Why Couldn't the Universe Exist Without a Cause?

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JuanFlorencio said:
Those are the physical properties that I mentioned, and apparently you thought they were prescriptive properties.
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No, I’m wondering why the fact that it is possible to describe causal events has any bearing on our ability to describe non-causal events
 
JapaneseKappa said:
No, I’m wondering why the fact that it is possible to describe causal events has any bearing on our ability to describe non-causal events
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How could we? We would need to interact with the entities that are involved in those hypothetical events; but interaction involves causality, and if those entities have nothing to do with it, we can’t say anything about them.
 
JuanFlorencio said:
How could we? We would need to interact with the entities that are involved in those hypothetical events; but interaction involves causality, and if those entities have nothing to do with it, we can’t say anything about them.
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So you are saying that you would not be able to know whether or not that other universe was caused since we (by the terms of the thought experiment) are not allowed to interact with it and therefore can’t say anything about it?
 
Peter_Plato said:
I suspect this marks the demarcation line between rational beings and sentient beings. Rational beings – the kind that humans purportedly are – are not merely interested in being “conditioned” to respond by the consistency of the causal interactions in the physical world, but are concerned with the explanations behind those interactions – the reasons why things happen as they do.

What inocente seems to be arguing is that comprehending the underlying principles behind change and why things are the way they are, generally speaking, is not important to rational beings. Rather – it seems to be his inference – rational beings are merely concerned with being properly conditioned.

While I have no doubt that some, if not many, human beings are merely concerned to respond to stimuli appropriately and have no inclination to understand why things occur the way they do. This means the intellectual endeavor of discerning explanations for why things are the way they are is not of interest to these individuals. Again, though that indicates they have risen only to the level of sentience and not – yet, anyway – to the level of rationality since they view intellection purely as conditioning and not related in any way to uncovering the actual workings of reality in terms of explanatory causality.

This is why it is frustrating discussing such issues with sentient – as opposed to intelligent – beings: the capacity to grasp the points being made seems beyond them. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to suppose they are incapable of comprehending to the level required, but they certainly show a reticence to use key powers of the mind in a consistent way, opting to fall back onto the force of what is presented to the senses and imagination rather than trust their own ability to think and reason.
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You make me think.
 
JapaneseKappa said:
So you are saying that you would not be able to know whether or not that other universe was caused since we (by the terms of the thought experiment) are not allowed to interact with it and therefore can’t say anything about it?
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Not exactly. I just say that we would not be able to know about the existence of such world. That is it. But if you say that in it every entity comes into existence and vanishes randomly (you are prescribing it), then I will say that each of those entities is contingent.
 
JuanFlorencio said:
Not exactly. I just say that we would not be able to know about the existence of such world. That is it. But if you say that in it every entity comes into existence and vanishes randomly (you are prescribing it), then I will say that each of those entities is contingent.
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That’s ok, but you have to be very careful, since it’s easy to morph the philosophical “contingent” into the colloquial “contingent on” and thereby mislead ourselves.

Returning to your original objection, though, where you say that the universe can have no physics. I have occasionally heard people with a purely philosophical background have a difficult time thinking about what it means to “have a physics.” In our universe, we think of physics (loosely speaking) as the math that describes how stuff changes over time. That kind of definition, while imprecise, is not far off. With that general understanding, we could look at this other universe where everything is going crazy, and say “there is no nice mathematical way to describe this universe, so it can’t have a physics!”

However, that’s not quite right because it puts too much emphasis on the “math” bit. What really matters is our ability to describe how the universe evolves with time, and in this case we have done so by describing it as “random, non-causal.” That means that if we were given the state of the universe at one instant, we would be completely unable to exactly determine how things would evolve from then on. However if it *were *possible for us to investigate that world, we *might *be able to describe that randomness to a certain extent (e.g. maybe there are certain classes of things that never randomly pop into existence, or maybe some things appear with higher probabilities than others.) We still wouldn’t be able to discover any sort of physics-as-we-know-it, or be able to know what would happen next, but there could still be regularities within the randomness.
 
JapaneseKappa said:
That’s ok, but you have to be very careful, since it’s easy to morph the philosophical “contingent” into the colloquial “contingent on” and thereby mislead ourselves.

Returning to your original objection, though, where you say that the universe can have no physics. I have occasionally heard people with a purely philosophical background have a difficult time thinking about what it means to “have a physics.” In our universe, we think of physics (loosely speaking) as the math that describes how stuff changes over time. That kind of definition, while imprecise, is not far off. With that general understanding, we could look at this other universe where everything is going crazy, and say “there is no nice mathematical way to describe this universe, so it can’t have a physics!”

However, that’s not quite right because it puts too much emphasis on the “math” bit. What really matters is our ability to describe how the universe evolves with time, and in this case we have done so by describing it as “random, non-causal.” That means that if we were given the state of the universe at one instant, we would be completely unable to exactly determine how things would evolve from then on. However if it *were *possible for us to investigate that world, we *might *be able to describe that randomness to a certain extent (e.g. maybe there are certain classes of things that never randomly pop into existence, or maybe some things appear with higher probabilities than others.) We still wouldn’t be able to discover any sort of physics-as-we-know-it, or be able to know what would happen next, but there could still be regularities within the randomness.
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Well, I am using the term “contingent” in its philosophical meaning, and I am not aware of any other, JK.

When I say that there could be no physics for your hypothetical world, I mean something absolutely fundamental: we would not be able to observe it, because observation is a kind of interaction (causality) and there is no interaction in that world. To describe a possible change we would need to observe it, and measure it. But to measure is to compare, or to observe the effect that one thing (the thing measured) produces on another (the measuring instrument); and as that doesn’t happen in your world, there can be no physics of it. Could we describe the changes without mathematics; qualitatively, so to say? No, we could not. Language refers to our world, and if everything in your hypothetical world is fundamentally different from ours, we could say nothing at all about it. Therefore, no physics about that world would be possible. We cannot even call it a “world”, so much the less a “universe”.
 
JuanFlorencio said:
Well, I am using the term “contingent” in its philosophical meaning, and I am not aware of any other, JK.

When I say that there could be no physics for your hypothetical world, I mean something absolutely fundamental: we would not be able to observe it, because observation is a kind of interaction (causality) and there is no interaction in that world. To describe a possible change we would need to observe it, and measure it. But to measure is to compare, or to observe the effect that one thing (the thing measured) produces on another (the measuring instrument); and as that doesn’t happen in your world, there can be no physics of it. Could we describe the changes without mathematics; qualitatively, so to say? No, we could not. Language refers to our world, and if everything in your hypothetical world is fundamentally different from ours, we could say nothing at all about it. Therefore, no physics about that world would be possible. We cannot even call it a “world”, so much the less a “universe”.
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We can, possibly – albeit superficially – “imagine" such world, but I think that you are correct that any experience or observation of it would require some consistent interaction or causality, at some level, to ground or underwrite the possibility of such experience. Absent that, there is no way of even determining that such a “hypothetical" world is even hypothetically possible.
 
JuanFlorencio said:
Well, I am using the term “contingent” in its philosophical meaning, and I am not aware of any other, JK.
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In my understanding “contingent” in philosophy means “logically possible for it to be otherwise.” Colloquially, “contingent” is almost always followed by “on” and used to identify causes that could be used to actually make it otherwise. The things in this universe would be contingent, but not on anything.
 
Peter_Plato said:
We can, possibly – albeit superficially – “imagine" such world, but I think that you are correct that any experience or observation of it would require some consistent interaction or causality, at some level, to ground or underwrite the possibility of such experience. Absent that, there is no way of even determining that such a “hypothetical" world is even hypothetically possible.
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I would have thought that those people with faith in metaphysics would have said that they hold the keys to determining the existence of such a world.
 
PRmerger said:
Excellent article.

Bible Alone Christians paralleled to Empiricism Alone Atheists. 👍

Both based on Faith Alone.

“Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.”
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For the benefit of those who will not bother to read the article, (names will go unmentioned,) the key point is made here.
But what does this have to do with sola scriptura? The idea is this. Summarizing an early Jesuit critique of the Protestant doctrine, Feyerabend notes that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpret scripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, and the like.
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Feser elaborates on this point quite extensively, but another way of seeing the result is to simply exchange the word “scripture” in the above passage, with the word “experiences.” Thus:
…(a) experiences alone can never tell you what counts as an experience, (b) experiences alone cannot tell you how to interpret experiences, and (c) experiences alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences [or meaning or significance] from experiences, applying them to new circumstances, and the like.
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Clearly, there is always a “squirreling in” of other processes and intellection or reasoning (akin to a magisterium) in order to make any sense at all of experiences – which is, I think, a key point made in the article, but not the only one.
 
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