Do you care what happens next?

I just finished reading a piece on the possibility of using heavy particle "time markers" in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to determine whether a Big Crunch preceded the Big Bang. The Big Bang or Big Crunch? Revealing the beginning of the universe from astrophysical signals.This is not about the physics, which, like most modern physics, I cannot follow far past analogy. Give me that old Newtonian universe! A 3-rail bank shot is about the best I can do. Word of caution: my browser goes mad at that site, apparently under ad attack, and I somehow posted 4-5 duplicates of my reply to a comment, shown below. I'm posting the exchange--his overweening despair and my pompous defense of knowledge--in the interest of full disclosure. This thread isn't about that, either.What I want to know is whether or not you care how the world ends? Whimper into the cold dark? Crunch and bang? Crunch and out the other side, making a helluva good universe next door let's go?If you don't care, do you have a preference? I don't mean a preferred scientific theory, either, but a preference based on esthetics, philosophy, spitefulness, your mood today or whatever.There's no rush.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

quote:

---

Is it pointless, or just without a point? The final analysis of all the *time markers* still leads to an inevitable dead end, the point at which the search for the answer is merely a circular path of reasoning within the limits of observation.

​

To what end? Even if there were a final answer, what then? Is it useful in any way? Extrapolating Drake and Fermi postulations, the answer is a rsounding NO. The answer of our beginning, and our end, carries no weight or meaning whatsoever.

​

In the cosmic scale, we and all that we may divine to know is no more important than a pissant striving to understand past/present/future. There is no real gain to either pursuit. Knowledge of that sort is not power, it is the source of madness.

​

Posted by: Picard, James | January 25, 2016 at 01:34 PM

​

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

​

Surely declaring any knowledge useless before it is gained is a greater madness.

​

The greatest human miseries spring from ignorance: dissipating ignorance is in itself a good.

​

At the most trivial level, the pursuit of knowledge empowers human capabilities to reduce suffering and increase pleasure in myriad ways.

​

You impose a pissant's perspective on human endeavor and knowledge while claiming an infinite vision of human possibility. Your own hubris contradicts your assertion.

​

Posted by: Omni | January 25, 2016 at 03:27 PM

---

It does, and with some of my favorite Frost: you have to suspect he favored the ice. I'm asking in part because, to my surprise, I find myself preferring the possibility of a continuing journey; not mine, particularly (I'm already tired), just someone's.Is this what moves deists?I've always thought mortality a blessing for the individual and a necessity for evolution. I wonder, should we find the universe rife with intelligent life, like an emergent property of matter, if atheists like me might not have to ask altogether different questions than we do: not about gods, more different than that.I surprised myself with my emotional response to the question. I appreciate your reply.

Yes. Exactly.I joked here a little while back that I hoped against a cyclic universe because I never wanted to watch another GOP debate. Since then, an unsettling 'that's just not true' has simmered in my back brain. Human history, yes, but not most individual humans. I think individual madness is nearly always a failure of our primitive wet hardware...a bit of bad protein that raises the dickens in our heads.Aren't our mass insanities more a function of the drive to own and master than the drive to know? Ahab wanted to master and destroy Moby Dick, not to know and understand him, or to make a friend; both are human, but I think the latter closer to the norm.Why do I care? That's what I'm wondering. Not for the first time, you're helping to explain myself to me better than I can. That's why I asked the question here. I can think of no better place to take it.

I think you've definitely sorted Picard's argument in your first post. Thanks for the reply here.A little imagination suggests other limits to his point.While what happens in that far-off future isn't going to affect us physically, conceivably what happens now could affect what happens then and after.In a cyclic universe where information isn't destroyed in singularities--neither all that outlandish as cosmogynic outlandishness goes--the state of affairs now, and how the universe ends billions of years from now, could shape the next expansion.I'm not not yet content to accept the insignificance of any event in this universe. If a cyclic universe routinely gives rise to constants inducive to sentience, you have to wonder how dynamic the role of sentience may be in that cycle.But I also refused to believe my first Easter ducky was dead, so you can take all that with some considerable salt.

Hi, Faith.I didn't see what you've deleted, but I hope you will still respond to the topic. I was looking forward to your response.I understand your answer will be framed by your religious faith. I'd still like to hear it.Edited by Omnivorous, : .

Hi, Faith.Upon reflection, I can see that answering my question on its terms would require you to set aside your strongly held religious beliefs. For you, the universe is a grand stage on which God and humanity enact the Passion Play; a question that presumes the fate of the universe depends solely upon the past and present state of the universe is nonsensical to someone who believes all will be determined by the will of God.Does that sound right? I was trying to suggest how profound our differences are on that question without prejudice against your view.In brief, what we observe about the universe suggests it may come to some kind of end. Some believe it will continue to expand and cool into an eternal cold darkness (if time makes any sense at that point), some that the universe cycles back, collapsing again into an infinitely dense point before being reborn in another Big Bang. There are other options, but these are two popular flavors.My question started when I read a comment elsewhere, appended to an article on research to determine which end was likely, suggesting it was madness to care how it all ends, because we (and presumably all of humanity) will be long gone when the end comes.My surprise was realizing that I care about how it ends. I don't want the heat to go out and the lights to go off forever. I don't especially care about the fate of humanity, but I've discovered I care very much about the existence of a universe where intelligent life continues to explore beauty and wonder; your beliefs, I think, suggest a perfected eternity of beauty and wonder.So, as I said, the premises are so diametrically opposed to your beliefs that the question may remain philosophically/religiously nonsensical. I appreciate your sincere attempt to clarify the question.

I don't feel the sun is obliged to rise tomorrow.But I still prefer that it did.Like Frost, I have a preference on bigger things as well.

On this one, I agree with Faith's larger point.I think we're special. Not unique entirely, certainly, but human beings at their best are magnificent creatures. We know time and space, past and future, cause and effect in ways unqiue in their depth and scope; that we make our will part of what shapes so much of our world is unique. The horizons of our knowledge and our technological power widen almost faster than our eyes and minds can open to accept them; but both do, faster and faster. That does make us special as well as especially dangerous.My personal moral foundation is that knowledge makes us moral agents. Because we lack the innocence of ignorance, we bear responsibility for our actions.* On that basis, I believe, we are responsible both to each other and to life in general. In my lost paradise, the willful, unnecessary infliction of any death or suffering is the mark of Cain.I think our sense of special moral agency is intuitive, important and true. Religion courts it, but the recognition that we alone of all creatures appear as significant actors on the moral stage is far older than religion.Clearly, by those lights we haven't done well, but I don't think we'll improve by embracing the notion that we're essentially just another animal. It's valid science (without the 'just'), I guess, but where will it take moral philosophy? If science has something to say to religion, should it be, "We're nothing special, get over yourself."?All life is special to me; all matter is pretty dang remarkable, existence itself the most extraordinary. So I appreciate the vanity of cosmic special claims from scantily furred mammals.But it appears to me that, so far, on this planet, we are unique in our fusion of moral and physical power. Some day, I hope, we'll have company and merely be uniquely human rather than uniquely intelligent in a small pond.I agree with much of your critique of organized religion, and the dark engines of belief you speak of in your post; probably most. Aw heck, pretty much all of it. If more religious folks truly followed their founders rather than their contemporary factions, more of them would arrive at a sense of reverence and stewardship to the world. Organized religion is a bad influence on genuinely religious people.But I agree with Faith that you don't have to be a Christian (or religious at all--I'm a strong atheist) to object to a reductionist view of our kind. **I get there with a moral philosophy quite different from hers, but I get there special. ***
_____________________________________________________*See also Spiderman.
**: Not saying you're being reductionist, just being wary of it.
***: No, not on the short bus, jar.

quote:

---

Sometimes it's just this simple.
Sometimes life is just this simple.
Sometimes life is really just this simple.

---

The Bottle Rockets, Dog

And we can replicate all those things with technology. All nature has to do is show the monkey something... I don't understand what is mooted by the commonality of life. Barring self-destruction, we're special enough to become far more powerful than we are. We may succeed in abstracting intelligence from the biological, pressing the limits of immortality and the supranatural. Already we're impressive enough to extirpate thousands of species (each of which had something important to tell us about life) and to alter an entire planet's climate.We won't escape self-destruction if we don't find the right compass. When you ask someone to surrender their broken moral compass, you need to have a better one on offer; due to the nature of magic beans, it has to be special.

Yes it does.

Morality concerns consequences. Only science has proven itself capable of weighing consequences with any accuracy. A morality that eschews our sharpest picture of the world is blind. That's where we agree, although the world largely finds that notion quaint, the religious and the irreligious alike. And that, of course, is where we disagree. Yes. Sometimes. If we don't find our way to a moral stewardship of the world and each other, we will not ony die but die out, and take the animals with us. I don't want to get sidetracked into a critique of God or theology in this thread, either [please, everyone, don't], but I know the theological answer, too, and as a child found it wanting. I still do: hell is an immoral proposition. Were it real, that's where I would belong, shaking a moral fist at immoral heaven.You and Sartre intersect on the necessity of choice, near where you and I intersect on moral agency. We must choose; there is no exit from that. I appreciate your thoughts, Faith, while I'm sorting these questions out again for the umpteenth time.My apologies to anyone who finds this all too self-important. It's important to me, for sure, and a proper task for an aging man:"Work, for the night is coming..."

It's not obvious to me. I agree we can live fulfilling lives regardless, but whether or not all this really matters-- in some larger way that we would care about if we knew--is an open question.

Bravo. Well said.

Like it was yesterday.