On 02/06/2025 07:37 AM, Jim Burns wrote:
On 2/6/2025 1:29 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
On 02/05/2025 10:19 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
On 02/05/2025 10:25 AM, Jim Burns wrote:
On 2/5/2025 8:25 AM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
On 02/04/2025 08:26 PM, Ross Finlayson wrote:
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What it's all about is
"The Principle of Sufficient Reason".
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⎛ The principle of sufficient reason states that
⎝ everything must have a reason or a cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason
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What causes everything to have a cause?
Does that have a cause? Is the cause itself?
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Hm.
Have you heard of "first principles" and "final cause"?
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They sound like they're things without a cause.
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If not everything has a cause,
why (if I understand you) are only these things without a cause?
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I mentioned Judea Pearl's work.
If I recall correctly,
when he sets up his formalism for causal relations,
he explicitly says not quantum mechanics.
I can see why,
experiment shows that quantum mechanics breaks local realism.
We may have some future version of causation
in which that's not a problem,
but he has enough on his plate for right now.
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It seems fair to me to say that
quantum mechanics is uncaused.
Statistics for radioactive decay, for example, are very firm,
but which individual atom decays next?
The impression I have is that
there is no way _even in principle_ to know that.
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My vague notion of the First Cause
is that it is a deistic version of God.
But radioactive decay displays none of the properties
one would want for a deistic God
-- including that it is NOT remote from humanity.
But, apparently, it is uncaused.
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I think we need a better idea of what 'cause' means.
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Hm. The discussion around "first principles" and
"final cause" and the "Principle of Sufficient Reason"
particularly as better than "Principle of Non-Contradiction"
is quite an old discussion.
The idea that quantum mechanics indicates that the
world is really absent the causal, of course still
has that "causality is inviolable", and so that
anything that appears to contradict that, must
indicate another effect, having falsified otherwise
the theory.
Modern things like Bell/Aspect type experiments,
of course many decades after Broglie/Bohm, help
show that "real wave collapse" is real and that
also what were called "hidden variables" and not
called "supplementary variables", are still
parameters, and in the causal.
Then, such notions as a fictionalist's, nominalist's,
infallibilist's Multiple Worlds Interpretation,
is a _silly_ place, and there's one Universe by
definition and univocity as after John Duns Scotus
is very much a thing.
It's a continuum mechanics, is why that "SuperString
Theory" is just twice as many orders of magnitude
smaller than sub-atomic particles, or about 10^-50,
figuring that's a fine enough grain that then thusly
what gets modeled as "extra dimensions" is as well
merely continuum mechanics.
Then that can perfectly explain quantum mechanics
and all its effects, in the super-classical, because
then there is a clock hypothesis, there is real space
contraction, information is free if metered, optical
light is special, and these usual sorts approaches
to a realist physics, then besides that an actual
proper merest metaphysics for the fundamental question
(of metaphysics).
Then, of course it's so that there's a simple inductive
counter-argument to any inductive argument, so, that's
why axiomless natural deduction starts looking defensible
(and "true", say).
The set of necessary FISONs
Re: The set of necessary FISONs