
The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001) - andrioni
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/02/the_mystery_of_the_millionaire_metaphysician_slate_republishes_one_of_the_greatest_magazine_stories_ever_written_.html?via=gdpr-consent&via=gdpr-consent
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cure
A little more information:

[http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/the-
founder/](http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/the-founder/)

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tlarkworthy
I wanted to see if anyone ever cited him, seems not [1].

[1]
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22C...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22Coming+to+Understanding%22+Monius&btnG=)

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joshuaheard
The link in the article to the institute was broken. Here is an updated link:
[https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/](https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/)

Interesting the institute calls itself "Ammonius", not A.M. Monius. And the
author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.

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antonvs
> And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc
> Sanders.

The Slate article is a republishing of a Lingua Franca article from 2001.
Author identification was presumably only added after the author's cover was
blown.

The 2000 and 2007 versions of the document don't mention his name. The
acknowledgements in the 2010 version mention his brother, Dr. Michael Sanders,
and the included review by Zimmerman mentions the author's name.

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Animats
Oh, that A. M. Monius thing again.

"Does reality have a purpose? Why are things intelligible at all?" Those
questions run into the usual problem when looking for a First Cause:

"God created the world."

"Then who created God?"

"Shut up, kid."

Some philosophers get into this mess by starting from the assumption that
there must be something more than the physical universe, so that it somehow
"makes sense". With that bias, you get things like this paper. Plus a big
chunk of theology.

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ythn
You have that problem with any theory, not just religious ones. You could
argue that God was created the same way we were - by another God. Which
eventually leads to "Gods have always existed", which is similar to Big Bang's
problem of "matter has always existed".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anythi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anything_at_all)

~~~
GW150914
It’s similar only if you misunderstand the questions physics seeks to answer.
“If we rewind time according to present observations and theories, what do we
see?” The answer is a Big Bang event, but that is just the answer to the
question posed, not the deeper one posed by the wiki article. If you ask “why
is there something rather than nothing?” physics has no single clear answer.
Science takes very limited questions and seeks to answer them in a limited
fashion with a high degree of confidence. Metaphysics plays word games with
philosophy because hey, who can really gainsay you? Maybe it’s D-Branes, maybe
it’s eternal inflation, maybe it’s the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The problem is that popular science and people who don’t know better
misunderstand the nature of what physics actually does and tries to shoehorn
theories into the questions they want answered.

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d0lph
I think the question in that case is what existed before the Big Bang, has a
vacuum always existed before? Or are we on a constant loop of universes
forming and disintegrating.

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lifeformed
I think the answer is that the concept of "before the Big Bang" doesn't make
sense. Time is a part of the universe, and so there is no "missing" time or
space before it. I think Steven Hawking said that it's like asking what is
north of the north pole.

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beaconstudios
I think the heart of the issue is that the big bang is confusing to our
understanding of causality. What caused the matter to exist in the original
singularity? Before it was a singularity, was it some other form or had it
always existed as such? What triggered the big bang?

Based on the first law of thermodynamics we can figure that a constant
quantity of energy (in the form of both energy and mass) has always existed,
but then the question remains - why does it exist?

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wnmurphy
What's a metaphysician? A doctor who doctors doctors?

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wje
A person who studies metaphysics.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions like 'What is
there?'.

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jackcarter
Odd, I'd have expected the term to be "metaphysicist."

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newsbinator
You're thinking of a person who studies physicists.

