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Steve Provizer's avatar

A theory with predictive powers. And, a nice way to situate us into a much wider structure. However, another question must be asked: wIthout evolution, would there be "nothing"? If not, then why evolution?

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Julian Gough's avatar

I think there has always been something. And there has always been time, in which that something has unfolded. The idea of "nothing" is just an idea, a mental construct, as is the idea of "no time"... or indeed, combining the two, "no spacetime".

We know there is now something; the parsimonious argument has to be that there always has been something; it has just changed in form over time and, I would argue, complexified to an astonishingly baroque extent from some absolutely simple initial/eternal ur-stuff... with the chief driver of that complexification being evolution, operating at more and more scales as time goes on.

You do need that ur-stuff to split in two, in some way, at some point, with some basic difference between the resulting halves, in order to get the whole show rolling. But if you have infinite time, and only require a very simple though perhaps very unlikely thing to happen... well, clearly it happened!

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Steve Provizer's avatar

Thank you for responding. Of course, this is the Advaita point of view. We are not born, nor do we die. Also, what some poets say-beauty is truth, all ye need to know, etc. But, still so difficult to accept-and science has some responsibility in making this acceptance even more difficult. "Hard facts." Well, there's nothing hard about them; or about anything else.

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