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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that to answer the question “where does X come from?” you need a viewpoint outside of X. Since we're presumably incapable of attaining a viewpoint outside of space, or time, I wouldn't expect any answers beyond more or less educated guesses.

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People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why this has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking questions. As long as there continues to be a verb ‘to be’ that looks as if it functions in the same way as ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’, as long as we still have the adjectives ‘identical’, ‘false’, ‘possible’, as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc. etc., people will still keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up.

And what’s more, this satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because in so far as people think they can see the “limits of human understanding,” they believe of course that they can see beyond these.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein [1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/culturevalue0000witt/page/n44/mo...

Not that I proclaim to have any idea how to answer any of these questions, but there is something about the question of time that I can never get past. And I feel like it's similar to what you're saying?

What happened before the big-bang? If time is a product of the big-bang, then how can it be used to provide any sort of perspective outside of the very thing that created it? (poor phrasing, sorry)

Imagine asking the question "what was @tempodox2 like before he was born?".

Moreover, our ability to perceive time shapes our way of thinking about it, potentially in ways that lead us to incorrect theories and conclusions. Simplest, although maybe worst example might be that time is actually flowing in the opposite direction that we perceive it. Isn't the direction of time just a subjective observation based on who or what the observer is? We have just happened to evolve with certain sensors that allow us to perceive time in a particular direction as a result of a subset of properties/reactions potentially exclusive to our universe.

I like this quote about this from Stephen Hawking: [1]

> "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang," Hawking said.

My layman's reading of that imagines if you move south, get to the south pole, and then keep going the same direction you had been going, you are still moving but no longer going "south." In this metaphor, you could go back in time, be "at" the Big Bang, keep going the direction you had been going in time, but the direction you're going would no longer be "before."

I have no idea how practical this metaphor is and how far it extends, but it's an appealing one to me. Maybe someone else could clarify.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/science/stephen-hawking-tells-degrasse-...

Fun speculation.

What if our reality (and universe) is on the same journey as the one you just described? What if the North Pole is our starting point (Big Bang), we walk southward and as soon as we cross the South Pole, everything reverts back into the Big Ben (you would eventually reach the North Pole again) just to start all over again. Like a piston, or a ballon that is being inflated, then deflated and re-inflated again; our reality is just "one stroke" (or "walk", in your metaphor) of a bigger "engine".

Somebody else commented about this: https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-...

This reminds me of some physicist I can't remember trying to refute William Lane Craig's formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a classical Islamic argument for the existence of God going something like:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe must have a cause of its existence, and that cause is God.

The issue is with the first premise. If you only understand causality from within a temporal framework, then your understanding only works from within a temporal framework. "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" presupposes the cause exists before the effect and that presupposition becomes incoherent at the beginning of time itself. If the big bang is the start of time, then nothing exists "before" the big bang because the very notion of "before" is meaningless without time. Our understanding of every event on the universal timeline is that it is linked inextricably by necessity and sufficiency to some set of prior events, and we call that causation, but attempting to use the same logic and language regarding the existence of the timeline results in paradoxical, meaningless statements.

The Cosmological argument was posited by Plato (c. 427–347 BC) and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC). It has nothing to do with "Islam"..

It is comical to claim that some "physicist" has managed to resolve a deeply _philosophical_ question such as Creatio ex nihilo.

The existence of God is a philosophical question and not a scientific one. One can't reach for a scientific method to resolve everything; if that were the case, then we might as well throw out the entire domain of philosophy all together.

I fully recognize that this is not a very popular comment on a forum like HN, however what I dislike about "Scientisim" today, is that they claim that the entire realm of human knowledge and experience can be reduce to Science alone.

I hold that this line of thinking forces you into a very narrow and reductive line of reasoning.

I think asking "what happened before the big bang?" is to an extent the same as "where do space, time and gravity come from?", but not in the sense that they're trying to obtain an external (to the universe) perspective.

The latter isn't trying to obtain an external perspective, but rather a more fundamental perspective, somewhat like how when you dig deep enough, the weak and electromagnetic force become unified, emerging from more fundamental properties. Similarly, with space-time and gravity being so heavily associated, there may be a more fundamental mechanism at work which is responsible for the properties of both.

The former is asking something potentially similar. In the early universe, there's a popular theory that the weak, strong and electromagnetic force were unified. Similarly, if the mechanisms for the properties of space, time and gravity can be unified, perhaps we may find that the big bang itself wasn't as much of a singularity as we think, instead being the result of some more fundamental properties of the universe being in a certain state. Thinking of it like the idea of a false vacuum decay, perhaps the fundamental properties of the universe were the same before the big bang, and the 'bang' was the vacuum dropping down to a more stable state, in which case "what happened before the big bang" makes some sense.

On the other hand, if the big bang was indeed the start of all physics including time, the big bang very well can have happened because this question would be asked.

As for our ability to perceive time shaping our way of thinking about it, from what I understand, we currently believe that physics holds under simultaneous charge, parity and time reversal. The various promising theories of quantum gravity have cases that might break this rule, which I think would effectively define a physical direction of time.

Roger Penrose came up with a very plausible theory that the heat death of our universe looks like the big bang moment, from the perspective of a photon. So our universe is caught in a cycle of birth death rebirth ad infinitum.

[0] https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/big-bang-didn-t-star...

iirc the CMB clues he’s talking about to justify the CCC have been ruled out.

While Penrose's specific theory is probably not correct, it does provide a conceptual framework to imagine how such clues might be possible.

but what created that loop in the first place?

There isn't a logical rule that says everything must have a beginning.

For example, do you think it's necessary to ask what created the natural numbers? When did they begin existing?

That question makes as much sense as asking “but what will be destroying the loop?”.

It's possible that there never was a first place.

> What happened before the big-bang?

Perhaps this is like asking the question "What value did the system clock have before the computer was turned on?"

Well, before the big bang, there had to be some environment that was such that a big bang could occur. (Just as, before the computer was turned on, there had to be a computer there to turn on.)

The question may be unanswerable from the information available in this universe (or, in the analogy, within the computer), but we know that there had to be something there.

Probably not a good analogy, since generally there’s an RTC running even if the computer is off. ;)

Indeed, it could be we are just not capable of understanding it for what it really is and the best we can do is make models that we can understand that fit some parts of what we see, but not all. We try new models but with the same results. We'll never be able to get it all right because its beyond of capacity.

It's just something that we haven't figured out yet, and eventually will.

We did discover though that the Earth is not the center of the universe without leaving it. Then with Newton we could learn where the arrangement of planets come from. Then Einstein developed further the knowledge about gravity without leaving the gravitational field.

But we could observe things outside of earth.

We cannot observe anything outside of space and time.

It's debatable [1]

[1] - https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-...

I hope this is true. Then I get to be immortal by nature of the infinite monkey theorem. I'll always come back! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Ugh, I can't believe you'd repost something you've already said 70 trillion years ago

This is actually terrifying in many respects. It's the basis of the eternal return idea, probably best known from Nietzsche, but found in many traditions. It compounds the consequences of anything that ever happens. Without it, you can at least take comfort in knowing anyone with the misfortune to live and die under chattel slavery, Naziism, or some other great evil at least only had to do it for one lifetime and then they get to escape forever to eternal peace. In a cyclic infinite monkey universe, nope, everything that ever happens happens infinitely many times, and those people who spent their entire lives on a plantation in fact spend eternity on a plantation. It's hell but real, and not levied as punishment but by pure randomness.

Except they're not the same person, they're just (mostly) variations on people that happen to be similar. It's a big universe. If it proves to be even more staggeringly big, well, it's more than I can comprehend either way.

We still did conclude how gravity more or less works while being within gravitational field.

This is scary when applied to consciousness to. How will we ever understand what makes consciousness from within consciousness?

Formally, this philosophical position is called mysterianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism

This can be either because one posits a fundamental limitation on self-conceptualization of systems, or a practical one on human biological or social intelligence.

By observing another small consciousness? That's like looking in the mirror. The traditional viewpoint of metaphysics, which studies consciousness, is that there are many such tiny mirrors everywhere, and all these mirrors reflect the one true consciousness that tries to understand itself by looking into these mirrors. Once it reaches this understanding, all the mirrors will go flat, will merge into one surface and will effectively disappear.

Is this the the “mirror of reality”? How does it respond to the view we can never fully escape our representation of the world?

The "cannot escape" part is where physics disagrees with metaphysics. The latter believes that there's 'absolute existence' that creates and uses reality as a crutch or a mirror to learn walking.

If there was an AI, it would encounter the same problem: it exists in some indescribable form, but it cant touch itself, it cant see itself, it cant understand itself. So it would create a 'reality' - also a fictional thing, but with properties such as inertia, reaction and invariance (the three laws of Newton), and then it would constrain itself with that reality, so it would feel real. After that it would start building fictional sandcastles and understand itself.

Someone else's consciousness?

Similar to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

Exactly, you can't verify a system using that system, so maybe it's not possible to exactly specify all of mathematics and physics within our universe.

Roger Penrose applies this thinking to the problem of consciousness and thinks this points to a special characteristic of humans that we can decide if things are true by 'stepping outside' of a problem, and that no mathematical function can do this. Therefore no computer running a mathematical function can be like us in that way.

Well no, not if it's a consistent system, but why does it have to be consistent? We're not consistent systems and we build systems that aren't consistent all the time, including computer systems.

Exactly. This is one reason I inherently distrust all closed-loop systems.

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