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.
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.
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”.
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.
Mo has a very interesting take on philosophy. It’s all got to do with language in the sense of what you say when you actually mean something else, but actually mean that you mean what you say but differently, actually as the opposite but an ironic version of that, so that in the end you’re always saying precisely what you didn’t say, except… I think it’s from reading so much Wittgenstein that he gets this skill.
I was actually thinking that he might go into the thought (common in quantum physics) that things can pop into reality causelessly. That is provably impossible (to logical minds anyway).
The lightning strike is only a cause to what it is a cause of.
But you’d be saying that a lightning strike was cause to a fire that it didn’t cause because it could have caused it.