Something From Nothing?

It's possible that something came from nothing via the same process that causes something to come from nothing at every moment in every point in space. Look it up - it's called the "Casimir Effect" and it means that matter is continually popping in and out of existence at every point in space. I don't know. But I do know that, no matter how unlikely it was, it only had to happen once.

I staff the night desk at a hotel. And they just set up internet access in the back office. Woot!

Do you mean that it has infinite volume, or that its volume is finite but unbounded? I confess I have a hard time wrapping my head around how a universe could go from infinitely small to infinitely large without being finitely large in-between.

And you come to know this through your own vast formal, academic training?Or isn't this just a case of "I don't have it, so it must not matter?"How can intuition be a guide to a universe that, from what we observe, resolutely refuses to consistently obey principles we think are common sense?

Because the warping of spacetime has very real effects that we can observe. It's ludicrous at this point to suggest that space is nothing; that it's merely a stage for matter and energy to playact on. Hardly - space itself is a participant as well. That's not why we do it. We do it because gravity has real, observable effects on time. In fact it has the same effect that motion has on time, suggesting that gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable to the universe. That has the implication that what we call gravity isn't actually a force, an "action at a distance", but simply straight-line motion through curved, warped space. Fine. Some entity, outside the universe, not made of matter. How, exactly, is this entity able to cause things to occur in the universe? Magic? By definition you've restricted God from acting in this universe. Sure, but that's hardly a reason to believe in something. After all, you can apply that reasoning to literally anything at all. Not very useful, then. Funny, I look at the world around me and can only conclude that this God you speak of can't possibly exist. Maybe our personal feelings on the issue aren't a good basis for trying to arrive at a description of what is real and what is not? Maybe we should try something a little more... objective?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 01-13-2004]

By putting something there. What's nothing going to do? Stop you? Exert a force? It's nothing!

No, it's something - a thought. An idea is still something. Only if you don't know what Occam's Razor says. God represents, by definition, an untestable unknown. Therefore Occam's Razor cuts it away.

No. You're confusing "trust" and "faith", much like Buz has been doing."Trust" is when you believe someting because of the evidence. Scientists trust their theories because they are supported by a preponderance of evidence."Faith" is when you believe something in spite of the evidence. Religious people have faith in God in spite of a lack of evidence that he exists.So, no. It's not all "faith" - unless you want to expand the meaning of faith so as to be completely useless.

Correct. The have trust in each other's theories, insofar as they are supported by evidence. You mean, your faith in God. After all, there's no evidence that he exists. Does it matter? For as much as we characterize this debate as "evolution vs. creationism", all I really care about is whether or not the mechanisms of evolution are sufficient to account for the diversity of life on Earth. As long as you think that statement is true, you're an evolutionist. If you also believe that the mechanisms of evolution themselves were created by God, I guess you could claim to be a creationist, too, though most creationists will disagree. But ultimately I think you have the right to decide what you want to call yourself.

I assert the opposite: it takes reality to make an idea. Ideas are symbolic thought, like language; symbols evolved as references to real objects.If you trace the history of written language, you see that it always starts with pictoral representations of real objects - pictograms - then the use of those real objects to refer to abstract ideas - ideograms.Since thought and consciousness itself appear to emerge from the brain's facility with language it stands to reason, therefore, that consciousness develops from rudimentary abilities to construct mental models of reality. Not the other way around.

I followed your methodology and was unable to replicate your results - God did not communicate with me. I'm going to have to conclude that your hypothesis is falsified.

Out of curiosity, why do you think this is so?For that matter, how sure are you that humans are assigning true content in data? Every human I know, when they parse words and concepts, do so by recourse to other words. It's arguable whether our symbolic consciousness is ever really able to get at the "real" content of an utterance.If I constructed a machine that was essentially a sufficiently sophisticated look-up table, and given utterances, returned other utterances to such accuracy that it appeared to actually understand the content of the utterances, how would you tell the difference between that and a human level of "understanding"?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-24-2004]

And a human neuron simply adds up to a threshold value and then fires. You're simply contrasting two entirely different levels of representation. I guess I'm not really impressed. That they're not good at it now is not evidence that they'll never be good at it.I guess I find it jumping the gun a little to claim that we'll never have machine intelligence when we don't even understand what human intelligence is.

Drop it into the "Human Intellgence" topic, if you want. I think that you need to establish that a human brain isn't a Turing machine, and that the kind of content that you're referring to can't be represented as digital data. I realize that. But emotions stem from inherently physical responses - glands, etc. - and therefore I contend that they could be simulated.