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Principle of Sufficient Reason

130 points by lainon 10y ago

manicmonad 10y ago
Why does this post exist?
- lainon 10y ago
  To show you the Principle of Sufficient Reason which might eventually trigger your intellectual curiosity
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  Hacker News allows anything which might "stimulate intellectual curiosity".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- sdenton4 10y ago
  To encourage you to keep asking 'why' until you hit on something interesting...
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Like a 4 yr old
  - jpttsn 10y ago
    I could argue that sometimes you won't find anything interesting, but that's probably interesting, defeating my example.
- pizza 10y ago
  For a sufficient reason.
baddox 10y ago
Ctrl-F "regress" For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.
- ysleepy 10y ago
  There are multiple paragraphs on it just above the Leibniz section (ctrl+f infinit). It comes down to, yes infinity (or any permutation (or DAG) of the universe of facts) for some facts. And yes that is not very satisfying. - But I think any techniques of cutting the chain at some point is arbitrary to some degree and not rigorous as an exploration of the problem.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  I use the PSR all the time, I don't think that infinite regress causes any practical problems. I have adapted an ad-hoc set of primitives that I grounded on like five years ago. I call these the principles of context. They're hard to write about, believe me I've tried, but I've come to believe that any logical position can be analyzed and represented using contextual verses. I've identified six of them, topic, inverse, converse, reverse, obverse, whole. I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest. Any idea / position can be related to any other idea by passing them through intermediary ideas in these contextual verses. This is mostly what we do when we think. The PSR in this sense encapsulates the idea that there is no true discontinuities in the world, only mental blocks we impose upon ourselves. You solve the infinity problem simply by making infinity an idea that can be reached or gone through contextually. Regression itself can be seen as operating on the inverse of a particular idea.
  - gknoy 10y ago
    > I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
    - vinceguidry 10y ago
      Sure. I'll start with an example. Take the United States. This is the topic, the verse in which the thing is the thing. The next step out is the inverse. What is the inverse of the United States? This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US. Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space. We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location. The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse. Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical. Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about. In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse. It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BucketSort 10y ago
I recently started studying Leibniz in my spare time. I found this book to be a delightful introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198718640 https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Intro...
foldr 10y ago
An interesting recent defense of the PSR: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/psr.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0010.007 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/psr.pdf?c=phimp;... The article itself has a rather flowery style, but there's a summary of the main argument and discussion of it here: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/della-rocca-on-psr.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/della-rocca-on-psr...
barrkel 10y ago
There's a real risk of storytelling with 'why'. You can construct a narrative that explains anything - this is probably the primary thing our consciousness does when communicating to other people - but there's no necessary relationship between the story and the world, and humans are great at believing the stories they tell themselves. Interesting events outside of abstract, simplified, theoretical scenarios normally have multiple probabilistic causes, and while the causes could be analyzed at multiple levels - atomic, mechanical, emotional, symbolic - only the atomic is real. The others are complex webs of stories we tell ourselves, stories using symbols that hide details because we cannot understand the world as it is, we can only cope with it in a simplified form. Only as a story. Our choice of symbols and abstraction level to tell our story creates artificial entities and forces to explain things. But the boundaries of these entities are a fiction. The world has no ontology; it's a giant bucket of interacting particles. The problem with getting serious with this kind of a principle is that it will break down. When you try and zoom in on the referents of the symbols, you'll find that they're a lot blurrier than your stories told you.
- dorgo 10y ago
  The different levels emerge from each other. And I don't think that we can be sure to have found the most basic one, or even to assume that there is a most basic level. But the emergent levels are not less 'real' than the more basic ones. There is more about emergent levels than just to hide details.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    Different abstraction levels are normally different ways of talking about the same physical phenomena. That is, they are parallel; they don't stack. The most basic one is the one that doesn't exist in our heads and doesn't have a model with predictions to violate. What does "real" mean here? I'm using it as a proxy for truth, or perhaps better, accuracy in a model. That is, if a model of the world makes predictions about the world, the model is "real" to the degree that the predictions are correct. But all human models of the world have their limits, usually forced by our tiny little brains and meagre data input senses. We take something that we've decided to categorize, and create symbols to represent commonalities, and theorize relations between the symbols, and test these theories, and gradually refine a calculus of symbols that we can use to apply to the world, and the system works, in so far as the commonalities stay common, and the symbols aim squarely at the average of the referents. But it's not reality; it's all made up, like mathematics. It's just a story, it's all in our heads and in narratives we communicate with one another. The symbols don't stick; the world moves on. People change; humans are animals that evolve over time, and continue to evolve. We can't even decide what a human is - the evergreen abortion debate - and other fictions like races, species and planets etc. shift as we change our mind. So when you want to get serious about causes, you're going to be using a system. You're going to be using symbols and relations between symbols; you're going to define your symbols in terms of commonalities between events and matter that appear to repeat reliably. But it only works because we have so little thinking matter, so little data, so little input; it's the only way we can squeeze the enormity of the world into our tiny heads.
justinpombrio 10y ago
Take three principles: The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts. Call those other facts the sufficient reasons for said fact. The Principle of Non-Cyclic Reasoning: No fact is ever explained in terms of itself. That is, if you repeatedly take the "sufficient reasons" for a fact, you never get back to the original fact. The Principle of No Infinite Regress: There is no infinite chain of (distinct) sufficient reasons. That is, there is no infinite sequence F1, F2, F3, ... such that "F2 is one of the sufficient reasons for F1", "F3 is one of the sufficient reasons for F2", etc. You can't have all three: every directed graph whose nodes are facts and whose edges are "is one of the sufficient reasons for" either has (i) a dead-end, or (ii) a cycle, or (iii) an infinite chain. For those who believe the PSR: which do you give up? Are you ok with cycles, or with infinite regress?
- westoncb 10y ago
  I think your claim is true for a single moment in time, but if you look at the Principle of Sufficient Reason as only talking about the potential for facts to be explained in terms of other facts ("Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts")—then I think dead ends at single points in time are fine.
  - justinpombrio 10y ago
    And the graph of all potential facts? Which does that have: dead ends, cycles, or infinite chains?
    - westoncb 10y ago
      Well, that's one way you can approach it: look at the graph of potential facts instead—but what I was considering was an interpretation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason where dead ends are fine at a single point in time, which adds another dimension to the graph and leaves freedom for not having dead ends, cycles, or infinite chains (as long as 'dead end' is interpreted as a node not only without outgoing edges, but which cannot develop any at any future time).
cs702 10y ago
Kurt Gödel had something to say about this. He proved that no formal system that is consistent is capable of proving (i.e., providing a sufficient reason for) all statements made within the system, including whether the formal system is consistent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th... No matter how we choose to model the world, there will always be statements in our models for which we won't be able to find or discover a sufficient reason.
woodandsteel 10y ago
The PSR seems to assume that the reasons are understandable by human intelligence, and hence the human mind, like a god, has no limits. Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that our brains were designed for dealing with practical matter in living, and so some things, like the mind-body problem are simply beyond our understanding.

130 points by lainon 10y ago

manicmonad 10y ago

Why does this post exist?

lainon 10y ago
To show you the Principle of Sufficient Reason which might eventually trigger your intellectual curiosity
H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
Hacker News allows anything which might "stimulate intellectual curiosity".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sdenton4 10y ago
To encourage you to keep asking 'why' until you hit on something interesting...
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Like a 4 yr old
- jpttsn 10y ago
  I could argue that sometimes you won't find anything interesting, but that's probably interesting, defeating my example.
pizza 10y ago
For a sufficient reason.

baddox 10y ago

Ctrl-F "regress" For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.

ysleepy 10y ago
There are multiple paragraphs on it just above the Leibniz section (ctrl+f infinit). It comes down to, yes infinity (or any permutation (or DAG) of the universe of facts) for some facts. And yes that is not very satisfying. - But I think any techniques of cutting the chain at some point is arbitrary to some degree and not rigorous as an exploration of the problem.
vinceguidry 10y ago
I use the PSR all the time, I don't think that infinite regress causes any practical problems. I have adapted an ad-hoc set of primitives that I grounded on like five years ago. I call these the principles of context. They're hard to write about, believe me I've tried, but I've come to believe that any logical position can be analyzed and represented using contextual verses. I've identified six of them, topic, inverse, converse, reverse, obverse, whole. I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest. Any idea / position can be related to any other idea by passing them through intermediary ideas in these contextual verses. This is mostly what we do when we think. The PSR in this sense encapsulates the idea that there is no true discontinuities in the world, only mental blocks we impose upon ourselves. You solve the infinity problem simply by making infinity an idea that can be reached or gone through contextually. Regression itself can be seen as operating on the inverse of a particular idea.
- gknoy 10y ago
  > I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Sure. I'll start with an example. Take the United States. This is the topic, the verse in which the thing is the thing. The next step out is the inverse. What is the inverse of the United States? This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US. Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space. We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location. The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse. Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical. Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about. In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse. It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BucketSort 10y ago

I recently started studying Leibniz in my spare time. I found this book to be a delightful introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198718640 https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Intro...

foldr 10y ago

An interesting recent defense of the PSR: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/psr.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0010.007 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/psr.pdf?c=phimp;... The article itself has a rather flowery style, but there's a summary of the main argument and discussion of it here: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/della-rocca-on-psr.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/della-rocca-on-psr...

barrkel 10y ago

There's a real risk of storytelling with 'why'. You can construct a narrative that explains anything - this is probably the primary thing our consciousness does when communicating to other people - but there's no necessary relationship between the story and the world, and humans are great at believing the stories they tell themselves. Interesting events outside of abstract, simplified, theoretical scenarios normally have multiple probabilistic causes, and while the causes could be analyzed at multiple levels - atomic, mechanical, emotional, symbolic - only the atomic is real. The others are complex webs of stories we tell ourselves, stories using symbols that hide details because we cannot understand the world as it is, we can only cope with it in a simplified form. Only as a story. Our choice of symbols and abstraction level to tell our story creates artificial entities and forces to explain things. But the boundaries of these entities are a fiction. The world has no ontology; it's a giant bucket of interacting particles. The problem with getting serious with this kind of a principle is that it will break down. When you try and zoom in on the referents of the symbols, you'll find that they're a lot blurrier than your stories told you.

dorgo 10y ago
The different levels emerge from each other. And I don't think that we can be sure to have found the most basic one, or even to assume that there is a most basic level. But the emergent levels are not less 'real' than the more basic ones. There is more about emergent levels than just to hide details.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Different abstraction levels are normally different ways of talking about the same physical phenomena. That is, they are parallel; they don't stack. The most basic one is the one that doesn't exist in our heads and doesn't have a model with predictions to violate. What does "real" mean here? I'm using it as a proxy for truth, or perhaps better, accuracy in a model. That is, if a model of the world makes predictions about the world, the model is "real" to the degree that the predictions are correct. But all human models of the world have their limits, usually forced by our tiny little brains and meagre data input senses. We take something that we've decided to categorize, and create symbols to represent commonalities, and theorize relations between the symbols, and test these theories, and gradually refine a calculus of symbols that we can use to apply to the world, and the system works, in so far as the commonalities stay common, and the symbols aim squarely at the average of the referents. But it's not reality; it's all made up, like mathematics. It's just a story, it's all in our heads and in narratives we communicate with one another. The symbols don't stick; the world moves on. People change; humans are animals that evolve over time, and continue to evolve. We can't even decide what a human is - the evergreen abortion debate - and other fictions like races, species and planets etc. shift as we change our mind. So when you want to get serious about causes, you're going to be using a system. You're going to be using symbols and relations between symbols; you're going to define your symbols in terms of commonalities between events and matter that appear to repeat reliably. But it only works because we have so little thinking matter, so little data, so little input; it's the only way we can squeeze the enormity of the world into our tiny heads.

justinpombrio 10y ago

Take three principles: The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts. Call those other facts the sufficient reasons for said fact. The Principle of Non-Cyclic Reasoning: No fact is ever explained in terms of itself. That is, if you repeatedly take the "sufficient reasons" for a fact, you never get back to the original fact. The Principle of No Infinite Regress: There is no infinite chain of (distinct) sufficient reasons. That is, there is no infinite sequence F1, F2, F3, ... such that "F2 is one of the sufficient reasons for F1", "F3 is one of the sufficient reasons for F2", etc. You can't have all three: every directed graph whose nodes are facts and whose edges are "is one of the sufficient reasons for" either has (i) a dead-end, or (ii) a cycle, or (iii) an infinite chain. For those who believe the PSR: which do you give up? Are you ok with cycles, or with infinite regress?

westoncb 10y ago
I think your claim is true for a single moment in time, but if you look at the Principle of Sufficient Reason as only talking about the potential for facts to be explained in terms of other facts ("Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts")—then I think dead ends at single points in time are fine.
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  And the graph of all potential facts? Which does that have: dead ends, cycles, or infinite chains?
  - westoncb 10y ago
    Well, that's one way you can approach it: look at the graph of potential facts instead—but what I was considering was an interpretation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason where dead ends are fine at a single point in time, which adds another dimension to the graph and leaves freedom for not having dead ends, cycles, or infinite chains (as long as 'dead end' is interpreted as a node not only without outgoing edges, but which cannot develop any at any future time).

cs702 10y ago

Kurt Gödel had something to say about this. He proved that no formal system that is consistent is capable of proving (i.e., providing a sufficient reason for) all statements made within the system, including whether the formal system is consistent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th... No matter how we choose to model the world, there will always be statements in our models for which we won't be able to find or discover a sufficient reason.

woodandsteel 10y ago

The PSR seems to assume that the reasons are understandable by human intelligence, and hence the human mind, like a god, has no limits. Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that our brains were designed for dealing with practical matter in living, and so some things, like the mind-body problem are simply beyond our understanding.