What Are the Chances That This Post Makes Any Sense? A Teleological Argument from Reason
Intro: (or skip to the questions below)
What are the chances that our world should be a rational one? To put the question more concretely in the terms of physics: is it likely for a universe evolve from state to state, such that past states dictate future ones? Or, is the apparent rationality of our world evidence for a designer?
Attempting to answer the last question has not been a common avenue for developing teleological arguments for the existence of God. In some respects, the reason is obvious. This is a difficult question to analyze; it involves probing at the borders of a conceptual space where our tools of analysis begin to lose their purchase. How can one analyze the irrational? Such endeavors seem likely to just fall into the well-worn tracks of arguments about Decartes' evil demon, brains in vats, etc., i.e., the territory of radical skepticism which philosophy has learned to comfortably live with, if not resolve.
Yet, it is also strange that this line of reasoning has not been more thoroughly investigated. After all, the identification of the Logos universal animating reason with both the creative force that generates the world, and God, is as old as philosophy. It appears in Heraclitus, is taken up by the Stoics, and becomes a pillar of theology for Christians, for whom Christ is the Logos.
If we invoke the Principle of Indifference, we should expect a universe where any given state is as likely as any other. This has become a common guiding light when tackling the domain of the unknown in the sciences and is the reason that there is consternation over the "Fine-Tuning Problem," the problem that, in several respects, the universe is fine-tuned' for life". For example, if we should expect that the initial conditions of the universe should be subject to the Principle of Indifference, with each possible outcome equally likely, then the extremely low entropy of the early universe is an absolutely astonishing fact. The same is true of the fact that free parameters in physics have exactly the values that are conducive to life, bucking an expected tendency towards "naturalness."
Questions
Phenomenological Questions
We can imagine many ways in which our life could progress forward in a less rational manner (and without logical contradiction). So why does it move forward so rationally?
To be sure, the world is full of surprises, but we also expect a great deal of regularity. We do not throw our pasta into a boiling pot and expect it will turn into broccoli. We do not drop our kids off at daycare in the morning and expect to pick up teenagers. The world is such that the writer(s) of Ecclesiastes could state that there was "nothing new under the sun," at the dawn of civilization.
If we start from the Principle of Indifference, shouldn't we expect a whirlwind of possible experiences, not a seemingly law governed progression such that empirical efforts succeed in defining future experiences based on mathematical laws (e.g., the successes of the sciences)?
Physical Questions
Why should we expect that the universe moves from state to state such that states are entailed by those immediately prior to them (either fully, determinism, or probabilistically, i.e., a past state entails a range of possible future states)? If the universe if a four-dimensional object, why shouldn't it be such that it randomly reassigns its mass energy from moment to moment? A 2D shape can start out looking just like an orderly square, but there is no reason its dimensions cannot begin to wildly vary at any point along its boundaries. Isn't a lawlike progression less likely given the Principle of Indifference because there are more ways to have states follow from one another randomly?
Per work already done on Boltmann Brains, the existence of a brain with a rational set of memories is astoundingly less likely than one that recalls an incoherent hodgepodge of experiences, simply because there are more ways to create incoherence than order. This same principle applies to any "universe production mechanism," of the sort advanced by multiverse theories to avoid Fine Tuning.
If we say the universe is the way it is because of intrinsic qualities, how can these qualities possibly be defined as necessary qualities (a requirement to avoid the Fine-Tuning Argument)?
There are obviously more ways for a universe to progress in a law-like manner for a period, even billions of years, and then begin progressing randomly, then there are ways for it to stick to a single set of law like behaviors vis-a-vis state progression for its entire existence. Additionally, there are more ways that a universe can be irrational and then snap into the picture of a rational universe, all constituent parts being rearranged such that they appear to have developed according to laws, then there are ways for it to actually have evolved in a law-like manner. Thus, any set of facts about the necessary traits of the universe will always be empirically undetermined. Further, there is no reason to think that any one such object should be necessary while others are not. Given this, we are back to the Fine-Tuning Argument even if me make the plunge into multiverses and a strictly mathematical "multiverse production object."
Appeals to the parsimony of a law like universe fail here because a completely random process (running over something like Floridi's maximally portable ontology) produces all universes and is simpler than any lawful universe. That is, it is easier and takes less information to describe an infinite (or just very vast), random bit (or qbit) generator that will eventually spawn a description of our universe than it is to describe any universe with laws.
But wait! Isn't it very unlikely for us to see the world we do if the universe isn't rational? And so, can't we dispense with the principle of indifference? I'd argue not, for the same exact reasons that the Boltzmann Brain problem remains a serious problem in cosmology, one that has been renewed by multiverse theories and eternal inflation, since these theories tend to make Boltzmann Brains more likely than observers of the sort we think we are (ergo the Measure Problem in cosmology). The only way to diffuse the Boltzmann Brain problem, or the related question of "why the universe should be rational," is to find out why the universes' incredibly unlikely traits should be necessary (and such that they avoid Boltzmann Brains), otherwise probability suggests they should be the result of Fine Tuning. However, any such explanation will always remain underdetermined (see above).
When taken together with Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-defeating (or Hoffman's more fleshed out, but similar argument against mind-independent reality) I find this line of reasoning compelling. However, it is hardly clear that this problem implies the "God of classical theism," a God that only seems to exist in philosophy journals anyhow, but it does seem to suggest principles of natural theology/teleology, or other conceptions of God.
Edit: Also note that if computational theory of mind is true, and computation at some level of complexity somehow causes consciousness, than there turns out not to be any reason to think of Logos as necessarily unconscious.
What are the chances that our world should be a rational one? To put the question more concretely in the terms of physics: is it likely for a universe evolve from state to state, such that past states dictate future ones? Or, is the apparent rationality of our world evidence for a designer?
Attempting to answer the last question has not been a common avenue for developing teleological arguments for the existence of God. In some respects, the reason is obvious. This is a difficult question to analyze; it involves probing at the borders of a conceptual space where our tools of analysis begin to lose their purchase. How can one analyze the irrational? Such endeavors seem likely to just fall into the well-worn tracks of arguments about Decartes' evil demon, brains in vats, etc., i.e., the territory of radical skepticism which philosophy has learned to comfortably live with, if not resolve.
Yet, it is also strange that this line of reasoning has not been more thoroughly investigated. After all, the identification of the Logos universal animating reason with both the creative force that generates the world, and God, is as old as philosophy. It appears in Heraclitus, is taken up by the Stoics, and becomes a pillar of theology for Christians, for whom Christ is the Logos.
If we invoke the Principle of Indifference, we should expect a universe where any given state is as likely as any other. This has become a common guiding light when tackling the domain of the unknown in the sciences and is the reason that there is consternation over the "Fine-Tuning Problem," the problem that, in several respects, the universe is fine-tuned' for life". For example, if we should expect that the initial conditions of the universe should be subject to the Principle of Indifference, with each possible outcome equally likely, then the extremely low entropy of the early universe is an absolutely astonishing fact. The same is true of the fact that free parameters in physics have exactly the values that are conducive to life, bucking an expected tendency towards "naturalness."
Questions
Phenomenological Questions
We can imagine many ways in which our life could progress forward in a less rational manner (and without logical contradiction). So why does it move forward so rationally?
To be sure, the world is full of surprises, but we also expect a great deal of regularity. We do not throw our pasta into a boiling pot and expect it will turn into broccoli. We do not drop our kids off at daycare in the morning and expect to pick up teenagers. The world is such that the writer(s) of Ecclesiastes could state that there was "nothing new under the sun," at the dawn of civilization.
If we start from the Principle of Indifference, shouldn't we expect a whirlwind of possible experiences, not a seemingly law governed progression such that empirical efforts succeed in defining future experiences based on mathematical laws (e.g., the successes of the sciences)?
Physical Questions
Why should we expect that the universe moves from state to state such that states are entailed by those immediately prior to them (either fully, determinism, or probabilistically, i.e., a past state entails a range of possible future states)? If the universe if a four-dimensional object, why shouldn't it be such that it randomly reassigns its mass energy from moment to moment? A 2D shape can start out looking just like an orderly square, but there is no reason its dimensions cannot begin to wildly vary at any point along its boundaries. Isn't a lawlike progression less likely given the Principle of Indifference because there are more ways to have states follow from one another randomly?
Per work already done on Boltmann Brains, the existence of a brain with a rational set of memories is astoundingly less likely than one that recalls an incoherent hodgepodge of experiences, simply because there are more ways to create incoherence than order. This same principle applies to any "universe production mechanism," of the sort advanced by multiverse theories to avoid Fine Tuning.
If we say the universe is the way it is because of intrinsic qualities, how can these qualities possibly be defined as necessary qualities (a requirement to avoid the Fine-Tuning Argument)?
There are obviously more ways for a universe to progress in a law-like manner for a period, even billions of years, and then begin progressing randomly, then there are ways for it to stick to a single set of law like behaviors vis-a-vis state progression for its entire existence. Additionally, there are more ways that a universe can be irrational and then snap into the picture of a rational universe, all constituent parts being rearranged such that they appear to have developed according to laws, then there are ways for it to actually have evolved in a law-like manner. Thus, any set of facts about the necessary traits of the universe will always be empirically undetermined. Further, there is no reason to think that any one such object should be necessary while others are not. Given this, we are back to the Fine-Tuning Argument even if me make the plunge into multiverses and a strictly mathematical "multiverse production object."
Appeals to the parsimony of a law like universe fail here because a completely random process (running over something like Floridi's maximally portable ontology) produces all universes and is simpler than any lawful universe. That is, it is easier and takes less information to describe an infinite (or just very vast), random bit (or qbit) generator that will eventually spawn a description of our universe than it is to describe any universe with laws.
But wait! Isn't it very unlikely for us to see the world we do if the universe isn't rational? And so, can't we dispense with the principle of indifference? I'd argue not, for the same exact reasons that the Boltzmann Brain problem remains a serious problem in cosmology, one that has been renewed by multiverse theories and eternal inflation, since these theories tend to make Boltzmann Brains more likely than observers of the sort we think we are (ergo the Measure Problem in cosmology). The only way to diffuse the Boltzmann Brain problem, or the related question of "why the universe should be rational," is to find out why the universes' incredibly unlikely traits should be necessary (and such that they avoid Boltzmann Brains), otherwise probability suggests they should be the result of Fine Tuning. However, any such explanation will always remain underdetermined (see above).
When taken together with Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-defeating (or Hoffman's more fleshed out, but similar argument against mind-independent reality) I find this line of reasoning compelling. However, it is hardly clear that this problem implies the "God of classical theism," a God that only seems to exist in philosophy journals anyhow, but it does seem to suggest principles of natural theology/teleology, or other conceptions of God.
Edit: Also note that if computational theory of mind is true, and computation at some level of complexity somehow causes consciousness, than there turns out not to be any reason to think of Logos as necessarily unconscious.
Comments (75)
I've only read this far and need to step out, so will look at the rest later. I just want to point out that we might equally say that the universe seems tuned to cause the death of any life that evolves. 99.99% of the places we might imagine being teleported to in this universe would result in a quick death. It looks to me as if life in the universe is a fluke, despite the fact that we happen to be in a location where we notice life all around us.
Haven't read the entire OP yet, but as to this, the reality of teleology directly contradicts the occurrence of the "God of classical theism".
This omnipotent God (psyche) either a) unintentionally creates everything or b) intentionally creates everything.
If (a), reasoning (emotive as well as cognitive) goes down the drain, and anything might be - which at the very least rules out the existential requirement for such a God.
If (b) then God Himself is teleologically driven, and hence determined, by His intentions - all intentions being teleological, i.e. intent/goal/end driven. Therefore, God here can rationally only remain subject to teloi (goals) which God does not (intentionally) create but, instead, intends to fulfill (irrespective of what they might be). Hence, here, God cannot be the omnipotent "creator of everything" - for he cannot, when rationally addressed, create (intentionally) his own intents by which he's driven when so creating.
There's always blind faith ... but when it comes to reasoning, the reality of teleology is logically incompatible with an omnipotent God that creates everything.
"[i]Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?
This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."
Even strongly atheistic physicists seem to believe the choice is unavoidable. Steven Weinberg, the closest physics comes to a Richard Dawkins, told the eminent biologist: "If you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning ... I think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse.[/i]"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/08/religion-philosophy-cosmology-multiverse#:~:text=It%20follows%20an%20article%20in,d%20better%20have%20a%20multiverse.%22
Taking off my idealist hat, I agree: either there's a sufficiently large multiverse (of the right kind), or there's god(s). Or there's been an endless Big Bang->Big Crunch. The odds that this single universe would be a life-supporting one are just too fantastical to take seriously the idea that we got lucky.
A counter to that line of thinking is that we wouldn't be here to wonder about it all if we hadn't been lucky, and we're here, so we got lucky, so what's the big deal? But that doesn't hold up. Leslie's Firing Squad analogy counters that objection.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/Leslie.html
Fortunately, the glass of wine that I turned away from to write the above paragraph was still there at the end of it. God is good! At least, that is what my memory is telling me - that I sipped and wrote, and sipped again and now am writing again. *sip* Primitivo, a full-bodied plumy wine - a current favourite.
The argument, such as it is, is an argument from ignorance; we don't know why anything should make sense, so maybe making sense came first, (God), because otherwise not making sense would make more sense, unless making sense is somehow necessary to existence.
It is an argument aimed at science as if science held sway over reality. but science does not hold sway, but is on the contrary the humble servant thereof and seeks only to describe. But neither reason nor experience can prescribe nor proscribe God - is that much not already obvious? Well, clearly not, unfortunately.
I suppose I should applaud the attempt to make room for teleological accounts of the universe, but it seems unambitious to the degree, that I have to wonder, supposing you are right so what? The Great Programmer designed the universe to ... ?
The odds of the universe supporting any life at all are fantastically improbable. This is a good article:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/#ExamPhys
ETA: But what if our false memories are the result of a fantastically improbable sequence of events?
Even in denying the validity of the argument I've presented against exactly such a "The Great Programmer", you do realize this question can only be answered via a teleological reason, don't you? In other words, by providing an end for the sake of which the means (in this case, the universe) was set in motion.
I really don't see how that follows. If the universe develops teleologically why does that entail that God is guided by the same goals? I don't even see how this necessarily applies to God's immanent activities and properties.
B. Seems to imply that having goals necessarily implies a lack of agency. I don't think I follow. Surely one isn't free if one's behavior is arbitrary. The ability to rationally develop one's own goals and the ability to have second and nth order goals about one's own desires are both generally taken as prerequisites for freedom. How does this not rule out all free will? If it does, why does doing what I want to do entail a lack of freedom?
That's fare. It was tersely given argument.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"It doesn't" to both questions.
It only requires that God has goals in what God does. If God does not have any goals, then irrationality or, at best, arational reasoning (if that can even make sense). If God does have goals, then these ends with God pursues cannot rationally all be God's creation. This is because the very act of creating (and of designing, programming, willfully generating, etc.) is intentional. Hence, it is driven by at least one end which is a priori to the act of creation for the sake of which the creation is enacted.
This is likely still too terse. Followed through, though, it at least currently seems to me that no god can be omnipotent (if at all occurrent) - for any god will abide by at least one telos/end that this god did not create. An end which the god seeks to actualize, but has not yet had the ability to.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I find quite the contrary to be the case: Agency cannot occur in the absence of teloi, i.e. of ends for the sake of which agency is enacted. This is what makes our free will intentional (here, for those of us who at least entertain the possibility of free will). We as agents are neither "fully determined" nor "perfectly undetermined by anything" in what we do. And each choice we make will be intentional (an unintended choice is nonsensical). This then, to me at least, entails that our freely willed choices are always partly determined by the ends we actively hold for the sake of which we so generate a made choice. While at the same time not being fully, or absolutely, determined as per traditional interpretations of causal determinism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Hence free will needing to be intent-driven or intent-semi-determined - and, thereby, intentional.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I grant this. And it, to my mind, can get complex. But then in so developing one's goals via one's free will, one's free will, to be intentional, will need to be telos-driven (i.e., semi-determined by teloi which are a priori to this developing of end to follow in the future). In sort: otherwise one's develping of goals would be unintentional and, hence, arbitrary.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No. It is, I find, a requisite for free will's occurrence. This with free will loosely defined at the metaphysical freedom to choose otherwise in the same situation - something which causal determinism disallows. (But then, neither does this in and of itself validate the reality of our being endowed with free will.)
You seem to be drawing probability (with the word 'unlikely") and possibility ("necessary") into it.
There are some good arguments for determinism, more along the lines of actualism than causality. Would that solve the problem?
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible". --Einstein
Was in a rush with my last post. But regarding Gods intentionality, heres a maybe better expressed argument:
Either a) God intentionally generated an initial given (e.g., the occurrence of light as per Genesis 1) or b) God has been intentionally generating givens for eternity such that there never was any initial given that God intentionally generated.
If (a), the generation of this initial given (call it X) was then necessarily to some extent limited or bounded (hence, determined) by an end for the sake of which it was generated which, as end aspired toward, could not have been generated by God prior to Gods very first, intentional generation (i.e., his generation of X). Here, then, God was himself to some degree limited or bounded (determined) by his actively held intent (telos or goal or aim), an intent held by him which he did not create and which he did not instantaneously realize. Therefore, God was not - and thereby is not - omnipotent.
If (b), then the conclusion of (a) also applies for, here, there never could have been an initial, intentionally created end (for the sake of which future creations would be enacted). To intentionally create such an end (call it Z), an end for the sake of which this created end Z is brought about is required. One could here draw this out ad infinitum and, always, there will be one end for the sake of which a creation is made which was not itself Gods creation yet was requisite for Gods intentionally creating anything. Hence, God is not omnipotent.
Lastly, were God able to fulfill all ends that God aims to fulfilling as would be required of omnipotence then God would at such juncture no longer be intentionally (i.e., teleologically) creating anything whatsoever. For all Gods intents would have here become fully actualized as God intended. Therefore, the omnipotence of a psyche logically mandates that the psyche does not intentionally generate anything - for there here is nothing that this omnipotent psyche has not been yet able to actualize.
Due to the aforementioned, no individuated psyche (no individuated anything, actually) that is teleologically driven - of which intentionality is a form - can possibly be omnipotent.
Hence, an omnipotent creator deity is logically impossible. Same is valid for the impossibility of an omnipotent designer, programmer, etc.
---
Hopefully that makes better sense. Would welcome to hear any flaws in this reasoning.
Yes, because there is a connection. Take the normal argument for Fine Tuning. If the constants of our universe and its initial entropy are such that the odds of their occuring are significantly less than 1 in 10×10^123, then it doesn't make sense to assume such things have occured by chance. You don't bet against a coin that has come up heads for 5 hours of flips because it is obvious that the coin isn't fair given the result. Hence, the Fine Tuning Argument has been taken seriously to date.
The counter to the Fine Tuning Argument is this: "sure, our world looks unfathomably unlikely. This seemed even more true back when we though the universe was eternal and that we lived in a Boltzmann Universe (i.e., a universe where, due to incredibly unlikely random thermodynamic fluctuations, everything moved just so, so as to create the visible universe out of heat death). However, we keep learning more about the world. For example, we developed the Big Bang Theory, which gets around the Boltzmann Universe's problem. Perhaps we can fully explain exactly why physical constants have the values they do and why entropy was so low in the early universe. Problem solved, Fine Tuning will get explained."
My point is that the argument above still fails even if you appear to have such explanations, and even if it seems like you can define our universe with mathematical certainty. Why? Because there are combinatorially unfathomably more ways that a mathematically describable universe could come to briefly appear to be the object you think you've discovered when creating such a "complete physics," and yet actually be some sort of different universe with different laws, or much more likely, no laws at all. Unless you can prove the necessity of the laws, under determination makes it more likely that you're actually in a universe that lacks such laws, and that this will be revealed at any moment as order breaks down.
Given that this doesn't happen, that the coin always comes up tails, and given that we reject that we just sprang into existence, we seem justified in assuming some sort of selection process or rational principle that is ontologically primitive at work in reality. Various conceptions of God fit this role.
Science assumes the world is rational because it must. We don't have a bedrock theory falsified by some observation and just declare "ugh, guess it was another Humean miracle." We assume that we either had something wrong originally, the we got the observation wrong, or that such an event is explained by a deeper law. However, this assumption isn't based on any necessity, since even if any N dimensional universe can be described mathematically, that in no way entails that information about any partial slice of said universe should let you know anything about what other parts look like. However, a law-like universe is exactly the type of object where data about a slice of it tells you everything about the whole (or at least brackets what the whole can look like probabilistically).
The multiverse does not solve this problem at all. Indeed, I'd argue that it makes it significantly worse by making structural realism more compelling. You're trading the very low likelihood of physical constants having the values they do for the even lower likelihood that the combinatorial possibilities for universes that exist in said multiverse just happen to be those that are governed by this sort of law.
You don't need to presuppose time, or strictly four dimensions. I mentioned Floridi's maximally portable ontology thinking of just this objection, but avoided going into detail because I figured it'd make the post too long.
Of course a universe doesn't need "time," but it needs difference. Imagine even the simplist toy universe consisting of just a single dimensional line. Obviously points on the line have to vary from one another in some respect (their coordinates) or else you have no line. Such universes also vary in length unless there is some reason they are necessarily infinite; you can have discrete or continuous models as well. But for all of them, contain any information, for them to describe anything, you need variance between [I]somethings[/I], elsewise everything is indistinguishable from everything else, making such a universe contentless. Even a point can't exist as a point if it isn't a point that is relative to some other point or a coordinate system.
Time is the dimension over which change occurs in our observable three dimensional universe. But we can posit n dimensions and the problem doesn't change. It doesn't collapse if we extrapolate from the Holographic Principle and suppose our world is two dimensional, nor does it go away if we posit all the dimensions of M Theory. I simply use time because it's more familiar and the way we commonly define physical laws due to how we experience the world, and because the world that we exist in obviously does have time.
Plus, any observer looking at n dimensions might really be in a reality where more or fewer observable dimensions exist depending on where you are in that reality, even us: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.21.2167
Anyhow, it seems to me like the idea that time exists shouldn't be controversial when discussing empirical arguments about the world.
I think probability can be taken one of two ways: it's either an assessment of some number of iterations (so we toss the coin 100 times, it comes up heads once, so we say it has a 1% chance of coming up. This assessment has to be considered in the light of the data from which it came.
The other way to assess probability is to examine the logical possibilities. Look at the coin and determine how it's weighted. If it's evenly weighted, there's logically a 50% chance it will come up heads.
If we've done an assessment of logical possibility and determined that of all the ways the universe could appear, the chances of it appearing as it is are 1 in 10^10^123, that doesn't really tell us anything about how this one possibility manifested, whether there was divine intervention or not. It just means we can imagine a huge number of other ways the universe could have been. Logical possibility is about our imaginations and logical dictates.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I see what you're saying, but I don't think it works that way. The universe either has a pending breakdown in order, or it doesn't. An assessment of logical possibility won't help us determine which universe we're in. We can't use the iterative form of probability either, because by definition, the universe is a one-off. However it is, it had a 100% chance of happening that way because the assessement is 1/1.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree. What's true of our universe is true of a multiverse. Each individual universe had a 100% chance of being the way it is.
Exactly, the first being frequentism and the latter being propensity. There is also subjective/Bayesian probability.
Frequentism has problems with all one-off events. What was the probability of Donald Trump winning the election in June 2016? If probability is frequency then it was already 100%. But then what is the chance that Joe Biden wins in 2024? Does it not exist? Do probabilities only exist for one-off events after the event? Or are we forced to posit eternalism, that all events exist eternally, so that there is some frequency for one-off events we can reference?
And what does this say about descriptions of quantum mechanics that are inherently probabilistic? At the start of the universe, T0, no quantum events have occured. So there existed no frequency through which to define quantum system probabilities. And yet, presumably, we think the universe had physical laws from the beginning.
More importantly, we generally don't think that past frequency, of itself, possesses causal physical powers. We don't say a coin flip is 50/50 because past flips have been so. A coin flip isn't "50/50 because the frequency of coin flips is 50/50," that's a vicious circle.
We say a coin flip has these probabilities because of the attributes of coins. But in that case, frequency is just a useful way to observe propensities and discover them, in which case it is absolutely fine to apply probability to one off events. And indeed cosmology would be impossible otherwise as nothing could be said about the likelihood of different hypotheses.
How does this not apply to all natural phenomena? Every event we observe only occurs at one time, in one place, in one way. I don't see how it doesn't generalize. Sure, you can claim that some phenomena belong together in some sort of relevant equivalence class, but at the same time there is always the counter argument that you're looking at the wrong type of equivalence. If you say all coin flips belong in the same class then it seems to me like you have to beg the question and assume that the universe behaves the same way vis-á-vis flipped coins at all times, in all places, otherwise the class wouldn't be valid.
Generally, we go in the reverse order. We see that coins have attributes such that, wherever we flip them, they come up 50/50, and assume their properties cause this distribution. Invariance across space and time for multiple classes then justifies the idea of "physical laws."
When we saw that the curvature of space and the conditions in places in the universe that were very far away from ours seemed very unlikely given an eternal universe, we developed the Big Bang Theory. Over time, a great deal of evidence was gathered that supports the Big Bang Theory. But by your logic, I don't get why we shouldn't have seen the facts that caused us to posit the Big Bang in the first place, shrugged, and said "probability can't be applied to cosmology, whatever universe exists, exists with p=1, so there is actually nothing to explain here in terms of likelihood." And I don't see how this stops at just cosmology.
How is the analogy to the Boltzmann Brain problem not apt? You could use the same counter for that problem and say: "thermodynamics isn't really about probabilities because there is actually just one universe that has one series of microstates, not many possible microstates. We are either merely a Boltmann Brain or we are in a legit Boltzmann Universe, it is one or the other with p=1, because there is just one universe. Thus, the mere Boltzmann Brain isn't actually more likely than the Boltzmann Universe."
But if you buy that, I don't see how it doesn't generalize to all arguments from statistical ensembles, making the entire scientific enterprise invalid. Every paper using statistics, every significance tests would be bunk. Frequency can't tell you that two samples are different unless you believe that differences in frequency can be defined in terms of something other than just the frequencies you happen to observe.
I will grant though that the argument is more compelling if you accept that the universe can be explained mathematically, and more so if you believe the universe and its component parts essentially are the mathematical object that describes it.
Exactly. Frequentism is what underlies actualism, a form of determinism.
Imagine that you're rolling a die at a craps table. You'll say that the 5 has a 1/6 chance of appearing face up. This is an assessment of logical possibility. We have to be careful about what we say after the die has landed. If it was a 5, we know it's possible that the 5 could appear face-up because it did! But could the 2 also appear face up? Logically, you can't have more than one side of the die face up. If the 5 appeared, it isn't possible for any other number to be face-up. So what happened to the other possibilities? Where did they go? What exactly are those other possibilities?
One way to look at it is to say those other possibilities are information we possess about how the universe works. We use that information to make predictions. But we can back off of imagining that those other possibilities have some ontological implications. They don't. They're just the result of our analysis.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Woe. I don't think so. This is the fatal mistake people commonly make about statistics. Statistics allows you to make predictions about populations, not individuals. For instance, people who smoke have a higher incidence of COPD. So I can say if a person smokes, they're more likely to get COPD. However, among smokers, only about 10% will actually get it. As a pulmonologists told me once, most people who smoke "get away with it." So all you can tell an individual smoker is that they're in a category that has a higher incidence of COPD. I can't tell an individual anything about their medical future.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It does generalize.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It's the misinterpretation that's bunk. You have to remember that probability is about knowledge, not ontology.
Knowledge is about something, no? So it's necessarily tied to ontologically.
"Correlation does not imply causation," does not imply that causation doesn't exist. Medicine does not say, "smoking doesn't cause cancer, bullets to the head don't cause brain damage, etc., all we can know is that previous samples of groups of people who have been shot in the head have a higher incidence of brain damage."
The entire reason you go out and compare the mean incidence of lung disease for smokers against the mean in some control population is because you think there is something about smokers that gives them a greater propensity for developing lung disease. Even eliminiativists re: "cause," allow that a complete description of a phenomenon will show how past events evolved into future ones, i.e., why the group of smokers tended to end up with lung disease more often.
There are all sorts of ways to explore cause, do-calculus and the like, which are employed heavily in medicine.
If you don't believe in propensities, then you have absolutely no grounds for defining the classes whose frequencies you compare in many cases. Take your example, if I notice smokers have higher rates of lung disease, why shouldn't I just assume that the frequency with which "all people" get lung cancer is actually higher than I thought. Why posit smokers as a class?
In the sciences, classes are often defined by frequencies of some observed variable themselves. If I flip a coin and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, and I don't believe in propensities, then I should just say that the probability of a coin coming up heads has changed, rather than positing that the coin is rigged. Indeed, what grounds would I have for saying the class of rigged coins and the class of coins are two different classes?
If it's knowledge about a unique event, it's knowledge of logical possiblity. This is just an assessment of which statements about the outcome are self-contradictory and which ones aren't. This is apriori knowledge. There is no empirical aspect to it. So yes, it's about something: it's about how we're bound to think.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
When we say that bullet to the head has the potential to cause brain damage, this reflects experience with brains and gun shot wounds. It's fully possible for a person to receive a GSW to the head and suffer no brain damage. It happens all the time, especially in suicide attempts where they just end up blowing their faces off. Again, you have to take it case by case.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Medicine is heavily and pervasively empirical. Most medical decisions are not research based. We do what works. We take ideas about causation with a grains of salt because the real world has so many variables.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Could you explain what you mean by "propensities" here? It seems like you're trying to smudge the different kinds of probability together with folk expectations of the kind that drive gamblers?
I do believe in propensities. I just don't believe it tells me anything about unique cases. It tells me something about populations. So if you've been drinking a milkshake everyday at 2pm for the last 27 years, that tells me nothing about what you're going to do today. I won't be surprised if you drink a milkshake at 2pm, but I don't know ahead of time whether you will or not.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Say you have a balanced coin. You have to face the fact that it's possible to flip it an octillion times and see it come up heads every time. That doesn't mean it's not balanced, and it tells you nothing about what it's going to do on the next flip.
By propensity I mean the propensity interpretation of probability: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/#ProInt
Although the logical interpretation may be more apt for the original example.
This is just the axiom that things have already happened have necessarily happened in temporal logic. This is no way entails that future events are necessary. And it doesn't entail that probability is frequency. Anyhow, if probability IS frequency then probability is NOT subjective in any case, it's not about "our information," but a fact about the world.
But for probability to be fully synonymous with frequency it seems like you also need eternalism, the claim that all events already exist at all times, so that the probability of an event's occuring can be based on its frequency throughout all times. Why? Because before an event has occured at least one time such a view, sans eternalism, would be stuck saying the probability of that event was 0, since it has never shown up in a population before. But then the probability somehow changes to 100% upon the outcomes first occurrence. However, we generally say that if a thing occurs with probability = 0 then it is contradictory to say it also occurs. IDK, there could be a work around here but I imagine it'd be convoluted.
Frequentism does not entail eternalism though. There are plenty of ways to embrace frequentism and not rope yourself into determinism and eternalism. Generally, frequentism is explained in terms of possible worlds for this reason, or it is represented as merely an epistemological methods for discovering propensities.
So sure, probability is frequency and future events are necessary if you take those claims to be as axiomatic, but I don't think there are good reasons to accept such a proposition because I have never observed anything to make me think that future events exist before they occur.
This is dancing around the point though. Are you aware of any cases where a .50 BMG round passed through the brain of an individual and they don't have brain damage? Is there a single case where a relatively large solid object goes through the brain and there is no biologically significant result? It's prima facie unreasonable to claim that, if such an event occured and was well documented, the medical and scientific community would simply shrug and say, "well there are outliers out there, all we can know if probabilities." Same thing if someone one day walks through a solid wall or begins floating through the air. Cause is there even if there is an attempt to banish it to the background.
Anyhow, in your view is it possible to meaningfully talk about the probability that Biden wins the 2024 election? Does it make sense to say that aggressive anti-Chinese rhetoric by US politicians increases the probability of war? Or, as one time events, is it impossible to say anything about them because they are one time events?
I guess actualism is just an interest of mine. We can put it to the side. The point is that talk of probability can reflect frequency. When it does, this does not represent information about the outcomes of unique events. In fact, all it really gives us is historical information.
It's true, we do have confidence in contiguity past to future, but Hume pointed out that this confidence can't be based on either empirical or logical evidence. This is the problem of induction. This inspired Kant to present the view that what we experience is conditioned by a priori knowledge. The idea is that we see and experience what we're wired to see and experience. This would explain why we're so sure about contiguity: it's coming from us in the first place.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As an essential element of the way we think, yes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Accepting that our powers of prediction and understanding are limited should leave us open-minded. Your touchstone is what you directly experience. If you saw a message written in English in the sky, you saw it. No question about that. Explanations should remain in flux. Was it a dream? Were you tripping? Is someone playing a joke? Is Allah talking to us? You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'd have to dissect what the speaker means in talking about the probability of unique events. I would look for signs that they're starting with a logical analysis, and weighting possibilities based on various factors.
For unique events, you can use probability based on logical analysis. You can't use frequency. You just can't. It makes no sense. You can't play out a unique event more than once.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You can't use frequency for a unique event. Ever. It makes no sense.
Not really. Scientists observe regularities and develop strong intuitions as to the reliability of the observed regularities. It is not a matter of having made a choice to assume the 'rationality' of the world. For scientists it is a matter of having an undeniable intuitive understanding of the 'rationality' of the world.
It would be more accurate to say, "Scientists have a working hypothesis that the world is 'rational' because doing so has reliably allowed for much better than chance accuracy of predictions."
Quoting frank
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I'm caught up on the thread now. I don't really want to get into a discussion of the fine tuning argument, because I've spent the past 15 years arguing with (mostly) Christian apologists and I'm pretty bored with discussing it at this point. My thinking is that the appearance of fine tuning to the universe gets us (at best) to recognition that there are things we aren't in an epistemic position to be able to explain.
We can speculate, and there are lots of speculative attempts at explanation, and not much strong reason to choose among speculations or even decide that anyone yet has speculated in a way that is somewhat accurate. I lean towards there being a multiverse (in line with Guth's thinking on eternal inflation) as being relatively parsimonious, but I don't lean that way nearly strongly enough to think it is worth spending any time arguing for it.
One point I would raise in the context of speculating about goddish minds as an explanation is, "What reason do we have to think that it is metaphysically possible for a mind to exist without supervening on some sort of information processing substrate?"
I did want to comment more on the following though:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Plantinga has a brilliant mind, but his brilliance is very limited by his nescience with respect to 'the' scientific picture and naturalistic perspectives. Unfortunately Plantinga is only able to present straw men to attack with the EAAN. Admittedly the EAAN can be highly effective as an apologetic that maintains others in a state of nescience similar to that of Plantinga.
I'm not interested in picking up the burden of presenting a standalone counterargument to the EAAN, because I'm not cognitively well suited to doing things that way. However if you, or anyone else wants to start a new thread discussing the EAAN specifically I'd be happy to jump in and point out flaws in the EAAN. Furthermore, I do see consideration of the EAAN to be valuable, in that engaging in consideration of it can lead to a well warranted humility with regards to the reliability of our cognitive faculties.
I'm much less familiar with Hoffman's argument, having only briefly looked into it today, but my initial impression is that it looks self defeating to me. Something along the lines of, "Our knowledge of how things work in reality proves that we know nothing about how things work in reality." Again, it seems like there is thinking there that is well worth considering in the interest of developing a nuanced understanding of the reliability and lack thereof of our cognitive faculties. However, I think it is important to avoid black and white thinking about the issue(s) and develop a nuanced understanding of our cognitive faculties.
I do agree that analytic definitions of the God of classical theism are contradictory, but I wasn't able to follow this reasoning.
It seems to me that:
1. If God is omnipotent then God can do anything God wants to do.
2. God only does the things God does want to do.
Is totally consistent with omnipotence as classically defined.
If I follow you're saying:
1. What God does do is determined by God's desires.
2. God's desires are properties of God, and such properties are necessary.
3. God didn't create God's properties, so God is constrained by God's uncreated desires, which cause God to only do what God wants to do.
Another way to phrase this is to say that God's omnibenevolence contradicts God's omnipotence by acting as a constraint on God's actions, since God can only perform good acts. Since God's property of omnibenevolence is necessary, this precludes God from some actions.
This has generally not been taken as a true contradiction because an agent's only doing what that agent wants to do doesn't seem to constrain what an agent is metaphysically capable of doing.
But we can reject that counter argument. However, this example only seems to outline problems with the coherence of the definition of omnipotence in play, and we don't need to reject the solution to devise the same problem in other terms.
Consider:
"If God is omniscient then God cannot forget anything and cannot create a truth that God does not know. Thus, God is constrained and not omnipotent."
Or:
"God can/cannot create a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it."
Plantinga argued that these turn out not to be real contradictions. The first is logically equivalent with "if there is a truth, God knows it." The second is logically equivalent with "God can lift all rocks." God only doing good things based on God's desires is equivalent with "all of God's actions are good and God only does what God wants to do," which is the same as "God is omnibenevolent and God can do or not do anything God desires."
I don't see how God having necessary/uncreated desires contradicts "God can do or not do anything God wants to do," which is the definition of omnipotence.
However, I think there is indeed a real problem, and it's one of self reference. Any proposition stating a truth about what God does or doesn't do entails some constraint on the what God does or doesn't do, but the trait of omnipotence is supposed to mean that God faces no such constraints. Omnipotence itself refers to control over the truth value all propositions, but the excluded middle implies that no such control can be absolute. I don't see how that's relevant to the OP though. The God of philosophical theism is a weird entity dreamed up by the constraints of analysis, not the only possible conception of the divine.
Your focus here is on God's desires (which are a part of God - this thought God is supposed to be divinely simple and thus partless) whereas mine was on God's teloi, or ends, that God seeks to actualize via his desires (which are other in respect to God). The latter, to my mind, necessarily entailing the reality of teleology. The end addressed is, again, apart from what God is. (Much like the universe is not, traditionally in the West, of itself an aspect of God but instead is God's creation.) In the latter case of teleological motives for creation - thereby of intent-ional creation - there will always then be an end which was not God's creation but which God seeks to actualize. With both the latter entailing lack of being "all-powerful".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You've brought up good examples. Plenty more; such as Genesis 2 onward portraying God as an omnipotent being that had no control over what the serpent did.
But yes, I go with the latter as well.
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I gave the work a look once, and to me it was pretty bad in just this way.
More generally, this mistake is surprisingly common.
For me it's hard to imagine intelligent life that hasn't imposed order on its perceptions. Life itself seems to be a kind of order that exploits its environment. It may be that you are trying to see around the very cognition that makes the attempt intelligible.
:up:
If God is real, why would human reason or our conceptual frameworks even begin to describe or understand what god can or cannot do? Or what god is. These sorts of questions are likely irrelevant and a bit like trying to teach card tricks to a dog. The notion of god is itself almost incoherent to human comprehension, completely outside our understanding of cause and effect, physics and behavior. Just what we are doing trying to project the known world on an unknowable deity is beyond me.
I guess what we are attempting to do here is imagine god as a kind of personality who is part of our world, but has super powers or magic which can be described and contextualized, based on what we already think we know. We are attempting to constrain or limit the idea and mold it to our presuppositions, our limited understanding of things. But I don't think the concept of god is a crossword puzzle to be solved over the weekend, with cups of tea and some hard thinking. If reason, time and space emanate from god's nature (and who is to know if this is the case?) then god presumably transcends such strictures and as such is likely unintelligible.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As presuppositions go, I don't see overwhelming evidence that the world we think we know is rational or ordered. Humans impose reason and order because we are pattern seeking machines. One could just as well argue that the universe specialises in black holes and chaos and kills most of the life it spawns, often with horrendous suffering. Life on earth is one of predation - for many creatures to eat, suffering and death are required. Why would a universe be designed to produce such chaos and suffering and a natural world which wipes out incalculable numbers of lifeforms with earthquakes, fires and floods? Why would a universe of balance have within it so many meaningless accidental deaths in nature, along with endless horrendous diseases and concomitant wretchedness?
That's a fair conclusion. I'm not super gungho about this argument outside of being interesting. I actually dislike most philosophy of religion, because I find that it's an area where one's ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics, mereology, etc. all tend to be relevant. This forces authors into question begging to make their papers manageable and tends to shift rebuttals towards attacks not really related to the original thesis. It's almost like you have to start most papers in the field with a list that begins "given we assume 1, 2... 117, then it follows..."
Plus, I don't recognize the God of classical philosophical theism in any real religious traditions I can think of.
That said, I think arguments like Plantinga's, if successful, do more than just show us our epistemic limits. If your theory of the world is self-defeating, if there is a contradiction in your justification for having true beliefs, it's worth looking at how you can avoid this problem.
For example, with Hempel's Dillema, I think the key take away is not so much that physicalism doesn't work, but rather that we shouldn't dismiss any theories because they don't "seem" to be physical, as what counts as physical is itself continually redefined and refined as we build knowledge.
That's a good point. How can a mind understand something like, say the current state of the Earth, without somehow containing all the gradations of difference required to specify such a thing? If God is a unity, without distinction, and yet God knows the world, it would seem like God knows the world in a way that is indescribable using the language of mathematics, or at the very least our existing concepts of information.
A sort of diagonal inverse of that point is that, if we buy into computational theory of mind or integrated information theory, it doesn't seem like the idea of a sort of cosmic intelligence is at all precluded.
Anyhow, I think the original argument, perhaps fixed up a bit, is most relevant to people who embrace the idea of a multiverse precisely because they think it somehow "fixes" the Fine Tuning Problem.
It seems like, by moving to the multiverse concept, you've made things much worse, exacerbating the very problem we want to solve. We've moved from the problem of our single, observable universe being extremely combinatorially unlikely, but still only finitely unlikely, to the problem of why one sort of multiverse production object exists that only produces certain types of universes out of an infinite number of possibilities.
This alone might not be enough to take the bloom off the rose of the multiverse, but combined with the problems of explaining the Born Rule in a coherent fashion in a multiverse context and the problem of observers having any coherent identity through which to actually frame the theory it might. I've personally become increasingly less enamored of it over time.
Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis seems particularly vulnerable to this attack because it posits that all mathematical objects exist. Although I don't know how much this matters because people have already pointed out that it also makes Boltzmann Brains the overwhelming majority of observers.
Might add that it's hard if not impossible to think of the emergence of space and time, as if we were outside of space or before time. Someone can come along and swear that they dream of round squares, but I can't believe them (or be sure that I understand them.)
:up:
Sure, "rationality" as a whole is an amorphous term. I was thinking more specifically in terms of "is it likely for a universe evolve from state to state, such that past states dictate future ones?" That is, that the Principle of Sufficient Reason holds. That PSR is a far assumption for our world has no doubt be challenged, but I think those challenges still are a small minority viewpoint. And that makes sense to me, after all, we don't see pigs materialize out of thin air, second moons appear in the night sky, chop a carrot and have one half turn to dust, etc. There are law-like ways to describe the behaviors of the universe at both the macro and microscales. That's the sort of rationality I'm getting at, one which I believe tracks fairly closely with the Stoic and Patristic conceptions of Logos Spermatikos.
We can imagine consciousness without PSR. We can think up toy universes similar enough to ours where PSR might not hold but first person experiences can still exist. However, there is a strong argument to be made that PSR, or at least a world that is "mostly law-like," is essential for freedom. I think that connection to arguments for God could be explored to some benefit. Although, it's probably more common to think that PSR somehow precludes freedom, so maybe this wouldn't be a very successful argument. I absolutely disagree with that interpretation, but it's certainly a common take.
A definition in those terms assumes a time dimension of course, but we could redefine it more abstractly in terms of dimensions only.
Death, suffering, chaos, etc. all only make sense in terms of living things so those issues seem anterior to life existing, more in the bucket of "the problem of evil."
BTW, 100% agree on this. He's one of the greatest logic choppers of a generation but it seems like he's thrown that talent into areas where it is just less relevant to what people care about. To be sure, there is some interesting stuff in the philosophy of religion, but it seems very rare for it to actually change people's opinions or even influence theology much. This, to me, is one of the weirder things about ontological arguments. There is a fair share of sophisticated analysis on Anselm and Godel's "proofs of God," that concludes both that they are valid deductions and completely unconvincing.
I do wonder though if people who come to believe that realityis mathematical, would tend to put more stock in such ontological arguments? It seems like they should, because they don't see mathematics as merely a practical tool, but for some reason I doubt it moves the needle much.
I'll have to think about that more. It seems to me that the "end" does not exist until it is actualized. Thus, God's desire is posterior to the existence of the end. Or, if God is eternal, God desires the end simultaneous with all times, while the end only occurs within created time. Sort of like how, if I build a house, my idea of a house and my desire to have a house exists before I have built the house. To be sure, the "idea" of my end exists before I start building it, but I don't know if it works to say the unactualized end must exist before an agent can desire it (at least not for God, I suppose that is true in Platonism for people).
This is definitely true of modern folk religion, which has tried to separate the realms of science and religion, but I don't think it's traditionally true. For example, in Neoplatonism the One still emanates nature (barring versions with a Demiurge, e.g., Gnosticism). In Christianity, God is often seen as continually causing the world to come into being. In the Confessions, Saint Augustine has God "within everything but contained in nothing," like "water in a sponge," Origen likewise has God involved in sustaining being. Eckhart has a conception of God that get likened to Pantheism, although I don't think this is entirely accurate, it's more Pantheism + more traditional Trinitarian conceptions. You have Spinoza in the Western Tradition, Boheme and Hegel's self-generating God/Absolute, Berkley, where God is responsible for all our sensations. Nature itself was suffused with God, before becoming "disenchanted," as Adorno puts it.
Not super relevant to the topic at hand, but I think it would be interesting to unpack why this strong tradition of seeing God involved in sustaining all things, filling all things, came to decline in favor of the "divine Watchmaker," or a God who mostly doesn't act in the world and only sometimes intervenes, and who always does so supernaturally.
I don't think Plantinga's EAAN does succeed in showing people their epistemic limits except in cases where the person recognizes that the EAAN fails.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think it depends on what is meant by "how you can avoid this problem".
The EAAN suggests that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties. (The argument utterly overlooks the fact that we are members of a social species, and therefore there is a huge adaptive benefit to homo sapiens being able to communicate with some accuracy. So the argument fails to make a very good case, but still...)
It seems to me there are two major categories of responses to this:
1. Go with epistemic grandiosity, and deny that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and reject evolution and/or naturalism.
2. Go with epistemic humility and accept that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and keep on following where the evidence leads to the best of your abilities.
Now I'm not saying those categories are exhaustive. Certainly they are rather exaggerated charicatures to make a point. However, with those categories in mind I do want to ask, what is the problem to be avoided here?
I'm not sure this is correct - for evil to exist, this seems to require free choice. How can something be evil if it is the necessary requirement for existence, built into it by the creator/evolution? The notion of predation, so much a part of the natural world of animals, must then imply that the natural world is evil. Do you subscribe to this? Manichaeism holds to this view. Earthquakes, fire and floods are built into how nature functions, how can they be evil? Are black holes evil?
When some people attempt to quarantine suffering and pain caused by natural processes as being somehow separate from a 'good' or 'balanced' creation, it seems manipulative or selective.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not sure this works for me. You talk about 'law-like'. But even in using the term 'laws' this implies a lawgiver - there's a prejudice built into the language. Would it not be fairer to argue that there are various regularities we have observed in our world (let's ignore QM). Do these say anything about a creator or about purpose? Not really. All they say is we have observed regularity. Maybe worth noting that Kant and others hold that our notion of space/time is not really 'out there' in the universe but inside us as part of our cognitive apparatus. Could not many of our accounts of the world be more about us than the world itself? Future accounts/discoveries may see some of those regularities we see be replaced in time. We just don't really know.
The end never occurs, exists, as an actualized end until the moment its actualized, if this moment ever manifests, true. But the end one pursues will occur as that for the sake of which one does what one does; i.e., it will occur as a telos. As an actively held telos, it will then limit or bind what one generates to its own self - for all which one brings about will be so brought about for the purpose of transforming one's telos into an actualized endstate (at which juncture the telos vanishes). This, at the very least, is my take on the more basic premises of teleology.
For a common example, Alice intends to go to the store. Her having gone to the store doesn't yet exist - and might never exist if, for example, Alice becomes barred from so doing due to an unexpected friend's call that she deems to be more important to prioritize. Here, suppose nothing bars her from so going to the store. "Going to the store" is her intent, her telos - which will occur (non-physically) as that which guides all her ensuing activities aiming to fulfill this telos (i.e., to make it an actualized endstate). This very telos, then, in this sense alone, serves as a determinant of her actions. In the complete absence of all teloi - both conscious and unconscious - Alice's behaviors could then all be perfectly random.
As a more abstract example, many conceive of all life seeking optimal self-presertavion. Here tentatively granting this, optimal self-preservation will then be the at least unconscious telos of all life: one can never perfectly fulfill this telos while living. It does not exist as might some actual object exists; nor does it exist as a completely fulfilled endstate. It, here, nevertheless is deemed to be the intent (telos) that guides, motivates, teleologically determines all behaviors enacted by lifeforms. One that is not of lifeforms willful creation.
In these two examples, while we can select certain teloi to be thereafter guided by, we do not select - much less create - inherent teloi such as that of pursuing optimal self-preservation. And to select any one telos (e.g. intent) from two or more alternative possibilities, we in this very activity will need to be guided by teloi (else our behavior is random). Due to this - if I've explained things well enough - we ourselves cannot choose, much less create, all the teloi which determine our behaviors (both cognitive and physical).
Then, as an example applicable to the notion of an omnipotent deity: Does the omnipotent deity abide by that which is good or, else, is this deity the creator of the very ideal of the good? If the former, then the good here is a telos which guides, motivates, teleologically determines this omnipotent deity toward a potential endstate has not yet realized in full and which the deity did not create.
Hence, here, either the good as telos is an existentially fixed aspect of reality (which simply "just is") that either directly or indirectly governs the activities of everything, very much including those of this omnipotent deity - in which case this deity cannot be all powerful, for he is limited or bounded by the good which is not of his creation - or, else, this omnipotent deity is the very creator of the good.
Its the latter interpretation that I take logical issue with: to create entails intentional creation which, in turn, entails intents/teloi. One could for example ask: for the sake of what (i.e., with what telos) did this omnipotent deity create the good? If he deemed this creation good, then he didn't create the good. And one can argue this line of thought more abstractly: There is an infinite quantity of creations - always with some telos that determines the creations of this omnipotent deity (for otherwise the creations would be random) which this omnipotent deity neither created not chose but is instead guided by and, hence, limited and bound by.
OK, now that I've written this - tough I'll post it any way - I realize that it might be hard to understand or maybe poorly expressed. In which case, at this point, maybe it might be better to leave things where they're at? Inconclusive though things might be.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
FWIW, these are the views I so far hold: in the history of mankind, there has repeatedly emerged the notion of a certain uncreated given that "just is" on which everything we know of is dependent. For materialists, this given is matter. For those who are often labeled spiritual, this given has either been an individuated psyche with superlative abilities in all respects (i.e., a deity, replete with the deity's requisite abilities to perceive things and to hold agency as a psyche) or, historically preceding this concept, a certain something that by its very properties cannot be an individuated psyche. Both these notions can be addressed by the term "God". Plato's "The Good", which later morphed into the neoplatonic "The One", serves as one example of God as non-deity. So too does the Judaic notion of G-d which takes the form of the Ein Sof. So too the Eastern notion of the Brahman.
In Western culture, polytheism (including henotheism) converged with philosophical notions of the absolute (e.g., Neoplatonic notions of "The One") to create the notion of something that holds the properties of the philosophical notion of the absolute while at the same time being a singular deity of superlative powers - a singular absolute deity which can hear your thoughts/prayers and act as he (intentionally) wishes in turn.
There's quite a lot more, obviously, both in terms of this very issue and in terms of the wide array of spiritual and theistic belief structures that occurred in the history of the West. I'll here add that the non-deity understanding of God can at the very least be amiable to certain interpretations of pantheism and panentheism - and, therefore, to nature and naturalism (e.g., as aspects of the Stoic-like logos which this absolute in one way or another entails) - whereas the God-as-deity understanding requires that the deity stands in contrast to the nature which he creates and/or created. And, as per your example of the Gnostics, one can hold onto this uncreated, existential aboslute while also upholding the occurrence of deities (in this case, that of the Demurge as a prime example; also of Sophia as that deity which leads toward this very absolute that dwells beyond the Demurge and his creations).
I very much doubt we'll be able to arrive at any definitive conclusion on the matter, but this is a basic outline of my own best current appraisals.
Pretty much what you pointed out, avoiding "epistemic grandiosity." I think it's an argument for pragmatism, circular epistemology, and fallibilism. Demands for absolute certainty and for an absolute foundation go too far.
And, as Hoffman develops his very similar argument, I think it also cautions looking closely at how our innate faculties might be acting as theoretical blinders. It's too much to get into in detail, but I think mechanical philosophy in particular seems like it is something that might be born out of how evolution shaped the human sensory system.
Because our senses are vulnerable to illusions, we use one sense to "cross check" the veracity of another. E.g., when we see a flower we think might be fake, we touch it and smell it to help us decide. Mechanism and corpuscularism draw us in by giving us a "fundamental" model of reality that nicely coincides with an "image" of reality as bouncing balls we can simulate for ourselves with most of our senses (touch, vestibular, sight, hearing).
It's worth noting here that we appear to use the same systems for imagining a phenomenon that we use for perceiving that same type of phenomenon. Gallielo though everything was particles in motion, but dog-Gallielo might have argued for "fundamental scents."
How can death and suffering exist without life? Something has to be alive in order for it to die, right? That's all I was getting at.
Is there? When people talk about "the laws of physics," or "natural laws," I don't think they're generally presupposing any sort of "lawgiver." I don't see anything inconsistent with being an atheist and believing in "laws of physics." Indeed, many prominent atheists claim these are the only things they believe exist.
Whether these laws are intrinsic, just a description of the way physical entities interact because of what they are, or extrinsic, e.g. the Newtonian view where laws are outside of physical entities and govern them, doesn't really make a difference. The claim is simply that there is invariance in fundemental aspects of nature. E.g. water doesn't dissolve skin one day out of every 1,000, we don't see solid objects passing though each other people walking through walls conservation of energy appears to hold in our experiments, etc.
Do you think that's a controversial claim? To be sure, it's open to the critiques of radical skepticism, and the critique that the sciences regularly refine their descriptions of nature, but I feel like the claim that "Newton's law of gravity is well supported empircally and describes a uniformity in the world," is fairly well justified, even if we accept that it doesn't describe the phenomenon perfectly.
IDK, if people don't believe in the law of universal gravity, don't think Maxwell's equations describe the behavior of something real in the world, I will grant that my argument won't have any real appeal for them.
Sure, absolutely. I'm willing to say that is almost certainly the case. But if we can't say we are justified in claiming that the fundamental findings in the sciences actually correspond to something about the way the world actually is, then how is knowledge even possible? If we observe gravity working the same way throughout our lifetime, and yet we still think this might be some sort of unreal order imposed upon the world, what could possibly justify any knowledge claims about external reality?
Why even posit a noumenal world in this case? If you take Kant that far, I'd argue you're better off going where Fichte and Hegel realized that thought led, to some form of idealism.
Not obviously. But I'll refer you to the Fine-Tuning Problem and this post. .
Fine Tuning is considered a problem because it appears that life should only be possible by a fantastical set of "just so coincidences." The multiverse hypothesis from cosmic inflation proports to solve this problem by showing that, if some very large set of universes is created, then it is actually not surprising that we exist. Most universes can't support life, but a few can. Clearly, observers like us will only be in that smaller set of universes where they can exist.
My point is that this sort of argument runs into the problem of then having to explain why the multiverse only creates certain types of universes, that is, ones with "physical laws." Why is that constraint relevant? Because if you don't specify that only those sorts of universes get created, then the number of random universes is far larger than the number of ones with describable laws. However, the random universes should also be able to create observers like us by pure chance, and even be observably indiscernible from universes that do have laws for long periods of time, by pure coincidence. It's sort of like how a program that randomly outputs English words is much more likely to produce a coherent page of text than one that randomly outputs letters (randomly outputting pixels might be a better analogy though).
It's a problem akin to the Boltzmann Brain Problem, which is also an issue for multiverse theories, but more generalizable and perhaps less tractable. Unless there is some explanation of why only certain types of universes exist in the multiverse, the pivot to the multiverse doesn't seem to actually address the problem.
It also works from a purely phenomenological perspective as well, unlike Fine-Tuning, because there are many more ways we can imagine that our world progresses from state to state.
No - that's not the point I am making. I'd say you're overlooking the obvious. This is not just death and suffering exist; this is creation as a orgiastic instantiation of chaos, death and suffering. Specifically the mechanism of predation is predicated on extremes of cruelty and violence. This is built into the fabric of creation - survival is not possible without this. Now why would a 'good' god who could do anything specifically chose a creation built upon predation - suffering and chaos as a way of life?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Indeed they do - read anything by any Islamic or Christian apologists - its a key line 'a law implies a lawgiver'. William Lane Craig, a big name Christian philosopher maintains this in most of his work. This is one of the reasons why many atheists no longer refer to the 'Laws of logic' but prefer the 'logical axioms'. Our language influences our arguments. But I agree with you that this shouldn't be the case. Laws are metaphors.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My problem is we don't know enough about the universe, the earth or even human perception and consciousness to make any totalizing claims about design. There isn't even agreement about idealism vs materialism. But what we do see, for what it's worth is that the universe seems mostly good at spawning black holes. :smile:
Agree. I don't think reason counts much in the god debates. You either buy the idea or you don't. I personally have no sensus divinitatis (to borrow from Calvin) so the notion of god is incoherent from my perspective, no matter how it is spun.
Most of my relevant experience in recent years has been with discussions at William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith Forum. So not a remotely unbiased sample. Still, there certainly are Christians who are very good reasoners and knowledgeable.
I think the intuitions individuals have, and the willingness those individuals have, to question intuitions, plays a big role. The premises of arguments for God depend greatly on intuitions, and intuitions (key to making the arguments seem like sound arguments) tend to get reinforced on Sunday mornings.
I hear you. I agree that some Christians are good at reason. And often they feel they need to be in a world that privileges reason and evidence over faith and feeling. When I think of defensive, perhaps even aggressive reasoning, I tend to think of apologists. Especially the presuppositionalists. Most atheists I know (certainly those who are not in America and don't have to face fundamentalists) are complacent and don't care much about the arguments for or against god. Their atheism is often a kind of lazy cultural scientism. You know the kind of thing - 'science makes sense, god's don't.'
As far as I see, there are three options:
1. The universe is uncaused, therefore it is rational for no reason.
2. The universe is caused by a non-rational cause/reason.
3. The universe is caused by a rational cause/reason.
Suppose we reject 1 as we believe it to be unlikely that rationality can just exist uncaused. Then we go to 2 and we conclude that natural non-rational causes are also unlikely to produce a rational universe. That leaves us with 3. If the rational cause/reason of the universe is itself caused, then we need to recurse the argument, until we arrive at an uncaused rational cause/reason. But we have already concluded that it is unlikely that rationality can just exist uncaused. If we retract that conclusion, then we might as well accept 1.
I don't associate aggressiveness with apologetics so much as naive confidence, and I can relate to having such naive confidence myself. When I was 16 or 17 I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and not having much in the way of exposure to philosophy, I was impressed and felt ready to argue with any atheist I had the chance to. I have the impression that for many W.L. Craig fans it is similar. WLC is skilled at presenting arguments, and conveying the sense that any reasonable person must come to the same conclusions he does. However, 'normal' apologists, who have an appreciation for logical reasoning have a lot of potential for developing a broader perspective.
Presuppositionalism is the worst though. It's mind poison. It really messes people up, and sets them up for becoming more and more out of touch with reality.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that more such atheists don't understand the thinking of believers better because they tend to say cringeworthy things (from the perspective of people with an insider view of the thinking of believers) which feed into the stereotypes many Christians have with respect to atheists. However, I don't blame such atheists for not getting the thinking of Christians better, and not being prepared to have a potentially fruitful dialogue with Christians. The cultural gap is just too wide.
On a weirder note... I just found out Sunday that my mom is going to be passing on a letter from my fundamentalist home schooled 16 year old niece, which I'm pretty sure is going to be a 'come to Jesus' letter. So I get to look forward to deciding how or whether to respond without alienating my whole family of origin.
I meant aggressive in the sense of super assertive and unassailably confident, not hostile.
Quoting wonderer1
Probably right.
Quoting wonderer1
He's definitely a very smart man but I find his style reminds me of a used car dealer, haranguing you to buy the product. For my taste he's too slick, too fast, too insinuating.
:100: Nicely and succinctly said.
Oh, me too. But I've spent 15 years biting my tongue while participating on his forum. Old habits die hard.
Because he moves in mysterious ways or in other words "he just fuck'n does, right"!. :wink:
Agreed. I'd just add that, if we go back to 1, we are still left with the problem of why an uncaused thing happened once, but hasn't happened since. If random, uncaused events happen, shouldn't they happen all the time? You can't really argue that this isn't a problem because uncaused events are "unlikely," since how could they have any sort of factor determining their likelihood while still remaining uncaused?
Maybe they do occur and we don't notice them, but since the birth of the universe was a pretty big event, leaving lots of evidence, it doesn't seem to to work to say all the other uncaused events are too small to see. Nor does it work so say "oh, uncaused events would necessarily occur outside our universe." Why? It's has no causal precedence, they can occur wherever and whenever.
But any argument about God stemming from this problem seems not unlike the Fine Tuning Argument, but even harder to quantify, so I don't see it having legs.
I fail to see how calling it something different changes the problem. Why should the uncaused and wholly unexplainable manifest in just one convenient way? Why can you have an uncaused first state but not an uncaused last state, a sudden uncaused end?
If a universe can blink into existence for no reason then it seems it can blink out of existence for no reason. In which case, maybe we should just assume the world, including ourselves and our memories, just began to exist in the past second, since that gives the universe less time to have vanished into the uncaused void from which it came?
IMO, an infinite regress seems more appealing. Such an infinite regress doesn't really require or specify the God of any existing religion either, so if I have to bite the bullet either way...
Or there are ways to avoid the infinite regress through logical necessity. For example, ontological arguments for God, or something like Behemism where the world is blown into existence by the force of contradiction the necessity of resolving contradictions being itself being a sort of dialectical engine (Hegel being an example of the latter). If successful, these avoid infinite regress. If they're actually successful in another question though.
Anselm and Gödel's ontological arguments have the dubious distinction of solid staying power in the face of many talented minds trying to find a definitive way to put them to rest while simultaneously convincing likely not one person to change their minds on the issue, which makes me think the pragmatic use of ontological arguments are even more dubious than the rest of the philosophy of religion.
Wow. Same book and same attitude for me at the same age. I loved that dude back then.
:lol:
How thing have changed, eh?
I'm kind of a C.S. Lewis own goal.
Oh yeah. I've been an atheist so long that I can enjoy theological metaphors now. That god from the bible is about as real as Huckleberry Finn --and interesting to me on that literary level.
Yeah, I love The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I've been considering posting The Coming of the Ship at what is left of the Reasonable Faith Forums but I'm afraid doing so might come across as grandiose, instead of conveying what I want.
I bumped into a Gibran passage that spoke to me:
[i]Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.[/i]
http://www.katsandogz.com/gibran/onknowledge.php
I posted a link to that passage here on TPF recently. I don't think there is a chapter in which I don't find something that moves me deeply.
Also, since there would be an infinite amount of these improbable worlds and an infinite amount of "normal" worlds, and countable infinite sets are the same size, how could you make a probabilistic argument that you're not in the set of improbable worlds? If both sets are the same size, and you didn't know which set you belonged to, isn't it equally likely you could be a member of either set?
Because it is logically impossible. A 'last state' by definition entails that it is a result of transformation from another state. You are asking 'why can't we have a transformation that is not a result of transformation'?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Your assumption is that the first state is itself the result of an event or a transformation ('blinking'). That is also logically impossible, as it assumes another state (pre-blinking) before the first state. But there are no states before the first one by definition - the first event or transformation is from the first state to the second one. So no 'blinking' is involved - the first state just exists uncaused at the beginning of time.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I always fail to see how the infinite regress solves any of those issues. EIther rationality/order of the reality requires an explanation or it does not.
IDK what you definition of state is. I figured you were talking about states in terms of physics, since physics is relevant to the cosmological argument. In physics a state is simply a set of variables describing a system at a given moment. Systems come into being and go out of being all the time in physics. However, they are all, to some degree, arbitrarily defined. We can give systems a definitive definition because we are the arbiters of what a system is, but that subjectiveness isn't helpful here.
Anyhow, defining the problem out of existence doesn't seem compelling. "An uncaused event can occur, but only once because of how we've defined our terms." It's a weak tautology IMHO. If all events can be described by physical state changes (a core premise of physicalism) then the line between "event" and "state transition" seems weak.
It's essentially akin to the claim that "talking about what came before the Big Bang is meaningless." Is it? I don't know, people don't seem to have any trouble thinking of something as causally prior to the Big Bang. Indeed, it is now popular scientific opinion that there was something before the Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation. And it seems likely that we will find out more about events prior to the Big Bang and potentially events prior to Cosmic Inflation. Hence the effort to redefine the "Big Bang" from its original scientific description into "time 0, the point before which we can claim that talking of cause is meaningless." IMO, this effort seems doomed as the interval between the earliest processes we think existed and the Big Bang as originally described continues to increase.
The uncaused has no limits, no cause can dictate its occurrence. What principle can explain why the uncaused can only be prior to the causal? I don't think definition does it. States transition causally, but its easy to imagine unchanged state transition and even build such things in toy universes.
---
As to infinite regress, it solves the cosmological argument, and potentially the rationality problem.
Take Penrose's idea that the conditions of the late universe might be such that they result in another Big Bang. This makes the universe cyclical, without beginning or end. There is no start time to consider. Black Hole Cosmology is another such theory, one which I could see becoming popular with the right evidence, that might deny the existence of any "first state."
Now, if we can also show that the random cannot be eternal, cyclical in this way, this seems like it could explain rationality to some degree in terms of necessity, although IDK how such an argument would work exactly, I could be convinced though.
If a transition, change or event occurs, it must be from something to something. I would define a 'state' as the totality of what comes before that transition. All that comes after the change would be another state, which could then change to another state etc.
And I am not defining the problem out of existence, I am pointing out the error of your assumptions. It seems you still do not see it, as you insist that I posit that 'an uncaused event can occur'. That is definitely not what I claim, on the contrary. You still treat the first state as an occurence, i.e. an event, a transition from something to something else. I am pointing out that it is logically incoherent, what I posit is the uncaused first state which is specifically NOT a result of event, occurence, transition, etc. So no, uncaused events cannot occur, events occur specifically because they are caused: a nature of one state results in its change to another state.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, you are asking 'why a second state cannot be a first state'? The simple answer: because then it would not be a second state. If you define a state as being subsequent to another state, then it must be so, because you have defined it that way.
I am not sure what you mean by 'unchanged state transition'.
But then the definition of a state is supposed to somehow preclude the possibility that there could ever be more than one system without prior states. That doesn't seem to flow from your definition. If an entity can exist in a "first moment," and we can say nothing meaningful about why, then any number of entities can exist in a first moment. Nor can we say might about these entities properties or if they can interact.
If one system can have no prior states why not others? Even if we say there can be no "last states," the definition doesn't suggest "there must be one and only one "first state," for one and only one system. Nor am I aware of a definition of "system," that precludes systems from interacting.
Then there is the other issue of events. If we adopt one of the more eliminative views on cause, then what we call events is really just the transition from state to state. For a Newtonian universe, we can think about 3D slices cut across the time dimension. An event then is simply a description for some phenomena we experience that can be described by some components of a state, a subset. The event has a starting time and an ending time, and it exists as just the relevant subset of components of a state from the start time to the end time.
Now the states we observe don't evolve in just any way. They evolve based on regularities that can be described by mathematics; our "laws of physics," are at least an approximation of these regularities. However, if a first state, a particular arrangement of variables occurs due to no prior states why does it then follow that the variables cannot shift their values randomly, as opposed to in accordance with their normal regularities, at any other time? More importantly, why should we define a state, a set of variables describing a system at some instant, as only a "state" when there are multiple states and states evolve such that regularities dictate that evolution.
I see no reason why I cannot have a model universe where the values of the variables describing S1 do not entail the values of variables at S2.
For the definition to solve the problems we need the definition of a state to be: "a variables describing a system at a given moment but only in cases where the evolution of states is dictated by mathematically describable regularities, except in the case of the first state. Further, to be a state, it must exist in a system that does not interact with any other systems (this is required to avoid a second 'first state' for some other system occuring, and then the new system interacting with our original)." That seems like an ad hoc definition aimed at "defining away," the problem.
Imagine if there was empirical evidence to support the existence of multiple Big Bangs, our universe being the result of some sort of cosmic merger. Would this entail that such a universe had no states?
I guess what would convince me of your point is if you could show that only one uncaused system can exist by necessity and that system's prior states necessarily have some sort of entailment relationship with their future ones. Otherwise the fix seems ad hoc. For it to be convincing that something is "true by definition," the definition needs to be necessary in some way, entailed by other premises we accept, or the disagreement needs to be about popular word usage.
Of course it precludes it - the totality means exactly that. You cannot have 'two everythings'. If there are two systems, they still comprise a single state. If system one predates system two, then system two necessarily has prior states (the ones in which only system one existed).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In the first state there exist some physical entities which are governed by some specific regularities. Due to those regularities they transform to the second state. Again, those same regularities obtain, which result in transformation to the third state, etc. The first state is no exception here, the regularities that obtain are exactly the same. Of course, in subsequent states we can have physical entities which are the result of some previous processes - we would not expect them to exist in the first state. But the regularity itself obtains for all states.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I have explained above, none of those exceptions are necessary.
Yeah, this still seems empty. All the work is done by definitions I'm not inclined to accept. I am left at a loss about why it is "illogical," to disagree with you. This seems reminiscent of the claim that it is "meaningless to talk about anything causing the Big Bang because by definition nothing caused the Big Bang."
If the universe has a first state then it does not exist without beginning or end, it is not eternal. If, as you say, states contain entities, then entities came to exist acausally. If entities began to exist for no reason then there is no constraint on entities coming into existence for no reason and it is not the case that, as you say, things always progress "from something to something." If an entity exists for no reason than its initial existence involves "something from nothing."
If there was a "birth of the universe" then that is an event, an occurrence, a thing that happened,etc. There aren't technical terms, I mean them just in the normal sense. If something coming from nothing can happen, then it can happen again because if something can begin to exist with no prior conditions then no prior conditions are relevant to it. If this the case, as you seem to accept, then the claim that "something always comes from something," is simply in contradiction with the claim "that everything came from nothing."
What exactly in logic makes the universe existing as a brute fact necessary? What formal system do we use to prove "things began to exist, all at once," by logical necessity?
I don't even think it's a bad option to claim that the universe simply began and we can know nothing as to why in virtue of the other options. This might be my preferred take. I don't know why there is an impetus to first claim the universe is a brute fact though, and then claim this is somehow logically necessary.
No, that is exactly where you are wrong. I understand that you are very attached to this notion, but that makes it nearly impossible to understand what I am saying.
If you say 'coming from nothing', then you are positing a transition: from one state - nothingness - to another state - the first state of the universe. That is NOT what I propose. The claims 'there was a state of nothingness before the first state of the universe' and 'there no state before the first state of the universe' are not equivalent and mean two different things. Can you see the difference between them?
Yeah, I got that part. If I accept your definition I accept your conclusion because your conclusion is contained in the definition. I understand why your conclusion flows from your definition. The question is, why should I accept your definition? Something starting to exist when it did not exist prior to its first moment of existence is something coming from nothing. I am not sure how the position just stated violates some core principle of logic?
If anything, the claim that the universe has no cause is the claim that violates a commonly held "rule of thought," the Principle of Sufficient Reason. But I will allow that not everyone agrees that PSR should be taken as axiomatic and that it remains controversial . However, I do think it's telling that the only context where I can recall seeing people deny PSR in the context of the external/physical world is on the topic of First Cause.
If the universe is a brute fact then it is a brute fact, not a deduction that it is illogical to question. I don't rule out that the position is true, only that it's illogical to question it, and I've yet to see or hear of a proof showing how PSR applies, except for the birth of the universe based on any commonly accepted first principles.
For what it is worth, I also don't think the claim that the universe began uncaused is illogical in any sense either, I just think it presents problems.
It might violate logic if you assume that before the first moment of existence of everything there was another moment of existence of nothingness. You interpret 'coming from nothing' as an actual event, which is not necessarily the only interpretation or even the most preferable one. If I say 'He gave nothing to his son for Christmas', nobody actually thinks that he gave his son an empty box, most people would assume that no act of giving anything occurred at all. That is how 'coming from nothing' might - and I would say should - be interpreted - as not coming from anything, i.e no event of 'coming' at all, no 'birth of the universe'. The first state just is, it is not a result of an event, change or transition. Interestingly, that confusion appears only in such languages like English, which abhor double negation. In Slavic languages it would be 'He didn't give nothing to his son' or 'The universe did not come from nothing' and it would be perfectly clear what is meant.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The issue with PSR is that it either assumes necessitarianism, which is itself problematic, or a property of aseity, which fares no better, so the defenders of PSR do not have it that easy either. But I suppose that is a topic for another discussion.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I understand, I am just pointing out how some of those problems might be avoided.
I suspect Jabberwock is sleeping now. So I'll interject.
I don't think is is a matter of definition. It looks to me as if you don't have a clear mental model of what Jabberwock is proposing. Jabberwock is proposing a first state, in which something exists. "A state prior to the absolute first state" is a nonsensical construction, which you seem to be insisting on inserting into Jabberwock's model instead of grasping the model that Jabberwock is trying to convey to you.
IOW, it looks to me like you are attacking a straw man of your own creation, where you've tacked your own addition, of a state of nothingness prior to the absolute first state, onto Jabberwock's model.
Might I suggest, spending some time, on getting a better grasp on the picture Jabberwock is seeking to convey to you?
I don't see how emptiness (an empty set) void, is precluded by logic. But, moreover, I never proposed such an assumption. The question is why uncaused entities, relations, etc. must necessarily all exist for the first time at the exact same moment (and then continue to exist indefinitely).
[Reply="wonderer1;822386"]
No, I get that there is no state prior to the first state in the way Jabberwocky frames things, and I see nothing wrong with that in terms of being coherent. I actually accept that way of looking at things (with a caveat). I didn't say "your model is nonsense," I said "why should I accept your claim that it would be illogical to question your model?"
The way this exchange started was not a disagreement over whether uncaused entities are coherent. It was a disagreement over whether or not it is necessary that, if uncaused entities exist (i.e., they exist without existing in any prior state) they can only exist for the first time simultaneously, that it is a necessity that uncaused entities not exist for the first time except at the exact same moment.
Maybe the phrasing is bad here, but I explained it in detail earlier. When I say, "something from nothing," I am not talking about a progression of states of nothing, a series of empty states with no variables, to a series of states with variable that is continuous with the empty states. I am talking about the fact that entities that can be described by variables exist in some first state, despite not existing in any prior state, and so there is "nothing" causally prior to them.
I get that we are not talking about a progression of moments. There is no time where there exists a "nothing." If nothing exists, then nothing changes, so there is no relevant time dimension. But the "first state," does not occur outside of time. It is a state existing within time. The first state is a state containing entities, per Jabberwocky, which I think makes sense. These entities exist in the first state and exist in no prior state. So, entities can exist without having existed in any prior state.
This being the case, I am left wondering why it follows that entities can exist without existing in any prior state, but only in the first state that any entity exists? If entities can exist uncaused (having existed in no prior state), then it seems like they should be able to exist uncaused in any state given the normal definition of "states," which is just "a description of what exists in a system.
If a set of uncaused entities can come to exist at some first state, why can't other uncaused entities exist for the very first time at any later state? This is where the definition seems to be doing the all heavy lifting, because a state is then also defined as "everything that exists," to preclude more than one uncaused system, and "states are such that they only progress from other states, except for the first state," to preclude additional uncaused entities. But all it normally means that states "progress" from one another is that they are ordered. That they are ordered does not mean that the descriptions of later states must be entailed by earlier ones. But the definition now seems to also include the caveat that, outside the first state, all future states are entailed by prior ones, precluding anything else that is uncaused. I'll buy that this might describe our universe, but I don't see how it's illogical to reject this model.
This isn't the usual definition of states. You can have toy model universes that are random and they can have states.
Glad that we understand each other now. I have disagreed with your objections due to such claims of yours like 'If it began to exist, if there was a "birth of the universe" then that is an event, an occurrence, a thing that happened,etc.', which seemed to suggest that the 'birthing' event is required for the first state. If we agree that is not necessary, then I have no problem with that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That is a valid objection, of course. There is no such preclusion for the things that start to exist which are preceded by a prior state but are not directly caused by it cannot be logically excluded. But I would argue that objection is valid for any model without an infinite regress of causes.
Sorry if I wasn't clear before. But yeah, that's the basic problem I see. If things start to exist, having not existed at any prior point, then it seems like things could start existing whenever and anything should start to exist in this way, not just the Cosmic Inflation state preceding the Big Bang.
I always figured this is one of the reasons why many cosmological theorists start with some sort of vacuum state or "the laws of physics," existing without beginning, instead of positing an initial first time they exist, but I might be wrong.
I am not entirely clear on the history of this sort of argument, but I gather that it was taken seriously and used to justify the the once popular view of an eternal, static universe, before evidence of expansion and the Big Bang began to pile up. "Start states,' seemed to open the door for supernaturalism. But the shift towards accepting the Big Bang didn't seem to rekindle interest in the problem, prehaps because it's intractable and there is not much new to say. IDK, you still see it in Big Bang to Big Crunch to Big Bang appeals or Black Hole Cosmology, the universe then never had a start states but oscillates or regress eternally.
This is actually one of the theories I find more interesting. What if every inside black hole singularity is a Big Bang, the Big Bang simply being our name for a specific white hole. Universes can have all sorts of traits, which are somewhat random, but only universes that tend to produce black holes "reproduce." Prehaps this fixes the Fine Tuning Problem, we exist because universes like ours produce more black holes and natural selection works on universes. It's intriguing at least because the mathematics of models around black holes jive with observations we'd expect were this the case, although to date this "Black Hole Cosmology," is empirically indiscernible from the position that the Big Bang is unique. This perhaps just gets us to an infinite regress, but it's a neat idea.
I would just add that the qualification of 'starting to exist' does not make much difference. Suppose we see a painting and when we ask 'Who painted it?' and the answer is: 'Oh, nobody - it has always existed!' Would such explanation be more acceptable than 'It started to exist uncaused!'?
Agreed. That gets to the unreasonability of denying PSR in many every day contexts. But generally we don't feel the same way about violations of PSR for seemingly "eternal," truths. "Why does the Golden Ratio or Pi have the values they do?" Well, we can explain that in terms of other ratios and numbers, but we generally are fine with there being no "cause," behind the explanation. 2+2 is equivalent to 6-2 in some way, but we don't tend to say 2+2 causes 4.
IDK, there are plenty of ways to deny that mathematical truths are eternal, and I'm open to those. But it does seem much more plausible that these sorts of Platonic truths exist in some sort of acausal way. So there is an argument from analogy that could be made that an eternal universe is sort of like 2+2 = 4, it's a truth without beginning or end.
I don't think the analogy works. What would be satisfying is something that doesn't work on analogy, but rather carries the same sort of necessity as simple mathematical truths or logical truths. This is what I take Hegel to be attempting in the Science of Logic, starting from the consciousness, but it's also fairly impenetrable.
The issue is that PSR does not explain why some things are necessary and others cannot be. Why paintings cannot have aseity?
In this case, there would be infinitely more irrational possible universes. Not convinced this works, but it seems plausible.
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If I had a good answer for that I'd be publishing my landmark philosophical treatise, but I'm at a loss.