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We are ambivalent, then, about begi
The 'draw a line' philosophy offers a substantial political advantage to people with hidden agendas. The method for getting what you want is first to draw the line somewhere that nobody would object to, and then gradually move it to where you really want it, arguing continuity all the way. For example, having agreed that killing a child is murder, the line labelled 'murder' is then slid back to the instant of conception; having agreed that people should be allowed to read whichever newspaper they like, you end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerve gas on the Internet.
If we were less obsessed with labels and discontinuity, it would be much easier to recognize that the problem here is not where to draw the line: it is that the image of drawing a line is inappropriate. There is no sharp line, only shades of grey that merge u
Even such obviously black-and-white distinctions as alive/dead or male/female turn out, on close examination, to be more like a continuous merging than a sharp discontinuity. Pork sausages from the butcher's contain many live pig cells. With today's techniques you might even clone an adult pig from one. A person's brain can have ceased to function but their body, with medical assistance, can keep going. There are at least a dozen different combinations of sex chromosomes in humans, of which only XX represents the traditional female and XY the traditional male.
Although the Big Bang is a scientific story about a begi
Turtles all the way down?
Does physics go all the way down, or does it stop at some level? If it stops, is that the Ultimate Secret, or just a point beyond which the physicists' way of thinking fails?
The conceptual problem here is difficult because the universe is a becoming, a process, and we want to think of it as a thing. We don't only find it puzzling that the universe was so different back then, that particles behaved differently, that the universe then became the universe now, and will perhaps eventually cease expanding and collapse back to a point in a Big Crunch. We are familiar with babies becoming children becoming adults, but these processes always surprise us, we like things to keep the same character, so 'becoming' is difficult for our minds to handle.
There is another element of the first moments of our universe that is even more difficult to think about. Where did the Laws come from? Why are there such things as protons and electrons, quarks and gluons? We usually separate processes into two conceptually distinct causal chunks: the initial conditions, and the rules by which they are transformed as time passes. For the solar system, for instance, the initial conditions are the positions and speeds of the planets at some chosen instant of time; the rules are the laws of gravitation and motion, which tell us how those positions and speeds will change thereafter. But for the begi
During the becoming of its first moments, our universe kept changing its state, changing the rules it accessed. In this respect it was rather like a flame, which changes its composition according to its own dynamics and the things that it is burning. Flames are all more or less the same shape, but they don't inherit that shape from a 'parent'. When you set light to a piece of paper, the flame builds itself from scratch using the rules of the outside universe.
In the opening instants of the universe, it wasn't just substances, temperatures and sizes that changed. The rules by which they changed also changed. We don't like to think this way: we want immutable laws, the same always. So we look for 'deeper' laws to govern how the rules changed. Possibly the universe is 'really' governed by these deeper laws. But perhaps it just makes up its own rules as it goes along.