Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

[Maui]

What is it, in the face of a good understanding of QM, that maintains a faith in the first option?

Our observations - you, me, the beauty of nature, love, the relentless human spirit for understanding how things work...

It's obvious at this point that the inner workings of reality are inaccessible to us, things happen, what the heck(ice-cream still tastes good, cold beer too)

 

[bohm2]

I enjoyed reading Kastner's paper but I don't know exactly why but I just don't buy the whole concept of a 'collapse' process. I think any theory that has collapse in it, just seems wrong. I really found the video below (including a double-slit type of experiment) really useful in getting a "picture" of what may be happening. Still, the major problem is the wave can't be that type of guiding wave (e.g. existing in our familiar space-time). But at least, one can get an intuitive sense of how emergence of our familiar space-time may come from this configuration space stuff (whatever it is). Of course, the problem is that a direct mapping from configuration space to the more familiar space-time can't be done in any unique way, as others have argued, because when one tries to do it, the structure of the 3-N space can underwrite more than one set of emergent 3-spaces.The MWI doesn't have a problem with this view because they argue that more than one set of emergent 3-spaces exist at the same time. But I just don't buy MWI, either. But I still like the picture of those silicone drops in the video being our familiar objects in space-time whereas "below" there is some other stuff that defies locality/separability (something unlike the guiding wave depicted in Couder experiments). This is in line with some of Bohm's metaphysics which I'm biased toward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yWv5dqSKk

One paper tries to get a wave to exist in the physical space we are familiar but the model seems really complicated:

This is admittedly a complicated, ugly, and highly contrived theory. (And although it is straightforward to generalize from 2 particles moving in 1 spatial dimension to N particles moving in 3 spatial dimensions, the complexity and ugliness in that more serious context is surely much worse!)...

It is sometimes raised as an objection against pilot-wave theory that, in the theory, the wave function causally influences the particles, but the particles exert no influences back on the wave. (This, it is apparently thought, suggests that the particles are some kind of mere epiphenomenon, which might as well be dropped-a bizarre suggestion, for anyone who understands the crucial role the particles play in making the theory empirically adequate, but still a suggestion one hears sometimes.) To whatever extent one takes such an objection seriously, then, it is of interest to point out its inapplicability to the pilot-wave theory (of exclusively local beables) sketched here: each particle’s motion is dictated just by its own associated pilot-wave field, but the evolution of each pilot-wave field is influenced by all the other particles. Not only, then, do the particles influence the pilot-wave fields, but the particles can quite reasonably be understood as (indirectly) affecting each other (through the various fields). Perhaps those who dislike the causality posited by the usual pilot-wave theory, then, will find the theory sketched here more tolerable...

The theory presented in Section III contains an infinite number of interacting fields on physical space and causal influences from particles onto the fields associated with other particles – but is mathematically equivalent to standard pilot-wave theory in which there is just one wave, on configuration space, and no causation from the particles onto the pilot-wave.

The Theory of (Exclusively) Local Beables
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0909/0909.4553v3.pdf

 

[bohm2]

Edit: I thought I'd mention that Bohm (at least in his metaphysics) didn't appear to believe in the "reality" of particles:

We have frequently been asked the question “Didn’t Bohm believe that there was an actual classical point-like particle following these quantum trajectories?" The answer is a definite No! For Bohm there was no solid 'particle' either, but instead, at the fundamental level, there was a basic process or activity which left a ‘track’ in, say, a bubble chamber. Thus the track could be explained by the enfolding and unfolding of an invariant form in the overall underlying process.

Zeno Paradox for Bohmian Trajectories: The Unfolding of the Metatron
http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson/ZenoPaper.pdf

 

[ryan7585]

In that sense, what you are describing is a justification or reasoning for nihilism, as the discussion about "something vs. nothing" eventually leads towards existential nihilism in the form of a logical conclusion of the argument being presented: if everything is nothing, no thing can have inherent meaning.

It is ultimately, from my perspective, a discussion about what the difference is between ideas and reality.

Nihilism is so ridiculous to me... Regardless of whether everything is nothing, we all have an objective experience which is affected in definite ways by how we interact. A search for "inherant meaning" will ALWAYS yield fruitless results. But contextual meaning can be found in absolutely everything in the universe. It is our experience of it which gives it meaning

How is this not obvious?

 

[bohm2]

Here’s some interesting arguments against the probabilistic argument presented in original post:

Van Inwagen, while not himself a cosmologist, addresses a cosmological question. He proposes to answer the question that is “supposed to be the most profound and difficult of all questions”: “Why is there anything at all?” The argument is elaborate, so I shall jump to the essential step. Van Inwagen presents the premises that there is only one possible world in which there are no beings but there are infinitely many possible worlds in which there are beings. The latter is arrived at by arguing that there are many ways for beings to be but only one way for them not to be. He then urges that the probability of being actual for each possible universe is the same. (I set aside the problem that this instantly conflicts with the requirement that probability measures normalize to unity.) It now follows that the probability “of there being nothing is 0.” It is “as improbable as anything can be” . Hence, no doubt, we are to infer that there being anything at all is as probable as anything can be. Van Inwagen prudently admits that he is “unhappy about the argument...No doubt there is something wrong with it...but I should like to be told what it is”. What is wrong is that it is an instance of the inductive disjunctive fallacy. Our background assumptions are near vacuous and provide completely neutral support for the actuality of each possible world; therefore, they provide completely neutral support for any disjunction of these possibilities. What van Inwagen has done is to represent this neutrality incorrectly by a widely spread probability measure, thereby committing himself fallaciously to the conclusion that a disjunction of all but one of them is strongly supported.

Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/cosmic_confusion_final.pdf

If one applies probabilities thoughtlessly, one might try to represent the state of complete ignorance by a broadly spread probability distribution over the outcomes. Then the probability of the disjunction can be brought close to unity merely by adding more outcomes. Hence one would infer fallaciously to near certainty for a sufficiently large contingent disjunction of outcomes over which we are individually in complete ignorance. The fallacy is surprisingly widespread. A striking example is supplied by van Inwagen [1996] in answer to the cosmic question “Why is there anything at all?” There is, he asserts, one way for no thing to be, but infinitely many ways for different things to be. Distributing probabilities over these outcomes fairly uniformly, we infer that the disjunction representing the infinitely many ways things can be must attract all the probability mass so that we assign probability one to it.

Challenges to Bayesian Confirmation Theory
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Challenges_final.pdf

Zinkernagel summarizes this:

From the perspective of Norton’s critique, it is not hard to see what is wrong with the analogy. When you win the lottery ticket it may be reasonable to infer that other people bought a ticket but, in any case, the very idea of winning a lottery presupposes that other tickets exist and that the winning ticket has been drawn more or less randomly from the collection of tickets. By contrast, our universe being the way it is (“winning the lottery”) does not presuppose that other universes (with different properties) exist-our evidence is simply neutral in this respect. Furthermore, we have no a priori right to presuppose that the values of the parameters characterizing our universe are bestowed on it by some random process-and so no right to presuppose a probability distribution (uniform or otherwise) of the outcomes. Therefore, a judgment of what is natural to infer from our universe being as it is (with us in it) hangs in the air.

Some trends in the philosophy of physics
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8761/

 

[apeiron]

Here’s some interesting arguments against the probabilistic argument presented in original post:

Excellent references for the points made earlier in this thread. Norton skewers Inwagen very nicely.

What Norton calls complete neutrality is of course what Peirce means by vagueness. A realm of pure possibility without any constraints. And so a realm to which the principle of contradiction (ie: of crisp disjunctions) fails to apply.

Bayesian reasoning has to guess at the constraints that might apply to shape pure possibility into some more definite distribution. And where such reasoning goes wrong is when it does not realize this is what it is doing.

It is the same mistake as in trying to apply set theory. Set theory has to presume some global state of constraint to apply to a distribution. Yet vagueness, or neutrality, is something different - it is the truly and profoundly unlimited. There are no constraints by definition. So a larger model of logic is needed to deal with the case - one such as Peircean logic that includes abductive leaps to get things started. And then semiotic constraints where - invoking final cause - it is not local change that is the isssue, but the emergence eventually of limits to change, to the expression of raw possibility.

So Norton provides an argument against all attempts on the "why anything?" question based on conventional probablity approaches - ones that have to already presume constraints on raw possibility. A vagueness doesn't have countable states, not even an infinity of them, as this would already give it something definite, something crisply developed. You have to step back further to a higher level of modelling, one like Peircean semiosis which has that "extra hidden dimension" Norton mentions.

But then of course once armed with the Peircean view, you can start to say something positive about the "why anything?" question.

As I stressed in post #139 - https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3665001&postcount=139 - once you take a view of probability spaces as things that develop, rather than simply exist, then the correct foundational dichotomy of vague~crisp comes into sight. Instead of trying to contrast the likelihood of nothing vs something, we are now talking about the likelihood of the vague yielding the definite. And how that then compares with the universe as we observe its developmental history.

 

[apeiron]

A few more contemporary references which demonstrate that logical and statistical arguments cannot solve this. A deeper view of causal process is needed.

This takes a Zeno type approach in which time sliced infinitely fine means there is no longer a "first moment" and so a universe can be considered self-causing...
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/smith_reason_universe_exists.htm

Then this one points out the Zeno-ic flaws in this idea...
http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rc...oc2mCg&usg=AFQjCNHZMeLvW84iV2uxicZeMaYiJzUUfg

[link fixed hopefully - google Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist? William F. Vallicella otherwise]

(And of course, the Planck scale already creates scientific problems for such approaches - time cannot be sliced infinitely thin.)

Then this is a somewhat useful taxonomy of approaches...that of course fails to mention any Peircean or systems thinking
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/downloads/skeptic13-2_Kuhn.pdf

 

[wuliheron]

Logically the entire argument is meaningless. We define something in terms of nothing and vice versa. Its like north and south, up and down, top and bottom. They're just descriptions we use and there are plenty of things we can say don't exist as well as plenty that do. The idea that you can have nothing without having something is an assumption that just doesn't make logical sense. We have both things that exist and don't exist and you can ask why we have both, but then the answer just comes back to because that is how we define them.

Like a little kid laying in bed contemplating infinity we can go round and round with such thoughts all day long and get nowhere. That's the only thing about this entire subject that is demonstrable. That instead of being the "ultimate" question, its just a waste of time.

 

[apeiron]

Logically the entire argument is meaningless. We define something in terms of nothing and vice versa. Its like north and south, up and down, top and bottom.

But that has been one of the important questions raised. Is nothingness actually complementary to somethingness? Is it a well-formed concept in the first place?

As has been mentioned often enough, some-things and no-things are both about the counting of things. And an absence of things still leaves the issue of the empty space that is left behind as itself a kind of thing. This was the null set problem - the implication still of a container even when it contains nothing.

And even before that, if we imagine subtracting away the existence of all things, that still leaves their possibility, which again is a kind of thingness. Certainly something more than absolute nothingness.

So I believe you end up having to accept a quite different metaphysical dichotomy of vague~crisp as the most fundamental description of degrees of existence and non-existence. Which has its profound implications as explored by Anaximander and Peirce to name a couple of philosophers.

Like a little kid laying in bed contemplating infinity we can go round and round with such thoughts all day long and get nowhere. That's the only thing about this entire subject that is demonstrable. That instead of being the "ultimate" question, its just a waste of time.

It is hardly meaningless to demonstrate there are lines of argument that don't wash. And it is hardly meaningless to expose some assumptions that were being thoughtlessly made. And it is hardly meaningless if a question leads you towards subtler concepts.

 

[wuliheron]

But that has been one of the important questions raised. Is nothingness actually complementary to somethingness? Is it a well-formed concept in the first place?

As has been mentioned often enough, some-things and no-things are both about the counting of things. And an absence of things still leaves the issue of the empty space that is left behind as itself a kind of thing. This was the null set problem - the implication still of a container even when it contains nothing.

And even before that, if we imagine subtracting away the existence of all things, that still leaves their possibility, which again is a kind of thingness. Certainly something more than absolute nothingness.

So I believe you end up having to accept a quite different metaphysical dichotomy of vague~crisp as the most fundamental description of degrees of existence and non-existence. Which has its profound implications as explored by Anaximander and Peirce to name a couple of philosophers.

I'd have to say what is demonstrable trumps concepts any day. I'm aware of things that exist and I'm aware of things that don't exist. I don't have a freight train in my living room, but I do have a couch. To me that's not a question of what is crisp or vague, its a demonstrable fact and the context and content are specific. The more specific I make them, the more demonstrable it becomes, while the less specific the less demonstrable. Its not so much an issue of what is vague or crisp, but what is demonstrable.

It is hardly meaningless to demonstrate there are lines of argument that don't wash. And it is hardly meaningless to expose some assumptions that were being thoughtlessly made. And it is hardly meaningless if a question leads you towards subtler concepts.

Debating concepts that are not demonstrable is the equivalent of reciting nonsense poetry. It might have some psychological or mystical benefit, but it is otherwise demonstrably meaningless. Reasoning begins with what is demonstrable and without that all you've got is something at best self-consistent.

 

[apeiron]

Its not so much an issue of what is vague or crisp, but what is demonstrable.

But this rather mixes up epistemology and ontology then.

Quite clearly, the modelling relationship is founded on our ideas in interaction with our impressions. Or more formally, as in the scientific method, the interaction between concepts and measurements, qualities and quantities.

And we want both those things to be as crisp as possible, not vague.

So a concept like "god" is not a lot of use because the definition is so murky, the ways to "demonstrate" the value of the idea so unfocused.

But other concepts, such as sofa and freight train, are quite crisply defined.

OK, there is some modern furniture you might look at and question whether it really counts as a sofa. Or you might be in a student flat where the "sofa" is an old matress. So on closer examination, all our concepts in fact are somewhat epistemically vague at the fringes - but we can fix that by adding further information, creating a crisper constraint.

Armed with a formal concept (information on formal cause, and also final cause because a key to sofa is "something a few people can comfortably sit on") you can then measure your world in terms of the concept. You can look around and justify an object as a sofa and not something else with crisp certitude.

So you can see that your argument here is not against vague~crisp as an ontic story at all. You are just again asserting the conventional fact that epistemic modelling is working best when it is least vague - when we have developed the crisp concepts that in turn enable the crisp measurements that allow us make our definite claims.

The "why anything" question is important because it makes us confront our established ideas. We have to get back in behind the shop-front of our conventional epistemology.

There is a real intellectual challenge here of course. How do we have a crisp model of vagueness? That seems a self-defeating project.

But again, there is no actual problem if we keep the distinction between ontology and epistemology clear. We can have a crisp model of something that is actually vague.

Debating concepts that are not demonstrable is the equivalent of reciting nonsense poetry. It might have some psychological or mystical benefit, but it is otherwise demonstrably meaningless. Reasoning begins with what is demonstrable and without that all you've got is something at best self-consistent.

You really are sounding like Samuel Johnson, stomping around, kicking stones, and proclaiming "I refute it thus".

But yes, I already agree that concepts need to be demonstrable. However what is it about vagueness that is not demonstrable (once you have found its correct complementary partner, crispness)?

Nothing and something are claimed to be demonstrable states of affairs. Except - as is the subject of this thread - the problem is that what you have to show people is some container that is empty of objects. So this is only about localised absence not global or total nullity.

And likewise, we can point to epistemic vagueness without much trouble, as in the sorites paradox. At what point do a few grains of wheat become a pile, or a lack of hair make a person officially bald?

So there is nothing that you have said which rules out vagueness as a demonstrable concept. You have given no reasons why we cannot define it, and measure the world in those terms.

There is of course a lack of a generally agreed model of vagueness. Which is why this is a metaphysics rather than a science thread.

But to give you an idea of what I have in mind, you can consider the phenomenon of critical opalescence - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_opalescence - that exact point where a gas and liquid are in scalefree balance so that you can't really say (that is demonstrate via measurement) whether you actually have a gas or liquid. The law of the excluded middle no longer applies crisply to this situation.

 

[wuliheron]

For me ontology is just an epistemological idea. We make it all up as we go along. Rules evolve, definitions change, etc. What is vague and what is crisp only have meaning in specific contexts and then the meaning changes with use. Classical Chinese doesn't have a verb "to be" and the Navajo language doesn't even have a future tense. The more we try to ontologize our language the less demonstrable it becomes.

Thus the "why anything" question only exists as an extreme expression of our compulsive desire to ontologize everything and to deny the evidence of our senses and awareness. Of what Heraclitus described as the flux and what Taoists sometimes call the novelty of each breath, each moment, each freight train and couch. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:

Home
Accept and you become whole,
Bend and you straighten,
Empty and you fill,
Decay and you renew,
Want and you acquire,
Fulfill and you become confused.
The sage accepts the world
As the world accepts the Way;
He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify himself, so is recognized,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not pride himself, so endures,
Does not contend, so none contend against him.
The ancients said, "Accept and you become whole",
Once whole, the world is as your home.

If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick. Ask him how to discern between vague and crisp and he'll likely hit you again.

 

[apeiron]

For me ontology is just an epistemological idea. We make it all up as we go along.

This sounds like a contradiction if you have just been demanding that concepts be crisply demonstrable. We don't just to get to make things up. We have to show that they work.

What is vague and what is crisp only have meaning in specific contexts and then the meaning changes with use. Classical Chinese doesn't have a verb "to be" and the Navajo language doesn't even have a future tense. The more we try to ontologize our language the less demonstrable it becomes.

Well yes, but we were talking about a philosophical approach to answering basic questions about reality. So instead of classical chinese or Navajo - languages which work in some particular historical social context - we are considering what is right as philosophy.

Talking about everyday usages of words or habits of grammar is a diversion here.

Thus the "why anything" question only exists as an extreme expression of our compulsive desire to ontologize everything and to deny the evidence of our senses and awareness.

You are just making rhetorical and emotional arguments, not reasoned ones.

What you call compulsive, others could call systematic. What you call denying the evidence of our senses and awareness, others would see as properly examining it.

No one is forcing you to do metaphysics here. But if you want to force others to stop, you have to produce some actual reasons why it is bad (in other words, you have to do some metaphysics to counter metaphysics, ah well ).

Of what Heraclitus described as the flux and what Taoists sometimes call the novelty of each breath, each moment, each freight train and couch. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:

OK, you believe the Eastern way is not to strive in a false and individualistic way but to dissolve back into the unity of the cosmos. Yeah, been there, done that. As a kid I had zen (and judo) training from a Buddhist monk. But I sat there thinking this is stupid letting mosquitoes whine their way towards me in circles and just trying to "omm" their biting presence away.

So I'm happy that it is a notion of life that appeals to some - just like any faith. However I had no problem making a different choice.

Besides, you know from eastern philosophy such as the I Ching and dependent co-arising just how close the parallels are to the kind of systems causality I am talking about here.

The real difference lies in the question of whether what emerges also subsides, or whether what emerges is set upon an ever rising path. The Eastern answer, on the whole, is that what is "right" is a return to the apeiron, the vague. While the Western answer is that individuals should be self-actualising Nietzchian supermen that transcend all limits.

Modern big bang cosmology suggests the real ontological answer here is "both". The universe emerges as a crisp act of individuation - a definite something where there was once only a vaguer "nothing". And yet also the ultimate fate of the universe is the cold fizzle of an infinitely large heat death. A very crisp outcome, yet one that is actually as near a "return to nothingness" as possible. We will all be very zen in the long run.

Now we shouldn't entangle the beliefs of faith with the answers of metaphysics. But you can appreciate that even your faith-based criticisms are not accurate about what has actually been said.

If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick. Ask him how to discern between vague and crisp and he'll likely hit you again.

My zen master was rather more easy going I guess. He saw the mediation wasn't going down so well so he stuck with the judo. (He could have been a complete fake of course, his life story was a little too fantastic.)

But anyway, in case you are unfamiliar with some of the parallels that exist in the world's various philosophies, here is one passage (sorry, I can't remember where I cut this from though)...

In Theogony the initial state of the universe,or the origin (arche) is Chaos, a gaping void (abyss) considered as a divine primordial condition, from which appeared everything that exists. Then came Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Love). Hesiod made an abstraction because his original chaos is something completely indefinite.[6] In the Orphic cosmogony the unageing Chronos produced Aither and Chaos and made a silvery egg in divine Aither. From it appeared the bisexual god Phanes who is the creator of the world.[7]
Some similar ideas appear in the Hindu cosmology which is similar to the Vedic. In the beginning there was nothing in the universe but only darkness and the divine essence who removed the darkness and created the primordial waters. His seed produced the universal germ (Hiranyagarbha), from which everything else appeared.[8]
In the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish the universe was in a formless state and is described as a watery chaos. From it emerged two primary gods,one male Apsu and one female Tiamat and a third deity who is the maker Mummu and his power is necessary to get the job of birth.[9]. In Genesis the primordial world is described as a watery chaos and the Earth "without form and void". The spirit of the god moved upon the dark face of the waters and created light.[10]

And some more bits and pieces just to show that this is a recurring theme. Tao, Brahman, Apeiron, Hyle, Quintessence, Bosenazelo, Hunabku, Manitu, Orenda, Wakonda, Wakan, Mana, Ain Soph, Central Monad, there are countless words that dance around a definition of the formless fundamental essence...

Anaximander says that the source and element of all beings[2] is the apeiron, or the Limitless/ Boundary-less/ Without-Definition. Apeiron is therefore the Hellenic equivalent of the Dao of Laozi on the Sinic side. From the apeiron come all the heavens and all that is in the cosmos.
http://www.lawrencechin2011.com/HTcontribution1-philosophy.htm

Ein Sof (or Ayn Sof) in the Kabbalah, is understood as the Deity prior to His self-manifestation in the production of the world, probably derived from Ibn Gabirol's term, "the Endless One" (she-en lo tiklah). Ein Sof may be translated as "no end," "unending," "there is no end," or Infinite.
Ein Sof is the divine origin of all created existence, in contrast to the Ein (or Ayn), which is infinite no-thingness. It was first used by Azriel ben Menahem, who, sharing the Neoplatonic view that God can have no desire, thought, word, or action, emphasized by it the negation of any attribute.

The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the Indefinite” or “the Unlimited” (to apeiron).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

In Mahâyâna Buddhism śûnyatâ refers first of all to the fact that all things come into being in “interdependent origination” (Sanskrit: pratîtya-samutpâda; Japanese: engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit: svabhâva). This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-self” or “non-ego” (Sanskrit: anâtman; Japanese: muga). All beings, including the ego, are interconnected and in flux.

The doctrine of Akasa, or space, as the origin of all things, came rather late in the history of Upanisadic thought. Also in Greek philosophy, the concept of space as the arche of things appeared very late. With Thales, Anaximenes, Heracleitus and Empedocles we meet the conceptions of water, air, fire, and earth, either individually or collectively. It is only when we come to the time of Philolaus that we get to the notion of space as the arche of all things. The first four elements, namely Prthivi, Ap, Tejas and Vayu are more or less tangible; but for Akasa to be regarded as the origin of all things requires a higher philosophical imagination.
These concepts of these two mystics, behad of Kabir and nirbayalu of Kudaluresa, would remind a student of Greek philosophy of the Apeiron of Anaximander against the Peras of Pythagoras. The Peras is a small conception, but the Apeiron brings us quite near to the infinitude that is portrayed in the manifestations of the sublime. The experience of the sublime seems to be almost transcendent and baffling even for the imagination to reach. Anaximander, therefore, regarded the Apeiron as his most fundamental category. It is this aspect of the element of Divinity in all cases of Infinitude which is at the basis of the behad of Kabir and nirbayalu of the Kannada mystic.
It is a long journey from sima to asima, from had to behad, from bayalu to nirbayalu, from peras to apeiron, from space to spacelessness. The concept of Akasa takes one ultimately to nirakasa, the spaceless.
http://www.ignca.nic.in/ps_05013.htm

 

[ThomasT]

... we were talking about a philosophical approach to answering basic questions about reality.

Ok, so for us pedestrians, can you or bohm2 (et al.) synopsize what you think is the best approach in as few words as possible?

The way I see it, the general approach of science (ie., somewhat controlled observation) with philosophy sorting out the meanings of various mathematical expressions designed to describe and predict scientific observations is a pretty good approach.

And from that stuff one can make objectively demonstrated, statistically based inferences/assumptions about more fundamental, ie., underlying, reality.

And of course I don't have any response to the question of why there's anything at all.

 

[chiro]

One thing to consider that in order to define anything you need to also define its complement.

This might be used to explain why something exists by relating to what else would exist if it wasn't that 'something'.

 

[ThomasT]

One thing to consider that in order to define anything you need to also define its complement.

I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?

This might be used to explain why something exists by relating to what else would exist if it wasn't that 'something'.

Well, I think that defining or explaining why anything at all exists leads eventually to an objectively nondemonstrable assumption. We can, for example, assume that there are fundamental dynamical mechanisms/laws, whatever. But where/how did those originate? It's, imho, an unanswerable question.

 

[chiro]

I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?

You describe it in the context of a notion of 'everything'. Doing this helps you relate concepts to one another by talking about them in the context of something synonymous with 'all that can be'.

Well, I think that defining or explaining why anything at all exists leads eventually to an objectively nondemonstrable assumption. We can, for example, assume that there are fundamental dynamical mechanisms/laws, whatever. But where/how did those originate? It's, imho, an unanswerable question.

Well again it can help by considering what else is 'possible' because the comparison to other such things can give the impetus for hypothesizing why something is 'as it is'.

As an example with cosmology we know from research that if the constants were even slightly different we wouldn't have the kind of universe that we have now in its current form.

This is an example of what I mean: you consider what "isn't" observed and compare it to situations that 'could be possible' in the context of some universal domain.

The actual universal domain is not trivial, but we can start with domains that are small enough to be able to consider with our minds yet large enough that they provide enough variability to consider enough of a general set of circumstances with enough variation.

What I mean by this is, is that this thinking gives us a reference point. When we discover something, what happens is that we study something, get relationships (maybe even down to a specific mathematical form) and then from that we wonder 'why is this the way it is?' by trying to consider what we have studied in a more or less isolated state.

By considering what we have found against a more general class of cases, what we do then is to say "Well this is the way it is and upon comparing it to these other cases, it makes sense that this is the way it is due to blah blah blah"

 

[apeiron]

Ok, so for us pedestrians, can you or bohm2 (et al.) synopsize what you think is the best approach in as few words as possible?

If you are talking about "what is philosophy's method" I don't see it as any different from science in essence. You observe. You generalise. You then see with more clarity and can go round the loop again.

So philosophy is the rough cut. And also the exploration of a bunch of approaches. Then science is the refinement of some particular model that is useful in some way. After that comes technology, application.

So far as the particular point about the use of language goes, everyday language is obviously going to be hit and miss when it comes to talk about fundamental reality. It would be the extremely rough cut.

Philosophy would then focus on the rational clarification of useful concepts, and science would pair those concepts with a prescribed method of measurement (a way to quantify a qualitative term).

So metaphysics invented pairings like discrete~continuous, stasis~flux, chance~necessity and many more. Science then uses them. Vague~crisp just seems to be one of the less familiar dichotomies.

 

[apeiron]

I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?

But a tree is not metaphysically fundamental. And indeed, we are proving that fact precisely because we can't think of "not-tree" as indicating anything in particular. Pretty much everything is not-tree.

So this is the power of the method. Only a limited number of complementaries function as complementary. And it is why it was possible for the ancient greeks to make so much rapid progress once they got the knack of what to do. (Socratic dialog, law of the excluded middle, the basics of philosophical thought.)

 

[alt]

Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

Indeed. And after 194 posts and a kaleidoscope of thought, thinkers (here and referenced) etc, it does not seem we are one jot closer to any semblance of an answer to the question posed in the OP title.

The aporia remains - looms larger in fact ..

 

[apeiron]

This paper is good on the parallels between the ancient Eastern and Western views on cosmo-genesis.

Revisiting Ancient Linguistic Worldview: East vs. West; Dao vs. Logos Jia Yuxin Jia Xuelai
http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/2008v17n4/07%20Jia%20Yuixn%20&%20Jia%20Xuelai.pdf

Then, ontologically, what is Dao? According to Lao Zi, Dao is neither being nor beinglessness. It is both being and beingless. It exists as the transcendental Nothingness. However, it is also a unique form of existence and Lao Zi also indicates that the Dao is an objective entity just as the ancient Western philosophers believe the absolute beginning of the world is Apeiron (water, vapor, fire, or chaos).

As a ‘thing’ Tao is vague and unclear;
Unclear and vague, yet within it is a symbol;
Vague and unclear, yet within it is a thing;
Obscure and dark, yet within it is an essence.
Its essence is truly authentic and within it is what is reliable. (Lao Tzu, Chap. 21)

Very interestingly, cosmo-genetically, the creation and formation of the world in the East somehow follows almost similar process as it is believed in the West. The following model may justify this statement:

East：Nameless ( Dao as transcendent and objective entity ) Name / Language
Heaven (or God) and Earth

West：Apeiron (water, vapor, fire, or chaos) / Logos (God /Word) the universe

However, differences exist. Dao or the nameless existed before the action of Name. Name comes from and after Dao.

I disagree with some of the detail of their characterisation of the Apeiron here. The Dao also has some critical differences in that while Lao Zi stresses the way things remain co-mingled (as in Yin-Yang), the key to Anaximander's cosmo-genesis is the fact that the polarities are moved far apart (and then mix).

However, the idea that the Dao is followed by the Name is indeed something crucial missing from Anaximander's scheme (and was somewhat corrected by Heraclitus' equivalent of Dao~Name in his dichotomy of Primal Fire~Logos).

In modern language, this translates into local degrees of freedom and global constraints. Or initiating conditions and boundary conditions.

And it is a way to think about a self-causing universe - one where in the beginning there is just naked potential (dao, primal fire, apeiron, unlimited degrees of freedom), and then design is called forth from that potential by the system's own future. The Name, Logos, or other terms to describe the future crisp limits of the system which can act backwards/downward as final/formal cause.

This can easily sound mystical. But quantum cosmology is already leading us down this very path of thought. If we talk of a quantum event, its causes are contextual, nonlocal, even retrocausal.

So if we view the big bang as a quantum event, and that this was also some form of collapse of a potential (the "collapse" being the obvious contentious issue in current quantum metaphysics), then what caused the collapse? It has to be in the future of the event. The universe has to be retrospectively fixed in some sense by what it became.

It is a grand sum over histories view in other words. Anything was possible. But just one thing was the least mean path of that infinite potential. And so you have a structured universe bootstrapping out of raw indeterminacy.

 

[jambaugh]

Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

Indeed. And after 194 posts and a kaleidoscope of thought, thinkers (here and referenced) etc, it does not seem we are one jot closer to any semblance of an answer to the question posed in the OP title.

That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"

1. You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
   
2. It may be instructive to try to explain the form of existence such as is done in physics but there are limits there.
   
3. Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event. Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject. Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
   Premise:The "why" question is valid i.e. there is a God ; Conclusion:There is a God. (Personally I am agnostic in that I believe this is a question of faith not deduction.)

I think it is instructive to consider for the moment the mundane topic of interval notation in mathematics. I can represent a bound interval $a \le x < b$ with the notation $x\in [a,b)$. We then extend this bit of language to include unbounded sets by defining a symbol $\infty$ as a place-holder for the absence of a bound. $x \in [a,\infty) \equiv a\le x < \infty \equiv a \le x$.
And even express: $x \in \mathbb{R} =(-\infty,\infty)$.
But we may then make the error of objectifying this null symbol as if it represented an actual real number. "There must be a number $\infty$"! This symbol isn't something (in this context) it is a place-holder for nothing when we use a language format which requires this be made explicit.

Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.

We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.

 

[wuliheron]

Apeiron, I think you have the wrong idea. I am a Pragmatic Taoist, not a mystic, and I would never bring up mysticism in a science forum without expressly calling attention to the fact it is mysticism. Pragmatic Taoism has a lot in common with Philosophical Taoism and Zen, but without all the mysticism. Its not that I have anything against mysticism, it's just not who I am. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Zen, but that's not my problem and it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

When I talk about something being demonstrable I mean that quite literally. A Zen master hitting a student over the head is attempting to prompt them to become more spontaneous. Enlightenment or some sort of mystical experience might be their ultimate goal, but such things are only achieved through spontaneity and, at best, the master can help the student to open the door.

For me spontaneity is the key to awareness which is necessary for discerning what is demonstrable. Its no more mystical then the fact you are more aware and capable of reasoning when awake then asleep. I'd suggest you re-read my post and ask your questions again.

 

[apeiron]

For me spontaneity is the key to awareness which is necessary for discerning what is demonstrable. Its no more mystical then the fact you are more aware and capable of reasoning when awake then asleep.

This is a view of epistemology which I believe is quite wrong. All perception is modelling, never direct experience. The zen idea is mystical for claiming otherwise. You can whack yourself over the head as much as you please, but it won't change things.

 

[apeiron]

That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"

1. 
   
   Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.
   
   Reductionists want to reduce all these sources of causality to just the question of effective cause. Though they also need some kind of local material stuff - a substance - that can carry this effective cause as a property or force.
   
   The "why anything" question then leads to a further problem of first cause - primum movens. And a reductionist will read this as the call to find some ultimate kind of effective cause (such as a creating god).
   
   But the point of having a more complex model of causality such as Aristotle's is that primum movens can also be a complicated "four causes" story. As some of the arguments presented in the thread illustrate.
   
   

   [*]You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.

   
   Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.
   
   A holistic view would agree that all causes would have to be internal to "existence". A world would have to be ultimately self-causing - and this is a problem!
   
   But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.
   
   This is in turn what leads to the necessity for a vague~crisp distinction. It underpins a view of holistic causality in which a process can arise from "nothing".
   
   

   [*]Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event.

   
   Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause. And it is easy to supply examples which make it seem obvious the world is just blindly materialistic, absent of purpose, goals, will or meanings, and only humans are different in this regard.
   
   But science still finds it hard not to frame its laws of nature in teleological fashion (thou shalt evolve, thou shalt dissipate, thou shalt gravitate, thou shalt follow the least mean path.)
   
   And a systems thinker will argue that the correct approach to human purpose and meaning is to generalise it. You can "water it down" so that you have a hierarchy of final cause such as
   {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or in more colloquial language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}. See for example - http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/189/283
   
   I mentioned already the connection between the problem of final cause and the problem of wavefunction collapse. It was not accident that early interpretations wanted to put the cause in the mind of the human observer, more recent ones are trying to put it out in a thermal environment or invoking retrocausality from future constraints.
   
   So this is a very live subject even in science.
   
   The thing to beware of is not turning final cause into another super-species of effective cause. It can't be merely "triggering event" seen on a larger scale (which is the kind of notion of a blue touch paper God you have in mind). It has to be something else, otherwise there is no need to distinguish it as a further aspect of causality.
   
   So final cause needs to be identified with global constraints, downwards causality - some way in which the ends do justify the means.
   
   I would agree that this is the least well developed part of our ideas about causality as yet. But that is what makes it interesting I guess. And asking the "why anything" question is particularly instructive in this regard.
   
   

   Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject.

   
   Exactly, we must dichotomise to clarify. To be able to model causality, we must divide it suitably.
   
   And here there may actually be novel metaphysics. The greeks did divide things into chance and necessity. But we know that randomness and determinism are still problematic concepts in science. What is a fluctuation really?
   
   There is a general distinction of reality into its local degrees of freedom and global constraints that seems to work. But the story does not seem quite in focus yet.
   
   

   Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.

   
   Yes, because they are actually just attempts to use the notion of effective cause to explain everything.
   
   

   [*]Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.
   
   We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.

   
   Correct. Even in metaphysics, we are constructing models of causality. We are breaking things down in ways that seem to work, seem to be true, but we must bear in mind that they still are just models and so may bear secret traces of their makers.
   
   The great yawning silence and banging of heads on tables that usually greets the "why anything" question is the sound of people confronting the limitations of their conceptual tools.
   
   Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.

 

[wuliheron]

This is a view of epistemology which I believe is quite wrong. All perception is modelling, never direct experience. The zen idea is mystical for claiming otherwise. You can whack yourself over the head as much as you please, but it won't change things.

I agree it is modeling, but the issue is how spontaneous is the modeling. The less spontaneous the more abstract it becomes and the less aware.

I often compare it to learning how to play the piano. At first you have to study different things, but eventually the idea is to play more spontaneously. Either one without the other makes for a bad pianist.

 

[apeiron]

I agree it is modeling, but the issue is how spontaneous is the modeling. The less spontaneous the more abstract it becomes and the less aware.

I often compare it to learning how to play the piano. At first you have to study different things, but eventually the idea is to play more spontaneously. Either one without the other makes for a bad pianist.

This is crazy. You are advising us to be unthinking as philosophers or scientists, to just act out of acquired habit.

There is a reason why Greek philosophy was eventually so fruitful, Eastern philosophy rather less so.

You are welcome to an opinion, to a position of faith or mysticism, but if you want to argue for something as an alternative way to do philosophy, you should move it to a separate thread.

Your pianist analogy is all muddled anyway. Practice allows for the unthinking, but the whole point then is to clear the way for continued thinking at a higher level of organisation. I can cite the relevant literature from creativity studies and neuroscience if you choose to open a separate thread.

 

[wuliheron]

This is crazy. You are advising us to be unthinking as philosophers or scientists, to just act out of acquired habit.

There is a reason why Greek philosophy was eventually so fruitful, Eastern philosophy rather less so.

You are welcome to an opinion, to a position of faith or mysticism, but if you want to argue for something as an alternative way to do philosophy, you should move it to a separate thread.

Your pianist analogy is all muddled anyway. Practice allows for the unthinking, but the whole point then is to clear the way for continued thinking at a higher level of organisation. I can cite the relevant literature from creativity studies and neuroscience if you choose to open a separate thread.

I never said we should just act out of acquired habit, and it is you who keeps trying to change the subject with these straw man arguments against everything I say and now even biased statements against Asian philosophy.

 

[alt]

That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"

1. You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
   
2. It may be instructive to try to explain the form of existence such as is done in physics but there are limits there.
   
3. Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event. Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject. Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
   Premise:The "why" question is valid i.e. there is a God ; Conclusion:There is a God. (Personally I am agnostic in that I believe this is a question of faith not deduction.)

I think it is instructive to consider for the moment the mundane topic of interval notation in mathematics. I can represent a bound interval $a \le x < b$ with the notation $x\in [a,b)$. We then extend this bit of language to include unbounded sets by defining a symbol $\infty$ as a place-holder for the absence of a bound. $x \in [a,\infty) \equiv a\le x < \infty \equiv a \le x$.
And even express: $x \in \mathbb{R} =(-\infty,\infty)$.
But we may then make the error of objectifying this null symbol as if it represented an actual real number. "There must be a number $\infty$"! This symbol isn't something (in this context) it is a place-holder for nothing when we use a language format which requires this be made explicit.

Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.

We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.

Thanks for the interesting and informative response. Re your (3) ..

But the term 'accidental' is itself as circular. In essence, it means 'an event' - cause of which is unknown (to you or me). But cause nonetheless. Bringing it back to the same questioin.

 

[alt]

Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.

Reductionists want to reduce all these sources of causality to just the question of effective cause. Though they also need some kind of local material stuff - a substance - that can carry this effective cause as a property or force.

The "why anything" question then leads to a further problem of first cause - primum movens. And a reductionist will read this as the call to find some ultimate kind of effective cause (such as a creating god).

But the point of having a more complex model of causality such as Aristotle's is that primum movens can also be a complicated "four causes" story. As some of the arguments presented in the thread illustrate.



Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.

A holistic view would agree that all causes would have to be internal to "existence". A world would have to be ultimately self-causing - and this is a problem!

But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.

This is in turn what leads to the necessity for a vague~crisp distinction. It underpins a view of holistic causality in which a process can arise from "nothing".



Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause. And it is easy to supply examples which make it seem obvious the world is just blindly materialistic, absent of purpose, goals, will or meanings, and only humans are different in this regard.

But science still finds it hard not to frame its laws of nature in teleological fashion (thou shalt evolve, thou shalt dissipate, thou shalt gravitate, thou shalt follow the least mean path.)

And a systems thinker will argue that the correct approach to human purpose and meaning is to generalise it. You can "water it down" so that you have a hierarchy of final cause such as
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or in more colloquial language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}. See for example - http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/189/283

I mentioned already the connection between the problem of final cause and the problem of wavefunction collapse. It was not accident that early interpretations wanted to put the cause in the mind of the human observer, more recent ones are trying to put it out in a thermal environment or invoking retrocausality from future constraints.

So this is a very live subject even in science.

The thing to beware of is not turning final cause into another super-species of effective cause. It can't be merely "triggering event" seen on a larger scale (which is the kind of notion of a blue touch paper God you have in mind). It has to be something else, otherwise there is no need to distinguish it as a further aspect of causality.

So final cause needs to be identified with global constraints, downwards causality - some way in which the ends do justify the means.

I would agree that this is the least well developed part of our ideas about causality as yet. But that is what makes it interesting I guess. And asking the "why anything" question is particularly instructive in this regard.



Exactly, we must dichotomise to clarify. To be able to model causality, we must divide it suitably.

And here there may actually be novel metaphysics. The greeks did divide things into chance and necessity. But we know that randomness and determinism are still problematic concepts in science. What is a fluctuation really?

There is a general distinction of reality into its local degrees of freedom and global constraints that seems to work. But the story does not seem quite in focus yet.



Yes, because they are actually just attempts to use the notion of effective cause to explain everything.



Correct. Even in metaphysics, we are constructing models of causality. We are breaking things down in ways that seem to work, seem to be true, but we must bear in mind that they still are just models and so may bear secret traces of their makers.

The great yawning silence and banging of heads on tables that usually greets the "why anything" question is the sound of people confronting the limitations of their conceptual tools.

Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.

Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.

A great question (why anything at all) - quite so.

And, having forced yourself to find and employ those better conceptual tools, as you admirably do here, what have YOU constructed with them ?

 

[apeiron]

A new review paper from Smolin gives an idea about how philosophically-minded physicists are thinking about the "why anything" problem of cosmogenesis.

A perspective on the landscape problem, Lee Smolin, 15 Feb 2012
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3373.pdf

Using the arguments of Peirce and others (Wheeler, Dirac), Smolin says the landscape problem of string theory is in fact a general issue for any approach to a theory of everything (ToE) because the questions of development and evolution always break into two parts - the material basis for change (the local degrees of freedom) and then the global constraints that pick out some particular outcome from those degrees of freedom.

So the fact that string theory ended up with an open-ended infinity of possible solutions is no surprise. The problem next is to identify the separate dynamical principle that might break this unlimited symmetry.

Here Smolin attempts to put this systems view of causality centre-stage...

But the strongest reason to expect the landscape problem is not an anomaly of string theory is that it has deep historical roots, which I sketch in the next section. It might have been anticipated a long time ago-and indeed it was. These historical roots of the landscape problem suggest that the landscape problem was bound to occur as physics progressed. As I will argue, it is an inevitable consequence of the general form we have assumed for physical theories since Newtonian mechanics.

He then introduces the idea that laws, that is global constraints, have to evolve. They have a history of development and were not crisply "there" at the beginning...

...Dirac had proposed that laws of physics may evolve:
At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus, we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the eoch, instead of as holding uniformly throught space-time[22].

...When logical implication is insufficient, the explanation must be found in causal processes acting over time. This was understood clearly more than a century ago by Charles Sanders Pierce, the founder of the school of philosophy called American pragmatism:
To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to
be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution[23].

Then Smolin makes an insightful point about the "first moment" for any developing system being organised by its constraints.

Time=0 is the singularity (unlimited possibility) and so constraints can't even begin to be present until some fraction of time has gone by. The constraints must lie in the future of what exists (even if by the tiniest fraction).

This is crucial to the point of the "why anything" question of whether the existence of things is caused from the outside (as by some earlier effective cause such as a creating god), or whether existence can be self-causing, bootstrapping out of unlimited potential.

Well in fact Smolin equivocates on this. He allows that the constraints might be present at t=0. But then his further comments on the dynamical emergence of constraints are a strong argument for the "shortly after" alternative...

We can also apply Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason to the problem of the selection of the initial conditions of the universe. It is a fact that in general relativity - and presumably in any field theory of gravitation - there are an infinite number of solutions of the field equations which have an initial singularity. To apply general relativity to cosmology, it is then necessary to give the initial conditions at - or shortly after- the singularity. The choice of initial conditions requires explanation. If we are optimistic and believe all questions about the universe are answerable, then that explanation must satisfy the principle of sufficient reason. If no sufficient reason can be given within a given theory, then that theory must be wrong.

Then for me Smolin goes astray because he argues that evolutionary stories are simply historical (which is in fact quite true of the evolutionary part of evo-devo - selection is contingent - but not necessarily of the developmental part, as development show a mathematical regularity in its self-organisation.)...

What kind of explanations can count as sufficient reason for a law or theory? As I argued before, two general kinds of explanations that could be advanced to account for a state of affairs. Reasons can be logical or they can be historical. They both may serve, but they have very different consequences for the methodology of science. This is because logical explanations can be complete while our knowledge of the past is always incomplete.

This then leads Smolin to the perhaps unnecessarily pessimistic view that...

...in some circumstances, the demand for sufficient reason must result in a confession of ignorance, when causal chains are pushed back into the past to the point where our present knowledge of the past ends. This is better then proclaiming first movers or initial states which are not subject to further explanation in terms of their pasts, and so cannot be further improved as our observations of the past improve.

Then Smolin swings back to the failure of the reductionist Newtonian paradigm...

Because this framework has been so successful when applied to the small subsystems of the universe, it appears almost obvious that when we come to the task of developing a cosmological theory, we should just scale it up to include the whole universe in the state space, C. However, as successful as it has been, this schema for physical theories cannot be applied to the universe as a whole. There are several distinct reasons for this...

...Any theory formulated in the Newtonian paradigm will have an infinite number of solutions. But, the universe is unique-so only one cosmological history is physically real. The Newtonian paradigmis then very extravagant when applied to cosmology because it not only makes predictions about the future of the one real universe, it offers predictions for an infinite number of universes which are never realized. The Newtonian paradigm cannot explain why the one solution that is realized is picked out from the infinite number of possibilities...

...One way to express the cosmological fallacy is through the following cosmological dilemma. The Newtonian paradigm expresses the forms of all the laws we know which have been thought of as exact. Nonetheless, every law formulated and verified within the Newtonian paradigm can only apply to a bounded domain and hence is approximate.

The rest of the paper then goes off into a recap of the familiar bounce and eternal inflation stories that Smolin's Darwinian perspective - the old-hat Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s - favours.

As said, a properly modern evo-devo approach would put the focus squarely on the issue of the development of constraints rather than the secondary matter of the evolution of constraints.

But still the paper shows that Smolin continues to lead the charge when it comes to thinking about how to think about the scientific modelling of cosmogenesis. How to answer the "why anything" question with a response other than "just because".

 

[jambaugh]

Thanks for the interesting and informative response. Re your (3) ..

But the term 'accidental' is itself as circular. In essence, it means 'an event' - cause of which is unknown (to you or me). But cause nonetheless. Bringing it back to the same questioin.

Not circular and not about known or unknown cause. It is used to qualify absence of purposeful intent. A raindrop may cause a pebble to fall instigating an avalanche. Or I may decide to set one off just as my enemy is passing the road beneath. One event is accidental the other intentional. It isn't an issue of cause or lack of cause but intent or lack of intent.

A believer in an omnipotent, omniscient God would reject the possibility of accidental events all together (every leaf that falls, etc.) But they cannot then, after the fact, reverse the implication, saying the impossibility of accidental events proves God's existence. That is indeed circular, the two assertions being equivalent.

If however you begin with the possibility (as in lack of asserted impossibility) of both accidental and purposeful causes and ask the question the it may be valid to inductively argue the existence of God from the existence of life, if one can show it it too improbable, even in the scale of the size and age of the universe, to be accidental. Valid in form but not, I believe valid under analysis. I've seen such arguments but they typically misrepresent physical assumptions (most often misapplying thermodynamic principles).

I stray from the point here but only as a demonstration of the use of "accidental" in a context.

 

[chiro]

The question is though 'how do you define intent?'

Do you think that there is a possibility that our actions are actually 'controlled' to some degree where we think otherwise?

In other words: is the feeling of 'free-will' masking an underlying hidden order?

I do like how you have made your internal thoughts highly concise on these forums and I thought it would be important to have a discussion on how you define 'accidental' vs 'intentional' in a more refined matter (i.e. mathematical).

Is the 'intentional' (like human intent) purely probabilistic while the accidental being completely deterministic (which may no doubt be chaotic)?

How are you willing to explicitly qualify the argument for the intentional being purely probabilistic and the 'accidental' being somewhat more deterministic if this is the case?

The reason I bring this up is because of our narrow scope of looking at things at human beings. Many people can't even deal with systems with more than say 10 variables and that's for a complex system! A lot of the general population finds it hard to deal with more than 5!

If we have a system involving millions if not billions (probably a dozen more orders of magnitude higher than that), then with our limited capacity it would make sense that we use a probabilistic framework since it reduces the system to a level that is able to grasped with our minds at this current time.

Pythagorean said this in another thread (I'll dig it up if you want) stating that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Determinism and probability are not incompatible with one another" and in the context of the above statement I have no doubt that his statement is correct.

 

[jambaugh]

Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.

As a matter of semantics Aristotle's αἴτιον can be translated as "cause" but I prefer a narrower definition of the common word. Rather αἴτιον="the why of something".

I also find this breakdown overly objective. (deterministic) Cause should not be ascribed to objects but to events. That being my position, I see "material cause" losing equal status with the other types. Rather than parsing the causes of a bridge, one would consider the cause for the event of its coming into existence or its sustained existence. "final" or "telelogical" cause then might be ascribed to its creation, or even if a "natural" bridge created accidentally, ascribed to its maintenance. This is clear when the bridge is used as a bridge and not when you so label a tree fallen over a stream absent its utility.

As to formal cause, I'm not sure that applies outside an ontological bias, except in the modified phenomenological form I described as "explanitory". Constraints on phenomena we think of as natural laws, e.g. conservation laws, relativity principles, thermodynamic laws, and such.

Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.

I shy from the term "reality" except as an object model we use... i.e. it is a mereological bundle, or rather it is a collection of mereological bundles these being the objects of reality bundling the categorical phenomena we observe. Stepping aside of the loaded word "reality", and replacing it with "actuality" (that which happens), I'm not "rejecting" actively so much as narrowing the semantics of the word "cause" as I'm using it. This semantic bias comes from how the term is used in physics.

But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.

Here, you're extending semantically the term. A holistic process view may assert emergence of higher order phenomena but it still resides in the same causal framework as the pre-emergent world. We can speak of caustic soda causing a change of pH without invalidating the level of (effective) causation below the point of emergence (chemistry) which "caustic" and "pH" have been given meaning. There is still the interaction of the fundamental particles and forces at work. Likewise up the emergent chain to bridges and murder's weapons. One cannot ascribe meaning to a weapon based on the configuration of atoms, rather its teleological purpose defines it. It none the less obeys the same fundamental physical laws, cause and effect, as does any elementary particle in physics. The hand that bludgeons the brain is applying a force, the entropy of the brain is being (fatally) increased, the heat engine of the victim's body is being permanently interrupted, etc.

Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause.

There is a middle ground. One can be a reductionist about "effective cause" while understanding and giving full weight to emergence. Chemistry isn't just physics, biology isn't just chemistry, and willful action (teleological cause) is not just biology. Yet each level emerges from and has effective cause wholly within the other. I can believe love as a phenomenon has no mystical component beyond the material phenomena physicists study and yet understand that reducing love to a series of particle interactions is totally meaningless,... and of course still believe in love itself.

And also don't confuse a semantic misalignment with a disagreement in opinion. Don't label someone a reductionist because they mean something different than you do when they use a particular word.
...

Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.

Well. I don't always see it so forcing people. I can see possibly the merit as with e.g. paradoxes in physics, to emphasize and make explicit conceptual errors. But I have more often seen such being used by the questioner to excuse their rejection of the effort to understand. Rather than clarifying the question they reject belief in the process of questioning and take the pat answer, e.g. mysticism.

 

[bohm2]

There is a middle ground. One can be a reductionist about "effective cause" while understanding and giving full weight to emergence. Chemistry isn't just physics, biology isn't just chemistry, and willful action (teleological cause) is not just biology. Yet each level emerges from and has effective cause wholly within the other. I can believe love as a phenomenon has no mystical component beyond the material phenomena physicists study and yet understand that reducing love to a series of particle interactions is totally meaningless,... and of course still believe in love itself.

I find this topic both interesting and confusing. A reductionist can always argue that the reason why full reduction (really unification) is not possible at present is because the "foundational" branch (e.g. physics) is not yet complete. Or due to our own cognitive limitations ( limitation of observer). Here's the basic argument:

Where there is discontinuity in microscopic behavior associated with precisely specifiable macroscopic parameters, emergent properties of the system are clearly implicated, unless we can get an equally elegant resulting theory by complicating the dispositional structure of the already accepted inventory of basic properties...such hidden-micro-dispositions theories are indeed always available. Assuming sharply discontinuous patterns of effects within complex systems, we could conclude that the microphysical entities have otherwise latent dispositions towards effects within macroscopically complex contexts alongside the dispositions which are continuously manifested in (nearly) all contexts. The observed difference would be a result of the manifestation of these latent dispositions.

Thus, a reductionist can claim that because we still lack these micro-dispositions (e.g. physics is not completed) strong emergence with its dualist flavour is really an illusion.

Emergent Properties
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

But others suspect that the non-locality and non-separability/contextuality implied by Bell's, Kochen–Specker (KS) theorem, etc. can be interpreted as a good argument for strong emergence and bi-directional causality as argued here:

The classical picture offered a compelling presumption in favour of the claim that causation is strictly bottom up-that the causal powers of whole systems reside entirely in the causal powers of parts. This thesis is central to most arguments for reductionism. It contends that all physically significant processes are due to causal powers of the smallest parts acting individually on one another. If this were right, then any emergent or systemic properties must either be powerless epiphenomena or else violate basic microphysical laws. But the way in which the classical picture breaks down undermines this connection and the reductionist argument that employs it. If microphysical systems can have properties not possessed by individual parts, then so might any system composed of such parts...

Were the physical world completely governed by local processes, the reductionist might well argue that each biological system is made up of the microphysical parts that interact, perhaps stochastically, but with things that exist in microscopic local regions; so the biological can only be epiphenomena of local microphysical processes occurring in tiny regions. Biology reduces to molecular biology, which reduces in turn to microphysics. But the Bell arguments completely overturn this conception.

For whom the Bell arguments toll
http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/H/James.A.Hawthorne-1/Hawthorne--For_Whom_the_Bell_Arguments_Toll.pdf