h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Cultural background? You!

Semantic primitives are meanings that can't be analysed into other meanings. Try defining right and wrong, or time and space without using the terms being defined as part of the definition.

I'm not sure that created and connected fall into that category though - especially as Toxx seems to mean something subtly different by them than I do.

Noggin

Yep I guess I must mean something a bit different Noggin. For me, time is that which permits the existence of change in the same place. Maybe it's just a question of where we stop in the circle. I confess I can't define 'change' without smuggling a temporal concept into the definition. Somehow 'change' seems to me to be more of a primitive or maybe an observable, than time. I feel I could point at something and say 'Hey that's change'. I couldn't do that with time.

Noggin. My thoughts have been drifting on and I think that by creation I mean 'Causation sub specie aeternitatis'. I didn't know that I was a Spinozan, but somehow I have to keep returning to his way of thinking. Guess there are worse attractants around.

Point taken (I think). Concepts like time and change can't be uncoupled, or space and objects (perhaps). Physicists also now treat matter, energy, space and time as mutually coupled (or quadrupled?).

But this only serves to throw the notion of a semantic primitive into the melting pot. Are there ANY concepts whose 'shape' is not at least partly determined by the concepts that it interacts with?

And it was the concepts of connection and creation I was asking about, specifically, and which seem to be shaped somewhat differently for you than me.

Noggin

Yep I finally (bit dozy today) realised that your question was specific to those. Hence my second response on 'creation'. I must confess to some 'backward chaining' from the existence of God to the nature of creation and eternity. I don't think that's particularly perverse though. I guess I'm also a bit of a pragmatist. I tend to make that sense of things that allows me to make sense of the most things. Sounds awkward, but you know what I mean.

Missed 4224.

To me causation and connection are part of the family matter, energy, space, time and also of physical laws.

If Noether's theorem is not only mathematically correct but also applies to reality, what happens in 'eternity'?

Noggin

Me too. Except 'creation' is different in a special way and 'connection' is just an ordinary kinda word. Must admit to not having heard of Noether's theorem. Off to look it up.

Noether's theorem is a posh mathematical proof of something that is intuitevely obvious. Namely that if the fundamental physical laws are invariant the existence of the universe must be underpinned by a conserved quantity.

Noggin

Ah yes. Got hold of it in the broadest possible sense I think. I recall having had similar thoughts about relativity if I've got it right. Let's assume that the speed of light is variable and that other things change. Is it not equivalent. Is that not kinda like the general idea?

Noggin
imagine
(And getting back to a little of the topic.)
Eternal is forever, timeless, without time. without time finite or infinite is a moot point.
Men have souls, I'm going with this one because of all the things religion disagrees about this one thing is almost a majority decision.
souls do not exist in the physical universe, they exist outside of it. where there is no time.
souls 'visit' the physical universe in bodies that are subject to time and hence decay.
when that decay is completed we call it death. It is death of the physical form, which inhabits the physical plain. The soul is not subject to decay or death. It is not subject to the the laws of physics.

I think that's something slightly different. Noether's theorem applies to physical laws however expressed. Whatever the law is, if it applies through time translations there has to be a conserved quantity, ie. energy, and so on for the other conserved quantities (momentum for space translations, and some others). My question was really about invariance of the laws where there is no time, and therefore no translations or conserved quantities. And therefore whether one could talk about causation or creation, or indeed anything at all, at the point where time begins. Not that I pretend to know the answer, mind. I just "feel" that the normal connections of our concepts would not be guarenteed.

Noggin

There are instances of causation happening without any time between the cause and effect.

Interestingly, the speed of gravity was recently confirmed to be approximately the same speed as light.

- Jordan

So what laws is it subject to? And what laws connect these two sets of laws together? This was Descartes' dilemma; his thesis and antithesis. The synthesis was Spinoza's. There can only be one set of laws.

Noggin

'[S]ouls do not exist in the physical universe, they exist outside of it, where there is no time... [they are] not subject to the the laws of physics.'

Oh yes they are! I certainly believe that the spirit is matter, and that if we had appropriate methods we could detect it.

I wonder - could everything be matter? If we simply extend the concept to include energy, I think it could be. We certainly seem rather obsessed with finding virtual particles to subliminate forces.

- Jordan

"Oh yes they are!
I certainly believe"

which ?

Note the 'believe' - it's a hypothesis, but it isn't supported by any scientific evidence to my knowledge.

- Jordan

Hass:

Noggin/toxxin: I can't seem to recall, do either of you know the conclusion that Aquinas reached in his 'Summae Theologica' concerning immaterial matter? I'm trying to remember his reasoning.

However, now I must go home to shed some tears.

- Jordan

Jordan
souls as matter?
Really?
If you believe that a soul is simply energy, we can already measure that, and yet we haven't measured the energy of the soul.
Or the energy that is God.

Matter is that lump of Islmaic clay that Allah used to create man. It's a metaphor, in my humble opinion, for the creation of the physical for the use of the spiritual.

Maybe I didn't get hold of all that, Noggin. Nevertheless, I'm postulating that the laws of nature were created together with time, space etc. Hence there is no need to separate them from time.

If you're talking about God. Well, He's 'sui generis'. Omnipotent therefore bound by no laws of His own or wherever sourced. That's why God is the only entity it makes sense to postulate in the absence of anything else. The creator has to be separate from the created.