2022-03-04
The Model of Reality IS NOT the Reality
Deva:
2022-02-28
Excerpts:
IS THERE A GOD? - Brief Answers to the Big Questions - Stephen Hawking
Cosmic cookbook
1. The first is matter—stuff that has mass.
2. The second is energy
3. The third thing we need to build a universe is space.
So where could all this matter, energy and space come from?
insights of Albert Einstein. Einstein realised something quite extraordinary: that two of the main ingredients needed to make a universe —mass and energy—are basically the same thing, two sides of the same coin if you like. His famous equation E = mc(2) simply means that mass can be thought
of as a kind of energy, and vice versa. So instead of three ingredients, we can now say that the universe has just two: energy and space.
where did all this energy and space come from? - Big Bang.
The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy.
Simple analogy
Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill —he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that
was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.
When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature.
So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space.
This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion—laws that are among the oldest in science—space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.
The positive side of things—the mass and energy we see today—is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or
negative side of things, is spread throughout space.
So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.
When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
Finally
No heaven and afterlife either. when we die we return to dust. we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children.
Thol:
Yes, there is no need for a God to create the universe.
Because universe is not created. It IS. It appears to be created in our model of the universe. Only our model (our interpretation of our observation and calculation) suggests that the universe was created. Universe doesn't come to us and say that it was created in our direct experience.
We confuse the model with the reality.
One may say all we have is model; all we can have is model; all we can ever hope to have is model. That may be so. But, that doesn't make the model = reality.
According to Hawking's logic (that a hole is created when a mountain is built), big bang should have a counterpart of big crunch. Where is it? How to verify?
We forget that the laws of physics will not create the universe or anything for that matter. The laws of physics (or chemistry...) are our models built on our observations. Of course it is verified and confirmed by predicting based on the model. That only verifies our model and says nothing about what and how things really ARE.
Big bang itself is a model (projected calculation) based on our observations.
We will never confuse a map of Chennai with actual Chennai. If a map of Chennai helps me correctly to find a street / house, I will not assume that the map is Chennai. But, we readily assume our model of reality is the reality!
Book extract:
Materialism and science
It is important to keep in mind the difference between materialism as a metaphysics and scientific theories as models. Many people – including many scientists – easily confuse the two, mistakenly construing the empirical evidence collected from nature through the scientific method to lend direct support to the materialist metaphysics. Were that to be so, materialism wouldn’t be a psychosocial phenomenon, but a scientific conclusion. However, that is not so. Empirical data proves the models of science under certain conditions, not the metaphysical interpretation of such models. Allow me to elaborate on this.
The scientific method allows us to study and model the observable patterns and regularities of nature. For instance, the observation that objects consistently fall when dropped – a regularity observed anywhere on the surface of the planet – allows us to infer the law of gravity. The observation that crystals form according to symmetrical shapes allows us to infer specific patterns of crystallization for different materials. By observing the consistency of these patterns and regularities, we can create mathematical models capturing them, run such models as computer simulations, and then predict how similar phenomena will unfold in the future. Such an ability to model and predict the phenomena of nature lies at the heart of the technological prowess of our civilization and represents the main social value-add of science.
But our ability to model the patterns and regularities of reality tells us little about the underlying nature of things. Scientific modeling is useful for informing us how one thing or phenomenon relates to another thing or phenomenon – this being precisely what mathematical equations do – but it cannot tell us what these things or phenomena fundamentally are in and by themselves. The reason is simple: science can only explain one thing in terms of another thing; it can only explicate and characterize a certain phenomenon in terms of its relative differences with respect to another phenomenon.
For instance, it only makes sense to characterize a positive electric charge relative to a negative electric charge; positive charges are defined in terms of their differences of behavior when compared to the behavior of negative charges, and the other way around. Another example: science can explain a body in terms of tissues; tissues in terms of cells; cells in terms of molecules; molecules in terms of atoms; and atoms in terms of subatomic particles. But then it can only explain one subatomic particle in terms of another, by highlighting their relative differences. Science cannot explain the fundamental nature of what a subatomic particle is in itself, since all scientific explanations need a frame of reference to provide contrasts.
Capturing the observable patterns and regularities of the elements of reality, relative to each other, is an empirical and scientific question. But pondering about the fundamental nature of these elements is not; it is a philosophical question. The problem is that, in recent decades, scientists who have little or no understanding of philosophy have begun to believe that science alone can replace philosophy. This dangerous combination of ignorance and hubris has done our culture an enormous disservice, which was exacerbated by the fact that scientists are over-represented in our society’s acknowledged intellectual elite, to the detriment of artists, poets, psychologists, philosophers, etc.
Childishly emboldened by the technological success achieved by our civilization, many scientists have begun to believe that the scientific method suffices to provide us with a complete account of the nature of existence – that is, with a complete ontology. In doing so, they have failed to see that they are simply assuming a certain metaphysics – namely, materialism – without giving it due thought. They have failed to see that the ability to predict how things behave with respect to one another says little about what things fundamentally are.
We, as a society, are guilty, by ignorance or omission, of allowing science to outreach its boundaries on the basis of the equivocated assumption that technological prowess is proof of some deep scientific understanding of the underlying nature of reality. Let us put this in context with an analogy: one needs to know nothing about computer architecture or software in order to play a computer game well and even win; just watch a five-year-old kid. Playing a computer game only requires an ability to understand and predict how the elements of the game behave relative to one another: if your character shoots that spot, it scores points; if your character touches that wall, it dies; etc. It requires no understanding whatsoever of the underlying machine and code upon which the game runs. You can be a champion player without having a clue about Central Processing Units (CPU), Random-Access Memories (RAM), Universal Serial Buses (USB), or any of the esoteric computer engineering that makes the game possible. All this engineering transcends the ‘reality’ accessible empirically from within the game.
Yet, the scientific method limits itself to what is empirically and ordinarily observed from within the ‘game’ of reality. Scientific modeling requires little or no understanding of the underlying nature of reality in exactly the same way that a gamer needs little or no understanding of the computer’s underlying architecture in order to win the game. It only requires an understanding of how the elements of the ‘game,’ accessed empirically from within the ‘game’ itself, unfold relative to one another.
On the other hand, to infer things about what underlies the ‘game’ – in other words, to construct a metaphysics about the fundamental nature of reality – demands more than the empirical methods of science. Indeed, it demands a kind of disciplined introspection that critically assesses not only the elements observed, but also the observer, the process of observation, and the interplay between the three in a holistic manner; an introspection that, as such, seeks to see through the ‘game.’ The construction of a metaphysics demands, thus, the methods of philosophy.
Our culture has become so blindly enamored with technology that we allowed science, on the basis of a misunderstanding, to be overrepresented in our intellectual elite. The damaging consequences of this mistake are felt with increasing intensity in the culture, in the form of a materialist paradigm that, while unsubstantiated – as I will attempt to show in this and subsequent chapters – dissolves all meaning and hope out of human life. It is time we corrected this.
It is time we understood that physics, while valuable and extremely important, just models the elements of the ‘game’: where to shoot, which wall to avoid, etc. The true underlying nature of reality – the inner workings of the computer running the game – is an issue of metaphysics; an issue of philosophy. It requires different methods to be properly assessed and understood.
For as long as scientists like Stephen Hawking (sender's note: he claimed philosophy is dead) are allowed to make preposterous pseudo-philosophical pronouncements and not be either ignored or thoroughly ridiculed by the mainstream media – in exactly the same way that, say, a famous artist would be ridiculed or ignored for making pseudo-scientific statements – our culture will fail to understand the nature of our predicament.
- Book: Why Materialism Is Baloney
- Author: Bernardo Kastrup
From the Foreword to the above book:
As such, it is regrettable that some practitioners of science – and even some philosophers of science – have now taken on the attitude that scientism is the only valid approach to
human knowledge. The idea that science, and science alone, exhausts the human potential has grown into a boy too big for his britches. Behind this monstrous presumption is the highly metaphysical view of materialism. One should make no mistake here: metaphysical beliefs distort science, for any kind of metaphysics is, in and of itself, contradictory to science’s own purposes as an open-ended search for truth. That does not mean a scientist cannot have a metaphysical view; but this view cannot impinge on the interpretation of observations. Scientism today is doing what the Church did in the fifteenth century: forcing theory to fit a predetermined metaphysics.
In the pursuit of an external truth, scientistic materialism has forgotten the internal, most fundamental reality of human existence: we can know nothing but that which appears in our own mind. Our mind is our reality and, when we attempt to reify either the subject or the object, we chase our own tail at light speed. The ontological vertigo produced by this exercise has extended to the point where materialist philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, Owen Flannigan, and Pamela and Paul Churchland, tell us that consciousness itself does not exist. And, as if this were not enough, they utter this pronouncement with the smugness and self-assuredness of a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.
How can anyone of us take seriously someone who stands up and pronounces that his or her own mind does not exist? Truly, this is a kōan worthy of a Zen Patriarch. It is, in fact, the very opposite of not only Buddhist thinking, but also common sense. And not a common sense based merely on the obvious, but on the most primal reality of the
human condition.
Shogaku Zenshin Stephen Echard Musgrave Roshi.
Director of the Zen Institute of San Diego, California.
Author of Zen Buddhism, Its Practice and the Transcendental Mind.
