8 ms·

If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" In philosophy, there is a

by jawns 4y ago

If you like the question of "Why does anything exist?" then an obvious next question is: "What's stopping things from not existing?" 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).

hydrolox 4y ago
but isn't the problem that you could get stuck in an infinite contingency loop? i.e if you pick God, what if God is contingent and so on. Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary.
- caloriesdont 4y ago
  >Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary. 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=TheUnapologeticApologists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX79xXgi44o&ab_channel=TheUn...
- logicchop 4y ago
  That is the whole point of God as an explanation. God is where the buck stops on contingency. God is necessary.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    It seems to me that you have created a one-time exception that gets yourself out of the infinite regress that this line of thought leads to. All it does, however, is to raise another question to replace the original one: why is God necessary?
    - logicchop 4y ago
      I think it does exactly that, which is supposes a one-time exception to get out of infinite regress. But, I mean, if God exists, that's how it is. So the story doesn't seem incoherent. As for asking why is God necessary, I think that is a misplaced question. God's necessity wouldn't derive from something else, because then it wouldn't be necessity (just another derived contingency). The starting point is that something necessary has to be the basis of the rest of the stuff, that's it.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        Not being obviously incoherent is not an argument for that belief being correct; it is merely the very minimum a belief has to achieve to avoid being summarily dismissed for being irrational. 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.
teolandon 4y ago
Can you give an example of a "necessary" thing? You brought up the square having four sides thing, but that's not about existence. Furthermore, why does a contingent thing have to depend on a necessary thing?
- jawns 4y ago
  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents a brief overview that addresses some of the questions you raise: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
  - teolandon 4y ago
    No it does not.
- logicchop 4y ago
  Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question (e.g., "ok, why Y?").
caloriesdont 4y ago
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set). 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. https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHEIA-20 https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHEIA-20
- packetlost 4y ago
  I personally think that time, and all dimensions (including the 3 that we typically thing of as "space") are simply caused by a few axioms: there is the concept of "something else" (that is, 1 != 0, there is at least 2 possibilities); there is "something" of which can we in at least 1 of those 2 possible states, but not both; there is something to a way in which the answer to the question of state can be known; there is cause -> effect. When taken to the infinite complexity, you end up with coalescing densities of state all of which cannot be simultaneously true and there fore
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  Check out Śūnyatā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 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.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
Thank you for taking the time to write that and explain the concepts so clearly. 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?
- caloriesdont 4y ago
  > Specifically, if the universe is everything that there ever is or ever will be, how can it be contingent upon something external to itself? 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.
  - cpr 4y ago
    It can't be contingent on something necessary within itself. Within means being part of the contingency.
    - caloriesdont 4y ago
      Hmm, I don't see the problem - Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation. What's the issue?
      - andyjohnson0 4y ago
        > Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation. How do you know this?
        smitty1e 4y ago
        How do we know anything, and how do we deem the human mind a suitable tool for ascertaining the result? At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.
jiggawatts 4y ago
> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set). 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.
- arrow7000 4y ago
  Diaspora is an extraordinary book and I second your recommendation, but I didn't think of that as one of its primary themes. Although it does fit.
otikik 4y ago
> But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary 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.
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  Everything we can observe in this universe has a cause and effect. The first cause is God.
  - tmountain 4y ago
    Theology fits comfortably with our intuitive perception of time, but that doesn’t make it the definitive answer.
    - logicchop 4y ago
      It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The "sustainment" question is different from the "causal" question. Causal questions are typically temporal and past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now", always.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    If the physical universe always existed, then it needed no creator. If it was created, then the question moves back a step: where'd the creator come from? And we wind up with the same mystery.
  - otikik 4y ago
    This has been discussed many times before. 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.
pdonis 4y ago
> would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or contingent? Neither. "Necessary" and "contingent" apply to properties, but existence is not a property. It's a quantifier.

by jawns 4y ago

hydrolox 4y ago

but isn't the problem that you could get stuck in an infinite contingency loop? i.e if you pick God, what if God is contingent and so on. Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary.

caloriesdont 4y ago
>Sure you can say something is required but it's rather arbitrary. 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=TheUnapologeticApologists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX79xXgi44o&ab_channel=TheUn...
logicchop 4y ago
That is the whole point of God as an explanation. God is where the buck stops on contingency. God is necessary.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  It seems to me that you have created a one-time exception that gets yourself out of the infinite regress that this line of thought leads to. All it does, however, is to raise another question to replace the original one: why is God necessary?
  - logicchop 4y ago
    I think it does exactly that, which is supposes a one-time exception to get out of infinite regress. But, I mean, if God exists, that's how it is. So the story doesn't seem incoherent. As for asking why is God necessary, I think that is a misplaced question. God's necessity wouldn't derive from something else, because then it wouldn't be necessity (just another derived contingency). The starting point is that something necessary has to be the basis of the rest of the stuff, that's it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      Not being obviously incoherent is not an argument for that belief being correct; it is merely the very minimum a belief has to achieve to avoid being summarily dismissed for being irrational. 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.

teolandon 4y ago

Can you give an example of a "necessary" thing? You brought up the square having four sides thing, but that's not about existence. Furthermore, why does a contingent thing have to depend on a necessary thing?

jawns 4y ago
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents a brief overview that addresses some of the questions you raise: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
- teolandon 4y ago
  No it does not.
logicchop 4y ago
Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question (e.g., "ok, why Y?").

caloriesdont 4y ago

> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set). 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. https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHEIA-20 https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHEIA-20

packetlost 4y ago
I personally think that time, and all dimensions (including the 3 that we typically thing of as "space") are simply caused by a few axioms: there is the concept of "something else" (that is, 1 != 0, there is at least 2 possibilities); there is "something" of which can we in at least 1 of those 2 possible states, but not both; there is something to a way in which the answer to the question of state can be known; there is cause -> effect. When taken to the infinite complexity, you end up with coalescing densities of state all of which cannot be simultaneously true and there fore
kordlessagain 4y ago
Check out Śūnyatā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 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.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

Thank you for taking the time to write that and explain the concepts so clearly. 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?

caloriesdont 4y ago
> Specifically, if the universe is everything that there ever is or ever will be, how can it be contingent upon something external to itself? 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.
- cpr 4y ago
  It can't be contingent on something necessary within itself. Within means being part of the contingency.
  - caloriesdont 4y ago
    Hmm, I don't see the problem - Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation. What's the issue?
    - andyjohnson0 4y ago
      > Everything in the universe is contingent, except for one thing which is necessary. Everything relies on that necessary foundation. How do you know this?
      - smitty1e 4y ago
        How do we know anything, and how do we deem the human mind a suitable tool for ascertaining the result? At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.

jiggawatts 4y ago

> our universe requires a "sustaining cause" (as with a picture on a TV set). 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.

arrow7000 4y ago
Diaspora is an extraordinary book and I second your recommendation, but I didn't think of that as one of its primary themes. Although it does fit.

otikik 4y ago

> But if our universe is contingent, then it must be contingent upon something that is necessary 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.

eldenwrong 4y ago
Everything we can observe in this universe has a cause and effect. The first cause is God.
- tmountain 4y ago
  Theology fits comfortably with our intuitive perception of time, but that doesn’t make it the definitive answer.
  - logicchop 4y ago
    It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The "sustainment" question is different from the "causal" question. Causal questions are typically temporal and past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now", always.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  If the physical universe always existed, then it needed no creator. If it was created, then the question moves back a step: where'd the creator come from? And we wind up with the same mystery.
- otikik 4y ago
  This has been discussed many times before. 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.

pdonis 4y ago

> would you say that our universe's existence is necessary or contingent? Neither. "Necessary" and "contingent" apply to properties, but existence is not a property. It's a quantifier.