Light and Matter (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, May 29, 2014, 17:41 (3829 days ago) @ GateKeeper

Gatekeeper, I drafted this post before seeing your latest response, and I shall again have to postpone a reply to that till tomorrow. But please rest assured, this is not a forum for fine writing ... it's the arguments we're interested in, and I for one really appreciate what you're bringing to our discussions.-This thread was opened because of an article in the Guardian announcing a forthcoming experiment to demonstrate that matter can be made from "pure light", which the article appeared to make synonymous with "pure energy". This came as a shock to me, because until now I'd accepted the idea that energy produced matter. (That is not the same, of course, as saying that matter contains and produces energy.) David confirms that the idea of the universe springing from "pure" energy is "the current theory". Theories appear to change from day to day, and so I'm now questioning whether there is even such a thing as "pure" energy, and whether we can say matter and energy are "interchangeable", as the current theory maintains.-That's the background to this discussion, which eventually I hope to relate to panpsychism, but there are two items I'd like to comment on now. You say matter is "not a thing, it is a series of events." BBella has elaborated on this with her usual acuity:"All that Is is ever changing", and matter is "an event that has slowed its rate of change down long enough for us to observe, discuss, name, and sometimes capture and control it..." The problem that arises in the context of our current discussion is where in the "All That Is" we can draw the line between matter and energy. When I think of energy, I think of movement, heat, light etc., all of which are produced by what we call matter (solids, liquids, gases). In other words, energy springs from matter, not the other way round, and it's the reverse that is of fundamental importance to theories about the birth of our universe. The scientists talk of "pure" light, and David believes his God not only comprises "pure" energy but is also self-aware and able to transform itself into matter; anyone who believes in an afterlife would presumably also have to believe that an identity can be preserved in the form of "pure" energy, since the material self will disintegrate. Materialists by definition reject any such concept. I've asked David for examples of pure energy, but there seems to be no scientific consensus on any of those he has given (plasma, photons, electrons), so I feel we are stuck, and I am confused!
 
The second point leaves me isolated, but I'll pursue the argument. You say "there is no time", BBella agrees and says we name observable changes "time", and David says that "our" time began with the inflation that preceded the Big Bang. Well, yes, we humans devise terms to help us describe the realities we think we observe. But that need not mean that the terms we devise do not correspond to any reality. We measure time through events or changes, but "time" can be defined differently from its means of measurement: namely, as the continuous passage from past to present to future. Individual events prove the reality of this "dimension", and if you accept the sequence of cause and effect (= before the event, the event itself, the consequences), in my view you are accepting the reality of time, even without the events by which we measure it. In terms of the birth of the universe, this means inflation or the Big Bang (whichever came first ... and at the moment inflation appears to be winning) must have had a cause, and the cause of the cause must have had a cause etc.(perhaps an endless cycle of bangs and inflations - who knows?), and so we can't state with any authority that time does not exist, or that it began with the birth of our universe. All that began was the observability and measurability of time, because we have no way of finding out what happened before our universe was born. At best, we can argue that we do not know when or even if time had a beginning.
 
One more item to comment on briefly: 
DAVID: All [atheists] have is faith in the belief: NO GOD. Agnostics have faith in NO PROOFS.-As regards atheists, I don't see how you can have faith in a non-belief. I think faith only comes in when atheists argue that chance is capable of producing the almost unfathomable complexities of life and consciousness. As regards agnostics, the traditional concept concerns the impossibility of knowing (or, if you like, of providing incontrovertible proof) ... which we have agreed would make us all agnostics. The definition to which I adhere (neither believing nor disbelieving in the existence of God) requires no faith at all. Each individual needs to be convinced that something is true, and so agnostics are people who are not (yet) convinced by, and therefore have no faith in, any particular theory.