Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

Consul wrote: September 24th, 2018, 8:17 pm
devans99 wrote: September 24th, 2018, 6:03 pmThe transfinite numbers are IMO nonsense. What is numerical about a quantity like the cardinality of the set of natural numbers. Transfinites are concepts not numbers and a flawed concept too.
It's a mistake to suppose that the rejection of infinite/transfinite numbers entails the rejection of infinite/transfinite multitudes or pluralities or collectives of numbers or other kinds of things. For you can consistently reject the Aleph numbers as pseudo-numbers—and literally call infinite sets numberless—and affirm that there are infinitely/transfinitely many natural numbers. Then, to do so is not to say that there are infinitely many natural numbers because the cardinality of their set is the transfinite number Aleph-0, but that there are infinitely many of them because for any finite subset Sn of them there is a larger finite subset Sn+1 of them.
devans99 wrote: September 24th, 2018, 6:03 pmThe problem I have with an eternal universe is it leads to logical contradictions. Here is just one for example:

- Say you meet an Eternal god in your Eternal universe
- and you notice he is counting.
- You ask and he says ‘I’ve always been counting’.
- What number is he on?
Your description implies that God's counting has no temporal beginning: There is no time in the past when God began to count (with "to count" defined as "to recite numbers in ascending order, usually starting at the number one" [Oxford Dictionary]). But if God never began or started to count, he never counts; and if he never counts, I cannot ever meet him and hear him counting, which contradicts your description, such that it is a nonstarter (as an argument against actual infinities) due to the incoherence of the concept of a beginningless counting.
- The definition of eternity has no temporal beginning
- it defines something without a start
- nothing can exist without a start
- eternity does not exist
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Consul
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Consul »

devans99 wrote: September 25th, 2018, 11:04 am - The definition of eternity has no temporal beginning
- it defines something without a start
- nothing can exist without a start
- eternity does not exist
That the action called counting must have a beginning/start doesn't mean that all occurrences or substances must begin/start to exist. For example, an object in an eternal spacetime may always have been in motion.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Consul
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Consul »

BigBango wrote: September 25th, 2018, 3:08 am This analysis seems to be convincing, however we must take into consideration its context. The closer we get to the behavior of black holes the further we get from the greater expanse of reality. If one is purposely trying to discover physical principles that can be deduced from the physical entities of our world then black holes are a worthy object of investigation. The fault in that approach is to dismiss the subtler elements of reality within which there may be both will and technology that has no simple reduction to "entropy". If the world only had black holes then your analysis could be correct. However, physical realities surrounding black holes have both values and will that are not so easily categorized.
As far as I know, it is not an established scientific fact that there are extended, Planck-sized (mereological) atoms of space without any substructure.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
Tamminen
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Tamminen »

devans99 wrote: September 25th, 2018, 11:04 am - The definition of eternity has no temporal beginning
- it defines something without a start
- nothing can exist without a start
- eternity does not exist
What if the universe had a beginning but no end?
devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

Consul wrote: September 25th, 2018, 12:27 pm
devans99 wrote: September 25th, 2018, 11:04 am - The definition of eternity has no temporal beginning
- it defines something without a start
- nothing can exist without a start
- eternity does not exist
That the action called counting must have a beginning/start doesn't mean that all occurrences or substances must begin/start to exist. For example, an object in an eternal spacetime may always have been in motion.
Things without a beginning don’t exist. Eternal does not exist. Eternal is a self-contradictory concept and it causes paradoxes like the counting god example above. Another example, Eternal breaks probability:

- If it can happen it will happen
- an infinite number of times
- no matter how unlikely it was in the first place!
- So all things happen an infinite number of times
- so all things are equally likely
- Reductio ad absurdum eternal does not exist
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Consul
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Consul »

Consul wrote: September 24th, 2018, 8:17 pm
devans99 wrote: September 24th, 2018, 6:03 pmThe problem I have with an eternal universe is it leads to logical contradictions. Here is just one for example:

- Say you meet an Eternal god in your Eternal universe
- and you notice he is counting.
- You ask and he says ‘I’ve always been counting’.
- What number is he on?
Your description implies that God's counting has no temporal beginning: There is no time in the past when God began to count (with "to count" defined as "to recite numbers in ascending order, usually starting at the number one" [Oxford Dictionary]). But if God never began or started to count, he never counts; and if he never counts, I cannot ever meet him and hear him counting, which contradicts your description, such that it is a nonstarter (as an argument against actual infinities) due to the incoherence of the concept of a beginningless counting.
Let's assume for the sake of the argument that this concept is not incoherent, and the eternal god has always been counting or reciting numbers. Then I could in principle answer your question What number is he on?, but only if I actually met him and heard what number he is on.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

The point being he’s counting so by definition he must be on a finite number, but he’s been counting for Eternity so by definition he must be on ‘infinity’ but you cannot count with infinity hence the paradox.

Eternal is logically inconsistent so it must be false. Time must have a start.
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Consul
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Consul »

devans99 wrote: September 25th, 2018, 5:20 pm The point being he’s counting so by definition he must be on a finite number, but he’s been counting for Eternity so by definition he must be on ‘infinity’ but you cannot count with infinity hence the paradox.
Infinity is not a number; but there are infinitely many finite numbers, so the number he's on is one of them (provided that beginningless counting is possible in the first place). Hence, there is no paradox.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

But if he’s on a finite number then eternity must of started finatly long ago and hence must not be eternal...
Fooloso4
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Fooloso4 »

Devans99:
If it can happen it will happen
an infinite number of times
I do not see this as self evident.

There is no limit on the number of possibilities of what will happen. With each moment new possibilities arise. They increase exponentially. Possibilities are inexhaustible and unrepeatable.

Eternal is logically inconsistent so it must be false.

I do not think that this is self-evident either. The limits of logic mark the limits of your thinking not the limits of reality. We cannot determine reality a priori.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Sy Borg »

I think Devan is saying that reality is only theoretically infinite. Since an infinite amount of time has not yet passed (and nor can it of course), then not all possible events and actualisations will have taken place since some of them have not happened yet.

I see this as an argument against the idea of an infinite number of "yous" doing almost exactly the same thing in an infinite universe, as is often raised by physicists like Sean Carroll, but that can only be the case over an infinite period of time.
devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

I think we’ve all been brainwashed into believing in this illogical concept of ‘infinity’ (or specifically ‘eternity’ in the temporal sense). I think we’ve been brainwashed for religious reasons: the motivations of Cantor and co for including the Actually Infinite in set theory was their believe that god was ‘infinite’.

So the mathematicians have let a contradictory and spiritual idea into maths; the Actually Infinite.

Then the cosmologists have picked up the concept and produced a lot of models based on an infinite universe; which are all a waste of time. Cosmology is in a mess IMO.
Eduk
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Eduk »

devans I think you need to spend more time with actual mathematicians and actual cosmologists, maybe then you wouldn't have such a low opinion of them.
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Steve3007
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by Steve3007 »

devans99:

Are you familiar with the mathematical concept of a "limit" and its use as the basic of differential and integral calculus? If so, do you think that concept, and those very useful mathematical tools, could have been developed without the idea that a quantity can "tend towards infinity"?

In mathematics and physics, if a quantity is allowed to be "arbitrarily large" it means that for any given size for that quantity, there is no fundamental reason why we can't consider a larger size. Similarly for "arbitrarily small". Can you see the use of this?
devans99
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Re: Did the universe exist for ever or does it have a beginning?

Post by devans99 »

I don’t have a problem with the concept of a limit as long as it is defined properly, in particular a limit should approach but NEVER REACH Actual Infinity. So the limit concept can be defined without making Actual Infinity into a bonafide mathematical quantity.

I agree that limits are very useful as approximations, particularly for the large and small. But just because something is very large or small, it does not mean it takes the actual value of oo or 1/oo because those are not mathematical quantities.

So limits are OK, Set theory’s definition of th Actually Infinite existing is not.
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