Ask Lemmy

To be clear:

When you “make” a cairn, you’re reorganizing stuff that already exists. In fact, whenever we say “make”, we usually mean modifying something that already exists.

It’s reasonable to assume that a painting has a painter. We have experience with how paint behaves over time when left alone, and it doesn’t assemble itself into a painting by default.

We don’t have first-hand intuitive experience with how cosmic amounts of matter behave over time. But we do have measuring tools and mathematical models, which give us a pretty good view of how it does seem to assemble itself into Earth-like places and even the prerequisites for life itself.

And we also have a good enough understanding of Earth’s history to know why we’re missing the ability to measure some of the most interesting steps here on our planet.

Buuuut all of that is pointless to our question anyway. Because we’ve been talking about whether “makers” are necessary to reorganize matter over time. And you made a leap from that to “making” matter and time itself. That is something for which we do not have an analogous experience.

If “making” means taking raw materials in a “before” time and combining them into something else in an “after” time… how do you “make” the very concept of “making”, and “when” does that occur if it must be “before” the concept of a “before”?