Creating Meaning
The year is 2077, and technology has advanced beyond all expectations. Computers can simulate practically anything. You are tasked to simulate a world full of human-like sentient beings. It is all feasible with current technology, to which you have access. You are also asked to program the lives of these 'humanoids' with a sense of meaning. Now how do you proceed? (Perhaps you might create a religion.)
If it's not possible to program meaning into the simulation under any scenario, then how is meaning created in our 'real' world (assuming there is)?
If it's not possible to program meaning into the simulation under any scenario, then how is meaning created in our 'real' world (assuming there is)?
Comments (63)
You just build in meaning from the get go, by fusing purpose into what the simulation 'is'. There is only a problem of creating meaning because we killed God, and so the universe isn't inherently meaningful as a purposeful creation. Since a simulation is in fact created by purposeful beings, you wouldn't have that problem.
The question to me that arises here is: is there free will or not? Are we going to let these human-like beings have the ability to choose what they do and not do or are they going to be given an allotment of choices after every action like a spreadsheet of possibilities?
Meaning, at least in my opinion, will be non-existent unless the creator programs it or the human-like beings create their own meaning...
Drawing correlations between different things.
Some meanings or meanings for some beings in this world can come from free will or no free will. If no free will, you are the creator of everything that happens to these beings, therefore, meaning can persist in what you program to happen. If there is free will, then those beings can either subscribe to what meaning your program or not, but even in doing that they can then have the OPTION to make their own meaning or not.
So, to the question of "programming" a singular sense of meaning or purpose - it largely depends on the ability to control all these conditions: upbringing, biology, culture, life experience - so that you can assure that each individual is getting the exact same thing (which is impossible even in a small family).
However, the closer to our biology, evolution or baser instincts the "idea" is, the easier it will be to program.
So, you could for example say that the "meaning" of life is to enhance pleasure - then it will be easy to accept because we naturally prefer pleasure over pain.
Doesn't this hinge on what you mean by meaning? From one perspective, as embodied animals we are drowning in meaning. It feels good if X and it hurts if Y. Beyond the simple animal stuff, we want to feel like part of a community, believe in our work, and so on. Give people this, and most of them don't notice an absence of some other kind of meaning.
IMO, the crisis of meaning that people often mention on philosophy forums quietly involves time. Nothing endures. Everything is vulnerable. Is a contempt for vulnerability central here? Is the lack of meaning the lack of a hiding place or perfect suit of armor?
At what price can the deeper-meaning-seeker be bought? Eternal, indestructible youth in an earthly paradise? Is this particular crisis of meaning a frustration that one is not and cannot be a young god?
Some religions promise something like this in another world, and even down here some can revel in their youth and forget their vulnerability for awhile (forgetting also the lack of meaning.)
It springs from the widespread acceptance that life is a fluke and we're products of an accident. Death of God, and all.
As is obvious, I'm trying to balance freedom with meaning as the too seem at odds with each other. If I give meaning then I take away freedom. If I give freedom I take away meaning.
Also, I would make it a point to give simulated people freedom, as much as is possible given the limits of the computing power, and what if even when this has been achieved people still look for meaning at a level that would require my (the programmer's) intervention at a much larger scale than the simulated people themselves. Does all [s]life[/s] consciousness seek meaning? Is the thirst for meaning an inevitable consequence of consciousness, the kind we're familiar with? An open question.
Let's say that plays a big role. I still think it misses something. Would deism help with the crisis of meaning? To some degree, I guess. If there were clearly a higher being, we could worship that being sincerely, assuming we saw it is wiser than us and benevolent.
But if there were just a creator who left us to our own devices? And we were still mortal?
I relate to a contempt for flatland. Something in humans want to transcend the human, or at least transcend the settled and the banal. In the brave new world of sensual pleasure the human mind would perhaps find itself creating problems for itself, taking a perverse pleasure in its restlessness (or, a cynic might say, playing ever more complicated status games in the symbolic realm.)
Is life a fluke? I remember an a senior in college once telling me that the evidence for god is the order that's apparent in the universe. I was young then and I was impressed with what he said about how all the planets revolve around the sun in an orderly, mathematically precise, manner. I'm sure he mentioned our beloved solar system only as a stepping stone to, in effect, cover the entire cosmos itself, displaying a regularity which, to him, was impossible without the participation of an intelligent being, God.
I hadn't read logic back then but I recall being troubled by a particular aspect of his claim. Is it that,
1. order implies god
or
2. god implies order
???
If it's 1 then sure his argument is as good as any but what if it's 2?
If I had to prove 1 then I'd have to prove that all cases where there's order, there's always intelligence involved (god). That, prima facie, seems acceptable until we come to the realization that to hold this to be true is a petitio principii - you're presupposing god's causal association with order.
If it's 2 then we can't conclude that god exists from order.
A penny for your thoughts.
I think we can see a spectrum in human affairs. We can see humans arranging things to stay warm, stay fed, etc. And this we can also see in animals. But we don't see beavers building the pyramids. We don't see them arranging a dam so beautiful that they hope it will be remembered forever by all the beavers to come. And I don't think that we think that beavers imagine some radically different world.
You mention consciousness. Perhaps we have to add a vivid imagination, including that of the past and more importantly the future.
One last issue is envy. Maybe a beaver can envy the dam of another beaver or even its mate. But humans can envy in such intricate and surprising ways. I propose that the complexity of our pursuit of status is tied up with this. Some men committed suicide when they weren't allowed to join this or that war because they were medically unfit. I can also imagine a rich artist envying the talent of a poor, unknown artist, because that rich artist has taste enough to see what the world can't. Or one human can envy the tragic backstory of another, envy its negative glamour. And so on.
Beavers are not pretentious. They have accepted that they are fundamentally cool and so are comfortable remaining at that level, therefore, as they have found true balance in themselves, feel no urge to seek a radically different world.
We could do worse than to aspire to the Zen state of the beaver.
I agree. But can we manage it? Instead I imagine humans competing to see who can seem the most zen.
It's as if any good thing has a kind of surface or shadow that can be caught up in the same anxious play for proximity to it, whatever it happens to be.
Having said that, I think we all sometimes really do enjoy the zen of the beaver. (You might say that we are only metaphysically human in a state of angst [Kojeve talks about something like this.] )
And no, as a species we are far from achieving a Zen state.
[quote=Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship]That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. [/quote]
One of Russell's earliest essays, published just after the turn of the century ~ 1901.
I think the reigning consensus has been that life is the outcome of chance as distinct from providential design or divine creation during the last century. That is one of the major grounds of the so-called 'culture wars'.
In that Russell quote a big deal is made of personal annihilation and the second and arguably greater death of the species itself. This second death means that individuals cannot escape death by storing their genius in works of art and science that will survive them -- or in the more usual vessel of descendants.
Our madness is strangely our glory and our privilege. Give humans time, and they will revolutionize their environment and their lifestyle, until it's normal for them to video-conference with humans on the other side of the globe or worry about terrorists with dirty bombs or the onset of an AI-perfected surveillance state.
What is the individual's fantasy these days? To disrupt, change the world, getting credit for something new and important. Anti-zen is something like our religion. I can't simply rebel or complain because even that rebellion and complaint must be original and disruptive in order to be good. In a certain sense rebellion is conformity in systematized permanent revolution.
Quoting Book273
They're critters. They have no self to save.
Maybe the common thread is the fear that life is not going anywhere. Don't people want an unambiguous sense of indestructible progress? If evolution is directed by trans-human intelligence, then presumably it is going somewhere, and one can perhaps participate in (or at least adore) this trans-human intelligence.
Along the same lines, thinking the heat death or just the death or sun suggests a blind machine unimpressed by what humans call progress.
Does the demystification of rulers figure into this? We want to believe that genuine, noble adults are in control. In the age of Nero, Christians had a secret king who was at least on his way. If the world is not run by holy or rational or noble adults, then one has instead a vision of the runaway machine.
Let's imagine that our world is a simulation created by humans who are more technologically advanced. If they are ethically no better than us but only have more power, would that really satisfy our need for meaning?
How has the idea of God comforted people, given them a sense of meaning? It seems to me that God 'has' to be adorable in order to function. Think of a son wanting to grow up and be like his good father, who seems not only full of love but also full of power and knowledge. Anything confusing or questionable in the world can be explained in terms of the son's incomplete education.
If all we have for a god is a confused older brother, on the other hand,...
This is an angle I hadn't exactly in mind, but sure. I think all that is needed that people believe in him, so he needs to be believable for it to work. There have been all kinds of different gods historically people believed in, good, evil, neutral etc... The problem, in relation to believing in a god anyway, in our current age is our commitment to empirical truth and scientific advancement. So I think it has more to do with the general cultural climate, than what a particular God looks like... but being all powerful, all knowing and infinitely good probably helps, yes. Though the pantheon of Greek gods weren't exactly all that perfect or impeccable, and that seemed to work alright.
I think the meaning people generally seek, is feeling part of some greater (cosmic) plan. If God created the universe, then you have such a plan because presumably he created it with a purpose.
I know what you mean about the climate. I'd like to believe in a good God, but I just can't. I had some belief when I was younger, and there was something nice (if also eerie) about a consciousness who could witness and care about every detail of my life and consciousness. If you have real faith in a benevolent God, you are never truly alone.
I do still find it hard to make sense of an evil god, except as an enemy of the good god which is actually worshiped. What I can make sense of is a conception of the big bad world in its entirety as a metaphorical god, but then the relationship becomes ambivalent. Or there is the strange vision of God as presented in the book of Job, a glorious and powerful God who is beyond human notions of good and evil.
My hunch, for what it's worth, is that all this talk of "life [the universe included] is an outcome of chance" by scientists and their ilk is, far from being even half an explanation, a smokescreen that conceals the truth, the truth that we have no clue as to how the universe, life, came to be.
To say that something, say x, occured by pure chance is simply to assert that many possibilities existed and that one of them actualized. That's all that the notion of chance/probability achieves - it doesn't, in any way, inform us why one possibility and not the others actualized and that's precisely the question that should've been answered if chance were a good alternative to a creator-god explanation for the existence of the universe.
Give it a moment's thought. Firstly possibilities are true for a creator-god too: there were many options available and a creator-god chose one of them and here we are. This feature of probability - possibilities - inheres in all creation including divine creation. Secondly, why one of the possibilities (in our case this universe the one in which we exist) became a reality isn't explained by chance for the simple reason that to do so would require those who claim it does to demonstrate how this universe is more likely to exist than not but that's a piece of information which, to my knowledge, we don't have. Were it that we possessed this knowledge, the matter would've been settled a long, long time ago.
I agree with you about participation in the cosmic plan. The only hitch is that maybe humans could resent and rebel against the plan of a god they considered evil. Or perhaps they obey out of fear of Hell or some other punishment. That makes the world a kind of prison, and casts God as the worst tyrant ever.
It's possible that I'm thinking from humanist prime directives that I just can't see around. For 'us,' a god must make sense, be rational, and seem virtuous by human standards in order to 'truly' be god and not just some powerful alien tyrant or inscrutable, cold machine.
Thoughts?
Accident presupposes intent, purpose, reason...
I’m kind of with you, but I’m also very reluctant to endorse anything associated with intelligent design.
The way I frame is, as I’ve said before, is that excluding ideas of ‘divine creation’ is required by naturalism as a matter of principle. However, methodological naturalism should by the same token not try and peer behind the curtain, as it were; naturalism ought to be circumspect with regards to philosophical ultimates.
Scientific method excludes the Aristotelian ‘final cause’ - the ‘why’ of things - in any sense other than the functional or instrumental. But saying that science ‘proves’ or ‘shows’ that there is no such principle as a final cause is a bridge too far. That is one of the things science ought to be circumspect about.
Regarding the ‘cosmic plan’ - the notion of ‘dharma’ is that the particular role you play or part you perform is a reflection of the cosmic dharma. Dharma is at once a cosmic law and an individual duty. Such a concept is sorely missing from current cultural discourse.
Quoting five G
Yes I think you, and I am too for that matter, are viewing it from a humanist perspective, which has grown out of the western judeo-christian tradition. Following Nietzsche, the concept of evil itself is an invention of this tradition. And the formula that fuses the good, reason and virtue together an invention of Socrates and Plato, and later coöpted by Christianity. Pre-socrates, Greek culture was Homeric, and the gods had little to do with reason, virtue or being morally good... the whole idea of equating the good with reason and virtue would probably have been completely alien to them. And so would the idea of good and evil as a dichotomy.
Any unambiguous good would do. It’s quite hard to come by.
I'm not suggesting intelligent design is the only other choice for us.
All I'm saying is that chance offered as an alternative to a creator-god doesn't pass muster. Why? Well, chance in the context of creation simply means that there was X% probability for the universe to come into existence.
Firstly, chance is an aspect of a god-created universe too. There were many possible universes god could've created and also god could've decided not to create anything at all. Lump all these possibilities together with the fact that god allegedly created this universe and we have the right ingredients for chance - there was X% probability that god created the universe.
Secondly, god is an explanation for how the possibility of this universe as expressed in the X% probability became a reality. In other words, the actualization of a possible universe is what a creator-deity is supposed to have effected.
To claim that the universe was created by chance is nonsense because, as I mentioned earlier, all that's possible, probabilistically, is to say that there was an X% chance for the universe to have come into existence. Nowhere in this is the information that such and such caused the possibility of a universe to become a reality.
It's like when successful enterpreneur call their hard work as passion. Maybe it is, or maybe they just have a tendency to work hard to pursue any goal they set onto. Or it's like someone who said family is the most important thing. We can only observe whether they really show sign of happiness/depression when enganging with family activities to know if they said the truth or not.
So in a way, as long as we program some goals for each of the humanoid to strive for, and program their internal system (mind/consciousness) to give reward in the form of happiness or satisfaction, I think we can program meaning. Though as an outside observer we can never know whether something meaningful for them or whether they simpy get an internal reward for pursuing their programmed goal.
Maybe we can if their internal monologue can be known. Then we program their internal monologue to give positive feedback while striving for certain goals.
Yes chance and probability are an expression of our epistemic uncertainty. In poker you put a probability or chance on you winning a hand because you lack information. If you had all the information, there would be no need for probabilities.
I think Wayfearer was originally using the term in another way though. By chance, as a fluke or an accident, means something like lack of design or intention... non-teleological. We never know for sure, but it seems like we came about by the process of evolution, which is a non-teleological process, i.e. "by chance".
Concerning the universe itself, yes, we just don't know. We don't even know if it sensible to talk about it being caused, since it's hard to see how causation even would apply outside of space and time.
And I agree with you! In some ways, the ‘created vs chance’ is a false dichotomy.
Right. It's my understanding that post-tribal universalism is historically entwined with a Christianity that was preached to the gentiles. I imagine pre-global societies understanding themselves as warrior organisms. A good citizen was a good cell, a good piece of the holy machine. Traditional societies like this just want proper repetition, to live up to the ancestors, the same anew. Well, we have to account for expansion (Assyrians come to mind, etc.) That pops the nostalgia bubble. But then Life 'is' expansion and exploitation. You mention Nietzsche, and he does seem like a key thinker on all of this. (footnotes to Nietzsche == foolosophy since? )
But we end up with global self-devouring humanism and runaway technological disruption. The tech promises and threatens. It could/should liberate us from drudgery, but it also threatens unprecedented domination. How about a department of precrime, brought to you by A.I.? Or a Big Brother who actually can watch everyone all of the time, a parody of God?
Right, or at least it's hard for a neurotic-critical-sophisticated mind to hold on to. Anyone in a state of genuine faith is saved by that faith while it lasts.
Does the self-lacerating conscience take itself for an idol?
There are lots of ways it can go horribly wrong, sure, but what I would want to question is if the upside is really there to begin with? Nietzsche, again, says that it's not really suffering itself that is the problem, but suffering without meaning. If that claim is true, then the idea of a humanism that values progress as a way to alleviate suffering is a flawed idea to begin with. Because it doesn't address the root of the issue. This is presumably only going to get worse as AI and automation can take over more and more roles in society, which was still a way people could feel part of that bigger whole and derive some meaning (although that certainly has it's problems too, I won't deny).
So yeah, this to me seems like the biggest challenge. And if we don't find a solution for that, it will cause a lot of problems, which will only be exacerbated by those technological advances. Technology is essentially neutral, it all depends on how you use it. And how we will use it, will depend on the state our civil societies will be in... which, you know, doesn't look to good at this particular moment :-).
Good point, and I also suspect that our dependence on screens is contributing to mass delusion. Our ape brains can't handle the tech. The lil' guy has no economic imperative toward info hygiene. The foundation is vanity and greed, with a fragile semi-neutral matrix that keeps us from ripping one another to shreds literally and not only in spirit. The whispers of Q make people happy, put some evil cabal in charge, provide ideal victims. The trafficked children are strong metaphors for the soul of man under late capitalism. To me a more realistic vision is that no one is steering the machine and that all are more or less complicit. This is the unmarketable position, fit only for anonymous graffiti. The figure of Socrates is only useful when integrated with a Cure and a Plan.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
One difficulty here is that any nation that sacrifices economic or technological strength for mental health runs the risk of being overpowered by more reckless nations. The machine can't stop. I can imagine humanity wiping out 95% of the population in some disaster, and then a few centuries later it happens again. Transcendence/transgression is the demon that lifts us above the apes that came before. (Maybe I'm laying it on thick, but it does seem to be the largest drama we can think of, our own global-species drama.)
Quoting Wayfarer
To both of you
Well, "chance" is the wrong word if you want to talk about the absence of teleology because chance is an aspect of the teleological too.
First, our universe existed as one among many possibilities and so there was a probability associated with its existence and that's chance. This is true for both a god-created universe and one that's not; after all even for god, this universe was first a possibility in faer mind i.e. this universe was nothing more than a mere probability before god created it.
Second, this possibility (for our universe to exist) became a reality and for theists it's at this point god enters the picture, as the cause that made the possible real.
As you can see, from a theistic perspective god converted the chance that our universe could exist into the actual existence of the universe.
If now one proposes chance as an alternative to divine creation then something's off because
1. Chance is an aspect of a god-created universe too.
2. Chance doesn't explain how possibilities actualize as it has with our universe.
A word can have a different meaning in a different context.
Which meaning of "chance" makes sense in the sentence "the universe came into existence by chance"?
The non-teleological one. He scored that goal by chance, means he didn't intent to score the goal... not that the goal was scored by some probability.
Although, I'll grant you that it can also mean that that he did intent to score it, but that there was a very low probability to score. It's a bit ambiguous and so maybe not the best word here, I agree.
Teleology isn't necessarily an attribute of a god-created universe. God is seen as the cause that made what is a possible universe (ours) a reality whether it be by design (teleology) or not. Aristotle's first cause argument for the existence of a god doesn't even imply that god, as the first cause, has to be a conscious, self-aware, being so we can forget about purpose (teleology). Since,a non-teleological universe is compatible with god, it doesn't make sense to differentiate chance and a creator-deity on that basis.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Exactly my point. A goal can't be scored by chance. Similarly, a universe can't be created by chance.
I don't know why you are so hung up on this particular point, it's just a figure of speech, not literally a probability. People do say that a goal was score by chance, by which they mean that it wasn't intended...
Quoting TheMadFool
It's hard to have a teleological universe without God is the important part you are leaving out. Sure, you can have a non-teleological universe with God, but then that is usually not the kind of God we invent.
What do you mean it's a "figure of speech"? Do you mean that when I say "the universe was created by chance" I mean something other than the literal meaning of that sentence and the words contained therein? I'm afraid that's not true. People actually mean that chance created the universe and chance here is being offered as a good enough alternative to a creator-god.
However, chance is simply a description of the relationship between possibilities and actuality. Chance isn't a cause and it, therefore, can't bring the universe into existence.
Yes, not literally but figuratively. Note that 'by chance' is not the subject of the sentence in 'he scored that goal by chance'. It's not chance that score the goal, he did.... by chance.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't agree because as you said, that would be incoherent. And I think one shouldn't use the word 'created' either, because that already implies intention.
Quoting TheMadFool
So, there has to be someone who causes the goal whether by chance or not. Similarly, there has to be something that causes the universe whether by chance or not. A valid competing explanation for a person who scores a goal by chance isn't chance itself, it''s something else. Similarly a valid alternative to god having created the universe isn't chance but something else. :chin:???
By the way,
Google definition of "chance": the occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious intention or cause
Galielean and Newtonian science, and the analysis of motion in terms of mass, velocity and so forth, which now seems second nature to us, was a complete break away from prior notions of physics. Likewise the whole grand structure of Ptolmaic cosmology, the crystal spheres and ethereal realms which were the literal heavens - the whole grand structure was swept asice by the Scientific Revolution and the advent of modernity.
Second point - Darwin himself was influenced by the 'Scottish enlightenment' - which figured such other luminaries as Adam Smith and David Hume. So he sought explanations solely in scientifically intelligible terms (which has been uncharitably attributed to 'physics envy' by some critics). The famous passage in Origin of Species on the metaphor of the Tangled Bank:
[quote=Charles Darwin]It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being (1) Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; (2) Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a (3) Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to (4) Natural Selection, entailing (5) Divergence of Character and the (6) Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.[/quote]
I added the numbers in the above, to illustrate that they were six. In this sense, it seems a very rigourous and scientifically sound theory whereby a small number of principles can be seen to give rise to the vast complexity of living species. (It is said that the phrase 'breathed by the Creator' was not in the first edition, but was added later to placate religious critics.)
But the point I'm making is that this was the kind of explanation that was and is seen to be congruent with natural science, in that it posits no 'guiding intelligence' or hidden power; the only 'power' is the primeval drive of all living things to continue to exist and to reproduce. And survival and reproduction are the only purposes that are conceived, and required, in this model. There's no underlying telos or 'elan vital' which animates (Aristotle's term) living beings.
That's the background against which the notion that life arose 'by chance' became influential. It was 'by chance' as distinct from an act of providential creation. And this argument is still going on, in the battles over evolutionary theory and its implications for mankind.
But I think it's important to consider that the kind of idea of purposelessness and meaninglessness that you find in a lot of 20th C existentialist literature was very much the product of the crashing down of the Medieval synthesis and the modern realisation of the 'appalling vastnesses of space' (Pascal's term). It really was a rude awakening. And we're still going through it.
Yes, the definition and use is ambiguous like I said, intention and cause are two different things. But that is often the case with common language which isn't intended for these kinds of discussions. For science and philosophy you often have to clarify terms.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well no, we can't just assume goal-scoring is analogous with universe-creating because you can formulate similar sentences about them. For one, we don't know if cause and effect even applies outside of the universe. And if causality would apply we don't know if there is intention behind the cause. To 'know' you would need some data to test your theory to. Since we lack data about the origin of the universe we are left with a range of possible origins that are possible in theory. Chances that any one guess will happen to be the right one seem rather low... in short we just don't know.
Can chance be a cause? The definition that I provided in my last reply to you states that chance means "an absence of...cause" and this is probably the meaning employed in the statement, "the universe came to be (began to exist) by chance" i.e. it had no cause.
The matter boils down to two options that are laid out before us:
1. Accept that the universe has no cause (it arose by chance)
or
2. Accept that the universe has a cause (Call this 'i]first cause[/i] God or whatever you like)
Which of the two, 1 or 2, has good supporting evidence? You'll notice that never in the lives of the 107 billion people who've ever lived and never in the lives of the 7 billion who are alive on our beloved planet has there ever been an instance of a causeless phenomenon. In a nutshell we've never come across something that has no cause. So, an infinite regress of causes notwithstanding, evidence seems to point in the direction of the universe being caused by something. What's interesting here is the proof that the universe had a cause is a posteriori (all observed phenomena have causes) but the objection to it is a priori (infinite regress). Rationalism or Empiricism? Can we hope to find a middle ground or is that even a valid question? How about causal loops rather than linear causality. The universe could've been created by a being that intelligent life will create in the far, far future through numerous events describable as technological singularities resulting in an Artificial Intelligence with infinite computing power that reverses the runaway entropy back to the Big Bang singularity and the process simply repeats: Big Bang -> Intelligent life -> Technological singularities -> Infinite Intelligent AI (god) -> Reverse entropy after/during the heat death of the universe -> Big Bang. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
But of course, where and how did the causal loop begin?
No I don't think so, chance pertains to how it was caused, not to what the cause was.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think Hume showed that the assumption of Causality with a big C, as a metaphysical principle, is unwarranted. We expect things to be caused out of habit, but have no actual proof that everything is caused, all the time, as an unbroken causal chain back to God.... so it's a psychological truth rather than a metaphysical one. There is no need to stop infinite regress (with something like God), if you don't assume an unbroken chain of causation.... which was ultimately Humes intention, he was a sneaky atheist.
As to the rest of your post, I definitely fall on the empiricist side, so I think I can only repeat what I already said, we just don't know because of lack of any data... anything is possible.
So, the coronavirus that cause the ongoing pandemic is "out of habit"? That we can treat tuberculosis with the specific drugs that kill the causative bacterium is just an illusion?
Evidence of something causing something, is no proof of everything being caused always.
Well, at least Hume wasn't correct that causation is "out of habit".
Yeah I think he was, as far as we can be certain, but I don't know if I can do his argument justice here, it has been a while. I'd have to read it again...
Another option is that we can't really make sense of the issue. The fluffy either does or does not have a gurgle.
I suggest considering the design of experiments. How do humans currently find and understand evidence for a causal relationship? We use a treatment and control group. We look at p-values.
And this effectively describes a great deal of people. Point of fact, I would move more to save the beavers. People should save themselves.
Of course, this doesn't mean that, objectively speaking, there is meaning in the world, it's just that we create it, to whatever extent each of us can. But even someone creating a simulation of the type described, why would they bother doing such a complicated thing? Surely it would be to get some meaningful results for some experiment, or some amusement of some form or other.