Astrology, Karma, Free Will, Einstein Cosmology
Can the relation of cause and effect underlying astrology or karma emerge from a big bang?
Some people state something like "if you believe in yourself, and want something enough, it will happen": is a universe in which events can be caused through desire in this way compatible with a universe emerging from a big bang? With a universe governed by karma or astrology?
Are the models of universe implied by astrology, karma and 'new age' incompatible with each other? Can one construct a model which incorporates the essential features of all these?
How radically must one modify our scientific picture of the universe in order to incorporate life-after-death? Reincarnation?
Was free will inherent in the big bang? If humans (or any other beings) possess true free will, they transcend the ordinary causal structure of the universe. If humans evolved, it could be that free will either evolved in them, or it might be that it was inherent in the universe at its inception.
A universe with sufficient complexity (a la 'ant fugue') could have aspects we associate with mind. The interconnections of the physical entities in the universe could themselves be the structure 'supporting' a 'cosmic mind'. A universe which produces free-willed beings can evolve into a mind-like entity.
Free will transcends causality, so do Godel universes in some sense, and so does Wheeler's universe as indicated in his observer-diagram, where time transcendence and causal loops make all types of scenarios possible, with initially mind-less big bangs ending up creating themselves etc.
Einstein's general relativity models the universe (cosmology) by assuming it to be a cloud of structureless dust. This model leads to the big bang, which is quite amazing. However, you can only get what you put in, and if physics thinks of the universe as fundamentally being a cloud of structureless dust, and that is all which needs explaining in cosmology, then we can't expect that the initial state of such a universe will contain features which lead to something more fundamental than featureless dust. If Mind not input into the model as part of what needs to be explained, then it won't feature in the description of the initial state. To me, since Mind is the most fundamental aspect of existence, it may well be that we cannot find realistic universe-models before we have a deeper understanding of mind; and perhaps when complexity theory, evolutionary biology etc will be successfully merged with physics/cosmology into a unitary whole.