The first cause argument

[Polymath257]

I am not following all the conversation between @muhammad_isa and you but it seems to me that you are making a similar point with him.


So my answer is that your refutation is a straw man WLC doesn’t argue that the concept of infinity is contradictory nor logically incoherent.

The claim is that it is metaphysically impossible to have an actual infinite number of things.

What the Hilbert hotel example shows are some of the paradoxes that would occur if you allow the existence of an actual “infinite ”……… for example removing 50% of the guests and still hace the exact same amount of guests,

OK, so this is conflating two different notions of 'the same number of guests'. The *sets* of guests will be different. But the *cardinality* of the guests will be the same.

What, precisely, is metaphysically impossible about that?

An other paradox would be that your birthday the Cambrian explosion and the big bang occurred at the same moment of time. (because all the occurred after the same amount of seconds)……….

No, they would NOT be at the same moment of time. The equality of the cardinality doens't imply the same time.

Again, a misunderstanding of the nature of infinity and NOT a metaphysical impossibility.

So my question is:

1 do you acknowledge that this paradoxes occur, you just think that the world is strange and that is the way reality is

or

2 do you deny these paradoxes? / the big bang and your birthday didn’t occur after the same amount of seconds, you don’t have the same number of guest after removing 50% of them

I just want to understand your position

I am saying that both confuse things because of misunderstanding. So it is closer to being 2, but I would actually say it is a 3rd situation: that there is no paradox, but not for the reasons given.

Being 'after the same number of seconds' does NOT imply 'at the same time' and having 50% of the guests removed changes the set of guests but not the cardinality.

Neither are problematical in any way.

The basic issue with both is that they confuse 'same size' in the sense of cardinality and 'equality' for subsets. The notion of cardinality is a very weak form of saying things are the 'same size'. So equal cardinality of subsets does not imply that the subsets are equal.

So, A might be a subset of B and the two have exactly the 'same size', but with B having more elements than A in the sense that there are (perhaps infinitely many) things in B that are not in A.

 

[KWED]

See, this kind of thread makes people kind of immune to these kind of threats and ad hominem. Read the OP and understand it properly if you can. Cheers.

I see you still don't understand what an ad hominem is. Why are you so averse to learning stuff?

 

[KWED]

The claim is that it is metaphysically impossible to have an actual infinite number of things.

The "metaphysical" and the "actual" are two contradictory concepts.
Is anything impossible "metaphysically"?

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

That's true.
..but most people believe that the universe has a beginning.
Not many doubt the validity of the big-bang.

The Big Bang might not be a beginning. After all, if the universe was a singularity or something, then the universe didn’t begin so much as was transformed.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

What is the other option that does not get into an infinite regression? Does not everything that begins to exist by default have a cause?

What is the start of the water cycle?

 

[firedragon]

What is the start of the water cycle?

The start of the water cycle is on earth. Chicken and the egg both are on earth. This is beyond that.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Not fact. You can give a million papers with a million hypotheses and theories. But you cannot one single paper that says its fact. Of course you will ignore this every single time.

Out of curiosity, is there some emotional life requirement that you hold to First Causes, especially despite evidence? I’m a theist and I don’t feel like the First Cause is a thing.

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

Do you think that philosophy works towards facts?

My favorite literature professor used to tell a story of philosophers getting into heated debate about how many teeth a horse had. One guy came up and told them to open the mouth and count the teeth and he was killed.

 

[firedragon]

Out of curiosity, is there some emotional life requirement that you hold to First Causes, especially despite evidence? I’m a theist and I don’t feel like the First Cause is a thing.

Nope.

 

[Ponder This]

But since time is internal to the 'surface' we are talking about (like latitude on the Earth), in what sense can it have a beginning? It would be just a static (timeless) object.

It can have a beginning in the sense that it has a surface (which is both a begining and an ending of a static object).

No, for a deductive argument to be sound its premises must definitely be true, not just guesses, possibilities, or intuition.

I think we agree... but just to be sure... I have to ask...
Are you suggesting that as long as you don't evaluate the truth of the premises, you can simply discard the argument as unsound?

This is simply not the case. We have counterexamples in current science for P1, and P2 is highly questionable for several reasons that have been explained here several times now.

The dominant accepted scientific theory is that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Sorry. I know you want to argue that other scientific theories are the main accepted.

Hang on a moment, in what way do you think an eternal universe caused itself? Why does that follow?

Okay... Would you agree that people in this thread appear to be arguing either that the universe is eternal "uncaused" or that the universe is caused by something "eternal"?

No. I see no reason why it had to have a cause at all.

Do you agree that no thing within the universe can exist without the universe as a whole?

That's a bit of a confused sentence as you still seem to be identifying an eternal universe with being self-caused. I'm not actually arguing for any position because we just don't know. I'm arguing that the claim that the universe had a cause has not been established.

Are you using the metaphysical notion of causality that we have from philosophy or are you using the lesser notion of causality from science and physics which is derived from the philsophical notion? I've seen a push in this thread to define a cause as a type of observable physical event contained within the universe.

ALL causes we know of are in the universe, so you need to argue that it is possible for a cause to be outside of the universe.

Would you say that the universe contains itself or not?

That is simply not true. The possibility of an infinite regression is hotly debated among astronomers and widely accepted by others.
You need to give an argument showing that an infinite regression is impossible.

You didn't accept the argument I gave you, nor did you say what was wrong about it. You hand-waved it as counter-intuitive stuff about infinity, but there was an actual contradiction there that you failed to address.

Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved, thanks to infinite sets.

Zenos Paradoxes have been resolved and it shows why you ought to be careful when it comes to infinity.

Infinite regress - Wikipedia
Some infinite regresses are vicious and some are not.
"An infinite regress argument is an argument against a theory based on the fact that this theory leads to an infinite regress.[1][5] For such an argument to be successful, it has to demonstrate not just that the theory in question entails an infinite regress but also that this regress is vicious.[1][4] The mere existence of an infinite regress by itself is not a proof for anything.[5] So in addition to connecting the theory to a recursive principle paired with a triggering condition, the argument has to show in which way the resulting regress is vicious.[4][5] ]"

Exactly! The infinite regress of causes is vicious precisely because it creates an Epistemic Infinite Regress of Explanation (one of the three types of vicious infinite regress recognized by philosophers). Epistemic Infinite Regress of Explanation is also the reason why the negative numbers aren't defined starting at negative infinity and counting up. They are defined by starting at zero and counting down. And it's also why Hilbert's Hotel doesn't overflow when it is full - people don't get pushed out when there is no mover.

 

[Polymath257]

Are you using the metaphysical notion of causality that we have from philosophy or are you using the lesser notion of causality from science and physics which is derived from the philsophical notion? I've seen a push in this thread to define a cause as a type of observable physical event contained within the universe.

I think the metaphysical notion is incoherent and the only coherent version of causality is the physical one.

Would you say that the universe contains itself or not?

No. The universe is not a thing in the universe.

You didn't accept the argument I gave you, nor did you say what was wrong about it. You hand-waved it as counter-intuitive stuff about infinity, but there was an actual contradiction there that you failed to address.

No, it actually was not a contradiction. It was a counter-intuitive truth about infinities.

Zenos Paradoxes have been resolved and it shows why you ought to be careful when it comes to infinity.

Yes, care is required. But the resolution relies on infinites.

Exactly! The infinite regress of causes is vicious precisely because it creates an Epistemic Infinite Regress of Explanation (one of the three types of vicious infinite regress recognized by philosophers). Epistemic Infinite Regress of Explanation is also the reason why the negative numbers aren't defined starting at negative infinity and counting up. They are defined by starting at zero and counting down. And it's also why Hilbert's Hotel doesn't overflow when it is full - people don't get pushed out when there is no mover.

First, I disagree that it is a vicious regress. It is NOT a regress of explanation, but of cause. The two are very different notions.

And no, the negative integers are NOT defined by counting, either up or down. They are defined as equivalence classes of ordered pairs of positive integers (essentially, as differences of positive integers). Sets are not defined by a process, but instead by a property.

Hilbert's hotel doesn't get 'full' because you can always map an infinite set to a proper subset. it really is that easy.

 

[sayak83]

Googling EPR and Quantum Mechanics did not help your case. Perhaps you can explain your claim further?

How do you say, with Certainty, that ALL causes are within the universe if the only things you ever examine are things within the universe? Surely you are simply creating a definition that suits your particular claims.
And why must causes happen over time? What does that mean?

I am not discussing anything other than if true randomness has been shown to exist in Quantum Mechanics. The answer is yes (with a lot of details) unless we have instantaneous faster than light communication between different parts of space time (for which there is no evidence).
A detailed (but still popular) treatment is here
Quantum Randomness
Excerpts
The second problem is philosophical, and goes back to the beginning of quantum mechanics. It’s well known that Einstein, in his later years, rejected quantum indeterminism, holding that “God does not play dice.” It’s not that Einstein thought quantum mechanics was wrong, he merely thought it was incomplete, needing to be supplemented by “hidden variables” to restore Newtonian determinism. Today, it’s often said that Einstein lost this battle, that quantum indeterminism triumphed. But wait! Logically, how could Einstein’s belief in a hidden determinism ever be disproven? Can you ever rule out the existence of a pattern, just because you’d failed to find one?

The answer to this question takes us to the heart of quantum mechanics, to the part that popular explanations usually mangle. Quantum mechanics wasn’t the first theory to introduce randomness and probabilities into physics. Ironically, the real novelty of quantum mechanics was that it replaced probabilities—which are defined as nonnegative real numbers—by less intuitive quantities called amplitudes, which can be positive, negative, or even complex. To find the probability of some event happening (say, an atom decaying, or a photon hitting a screen), quantum mechanics says that you need to add the amplitudes for all the possible ways that it could happen, and then take the squared absolute value of the result. If an event has positive and negative amplitudes, they can cancel each other out, so the event never happens at all.

The key point is that the behavior of amplitudes seems to force probabilities to play a different role in quantum mechanics than they do in other physical theories. As long as a theory only involves probabilities, we can imagine that the probabilities merely reflect our ignorance, and that a “God’s-eye view” of the precise coordinates of every subatomic particle would restore determinism. But quantum mechanics’ amplitudes only turn into probabilities on being measured—and the specific way the transformation happens depends on which measurement an observer chooses to perform. That is, nature “cooks probabilities to order” for us in response to the measurement choice. That being so, how can we regard the probabilities as reflecting ignorance of a preexisting truth?

What Bell showed is that, yes, it’s possible to say that the apparent randomness in quantum mechanics is due to some hidden determinism behind the scenes, such as “God’s unknowable encyclopedia” listing everything that will ever happen. That bare possibility has no experimental consequences and can never be ruled out. On the other hand, if you also want the hidden deterministic variables to be local—that is, to obey the inherent impossibility of faster-than-light communication—then there’s necessarily a conflict with the predictions of quantum mechanics for certain experiments. In the 1970s and 1980s, the requisite experiments were actually done—most convincingly by physicist Alain Aspect—and they vindicated quantum mechanics, while ruling out local hidden variable theories in the minds of most physicists.

In essence, what Bell’s theorem shows is that if you want a deterministic theory underpinning quantum mechanics, then it has to be strange in exactly the same way Bohmian mechanics is strange: It has to be “nonlocal,” resorting to instantaneous communication to account for the results of certain measurements.

There is also a free will theorem of the form below
Suppose you agree that the observed behavior of two entangled particles is as quantum mechanics predicts (and as experiment confirms); that there’s no preferred frame of reference telling you whether Alice or Bob measures “first” (and no closed timelike curves); and finally, that Alice and Bob can both decide “freely” how to measure their respective particles after they’re separated (i.e., that their choices of measurements aren’t determined by the prior state of the universe). Then the outcomes of their measurements also can’t be determined by the prior state of the universe.

Although the assumption that Alice and Bob can “measure freely” might seem strong, all it amounts to in essence is that there’s no “cosmic conspiracy” that predetermined how they were going to measure. (Alice and Bob need not be persons, but detectors or instruments).

Read through the rest of the work. In the end you would also find a theorem that shows how you can generate clean randomness (guaranteed to have no hidden deterministic correlations) from dirty randomness (where there might be some hidden deterministic correlations).

Coudron and Yuen’s final protocol (illustrated above) involves six players who perform alternating rounds of expanding and laundering. First Alice and Bob expand the original n -bit random seed into 2n dirty random bits. Next Charlie and Diane launder the 2n dirty bits to get 2cn clean bits. Then, having been laundered, these 2cn clean bits are ready for Alice and Bob to expand again, into 22cn dirty bits. Then Edith and Frank launder these 22cn dirty bits into 2c2cn clean bits, which Alice and Bob expand, and so on forever. We need two laundromats, working in alternate shifts, to clean the bits for the other players, so no one sees the same “dirty” bits twice.

We’ve seen statistical randomness tests, Kolmogorov complexity, Bell’s theorem, the CHSH game, the “Free Will Theorem,” and finally, recent protocols for generating what’s been called “Einstein-certified randomness.” Starting with a small random seed, these protocols use quantum entanglement to generate as many additional bits as you want that are guaranteed to be random—unless nature resorted to faster-than-light communication to bias the bits.

I hope this answers the question of whether randomness exists in the world or not.

 

[ratiocinator]

It can have a beginning in the sense that it has a surface (which is both a begining and an ending of a static object).

I don't get what you're even suggesting here. The space-time may have a 'beginning, but would would just a an 'edge' (in the past time direction) beyond which it doesn't extend, so the whole object doesn't have a beginning, it's just an object.

The dominant accepted scientific theory is that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Sorry. I know you want to argue that other scientific theories are the main accepted.

Not strictly correct. It is generally accepted that the current form of the universe started about that time ago in a hot dense state, our scientific theories are not good enough yet to decide one way of the other it that was that start of time itself or if it could be extended backwards, perhaps infinity. When we extrapolate backwards to the time when general relativity predicts a singularity, we know our theories are inadequate because GR does not take quantum effects into account.

We simply don't have any theories to cover that time, we only have hypotheses (many of which do suggest that time can be extended into the past).

This whole, "universe began with a singularity" thing seems to be something that has got stuck in the popular idea of what the "Big Bang Theory" is all about, but have a look at what a working physicist has to say about it: Did The Universe Really Begin With a Singularity?

"Yet all over the media and all over the web, we can find articles, including ones published just after this week’s cosmic announcement of new evidence in favor of inflation, that state with great confidence that in the Big Bang Theory the universe started from a singularity. So I’m honestly very confused. Who is still telling the media and the public that the universe really started with a singularity, or that the modern Big Bang Theory says that it does? I’ve never heard an expert physicist say that. And with good reason: when singularities and other infinities have turned up in our equations in the past, those singularities disappeared when our equations, or our understanding of how to use our equations, improved.

Moreover, there’s a point of logic here. How could we possibly know what happened at the very beginning of the universe? No experiment can yet probe such an early time, and none of the available equations are powerful enough or usable enough to allow us to come to clear and unique conclusions.

The modern Big Bang Theory really starts after this period of ignorance, with a burst of inflation that creates a large expanding universe, and the end of inflation which allows for the creation of the heat of the Hot Big Bang. The equations for the theory, as it currently stands, can be used to make predictions even though we don’t know the precise nature of our universe’s birth. Yes, a singularity often turns up in our equations when we extend them as far as they can go in the past; but a singularity of this sort is far from likely to be an aspect of nature, and instead should be interpreted as a sign of what we don’t yet understand."​

Also, I'm not trying to argue that for any particular view on this, the first cause argument is unsound regardless.

 

[KWED]

Not fact. You can give a million papers with a million hypotheses and theories. But you cannot one single paper that says its fact. Of course you will ignore this every single time.

*Nails his flag to philosophical arguments with dodgy premises*
*Demands unequivocal facts from others*

 

[PureX]

My favorite literature professor used to tell a story of philosophers getting into heated debate about how many teeth a horse had. One guy came up and told them to open the mouth and count the teeth and he was killed.

That's why a literature professor isn't a philosophy professor. Philosophers don't argue about the number of teeth a horse has.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

if it is about the real world (as opposed to abstract concepts), then yes, it is ultimately a scientific question.



No, it does not. It deals with how to get information about the physical world. It asks how science can and should be done. It does not affect the results of the scientific investigations and says nothing in and of itself about the real world.



Do you think that philosophy works towards facts?

The problem is that the word "real" is an abstract word itself. The same with world, fact, physical, information, science, result, investigation and nothing. And ultimately and question. And yes the word yes, now we are at it.
The joke is that you can spot some abstract words but do it differently for other abstract words.

And yes, philosophy is also abstract.

 

[danieldemol]

The claim is that it is metaphysically impossible to have an actual infinite number of things.

If it is metaphysically impossible to have an infinite number of things, would that not make it metaphysically impossible for God to have an infinite number of years to God's age?

If God has a finite number of years on God's age, when did God begin?

Are you beginning to see that the claim is nonsensical yet?

 

[ratiocinator]

Seemed to have missed these points last time.

I think we agree... but just to be sure... I have to ask...
Are you suggesting that as long as you don't evaluate the truth of the premises, you can simply discard the argument as unsound?

No, I'm saying that if we examine the premises and conclude that they are only one of many possibilities, or that we have good reason to question them, then the deduction is unsound.

Do you agree that no thing within the universe can exist without the universe as a whole?

No. What does this have to do with the universe having a cause at all?

Okay... Would you agree that people in this thread appear to be arguing either that the universe is eternal "uncaused" or that the universe is caused by something "eternal"?

I can't speak for everybody, but I'm not making either argument. I think it entirely possible that the universe has a finite past and still be uncaused.

 

[muhammad_isa]

..I think it entirely possible that the universe has a finite past and still be uncaused.

How could that be possible?
That implies that things can happen without a reason.
If that were the case, we would not be able to deduce anything about anything.
..which is obviously not true.

 

[ratiocinator]

How could that be possible?

Because the modern picture of time is not Newtonian and absolute. We have a space-time manifold and time is just a direction through it. The whole thing is just a four-dimensional object. If time is finite in the past direction that changes nothing important because you can't have causality without time. Looking at the 'start of time' for the reason why the manifold exists (its 'cause') is rather like looking at the north pole for why the surface of the earth exists.

That implies that things can happen without a reason.

A reason is somewhat different to a cause. As has already been pointed out, some things do happen without a cause, according to current science (quantum fluctuations or a particular radioactive nucleus decaying at a particular time, for example).

The problem with looking for reasons why everything exists and is as it is, is that you have to get to the end of the line at some point. If we just say "well, there must be a reason why the universe (the whole space-time) exists", then, whatever it is that you postulate as the reason, we can ask the same question about that, and so on ad infinitum. This sort of infinity really is a problem (as opposed to an infinite past) because it's a regress of explanation.

There maybe a deeper reason why the universe exists in some larger context (with or without an infinite past), but I can see no way out of eventually hitting a brute fact.