said:
Shadowy Man said:
I disagree. Systems can exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them. Therefore there need not be foreseen design intended to explain apparent design.
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Do you have some examples of such systems?
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Other than the universe itself and all the various systems in it?

I came to this conclusion first when learning about Langton’s Ant.

Atomic structure has fairly simple rules of electric attraction and quantized eigen states and yet all of chemistry basically arises from this.

Hydrodynamics has only a couple of basic equations governing it but the number of phenomena that arise are quite numerous and varied.

Many chaotic systems arise from simple formulae.

I guess what I’m saying is that I find it completely palatable that complex behaviors are emergent properties of simple rules and that obviates the need of a creator that needs to be more complex than the entities it created.

Langton’s Ant was the final step on my journey to an intellectually honest atheism.
 
Tigers! said:
Shadowy Man said:
I disagree. Systems can exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them. Therefore there need not be foreseen design intended to explain apparent design.
Click to expand...

Do you have some examples of such systems?
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I would be damned hard pressed to think of an example where a system does not exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them.

One example: The motion of every planet, moon, asteroid, dust grain, comet, etc. in the solar system is governed by only the law of gravitation and F=dp/dt. But the motions of each and every thing in the solar system is quite a complex system since the motion of every single thing is continually being gravitationally influenced by everything else.
 
Shadowy Man said:
Lion IRC said:
bilby said:
...Using this heuristic, we can surmise that mathematics and the hard sciences - physics, chemistry, biology - are likely a good reflection of reality;
Click to expand...

Coherent laws of physics, mathematics, logic, etc. which frame reality are, themselves, primary facie evidence which suggests a Higher Order, design, teleology....

View attachment 31883
Click to expand...

I disagree. Systems can exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them. Therefore there need not be foreseen design intended to explain apparent design.

Also, the existence of rules also need not be evidence of intention for those rules. The fact is that we don’t know why those rules exist anymore than we would know why a putative god responsible for creating those rules would exist.

And as for the Sagan quote, spirituality is not the same thing as religion or theism, and I would be surprised if Carl intended that quote to be interpreted as such.
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And frankly, it doesn't matter.

Lion constantly confuses his faith in powerful people and institutions for a natural law, and reaches the false conclusion that atheists and rationalists will be more easily swayed by arguments that come from people like Sagan, or Dawkins, who Lion has identified as 'leading atheists'. But like most reasoning, this is yet another example of religion getting causality backwards.

Theists give more weight to utterances from authorities. Atheists give more authority to individuals based on their utterances.

The pope is right because he's the leader. Sagan is a leader because he's right - and like anyone else, when he's wrong (and nobody's infallible), rational people will discard his erroneous statements just as they would no matter who uttered them.

Lion seems incapable of grasping this, which is a sad indictment of the power of theistic indoctrination at an early age. His ability to reason was deliberately and cruelly stunted by his upbringing, which falsely made a virtue of loyalty and respect for authority.
 
fromderinside said:
Why questions are linked to how questions and how questions demand empirical response. I'm not sure a dirty, little, evil, atheist disqualifies one from caring nor answering why questions.
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According to Lion we shouldn't care about truth because we're atheists.
 
GenesisNemesis said:
fromderinside said:
Why questions are linked to how questions and how questions demand empirical response. I'm not sure a dirty, little, evil, atheist disqualifies one from caring nor answering why questions.
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According to Lion we shouldn't care about truth because we're atheists.
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Does that not follow from the theist logic? If god is true and atheists disbelieve in god then atheists don’t believe in truth. QED.
 
Shadowy Man said:
GenesisNemesis said:
fromderinside said:
Why questions are linked to how questions and how questions demand empirical response. I'm not sure a dirty, little, evil, atheist disqualifies one from caring nor answering why questions.
Click to expand...

According to Lion we shouldn't care about truth because we're atheists.
Click to expand...

Does that not follow from the theist logic? If god is true and atheists disbelieve in god then atheists don’t believe in truth. QED.
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Well no, "atheists don't believe in truth" is a different statement than "atheists shouldn't care about truth".
 
Lion IRC said:
Why did our universe begin?
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We don't know that our universe had a beginning.
We don't know that a cause is required for universes to begin.

Further, for things to change, time has to pass. Prior to the beginning of the universe, there would have been no time for a cause to bring about a change (from a non-universe to a universe) since time would not have existed. Your argument is based on unsupported assumptions, and also appears to to be self contradictory.
 
Tigers! said:
Shadowy Man said:
I disagree. Systems can exhibit behaviors more complex than the rules that govern them. Therefore there need not be foreseen design intended to explain apparent design.
Click to expand...

Do you have some examples of such systems?
Click to expand...

The game of cricket is played using fairly simple rules that define how the game is played. The rules can be codified in a small booklet with just a few pages. Yet every time the game is played, a complex series of events driven by many variables plays out in front of our eyes. The way the ball is delivered is dependent on the physical and mental conditioning of the bowler, the trajectory of the ball is effected by weather and the condition of the pitch, the way the ball is struck (or not) depends on the physical and mental conditioning of the batsmen, and so on. Many variables come together to shape every event that transpires on the field, in a process that is too complex to predict with precision even though the laws describing how the game is played are simple and easily defined.

That is just one example. Another example would be weather, and in the bigger picture, climate. Both are described by simple, well defined rules, but the resulting weather and climate can exhibit behavior much more complex than the rules.
 
Another excellent example is the boardgame 'Go', which is particularly popular in Japan.

The rules are incredibly simple, and there's only a handful of them. But the games that are played by those rules are so difficult to predict that, long after chess computers reached the point where they could routinely win against grand masters, Go playing computers are unable to beat the top human Go players.

There are over 2.49 Billion (with a B) ways for the two players to play just their first two moves each. So brute force algorithms are on a hiding to nothing.
 
There are many good examples of complexity emerging from simplicity. (Supposedly it may have been Aristotle who first pointed out this phenomenon.) The way complicated multicellular creatures arise when cells all have the same genome is amazing. And programs that play Chess or Go well have strategies that their own creators do not understand.

bilby said:
Another excellent example is the boardgame 'Go', which is particularly popular in Japan.

The rules are incredibly simple, and there's only a handful of them. But the games that are played by those rules are so difficult to predict that, long after chess computers reached the point where they could routinely win against grand masters, Go playing computers are unable to beat the top human Go players.
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I believe your information is out-of-date. As late as the 1990's, most computer scientists thought that expert Go play was a long ways away, but that Game has also succumbed to DeepMind's methods. Here's a 90-minute documentary on the program called Alpha Go.
[YOUTUBE]WXuK6gekU1Y[/YOUTUBE]
Alpha Go defeated the top professional player in Europe, but could it defeat Lee Sedol, the best human player in the world? Many, including Lee Sedol himself, were confident that that would be impossible. A five-game match was arranged in 2016, man vs machine.

Lee was stunned to lose the first three games. In one game Alpha Go shocked the world by playing a shoulder hit on the fifth row, a play no professional would ever make. By the fourth game, with Alpha Go ahead 3-0 and certain to win the match, humans were almost in tears; even those on the computer side seemed to be hoping Lee would win a game.

Ninety minutes is a long watch for all but avid Go fans. You can skip to 1:05:50 if you wish, to see the crucial position in Game 4. Lee Sedol thinks for several minutes, and at 1:06:52 in the video he plays a wedge tesuji. Alpha Go hadn't seen this coming, starts making bad news, resigns. Humans celebrate in the streets. The final match score was 4-1, with Lee Sedol (who'd been confident he'd win 5-0), now proud that he didn't lose 0-5. A few years later, knowing that computers could only get better and that, at best, he could only hope to remain the top human player, Lee Sedol retired from the world of professional Go.

In the following Youtube, you can see the humans laughing at Alpha Go's 5th-row shoulder hit. Alpha Go won that game.
[YOUTUBE]HT-UZkiOLv8[/YOUTUBE]
 
bilby said:
Another excellent example is the boardgame 'Go', which is particularly popular in Japan.

The rules are incredibly simple, and there's only a handful of them. But the games that are played by those rules are so difficult to predict that, long after chess computers reached the point where they could routinely win against grand masters, Go playing computers are unable to beat the top human Go players.

There are over 2.49 Billion (with a B) ways for the two players to play just their first two moves each. So brute force algorithms are on a hiding to nothing.
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This is trivial.
Its like saying the decimal system of counting is very basic yet it can be used to express a gazillion different complex combinations of numbers.
1234567890
2345678901
3456789012
95857565554535251505
99x88x776

You haven't increased what was there to start with.
 
Swammerdami said:
...Lee was stunned to lose the first three games. In one game Alpha Go shocked the world by playing a shoulder hit on the fifth row, a play no professional would ever make. By the fourth game, with Alpha Go ahead 3-0 and certain to win the match, humans were almost in tears...
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In other breaking news...
Usain Bolt comes second in sprint race with a Porche 911 GT3. Spectators in tears as it becomes obvious that a machine has finally become superior to humans.
 
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