What did it all started with?

The happy Objectivist

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Matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but they can be interchangeable, and can switch or change forms, and it can be compacted and/or expanded, etc, so maybe the universe came from what is already here, etc, but then, if that is the case, then how did it come to be there/here in the first place, etc...?

Anyway...

God Bless!
It's always existed and it is their nature that is the first cause. People have a hard time accepting this, I know, but for some reason, they are perfectly happy to start with a consciousness that has always existed, even though consciousness is dependent on something external to it to be conscious of.

It is the nature of energy to become matter and for the matter to convert back to energy. It is the nature of matter to form atoms and then molecules and then rocks and planets and everything else that exists.
 
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The happy Objectivist

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But that's just the thing, we don't think anything (existence) can come from non-existence, etc...?

So we wonder why some of your's "denial" persists, etc...?

God Bless!
You might not but I've spoken to many who do, both Christian and atheist.
Oh, and BTW, you kind of just now said that anything that exists has to come from something that either does or did (always) exist...?

Don't know if you caught that or fully realized that, etc...?

And we 100% completely agree with you, etc...

God Bless!
Yes I do realize that. Everything comes from existence, there's nowhere else for it to come from.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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How can you have physics unless something exists?
Obviously, something existed - but it doesn't have to be matter. What we call matter didn't early in the big bang. Even spacetime itself is probably emergent from a more fundamental state.
 
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renniks

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Obviously, something existed - but it doesn't have to be matter. What we call matter didn't early in the big bang. Even spacetime itself is probably emergent from a more fundamental state.
Then we are just guessing. Because we can't know how physics worked before there was matter. And why assume something always existed? That's just another guess.
 
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renniks

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It's always existed and it is their nature that is the first cause. People have a hard time accepting this, I know, but for some reason, they are perfectly happy to start with a consciousness that has always existed, even though consciousness is dependent on something external to it to be conscious of.

It is the nature of energy to become matter and for the matter to convert back to energy. It is the nature of matter to form atoms and then molecules and then rocks and planets and everything else that exists.
If energy always existed then you are saying energy is basically your version of God. It's still a faith based, assumption.
 
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The happy Objectivist

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Nope. I don't have a god. I don't see any reason that we need to call engery a god when it is already called energy. I hold that the universe always existed but I don't call that a god either and I don't take its existence on faith. My belief that energy has always existed is not absolute either. I hold that something has always existed. There may be something more fundamental than energy that energy is made of, I don't know. But The evidence points towards energy being the most fundamental existent. If some other thing can be demonstrated I'll believe that. Belief is the degree to which we accept a claim or idea to be true and it can range from near certainty to extremely tentative.

I don't hold any belief on faith.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Then we are just guessing. Because we can't know how physics worked before there was matter. And why assume something always existed? That's just another guess.
Well, we have a high degree of confidence what happened before there was matter because we use the same physics to explain how matter was produced in the early universe as we do to explain how it behaves now.

I assume something has aways existed because stuff exists now and true or absolute nothing is not a state of existence, it's an abstract concept of negation. When physicists talk of 'nothing' they mean states like empty spacetime, the vacuum state, or whatever spacetime is emergent from, in much the same way as we say "there's nothing in the cupboard"; empirical usage of the word 'nothing' is relative, contextual, because true or absolute nothing can't exist, it's an oxymoron.

Having said all that, there are universe models where time is finite but unbounded, where space and time change places at the 'start' and 'end', analogously to the way they swap over inside the event horizon of a black hole.

But in any case, these assumptions are about what we know exists, we're not making up hand-waving, special pleading stories about mythical beings that create everything without having to be explained themselves.
 
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renniks

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Nope. I don't have a god. I don't see any reason that we need to call engery a god when it is already called energy. I hold that the universe always existed but I don't call that a god either and I don't take its existence on faith
Of course you do. You have no way to confirm it. So it is a belief.
 
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The happy Objectivist

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Of course you do. You have no way to confirm it. So it is a belief.
Are you perhaps operating under the misapprehension that if one does not have absolute certainty then one is opperating on faith? because that is absurd. My belief is based on the evidence of science so it's not faith.

also, I can confirm that the universe did not come into existence philosophically. Existence exists and only existence exists. There's nowhere else for the universe to come into existence from and there's nowhere for it to go. The idea of the universe, of existence, having a cause commits the fallacy of the stollen concept and the notion of the Christian God violates the primacy of existence so I'm on solid ground here in my belief.
 
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renniks

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Are you perhaps operating under the misapprehension that if one does not have absolute certainty then one is opperating on faith? because that is absurd. My belief is based on the evidence of science so it's not faith.

also, I can confirm that the universe did not come into existence philosophically. Existence exists and only existence exists. There's nowhere else for the universe to come into existence from and there's nowhere for it to go. The idea of the universe, of existence, having a cause commits the fallacy of the stollen concept and the notion of the Christian God violates the primacy of existence so I'm on solid ground here in my belief.
Science can not prove or disprove the existence of eternal anything. To believe something always existed is religion, not science.

Infinity is a concept, not a number, it can not be measured.
Science deals with what can be observed and measured.
 
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SelfSim

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Science can not prove or disprove the existence of eternal anything. To believe something always existed is religion, not science.
Science can posit 'things' as existing, where these 'things' are necessary for making consistent, present-day testable predictions.

Believing that these 'things' existed eternally however, is purely a matter of personal choice.
I'm not at all sure religions permit such choices when it comes to, say, the existence of their respective deities.

renniks said:
Infinity is a concept, not a number, it can not be measured.
Science deals with what can be observed and measured.
Numbers also describe concepts .. such as infinity.
 
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The happy Objectivist

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Science can not prove or disprove the existence of eternal anything. To believe something always existed is religion, not science.

Infinity is a concept, not a number, it can not be measured.
Science deals with what can be observed and measured.
We don't need science to prove or disprove that existence is eternal. Philosophically, the idea that the universe had a cause is fallacious as I've said. It commits the fallacy of the stolen concept. It's not those who propose that something has always existed that are in trouble but those that propose that at one time nothing existed which you are implicitly doing when you say the universe had a beggining. It's those that propose this that are standing on quicksand. How would one go about proving that at one time nothing existed? What evidence would nothing leave behind? I don't even think it's possible even to prove that it's possible that at some point nothing existed since the concept "possible" presupposes existence. The very notion of a time or a place where nothing existed also makes use of stolen concepts since if time exists then something exists and there is not nothing but something. So it's those that propose that nothing existed and then something came into existence that are in an untenable position. How could something come into existence unless existence exists? Blank out. There is no reason at all to suppose that something hasn't always existed. And since the universe is the sum total of what exists now, has ever existed and will ever exist, there is no place for it to come from and nothing outside of it to act as a cause. To say that there is is to trade in stolen concepts. And finally, scientists have just proved that there was another universe that existed before the big bang. The ending stage of that universe becomes the new big bang. Everything resets including time. This has just happened in the last few months but it's been confirmed. So given the scientific findings and the philosophical evidence, my position is completely rationally justified. No faith required.
 
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The happy Objectivist

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Infinity is a concept, not a number, it can not be measured.

You are right. The concept infinity represents the potential to carry a sequence of numbers indefinitely. It does not denote an actual infinity. That's one of the minor reasons I don't believe in a god that is infinite. To say that something is infinite means that it has no specific identity or in other words to say that it is nothing in particular, i.e., it is nothing.

Science deals with what can be observed and measured.
Yes, and scientists have just proved through observation that there was something before the big bang. Look up Roger Penrose and conformal cyclic cosmology.
 
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sjastro

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SelfSim

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The concept infinity represents the potential to carry a sequence of numbers indefinitely. It does not denote an actual infinity.
Depends entirely on how you arrive at your meaning for 'actual' there.
'Infinity' has a theoretical mathematical context .. it carries a meaning within that context.
 
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SelfSim

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So was the Big Bang at one time.
I think the difference there, was that at that time, there was little-to-no relevent data available at the large scales.

In the modern-day Penrose CCC case however, there is data and it contradicts CCC's predictions:
The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly, it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data, and the CCC is quite clearly not.
 
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sjastro

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So was the Big Bang at one time.
As @SelfSim has pointed out, CCC will remain a fringe theory as it is contradicted by observation.
Here are the abstracts of two peer reviewed papers which contradict CCC.

A search for concentric circles in the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps

Authors: I. K. Wehus, H. K. Eriksen

Abstract: In a recent analysis of the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps, Gurzadyan and Penrose claim to find evidence for violent pre-Big Bang activity in the form of concentric low-variance circles at high statistical significance. In this paper, we perform an independent search for such concentric low-variance circles, employing both chi^2 statistics and matched filters, and compare the results obtained from the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps with those obtained from LCDM simulations. Our main findings are the following: We do reproduce the claimed ring structures observed in the WMAP data as presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose, thereby verifying their computational procedures. However, the results from our simulations do not agree with those presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose. On the contrary we obtain a substantially larger variance in our simulations, to the extent that the observed WMAP sky maps are fully consistent with the LCDM model as measured by these statistics.

And this...
No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky

Authors: Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, James P. Zibin

Abstract: In a recent paper, Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions on the sky centred on which are circles of anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented as evidence for a particular picture of the very early Universe. We attempted to repeat the analysis of these authors, and we can indeed confirm that such variations do exist in the temperature variance for annuli around points in the data. However, we find that this variation is entirely expected in a sky which contains the usual CMB anisotropies. In other words, properly simulated Gaussian CMB data contain just the sorts of variations claimed. Gurzadyan & Penrose have not found evidence for pre-Big Bang phenomena, but have simply re-discovered that the CMB contains structure.

Basically what the researchers are stating you will find circles in the CMB if you look for them but these are random alignments.
 
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renniks

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Yes, and scientists have just proved through observation that there was something before the big bang. Look up Roger Penrose and conformal cyclic cosmology.
Which points to God, for all practical purposes.

Carl Friedrich Gauss denied that anything infinite really exists: “Infinity is merely a way of speaking” and “I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics.”
 
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