Pastor AIO: I just realised that my definition of a universe was just a definition for a closed system. So in other words, A universe is a Closed system.

I guess we can appeal to the 2 aspects of God to get out of this. That God is both Immanent and Transcendent.

You still haven't told us what you mean by Intelligence and how it functions.

LOL! Sometimes I'm not sure who you're asking a question when you quote one person and seem to be asking the other

Wiegraf brought up the "intelligence" bit, and so I thought in post 60 you were referring to him, especially as you quoted him.

Intelligence relates to an ability to make adept decisions based on sound knowledge of a process. For me, I see the first cause as "intelligent" because of accurately calculated "initial values" (see post 31) that seem to have been preset into the universe at the Big Ban'g.

Actually the first time was addressed to Wiegraf but then when you used it too I directed the question to you.

I like the definition of Intelligence being the ability to make 'adept decisions'. Making decisions suggests that there are options. and one of them is the right one. That makes me wonder, Did the laws of the universe precede the universe? What was the cognitive process via which 'God/first cause' considered the options and made the decisions. Did they involve notions, ideas, and knowledge of the laws? And if so where did these notions come from? Did they pre-exist the universe.

When God has Knowledge (sound knowledge in fact) What does he have knowledge of? To have knowledge seems to suggest that there is something else in existence besides the knower. Unless all he knows is himself.

I think the laws must have had to precede the universe or else they were created simultaneously, because the very first instance of expansion of the Universe at the big ban'g is according to some laws! The laws may have been a reflex creation thanks to the First Cause's thought process / notions, but I don't know.

What did God have sound knowledge of? Probably the various paths that his choices would take. Thence selecting the one that best suits his purpose. So I won't say having sound knowledge means there is something else besides the knower. But now that I say that, there is the concept of future upshots (includes a concept of time, not yet created but he had foresight shey? )

Good read!
This sorta buttresses d fact dt d normal state of d mind is CHAOS...
I'm begining to like 'chaos'
Keep them coming, i like it

InesQor: I think the laws must have had to precede the universe or else they were created simultaneously, because the very first instance of expansion of the Universe at the big ban'g is according to some laws! The laws may have been a reflex creation thanks to the First Cause's thought process / notions, but I don't know.

What did God have sound knowledge of? Probably the various paths that his choices would take. Thence selecting the one that best suits his purpose. So I won't say having sound knowledge means there is something else besides the knower. But now that I say that, there is the concept of future upshots (includes a concept of time, not yet created but he had foresight shey? )

hey, i thought d expansion of d universe has been proved wrong by prof oyinbo? Or does it still hold?

ATMC: hey, i thought d expansion of d universe has been proved wrong by prof oyinbo? Or does it still hold?

LOL for real? I never heard that he made such a disproof.

But Oyibo and his GAGUT sound like intellectual frauds so even if he did, it's probably just something he cooked up with no basis.

According to GAGUT, any scientific observation (like all the observation made so far about the universe's expansion) that does not align with GAGUT was not done properly. FOHWTBS pardon my language.

FOHWTBS means?

ATMC: FOHWTBS means?

Sigh. A phrase that contains a number of expletives. I wasn't talking to you though; I was referring to the sketchy GAGUT theorem.

Randomness

@inesq, yeah, tl; dr: , but hope you don't misunderstand, there are 2 ways of using it. One to say you frankly didn't read the post, the more popular usage. It is also used by the post's author to indicate he's acknowledge he's made a rather long post that might be in dire need of proofreading/editing, so he's providing a quick summary for those who would rather tl; dr:. I've been using the latter

And even now there's too much to say, but I'm rightfully paying for some procrastination atm

So quickly.. @pastor we could switch consciousness for intelligence, that's still blurry but more satisfactory. I appreciate there are different types of intelligences. To be more concise, maybe I would say sentience + reason = consciousness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

In my words, what I've been calling intelligence would imply being self-aware and capable of reason. And very importantly as far as determining one's goals and purposes are concerned, would be capable of emotion. Without emotion frankly one wouldn't be able to self generate his/her goals, they would have to have been placed there by something else. I know that's flirting with freewill/determinism, so let's just stick with 'consciousness' instead of 'intelligence'. Wiki's description:

"Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.""


Immanence implies being in everything, we're now heading into pantheism, aren't we?

While another member of this forum has vilified me for having this position (though that might be for other reasons, like my winning personality), there are simply things that must have existed before or simultaneously to any consciousness, or anything else for that matter. Even knowledge for instance, if knowledge didn't exist before our first consciousness, where did it get the knowledge to create knowledge? So simple things, usually abstractions like numbers, must have always existed. Or simply 'being', or 'existing', at the very least they must have simultaneously existed with any 'god'. Putting a wrench into the notion that god created everything, creating must have existed before god! It also puts a dent on god's that are supposedly omnipotent, as it implies there are laws it is subject to (though that should be obvious even without pointing this out, imo)

@inesq I think you are pushing for something similar to the scenario you gave in an earlier post. Where the colors which represented entropy were mixed in a closed system. You think there's some consciousness that can open the box and manipulate this and that bit. So, it won't exactly be a member of our universe but one that has access to it, along with others we cannot reach? It sounds nice, but of course I would shout evidence, and point out that it's needless and only complicates things. Of course I will have to show you how properly, soon enough. It would mostly just be expatiating on what I've already said though, and showing you something about abiogenesis, evolution and odds, which maybe could be applied elsewhere, like the big bang.

And you have to consider what space is expanding into, nothing. It's just expanding... Well, it's complicated, but it has been theorized that our universe could bump into another one. This expanding into 'nothing' is one of the reasons I don't hold the position that 'sameness of energy' is the only form of 'nothingness', or at least different forms of energy could lead to 'nothingness'. Could the nothingness across universes (if they exist) be genuinely nothing? Doubtful. Very. Could they be made of a different kind of energy? Probably. But this is speculation.

Ramble, ramble, ramble

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you are of the view that this universe did not have a beginning and has been expanding, regardless of how slowly it's been doing that, that would mean that an infinite amount of time has already passed. Therefore an infinite distance would separate the expanding bodies by now, no? (And of course, entropy would have rendered this particular universe useless) . True infinites arguably don't exist physically

And there's more, and really related even if it doesn't seem so. There's not time though.... Some excerpts from Brian Greene's the Elegant Universe...

Ze Big B.ang

In a little more detail, the modern theory of cosmic origins goes like this. Some 15 billion or so years ago, the universe erupted from an enormously energetic, singular event, which spewed forth all of space and all of matter. (You don't have to search far to locate where the big bang occurred, for it took place where you are now as well as everywhere else; in the beginning, all locations we now see as separate were the same location.) The temperature of the universe a mere 10-43 seconds after the bang, the so-called Planck time, is calculated to have been about 1032 Kelvin, some 10 trillion trillion times hotter than the deep interior of the sun. As time passed, the universe expanded and cooled, and as it did, the initial homogeneous, roiling hot, primordial cosmic plasma began to form eddies and clumps. At about a hundred-thousandth of a second after the bang, things had cooled sufficiently (to about 10 trillion Kelvin—about a million times hotter than the sun's interior) for quarks to clump together in groups of three, forming protons and neutrons. About a hundredth of a second later, conditions were right for the nuclei of some of the lightest elements in the periodic table to start congealing out of the cooling plasma of particles. For the next three minutes, as the simmering universe cooled to about a billion degrees, the predominant nuclei that emerged were those of hydrogen and helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium ("heavy" hydrogen) and lithium. This is known as the period of primordial nucleosynthesis.

Not a whole lot happened for the next few hundred thousand years, other than further expansion and cooling. But then, when the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees, wildly streaming electrons slowed down to the point where atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium, could capture them, forming the first electrically neutral atoms. This was a pivotal moment: from this point forward the universe, by and large, became transparent. Prior to the era of electron capture, the universe was filled with a dense plasma of electrically charged particles—some with positive charges like nuclei and others with negative charges, like electrons. Photons, which interact only with electrically charged objects, were bumped and jostled incessantly by the thick bath of charged particles, traversing hardly any distance before being deflected or absorbed. The charged-particle barrier to the free motion of photons would have made the universe appear almost completely opaque, much like what you may have experienced in a dense morning fog or a blinding, gusty snowstorm. But when negatively charged electrons were brought into orbit around positively charged nuclei, yielding electrically neutral atoms, the charged obstructions disappeared and the dense fog lifted. From that time onward, photons from the big bang have traveled unhindered and the full expanse of the universe gradually came into view.

About a billion years later, with the universe having substantially calmed down from its frenetic beginnings, galaxies, stars, and ultimately planets began to emerge as gravitationally bound clumps of the primordial elements. Today, some 15 billion or so years after the bang, we can marvel at both the magnificence of the cosmos and at our collective ability to have pieced together a reasonable and experimentally testable theory of cosmic origin

Possibilities if you permit multiverse, possible explanations for the constants, etc, via evoltion

But we must emphasize that even if we accept the speculative premise of the multiverse, the conclusion that this compromises our predictive power is far from airtight. The reason, simply put, is that if we unleash our imaginations and allow ourselves to contemplate a multiverse, we should also unleash our theoretical musings and contemplate ways in which the apparent randomness of the multiverse can be tamed. For one relatively conservative musing, we can imagine that—were the multiverse picture true— we would be able to extend our ultimate theory to its full sprawling expanse, and that our "extended ultimate theory" might tell us precisely why and how the values of the fundamental parameters are sprinkled across the constituent universes.

A more radical musing comes from a proposal of Lee Smolin of Penn State University, who, inspired by the similarity between conditions at the big bang and at the centers of black holes—each being characterized by a colossal density of crushed matter—has suggested that every black hole is the seed for a new universe that erupts into existence through a big bang-like explosion, but is forever hidden from our view by the black hole's event horizon. Beyond proposing another mechanism for generating a multiverse, Smolin has injected a new element—a cosmic version of genetic mutation—that does an end run around the scientific limitations associated with the anthropic principle. Imagine, he suggests, that when a universe sprouts from the core of a black hole, its physical attributes, such as particle masses and force strengths, are close, but not identical, to those of its parent universe. Since black holes arise from extinguished stars, and star formation depends upon the precise values of the particle masses and force strengths, the fecundity of any given universe—the number of black hole progeny it can produce—depends sensitively on these parameters. Small variations in the parameters of the progeny universes will therefore lead to some that are even more optimized for black hole production than their parent universe, and have an even greater number of offspring universes of their own. After many "generations," the descendants of universes optimized for producing black holes will thus be so numerous that they will overwhelm the population of the multiverse. And so, rather than invoking the anthropic principle, Smolin's suggestion provides a dynamic mechanism that, on average, drives the parameters of each next-generation universe ever closer to particular values— those that are optimum for black hole production.

This approach gives another method, even in the context of the multiverse, in which the fundamental matter and force parameters can be explained. If Smolin's theory is right, and if we are a typical member of a mature multiverse (these are big "ifs" and can be debated on many fronts, of course), the parameters of the particles and forces that we measure should be optimized for black hole production. That is, any fiddling with these parameters of our universe should make it harder for black holes to form. Physicists have begun to investigate this prediction; at present there is no consensus on its validity. But even if Smolin's specific proposal turns out to be wrong, it does present yet another shape that the ultimate theory might take. The ultimate theory may, at first sight, appear to lack rigidity. We may find that it can describe a wealth of universes, most of which have no relevance to the one we inhabit. And moreover, we can imagine that this wealth of universes may be physically realized, leading to a multiverse— something that, at first sight, forever limits our predictive power. In fact, however, this discussion illustrates that an ultimate explanation can yet be achieved, so long as we grasp not only the ultimate laws but also their implications for cosmological evolution on an unexpectedly grand scale.

The concept of knowledge and God is very interesting but beset with problems, cos we don't KNOW or haven't really thought about the qualities of the first cause. We rely too often on divergent religious authorities for such an answer. Is omniscience necessary for such a being? Is foresight necessary and is consciousness necessary.

For there to be a first cause and an effect, it suggests preexisting laws/structures thru which rationality follows. E.G causality. Therefore first cause is limited only on discussions abt this present universe.

It is logically faulty to say the first cause is part of the Universe, rather the Universe is part of the first cause.

I'm afraid inquiries into the past preceding the B.IG BAN.G find the limits of Science.

LOL i've been feeling lazy to reply this thread

Wiegraf dropped some really heavy stuff there, need to chew and digest properly.

Will return.

InesQor: LOL i've been feeling lazy to reply this thread

Wiegraf dropped some really heavy stuff there, need to chew and digest properly.

Will return.

I know what you mean.. Where to even start.. But I'm still driving at this basically: there's no need to assume a conscious purpose, in fact, it complicates things. Thus adding a conscious purpose would violate occam's razor. Also, the evidence to support a conscious purpose is rather weak and perhaps tainted by the anthrophic principle (among other things). But I'll still have to knit it together coherently, and provide other small tidbits to support my case...

I'm guessing you'll return before I do though
Looking forward to it