Are we "Things" or "Events"

[Vox]

I have been wondering this question for a while.

Normal common sense structures person as "I" which thinks and therefore is existing as "thing" and "being" separate entity from all the other separate entities. Also we consider ouselves as independent observer observing things around us..

 

I not so sure that this is the case...

 

if we assume that "there was a "Big Bang"" it would then mean that the Big Bang is also now and continuing..it has never stopped as an event or bang..within this event, event within the event change constantly, I would compare event as like whirlpool in the river it emerges and then disappears..we could ask from where did it come from and to where did it go? Merging from event and going back to the event. If this is the case should all what is within this big bang event be events also.. emerging and disappearing, also we humans ?..We could be named as event with consciousness? This would change totally the view from outside conscious observer observing separate material things to event which is observing event arising within the event? Assumed things separateness would not be reality anymore in our thinking..

 

Also question is: What leads us to think that we are separate things?

is it our minds concept where ego created by mind keeps itself alive within the mind with this "Optical mind illusion"

 

We as currently assumed persons and things are constantly changing , moment by moment ..cells die , cells will be created within us all the time, without us conscioulsy knowing it or being able to controll it..so who is "I" if it´s already changed to something else when "I" am writing this Thread and it do not know by thought what "I" as body is actually doing or to which form it is going to change next?

 

Provocative statement, you or "I" can not know who you or "I" will be in next moment...

 

You can´t step into the same river twice....

[Turtle]

I have been wondering this question for a while.

...

so who is "I" if it´s already changed to something else when "I" am writing this Thread and it do not know by thought what "I" as body is actually doing or to which form it is going to change next?

 

Provocative statement, you or "I" can not know who you or "I" will be in next moment...

 

You can´t step into the same river twice....

 

i currently favor floating some eddies of doug's stream. while i have broached this in several other threads, no real discussion has ensued as it's rather a necessary condition to have read the book. here i am, trying again. :doh: i is a strange loop. :beer:

 

Definitions

A strange loop is a hierarchy of levels, each of which is linked to at least one other by some type of relationship. A strange loop hierarchy, however, is "tangled" (Hofstadter refers to this as a "heterarchy"), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level. Examples of strange loops that Hofstadter offers include: many of the works of M. C. Escher, the information flow network between DNA and enzymes through protein synthesis and DNA replication, and self-referential Gödelian statements in formal systems.

 

In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows:

 

“ And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (pp. 101-102) ...

Strange loop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[jedaisoul]

Vox,

 

I find the OP little more than a random collection of trivial and unsubstantiated claims. For example:

 

if we assume that "there was a "Big Bang"" it would then mean that the Big Bang is also now and continuing..it has never stopped as an event or bang.

Why? The idea that "the Big Bang is also now and continuing" does not automatically follow from the assumption "there was a Big Bang". If you want to claim this, then you need to either:

a) State that "the Big Bang is also now and continuing" as a separate precept. Or...

Give some justification as to how you conclude it to be so.

 

The exact structure does not matter, but it would also benefit from a definition of what you mean by the "Big Bang". That may seem unnecessary, but it seems to me that you are implicitly defining it as:

 

c) Not only the initial "explosion" that initiated this universe, but also the ongoing expansion of it. Rather than...

d) Only the initial "explosion" that initiated this universe.

 

I.e. Assuming you meant c), you could structure the claim in at least two ways:

 

I define the "Big Bang not only as the initial "explosion" that initiated this universe, but also the ongoing expansion of it. Therefore I make the following assumptions:

 

Precepts:

a) There was a Big Bang.

:doh: The Big Bang is also now and continuing.

 

From these I conclude... because...

Or...

 

Precepts:

a) There was a Big Bang.

 

I define the "Big Bang not only as the initial "explosion" that initiated this universe, but also the ongoing expansion of it. Therefore the "Big Bang" is also now and continuing...

Instead, you have stated it as an unsubstantiated conclusion based, presumably, on an assumption that we all intuitively understand what YOU mean by the "Big Bang", (which, incidentally, does not accord with the usage in at least this reference work):

 

The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe.

[jedaisoul]

Having written the above, it occurs to me that there is a further possible interpretation of your meaning, which relates to the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). It could be argued that,like a forest fire that has not been entirely extinguished, the presence of the CMBR means that the Big Bang, of which it is a remnant, is still with us today. That could make a coherent argument. The trouble is, I have no idea whether that was what you meant!

[Knothead]

We as currently assumed persons and things are constantly changing , moment by moment ..cells die , cells will be created within us all the time, without us conscioulsy knowing it or being able to controll it..so who is "I" if it´s already changed to something else when "I" am writing this Thread and it do not know by thought what "I" as body is actually doing or to which form it is going to change next?

 

Provocative statement, you or "I" can not know who you or "I" will be in next moment...

 

You can´t step into the same river twice....

 

Not sure I understand what you're saying. How does the fact that we are living, ie constantly changing, mean that we aren't things or separate beings? We have mass. We take up space. Of course we're things.

That is unless I'm imagining all this and am in reality just a bit of cosmic energy with too much time on my hands.

[Vox]

Having written the above, it occurs to me that there is a further possible interpretation of your meaning, which relates to the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). It could be argued that,like a forest fire that has not been entirely extinguished, the presence of the CMBR means that the Big Bang, of which it is a remnant, is still with us today. That could make a coherent argument. The trouble is, I have no idea whether that was what you meant!

 

This is the one which I tried to decribe/state..so the actual "Big Bang" or explosion is in this moment continuing still as it was in that moment in 13,7 B years ago..so my point is the verify can take out any separate/independent "things" out of this explosion which is "alive and kicking" still today or is all within this explosion just continuing event containing smaller events within.. like river have water flow as an event but also can have events like whirlpool arising from it and returning to it..But we do not call whirpool a thing but we call it an event?

 

Just to visualize and simplify more, let`s take a bottle of ink and throw it to the wall..as soon as ink hits the wall it "separates" to smaller events within total event and slowing that process heavily we could imagine ourselves being event in one these droplets of in as galaxies..but there is no start and stop moments within the flow of event to be able to descibe as separate things? Concerning this I would appriciate more advanced thinkers opinions? Or every moment/now is a separate "thing" , but has a moment/now any time within it to be able separate anything out of it as thing(s)?

[Vox]

Not sure I understand what you're saying. How does the fact that we are living, ie constantly changing, mean that we aren't things or separate beings? We have mass. We take up space. Of course we're things.

That is unless I'm imagining all this and am in reality just a bit of cosmic energy with too much time on my hands.

 

How do you define you or you "birth" , normal definition is that you have been born as a person when you came out from your mothers uterine..we as humans have agreed to call that a persons birth. But that is not from my perspective any separate moment out of the even from where this "thing"/person emerges..you were before that also existing and if we take out your father for example from the event you would not "be".. so when "you" have actually been born? For me it looks that all have been born when time and space have been born..if you try to cut out something from that total event todays event /now would not be the same..looking from diffrent perspective: Every momet would be as separate thing, then we change from moment to moment so where is this static person as thing due it will be diffrent entity / thing from now to next now..

 

I dare to oversimplify my question: Are we conscious events raising from cosmic soup and returning it?

[jedaisoul]

This is the one which I tried to decribe/state..so the actual "Big Bang" or explosion is in this moment continuing still as it was in that moment in 13,7 B years ago.

I said that a coherent (valid) argument could be made for that view, but, sadly, I do not think it is sound. The reason is, the CMBR we see today has been traveling for 13.7 billion years. So what we are seeing is not what is there today. Has the Big Bang (meaning the early stages of the inception of our universe when the CMBR was emitted) ended? Yes. It ended when the universe was about 379,000 years old.

 

Will we still receive the CMBR in a 100 million years time? Probably so, if our planet is still around, because the remnants of the Big Bang we will receive then will be from 13.8 billion years in the past! It's confusing, but you have to remember that the further away something is in the cosmos, you are seeing it as it was further in the past.

[Vox]

I said that a coherent (valid) argument could be made for that view, but, sadly, I do not think it is sound. The reason is, the CMBR we see today has been traveling for 13.7 billion years. So what we are seeing is not what is there today. Has the Big Bang (meaning the early stages of the inception of our universe when the CMBR was emitted) ended? Yes. It ended 13.7 billion years ago.

 

I disagree.. the only moment which exist in cosmos as reality is now so we are the continious big bang now..broadly speaking we are in the explosion wave within. That what we are seeing or experiencing now is "naturally" not the same what was 13,7B years ago due there is not same moment/now, it changes constantly ..again.. point is that it is continuing explosion event which we are riding within now

[jedaisoul]

I disagree.. the only moment which exist in cosmos as reality is now so we are the continious big bang now..broadly speaking we are in the explosion wave within. That what we are seeing or experiencing now is "naturally" not the same what was 13,7B years ago due there is not same moment/now, it changes constantly ..again.. point is that it is continuing explosion event which we are riding within now

The trouble is, you are stating an opinion on scientific facts that I, and I suspect you, are not competent to judge. My comments come from here:

 

After 10^-6 seconds, the early universe was made up of a hot plasma of photons, electrons, and baryons. The photons were constantly interacting with the plasma through Thomson scattering. As the universe expanded, adiabatic cooling caused the plasma to cool until it became favorable for electrons to combine with protons and form hydrogen atoms. This recombination event happened at around 3000 K or when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old. At this point, the photons scattered off the now electrically neutral atoms and began to travel freely through space, resulting in the decoupling of matter and radiation.

[Vox]

The trouble is, you are stating an opinion on scientific facts that I, and I suspect you, are not competent to judge. My comments come from here:

 

I fully agree this concernig my competence, But still making statemet so that someone more cabable could either validate or "demolish" it

[jedaisoul]

I fully agree this concernig my competence, But still making statemet so that someone more cabable could either validate or "demolish" it

Well I can't say I'm more capable, and I'm not out to demolish your ideas. I want to help you refine them. That may mean throwing out some parts that are untenable, but that's part of learning.

 

Some of your ideas I agree with, like the idea that "now" is the only moment that exists in reality. That means that we are both presentists as opposed to "eternalists". You might want to look up the link I've given to find out more about that...

 

However, getting back to the subject... The fact that we are receiving the CMBR now, does not mean that we are encircled in a "continuing explosion". That radiation has traveled for 13.7 billion years to reach us, so we are "seeing" it as it was 13.7 billion years ago. I say "seeing" because it's not actually visible to the human eye. It is received by radio telescopes that operate in the microwave band.

 

Scientists estimate that the event that caused the CMBR to be emitted happened when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old. That's a very long time ago, given that the universe is now around 13.7 billion years old. That's scientific fact, as best as is known at the moment. So, even though this is a philosophy forum, statements that contradict scientific facts need a high degree of justification. As you have indicated, you do not have that. So I think you need to reconsider that part of your ideas.

[Vox]

Well I can't say I'm more capable, and I'm not out to demolish your ideas. I want to help you refine them. That may mean throwing out some parts that are untenable, but that's part of learning.

 

Some of your ideas I agree with, like the idea that "now" is the only moment that exists in reality. That means that we are both presentists as opposed to "eternalists". You might want to look up the link I've given to find out more about that...

 

However, getting back to the subject... The fact that we are receiving the CMBR now, does not mean that we are encircled in a "continuing explosion". That radiation has traveled for 13.7 billion years to reach us, so we are "seeing" it as it was 13.7 billion years ago. I say "seeing" because it's not actually visible to the human eye. It is received by radio telescopes that operate in the microwave band.

 

Scientists estimate that the event that caused the CMBR to be emitted happened when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old. That's a very long time ago, given that the universe is now around 13.7 billion years old. That's scientific fact, as best as is known at the moment. So, even though this is a philosophy forum, statements that contradict scientific facts need a high degree of justification. As you have indicated, you do not have that. So I think you need to reconsider that part of your ideas.

 

I appreciate your "sparring" concerning this topic..

 

For me the important question is this is all in cosmos connected to everything else or things are separete entities.. if "all" was packed to one point "in the beginning"..even after explosion and expansion should it contain the same unity within..then consciousness would be also unified in "some level" regardless of the current distancies in Cosmos....

[Vox]

Some of your ideas I agree with, like the idea that "now" is the only moment that exists in reality. That means that we are both presentists as opposed to "eternalists". You might want to look up the link I've given to find out more about that...

 

Thanks for the link, yes, currently favoring "presentist" ideas

[CraigD]

Ignoring objective science for a moment in favor of semantic philosophy, this thread’s question strikes me as being primarily lexiconographical (related to word meaning), to wit: the meaning of “thing”, “event”, and “being (entity)”.

 

“Thing” is in the English language one of our most general, versatile references. We can sensibly use it to refer to a pebble, a brick, an airliner, a movie (eg: “wow! That was really something!”) a discussion, the subject of a discussion, a tenuously connected series of occurrences (eg: “the series of regulatory and technical oversights and errors leading to the Deepwater Horizon disaster were a terrible thing”) or an abstraction (eg: “a crazy little thing called love”, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”). When we know a referent has a more specific reference, but can’t recall it, we default to calling it a thing, or to emphasize our defaulting, a “thingey” (eg: “hand me that static switch retaining thingey”)

 

“Event” is a more specific yet still very general reference that we typically use when a referent has a well defined start and end point in time and space (eg: “a M3.6 earthquake centered at 39.167°N, 77.252°W started Friday, occurred between 09:04:47 and 09:04:54 UTC 16 July 2010”), or is in some other way precisely defined (eg: “during the 30 hour experimental run, 317 detection events were recorded”).

 

“Being” is a reference we fairly strictly reserve for animals. The phrase “living being”, is, therefore, somewhat redundant in the common usage. Beings neurologically complex enough to think about their own and others existence and extrapolate a rich metaphorical description of their thoughts and experiences, we term “sentient beings”, a non-redundant phrase, as many living beings are demonstrably not sentient.

 

We have uncountable many, references little to very much more specific than “thing” – effectively every word in our language as it is used except “thing” and its various forms.

 

Taking my descriptions above as conventional, and its theory as correct, the Big Bang is best described as an event, because it is well-defined in time and space: it occurred at the beginning of time as it can meaningfully be measured, at the only location that could be meaningfully measured. Its duration depends on the context of its use. Commonly, it’s assumed to be zero, making it an instant, and used to describe the time at which other events are theorized to have occurred (eg: “between [imath]10^{-6} and 1 second after the Big Bang, the quark-gluon plasma condensed into hardons”), but sometimes it refers to a sequence of era of the formation of the universe that were hot in a way analogous to an everyday chemical explosion (eg: “about 37700 years after it began, the Big Bang ended as the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons and atomic nuclei to condense into atoms, rendering the universe transparent, and releasing the photons we now observe as the cosmic microwave background”)

 

In short, I don’t think there’re especially deep philosophical questions concerning the distinctions between the terms thing, event, and being. Rather, these are just vocabulary terms for which a conventional meaning need be understood by the participants in a conversation before effective communication can occur.

[jedaisoul]

For me the important question is this is all in cosmos connected to everything else or things are separete entities.. if "all" was packed to one point "in the beginning"..even after explosion and expansion should it contain the same unity within..then consciousness would be also unified in "some level" regardless of the current distancies in Cosmos....

I think you are jumping ahead. You need to think more on the definition of the topic, because you've not really nailed that down. The topic is "Are we things or events". The important question, to me, is how you are defining "we" in that sentence. It seems to me that "we" may be regarded as either "things" or "events" depending on how you define "we". Think on that...

 

Also you need to consider CraigD's comments, which contain, in my opinion, a valuable insight into the question. You should think on that too...

[Vox]

In short, I don’t think there’re especially deep philosophical questions concerning the distinctions between the terms thing, event, and being. Rather, these are just vocabulary terms for which a conventional meaning need be understood by the participants in a conversation before effective communication can occur.

 

Thank you for this detailed contribution.

 

What I try to express by using these 2 words "Thing" or "Event" is to find possible proofs of oneness of Cosmos (Event) or separateness of observed activities in cosmos (Things).. Do we consider that human beings are separate observers in Cosmos or are we inherently linked with cosmos with some "media"(for example "Superstrings theory") which preserves oneness and is present now within the whole Cosmos..assumption if "all" what was existing before big bang/explosion was compressed to one and then exploding ..did the explosion break the unity of oneness? Or do Cosmos contain still the same interlinking qualities of oneness....Pardon my selection of the words, it´s like trying to simulate flower with pile of bricks ;-)