The universe as a sentient being
Discussion
Super Sonic said:
NRG1976 said:
What is the definition of theory? Genuine question, if I suggest something in the absence of any evidence would that constitute a theory?
I think that would be more a conjecture or a hypothesis. If it is backed up by evidence, and can make predictions which turn out to be true, it becomes a theory.Edited by NRG1976 on Saturday 22 June 20:38
There are other definitions though.
Panamax said:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Meanwhile, back in reality, the fundamental questions remain the same.
except that it turns out what you might call attempts to answer that question have been quite useful, really, haven't they? I know it was coined as a way to mock philosophical or more accurately theological speculation without evidence or experiment, but the same thought process is where hypotheses and experiments come from. informed speculation is valuable in science. Meanwhile, back in reality, the fundamental questions remain the same.
Edited by PlywoodPascal on Saturday 22 June 21:30
PlywoodPascal said:
except that it turns out what you might call attempts to answer that question have been quite useful, really, haven't they?
Isn't it something that only religious people debate though? It depends on angels being real doesn't it?'Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, written c. 1270, includes discussion of several questions regarding angels such as, "Can several angels be in the same place?". However, evidence that the question was widely debated in medieval scholarship is lacking' - Wikipedia
Edited by Super Sonic on Saturday 22 June 21:33
Super Sonic said:
PlywoodPascal said:
except that it turns out what you might call attempts to answer that question have been quite useful, really, haven't they?
Isn't it something that only religious people debate though? It depends on angles being real doesn't it?
Panamax said:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Meanwhile, back in reality, the fundamental questions remain the same.
Explain have rocks created life?Meanwhile, back in reality, the fundamental questions remain the same.
Life evolved from nothing. Yet people are now deciding what are good science theories and bad based on their own ideology.
We just don't enough about the universe not to say that if life can come from nothing than obviously there are things we cannot fully comprehend.
mickythefish said:
Explain have rocks created life?
Life evolved from nothing. Yet people are now deciding what are good science theories and bad based on their own ideology.
We just don't enough about the universe not to say that if life can come from nothing than obviously there are things we cannot fully comprehend.
Rocks haven't created life. Life evolved from nothing. Yet people are now deciding what are good science theories and bad based on their own ideology.
We just don't enough about the universe not to say that if life can come from nothing than obviously there are things we cannot fully comprehend.
Life ultimately evolved from 'nothing' if the big bang theory is true. Unfortunately, conditions at and before the big bang cannot be tested by science as it stands today, so the nature of the apparent 'nothing' is unknown.
People are deciding what are good and bad theories based on the testability of those theories, how they stand up to experimentation etc.
Not sure what your last sentence means, but the last bit about there are things we cannot fully comprehend could be true but that doesn't mean we have to make things up.
mickythefish said:
Life evolved from nothing.
What?Life evolved from non-living matter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
juliussneezer said:
Yes but the universe can't be sentient lolmickythefish said:
juliussneezer said:
Yes but the universe can't be sentient lolSuper Sonic said:
there are things we cannot fully comprehend ... but that doesn't mean we have to make things up.
^^ Bingo. No "God of the Gaps".Strangely, the concept overlaps with a rather splendid speech by Donald Rumsfeld during one of the Iraq wars,
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones."
juliussneezer said:
mickythefish said:
juliussneezer said:
Yes but the universe can't be sentient lolPlywoodPascal said:
just to point out the existence of evidence or not has no bearing on whether the universe can be sentient or not, only on what we can safely conclude about whether it is sentient or not.
Not sure I understand this.As I understand it, in general, if we have evidence for something, we can say it exists. If it exists, then by extension it can exist.
If we have no evidence, then we cannot say either way if something exists. As to wether something can exist, I'm not so sure.
Super Sonic said:
PlywoodPascal said:
just to point out the existence of evidence or not has no bearing on whether the universe can be sentient or not, only on what we can safely conclude about whether it is sentient or not.
Not sure I understand this.As I understand it, in general, if we have evidence for something, we can say it exists. If it exists, then by extension it can exist.
If we have no evidence, then we cannot say either way if something exists. As to wether something can exist, I'm not so sure.
i.e. what I know (or am able to know) about whether you ate this evening does not change the fact of you having eaten (or not). it just means that I cannot know whether you did (or did not). Your 'state' is what it is, whether I (can) know about it or not.
as you say, there are only:
- things we have evidence for and may safely conclude are true
- things we have no evidence for for, and thus cannot safely make any conclusion as to their truth or falsehood
but a thing can be true, even if we do not have any evidence for it. we just cannot then know it to be true (until, perhaps, we later get some evidence for it).
a good example is... I dunno.. oxygen. oxygen in the atmosphere was there being breathed by generations of humans before one of us (actually, several) amassed sufficient evidence to know that it was true that oxygen existed in the atmosphere. the previous lack of evidence did not mean there was no oxygen in the atmosphere.
Edited by PlywoodPascal on Saturday 22 June 23:38
Edited by PlywoodPascal on Saturday 22 June 23:40
Edited by PlywoodPascal on Saturday 22 June 23:42
So if you saw me eat dinner you would know I had dinner but if you didn't see me eat you wouldn't know if I had dinner or not? That makes sense, but I'm not sure if that means you cannot know.
Do you mean cannot know with the evidence you have 'now', or it is not actually possible to find out?
To return to your original point, if there were evidence that something did exist, surely that proves it can, so I would say only a lack of evidence about wether something does exist leaves us unable to say if something can exist.
Do you mean cannot know with the evidence you have 'now', or it is not actually possible to find out?
To return to your original point, if there were evidence that something did exist, surely that proves it can, so I would say only a lack of evidence about wether something does exist leaves us unable to say if something can exist.
Edited by Super Sonic on Sunday 23 June 00:02
I don’t have evidence of SuperSonic eating dinner either, so my current theories are that either he can photosynthesise, or that he is a being of pure energy existing in a parallel universe and using quantum entanglement to communicate with us. Here is a link to a New Scientist article about symbiotic algae in corals, and here is one about quantum entanglement, neither of which I understood.
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