PAUL DAVIES

[ChristineM]

What that mean 42???

42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.



42 (number) - Wikipedia
Look in the popular culture paragraphs.

 

[Polymath257]

What that mean 42???

It's a joke. There is a series of comedic books where the 'answer to life, the universe, and everything' is said to be 42.

 

[napatunsaga]

[QUOTE = "Polymath257, mesaj: 6588452, üye: 61896"] Bu bir şaka. 'Hayata cevap, evren ve her şeyin' 42 olduğu söylenen bir dizi komedi kitabı var. [/ QUOTE]
Is there a god

 

[Regiomontanus]

Big bang cause ???

It is rather amusing to see atheists try to answer that question (not referring to anyone in particular). I am honestly a little embarrassed at how I used to try and explain away any notion of design or intent. But I know now it is a category mistake to equate existence - and the ultimate source and ground of being - with cosmology. Our mathematical models are noble achievements and offer enormously interesting and penetrating insight into the nature of the universe but are, as I said earlier, beside the point.

 

[Yazata]

The problem is that ‘some as yet not understood intelligence’ gets conflated with ‘God’ and buried under a mountain of superstition and cultural relics.

I certainly agree with that.

I'd just add that if all we can really observe about the universe is its apparent order, then conflating apparent order with the concept of intelligence seemingly introduces all kind of additional anthropomorphic psychologistic baggage like mind, will, purpose, awareness and so on.

 

[Polymath257]

It is rather amusing to see atheists try to answer that question (not referring to anyone in particular). I am honestly a little embarrassed at how I used to try and explain away any notion of design or intent. But I know now it is a category mistake to equate existence - and the ultimate source and ground of being - with cosmology. Our mathematical models are noble achievements and offer enormously interesting and penetrating insight into the nature of the universe but are, as I said earlier, beside the point.

Well, my view is that the whole notion of causality is suspect in such matters. To be a cause means that there are physical laws that say that some initial situation (the cause) leads to some final situation (the effect).

But this means that if no physical laws apply, there is no causality.

Second, people have an intuition that there is always a 'before' for any event. Once again, if time has a beginning, that is simply wrong. And, in the Big Bang model, time does NOT have a beginning.

Furthermore, causality also requires time to exist. There has to be an earlier event (the cause) and a later event (the effect), so there has to be time that orders those events. So, in situations where time does not exist, the whole notion of causality is problematic.

Finally, people have an intuition that everything must have a cause. But this is brought into question by what we *know* about quantum mechanics. At least at the level of the very small (atomic level and below), the universe is NOT deterministic. It is probabilistic. At the very least, this means our notions of causality need to change. And, truthfully, the classical notions of causality simply don't apply: quantum mechanics simply is not a causal description of the universe.

And I don't think it *is* a category mistake to identify existence and cosmology: the universe is, after all, the totality of all that exists. And cosmology is devoted to understanding the full spacetime nature of the universe.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming

Somebody? Did you mean a god, by which I mean a conscious agent capable of creating universes like this one?

Why would a god need to finely tune the physical constants in order for the universe to work unless that god was being restricted by laws that transcended it? How could such an entity be called a omnipotent if its choices were constrained to very narrow limits?

For that matter, what does a universe ruled by a creator god need laws for at all? Planets could orbit their stars according to its will. Light could travel only so fast because this omnipotent god was propelling it that fast and no faster. It's a godless universe that requires laws in order to run unmonitored.

If the laws of nature could only be one kind of way to permit life, and the universe runs all on its own, then what does it need with a god? Because if that's the case, that god didn't actually design anything. It merely followed a set of instructions that constrain its options. A multiverse that can generate countless copies of every type of possible universe would inevitably lead to universes like ours capable of generating stable galaxies of solar systems, life, and consciousness, and it would do so without requiring a conscious agent, making it the preferred hypothesis according to Occam.

 

[Howard Is]

I'd just add that if all we can really observe about the universe is its apparent order, then conflating apparent order with the concept of intelligence seemingly introduces all kind of additional anthropomorphic psychologistic baggage like mind, will, purpose, awareness and so on

True.
Swarms of insects, flocks of birds, schools of fish etc, whether natural or artificial, exhibit complex behaviour which looks like some transcendent group mind. In reality it comes down to a few simple rules replicated in each unit in the group.

 

[Yazata]

The word 'how' has two different meanings: one asks for a cause, the other asks for a description.

I agree with your distinction.

One can imagine each state of the universe the causal result of an immediately prior state, and that chain extended infinitely into the past without any origin or first cause. (The early Buddhists and their Indian contemporaries may have conceived of time this way.) But while we have ruled out a first cause (your first meaning) ex hypothesi, we can still ask why there is an infinite chain of causes instead of nothing at all (something like your second meaning).

My version of your second alternative asks for an explanation. What an 'explanation' is, isn't entirely clear in the philosophy of science. For one thing, not all sciences explain things the same way. Physics turns to its beloved theoretical equations (and the implicit Platonism that goes with that), while biology depends more on mechanical models. Questions about things like reduction arise.

In this case, when we are seeking an explanation for the existence of reality itself (or at least natural reality) it seems to me that no existing kind of scientific explanation will suffice. We need something else, some kind of hitherto unknown metaphysical explanation.

 

[Jedster]

It's a joke. There is a series of comedic books where the 'answer to life, the universe, and everything' is said to be 42.

Whatdymean 'its a joke'?

I'm gonna sue the universe now

 

[HonestJoe]

what does physicist paul davies think of the finely tuned universe?does he believe in God?but in his writings, he evokes God.example There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all .. . It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming.on the one hand, he says there is no God.

Who is Paul Davies and why should either of us care what he believes?

 

[Yazata]

Who is Paul Davies and why should either of us care what he believes?

He's a British physicist who is probably best known as a writer of many very good popular science books in the 1980's.

Paul Davies - Wikipedia

Why should we care what he thinks? Well, he's a smart guy and if he has good persuasive reasons for his ideas...

(My own view is closer to Sean Carroll's in the video, I guess.)

 

[napatunsaga]

Who is Paul Davies and why should either of us care what he believes?

a physicist.he doesn't believe in both God and multiverse.

 

[napatunsaga]

He's a British physicist who is probably best known as a writer of many very good popular science books in the 1980's.

Paul Davies - Wikipedia

Why should we care what he thinks? Well, he's a smart guy and if he has good persuasive reasons for his ideas...

(My own view is closer to Sean Carroll's in the video, I guess.)

what does paul davies think of the finely tuned universe?does he believe in God?

 

[sun rise]

The problem is that ‘some as yet not understood intelligence’ gets conflated with ‘God’ and buried under a mountain of superstition and cultural relics.

People have the tendency to create God in a human image but with expanded powers.

That is a human limitation.

 

[Polymath257]

In this case, when we are seeking an explanation for the existence of reality itself (or at least natural reality) it seems to me that no existing kind of scientific explanation will suffice. We need something else, some kind of hitherto unknown metaphysical explanation.

I would go further. At the most fundamental level there *cannot* be an explanation. That is because you always have to explain something in terms of something else, which just pushes the problem back a step. The most fundamental level *cannot* have an explanation for this reason. It just is the way it is.

We see the same in science. The most fundamental laws do NOT have deeper explanations. They can be tested and verified, hopefully, but to explain further would require a *more* fundamental law.

In your scheme, all that happens is that the questions become why the metaphysical realm exists and works the way it does. The basic problem isn't solved, only diverted.

Ultimately, I disagree that metaphysics is any sort of answer. In fact, because it cannot be verified or tested, it *cannot* have real explanatory power.

 

[Yazata]

I would go further. At the most fundamental level there *cannot* be an explanation.

I'm willing to go so far as to say that I don't know what kind of explanation it could be. What's more, I suspect that the ultimate questions might never be conclusively answered.

In practice, I agree that we need to take things that we can't explain as givens. We have to proceed through our lives by existential necessity, even in the absence of complete understanding.

But I'm not willing to simply dismiss the ultimate questions as what philosophers call 'pseudo-problems', just because I currently see no way of answering them.

 

[Polymath257]

I'm willing to go so far as to say that I don't know what kind of explanation it could be. What's more, I suspect that the ultimate questions might never be conclusively answered.

In practice, I agree that we need to take things that we can't explain as givens. We have to proceed through our lives by existential necessity, even in the absence of complete understanding.

But I'm not willing to simply dismiss the ultimate questions as what philosophers call 'pseudo-problems', just because I currently see no way of answering them.

And I guess I see it as being something about how explanations work and what they are. You explain something by going to something more fundamental and showing why that more fundamental thing/process/whatever produces whatever it is you are trying to explain.

So, we can explain why you get a frothy mess when you add baking soda to vinegar by using chemistry. You can explain the chemical reaction by looking at the properties of the molecules involved. You can explain the properties of the molecules by looking at the properties of the atoms, etc.

Each level is explained by the activities of a more fundamental level. That is how explanations work.

But that means if you are at the *most* fundamental level, there *is* no more fundamental level to use to explain it. And that means there is no 'explanation' possible. At the most fundamental level, whatever properties it has have to 'just be that way'.

Now, do I think we know any fundamental laws? I strongly doubt it. Is it possible that there *is* no 'most fundamental' level at all? Possibly--it just means that every explanation is explained by something that requires an even deeper explanation: that there *is* no 'explanation of it all'. And I'm OK with that.

I think many deep philosophical questions really are pseudo-problems. And I think others will ultimately be scientific problems and be solved. Which is which is the problem.

 

[HonestJoe]

a physicist.he doesn't believe in both God and multiverse.

So? There'll be hundreds of thousands of physicists around the world, each with different sets of individual beliefs and opinions on these topics. I'm just not sure why the opinion on any one is of any greater significance than that of any other random individual.