“I think that this is a very important question to ask, and to really seek answers on, if this discussion is to advance any.”
The thing which is missing, “when God is gone”, is any explanation as to why the universe exists. And the thing which is missing, when nothing is felt to be missing in the absence of a God-concept, is any awareness that the existence of the universe is even an intellectual problem. The world is merely perceived as consisting of already existing things, and the cause of their being is to be found in other things that used to exist, and the question as to why the whole big causal network exists—why there is anything at all in the first place, not just this or that particular thing right now—is not noticed or is shrugged off in various ways.
Uh, even if that were a valid problem, isn’t it obvious that God isn’t a good explanation? If the universe exists because God caused it or sustains it, why does God exist?
And the original gods weren’t even supposed to be causes of the world-as-a-whole—they were just anthropomorphic hypotheses to explain aspects of the world.
However, that sort of thinking eventually got us to the point of asking about where existence as such, the world as a whole, came from.
Which in turn—thanks to basic questions like the one you just asked—led to concepts such as “first cause” and “necessary being” and so forth.
So, the human race already has had a few ideas regarding why existence exists. You may not find any of them persuasive. But my real point is to warn against complacency. Rationalist materialists such as congregate on this site have a deplorable tendency to regard some combination of mathematical physics and quantitative epistemology as a closed and complete philosophical system, and they need a periodic prod in the third eye to remind them that there are questions which are not addressed even in principle by that particular synthesis—and that it is possible to think about them, rather than just rationalize them away.
The world is merely perceived as consisting of already existing things, and the cause of their being is to be found in other things that used to exist, and the question as to why the whole big causal network exists—why there is anything at all in the first place, not just this or that particular thing right now—is not noticed or is shrugged off in various ways.
But the question itself only arises from the nature of human mental models, which have to contain “why’s”. The universe itself doesn’t have things labeled “causes” and “effects”; these are labels that human brains attach.
Or to put it more pointedly—the universe doesn’t need a why. That’s just something (some) humans want.
Focusing on names, and on the contingency of the names we give things, or whether we even notice them for long enough to give them a name, is a great way to shrug off “metaphysical” problems like this.
P.J. Eby, are you really saying there’s no such thing as cause and effect? That the smashing of the glass on the floor has nothing to do with the dropping of it the moment before?
Judea Pearl’s perspective on this question is that causality is best viewed as an intervention originating from outside the system in question, and not as a mode of behavior within that system. In this view, causality is related to counterfactual queries we might ask about the system, e.g., if an intervention had forced situation X, would Y have occurred? Because the intervening agent always stands outside the system, causality is always relative to where we draw the boundary around the system, and thus is not a property of reality.
are you really saying there’s no such thing as cause and effect? That the smashing of the glass on the floor has nothing to do with the dropping of it the moment before?
That territory has only one level (a thesis of reductionism) means that it doesn’t compute in terms of high-level concepts, but the high-level concepts still refer to the real clusters of configurations of territory.
We know that “the glass smashed on the floor” is a high-level interpretation, a genuinely complicated cluster in thingspace. In the vast majority of cases we encounter, it’s a pretty useful and well-delineated cluster, which is why it all adds up to normality. So too with cause and effect in timeless physics.
You’re drifting off topic. My original post in this thread was saying that “the universe doesn’t need a why”. Are you actually disagreeing with that conclusion?
(Heck, I can’t even tell if you’re disagreeing with what I just said.)
I do agree that the universe as a whole may not have what we would consider a “why”; however, I think it’s quite ridiculous to argue for that conclusion by attempting to discard talk of causality within the universe.
“I think that this is a very important question to ask, and to really seek answers on, if this discussion is to advance any.”
The thing which is missing, “when God is gone”, is any explanation as to why the universe exists. And the thing which is missing, when nothing is felt to be missing in the absence of a God-concept, is any awareness that the existence of the universe is even an intellectual problem. The world is merely perceived as consisting of already existing things, and the cause of their being is to be found in other things that used to exist, and the question as to why the whole big causal network exists—why there is anything at all in the first place, not just this or that particular thing right now—is not noticed or is shrugged off in various ways.
Uh, even if that were a valid problem, isn’t it obvious that God isn’t a good explanation? If the universe exists because God caused it or sustains it, why does God exist?
And the original gods weren’t even supposed to be causes of the world-as-a-whole—they were just anthropomorphic hypotheses to explain aspects of the world.
However, that sort of thinking eventually got us to the point of asking about where existence as such, the world as a whole, came from.
Which in turn—thanks to basic questions like the one you just asked—led to concepts such as “first cause” and “necessary being” and so forth.
So, the human race already has had a few ideas regarding why existence exists. You may not find any of them persuasive. But my real point is to warn against complacency. Rationalist materialists such as congregate on this site have a deplorable tendency to regard some combination of mathematical physics and quantitative epistemology as a closed and complete philosophical system, and they need a periodic prod in the third eye to remind them that there are questions which are not addressed even in principle by that particular synthesis—and that it is possible to think about them, rather than just rationalize them away.
But the question itself only arises from the nature of human mental models, which have to contain “why’s”. The universe itself doesn’t have things labeled “causes” and “effects”; these are labels that human brains attach.
Or to put it more pointedly—the universe doesn’t need a why. That’s just something (some) humans want.
Focusing on names, and on the contingency of the names we give things, or whether we even notice them for long enough to give them a name, is a great way to shrug off “metaphysical” problems like this.
P.J. Eby, are you really saying there’s no such thing as cause and effect? That the smashing of the glass on the floor has nothing to do with the dropping of it the moment before?
Judea Pearl’s perspective on this question is that causality is best viewed as an intervention originating from outside the system in question, and not as a mode of behavior within that system. In this view, causality is related to counterfactual queries we might ask about the system, e.g., if an intervention had forced situation X, would Y have occurred? Because the intervening agent always stands outside the system, causality is always relative to where we draw the boundary around the system, and thus is not a property of reality.
“Smashing”, “glass”, and “floor” also only exist as labels, because reality only has one level.
(See also Timeless Physics for why “cause and effect” aren’t what we think they are, either.)
That territory has only one level (a thesis of reductionism) means that it doesn’t compute in terms of high-level concepts, but the high-level concepts still refer to the real clusters of configurations of territory.
We know that “the glass smashed on the floor” is a high-level interpretation, a genuinely complicated cluster in thingspace. In the vast majority of cases we encounter, it’s a pretty useful and well-delineated cluster, which is why it all adds up to normality. So too with cause and effect in timeless physics.
You’re drifting off topic. My original post in this thread was saying that “the universe doesn’t need a why”. Are you actually disagreeing with that conclusion?
(Heck, I can’t even tell if you’re disagreeing with what I just said.)
I do agree that the universe as a whole may not have what we would consider a “why”; however, I think it’s quite ridiculous to argue for that conclusion by attempting to discard talk of causality within the universe.