The principle of no sufficient reason?
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it all had a definite earliest time, a "time zero" as it were.
(1) By free (perhaps lax) application of sufficient reason, we'd expect a cause, an "outside", "atemporal" cause.
This is roughly the kalam cosmological argument towards an all-creator deity, however much of a reach that may seem.
(2) By another application of sufficient reason we get something else.
A definite earliest time means an age, say, like 14 billion years, Big Bang style.
Yet, with an atemporal cause of the universe, (1), there's no sufficient reason that the universe is 14 billion years old and not some other age, any other age in fact.
We'd then expect an infinite age.
At a glance, both of these, (1) and (2), appear to have some intuitive import, except they self-refute.
An antinomy?
We seem forced to either abandon the supposition (a definite earliest moment) or abandon sufficient reason, with whatever implications that may have, and regardless of McTaggartian theories.
Furthermore, the cosmological conclusion was both derived, (1), and then shown not derivable ((2), denying the supposition from which it was derived).
The principle of sufficient reason and the like may not be applicable here; delineation required; a take-away then being that whatever such metaphysics we conjure up and employ (unconditionally) are inherently suspect.
[sup](Besides, spacetime is an aspect, or are aspects, of the universe, and "before time" is incoherent; causation is temporal, and "a cause of causation" is incoherent.)[/sup]
Haphazard application of the principle, delineation required:
There can be no (other) reason for existence, since then such a reason would then not exist (by definition).
That being said, in most common things (and everyday life), seeking explanations, more or less going by sufficient reason, do seem fine.
(1) By free (perhaps lax) application of sufficient reason, we'd expect a cause, an "outside", "atemporal" cause.
This is roughly the kalam cosmological argument towards an all-creator deity, however much of a reach that may seem.
(2) By another application of sufficient reason we get something else.
A definite earliest time means an age, say, like 14 billion years, Big Bang style.
Yet, with an atemporal cause of the universe, (1), there's no sufficient reason that the universe is 14 billion years old and not some other age, any other age in fact.
We'd then expect an infinite age.
At a glance, both of these, (1) and (2), appear to have some intuitive import, except they self-refute.
An antinomy?
We seem forced to either abandon the supposition (a definite earliest moment) or abandon sufficient reason, with whatever implications that may have, and regardless of McTaggartian theories.
Furthermore, the cosmological conclusion was both derived, (1), and then shown not derivable ((2), denying the supposition from which it was derived).
The principle of sufficient reason and the like may not be applicable here; delineation required; a take-away then being that whatever such metaphysics we conjure up and employ (unconditionally) are inherently suspect.
[sup](Besides, spacetime is an aspect, or are aspects, of the universe, and "before time" is incoherent; causation is temporal, and "a cause of causation" is incoherent.)[/sup]
Haphazard application of the principle, delineation required:
There can be no (other) reason for existence, since then such a reason would then not exist (by definition).
That being said, in most common things (and everyday life), seeking explanations, more or less going by sufficient reason, do seem fine.
Comments (19)
But "nothingness" isn't something, isn't anything at all, but absence.
So, also absence of constraints, prevention, checkbooks and coffee.
Not much to talk about it seems, but physicists prefer at least something to talk about, like the Casimir effect, virtual particle pairs, quantum fluctuations, radioactive decay, spacetime foam/turbulence, the "pressure" of vacuum energy, Fomin's quantum cosmogenesis (successors), Krauss' relativistic quantum fields, ...
And that stuff (perhaps with the zero energy universe) suggests a different sort of "(ex) nihilo".
(EDIT: typo)
:chin: How so? I haven't introduced anything new into the already heady cocktail of sufficient reason and the assumption of a definite earliest moment. In fact, what I've done is simplify the whole rigmarole by removing the latter from consideration.
But then simpler, though, when adding an extra cause (of causation)...?
Seems more like an article of faith than otherwise called for, causes and effects already being accounted for, cf composition fallacy.
For that matter, it might be "simpler" to delineate or do away with sufficient reason (search for cases with no sufficient reason or no applicability).
Anyway, causes and effects are typically taken to be events, so applying sufficient reason, in this case, seems more like responding to different inquiries, say,
or
Not to sound too presumptuous but if one jettisons the principle of sufficient reason one might as well just stop thinking. Everything we know appears begotten of the principle of sufficient reason and so to abandon the principle of sufficient reason amounts to invalidating, in one fell swoop, all that we know and, in fact, can know. Perhaps you had that in mind when you recommended we give up on principle of sufficient reason. It's a very bold proposal. I'm up for it if only because the other route seems to be a dead end.
As for the fallacy of composition, it's a head-scratcher but if you're asking my opinion then I'd say there's no fallacy in concluding the universe has a cause for the reason that causation is a property of matter-energy and the universe is matter-energy.
(E.g. there can't be anything (else) that's the reason for everything.)
I'd say causality is an event-relation, a cause and its effect are related.
If the principle of sufficient reason is true, it applies to all events, processes, facts or whatever you want to call them.
If you delineate the principle of sufficient reason, it does not apply to all events, processes, facts or whatever you want to call them.
So if you delineate the principle of sufficient reason, it is not true.
To say of some principle that it is not true is to jettison it.
You cannot eat your cake and have it rest on your plate.
What means you by delineate? To say "there can't be anything (else) that's the reason for everything" directly contradicts the principle of sufficient reason. You can't eat the cake and have it too. :chin:
That is a tautology.
That needs an argument. What are your reasons for thinking that causality relates events rather than, for instance, facts?
Quoting jkg20
Facts are relations (distances).
Events are relations (intervals).
Facts are events (spatiotemporality).
So causality denotes the manifold configuration - non-planck phase-space - of fact-events (world).
Delineate means finding pre-conditions, exceptions, something like that.
Quoting jkg20
The point was that I found
Quoting TheMadFool
a bit odd.
Quoting TheMadFool
There you go. (y)
Better ensure we don't apply the principle to everything/existence first, or we follow the haphazard structure of "everything and then some". (n)
Then there are those considerations of quantum mechanics.
Without such a grounding principle, the existence (again real or imagined) of logical order is puzzling indeed.
Are you suggesting changing the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) from
1. Everything has a reason = original PSR
to
2. Some things don't have a reason even though some things do = modified PSR
?
The problem is that 1 (original PSR) is based on easily demonstrable facts of our world - everything we know of seems to have a reason. The original PSR is not something pulled out of thin air - it's a well-grounded claim about our world.
Therefore, since the modified PSR (2) contradicts the original PSR (1), it's a must that the modified PSR (2) have some kind of evidence to back it up. We have good reason to believe in the original PSR (1); ergo, we need good reason to believe in the modified PSR (2) which contradicts the original PSR (1).
It's here that a problem arises for the modified PSR (2) for to prove it, find reasons to support it, we need to first assume the original PSR (1) to be true: for something, x, we first assume the original PSR (1) and only after discovering x has no reason can we prove that the modified PSR (2) is a reasonable position to hold. The original PSR (1) is the default position as it were, very much like the legal principle that states that a person is innocent until proven guilty, innocent being the original PSR (1) and guilty being the modified PSR (2).
Therefore, the original PSR (1) is not something we can choose to disagree with or modify as suits our fancy; it must always be assumed to be true even when the objective is to disprove it and will remain true until proven as erroneous and this, fortunately or unfortunately, hasn't happened till date. What then are we supposed to do other than take the original PSR (1) as true until, of course, we find something that has no reason?
But yes, right, sufficient reason is a fine metaphysical thesis, it's just misapplication that's not.
Where do these fit in?
• the Casimir effect, virtual particle pairs, quantum fluctuations, radioactive decay, spacetime foam/turbulence, the "pressure" of vacuum energy, Fomin's quantum cosmogenesis (successors), Krauss' relativistic quantum fields, ..., the zero energy universe, the "edge-free" universe
• why anything at all?
• why this-or-that and not something else?
(As a side-topic here, Leibniz wanted to posit something necessary, going by what we now call modal logic, but I think anything necessary in general falls back on what all possible worlds have in common, i.e. more or less just self-consistency.)
Well, there you have it. Some evidence, even if just in areas that, to me, seem poorly understood or, to put it more accurately, not sufficiently understood to make any definitive claims about how causality applies thereof. Please note that my ignorance on these topics you mentioned allows only simple guesswork and speculation on my part.
Interesting. This harkens back to the point I raised earlier about the immanence of the first cause throughout the whole. In modal metaphysics, if we take any event, we should be able to derive from it all the predicates of its subject. Tracing the lineage back, we eventually arrive at our reason.
You might also think of this in terms of duration, the rolling up of the past into the present. This gets taken up in the later process metaphysics so that the actual entities are causally connected to everything in the cosmos in an intensively connected system.
Let's try a third application of the principle, an anecdote attributed to Wittgenstein [sup]† ‡[/sup] :
Wittgenstein overhears someone saying "5, 1, 4, 1, 3. Done."
He asks what that was about, and they respond that they just finished reciting ? backward.
"But, how old are you?"
"Infinitely old. I never started, but have been at it forever and finally finished."
The moment they were done reciting seems random, no sufficient reason their recitation was done at one time and not another, any other.
And likewise for any of the other digits.
So, with our expectation violated, we tend to reject the thought experiment, and out goes an infinite past.
Now what?
[sup]†[/sup] James Harrington
[sup]‡[/sup] Craig Skinner