Could all really come from nothing?

via NPR

The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.

It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"

This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.

Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.

Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.

Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.

Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.

Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.

What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)

Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.

Non-Aristotelian Logic and other topics to turn your brain inside out

Non-Aristotelian logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aristotelian_logic

The term non-Aristotelian logic, sometimes shortened to null-A, means any non-classical system of logic which rejects one of Aristotle's premises (see term logic). The main feature of non-Aristotelian logic revolves around rejecting the use of the word 'is' and replacing it with 'appears to be' or similar constructions that are less absolute - so that the subjective nature of human perception can be acknowledged.

Nicolai A. Vasiliev since 1910 and Jan Łukasiewicz called their own work non-Aristotelian logic. Alfred Korzybski carried the term into his system of General Semantics in 1933 (citing Łukasiewicz), and science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt later helped popularize it. Korzybski focused on the use of three or more truth values in the new systems of logic, although he connected this to his own rejection of Aristotle's principle of identity. Following Łukasiewicz's early work, Korzybski and later proponents of General Semantics associate these truth values with probabilities and the use of scientific induction. Łukasiewicz later seemed more cautious about this connection.

While Łukasiewicz seems to have spent more time on three-valued logic than any other system, he said that one could keep increasing the number of truth values indefinitely. Thus, he wrote: "if 0 is interpreted as falsehood, 1 as truth, and other numbers in the interval 0-1 as the degrees of probability corresponding to various possibilities, a many-valued logic is obtained which is expansion of three-valued logic and differs from the latter in certain details."[1] Richard Threlkeld Cox later showed in Cox's theorem that any extension of Aristotelian logic to incorporate truth values between 0 and 1, in order to be consistent, must be equivalent to Bayesian probability.

Nicolai A. Vasiliev in 1910 rejected the law of contradiction as well as law of the excluded middle and proposed a logic he called imaginary which is tolerant to contradiction.

Hans Reichenbach described a system of logic that he explicitly linked with probability theory. He called his probability logic a generalization of two-valued logic. Reichenbach also suggested applying a three-valued logic to quantum mechanics. His probability logic does not receive much attention from modern logicians.

Aristotle allowed for the possibility of all these logics in De Interpretatione, Chapter 9. He wrote here that when it comes to statements about the future, "it is not necessary that of every affirmation and opposite negation one should be true and the other false." (Revised Oxford translation)

Lotfi Zadeh developed a system of "fuzzy logic" using a range of truth values from 0 to 1, but distinguished it sharply from probability theory.

Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition developed a non-Aristotelian system of classification in which propositions can be assigned one of 7 values: true, false, indeterminate, meaningless, self-referential, game rule, or strange loop. Wilson did not devise a formal system for manipulating propositions once classified, but suggested that we can clarify our thinking by not restricting ourselves to simplistic true/false binaries.

Alternative terms for these logics in common academic usage include deviant logic and multi-valued logic (see Haack, 'Philosophy of Logic', 1980). Not all non-classical logics fall into this class, e.g. Modal logic is a non-classical logic which, however, has only two truth values...

General Semantics

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

General semantics is a program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial launches under the names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) fully launched the program as "general semantics" in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.

General semantics should not be confused with generalized semantics (a branch of linguistics). Misunderstandings traceable to the discipline's name have greatly complicated the program's history and development.

The sourcebook for general semantics, Science and Sanity, presents general semantics as both a theoretical and a practical system whose adoption can reliably alter human behavior in the direction of greater sanity. Its author asserted that general semantics training could eventually unify people and nations. In the 1947 preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote, "We need not blind ourselves with the old dogma that 'human nature cannot be changed,' for we find that it can be changed."

Many recognized specialists in the knowledge areas where Korzybski claimed to have anchored general semantics—biology, epistemology, mathematics, neurology, physics, psychiatry, etc.— supported his work in his lifetime, including Cassius J. Keyser, C. B. Bridges, W. E. Ritter, P. W. Bridgman, G. E. Coghill, William Alanson White, Clarence B. Farrar, David Fairchild, and Erich Kähler. Starting around 1940, university English professor S.I. Hayakawa (1906–1992), speech professor Wendell Johnson, speech professor Irving J. Lee, and others assembled elements of general semantics into a package suitable for incorporation into mainstream communications curricula. The Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski and co-workers founded in 1938, continues today...

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, just the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory"...

I know that I know nothing

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

 The phrase "I know that I know nothing" or "I know one thing: that I know nothing" (originally from Latin: "ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat", a possible paraphrase from a Greek text; also quoted as "scio me nihil scire" or "scio me nescire"; later back-translated to Katharevousa Greek as "[ἓν οἶδα ὅτι] οὐδὲν οἶδα", [hèn oîda hóti] oudèn oîda), sometimes called the Socratic paradox, is a well-known saying that is derived from Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates.

This saying is also connected and/or conflated with the answer Socrates is said to have received from Pythia, the oracle of Delphi, in answer to the question "who is the wisest man in Greece?".