I don't see the clear distinction of a welfare state where the citizens eschew responsibility for the welfare of the public. Generally, governments that don't answer to the citizens are not interesting in caring for the people. If a government does implement welfare programs, it is almost certainly done under the influence of its citizens. Therefore, the welfare state is basically a mechanism for which the people choose to use.

The difference seems to be that a welfare state is a system that requires the citizens to participate in the welfare of others versus leave it to individual people to decide for themselves if and how they participate, which suggests a lack of responsibility upon the citizens in the case of a non-welfare state.

One can debate about how efficient government welfare programs operate, but that is an orthogonal argument to whether to have them or not. If there is a will, then the programs can be made to operate efficiently.

One can also debate how efficient it is for individuals to act independently for the welfare of others. Care will likely go only to those that get noticed, while leaving others forgotten. Scammers, and people who are better able to market themselves will likely get abundant care while the forgotten others fall through the cracks. Also, there will likely be more feast and famine cycles (e.g. homeless shelters and food banks buried in volunteers over the Thanksgiving holiday season but struggling other times of the year).

You mentioned the argument that if the people expect the government to take care of the welfare of people, that they won't care to do anything themselves. There are also counter examples, such as the homeless kids in our streets. Many of these kids ran away from home to escape sexual abuse and other horribly abusive situations. We generally understand that our government won't come scooping them up to safety, yet rarely do any of us inconvenience ourselves the slights to help them. In general, homeless people are seen as a nuisance.

From what I observe, I believe that, generally, a person's willingness to step up and do something for the welfare of others correlates to a multiple of how convenient it is and how much credit they get for it. If it is inconvenient, they will look away and hope someone else does something. If they will not be recognized for their contribution, they will be even less likely to inconvenience themselves over it.

When they come up with "happiness" metrics, rating the countries in the world on happiness, it is always the more welfare like states (e.g. Norway, Finland) that come out on top. Counties of which the state does less for the welfare of its citizens score lower. That would be a strong suggestion that welfare states generally do a better job than those that leave it to the good nature of their citizens.

This question doesn't make sense to me.

If space can bend, what is the space that it is bending in? If there is no space outside of it, then there is no framework for bending to occur in.

Years ago as a math tutor in college, I saw first hand that intelligence is mufti-dimensional. You cannot squish it down to a single metric. Different people learn different methods of thinking. So many of them struggled with the rigid logic of mathematics but excelled in other ways of thinking. As a tutor, I focused on observing their thinking and doing my best to adapt to it, and that was surprisingly successful.

Considering that, I claim that trainability may be one way to measure one aspect of intelligence, but not overall intelligence.

Also, there is the challenge of measuring trainability. Your dog may enjoy the training you provide so it is eager to go along with it. Another pet may not be so motivated for various reasons, such as personality, health (e.g. distraction from physical discomforts), etc. can factor in as well. Therefore, observing training results is not good measure of trainability.

It might be helpful to be more specific. For example:

"mind type" - Do you mean a human brain, with the biological structure and limits of the hypothetically smartest being that is still considered human? Or do you mean any neural net structure of the same pattern and biochemical nature of the human brain, but without any limits on size, resources, lifespan, etc.?

"comprehend" - Do you mean comprehending at least in an abstract way, or truly understanding it? For example, it is trivial to build mathematical models for space-time with more than 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time, and perhaps other kinds of dimensions, but could we truly comprehend them?

Do we get other tools, such as computers, to help with simulations and analysis?

If our experience is simulated, then could that outer environment have something other than spatial dimensions and time? Our brains seem to be limited to modelling in a framework of 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. Perhaps that outer environment has more dimensions, or other kinds of dimensions that are not like time and space as we understand them. (by "dimension", I mean something that provides some kind of scale that separates components in a way to permit relationships/interactions, for complex mechanisms to form)

Nothing in relativity or quantum mechanics indicates that the Planck length (and Planck time) are some kind of limit to the scale of the universe. It is a common misconception that the universe is like a granular field of pixels of Planck dimensions.

When you say "the meaning of life is peace", do you really mean "what I want in life is peace"? I think it could be argued that life is detrimental to peace.

The analogy I often use is with water pipes. Voltage corresponds to the water pressure in the pipe, while amps corresponds with the rate of water flow (e.g. liters per second). Ohms would be sort of like the friction from the surface of the pipe (give me some fudge room here). Therefore, you are dividing the pressure by the friction, which determines rate that water flows through the pipe. The friction on the pipe does not impact the overall pressure, as long as our pump has enough capacity to keep up with the flow. Just like with the electrical model, the resistance does not impact the overall voltage, as long as your power source can keep up with the amps.

I think you are not alone in finding it odd, but that is what is confirmed by the famous "double slit experiment". There are different variations of this experiment, but the ones I'm thinking of are when particles are shot through one at a time, as it demonstrates the particle interacting with itself.

In Quantum Mechanics, there are a couple of primary interpretations: "many worlds interpretation" and "copenhagen interpretation". I think reviewing the many worlds interpretation helps it seem somewhat plausible without losing all of your sanity.

I think what you mean by "logic" here is known irrefutable facts.

Couldn't I say that I don't know anything other than this fact (that I don't know anything (else))? Everything else that we know is based on some assumptions that we believe in. We could go run a bunch of scientific experiments that tell us all sorts of interesting things, but all of that is based on some assumptions.

The line between belief and established irrefutable facts is blurry. I could believe that there is a god that is a purple stegosaurus swimming through the universe, but I think very few people would agree with me and I don't have much evidence to convince them. I could believe gravity pulls things down, and we could spend days or years dropping thousands upon thousands of rocks on the ground until we decide the evidence is strong enough to consider it an irrefutable fact that gravity pulls things down. But, still, those rock dropping observations are based on beliefs. The difference is that the claim of gravity pulls things down is a lot more convincing than that of the purple stegosaurus god.

For me, it seems that to tell a lie, the information you are dispensing must meet two requirements:
1. It is incorrect.
2. It was your intention for it to be incorrect.

If you think it's a dog and you say it is a cat, and it turns out it really is a cat, then you gave correct information. I think of that as a failed attempt to lie.

As a child, I tortured myself trying to figure out the causality problem: how anything could exist at all. I wondered that we are stuck with a nothing -> something derivation, which did not make any sense to me. The explanations I heard of seemed to start with a "nothing" that seems really like some kind of "something" (e.g. quantum flux, a mechanism that provides for our laws of physics, a mechanism that would allow time to start, etc.). It seemed clear that my concept of existence and reality had to be fundamentally wrong.

What helped my sanity on this was when I started to try and understand what absolutely nothing was, as it was the only thing I could imagine that could exist without an explanation. I figured it could not have physics (what mechanisms are driving the behavior described by those laws?), or properties (what is holding onto that property, or lack thereof?). And, well, I could not say that Thing A exists inside a realm of absolute nothingness, nor could I say that Thing A does not exist. There was nothing that was holding the existence of Thing A, or lack thereof.

This got me thinking about existence differently than my brain was trained for. It seemed relative, in that given any sort of hypothetical realm that included a description of something we might see as "existence" for this realm to exist, then that realm exists, but only with respect to itself. If the hypothetical description of this realm includes mechanisms to allow for things such as our laws of physics, and for existence (with respect to that realm or with respect to something within that realm), and allows for universe to big bang out and form people sitting on some planet thinking about it, then that that could make sense to me as what we have.

I don't think there will be no upper bound with technological development. It will be limited by whatever is possible by the laws of physics. If we don't destroy ourselves first, it would seem that we are not far away from developing generalized artificial superintelligence. When this happens, it is likely that it will quickly develop all useful technological capabilities developed to the laws of physics that could ever be discovered, and we would just sit at that ceiling. Maybe some super hard problems that require incomprehensible amounts of computation or resources may take longer, but, for the most part, new developments will stop.

However, maybe with just a little bit more technological advancement than where we are at, we understand what is going on in the brain and how it contains consciousness. Then, maybe, we learn how to transfer our consciousness to machines. Then, there are many practical reasons it makes sense to move our civilization into a virtualized world. Currently we are devouring enormous amount of resources to keep billions of humans comfortable while killing off our planet, dealing with the unpleasant limits of our biology such as health problems, dealing with limits to what we can have due to exorbitant costs of luxuries and pesky limits of the laws of physics, etc. If we become virtualized, all these issues go away as we only need to keep a computer running somewhere in the universe, and we live in a "magical" universe that allows us whatever we want that we can imagine.

I suggest that this could be the reason why we have not detected advanced civilizations, as they would likely want to keep that computer well hidden to protect themselves.

With a virtualized environment like this, would it be a lot like this singularity?

Is there anything that is not statistically uncommon (or "unnatural", or "weird", or whatever terminology we want to use for it) in some way? We would have to be able to find something that when we look at all of its attributes, nothing about it is uncommon. Such a thing would not be detectable because it has no distinguishing features.

Are you sure we can resist our inclinations?

When I was a child, I concluded that you cannot willingly choose to do something other than what you most want to do at that moment. My brother tried to disprove me by slapping himself, and I told him that he wanted to disprove me more than not slap himself, so he slapped himself a little harder. It was kind of fun because my brother usually was the bully.

In all these subsequent years, I have yet to see an example of myself or anyone willingly choose to do something other than what you most want to do at that moment. If you think of an example, take a closer look at what you really wanted to do.

With that, this magical mysterious "free will" starts looking like a simple and deterministic function that can be done by a computer running an AI program. Run all the known options through a goal evaluation function to calculate a metric and select the one with the highest value (or if there is a tie, just pick the first one, last one, or whatever).

If everything has already been thought of, how would AI (or aliens) change it?

I'll defer to others for specific answers, but for many of those, if they were not in balance, then there would be instability. If the laws of physics allow for an imbalance, then the only universes that would have humans on some planet pondering these things would be those that are stable enough to support that. For example, consider #3. If it were not balanced, and in consideration of #16 going on everywhere, it would seem the universe would quickly become inhospitable to humans (unless the imbalance was super tiny).

All we know is our experience of the past (as memories) and the future (as anticipation) in this current moment. We don't know that either the past or the future exists, has existed, or will exist. It is possible that there is no other moment of time then right now, and in this moment of right now, we are structured to have memories that appear to be of previous times, and we have thoughts that appear to anticipate a future. Also, it is possible that all moments of time are currently happening, and at each slice in time, our experience is of that slice as "now", the past as memories (with some fuzziness, and the future as anticipated). There are other possibilities (e.g. our experience of "now" could be at an endpoint in the time line). All of those possibilities allow for us to experience this current moment as we do, with it looking like time is flowing from past to future, so we cannot prove one over the other.

As a child, I tortured myself trying to understand how this universe exists (create something out of nothing, or something always was...). That led me to thinking about nothing, and when I thought about it, I came to a different understanding of existence, and solved my little existential issue. I will share some of those thoughts here, if they make any sense, but they are nothing more than my childhood thoughts.

I concluded that nothing has no laws of physics, because those laws imply some sort of underlying mechanism that causes the behavior described by those laws. It has no properties, because there is nothing to substantiate, or "hold onto" those properties.

Then I thought about existence in relation to this, and pondered that it might be relative, in spite of my intuitive sense of it being a more absolute concept. I concluded that with nothing, there is nothing to substantiate the existence of a something, or the lack of existence of it. Then existence of a something within this realm of nothing became unclear, and after torturing myself some more, I eventually concluded that anything that could theoretically be described, of which that description contains within itself a mechanism that allows for it to exist with respect to itself, does exist, with respect to itself, but does not exist outside of itself. Then you can take such a description and add to it stuff to allow for the laws of physics, the big bang, etc., and viola, the universe exists. Problem solved.

These concepts have held with me over the years.

So to me it seems like nothing starts looking a lot like what apokrisis described above as the opposite of nothing: absolutely every possible something, except that those various somethings do not exist with respect to each other.

You don't seem to understand me. It's possible that I was not clear, given that is a common tendency with me. :)

But, I was not claiming that there are multiple universes. I was simply stating it as a possibility, given the limits of what we know. The original question was about whether or not the universe was designed or random, and it is a possible explanation that allows for the "random" option (I will use random broadly here for the sake of simplicity, to mean anything that varies over a range of options). I am not declaring that things are this way; it is just a hypothetical possibility and nothing more, given the constraints of what we currently know.

I don't know how atheism fits into this. I actually consider myself quite spiritual, but those spiritual feelings are irrelevant here.

As far as I know, science does not know yet why these constants are set the way they are, or of any relationship between them. The multiverses is one option being presented to explain why the universe is so finely tuned to allow us to be here, given that astronomically low probability that it would be set that way if the properties were set randomly.

Until a scientific experiment is performed that adjusts our confidence level past a threshold that a scientific theory can be accepted that multiverses exist or not, it is in the realm of the unknown. This does not mean that we can assume they exist. But is also does not mean that we can assume they do not exist.

You seem to be assuming they do not exist until we know otherwise; therefore, we can conclude that a designer created this universe. Your concluding sentence was:

Thus, physics reveals that our universe is fundamentally intentional, both in its laws and in the values of its constants.

. What I am saying is that no, we cannot make such conclusions yet because there are other hypothetical options of which we do not yet know enough to rule them out with high confidence.

Part of your logic was to rule out the random option on the assumption that it is not as parsimonious as the conclusion that the universe is designed. That is, given these two possibilities:

A: There are multiverses and these have a range of parameters such that there is reasonable probability that at least one of them is finely tuned to support us being here.

B: There is either one universe or they are all set to the same parameters, but there is also a designer with the intelligence and capability to set the universe to be finely tuned to support us being here.

You seem to assume that B is more parsimonious and, thus, must be assumed to be true. It is hard for me to agree with that.

I am puzzled by your discussion. At the 20,000ft level, I read it like so:

1. There are things we don't know about the universe. [me: I agree]
2. Therefore, it must be like this. [me: uh.... wait;.. what?]
3. Therefore, because it is like this, we can conclude the universe is fundamentally intentional. [me: let's go back to 2 again?]

There is speculation that evidence of multiverses may be found in CMB radiation so it's not ruled out yet if any of them are testable scientific theories.

Science has no theories as to why these constants are set the way they are, or any relationship between them, so we do not know that if there are other universes, how their settings would compare to ours. Without additional information, you could be right that they are likely the same, or they could vary across the different universes. We cannot make any assumptions without additional information. I don't share the assumption that it is reasonable to assume they are fixed as it seems that (barring additional info) having the values flow through the ranges seems simple and frees us from having to explain why they are fixed to certain values-- a good challenger for the most parsimonious assumption.

I'm not arguing that we can conclude the universe was not intentional, just that the option of it being random is still a perfectly viable option given what we know.

However, if we do come up with a good reason to conclude the universe was intentional, then that implies the universe is only part of a larger realm of which includes the entity that caused the universe as it intended. But then we just moved the original question (is universe intentional or random) to this larger realm.

why would anyone care what some others are consenting to and doing amongst themselves, as long as it does not impact me? — jajsfaye


Because human behavior is so interesting. You could be straight as the day is long, and still find it interesting what kind of lives homosexuals lead. And in reverse, gay people find the various doings of heterosexuals to be interesting as well.

-Bitter Crank

You're correct. Maybe I should have replaced "why would anyone care..." with "why would anyone be concerned about...".

I think that in these discussions it really isn't about defining exactly what it is. It seems to me these discussions are more about triggered emotions in response to it, and emotions are not real good at logic.

If it wasn't about triggered emotions, than why would anyone care what some others are consenting to and doing amongst themselves, as long as it does not impact me?

How is anything clearly immoral? Morality is heavily nuanced by our values and our psychology. What is immoral to one person may be considered moral by someone else. Therefore, your argument may be valid for you and others who share similar values and psychology, but may not be valid for someone else.

As an example, look up the thought experiments: "trolly problem" (choosing to kill one person to save 5 others) and the related "fat man problem" (pushing a fat man to his death to stop a runaway train to save others). One can make logical rules for what is most moral (e.g. actively choosing to kill one person to save more than one person results in a net effect of saving lives), but different people will choose differently, and often people will chose to save one life for many in the "trolly problem" but choose not to do so for the "fat man problem".... and the main difference seems to be that with the trolly problem, they are flipping a switch (not directly interacting with the person they are choosing to kill) vs with the other problem they have to directly interact with the man to kill him. You see similar behavior in everyday life, as "nice" people can sometimes be angry and confrontational when driving a car, or on online forums, where there is some depersonalization.

In the case of pacifism, your choice to avoid war may allow a tyrannical leader to walk in, send all the people that the tyrant considers undesirable to death camps, and cause the rest to suffer through a miserable obedient life as peasants in service to the tyrant. Your choice might have resulted in killing more people and caused much more suffering by choosing a pacifist approach. Perhaps we don't know what the outcome will be and have to make a guess of what seems best.

We can also take this in all sorts of directions, any of which could be argued by someone to be the moral decision, while considered immoral by someone else. One can argue that the society is killing a lot of other plants and animals to sustain itself, and therefore it is moral to kill them off to save those other plants and animals being killed. One could argue that a lot of people are suffering, and if we just kill off everything on Earth quickly, we can finally put an end to all that suffering (afterall, there are a lot of lifeless planets in the universe and there's nothing wrong with them). One could argue that the natural path of evolution is to let the strongest survive, so letting the tyrant conquer and dominate is a natural process that should be allowed. One could argue that nature has all sorts of examples of things killing things for evolution and survival, so it's no biggie for one group of people to kill another group, and let the strongest survive. One could argue that choosing the most peaceful loving action is always the best, regardless of what other people do.

I think we can rule out the option that everything that exists was designed or intended to be this way, as that implies there is something in addition to "everything that exists" that did that design, so it's not really everything that exists. Unless we consider that maybe everything that exists designed itself, and deal with how that got started since you need everything that exists in place to design the everything that exists.

About the other part, it might be interesting to google "finely tuned universe". There, you will read about a cosmologist named Martin Rees who identifies six physical constants within the universe that science has no theories why they are set the way they are, or of any relationship between them, suggesting they are set randomly (let's set aside the discussion about whether there is such a thing as randomness to keep this simple). If so, then the odds that they would be set in a way that provides for a stable universe that allows human life to form is astronomically small. This has been fueling multiverse theories. These theories basically visualize that there are an infinite or astronomically large number of big banged out universes out there, kind of like a sea of bubbles, and a very super tiny fraction of them would have universes that are stable and suitable for life. Of course any humans out sitting on some planet pondering these things are going to be in one of those rare universes that is set just right to allow for them to exist, so as long as there are enough of these universes out there that it is likely that at least one of them has this, then it is irrelevant how improbable it is for a specific bubble.

Re: "Homosexuality is contrary to evolution since it does not reproduce itself biologically."

Assuming this is true (I recall reading articles about evolution disputing this assumption, but that was a long time ago and I don't know where to find it.), but assuming it is true, how does it support an argument opposed to homosexuality? Are we assuming that actions that do not support biological reproduction are bad?

I could see how one might use it as an argument favoring homosexuality over heterosexuality, given that the human population has grown many times higher than what it has been for most of human existence and there's strong evidence we are consuming the Earth's resources faster than they are being replenished. Personally, I'm straight and not advocating this argument, but just pointing out that there seems to me to be a chasm in the logic when this argument is so often used against homosexuality.

Perhaps the mysterious decision making process of free will is more of an illusion than we realize? Can you think of a time when you willingly chose an option that was not what you most wanted to do at that moment?

I remember as a child, I told my older brother that it was impossible to choose to do something that is not what you most want to do at that moment. He tried to prove me wrong by slapping his head and said "See, I didn't want to slap my head by I did it.", and I explained that he wanted to prove me wrong so that is what he most wanted to do at that moment.

With this, it would seem that a computer program could have a function, Desirability(X) that returns a measure of desirability of a choice, X. It could be written like this: IF X == "eating a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie" THEN return 1000000, ELSE IF X == "eating moldy green bread" THEN return -2000. Then it could have a higher level function, FreeWill(Y) where Y is a set of choices, that simply walks through all the elements within Y and returns the one that returns the highest value of Desirability().

We can expand on this with more complexity, with many more choices. Perhaps it has internal state that it uses in the desirability function. For example, if it is very hungry, then the desirability of eating the chocolate chip cookie goes way up, while eating the moldy green bread might go up just a little bit.

Wouldn't this computer program look like it is making free will choices?

Oh this thread covers so much, but back to your original topic, the problem of where did something come from, and what is nothing? I spent years of my childhood torturing myself trying to make sense of this. The answer, and peace of mind, for me came from thinking about just what "absolutely nothing" is, as that was the only thing that made sense that could be without being caused.

I don't claim this to be valid reasoning. It is just my childhood thoughts. But it makes sense to me to this day so I share it with you.

I thought that absolutely nothing had no mechanisms within it. No time. No space. No laws of physics, for the laws of physics describe describe very precise mathematical terms a set of complex behaviors, which suggested to me that some kind of mechanism was operating that causes those behaviors. No endless sea of quantum flux, or no other mechanisms that would allow a universe to big bang forth.

Then I started to think that existence was a property, and that something must be there to persist the existence of something --or the lack of something. For example, this white and brown coffee cup in front of me exists, and it continues to exist across a span of time... something seems to be persisting that state of existence. Meanwhile, the purple kangaroo in this room does not exist, and continues to not exist, so something must be persisting the lack of existence of the purple kangaroo just as something is persisting the existence of this coffee cup.

From this, I concluded that if there was absolutely nothing, the existence of something in it was undefined. I could not say that this something exists (within this realm), and I also could not say that this something does not exist.

It was easy for me to understand that something exists, such as this cup, or that something does not exist, such as the purple kangaroo. But to understand how something could not be defined to exist or not exist was more challenging. I spent a few days struggling to comprehend what that could mean before I came to a conclusion.

The conclusion that I came to was that existence was relative. If, hypothetically, it were possible to form a description of something of which, within that description, allowed for itself to exist, then, I concluded, that it exists (with respect to itself). Therefore, if, hypothetically, it were possible to describe something that provided for its existence, and provided the mechanisms that allows for the laws of physics, and for the big bang, for our universe to be created, then this universe exists within that realm.

This explanation has and continues to work for me. It provides for an infinite variation of every possible option for the universe to exist, with respect to its realm of existence. Perhaps only an infinitesimally small percentage of those are configured in a way that allows for humans to be in there, pondering things. However, as long as there is a non-zero probability, the one we are in is going to be configured as needed to allow for us to be here.