How do you know that there was a world war? Were You there?
Only to those who are not aware of the strawman at the party.
As I said very explicitly in the OP, the first premise was the issue. Nothing else. And that’s clear from the OP. Perhaps you could read it again, more carefully.
Very well done, the whole poem that is. Holds a consistant tone, which is actually rather mild almost World weary (or slightly withering), and that’s not Always easy to do in verse.
Anyway I took this one part of the set vs. members issue, nicely handled also, and it seem to me it implies an eternal universe, or?
Myself, I’ve often been skeptical about deduction in regards to things at the edge of our knowledge, and in general I Think it is often misused. That said, I Think one can deduce that if there is no cause for the universe it is eternal. Not because we know what rules apply to sets, but because of the members - given what you seem to accept, that members have causes.
Hm, though on second thought if the set can cause it’s members to exist, once it is in existence, then one can’t deduce this…
Must mull.
Third thought, if the set can cause it’s members, this would seem to make the set something more than the sum of its members. Or things can cause themselves.
And as I said, the first wasn’t the issue, but the second. The first is merely an alluring strawman.
Perhaps you could read more carefully the reasoning that I gave.
That’s true of course. But then there are lots of folks who were. My father for example. Folks who can attest to its existence. And don’t even get started on the mountains of empirical evidence out there. Of course one can always fall back on the idea that nothing really exist at all except what we happen to think [believe] does. So even though I was a soldier in the Vietnam war, it may not have actually happened at all. I merely think that I was a soldier in it.
But I am reasonably certain that none of us were there when the cosmos [existence] began. And though there does exist much empirical evidence that can be made to line up with what most physicists now construe to be the laws of nature [going back to what most call the big bang], no one is able to say definitively what the ontological truth is. Well, other than those who claim that by accepting the definitions and the meanings they give to the words they use in their arguments we have.
Okay, for some, maybe I should have said, “it’s my argument all the way down”.
Thanks. It needs some fine tuning. Some of the lines are inconsistent in the number of syllabus, or meter, or whatever it is that poets go by. Some of the rhymes could be cleaner, and better. I tried to copy the rhyme structure of Poe’s The Raven, which I think has a hypnotic and lyrical feel.
I think I have an aesthetic bias toward an eternal universe, one that expands and contracts, or pulses. Something like the cosmology of an eternal recurrence of the same. It’s not intuitively obvious to me that you can’t have a loop in causation. An eternal loop. It’s also not intuitively obvious to me that there has to be a first cause, just because.
I don’t think I’d be on-board with the idea that the set of ‘all things’ can cause any particular ‘thing’.
So that would be a kind of ‘yes’. As far as the first cause - I Think that seems intuitively false to me - and some of the things I consider intuitively true or possible are pretty damn weird. Not that the fact that my intuition is wide ranging is evidence of sométhing. It would seem to me, in any case, that there was a possibility, even Before that first cause. And that’s something.
It bothers me. I can see something being more than the sum of its parts, but to say it caused all of its parts seems like something other than an emergent property - which ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ seems like a way of saying. The parts seems to cause the emergent properties or at least exist prior to them.
though this is all the kind of speculative deduction I am skeptical about. I mean, I doubt I would have come up with some of quantum mechanics, in fact I would likely have ruled some of it out via deduction.
P1 and p2 are axioms that cannot be justified logically actually.
I think it’s perfectly fine to say that some things that exist don’t have causes, and to build a model/philosophy of the universe around that. And then some other people say that everything that begins to exist does have a cause, and they build a model/philosophy of the universe around that. The people in the middle try to figure out which model makes more sense, and which one describes the universe they see around them.
Is it a shame that there’s no argument that everything that begins to exist has a cause? Sort of. It really does seem to have a high intuitive value for most of us. Nobody attempting to understand the universe, religiously, philosophically, or scientifically, is encountering things and assuming they can be for no reason.
If you do deny the intuitive value of P1, though, there’s simplicity to consider too. We all know that some things that begin to exist have a cause. Heck, I think I could go so far as to say that everything we’ve ever heard of that begins to exist has a cause. That in itself is a pretty damn strong inductive case that all things that begin to exist have causes, and it’s the premise we ought to prefer in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Could it be otherwise? Sure. But the burden of proof is going to be on somebody that wants to claim there are things beginning to exist for no reason out there somewhere.
Every single one of them is. Every. single. one.
Religious people have god; God’s just there, chilling, always. Philosophers have laws of logic; just there, chilling, always have been. Even scientists may have areas that aren’t open to question or exploration, like external world realism as a base assumption.
To your point, it’s really not. Nothing that you can point to is anything like the universe. You can’t build an inductive argument from X-class of things and then apply it to Y-class of things, when there’s no connection. They are different in kind. And that’s because----here’s the point of the argument----the universe is not a ‘thing’, which the argument requires we treat it as. Logically speaking, the universe is the set of all things.
The idea that “nothing brought it about” (aka “uncaused”) is an absurd notion given by those who either cannot think or simply don’t want to. If anything in the universe is uncaused, then the entire universe is completely unpredictable and thus all thought is completely pointless and Science is completely meaningless. A cause is merely a description of the necessary state in order to bring about a particular effect. If you can get the effect without regard to the prior state, the effect can and will show up anywhere at any time without regard to size, shape, interval, or anything. The entire universe would be pure chaos with no discernible entities within it. There would be no universe nor you to be talking about it.
Yeesssss, of course… why didn’t I think of that!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL5ZVljj4vg[/youtube]
I’m afraid that’s wrong. Every sentence. Let me know if there’s one in particular you want to discuss.
Do you mean that you want to discuss your mistakes in assessment? Well, okay.
I’ll give you that the first statement uses the word “cause” in the rhetorical sense (due to a prior discussion I was having), but in this sense (to be pedantic) should really have referred to the prior state rather than the description of that state. But that falls into the category of “you know what I meant”.
- A cause is not a description.
- A cause needn’t have necessitated its effect.
- A cause is not a state, it’s a particular thing, or combination of things.
All of these points are analytical; that is, true just by the concept ‘cause’, and not in need of any further justification.
- A cause does not need to necessitate its effect to be the cause of it. Read that again, please.
- A ‘thing’ is not a ‘state’. Look in the fucking dictionary, please.
Anyways, good luck to you. I’m afraid we operate on different wave lengths, and that we’re not likely to benefit each other by continuing.
That is entirely illogical.
Look up “cause” in the dictionary.
“Cause” as a term implies “effect”. It has no other meaning than “that which leads to an effect”.
There are no discrete objects, only states. So every thing is a state.
Perhaps you’re entirely new to physics, in that case your platonic belief is forgivable.
You completely misread what I wrote. I said that there are indeterministic causes. That’s ordinary language. Read what I fucking said again.
Read the fucking dictionary, please.
You were the one who chose to be pedantic.
And FC is correct and read what you “fucking wrote” and the dictionary properly.
You never said anything about “indeterministic causes” (whatever that means).
- It’s not pedantic to require others to be clear about the fucking dictionary.
- FC thought I was saying something that had, literally, nothing to do with what I said.
- Goodday.