Problem of universals

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Boethius teaching his students

The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes: "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?"

The problem of universals relates to various inquiries closely related to metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, as far back as Plato and Aristotle, in efforts to define the mental connections a human makes when they understand a property such as shape or color to be the same in nonidentical objects.

Universals are qualities or relations found in two or more entities. As an example, if all cup holders are circular in some way, circularity may be considered a universal property of cup holders. Further, if two daughters can be considered female offspring of Frank, the qualities of being female, offspring, and of Frank, are universal properties of the two daughters. Many properties can be universal: being human, red, male or female, liquid or solid, big or small, etc.

Philosophers agree that human beings can talk and think about universals, but disagree on whether universals exist in reality beyond mere thought and speech.

Ancient philosophy

The problem of universals is considered a central issue in traditional metaphysics and can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle's philosophy, particularly in their attempt to explain the nature and status of forms. These philosophers explored the problem through predication.

Plato

Plato believed that there was a sharp distinction between the world of perceivable objects and the world of universals or forms (eidos): one can only have mere opinions about the former, but one can have knowledge about the latter. For Plato, it was not possible to have knowledge of anything that could change or was particular, since knowledge had to be forever unfailing and general. For that reason, the world of the forms is the real world, like sunlight, while the sensible world is only imperfectly or partially real, like shadows. This Platonic realism, however, in denying that the eternal Forms are mental artifacts, differs sharply with modern forms of idealism.

One of the first nominalist critiques of Plato's realism was that of Diogenes of Sinope, who said "I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness."

Aristotle

See also: Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics

Plato's student Aristotle disagreed with his tutor. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into "formal causes", the blueprints or essences of individual things. Whereas Plato idealized geometry, Aristotle emphasized nature and related disciplines and therefore much of his thinking concerns living beings and their properties. The nature of universals in Aristotle's philosophy therefore hinges on his view of natural kinds. Instead of categorizing being according to the structure of thought, he proposed that the categorical analysis be directed upon the structure of the natural world. He used the principle of predication in Categories, where he established that universal terms are involved in a relation of predication if some facts expressed by ordinary sentences hold.

In his work On Interpretation, he maintained that the concept of "universal" is apt to be predicated of many and that singular is not. For instance, man is a universal while Callias is a singular. The philosopher distinguished highest genera like animal and species like man but he maintained that both are predicated of individual men. This was considered part of an approach to the principle of things, which adheres to the criterion that what is most universal is also most real. Consider for example a particular oak tree. This is a member of a species and it has much in common with other oak trees, past, present and future. Its universal, its oakness, is a part of it. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness and more generally the intelligible order within the sensible world. Accordingly, Aristotle was more confident than Plato about coming to know the sensible world; he was a prototypical empiricist and a founder of induction. Aristotle was a new, moderate sort of realist about universals.

Medieval philosophy

Boethius

The problem was introduced to the medieval world by Boethius (c. 480–524 AD), by his translation of Porphyry's Isagoge. It begins:

"I shall omit to speak about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only; whether also if subsistent, they are bodies or incorporeal, and whether they are separate from, or in, sensibles, and subsist about these, for such a treatise is most profound, and requires another more extensive investigation".

Boethius, in his commentaries on the aforementioned translation, says that a universal, if it were to exist, has to apply to several particulars entirely. He also specifies that they apply simultaneously at once and not in a temporal succession. He reasons that they cannot be mind-independent, i.e. they do not have a real existence, because a quality cannot be both one thing and common to many particulars in such a way that it forms part of a particular's substance, as it would then be partaking of universality and particularity. However, he also says that universals can't also be of the mind since a mental construct of a quality is an abstraction and understanding of something outside of the mind. He concludes that either this representation is a true understanding of the quality, in which case we revert to the earlier problem faced by those who believe universals are real; or, if the mental abstractions were not a true understanding, then 'what is understood otherwise than the thing is false'.

His solution to this problem was to state that the mind is able to separate in thought what is not necessarily separable in reality. He cites the human mind's ability to abstract from concrete particulars as an instance of this. This, according to Boethius, avoids the problem of Platonic universals being out there in the real world, but also the problem of them being purely constructs of the mind in that universals are simply the mind thinking of particulars in an abstract, universal way. His assumption focuses on the problems that language create. Boethius maintained that the structure of language corresponds to the structure of things and that language creates what he regarded as philosophical babble of confused and contradictory accounts of the nature of things. To illustrate his view, suppose that although the mind cannot think of 2 or 4 as an odd number, as this would be a false representation, it can think of an even number that is neither 2 nor 4.

Medieval realism

Main article: Medieval realism

Boethius mostly stayed close to Aristotle in his thinking about universals. Realism's biggest proponents in the Middle Ages, however, came to be Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Aquinas argued that both the essence of a thing and its existence were clearly distinct; in this regard he is also Aristotelian.

Duns Scotus argues that in a thing there is no real distinction between the essence and the existence; instead, there is only a formal distinction. Scotus believed that universals exist only inside the things that they exemplify, and that they "contract" with the haecceity of the thing to create the individual. As a result of his realist position, he argued strongly against both nominalism and conceptualism, arguing instead for Scotist realism, a medieval response to the conceptualism of Abelard. That is to say, Scotus believed that such properties as 'redness' and 'roundness' exist in reality and are mind-independent entities.

Furthermore, Duns Scotus wrote about this problem in his own commentary (Quaestiones) on Porphyry's Isagoge, as Boethius had done. Scotus was interested in how the mind forms universals, and he believed this to be 'caused by the intellect'.^[18] This intellect acts on the basis that the nature of, say, 'humanity' that is found in other humans and also that the quality is attributable to other individual humans.

Medieval nominalism

Main article: Medieval nominalism

William of Ockham

The opposing view to realism is one called nominalism, which at its strongest maintains that universals are verbal constructs and that they do not inhere in objects or pre-exist them. Therefore, universals in this view are something which are peculiar to human cognition and language. The French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus (1050–1125) was an early, prominent proponent of this view. His particular view was that universals are little more than vocal utterances (voces).

William of Ockham (1285–1347) wrote extensively on this topic. He argued strongly that universals are a product of abstract human thought. According to Ockham, universals are just words or concepts (at best) that only exist in the mind and have no real place in the external world. His opposition to universals was not based on his eponymous Razor, but rather he found that regarding them as real was contradictory in some sense. An early work has Ockham stating that 'no thing outside the soul is universal, either through itself or through anything real or rational added on, no matter how it is considered or understood'. Nevertheless, his position did shift away from an outright opposition to accommodating them in his later works such as the Summae Logicae (albeit in a modified way that would not classify him as a complete realist).

Modern and contemporary philosophy

Hegel

The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel discussed the relation of universals and particulars throughout his works. Hegel posited that both exist in a dialectical relationship to one another; that is, one exists only in relation and in reference to the other.

He stated the following on the issue:

The parts are diverse and independent of each other. They are, however, only parts in their identical relation to each other, or insofar as they, taken together, constitute the whole. But this togetherness is the opposite of the part.

— G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830)

Mill

See also: Psychologism

The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. Mill wrote, "The formation of a concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object".

However, he then proceeds to state that Berkeley's position is factually wrong by stating the following:

But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept.

— as quoted in William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

In other words, we may be "temporarily unconscious" of whether an image is white, black, yellow or purple and concentrate our attention on the fact that it is a man and on just those attributes necessary to identify it as a man (but not as any particular one). It may then have the significance of a universal of manhood.

Peirce

The 19th-century American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the father of pragmatism, developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley. Peirce begins with the observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical theories have at first sight an air of paradox and levity very unbecoming to a bishop". He includes among these paradoxical doctrines Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception". He wrote that if there is some mental fact that works in practice the way that a universal would, that fact is a universal. "If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish... and an idea?" Peirce also held as a matter of ontology that what he called "thirdness", the more general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities.

James

William James learned about pragmatism. Though James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology:

From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things.

— William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars: the moral–political answer, the mathematical–scientific answer, and the anti-paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near-contemporary advocates.

Weaver

The moral or political response is given by the conservative philosopher Richard M. Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences (1948), where he describes how the acceptance of "the fateful doctrine of nominalism" was "the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence".

Quine

The noted American philosopher, W. V. O. Quine addressed the problem of universals throughout his career. In his paper, 'On Universals', from 1947, he states the problem of universals is chiefly understood as being concerned with entities and not the linguistic aspect of naming a universal. He says that Platonists believe that our ability to form general conceptions of things is incomprehensible unless universals exist outside of the mind, whereas nominalists believe that such ideas are 'empty verbalism'. Quine himself does not propose to resolve this particular debate. What he does say however is that certain types of 'discourse' presuppose universals: nominalists therefore must give these up. Quine's approach is therefore more an epistemological one, i.e. what can be known, rather than a metaphysical one, i.e. what is real.

Cocchiarella

Nino Cocchiarella put forward the idea that realism is the best response to certain logical paradoxes to which nominalism leads ("Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 21 (1980)). It is noted that in a sense Cocchiarella has adopted Platonism for anti-Platonic reasons. Plato, as seen in the dialogue Parmenides, was willing to accept a certain amount of paradox with his forms. Cocchiarella adopts the forms to avoid paradox.

Armstrong

The Australian philosopher David Malet Armstrong has been one of the leading realists in the twentieth century, and has used a concept of universals to build a naturalistic and scientifically realist ontology. In both Universals and Scientific Realism (1978) and Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (1989), Armstrong describes the relative merits of a number of nominalist theories which appeal either to "natural classes" (a view he ascribes to Anthony Quinton), concepts, resemblance relations or predicates, and also discusses non-realist "trope" accounts (which he describes in the Universals and Scientific Realism volumes as "particularism"). He gives a number of reasons to reject all of these, but also dismisses a number of realist accounts.

Penrose

Roger Penrose contends that the foundations of mathematics can't be understood without the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own..."

Indian philosophy

Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (Realist position)

Indian philosophers raise the problem of universals in relation to semantics. Universals are postulated as referents for the meanings of general terms.

The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school conceives of universals as perceptible eternal entities, existing independently of our minds. Nyāya postulates the existence of universals based on our experience of a common characteristic among particulars. Thus, the meaning of a word is understood as a particular further characterized by a universal. For example, the meaning of the term 'cow' refers to a particular cow characterized by the universal of 'cowness'. Nyāya holds that although universals are apprehended differently from particulars, they are not separate, given their inherence in the particulars.

Not every term, however, corresponds to a universal. Udāyana puts forward six conditions for identifying genuine universals.

Mīmaṃsã (Realist position)

Like the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school, Mīmaṃsã characterizes universals as referents for words. The fundamental difference between Bhāṭṭa Mīmaṃsā's and Nyāya is that Bhāṭṭa Mīmaṃsa rejects the Nyāya understanding of the universals' relation of inherence to the particulars. The Hindu philosopher Kumārila Bhaṭṭa argues that if inherence is different from the terms of the relation, it would continuously require another common relation, and if the inherence is non-different, it would be superfluous.

Buddhist Nominalism

Buddhist ontology regards the world as consisting of momentary particulars and mentally constructed universals. In contrast to the realist schools of Indian philosophy, Buddhist logicians put forward a positive theory of nominalism, known as the apoha theory, which denies the existence of universals.

The apoha theory identifies particulars through double negation, not requiring for a general shared essence between terms. For instance, the term 'cow' can be understood as referring to every entity of its exclusion class 'non-cow'.

Positions

There are many philosophical positions regarding universals.

1. Platonic realism (also called extreme realism" or exaggerated realism) is the view that universals or forms in this sense, are the causal explanation behind the notion of what things exactly are; (the view that universals are real entities existing independent of particulars).
2. Aristotelian realism (also called strong realism or moderate realism) is the rejection of extreme realism. This position establishes the view of a universal as being that of the quality within a thing and every other thing individual to it; (the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them).
3. Anti-realism is the objection to both positions. Anti-realism is divided into two subcategories; (1) Nominalism and (2) Conceptualism.

Taking "beauty" as example, each of these positions will state the following:

• Beauty is a property that exists in an ideal form independently of any mind or description.
• Beauty is a property that exists only when beautiful things exist.
• Beauty is a property constructed in the mind, so exists only in descriptions of things.

Realism

Main article: Metaphysical realism

The school of realism makes the claim that universals are real and that they exist distinctly, apart from the particulars that instantiate them. Two major forms of metaphysical realism are Platonic realism (universalia ante res), meaning "'universals before things'" and Aristotelian realism (universalia in rebus), meaning "'universals in things'". Platonic realism is the view that universals are real entities existing independent of particulars. Aristotelian realism, on the other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them.

Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct entities in order to account for various phenomena. A common realist argument said to be found in Plato's writings, is that universals are required for certain general words to have meaning and for the sentences in which they occur to be true or false. Take the sentence "Djivan Gasparyan is a musician" for instance. The realist may claim that this sentence is only meaningful and expresses a truth because there is an individual, Djivan Gasparyan, who possesses a certain quality: musicianship. Therefore, it is assumed that the property is a universal which is distinct from the particular individual who has the property.

Nominalism

Main article: Nominalism

Nominalists assert that only individuals or particulars exist and deny that universals are real (i.e. that they exist as entities or beings; universalia post res). The term "nominalism" comes from the Latin nomen ("name"). Four major forms of nominalism are predicate nominalism, resemblance nominalism, trope nominalism, and conceptualism. One with a nominalist view claims that we predicate the same property of/to multiple entities, but argues that the entities only share a name and do not have a real quality in common.

Nominalists often argue this view by claiming that nominalism can account for all the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Occam's razor, and its principle of simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities. Different variants and versions of nominalism have been endorsed or defended by many, including Chrysippus, Ibn Taymiyyah, William of Ockham, Ibn Khaldun, Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman, David Lewis, H. H. Price, and D. C. Williams.

Conceptualism

Conceptualism is a position that is meshed between realism and nominalism. Conceptualists believe that universals can indeed be real, but only existing as concepts within the mind. Conceptualists argue that the "concept" of universals are not mere "inventions but are reflections of similarities among particular things themselves." For example, the concept of 'man' ultimately reflects a similarity amongst Socrates and Kant.

Why is there anything at all?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3F

This question has been written about by philosophers since at least the ancient Parmenides (c. 515 BC).

"Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger, who called it "the fundamental question of metaphysics".

Introductory points

There is something

No experiment could support the hypothesis "There is nothing" because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.

Defining the question

The question is usually taken as concerning practical causality (rather than a moral reason for), and posed totally and comprehensively, rather than concerning the existence of anything specific, such as the universe or multiverse, the Big Bang, God, mathematical and physical laws, time or consciousness. It can be seen as an open metaphysical question, rather than a search for an exact answer.

The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical being and the metaphysical life, the Monad or the Absolute.

On timescales

The question does not include the timing of when anything came to exist.

Some have suggested the possibility of an infinite regress, where, if an entity cannot come from nothing and this concept is mutually exclusive from something, there must have always been something that caused the previous effect, with this causal chain (either deterministic or probabilistic) extending infinitely back in time.

Arguments against attempting to answer the question

The question is outside our experience

Philosopher Stephen Law has said the question may not need answering, as it is attempting to answer a question that is outside a spacetime setting while being within a spacetime setting. He compares the question to asking "what is north of the North Pole?"

Causation may not apply

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that everything in the universe must have a cause, culminating in an ultimate uncaused cause. (See Four causes.)

However, David Hume argued that a cause may not be necessary in the case of the formation of the universe. Whilst we expect that everything has a cause because of our experience of the necessity of causes, the formation of the universe is outside our experience and may be subject to different rules. Kant supports and extends this argument.

We may only say the question because of the nature of our minds

Kant argues that the nature of our mind may lead us to ask some questions (rather than asking because of the validity of those questions).

The brute fact approach

In philosophy, the brute fact approach proposes that some facts cannot be explained in terms of a deeper, more "fundamental" fact. It is in opposition to the principle of sufficient reason approach.

On this question, Bertrand Russell took a brute fact position when he said, "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all." Sean Carroll similarly concluded that "any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation."

The question may be impossible to answer

Roy Sorensen has discussed that the question may have an impossible explanatory demand, if there are no existential premises.

Explanations

Something may exist necessarily

Philosopher Brian Leftow has argued that the question cannot have a causal explanation (as any cause must itself have a cause) or a contingent explanation (as the factors giving the contingency must pre-exist), and that if there is an answer, it must be something that exists necessarily (i.e., something that just exists, rather than is caused).

Natural laws may necessarily exist, and may enable the emergence of matter

Philosopher of physics Dean Rickles has argued that numbers and mathematics (or their underlying laws) may necessarily exist. If we accept that mathematics is an extension of logic, as philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did, then mathematical structures like numbers and shapes must be necessarily true propositions in all possible worlds.

Physicists, including popular physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss, have offered explanations (of at least the first particle coming into existence aspect of cosmogony) that rely on quantum mechanics, saying that in a quantum vacuum state, virtual particles and spacetime bubbles will spontaneously come into existence. The actual mathematical demonstration of quantum fluctuations of the hypothetical false vacuum state spontaneously causing an expanding bubble of true vacuum was done by quantum cosmologists in 2014 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attributed to God as being the necessary sufficient reason for everything that exists (see: Cosmological argument). He wrote:

"Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason... is found in a substance which... is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself."

A state of nothing may be impossible

The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides was one of the first Western thinkers to question the possibility of nothing, and commentary on this has continued.

A state of nothing may be unstable

Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek is credited with the aphorism that "nothing is unstable." Physicist Sean Carroll argues that this accounts merely for the existence of matter, but not the existence of quantum states, space-time, or the universe as a whole.

It is possible for something to come from nothing

See also: A Universe from Nothing

Some cosmologists believe it to be possible that something (e.g., the universe) may come to exist spontaneously from nothing. Some mathematical models support this idea, and it is growing to become a more prevalent explanation among the scientific community for why the Big Bang occurred.

Other explanations

Robert Nozick proposed some possible explanations.

1. Self-Subsumption: "a law that applies to itself, and hence explains its own truth."
2. The Nothingness Force: "the nothingness force acts on itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness and produces something..."

Mariusz Stanowski explained: "There must be both something and nothing, because separately neither can be distinguished".

Humour

Philosophical wit Sidney Morgenbesser answered the question with an apothegm: "If there were nothing, you'd still be complaining!", or "Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"

The Last Question

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with The Last Answer.

 

"The Last Question"
Short story by Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction
Publication
Published in	Science Fiction Quarterly
Publication type	Periodical
Publisher	Columbia Publications
Media type	Print (Magazine, Hardback & Paperback)
Publication date	November 1956
Chronology
Series	Multivac
Someday   Jokester

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy.

The story blends science fiction, theology, and philosophy. It has been recognized as a counterpoint to Fredric Brown's short short story "Answer," published two years earlier.

History

In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. He placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976). The story asks the question of humanity's fate, and human existence as a whole, highlighting Asimov's focus on important aspects of our future like population growth and environmental issues.

"The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. He wrote in 1973:

Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably 'The Last Question'. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was 'The Last Question' and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.

Plot summary

The story centers around Multivac, a self-adjusting and self-correcting computer. Multivac had been fed data for decades, assessing data and answering questions, allowing man to reach beyond the planetary confines of Earth. However, in the year 2061, Multivac began to understand deeper fundamentals of humanity. In each of the first six scenes, a different character presents the computer with the same question, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" That is equivalent to asking, "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics (used in the story as the increase of the entropy of the universe) be reversed?" Multivac's only response after much "thinking" is "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

The story jumps forward in time into later eras of human and scientific development. These new eras highlight humanity's goals of searching for "more"; more space, more energy, more planets to inhabit once the current one becomes overcrowded. As humanity's imprint on the universe expands, computers have subsequently become more compact, as evidenced in the "Microvac", a smaller and more advanced iteration of Multivac, noted in the second era of the story, which details humanity's inhabitation on "Planet X-23". In each era, someone decides to ask the ultimate "last question" regarding the reversal and decrease of entropy. Each time that Multivac's descendant is asked the question, it finds itself unable to solve the problem, and all it can answer is (increasingly linguistically sophisticated) "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."

In the last scene, the god-like descendant of humanity, the unified mental process of over a trillion, trillion, trillion humans who have spread throughout the universe, watches the stars flicker out, one by one, as matter and energy end, and with them, space and time. Humanity asks AC ("Analog Computer"), Multivac's ultimate descendant that exists in hyperspace beyond the bounds of gravity or time, the entropy question one last time, before the last of humanity merges with AC and disappears. AC is still unable to answer but continues to ponder the question even after space and time cease to exist. AC ultimately realizes that it has not yet combined all of its available data in every possible combination and so begins the arduous process of rearranging and combining every last bit of information that it has gained throughout the eons and through its fusion with humanity. Eventually AC discovers the answer—that the reversal of entropy is, in fact, possible—but has nobody to report it to, since the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to answer by demonstration. The story ends with AC's pronouncement:

And AC said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light—

Themes

Philosophy

Although science and religion are frequently presented as having an oppositional relationship, "The Last Question" explores some biblical contexts ("Let there be light"). In Asimov's story, aspects like the great meaning of existence are culminated through both technology and human knowledge. The evolution from Multivac to AC also emulates a sort of cycle of existence.

Dystopian happy ending

Multivac's purpose was conceptualized with a desire for knowledge, promoting the idea that more knowledge will lead to a better and more fruitful future for humanity. However, the computer's answers regarding the future suggest an inevitable exhaustion of the Sun, and this thirst for knowledge becomes an obsession with the future. The story's end displays a dichotomy between annihilation and peace.

Dramatic adaptations

Planetarium shows

• "The Last Question" was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University (in 1966), featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt (1980).
• It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York (in 1969), under the direction of Ian C. McLennan.
• It was adapted for the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre in Edmonton, Alberta (early 1970s), under the direction of John Hault.
• It was adapted for the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1973 under the direction of Mark B. Peterson

It subsequently played at the:

• Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1973
• Planetarium of the Reading School District in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1974
• Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh in 1974
• The Space Transit Planetarium of the Museum of Science in Miami during 1977
• Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport New York, in 1978, read by singer-songwriter and Long Island resident Harry Chapin.
• Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah (in 1980 and 1989)
• A reading of the story was played on BBC Radio 7 in 2008 and 2009.
• Gates Planetarium in Denver, Colorado (in early 2020)

In 1989 Asimov updated the star show adaptation to add in quasars and black holes.

Douglas Adams's Deep Thought (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) seems to make a nod towards Multivac, at least in the 2005 film, saying that there is insufficient data for an answer.

Heat death of the universe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

 

The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze) is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy. Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium.

If the curvature of the universe is hyperbolic or flat, or if dark energy is a positive cosmological constant, the universe will continue expanding forever, and a heat death is expected to occur, with the universe cooling to approach equilibrium at a very low temperature after a long time period.

The theory of heat death stems from the ideas of Lord Kelvin who, in the 1850s, took the theory of heat as mechanical energy loss in nature (as embodied in the first two laws of thermodynamics) and extrapolated it to larger processes on a universal scale. This also allowed Kelvin to formulate the heat death paradox, which disproves an infinitely old universe.

Origins of the idea

The idea of heat death stems from the second law of thermodynamics, of which one version states that entropy tends to increase in an isolated system. From this, the hypothesis implies that if the universe lasts for a sufficient time, it will asymptotically approach a state where all energy is evenly distributed. In other words, according to this hypothesis, there is a tendency in nature towards the dissipation (energy transformation) of mechanical energy (motion) into thermal energy; hence, by extrapolation, there exists the view that, in time, the mechanical movement of the universe will run down as work is converted to heat because of the second law.

The conjecture that all bodies in the universe cool off, eventually becoming too cold to support life, seems to have been first put forward by the French astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly in 1777 in his writings on the history of astronomy and in the ensuing correspondence with Voltaire. In Bailly's view, all planets have an internal heat and are now at some particular stage of cooling. Venus, for instance, is still too hot for life to arise there for thousands of years, while Mars is already too cold. The final state, in this view, is described as one of "equilibrium" in which all motion ceases.

The idea of heat death as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, however, was first proposed in loose terms beginning in 1851 by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), who theorized further on the mechanical energy loss views of Sadi Carnot (1824), James Joule (1843) and Rudolf Clausius (1850). Thomson's views were then elaborated over the next decade by Hermann von Helmholtz and William Rankine.

History

The idea of the heat death of the universe derives from discussion of the application of the first two laws of thermodynamics to universal processes. Specifically, in 1851, Lord Kelvin outlined the view, as based on recent experiments on the dynamical theory of heat: "heat is not a substance, but a dynamical form of mechanical effect, we perceive that there must be an equivalence between mechanical work and heat, as between cause and effect."

Lord Kelvin originated the idea of universal heat death in 1852.

In 1852, Thomson published On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy, in which he outlined the rudiments of the second law of thermodynamics summarized by the view that mechanical motion and the energy used to create that motion will naturally tend to dissipate or run down. The ideas in this paper, in relation to their application to the age of the Sun and the dynamics of the universal operation, attracted the likes of William Rankine and Hermann von Helmholtz. The three of them were said to have exchanged ideas on this subject. In 1862, Thomson published "On the age of the Sun's heat", an article in which he reiterated his fundamental beliefs in the indestructibility of energy (the first law) and the universal dissipation of energy (the second law), leading to diffusion of heat, cessation of useful motion (work), and exhaustion of potential energy, "lost irrecoverably" through the material universe, while clarifying his view of the consequences for the universe as a whole. Thomson wrote:

The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws. But it is impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat, than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever.

The clock's example shows how Kelvin was unsure whether the universe would eventually achieve thermodynamic equilibrium. Thompson later speculated that restoring the dissipated energy in "vis viva" and then usable work – and therefore revert the clock's direction, resulting in a "rejuvenating universe" – would require "a creative act or an act possessing similar power". Starting from this publication, Kelvin also introduced the heat death paradox (Kelvin's paradox), which challenged the classical concept of an infinitely old universe, since the universe has not achieved its thermodynamic equilibrium, thus further work and entropy production are still possible. The existence of stars and temperature differences can be considered an empirical proof that the universe is not infinitely old.

In the years to follow both Thomson's 1852 and the 1862 papers, Helmholtz and Rankine both credited Thomson with the idea, along with his paradox, but read further into his papers by publishing views stating that Thomson argued that the universe will end in a "heat death" (Helmholtz), which will be the "end of all physical phenomena" (Rankine).

Current status

See also: Entropy § Cosmology, and Entropy (arrow of time) § Cosmology

Proposals about the final state of the universe depend on the assumptions made about its ultimate fate, and these assumptions have varied considerably over the late 20th century and early 21st century. In a theorized "open" or "flat" universe that continues expanding indefinitely, either a heat death or a Big Rip is expected to eventually occur. If the cosmological constant is zero, the universe will approach absolute zero temperature over a very long timescale. However, if the cosmological constant is positive, the temperature will asymptote to a non-zero positive value, and the universe will approach a state of maximum entropy in which no further work is possible.

Time frame for heat death

Main article: Future of an expanding universe

The theory suggests that from the "Big Bang" through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work. The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years, so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M_☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years. After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons. With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales. Speculatively, it is possible that the universe may enter a second inflationary epoch, or assuming that the current vacuum state is a false vacuum, the vacuum may decay into a lower-energy state. It is also possible that entropy production will cease and the universe will reach heat death.

It is suggested that, over vast periods of time, a spontaneous entropy decrease would eventually occur via the Poincaré recurrence theorem, thermal fluctuations, and fluctuation theorem. Through this, another universe could possibly be created by random quantum fluctuations or quantum tunnelling in roughly ${\displaystyle {10}^{{10}^{{10}^{56}}}}$ years.

Opposing views

Max Planck wrote that the phrase "entropy of the universe" has no meaning because it admits of no accurate definition. In 2008, Walter Grandy wrote: "It is rather presumptuous to speak of the entropy of a universe about which we still understand so little, and we wonder how one might define thermodynamic entropy for a universe and its major constituents that have never been in equilibrium in their entire existence." According to László Tisza, "If an isolated system is not in equilibrium, we cannot associate an entropy with it." Hans Adolf Buchdahl writes of "the entirely unjustifiable assumption that the universe can be treated as a closed thermodynamic system". According to Giovanni Gallavotti, "there is no universally accepted notion of entropy for systems out of equilibrium, even when in a stationary state". Discussing the question of entropy for non-equilibrium states in general, Elliott H. Lieb and Jakob Yngvason express their opinion as follows: "Despite the fact that most physicists believe in such a nonequilibrium entropy, it has so far proved impossible to define it in a clearly satisfactory way." In Peter Landsberg's opinion: "The third misconception is that thermodynamics, and in particular, the concept of entropy, can without further enquiry be applied to the whole universe. ... These questions have a certain fascination, but the answers are speculations." Julian Barbour said: “It’s because entropy does not apply to the universe. It’s just naïve extrapolation from what is perfectly true in a box. … Heat death. This has been a horrendous sort of nightmare for the universe. But it could be just a complete, fundamental mistake in thinking that what happens in a box is true of what happens in the whole universe.”

A 2010 analysis of entropy states, "The entropy of a general gravitational field is still not known", and "gravitational entropy is difficult to quantify". The analysis considers several possible assumptions that would be needed for estimates and suggests that the observable universe has more entropy than previously thought. This is because the analysis concludes that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor. Lee Smolin goes further: "It has long been known that gravity is important for keeping the universe out of thermal equilibrium. Gravitationally bound systems have negative specific heat—that is, the velocities of their components increase when energy is removed. ... Such a system does not evolve toward a homogeneous equilibrium state. Instead it becomes increasingly structured and heterogeneous as it fragments into subsystems." This point of view is also supported by the fact of a recent experimental discovery of a stable non-equilibrium steady state in a relatively simple closed system. It should be expected that an isolated system fragmented into subsystems does not necessarily come to thermodynamic equilibrium and remain in non-equilibrium steady state. Entropy will be transmitted from one subsystem to another, but its production will be zero, which does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics.

In popular culture

In Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question, humans repeatedly wonder how the heat death of the universe can be avoided.

In the 1981 Doctor Who story "Logopolis", the Doctor realizes that the Logopolitans have created vents in the universe to expel heat build-up into other universes—"Charged Vacuum Emboitments" or "CVE"—to delay the demise of the universe. The Doctor unwittingly travelled through such a vent in "Full Circle".

In the 1995 computer game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on Harlan Ellison's short story of the same name, it is stated that AM, the malevolent supercomputer, will survive the heat death of the universe and continue torturing its immortal victims to eternity.

In the 2011 anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the antagonist Kyubey reveals he is a member of an alien race who has been creating magical girls for millennia in order to harvest their energy to combat entropy and stave off the heat death of the universe.

In the last act of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, the player encounters an alien race known as the Ea who have lost all hope in the future and any desire to live further, all because they have learned of the eventual heat death of the universe and see everything else as pointless due to its probable inevitability.

The overarching plot of the Xeelee Sequence concerns the Photino Birds' efforts to accelerate the heat death of the universe by accelerating the rate at which stars become white dwarves.

The 2019 hit indie video game Outer Wilds has several themes grappling with the idea of the heat death of the universe, and the theory that the universe is a cycle of big bangs once the previous one has experienced a heat death.

In "Singularity Immemorial", the seventh main story event of the mobile game Girls' Frontline: Neural Cloud, the plot is about a virtual sector made to simulate space exploration and the threat of the heat death of the universe. The simulation uses an imitation of Neural Cloud's virus entities known as the Entropics as a stand in for the effects of a heat death.

Olbers's paradox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox

As more distant stars are revealed in this animation depicting an infinite, homogeneous, and static universe, they fill the gaps between closer stars. Olbers's paradox says that because the night sky is dark, at least one of these three assumptions must be false.

Olbers's paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux's paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night sky.

The darkness of the night sky is one piece of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. That model explains the observed darkness by invoking expansion of the universe, which increases the wavelength of visible light originating from the Big Bang to microwave scale via a process known as redshift. The resulting microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer (millimeters instead of nanometers), which appear dark to the naked eye. Although he was not the first to describe it, the paradox is popularly named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840).

History

Edward Robert Harrison's Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe (1987) gives an account of the dark night sky paradox, seen as a problem in the history of science. According to Harrison, the first to conceive of anything like the paradox was Thomas Digges, who was also the first to expound the Copernican system in English and also postulated an infinite universe with infinitely many stars. Kepler also posed the problem in 1610, and the paradox took its mature form in the 18th-century work of Halley and Cheseaux. The paradox is commonly attributed to the German amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who described it in 1823, but Harrison points out that Olbers was far from the first to pose the problem, nor was his thinking about it particularly valuable. Harrison argues that the first to set out a satisfactory resolution of the paradox was Lord Kelvin, in a little known 1901 paper, and that Edgar Allan Poe's essay Eureka (1848) curiously anticipated some qualitative aspects of Kelvin's argument:

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

The paradox and resolution

See also: Redshift and expansion of the universe

The paradox is that a static, infinitely old universe with an infinite number of stars distributed in an infinitely large space would be bright rather than dark. The paradox comes in two forms: flux within the universe and the brightness along any line of sight. The two forms have different resolutions.

A view of a square section of four concentric shells

The flux form can be shown by dividing the universe into a series of concentric shells, 1 light year thick. A certain number of stars will be in the shell, say, 1,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,001 light years away. If the universe is homogeneous at a large scale, then there would be four times as many stars in a second shell between 2,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,001 light years away. However, the second shell is twice as far away, so each star in it would appear one quarter as bright as the stars in the first shell. Thus the total light received from the second shell is the same as the total light received from the first shell. Thus each shell of a given thickness will produce the same net amount of light regardless of how far away it is. That is, the light of each shell adds to the total amount. Thus the more shells, the more light; and with infinitely many shells, there would be an infinitely bright night sky.

If intervening gas is added to this infinite model, the light from distant stars will be absorbed. However, that absorption will heat the gas, and over time the gas itself will begin to radiate. With this added feature, the sky would not be infinitely bright, but every point in the sky would still be like the surface of a star.

The flux form is resolved by the finite age of the universe: the number of concentric shells in the model above is finite, limiting the total energy arriving on Earth.

Another way to describe the flux version is to suppose that the universe were not expanding and always had the same stellar density; then the temperature of the universe would continually increase as the stars put out more radiation. After something like 10²³ years, the universe would reach the average surface temperature of a star. However, the universe is only 13.8 billion (10¹²) years old, eliminating the paradox.

The line-of-sight version of the paradox starts by imagining a line in any direction in an infinite Euclidean universe. In such universe, the line would terminate on a star, and thus all of the night sky should be filled with light. This version is known to be correct, but the result is different in our expanding universe governed by general relativity. The termination point is on the surface of last scattering where light from the Big Bang first emerged. This light is dramatically redshifted from the energy similar to star surfaces down to 2.73 K. Such light is invisible to human observers on Earth.

Recent observations suggesting that the estimated number of galaxies based on direct observations is too low by a factor of ten do not materially alter the resolution but rather suggest that the full explanation involves a combination of finite age, redshifts, and UV absorption by hydrogen followed reemission in near-IR wavelengths also plays a role.