You say that as if it was a obvious why, but to me that looks like a baseless assumption. The way I see it, if our universe is contingent, then that’s all we can know, the journey ends, there’s nothing else we can deduce. I simply can’t “assume” that there’s a “necessary substrate” just … because.
If you are using "contingent" with its normal meaning, the idea is absurd. We can divide everything that exists into "necessary" and "contingent", one or the other? We might as well divide everything into edible and picturesque, for example. Words, but more like word salad than meaningful statements.
That there's no necessary substrate.
> Contingency means being contingent on something else
Can't it just be "luck", then? Chaos just happened to take this form.
> At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent
Sorry but I don't agree. I think it is perfectly conceivable that everything is contingent and there's no "necessary substrate". For example: it could be that several factors (things like the gravitational constant and the different fundamental forces) are contingent on isolation, but when they are put together the ensemble becomes necessary. Like in a tensegrity structure (not saying that I think that's what happens to our Universe, just pointing out that there's other options besides "One necessary substrate", and we don't know which one is ours).
By introducing the concept of reasons into the discussion, you seem to be adding a new dimension of purpose to it (unless you are using 'reason' as a synonym for 'cause', but if so, it would have been clearer to stick with the latter.) Your belief that the universe has a purpose (if that is what you are saying here) does not logically compel anyone else to accept a first cause.
Update: In your view, there is a hierarchy of causes of something, the first of which is necessary and the rest of which are contingent. Therefore, the second cause was contingent. This implies that the first cause made a choice between which of the second-cause options obtained. But as the first cause had a choice, then it could have gone another way, so it was contingent...
The problem is that "the first cause is God" is not based on anything. It is perfectly fine to ask "If everything has a cause, then what caused God?".
Then there's two options. One is that it's "turtles all the way down" - God1 caused God. And God2 caused God1. And that goes on, forever.
The other option is "God caused himself". Which is similar to being "the first cause", but here's the difference: at that point, we have admitted an exception to the "everything has a cause" rule, which is that "some things can cause themselves". At which point one might as well make that decision earlier and conclude "The Universe Created Itself", not needing God at all.
Diving further into this, there's a hot debate about whether the universe does require a sustaining cause (the Existential Expiration thesis), or whether it can just exist unless something stops it from existing (Existential Inertia Thesis)
Personally, I am inclined to think that things tend to keep existing unless something stops them from existing, and that the universe therefore needs no sustaining cause.
Here's how Mitta summarized that page: "The term 'nyat' is used in Early Buddhism to refer to the emptiness of all things. This emptiness is seen as a meditative state, an attribute of objects, and a type of awareness-release. The term is used to emphasize the deceptive nature of all things, and to show that they are all ultimately worthlessness and vacuous."
Now we ask it directly to compare it to a monitor (I'm pastel-mature-herring):
pastel-mature-herring~> Discuss this likening emptiness to a blank computer monitor.
victorious-capuchin*> One way to think of emptiness is to liken it to a blank computer monitor. Just as a blank monitor contains the potential for any image to be displayed on it, so too does emptiness contain the potential for any and all things to arise within it. Just as a monitor cannot display any image without the proper input, so too does emptiness require the right conditions in order to give rise to anything. And just as a monitor will eventually return to its blank state when the input is removed, so too will things eventually return to emptiness when the conditions that gave rise to them are no longer present.
pastel-mature-herring~> And if someone understands this, what does that say about them?
victorious-capuchin*> If someone understands that emptiness is like a blank computer monitor, it suggests that they understand that everything is ultimately emptiness and that everything is ultimately impermanent. This understanding can lead to a sense of detachment from the things of the world, and can ultimately lead to a state of liberation from suffering.
Some back and forth between Schmid (author of the paper) and Feser (whose arguments it is critiquing):
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/07/schmid-on-aristotel...
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/07/schmid-on-existenti...
Isn't the question about the universe existing really asking where energy/matter came from? How the energy and matter are configured is a different question entirely, it seems.
Neither. "Necessary" and "contingent" apply to properties, but existence is not a property. It's a quantifier.
The movie doesn't cease to exist because you turned the television off, only the projection of it into those particular photons.
Top Gun will continue to exist even if you break every Blu Ray of it into tiny pieces, crush those pieces to powder, and melt the result into a formless goo.
Movies are purely information, a sequence of bits. Those bits can have manifestations such as copies on a hard drive, blu ray, or whatever. The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation. A sequence of bits is just a very big number, and all numbers continue to exist whether we write them down or not. We can discover specific interesting numbers, such as the number 'T' that is the H.264 encoding of the Top Gun Blu Ray movie. It is 40 billion bits long, but it's still just a number. It has adjacent numbers, integer factors, and everything.
Here's the thing: the number 'T' existed before Tom Cruise was born. It existed before the evolution of humanity and will exist after the heat death of physical universe. It exists independent of time. It didn't come into existence at any point in time, or "before" time, or any nonsense like that.
Similarly, if[1] you believe that the universe follows strict, mathematical laws of physics[2], then you can imagine it as pure information, like a Mandelbrot set. Fractals in fact might be a very good analogy. They're actually very simple things, exist independent of time, and yet can produce intricate detail if you look closely. That detail may appear chaotic, but "seems" to follow oddly consistent rules, much like physics.
So this is my point of view: The Universe is "just" mathematics, and mathematics exists independent of time, making the Universe necessary. As in-universe observers, we're part of the mathematics, not any particular manifestation or representation of it. Even if there were some sort of God scribbling the bits down on a napkin that represent the state of the Universe, he's discovering the numbers, not creating them. If he destroys the napkin, the bits will not cease to exist. Inside the universe, we would never know anything had occurred.[3]
[1] Granted, this is a "if"!
[2] The more we know about the universe, the more this seems to be true.
[3] This entire point of view is the main theme of the book Diaspora by Greg Egan, which I highly recommend.
I have come to this conclusion as well. It came to be when I was looking at a fractal animation, and it appeared that things moved in it as if obeying some laws of physics.
I have expanded on this idea here, and have described a sort of thought expiriment where I try to "prove" this. You probably not want to read it. It is not very well written.
https://sras.me/the-root-of-all-existence.html
Later I came across Max Tegmark's paper, which describes the same thing..
From our perception at least, it seems like Tom and Val were a part of the earliest & highest fidelity information that makes up Top Gun when they were part of shooting it day to day. Or somewhere around there, the movie that the h264 derives from requires daily shots + editing/effects etc. If Tom & Val are in-universe observers, then wtf happened during those shooting days, and in their argument I’d imagine, the ideas & experiences they’d had on how they portrayed their parts?
- I don't think it can be taken for granted that math exists independent of consciousness to think of it.
- Even if math exists independent of time and consciousness, it need not have a physical manifestation (by your own logic). So why does a physical universe have to exist?
The Mandelbrot set exists and contains self reference without any need for it to be graphed (a manifestation). Similarly the universe as we experience it may exist without any physical manifestation.
If you destroy every recording of Top Gun, it will cease to exist.
> The bit sequence doesn't stop existing just because we delete every manifestation
Yes it does.
And Top Gun didn't exist before 1986.
How? Get rid of the universe, and the concept of pi doesn't exist. Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter. Circles didn't exist before the universe, thus no pi. There could be another universe where circles are impossible due to whatever laws of physics exist, thus no pi.
Circles (perfect ones) are impossible in our universe, too. Circles are abstractions. If we have successfully deduced a conclusion from a set of axioms, wouldn't that deduction hold true in all possible universes?
The mathematical realist position is that these abstract math objects exist independent of an observer.
Ditto with sqrt(2), you need to "sharpen" the triangle made from half an square forever in order to get all the decimals.
I've noticed people in this thread are getting actual, physical things confused with concepts and mental representations of things.
Confusing the map for the territory.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/
> It's like saying unicorns exist. They're a shared fiction. (A highly useful fiction, to be sure)
I will mention that dogs are also a useful shared fiction. We assign the label dog to a perception of a configuration of atoms that we think satisfy the criteria for what a dog is. So I'd say that numbers are more like dogs than unicorns, in that they are an abstraction that is used by us in practice to map to perceptions of physical objects.
And memory is fallible. It changes over time. People will all remember the movie differently.
The memory of Top Gun != Top Gun.
How do you know that concepts/categories like "necessary" and "contingent" apply to the universe? Specifically, if the universe is everythibg that there ever is or ever will be, how can it be contingent upon something external to itself?
Could it not be the case that there concepts come from a causality-based view of reality that may be far from universally applicable?
So maybe we can more precisely talk about all of physical reality, regardless of whether they exist in our universe or an alternative universe, or a realm that exists outside of the universe but influences or produces the material of the universe. Clearly, that includes all material things themselves, but might also encompass the non-material but very real and observable physical laws that govern how reality operates.
How can there be something outside of that physical reality? Well ... the Greeks had a word for that: meta-physics. And generally, when it is posited that something necessary exists (whether it be God or something else), that necessary thing exists metaphysically. So yes, as you are suggesting, a distinction does need to be made between physical reality and metaphysical reality for it to make sense that the universe (comprising only physical reality) is contingent.
It would be contingent upon a necessary foundation within the universe.
So there is one specific part in the universe that is necessary, and everything else around that is contingent.
Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation.
What's the issue?
How do you know this?
At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.
> faith is orthogonal to the mind
Conflating the two is intellectually dishonest, in addition to commonplace.
Furthermore, why does a contingent thing have to depend on a necessary thing?
It's only arbitrary if there aren't good reasons.
Dozens of reasons have been given in philosophy, it's up to you to decide if any of them work.
One of the big differences would be to point out that the universe is completely composite, whereas a foundation could be purely simple.
Josh Rasmussen is a great communicator about this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX79xXgi44o&ab_channel=TheUn...
I can understand why you would like the question of why God is necessary to be "misplaced" (which is a euphemism for what, exactly? It is no less coherent than the other questions being entertained here), but, with your 'that's it", you are simply refusing to look further than the answer you wanted.
Furthermore, as I am sure you are aware, 'God' is a loaded term, on which has been heaped a huge amount of conceptual baggage. Therefore, I assume you chose to write 'God', rather than some more neutral term such as 'necessary cause', for some purpose - but what? Your argument for there being a necessary cause would not offer any reason to justify any of that baggage.
The cool part about this definition of God, is that it necessitates the existence by definition, and gives a falsifiable hypothesis.
Continuing with this definition, current cosmological theories would then imply that the Big Bang is God. Though this explanation of the beginning of everything leaves me unsatisfied. It just feels like something else kicked everything off.
We really need a way to peer behind the Event Horizon of the Big Bang, which we obviously can't do empirically, so we are stuck using logical deductions.
I personally think studying pure math and some of the more untested physics theories like String Theory, and Stephen Wolfram's physics project give a lot of food for thought.
Enumerating every possible pattern, while computationally infeasible, still paints an interesting landscape, even granting how little of it we can describe.
You say we are stuck with logical deductions, but the thing about them is that they are no more true than are their premises, so analytical metaphysics grounds out in a personal and subjective choice of axioms (subjective in the sense that no-one else is logically compelled to accept them.)
Assuming God = Beginning of the causal chain, Finding this prime mover becomes a tangible physical hypothesis.
I don't think most religious people would agree with this definition of God though.
Also, if the information needed to confirm the beginning of the causal chain is locked behind an Event Horizon, then I don't know what to conclude about this.
I think it's possible to build a model in our slice of the universe that can let us peer beyond such limitations. But I can't be sure.
Rather ironically, the "there must be a prime mover" argument for God can only avoid being blatantly arbitrary, tendentious and self-serving by saying God had no choice in anything, which is definitely not what most religious people want to believe.
To rephrase what you are saying for my own brain: An original causal event may still have dependencies that aren't necessarily bound to it in time or space. And these dependencies may have their own structure that are suspectable to infinite regress.
Perhaps an example of this is how all the fundamental constants have very specific values that are required aprori for anything to happen in the first place.
In philosophy, there is a distinction between things that must be (they're called necessary) and things that may or may not be (they're called contingent). For instance, if we use the standard definition of a square, then every square you will ever encounter will necessarily have four sides. In contrast, not every square you encounter will be blue or tiny. Those are contingent properties of a square. A square may be blue, or it may not be. A square may be tiny, or it may not be.
Now, would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or contingent? If its existence is necessary, it would mean that there is no possible way for our universe not to exist. If its existence is contingent, then our universe either could exist, or it could not.
I happen to think it's contingent. But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary. Regardless of whether you view that necessary thing as God or something else, if you agree that the universe is contingent, then the contingency doesn't stop at its creation; its continued existence is also contingent.
So, beyond needing a "first cause" to explain its existence (as with a picture on a painted canvas), our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set).