/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13957118]

>infinite universe is impossible because the present could never happen
Do you agree with this concept?

[Anonymous No.13957124]

>>13957118
There is an Eternal inflation of the Universe.

[Anonymous No.13957127]

>>13957118
>do I agree with this metaphysical jibber jabber
no

[Anonymous No.13957133]

>>13957118
>happen
>present
Absolute nonsense.

[Anonymous No.13957140]

>>13957118
>the universe operates off my perception
no I don't agree

[Anonymous No.13957147]

>>13957124
I thought that the universe might be infinite, but the counter-argument presented doesn't seem to have a good rebuttal. Do you think the universe "began", or do you think it is infinite? If it's infinite, there would be an infinite amount of days before the present, meaning the present could never occur.
>>13957127
>metaphysical jibber jabber
This seemed to be the most coherent argument in the book, rest of it seemed like a lot of baseless assumptions.

[Anonymous No.13957937]

>>13957140
So, do you perceive it as being untrue?

[Anonymous No.13958027]

>>13957118
>ITT: OP posts about a book he didn't finish, misquotes a concept he didn't understand and asks people who haven't read the book for their thoughts on the misquoted concept.

God /lit/ really is the smartest board, isn't it!

[Nietzsche's fangirl No.13958422]

>>13957133
>not getting something
>''nonsense''

[Anonymous No.13958619]

>>13957118
Does Feser actually argues that? I would be surprised since both Aristotle and Aquinas think it's very much metaphysically possible (Feser is a Thomist).

[Anonymous No.13958627]

can I get a formal argument? you lost me.

[Anonymous No.13958699]

Have Thomists managed to prove the PSR yet?

[Anonymous No.13958799]

>>13957147
>I thought that the universe might be infinite
For me there is an infinite/eternal inflation from both before and after the so called Big bang
See: String theory, Leonard Susskind.

[Anonymous No.13959001]

>>13958627
Imagine someone is counting. He’s slowly going through numbers, and you ask him how long he’s been doing it. He says he’s been counting forever. There was never a moment in the past when he was not counting. What number should he be on? There must be infinite numbers behind him, and yet, he is a finite distance from 0, as he continues to count and pass by distinct numbers. It makes more sense that he started counting a finite time ago.

[Anonymous No.13959030]

>>13959001
this simply doesn't make any sense to me, at what number did he start counting?

[Anonymous No.13959057]

>>13959001
the universe is not some rambling autist counting.

nice analogy though

[Anonymous No.13959064]

>>13959030
He never started counting. If there’s any start that makes the most sense, it’s negative infinity.

[Anonymous No.13959087]

>>13959064
This is fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.13959095]

>>13959087
That’s the point. A finite universe makes more sense.

[Anonymous No.13959298]

>>13958699
I don't see why it would be controversial. Some version of the PSR, sure, but not PSR itself. We tend to find explanations when we look for them, and even when we don't find them we have reason to think there is an explanation even if, for whatever reason, we don't have access to it.

The world just doesn't behave in the way we would expect it to if the PSR was false. Events without any evident explanation would by occurring constantly and the world wouldn't have the intelligibility that makes science as successful as it is. The PSR is proven by reductio ad absurdum.

[Anonymous No.13959311]

>infinity is possible in god because god is beyond our comprehension
>infinity is not possible because it would be incomprehensible

[Anonymous No.13959386]

>>13957118
Infinite in duration or extent? Eternal as in infinite temporal duration or atemporality? The present can be eternal if it is the latter

[Anonymous No.13959488]

>>13959298
Could it be that you happen to be a Thomist?
>We tend to find explanations when we look for them, and even when we don't find them we have reason to think there is an explanation even if, for whatever reason, we don't have access to it.
Okay, but do you think that the PSR is known a priori or only vindicated a posteriori? You need a priori justification for the cosmological argument to be watertight, as Feser claims it to be.

>The world just doesn't behave in the way we would expect it to if the PSR was false. Events without any evident explanation would by occurring constantly and the world wouldn't have the intelligibility that makes science as successful as it is. The PSR is proven by reductio ad absurdum.
But denying the PSR doesn't entail accepting that nothing has an explanation. It could very well be that most things have an explanation, but not all.

[Anonymous No.13959614]

>>13959311
God is within and beyond comprehension

[Anonymous No.13959632]

>>13959614
Not really
>God may be called Absolute Reality, Absolute Power, if God is the Absolute, then He is transcendent of everything that can be known by men, all of which is but relative. God is altogether other than man and man's world. His existence, therefore, cannot be proven nor His nature conceived. To demonstrate or delineate God would be to bring Him within the gambit of finite reason and so to demean His absoluteness. Anything said about God discredits Him, except this confession itself. Nevertheless, God can be experienced. Because He is wholly other than man, He can be encountered as the negation of everything human. This is what happens in the experience of guilt; when a man admits the impossibility of legislating, enacting, and warranting his own conduct, he is exposed to God. God is the infinite nothingness that appears in the failure of the finite. Whenever some finite hope or finite assurance breaks down, there is an access to God. Whenever all human possibilities – aesthetic, intellectual, moral – are exhausted, there God is present.
~ Paraphrase of Kierkegaard

[Anonymous No.13959650]

>>13959632
>appeal to authority
Cringe

[Anonymous No.13959653]

>>13959632
if god is transcendent how many things about him can be known?

[Anonymous No.13959656]

>>13959650
>fallacy fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

[Anonymous No.13959665]

>>13959653
>Anything said about God discredits Him, except this confession itself

[Anonymous No.13959667]

>>13957118
I haven't read it so maybe there's something new there. But I will say that tracing the origin story back to the big bang to a moment where physical laws break down is no more or less informative than the story in Genesis. I don't believe in that old religion, but its fables supplemented with math are no more convincing.

[Anonymous No.13959740]

>>13959656
>I get to use fallacies because I’m right
Then prove it without using a fallacy

[Anonymous No.13960135]

Bump

[Anonymous No.13960670]

>>13957118
That is very misstated. I'd phrase it as "an infinite sequence of causes cannot bring change in the present", but he explains the narrow sense of cause better than I can in a 4chan post.
>>13957147
Infinite time doesn't make a difference to that argument- there would need to be a first cause behind the infinite series of causes for any change to occur.
>>13959488
If you only take the existence of change a posteriori, cosmological argument follows via the impossibility of change without it. Similarly, abandoning PSR kills any foundation for knowledge- sure, you can take some brute fact as a starting point, but it's hard to justify epistomology with that and a transcendent truth makes more sense for that than a set of laws of physics, and better explains causality. This is a departure from the cosmological argument alone, but that mostly tackles God's existence given observed change and PSR.
>>13959740
He's referring to Kierkegaard's argument, that's not an argument from authority.

[Anonymous No.13960737]

>>13958027
I did finish the book, I might have worded the OP a bit poorly, but I am ESL. Instead of posting a cringe wojak image, could you elaborate on how I misunderstood this concept?

[Anonymous No.13961455]

>>13960670
I see no plausibility in the claim that we know the PSR a priori. We cannot even know individual causes a priori, but we somehow know that every fact has an explanation? How so? Where is the evidence?
Secondly, it doesn't follow that abandoning the PSR makes knowledge somehow impossible. We can still look for explanations even if we don't gratuitously assume that such an explanation can always be found.

[Anonymous No.13961519]

1: The explanation of all existing things are either inside a thing our outside of a thing.
Corollary: If a thing doesn't have an explanation either inside itself or outside of itself, then it doesn't exist.
2: The explanation of an infinite regress can't be outside of the regress becuase then it wouldn't explain the origin of the universe.
3: If an explanation of a thing is inside of itself, then said thing is a necessary being.
4: An emergent property is caused by the essense of the parts in the compound.
5: If the explanation of the infinite regress is inside of itself, then the infinite regress is a necessary being.
6: Then the property of being necessary being is a contingent emergent property based on the compounds of the infinite regress, but it's impossible for a non-contingent thing to be made out of contingent parts.
7: Therefor, an infinite regress does not exist.

[Anonymous No.13961669]

>>13960737
It's easier to be superior.

[Anonymous No.13961673]

>>13961519
>If a thing doesn't have an explanation either inside itself or outside of itself, then it doesn't exist.

Baseless assumption, argument fails at premise 1. GG

[Anonymous No.13961693]

>>13961673
Name one single thing that not only doesn't have an explanation, but couldn't have an explanation even in theory.

[Anonymous No.13961718]

>>13961693
You are the one who accepts the proposition, so the burden of proof is on you.

That said, the existence of the universe is something that seems to be a brute fact.

[Anonymous No.13961734]

>>13961718
You have no reason to think the universe couldn't principle have an explanation for its existence. I think it's hilarious that you'll deny the PSR as being a brute fact but you'll have no problem accepting the universe as being one. You're a bad thinker.

[Anonymous No.13961779]

>>13961734
First off, you still hasn't offer a justification for
>If a thing doesn't have an explanation either inside itself or outside of itself, then it doesn't exist.
Until you do, your proof fails.
Secondly,
>You have no reason to think the universe couldn't principle have an explanation for its existence.
The fact that we can't even imagine what such an explanation would look like its a good enough reason to doubt whether such an explanatiom even exists.
>I think it's hilarious that you'll deny the PSR as being a brute fact but you'll have no problem accepting the universe as being one.
Wat

[Anonymous No.13961822]

>>13961779
You start quoting and responding to individual sentences and I'm no longer interested in even reading your silly shit. You guys always follow the same tract and it's boring. The point about denying the PSR but accepting the universe as being a brute fact is that you're being inconsistent with your own skepticism, but of course that goes over your head.

I don't owe you a proof of the PSR because of the simple fact that the universe is intelligible, meaning things will have explanations. This is the basis for all science. Denying it is absurd and in order to do that you would need some sort of example of a thing that couldn't even in principle have an explanation. You say the universe doesn't have an explanation but you're unable to explain you believe that. You know you don't have a reason to believe the universe couldn't in principle have an explanation which is why you keep talking about burdens of proof. You don't know what you're talking about because you're a bad thinker and I see it for being the ploy it is.

[Anonymous No.13961835]

>>13957118
Do you disagree with our telescopes?

[Anonymous No.13961890]

>>13961822
>You start quoting and responding to individual sentences and I'm no longer interested in even reading your silly shit.
1. It's easier to organize the post that way. I didn't take what you said out of context, so what the fuck is even the problem.
2. I already explained why I think the PSR is probably false. So much for my arbitrary scepticism:
>The fact that we can't even imagine what such an explanation would look like its a good enough reason to doubt whether such an explanation even exists.
Then you write:
>I don't owe you a proof of the PSR because of the simple fact that the universe is intelligible, meaning things will have explanations. This is the basis for all science. Denying it is absurd and in order to do that you would need some sort of example of a thing that couldn't even in principle have an explanation. You say the universe doesn't have an explanation but you're unable to explain you believe that. You know you don't have a reason to believe the universe couldn't in principle have an explanation which is why you keep talking about burdens of proof. You don't know what you're talking about because you're a bad thinker and I see it for being the ploy it is..
Yes you do owe me a proof for the PSR you fucking retard, it's a central premise to your argument. There is no logical contradiction in denying the PSR, hence it is not "absurd". And science has no need for any a priori justification, we justify our claims a posteriori through empirical evidence.
As for why I think the universe is a brute fact, I already gave you a response in this very post.

[Anonymous No.13961900]

>>13961890
Too much greentext for me. Have a nice day.

[Anonymous No.13961906]

>>13957118
>Feser?
>Yeah, he's a good guy, solid thomist
>Too bad I refuted him already

[Anonymous No.13961924]

>>13961906
That dudes video on the 5 ways was embarrassing. At one point he says "If everything has a cause then I can't in the syllogism leap to saying God is a special exceptions" which is literally the same mistake that Dawkins made. Thomas doesn't assert that "everything has a cause." He claims to have studied Thomism for 10 years too.

[Anonymous No.13961926]

>>13959632
Insofar as God can not be comprehended he can not be claimed as present.

[Anonymous No.13961939]

Ultimately to discuss "infinity" you need an understanding of what time and space are. So what is time and what is space /lit/?

[Anonymous No.13961958]

>>13957118
Anyone saying something 'has to be' or is 'impossible' solely because of 'muh reasons' is a retard, no matter how well they dress it up

[Anonymous No.13961962]

>>13961900
I swear I never met a single Theist that doesn't cop out when I press them to argue for the PSR

[Anonymous No.13961994]

>>13961962
Well maybe you should write properly. You've said some stupid things which by itself is not a bad thing but when you add the greentext on top of it, I'm just not willing to talk to you. I don't owe you anything.

[Anonymous No.13962024]

>>13961994
The greentext is just quotes from your own post, you didn't have to read it if you remember what you said. I give your excuse for the cop out a miserable 5\10. Step up your game, Thomist.

[Anonymous No.13962060]

>>13962024
As I said earlier, you don't have to be a Thomist to accept some version of the PSR because literally every science presupposes it. Aside from that I don't care what the greentext is. If I see a certain ratio of it I don't read the posts because I have never seen a good thinker write like that. There's never anything interesting about it and you're justifying my beliefs with the way you're trying to taunt me. It's boring.

[Anonymous No.13962069]

>>13957118
>>13957147
Read Parmenides and Zeno. Does it not strike you that the present is always occurring? There is nothing 'before' the present, nor is there anything 'after' the present.

[Anonymous No.13962074]

>>13961962
>I never met a single philosopher that doesn't cop out when I press them to argue against absolute skepticism.

[Anonymous No.13962077]

>>13962069
What books from Zeno have you read?

[Anonymous No.13962096]

>>13962077
I obviously mean what we know of Zeno, from either a book like The Pre-Socratic Philosophers or from Aristotle, autist.

[Anonymous No.13962105]

>>13962096
Why do you tell people to read Zeno when you don't actually mean reading Zeno? I wouldn't tell people to read Aristotle if I meant to tell somebody to read a commentary on Aristotle.

[Anonymous No.13962119]

>>13962060
All I did was use quotes from your post to individually respond to each of your points. Every philosopher does that. Feser does it all the time in his blog when he responds to his critics. Also I like how you keep responding to my posts but you skipped the one where I pressure you to defend your philosophical commitments, how convenient.

[Anonymous No.13962127]

>>13962074
Denying the PSR leads to empiricism, not scepticism. Everything is justified a posteriori.

[Anonymous No.13962139]

>>13959001
This implies that time can be reduced to numbers passing and thus has to have a beginning point.
Which seems baseless to me. Why couldn't time just flow on without beginning and without end in the first place?

[Anonymous No.13962145]

>>13962119
I'm responding to posts that don't quote and respond to individual sentences. I've seen a lot of people say that's something smart people do but it isn't. It really isn't worth arguing about.

[Anonymous No.13962157]

>>13962105
because it is implied by the obvious fact that we have none of Zeno's books that I mean his thought as preserved by other writers. We specify with Aristotle because we have a lot of Aristotle's work. Saying 'Zeno' to mean 'the part where Aristotle describes Zeno's work that many people know and refer to when they want to talk about Zeno and his thought as opposed to the literally nothing that survives from Zeno's original body of work in case you thought I wanted you to read that instead' is truly a huge and grave mistake, please pardon my fucking French.

[Anonymous No.13962158]

>>13962145
Just admit you can't defend the PSR for shit already

[Anonymous No.13962166]

>>13962158
I have defended it. It can be proven through a reductio ad absurdum. You didn't understand the answer and then you started writing like an idiot, which is when I told you I'm no longer interested in what you have to say. You've been shitposting since.

[Anonymous No.13962174]

>>13962157
Fragments do survive from Zeno so it's important to be at least somewhat accurate in your writings.

[Anonymous No.13962183]

>>13962166
Your reduction ad absurdum doesn't work because being skeptical of the PSR doesn't entail that everything is unintelligible. It says that there is no reason to be certain a priori that literally everything has an explanation and that we should only accept explanations that are verified a posteriori. You can only attack a shitty strawman because your argument has no bite against my position.

[Anonymous No.13962190]

>>13961673
1: The argument is a logical consequence of a previous principle, that for everything that exists there's either an explanation inside it our outside of it. You need to reject the first premise and not the cause of it. It's also backed up by science, so if you reject it, you reject science. Do you reject science?

[Anonymous No.13962194]

The world resets. As it turns from the Saturnian to the Jovian ages. Last reset was the Big Bang; next one will be when the last black holes go out through hawking radiation. All reality returns to the One, and all scales and clocks are canceled out.

[Anonymous No.13962199]

>>13962183
I didn't say a rejection of the PSR meant everything would be unintelligible. I'm saying that PSR not being true would mean that there would be at least some events or things that not only don't have an explanation, but couldn't in principle have an explanation. You failed to come up with a single example of something that couldn't in principle be explained therefore you have no reason to deny the PSR.

[Anonymous No.13962216]

>>13957124
That is not true. It’s expanding from a single point, which means it started, which means at most it extends infinitely in one direction in time. We haven’t even observed it continuing infinitely, so infinite expansion is not provable.

[Anonymous No.13962219]

>>13962190
I do reject your first premise. And in regards to science, I can accept the weaker principle that like causes produce like effects.

[Anonymous No.13962254]

>>13961890

Am I retarded, what does PSR stand for?

[Anonymous No.13962266]

>>13962199
But the point is that I don't even have to positively reject the PSR, because if I did that I would need to show that there is at least one thing that has no explanation. Instead, I can take the agnostic position: There is no reason to think that everything has an explanation, hence if your argument presupposes the PSR, your conclusion is uncertain. You can't reply to that by saying "Well then prove that the PSR is false".

But I actually took up your challenge in my previous post and made the stronger claim that the universe IS a brute fact just to get the conversation rolling. My argument was that no one can even come up with a plausible explanation as to why the world exists instead of nothing.
>>13962254
The Principle of Sufficient Reason.

[Anonymous No.13962300]

>>13962266
I could deny the theory of gravity but it isn't interesting if I don't a reason. It's not a justified skepticism. If the PSR is false, there would be completely explainable things. There are no explainable things therefore the PSR is true. There isw no room for agnosticism

You have no reason to think the universe could not possibly be explained. You can make the assertion that it can't have an explanation but it's meaningless.

[Anonymous No.13962303]

>>13962300
>If the PSR is false, there would be completely explainable things
I mean unexplainable things.

[Anonymous No.13962304]

>>13957937
'the present' is your momentary experience, has no bearing on underlying reality.

[Anonymous No.13962312]

>>13962139
>Why couldn't time just flow on without beginning and without end in the first place?
Indeed. This seems like the least assumptive of the lot.

[Anonymous No.13962425]

>>13962300
So I'm going to let aside the question of justifying the PSR in order to focus on my second, stronger claim and move the discussion forward a bit. You accuse me of having no reason to think that the universe cannot possibly be explained - Well, I challenge you to produce an explanation of why the universe exists instead of nothing.

[Anonymous No.13962441]

>>13962425
No I'm not playing that game with you. You make an assertion it's on you to give a reason to believe it. You say the universe cannot possibly have an explanation, well why the hell do you believe that?

[Anonymous No.13962507]

>>13962425
>Well, I challenge you to produce an explanation of why the universe exists instead of nothing.
God m8

[Anonymous No.13962582]

>>13962441
I love how when you say that the PSR is true you don't need to give a reason as to why you believe it, but when I say that the PSR is false I need to explain why I think that! Well played. The burden of proof is never on the Thomist.

[Anonymous No.13962605]

>>13962582
I did give you a reason to believe the PSR was true, it's the reductio ad absurdum. It is absurd to assert that there are things which cannot possibly be explained. First you tried to fall back on agnosticism but there is no room for agnosticism on this question. The PSR is either true or false. Either everything can be explained in principle if not in fact, or there are some things which cannot in principle be explained. You assert that the universe cannot possibly be explained but you're unable to give a reason for believing that precisely because it is an absurd claim. This is why I called you a bad thinker and had no patience for you quoting and responding to individual sentences.

[Anonymous No.13962691]

>>13962605
Why is it an absurd claim? There is no logical contradiction in the phrase "the PSR is false".

And I told you multiple times that the reason why I don't think that the universe can be explained is that nobody has ever managed to explain it and we can't imagine what such an explanation would be like even in principle.

[Anonymous No.13962745]

>>13962691
The reason it's absurd is because there's literally no reason to believe the universe can't be explained. The universe could be explained in a hundred different ways, that is was created by God or that it's just a bunch of atoms that have existed eternally or you could even say that we currently don't know the explanation. Nobody says there couldn't be an explanation because that is absurd.

To say that we don't know the explanation is not a reason to think there couldn't be an explanation.

[Anonymous No.13962936]

>>13962745
"The reason it's absurd is because there's literally no reason to believe the universe can't be explained"

Then you don't understand what reductio ad absurdum means. I hope I don't need need to explain to you the difference between an unsupported proposition and an absurd one.

Secondly, it seems that you don't really understand how far reaching the principle of sufficient reason is. If you say that the reason the universe exists is that it's just a bunch of atoms that exist eternally, then personally I would be perfectly fine with this explanation. However, the PSR would still not be satisfied - because we can still ask "Why there are a bunch of atoms instead of nothing"? According to the PSR, the answer can't just be " well, that's just how the world turned out to be". But doesn't that show that the PSR can't ever be satisfied? In the end, you will have to take an explanation as final - atoms simply exist, there is no further reason why they do. You see what's the problem?

Classical Theists respond that the PSR can only be answered if we postulate the existence of God, but of course that doesn't really solve the issue since we can still ask "but why does God exist?". Therefore, it seems that we will never be able to give a final explanation for the existence of things.

[Anonymous No.13963026]

>>13962936
It's pointless to ask why God exists then, because the entire point is demonstrating that a self-contained principle of existence must underly the rest if PSR holds.

[Anonymous No.13963029]

>>13962936
You asked me why it's absurd to say that the universe doesn't have an explanation and I answered that it's because there's no reason. To be absurd is to be unreasonable. None of this has anything to do with the reductio ad absurdum so I don't know why you're accusing me of not knowing what that is. You're confused.

The PSR doesn't say that we will or even can in actuality know every explanation for everything. It's saying that there is an explanation for everything regardless of whether or not we will ever actually come to know it. You can ask why there's a God or why there's atoms all you want, but there's nothing implicit in those questions to require us to believe there can be no answers to those questions. Do you understand why not knowing an explanation for something is not a reason to believe there can't an explanation for that something? To deny the PSR is to say that there are some things that cannot have an explanation. Denying the PSR leads to absurdity since there is no reason to believe there is something that cannot be explained.

[Anonymous No.13963057]

>>13957124
>eternal
I bet it will contract at some point, into another big bang. Suns eventually gravitate back together after a supernova, and who's to say mysterious shit like dark ennergy won't flip directions someday

[Anonymous No.13963062]

>>13962219
Would you agree that there could be brute facts and contingent things amd nothing else? Or do you believe that there is a third possibility? I'm not the other guy.

[Anonymous No.13963078]

>>13963026
So the Theistic answer is that God is a being whose essence includes existence, and therefore is self-explanatory. However, a being whose essence includes existence is not really self explanatory - there could have failed to be such a being. If a being whose essence included existence was self-explanatory we would have no need for the cosmological argument. Why derive the existence of God from the contingency of the world if God is self explanatory as to why he exists?

[Anonymous No.13963142]

>>13963029
"You asked me why it's absurd to say that the universe doesn't have an explanation and I answered that it's because there's no reason. To be absurd is to be unreasonable."

That's a fallacy of equivocation. When we talk about something being unreasonable, "reason" there means "epistemic justification". When we talk about the reason why the world exists, "reason" means "cause". Only by confusing ontology with epistemology you can argue that something having no reason in the causal sense is unreasonable.

Secondly, doesn't the fact that the reason why things exist cannot be explained even in principle cast some doubt on your confidence of the PSR? I think it doss, especially since your argument for the PSR amounts to a fallacy of equivocation, as I explained earlier.

[Anonymous No.13963168]

>>13963142
I think intentionally being stupid in order to provoke me now. You literally asked me whether or not the existence of unexplainable things makes me doubt the PSR when we've been debating whether or not unexplainable things exist all day. I'm done with you.

[Anonymous No.13963169]

>>13963078
There could have failed to be such a being, the cosmological argument demonstrates that He exists on basis of observed change- and as a being whose essence includes existence.
My point was just that it's stupid to ask for a PSR-based "sufficient reason" for God when the point of invoking God in such an argument is that there must be a self-caused being.

[Anonymous No.13963170]

>>13963062
>Would you agree that there could be brute facts and contingent things amd nothing else?
Yes, that would be my view. I am not sure what do you mean by a third possibility, there is either an ultimate explanation of why things exist or its just a brute fact and we have to deal with it.

[Anonymous No.13963250]

>>13963169
I am talking about Leibniz's version of the Cosmological argument, not Aristotle's argument from change. The first argues for a being whose essence includes existence, the second argues for a being who is pure actuality.

Also no version of the cosmological argument says that God is "self-caused". I think you confused the God of Spinoza with the God of Aristotle.

[Anonymous No.13963717]

>>13957118
>>13957118

Completely off topic but what if video games actually micro simulations and created temporary realities for the characters within?

Let's use Dark Souls as an example. Each death actually ends the character's life in the simulation and that reality ceases to exist. There is a single iteration that actually makes it through the whole game without dying. In that reality that version of that character actually appears to be the chosen one since the perception is that they have conquered impossible odds. As the player you just know all it took was some getting gud and dying a shit load of times.

What if our reality is like that? You've died hundreds of times already but the current version of you is the one that made it. I need some more drugs.

[Anonymous No.13963779]

>>13962304
Impossible to prove, as your perception is the lense in which all exists. In practice, having you be a distict entity being a given, yes, you are correct, but you have to have that as a given for that to be true, which it is not.

Again, allegory of the cave.

[Anonymous No.13963805]

>>13963170
In the dichotomy between brute facts and contingent things, there could be some possible third alternative. Like something that has both contingent and brute facts explaining its existence or something like that.

Id argue that the distinction between brute facts and necessary beings aren't meaningful.
For example, the two sentences "The reason why that is such a way is because it is a brute fact" and "The reason why that is such a way is because it is a necessary being". If the ultimate explanation of the universe is a brute fact, then the explanation of it's existence is that it is a brute fact. I think that sounds awfully similar to the concept of a necessary being.

[Anonymous No.13963809]

>>13963717
The falicy in your argument is that the player is a continuous observing entity throughout, therefor all the restarted are part of the same larger system known as reality.

I think thats a descant concept of reality.

[Anonymous No.13963851]

>>13963809
If the player was to assume the role of god I don't think the fallacy would apply. If there were a god, I'm assuming that they would be able to sense all branches of reality.

[Anonymous No.13963876]

>>13963851
Sorry, typo. Yes I meant that this was DESCARTE's concept of God and reality.

[Anonymous No.13963878]

>>13957124
>There is an Eternal inflation of the Universe.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.13963919]

>>13957118
No. It challenges my position, but I considered it, and no, I don’t agree.

>>13959001
>It makes more sense that he started counting a finite time ago.
No, it doesn’t. Numbers are infinite. Measurements are subjective. Doesn’t matter where you put zero, the numbers go backwards in time infinitely.

I see I’m late to the thread

[Anonymous No.13964254]

>>13959001
>Studied math in college
>Took real analysis as part of it
>People who don't know enough math think this is profound, and are unaware of countable infinites

cringe

[Anonymous No.13964268]

>there are people browsing this thread right now who don't have a Cartesian view of reality

[Anonymous No.13964392]

>>13964254
>using retarded Cantorian nomenclature of labeling bijective properties, to make philosphical arguments
>dude, some infinities are bigger than other infinities

now that's cringe

[Anonymous No.13964417]

>>13959632
>His existence, therefore, cannot be proven nor His nature conceived

I'm totally fine when religious people say things like this.

The problem is when religious people follow it up with bullshit where they try to have their cake, AKA
>When you demand proof of God, he's a Cthonically incomprehensible being we are incapable of proving anything about
and eat it too,
>My particular brand of Judeochristian theology, philosophy, and traditions are prescriptively good or moral as an expression of revealed truths from our creator

Like, either we're bacteria in the pietri dish truly incapable of understanding or reasoning about the scientists watching us under the microscope, or we can, and using those "revealed truths" as a basis we can probe more deeply about our gods at a rational level.

This latter approach of a touchy-feely god that wants to know us and which we can understand parts of because we were made in its image can be okay too, but generally seems to end poorly. It seems like most historical deities and the revealed truths we've come up for them with don't last long when faced with brutally cold rationally testable scrutiny, and I think it's pretty clear why you stop having lightning gods once you know about the electron, and why the scientific revolution was so long-term devastating to organized religion.

The remains of faiths after this kind of long-term nerd scrutiny mostly end up looking like a pile of unfalsifiable-but-useful moral stances and codes, because anything more than that doesn't last long.

>TLDR
There's nothing wrong with a useful set of morals and codes, or with Cthonic incomprehensible gods, but the latter giving the former is nonsense, by definition.

[Anonymous No.13964451]

“What will the scientists of the future see as they peer into the skies 100 billion years from now?” they ask. “Without telescopes, they will see pretty much what we see today: the stars of our galaxy… The big difference will occur when these future scientists build telescopes capable of detecting galaxies outside our own. They won’t see any! The nearby galaxies will have merged with the Milky Way to form one large galaxy, and essentially all the other galaxies will be long gone, having escaped beyond the event horizon.”

This won’t only mean fewer luminous objects to see in space; it will mean that, “as a result, Hubble’s crucial discovery of the expanding universe will become irreproducible.”
>go on

[Anonymous No.13964471]

>>13963805
A necessary being is a much more obscure idea than a brute fact. It is supposedly something that when you comprehend it, you realize that it somehow isn't possible that it couldn't exist.

So for example, when we think of a chair, we can conceive the possibility that it could fail to exist. Therefore, we need to give an explanation for why the chair does in fact exist - say, a craftsman made it. And we can explain all ordinary things with the same method. Same goes with the universe - it exists, but we can think of the possibility that it could not exist. But then, what is the reason that the universe exists? Well, perhaps it is an entity outside the universe that created it, let's say God. But then couldn't we still ask why God exists? It seems that however far we go we will have to use some data that it will itself remain unexplained. If we accept that there is such an ultimate fact that cannot be explained, then we have what philosophers call a "brute fact".

Now some philosophers were unsatisfied with this situation - they thought that there must be some final explanation, some way to explain things through and through without being forced to accept brute facts. So they came up with the idea of a necessary being, a being that its nature is such that it somehow doesn't need further explanation, because it explains itself.

Of course, the problem is that we can't really imagine a being that it somehow explains itself. Every being we can think of does not really explain itself.which makes me (and many others) sceptical as to whether there really is such a thing (although I can see the appeal of the idea).

[Anonymous No.13964551]

>>13964392
>implying I even brought up comparative infinities OR bijective properties

All I'm saying is that the guy I'm replying to seems to think you can only count from negative infinity, or that you can't count an arbitrarily long amount of time without having a meaningful number a finite distance from zero at any given time you'd care to ask. Both things are wrong, so long as you're willing to grant
>in such a sequence, at t=0, counting began, and new values are counted at a non-zero rate.
>this is a reasonable axiomatic definition of "counting forever" (ie, for t ∈ {x | x >= 0}, counting is ongoing.)

Which both seems reasonable to demand to me, because
>western religion seems completely in consensus there was a LET THERE BE LIGHT creation moment, so it's fair to call that moment t=0.
>if there was no time past that moment when counting was NOT happening, it seems fair to say somebody's been counting "forever", even if the time spent counting is finite: you'd never be able to present a t where counting wasn't happening.