>>unq: attempting to harmonize a marriage of philosophy and science<<

>opg: Probably impractical, frankly. Philosophy is philosophy. It doesn't deal in facts. ... Now, there is a philosophy of science. It was an interesting class I took.<

unq: How does your dismissal of philosophy jibe with your reference to a 'philosophy of science'? I too took some philosophy courses; in fact I majored in it. I can assure you that it's deeply rooted in explorations of factual experience going back thousands of years and including highly respected luminaries like Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu and countless others.

If you're attending to what's going on right now you'll know that serious scientists are increasingly delving deeply into philosophy in an effort to resolve some of their most puzzling and fundamental conundrums, such as the inability of QFT to accommodate the gravity that's at the core of GR.

>>unq: I'm inclined to regard the whole thing as complexifying possibilities atemporally emergent within the infinite potential of erstwhile nothingness. Emergent complexity rooted in ephemeral quarks is at once experienced as the ubiquitous becoming of individual existence and as a boundlessly evolving cosmic environment.<<

>opg: This is where you lose me. Perhaps it's just the phrasing. Was there ever "nothing"? How do you even define it? Physicists define it very differently from ordinary people, and know that in our present universe there is not ever nothing. Quantum fluctuations are not "nothing", for example. Even in empty space isn't really empty because of quantum fluctuations.<

unq: That's why I refer to it as 'erstwhile nothingness'. I've considered 'Alternative nothingness' as another possibility. Physicists prefer to regard it as a quantum vacuum serving as a venue for ubiquitously flickering quarks.

The problem is that these most fundamental virtually atemporal swarming imperceptible quarks underlie boundlessly complexifying matter — the protons, neutrons, electrons and so on that comprise our macroscopically observable universe. Protons have never been observed to disintegrate in countless studies of this seemingly aged universe, despite their underlying composition as three ephemerally flickering quarks.

And then there's the atemporality of the photons conveying the impression of this apparently 13.7 billion light-year universe. Those significant inconsistencies prompt my ongoing 'philosophical' speculation.

Tom