what happened before the big bang?

[AmIdYfReAk]

Stuff floated, and other Stuff happened.

[tnf]

The old lady story.

[seremtan]

The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.

what's the tortoise standing on?

You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's turtles all the way down!

lol, you know that anecdote too

edit: btw can i just say that this



is the best sig ever. i just can't stop watching it

[seremtan]

Recent scientific data have shown that the rate of the expansion is increasing, however, so this throws a bit of a curveball into the crunch idea. But there is still much work to be done in trying to figure out exactly what the fate of the universe might be.

i'm glad to hear that since the thought that it'll all crunch back into nothing again at some point - even though gazillions of years after i'm gone - makes me think that nothing we do amounts to sweet f a in the long run

[[xeno]Julios]

the most mind-bending thing for me is that anything exists at all (sartre: "why is there something and not nothing?") and what that means, if anything (wittgenstein: "it is not how the world exists that is mystical, it is that it exists at all").

This is the biggest mystery to my mind, also.

[ScooterG]

the most mind-bending thing for me is that anything exists at all (sartre: "why is there something and not nothing?") and what that means, if anything (wittgenstein: "it is not how the world exists that is mystical, it is that it exists at all").

This is the biggest mystery to my mind, also.

W3RD.

[Hannibal]

(sartre: "why is there something and not nothing?")

This is the biggest mystery to my mind, also.

The modern King of this question is Martin Heidegger...his Introduction to Metaphysics will knock your balls off. And then ask for seconds.

[Hannibal]

Here is another idea which I realized.

In order for something to exist something else needs to know the properties of that something, otherwise there would be nothing.

Are you sure? Did Pluto magically wink into existence in 1930?

yes.

now: prove the opposite, lol.

Does the 'lol' mean you are joking?

[[xeno]Julios]

The modern King of this question is Martin Heidegger...his Introduction to Metaphysics will knock your balls off. And then ask for seconds.

if he could write in english, i'd be happy to make sense of him...

i tried understanding his intro (as well as excerpts from being and time), but all that happened was that a rage built deep within me. I just wished he would apparate in front of me so i could stick my foot in his eye multiple times.

[mjrpes]

the most mind-bending thing for me is that anything exists at all (sartre: "why is there something and not nothing?") and what that means, if anything (wittgenstein: "it is not how the world exists that is mystical, it is that it exists at all").

Existence is a paradox. It's obvious that there could have never been a state of 'nothing'. Something could never come out of nothing, or else it wasn't really 'nothing' to begin with. And it's obvious that we exist, therefore there exists 'something'.

Yet, if there never was truly 'nothing', it is hard to fathon that there was always this 'something'. Our minds can't comprehend an unending chain of causal events without a primary cause, even when we consider the grand scale of the creation of the universe followed by its collapse and continual rebirth. Even the theory of multi-universes or a radical quantum theory of spontaneous creation provide no help; universes are still 'something' and there must have been a chain of events that lead to their creation, and spontaneous creation seems a cop-out where we just don't understand some underlying cause. So an infinite regress of causal events without beginning seems just as absurd as 'something' coming into existence from 'nothing'.

I don't see how our understanding of this subject has changed at all since the time of Parmenides, but then again I didn't get that far in my philosophy studies. I tried reading Heidegger but the sadist had my ball's in a vise.

[menkent]

if he could write in english, i'd be happy to make sense of him...

i tried understanding his intro (as well as excerpts from being and time), but all that happened was that a rage built deep within me. I just wished he would apparate in front of me so i could stick my foot in his eye multiple times.

<i>Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table.</i>

now go learn zee german!