Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

apeiron

This sounds like a contradiction if you have just been demanding that concepts be crisply demonstrable. We don't just to get to make things up. We have to show that they work.

Well yes, but we were talking about a philosophical approach to answering basic questions about reality. So instead of classical chinese or Navajo - languages which work in some particular historical social context - we are considering what is right as philosophy.

Talking about everyday usages of words or habits of grammar is a diversion here.

You are just making rhetorical and emotional arguments, not reasoned ones.

What you call compulsive, others could call systematic. What you call denying the evidence of our senses and awareness, others would see as properly examining it.

No one is forcing you to do metaphysics here. But if you want to force others to stop, you have to produce some actual reasons why it is bad (in other words, you have to do some metaphysics to counter metaphysics, ah well ).

OK, you believe the Eastern way is not to strive in a false and individualistic way but to dissolve back into the unity of the cosmos. Yeah, been there, done that. As a kid I had zen (and judo) training from a Buddhist monk. But I sat there thinking this is stupid letting mosquitoes whine their way towards me in circles and just trying to "omm" their biting presence away.

So I'm happy that it is a notion of life that appeals to some - just like any faith. However I had no problem making a different choice.

Besides, you know from eastern philosophy such as the I Ching and dependent co-arising just how close the parallels are to the kind of systems causality I am talking about here.

The real difference lies in the question of whether what emerges also subsides, or whether what emerges is set upon an ever rising path. The Eastern answer, on the whole, is that what is "right" is a return to the apeiron, the vague. While the Western answer is that individuals should be self-actualising Nietzchian supermen that transcend all limits.

Modern big bang cosmology suggests the real ontological answer here is "both". The universe emerges as a crisp act of individuation - a definite something where there was once only a vaguer "nothing". And yet also the ultimate fate of the universe is the cold fizzle of an infinitely large heat death. A very crisp outcome, yet one that is actually as near a "return to nothingness" as possible. We will all be very zen in the long run.

Now we shouldn't entangle the beliefs of faith with the answers of metaphysics. But you can appreciate that even your faith-based criticisms are not accurate about what has actually been said.

My zen master was rather more easy going I guess. He saw the mediation wasn't going down so well so he stuck with the judo. (He could have been a complete fake of course, his life story was a little too fantastic.)

But anyway, in case you are unfamiliar with some of the parallels that exist in the world's various philosophies, here is one passage (sorry, I can't remember where I cut this from though)...

And some more bits and pieces just to show that this is a recurring theme. Tao, Brahman, Apeiron, Hyle, Quintessence, Bosenazelo, Hunabku, Manitu, Orenda, Wakonda, Wakan, Mana, Ain Soph, Central Monad, there are countless words that dance around a definition of the formless fundamental essence...

ThomasT

Ok, so for us pedestrians, can you or bohm2 (et al.) synopsize what you think is the best approach in as few words as possible?

The way I see it, the general approach of science (ie., somewhat controlled observation) with philosophy sorting out the meanings of various mathematical expressions designed to describe and predict scientific observations is a pretty good approach.

And from that stuff one can make objectively demonstrated, statistically based inferences/assumptions about more fundamental, ie., underlying, reality.

And of course I don't have any response to the question of why there's anything at all.

chiro

One thing to consider that in order to define anything you need to also define its complement.

This might be used to explain why something exists by relating to what else would exist if it wasn't that 'something'.

ThomasT

I'm not sure I understand. Suppose I define 'tree'. What's the complement of that?

Well, I think that defining or explaining why anything at all exists leads eventually to an objectively nondemonstrable assumption. We can, for example, assume that there are fundamental dynamical mechanisms/laws, whatever. But where/how did those originate? It's, imho, an unanswerable question.

chiro

You describe it in the context of a notion of 'everything'. Doing this helps you relate concepts to one another by talking about them in the context of something synonymous with 'all that can be'.

Well again it can help by considering what else is 'possible' because the comparison to other such things can give the impetus for hypothesizing why something is 'as it is'.

As an example with cosmology we know from research that if the constants were even slightly different we wouldn't have the kind of universe that we have now in its current form.

This is an example of what I mean: you consider what "isn't" observed and compare it to situations that 'could be possible' in the context of some universal domain.

The actual universal domain is not trivial, but we can start with domains that are small enough to be able to consider with our minds yet large enough that they provide enough variability to consider enough of a general set of circumstances with enough variation.

What I mean by this is, is that this thinking gives us a reference point. When we discover something, what happens is that we study something, get relationships (maybe even down to a specific mathematical form) and then from that we wonder 'why is this the way it is?' by trying to consider what we have studied in a more or less isolated state.

By considering what we have found against a more general class of cases, what we do then is to say "Well this is the way it is and upon comparing it to these other cases, it makes sense that this is the way it is due to blah blah blah"

apeiron

If you are talking about "what is philosophy's method" I don't see it as any different from science in essence. You observe. You generalise. You then see with more clarity and can go round the loop again.

So philosophy is the rough cut. And also the exploration of a bunch of approaches. Then science is the refinement of some particular model that is useful in some way. After that comes technology, application.

So far as the particular point about the use of language goes, everyday language is obviously going to be hit and miss when it comes to talk about fundamental reality. It would be the extremely rough cut.

Philosophy would then focus on the rational clarification of useful concepts, and science would pair those concepts with a prescribed method of measurement (a way to quantify a qualitative term).

So metaphysics invented pairings like discrete~continuous, stasis~flux, chance~necessity and many more. Science then uses them. Vague~crisp just seems to be one of the less familiar dichotomies.

apeiron

But a tree is not metaphysically fundamental. And indeed, we are proving that fact precisely because we can't think of "not-tree" as indicating anything in particular. Pretty much everything is not-tree.

So this is the power of the method. Only a limited number of complementaries function as complementary. And it is why it was possible for the ancient greeks to make so much rapid progress once they got the knack of what to do. (Socratic dialog, law of the excluded middle, the basics of philosophical thought.)

alt

Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

Indeed. And after 194 posts and a kaleidoscope of thought, thinkers (here and referenced) etc, it does not seem we are one jot closer to any semblance of an answer to the question posed in the OP title.

The aporia remains - looms larger in fact ..

apeiron

This paper is good on the parallels between the ancient Eastern and Western views on cosmo-genesis.

Revisiting Ancient Linguistic Worldview: East vs. West; Dao vs. Logos Jia Yuxin Jia Xuelai
http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/200...a%20Xuelai.pdf

I disagree with some of the detail of their characterisation of the Apeiron here. The Dao also has some critical differences in that while Lao Zi stresses the way things remain co-mingled (as in Yin-Yang), the key to Anaximander's cosmo-genesis is the fact that the polarities are moved far apart (and then mix).

However, the idea that the Dao is followed by the Name is indeed something crucial missing from Anaximander's scheme (and was somewhat corrected by Heraclitus' equivalent of Dao~Name in his dichotomy of Primal Fire~Logos).

In modern language, this translates into local degrees of freedom and global constraints. Or initiating conditions and boundary conditions.

And it is a way to think about a self-causing universe - one where in the beginning there is just naked potential (dao, primal fire, apeiron, unlimited degrees of freedom), and then design is called forth from that potential by the system's own future. The Name, Logos, or other terms to describe the future crisp limits of the system which can act backwards/downward as final/formal cause.

This can easily sound mystical. But quantum cosmology is already leading us down this very path of thought. If we talk of a quantum event, its causes are contextual, nonlocal, even retrocausal.

So if we view the big bang as a quantum event, and that this was also some form of collapse of a potential (the "collapse" being the obvious contentious issue in current quantum metaphysics), then what caused the collapse? It has to be in the future of the event. The universe has to be retrospectively fixed in some sense by what it became.

It is a grand sum over histories view in other words. Anything was possible. But just one thing was the least mean path of that infinite potential. And so you have a structured universe bootstrapping out of raw indeterminacy.

jambaugh

That is because the question is ill posed. "Why" questions have three contexts, causality, explanatory and purpose:
"Why did the bridge collapse?"
"Why does lead become superconducting below a critical temperature?"
"Why did you slap me?"

1. You can't invoke causality outside the domain of existence and indeed doing so is a category error. Causation links events. Existence isn't an event it is a collection of events. Causality works within this collection not upon this collection.
   
2. It may be instructive to try to explain the form of existence such as is done in physics but there are limits there.
   
3. Questions of purpose per-suppose a purpose holder. If I step on a rake in the dark and ask "why did you hit me" I'm asking the purpose behind an accidental event. Before resolving purpose one must resolve the intentional vs accidental nature of the subject. Typically I see questions of purpose in attempts to deduce the existence of God. "There must be a God, else why do we exist?" but these are circular arguments.
   Premise:The "why" question is valid i.e. there is a God ; Conclusion:There is a God. (Personally I am agnostic in that I believe this is a question of faith not deduction.)

I think it is instructive to consider for the moment the mundane topic of interval notation in mathematics. I can represent a bound interval [itex] a \le x < b[/itex] with the notation [itex] x\in [a,b)[/itex]. We then extend this bit of language to include unbounded sets by defining a symbol [itex]\infty[/itex] as a place-holder for the absence of a bound. [itex] x \in [a,\infty) \equiv a\le x < \infty \equiv a \le x[/itex].
And even express: [itex]x \in \mathbb{R} =(-\infty,\infty)[/itex].
But we may then make the error of objectifying this null symbol as if it represented an actual real number. "There must be a number [itex]\infty[/itex]"! This symbol isn't something (in this context) it is a place-holder for nothing when we use a language format which requires this be made explicit.

Now in mathematics we can of course invent infinite "numbers" and treat them as object. But math is a game of mental construction, not in and of itself a study of nature.

We must be careful about similar constructs in philosophy "first cause" "why everything?" etc. should be parsed for their implicit assumptions before we attempt resolving answers.

wuliheron

Apeiron, I think you have the wrong idea. I am a Pragmatic Taoist, not a mystic, and I would never bring up mysticism in a science forum without expressly calling attention to the fact it is mysticism. Pragmatic Taoism has a lot in common with Philosophical Taoism and Zen, but without all the mysticism. Its not that I have anything against mysticism, it's just not who I am. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Zen, but that's not my problem and it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

When I talk about something being demonstrable I mean that quite literally. A Zen master hitting a student over the head is attempting to prompt them to become more spontaneous. Enlightenment or some sort of mystical experience might be their ultimate goal, but such things are only achieved through spontaneity and, at best, the master can help the student to open the door.

For me spontaneity is the key to awareness which is necessary for discerning what is demonstrable. Its no more mystical then the fact you are more aware and capable of reasoning when awake then asleep. I'd suggest you re-read my post and ask your questions again.

apeiron

This is a view of epistemology which I believe is quite wrong. All perception is modelling, never direct experience. The zen idea is mystical for claiming otherwise. You can whack yourself over the head as much as you please, but it won't change things.

apeiron

Aristotle said there are four "why" questions. What you call "causality" here is just effective cause. There is also material, formal and final cause in his analysis. So a bridge exist because someone made it, it is made of something, it has some shape, and there was a reason that caused it to get made.

Reductionists want to reduce all these sources of causality to just the question of effective cause. Though they also need some kind of local material stuff - a substance - that can carry this effective cause as a property or force.

The "why anything" question then leads to a further problem of first cause - primum movens. And a reductionist will read this as the call to find some ultimate kind of effective cause (such as a creating god).

But the point of having a more complex model of causality such as Aristotle's is that primum movens can also be a complicated "four causes" story. As some of the arguments presented in the thread illustrate.

Your claim here rest on the assumption that effective cause is "the whole of causality". And that reality is a mereological bundle.

A holistic view would agree that all causes would have to be internal to "existence". A world would have to be ultimately self-causing - and this is a problem!

But there is a richer arsenal of causality available. The holistic view would also be a process view - worlds would develop and endure, or persist rather than exist.

This is in turn what leads to the necessity for a vague~crisp distinction. It underpins a view of holistic causality in which a process can arise from "nothing".

Again, what reductionists really want to get rid of is teleological cause. And it is easy to supply examples which make it seem obvious the world is just blindly materialistic, absent of purpose, goals, will or meanings, and only humans are different in this regard.

But science still finds it hard not to frame its laws of nature in teleological fashion (thou shalt evolve, thou shalt dissipate, thou shalt gravitate, thou shalt follow the least mean path.)

And a systems thinker will argue that the correct approach to human purpose and meaning is to generalise it. You can "water it down" so that you have a hierarchy of final cause such as
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or in more colloquial language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}. See for example - http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.ph...ewFile/189/283

I mentioned already the connection between the problem of final cause and the problem of wavefunction collapse. It was not accident that early interpretations wanted to put the cause in the mind of the human observer, more recent ones are trying to put it out in a thermal environment or invoking retrocausality from future constraints.

So this is a very live subject even in science.

The thing to beware of is not turning final cause into another super-species of effective cause. It can't be merely "triggering event" seen on a larger scale (which is the kind of notion of a blue touch paper God you have in mind). It has to be something else, otherwise there is no need to distinguish it as a further aspect of causality.

So final cause needs to be identified with global constraints, downwards causality - some way in which the ends do justify the means.

I would agree that this is the least well developed part of our ideas about causality as yet. But that is what makes it interesting I guess. And asking the "why anything" question is particularly instructive in this regard.

Exactly, we must dichotomise to clarify. To be able to model causality, we must divide it suitably.

And here there may actually be novel metaphysics. The greeks did divide things into chance and necessity. But we know that randomness and determinism are still problematic concepts in science. What is a fluctuation really?

There is a general distinction of reality into its local degrees of freedom and global constraints that seems to work. But the story does not seem quite in focus yet.

Yes, because they are actually just attempts to use the notion of effective cause to explain everything.

Correct. Even in metaphysics, we are constructing models of causality. We are breaking things down in ways that seem to work, seem to be true, but we must bear in mind that they still are just models and so may bear secret traces of their makers.

The great yawning silence and banging of heads on tables that usually greets the "why anything" question is the sound of people confronting the limitations of their conceptual tools.

Which is why it is a great question. It forces you to find better conceptual tools.

wuliheron

I agree it is modeling, but the issue is how spontaneous is the modeling. The less spontaneous the more abstract it becomes and the less aware.

I often compare it to learning how to play the piano. At first you have to study different things, but eventually the idea is to play more spontaneously. Either one without the other makes for a bad pianist.

apeiron

This is crazy. You are advising us to be unthinking as philosophers or scientists, to just act out of acquired habit.

There is a reason why Greek philosophy was eventually so fruitful, Eastern philosophy rather less so.

You are welcome to an opinion, to a position of faith or mysticism, but if you want to argue for something as an alternative way to do philosophy, you should move it to a separate thread.

Your pianist analogy is all muddled anyway. Practice allows for the unthinking, but the whole point then is to clear the way for continued thinking at a higher level of organisation. I can cite the relevant literature from creativity studies and neuroscience if you choose to open a separate thread.

wuliheron

I never said we should just act out of acquired habit, and it is you who keeps trying to change the subject with these straw man arguments against everything I say and now even biased statements against Asian philosophy.

alt

Thanks for the interesting and informative response. Re your (3) ..

But the term 'accidental' is itself as circular. In essence, it means 'an event' - cause of which is unknown (to you or me). But cause nonetheless. Bringing it back to the same questioin.