[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles

[Damien Broderick]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury at aeiveos.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 1:37 PM

> The question of *why* your pants are on fire is one of simple
> chemistry.  It is the release of free energy

Quite so, and I think this is a clue. (The other common sense of `why' might
call for the answer: `Because Robert was infuriated and set Eliezer's pants
on fire with a flaming match', or some such, but that formulation is even
farther from touching the original ontological enquiry.)

Pants changing their electrochemical state, like every issue about the
observable world, is a transform of one mass/energy/information state into
another. `Why something not nothing?' is an utterly different kind of
question, since it presumes that `nothing' is the name of the *thing* that
could take the place of another thing, a *something* in fact. But our
experience does not support this word (mis)usage, this conceptual slippage,
this conjuring trick. We never experience *nothing* (as I've argued before
on this list), only the absence of one thing in favor of another. When a
chair burns, its hard rigidity vanishes into a small pile of ash, a quantity
of dissipated heat, and gases that can't be readily seen. When ice
evaporates, it seems to become... nothing. But it doesn't. True, the
informational state subserving or perhaps supervening upon the water
molecules has changed; perhaps one could say it has become nothing. But if
so, it can reappear from nothing when the temperature drops.

The question, then, looks like a cognitive optical illusion, and one that
has no counterpart we can readily draw upon for analogy. Pants on fire isn't
it. Why am I here rather than in another galaxy, why am I now rather than at
the end of time--these are locational or deictic questions with, perhaps,
anthropic answers. But being and nothingness isn't like that. It really
isn't. It's *sui generis*, and blows away when you think hard about it
into... nothing.

Damien Broderick