**The Necessary Reality Argument**

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Hugh_Farey said:
AlNg, I’m not sure we’re using the word “unchanging” in the same way. Not all laws govern all situations, and at extremes they need careful modification. However, it is most certainly an axiom of standard physics that the laws as a whole are indeed universal and unchanging, and relate intimately with one another. The laws which govern particular situations, such as black holes, have governed them since before there were such things, and continue to do so.
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How do you define change? I see it as the act of becoming different.
 
lisaandlena said:
Now consider that our necessary cause may be just such a quantum system. It contains within itself every possible iteration, and every possible outcome.
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I don’t see how a quantum system in this universe could possibly contain within itself every possible iteration, and every possible outcome in other universes.
 
lisaandlena said:
Actually, it wouldn’t make any difference at all.
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I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I suggest that if a solipsist were beaten, she would wake up and quickly admit to a reality beyond her inner dream world.
 
lisaandlena said:
Neither is it my job to judge the behavior of others, for they all serve a purpose. Each in their own way. People tend to believe that a solipsist should indifferent. But to me, everyone is important, because everyone serves a purpose
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If you believe that there are others, then I don’t think that you qualify as a solipsist?
 
lisaandlena said:
it seems more logical to me, that what that quantum field gave rise to was consciousness.
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I don’t see why it would be necessary to postulate a quantum field giving rise to consciousness instead of having a classical field explain the process.
 
I like lisaandlena’s idea that a universal quantum field consists of every possible state in which the universe could be. Such an idea would not conflict, I think, with most of the “omni-” adjectives applied to God. Our understanding of change, then, would involve some kind of transition from one state to another, which (per the universal and unchanging laws of physics) is along definable lines, although for small changes these can include an element of randomness.

I have a set of just over 500 cards which I occasionally present to my students (of any age from very young to adult), on each of which which is a grid of 9 squares, each of which is either black or white. They represent lisaandlenas ‘quantum field’. Students are simply asked to ‘put them in order’. They usually take a while to decide where to begin, and by what logic they are attempting to arrange the cards, and no-one has ever bothered to complete the task (it is not necessary for the experiment and would take too long). The point is that interesting discussions then emerge as to whether any order is ‘better’ than another, and whether such an experiment helps us to understand our concept of the progress of the universe, time, purpose, and so on.

I’m not sure how this contributes to this discussion. I retried a while ago, so I haven’t used the cards for a while, so I thought I’d give them a ‘virtual’ airing!
 
Yes but the quantum field is realizing potential in the fact of your existence and whatever else is changing, because you are all a part of the same physical nature, just varying in form… A thing cannot be both pure potentiality and pure actuality mainly because pure potentiality by itself is nothing at all. Potentiality is simply what a being could be, and possibility is what could exist.

Also you said the quantum field expresses itself as every possibility, but then wouldn’t it not be the case that other minds distinct from your own would exist since they are also possibilities?

The only way that some possibilities wouldn’t be actualized is because the quantum field has a mind of its own and is purposely stopping some possibilities from being actualized.
 
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IWantGod said:
The Necessary Reality Argument
  1. Out of absolutely nothing comes nothing
  2. Therefore there must be something that absolutely and necessarily exists and is necessarily actual.
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Hi IWG,

The place to begin is to ask whether absolute nothingness is possible. But even granted that absolute nothingness is impossible, the most you can conclude from that is that something or other must exist. You still need to justify that a particular thing necessarily exists. After all, there are other possibilities. e.g. an eternal and necessarily existing series of contingent entities.
 
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iggypkrebsbach said:
necessarily existing series of contingent entities.
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If they are necessarily actual it makes no sense to describe their existence as being contingent, since they are necessarily actual, that is if by contingent you are talking about something moving from potential to actual through the power and existence of another being…
 
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I’m not sure that either the Hamilton or the canonical variables are either calculable or indeed relevant to this discussion. Sorry.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
I’m not sure that either the Hamilton or the canonical variables are either calculable or indeed relevant to this discussion. Sorry.
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How are you going to define the quantum field? Without the Hamiltonian and canonical variables your discussion of a quantum field is meaningless.
 
Hi IWG,

It is conceivable that what is necessarily actualized is a succession or series of contingent entities. The entities themselves are not eternal and only exist finitely and contingently. However, the series is eternal and necessary.
 
How is this assumption of unchanging governing laws different from assumptions on potentialities?
The only sets of potential states are those by which the governance is unchanging which is a far smaller set than that of all potentialities independent of necessary contingencies.
Typical state of affairs for spinning wheel materialist universal conceptions. Advertised as “greater than God” by hand waving Hamiltonian card tricks but actually a small closed set of perceptions.
 
That’s self contradictory. What you can say is that there is an actual infinite and thus no temporal beginning to their existence. But that is not the same thing as being necessarily actual. it makes no sense to say that the series is necessarily actual if it fundamentally made up of dependent beings that move from potential to actual. The series is nothing at all without its parts because it is its parts and they are all dependent beings. Given that fact, there is nothing in the series to distinguish it as ontological necessary and so its meaningless to describe the whole series in that way. .You are just adding the word necessary even though it has no meaningful relevance to the fundamental nature of the series.
 
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Perhaps it would be clearer not to use phrase ‘quantum field’. I postulate that the totality of actualised reality consists of a very large number of states, comprising every possible state that actualised reality could possibly be in. If these aren’t quantum fields, then we can call them something else. It is philosophically meaningful to make this postulate, and philosophically meaningful to try to understand how an individual’s awareness of coherent progress through some of these these states might occur, and how the awarenesses of a whole group of individuals (human and not) might themselves cohere to form an entity we call the physical universe.

Of course this model does not address how these states arose, or what rules govern an individual’s awareness of progress through them, or how those rules arose. If we are not to get stuck in an infinite regression loop, we must postulate some factor external to time and space, which must therefore be unchanging. This is IwantGod’s “necessary non-physical cause of reality”.

But is it necessarily intelligent?

I’m sorry I keep coming back to the intelligence thing, but it seems to me that it is possible to accept all sorts of ways which the universe began or functions, involving universal power and predictive capability, without calling any of them God. To make any of them relevant to a Catholic forum, we need to demonstrate that they necessarily involve purpose or intent, and I’m not sure that anybody except IwantGod has attempted that, and I don’t think that IwantGod has succeeded.
 
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