The problem in MWI is shifted towards the branching points. — Hillary

I am not promoting MWI, but if I was, I am unaware of it positing ‘branching points’ at all. It is a common misconception that “at certain magic instances, the world undergoes some sort of metaphysical “split” into two branches that subsequently never interact”. That seems closest to what I suspect you’re referencing.

Tegmark's view suffers from the question what math structures are made of of approximations. — Hillary

While I’m definitely adopting a good chunk of Tegmark’s MUH, I am unaware of this issue with approximations. A reference might help clarify.

I can't complain too much as this forum is far better than any interaction you can have on Twitter or FB — Harry Hindu

I do notice a lot of terse replies in most threads, but that’s more like a conversation over a table with continuous interaction. I’m frequently not around for hours (days?) and must reply in full to all points necessary. I do try to keep my reply shorter than the post to which I’m replying, but I’m failed at that lately. I mean, who actually wants to read a long post like this?

First, I need to understand what you mean by "exists". You contradict yourself by saying that there is no meaning in using the phrase, "X doesn't exist", and then you go on to say that that to the unicorn, you don't exist.

I don’t exist relative to the unicorn. It’s expressed as a relation. “X doesn’t exist” is meaningless because no relation is specified.

If you really cannot accept the name ‘unicorn’, then just think of it as some word arbitrarily assigned to some creature on a different evolutionary future than the ones with humans.

Some relations are bidirectional. X and Y are both members of some common structure and are related in that way. So the unicorn seems to relate to us as both being part of the same structure, the structure perhaps being expressed as a universal wave function. So I’m typically pitching the unicorn as some alternate evolutionary path on this same planet. It’s a reasonable creature (minus the rainbow blowing out of its butt) and it would be dang unlikely that it’s not a valid future of Earth state from say 100 million years ago.

Some relations are unidirectional such as Y measures X, meaning Steve the stegosaurus exists to me but I don’t exist to Steve. This sort of relation seems only to work with structures with a Hilbert space going on, such as the chess states example, but not with the GoL example. Nothing measures anything in GoL. There’s no ‘wave function’ collapse, meaning measurement has nothing to do with the existence of related states. GoL is entirely deterministic in one direction, so in that sense, relative to any given state, all future states are determined and thus they relate to that given state. Future states exist relative to it, but past ones do not since GoL doesn’t have a unique history property like our universe, so prior state cannot be determined. It’s sort of the opposite of our physics in that way.

It seems to me that the unicorn's existence is dependent on your existence to imagine it's existence.

This is expressed without a relation. It very much exists relative to anything that gets gored by that horn. I’m not suggesting that imagination/abstraction has any causal powers beyond creation of ideas. I’m talking about the unicorn, not the idea of a unicorn, but I necessarily must use ideas to discuss it just like I necessarily must use ideas to discuss the mug in front of me.

If the term, "exists" is the problem and is what is causing this contradiction, feel free to use a different term that captures your meaning.

Plenty of philosophical views redefine words like ‘exists’ and ‘universe’ to mean different things, but I get your point. What other word conveys to me that we can interact, that it is not possible that you are not in the world I see, or more in particular, that some part of your worldline is within my past light cone? I don’t have a word that better expresses that, except it has to include the relation: You exist to me. You don’t exist to the unicorn, but Steve probably does (yes, the very same Steve).

In what way did you exist before you and I had our first interaction? Did I exist?

Let’s say I’m older. If you qualify ‘me’ and ‘you’ as unique worldlines, then no part of your worldline was in the past light cone of my younger moments, so you didn’t exist to me then, but some part of my worldline is in the past light cone of your first moment, so I always exist to you, even if I die first, just like Steve exists to us despite the termination of its worldline.

Did you exist prior to our first interaction?

Our first interaction took seconds. Quantum decoherence occurs incredibly quickly, especially when there’s no vacuum separating us. It has nothing to do with being human or any kind of say deliberate information transfer. Remember one of my few axioms: Nothing special about humans or even life.

If so, in what way did we exist?

After that decoherence, each of our states is a function of the state of the other. But the state of the unicorn is not a function of our state.

If you'd like, for the purpose of this discussion, we can say that existence, or exists, is just a state-of-affairs, or what is the case.

Only if you say ‘the state of affairs relative to X’ since the state of affairs is technically different for every event X. The wording implies a moment in time, and so far I’ve avoided that by talking about worldlines instead of events at specific times along those worldlines.
Having thought about it, we can replace ‘X exists relative to Y’ with ‘Y measures X’. This identifies a unique relation that seems to apply only to a very limited number of structures. The ‘fellow member of some structure’ relation is different. Then perhaps we could avoid the word ‘exists’ altogether.

X and Y are each separate state-of-affairs

Neither a worldline nor an event along a worldline is especially a state of affairs, but there is a state of affairs relative to it. I am not ‘war in Ukraine’, but there is a state of war in Ukraine relative to me (a system at say the time of posting this). On the other hand, I, as a system at a specific time, constitute the state of that system, and thus am a local state of affairs. By identification of a time, I’ve dropped down to speaking of events instead of worldlines, which opens up a different can of worms about identity of those events.

If there can be two states-of-affairs prior to any relation (potential vs. actual)

If a measurement has been taken, then that measurement makes the measured state actual to the measurer. If not, then none of the potential states exist relative to that non-measurer, just like neither the dead state of cat nor the live state of cat exists relative to the exterior of the box. There I go using ‘exists’ again, but it seems trivially tautological to say “If not, then none of the potential states are measured relative to that non-measurer”. Ontology in this universe is measurement. To say something exists in the absence of measurement is to assert the principle of counterfactual definiteness, a principle which necessarily must reject locality and thus accept things like cause significantly (years) after its effect.
Maybe we’re talking past each other, but that’s how I’m best able to work in your wording into a relational description.

If X exists in relation to Y, then what are X and Y independent of the relation? Just because I had no information about you prior to us meeting, does that mean that you didn't exist until I did?

Our meeting had nothing to do with it. You had information on me, which is what decoherence does. Technically, X existing to Y means X is some ‘state of affairs’ in the past causal cone of Y, which is approximated by a light cone, but in special circumstances where information transfer is totally inhibited (Schrodinger’s box), can be a smaller subset than that.

Does this mean that there are not parts of the world that have changed as a result of you being in it independent of my first meeting with you?

Meeting has nothing to do with anything. I (worldline) exist relative to the state of affairs of this planet today (event), therefore it has measured me (worldline).

This is what I mean by exists - that it is a relation of causation.

It seems to be a relation of non-counterfactual wave function collapse, a relation unique to non-counterfactual physics that support it. A universe counterfactual physics such as GoL or Bohmian mechanics, the definition doesn’t work since these models posit existence that is not a function of measurement. Causality in GoL is straightforward, but really complicated in Bohmian mechanics where the state of a system might be determined by causes in the far future. I’m not concerned with this since my model holds to locality for this universe. No reverse causality.

Are you saying that X and Y are states-of-affairs prior to the state-of-affairs of existing in relation to each other? Does one come before the other?

X is prior (earlier in time) to Y in this case. The relation is a way of expressing that the state of affairs Y is causally a function of the state of affairs X. Not sure if you’re using ‘prior’ to mean something else like ‘more fundamental than’.

I've been saying that unicorns exist as well as us because they are both causal.

Again, I’ve not been talking about abstractions. I’m talking about an alternate mammal species on Earth in a world with a different evolutionary history. I’m using it as an illustrative device.

So all the components of a structure are related as being a member of the whole, which is very different from the concept of an ‘existence’ relation which involves measurement and only applies to temporal structures with causal physics.
— noAxioms
I don't see how. You're simply talking about spatial relations in the components being a member of a whole.

It’s not necessarily spatial. How does 3 relate to 5? One doesn’t cause or measure the other, so it isn’t that sort of relationship, but more of a ‘members of set of numbers’ kind of sisterhood, an equal relationship. We have a similar relation with the unicorn, a different relation than the 1-way ‘measures’ relationship. OK, there is a sort of spatial relationship between 3 and 5. The chess example (a tree structure) has no immediate spatial relationship between the various states. Two states might be related by how long a tree walk would be between them, but would only have a causal relationship if that walk was one way, that the one state was a parent node of the other. The members of the Mandelbrot set are just complex numbers, relating to each other by little more than ‘fellow member of the set’ and such.

I don't believe in any fundamental scale of reality independent of some view of reality. Wholes and members of wholes are the products of different views (measurements) of the same thing.

I couldn’t understand that. Perhaps an illustrative example would help.

If they don't exist (have a causal relation) relative to the Earth, then how did humans on Earth come to contemplate it or know about it?

Each of them follows from some theory, principle, or interpretation. A level one multiverse results from the cosmological principle among other things that assume that Earth is not the exact center of a universe. Level II is from inflation theory, which otherwise leaves unexplained the ‘fine tuning’ of our universe. Each level results from a rejection of geocentrism in a different way.

How do physicists and philosophers come to talk about this? How did you come to talk about such things?

Because it is painfully difficult to explain empirical observations with geocentric interpretations. This is what I’m doing. I’m rejecting the bias that our universe (the spacetime in which we find ourselves) is preferred, even at the ontological level.

[relations] only property of Y? If so, then it seems that Y is dependent upon the there being an X to measure, but then what is X?

Dependent for what? In a causal structure, if Y measures X then Y is dependent on X to be ‘caused’, but I’m not equating ‘caused by’ with ‘exists relative to’. The relation here is one way, so Y doesn’t exist to X. It’s only a possibility to X, or to be precise, Y is a valid solution to the evolution of X’s wave function (or rather the wave function of the environment including X since X is not a closed system), but so is ~Y.

What you seem to be saying is that there is X and Y and Z is the relation (existence) between them. My question is what is X and Y independent of this relation, as in you and I before we ever met.

There’s two ways to answer that. Assuming the pragmatic view that natural language presumes, the view that you’ve taken with your question above, X and Y are worldlines of persistent systems (systems with identities), such as you and I or a brick.
But the pragmatic view can be driven to contradiction in a more universal context, and thus to be technically accurate, X and Y are events, not worldlines. They represent the ‘state of affairs’ of a specific system at a specific time. Natural language then fails and one must resort to something akin to B-speak where references to meaningless persistent identities are avoided similar to how B-speak avoids references to the meaningless present. Then X and Y have have a relation of ‘measures’ or they don’t.

I'm not sure if this is an adequate example, but think of a 3D open-world game installed on your computer.

I’m old enough that I had to look up the term ‘open world game’.

Before you run the game, the game is just a program written in some computer language stored as an executable file on your hard drive. All the events within the game have already been written. The past, present and future events within the game all exist at once within the program. The programmer already knows what will happen and has happened before running the program, but the player does not.

Not sure what you mean by this. You make it sound like a movie, a story with all the events pre-planned (determinism) and no choices to be made by an outside entity (the player). The programmer certainly doesn’t know how the game will progress. There are more possible events than there is code.

It is only in playing the game - of living the life of one of the characters in the game - that time's passage becomes apparent, but outside of the game there is no time as all the causal events of IF-THEN-ELSE in the code happen all at once.

Not following. Outside the game the code doesn’t ‘happen’ at all, and during the game, groups of instructions are indeed executed in sequence. Usually there are several (4 to hundreds) of instruction streams running at once.
Maybe I’m not getting your usage of ‘at once’, which I’m probably incorrectly equating to ‘at the same time’. This is sort of the language used to describe a block universe, a completely self-contained structure containing time, but without change to the structure itself. It is said that all moments of this block exist ‘at once’ and don’t ‘happen’, which is different than saying that the events are at the same time, which would be wrong as saying they’re all at the same place.

If any interaction is a measurement and humans/lifeforms are not special in this role, then the Moon and Earth existed prior to humans as a measurement?
-- Harry Hindu
Relative to what? Question is meaningless without that.
-- noAxioms
Relative to each other.

Yes, the Moon and Earth on which humans eventually evolve existed relative to each other. My MWI digression was due to my confusion as to which Earth and which moon since some worlds have a moonless Earth.

You know that you exist.

Rovelli would disagree, and I'm with him on that point. He says a system cannot measure itself (cannot collapse its own wave function) and thus cannot meaningfully assess the state of its own existence just like inability of the cat in the box to determine what the observer outside the box will observe upon opening the box. It was the reading of Rovelli on which much of my view is based. He’s the one that defines existence (at least in this universe) as a measurement relation. I’m driving it a bit further I think.

What is the nature of the thing that you are referencing and how is it different than the state-of-affairs of referencing, or what is the case of referencing?

It is the difference between a physical rock made of protons and such, and the abstraction (or the referencing) of a rock, consisting of mental process and discourse. I’m not talking about abstractions. A rhino is almost a unicorn, if only it leaned more on the equine side. Surely unicorns are a possible future of some fairly recent state of Earth’s biological history. The unicorn of which I speak probably doesn’t look completely like the abstraction I have in mind, but that’s also true of say you.

Then "real" and "existing" are dependent on each other - you cannot have one without the other?

Depends if you define them in ways that they’re synonymous or not. I’m defining ‘exists’ as a relation the way Rovelli does. I’m keeping ‘is real’ as the property so as not to take away all my vocabulary for that concept. As a non-realist, I don’t have to explain the reality of whatever I assert to be real, which removes a significant issue with any view that does. Per Rovelli’s arguments, there seems to be no empirical test for being real. Nobody seems to be able to design a device that behaves differently only when its real. That reduces ‘being real’ to an interpretational choice, and I’ve chosen to discard it as superfluous.

But scribbles are concrete things as well

But I’m not talking about scribbles or abstractions. You keep attempting to drive things there. I’m not disagreeing with your discussion of abstractions and scribbles, but it’s not on topic.

If they are numbers, then they represent something.

It is admittedly harder to think of numbers being things in themselves and not just abstractions, but imagine if mathematics worked even without humans or other life forms to utilize them. Imagine the sum of two and two actually being four and not only being four when some calculator executes the computation.
I know, it’s like asking you to imagine something independent of an imaginer.

Which my response was that they wouldn't represent anything. They'd be scribbles.

No, they’d not be scribbles, which is an abstraction. I’m not talking about abstractions or any instantiation of the numbers. I’m proposing that mathematics is more fundamental than the scribbles that allow us to abstract it.

This discussion started out with a relevant comment about a priori knowledge that 2+2=4 or some such, and while that point is still on the table, things have certainly evolved into a side discussion (for which I’m massively grateful since you’re at least trying to hear me out). I don’t know if mods here are in the habit of splitting off side discussions. I see such sidetracks happening in many lengthy threads, so I suspect it isn’t site policy to split. Some sites split topics given even a hint of discussion not directly related to the OP.
I see little evidence of active mod activity on this site, but I also see a delicious absence of true trolls here, so maybe I’m just not privy to the silent but deadly actions being taken.
I’m a mod myself on another forum (not a philosophy site) and have split my share of topics, and that site indeed seems to be a troll (and spam) magnet.

Sorry for the long post, but more details are needed to answer at least the one question.

But how can you talk about something that doesn't exist? — Harry Hindu

I didn’t say it doesn’t exist. I said that there is no meaning to ‘X exists’ or ‘X doesn’t exist’. It puts us and the unicorn on equal footing. To the unicorn, I don’t exist, so all nice and symmetrical.
Continuing to use language that presumes realism is inhibits the ability to discuss a view that doesn’t. I looked at nihilism, but it seems to give meaning to such a property, but asserts that nothing has it. So it gives meaning to ‘exists’, but then says nothing exists. So I’m not a nihilist. I cannot find a reference to what I’m describing.

It is the thing itself and "unicorn" the word is the representation of the abstraction.

Agree with that.

unicorns only exist as abstractions.

Under a relational view, this statement is not even wrong. It references a realist bias (that there is a property of ‘exists’ and we have it and unicorns do not, making us real and not the unicorn). Step one is to drop that bias, because the view needs to be driven to contradiction without resorting to it.

If you want to get down and dirty, the relation seems to depend on the nature of the structure defining X and Y. So for instance, in this universe it seems that quantum decoherence defines X to Y: Y measures X when information of X leaks to Y.
— noAxioms
Then the structure for defining X and Y is prior to the relation of X and Y? How does this structure exist as a relation to what? — Harry Hindu

Much better question. Yes, it is a structure, and if that’s what you mean by infinite regression, there isn’t infinite regression. The structure, if not a sub-structure of something deeper, doesn’t exist relative to anything.
The view is a mix of Tegmarks mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH, mathematical structures being fundamental, but without the ontology suggested), Everett’s relative state formulation (RSF, also known as MWI: one universal wave function, making it a mathematical structure) with no wave function collapse, and Rovelli’s relational view (RQM), which is mostly just RSF with different ontology including collapse. RSF has a single postulate: “All isolated systems evolve according to the Schrodinger equation”. This doesn’t mention ontology at all, but somehow MWI evolved into somethings that suggests the existence of the universal wave function. MUH similarly suggests that various mathematical structures ‘exist’, and heated discussions ensue over exactly what ‘breathes the fire of existence’ into one structure and not another, which is exactly the sort of problem I'm trying to avoid.

I bring all this up for terminology purposes. Level 1 is universes separated by physical distance (visible universes). Level 2 comes from inflation bubbles that have different physical constants like multiple dimensions of time and field strengths that don’t allow particles to form and such. Level 3 is other worlds per MWI. Level 4 is unrelated structures, of which I have a few choice examples. All of these ‘universes’ are inaccessible to us, hence (in relational terminology) don’t exist relative to our Earth.
The first three of these levels are part of the same quantum structure, so that one structure encompasses all these different components.
I think that’s an important point since the relation between them is more like the relation between 3 and 5 and not a relation of Y measures X. So all the components of a structure are related as being a member of the whole, which is very different from the concept of an ‘existence’ relation which involves measurement and only applies to temporal structures with causal physics.

Some of my pet examples:
1) The Mandelbrot set is an oft-cited example of a non-temporal two-dimensional structure in the complex plain. It is complex, beautiful, but not being a causal structure, there’s no measurement going on. I’d say that Mandelbrot discovered the set, not that he created it. It can be independently discovered by anybody without any specific empirical observation, hence is a priori knowledge. The parts of the set relate to each other in a member-of relationship. Value X is a member of the set. Value Y is not.

2) The set of all possible chess states, including move history. This is not in any way to be confused with a game being played. This is a temporal structure and serves as a wonderful analogy to wave function collapse. The structure is finite: There is a maximum length possible game something on the order of 5 thousand moves. It is temporal: It starts at some initial state, and time is measured by half-moves (one move is a move by both white & black). Each state has one prior parent state and several child states. This is thus a causal structure of sorts. Each state can only be caused by its parent. Relative to any position Y1, the parent X exists but the sibling states (Y<n>) do not exist, so each move effectively collapses the ‘wave function’ of how the game can possibly further proceed, all very much like alternate futures disappearing from our existence into other worlds under MWI. All the states still relate to each other with the ‘member of the structure’ relation, which I think I’m going to need to name.

3) Conway’s game of life (GoL) is a fairly classic and crude analogy to our physics. It has one dimension of time and two of space (there are versions with more), a speed of light, and causality. It is a counterfactual structure unlike quantum physics, so it is unclear how a ‘measures’ relation might be expressed. It is complex enough to simulate itself, which is more than I can say about our physics. It lacks a specific initial condition, so each initial state defines a different structure.

And when I ask how does it exist, I'm asking how does it have causal power as in causing a relation between X and Y?

Causal powers are inherent in the structure properties. It’s real obvious in the GoL example. Any defined state defines all the subsequent state in the same way that 2+2 determines the sum 4 despite the lack of any calculator instantiating the sum.

Do relations exist?

There are views that are realist about relations. I’m trying to avoid being realist about anything, so no, it is not meaningful to discuss the existence of relations except as relations to its relata. Yea, I suppose ‘measures X’ can be thought of as a property of Y.

the Moon and Earth existed prior to humans as a measurement?

Relative to what? Question is meaningless without that. — noAxioms

Relative to each other.[/quote]
Think MWI here. The moon seems a direct result of a specific Theia event. So some worlds have a moon, and yes, it orbits what can be named Earth. Some worlds have a different Theia event leaving a much different Earth any different moon or no moon. Relative to a world where the Theia impact did not occur, there is probably still something that is the future version of what had become our Earth in our world. Some (most) worlds don’t have our solar system at all. Some worlds have unicorns on them, but probably not human maidens to adopt them. The ones with unicorns (evolved from the same primitive live as did we) very much have a moon in their sky. The exact same Theia event exists relative to the unicorn as it does to us. The branching of worlds that cumulated in those two states most certainly occurred. It’s like two very different chess game states (one with (horny) knights still on the board, one with only bishops) both sharing a common first dozen moves.

So for the Moon to exist it must have a relation with something, say the Earth, and this relation existed before humans, right?

Yes, our prehistoric Earth is related to our prehistoric moon. They very much measure each other, in a Bang-Ding-Ow way (I hope you get that reference).

If humans are not special in this role then you don't necessarily need an observer for quantum decoherence. You just need other relations, no?

With the exception of one (Wigner) interpretation that was so unpopular that it was abandoned by its creator, decoherence or wave function collapse has absolutely nothing to do specifically with humans or consciousness of any kind.

There’s only finite stuff that exists relative to me for instance, all of it in my past light cone.
— noAxioms
Yeah, but that stuff exists relative to other stuff, not just you. — Harry Hindu

That it does. Some of it exists relative to the unicorns, as I spelled out above, but nothing particularly recent.

It also existed before you and will continue to exist after you, no?

Relative to say my mailbox after I’m gone, stuff that was in my past light cone will be in its past light cone, so yes. I assumed the name noAxioms, but I do hold a few axioms that are not necessarily self evident or true, but without which no progress can be made. These include that my sensory input is not a lie. If I’m being fed fiction (evil BiV scenario), then I have zero knowledge and cannot help getting it wrong, sort of like the N Koreans. (Two Korean references in the same post, wow). I also assume humans are not in any way special. That path leads to a different dark hole.

Or are you saying that all other relations of things other than with you do not exist when you don't? That would be solipsism.

Yea, it would. The Wigner interpretation mentioned above can be driven to solipsism, which is why Wigner abandoned it.

But I am a realist. So now what?

Now you punch holes in my idea.

You like to postulate other universes when you don't believe that there actually are.

Same with the unicorns, but I don’t postulate their existence, I just reference them. Yet again, it is meaningless to talk about if they actually are or are not. Lacking the meaning of the property, the other universe is on no more or less stable ground than this one. That’s the beauty of it.

Is it so hard for you to pretend that maybe you're not an anti-realist? You say 'real' has no meaning and then go on to categorize your beef as being real and existing as a relation with you.

Which is different than any of that just existing.

Our conversation is unraveling quickly. What is meaningless is your use of language.

I’m trying. Part of the problem is that most basic assumptions are part of the language, such as all the verb tenses that presume presentism. It’s all very pragmatic, but not so useful when it gets in the way of understanding a different point of view. So other than my continued nattering about using existence, ‘is’, or being real in an objective way, please point specific points out where my language gets in the way.

That is the difference between what makes a scribble a number or word and not just a scribble. So are 2 and 4 scribbles or numbers?[/quote]I’m talking about the latter. What is written down is a representation, an abstraction of sorts, not the thing.

If they are numbers, then they represent something.

Well, that goes against my original question of if they needed to represent anything. I think somebody working in pure mathematics (not applied) would still say that 2+2=4.

Welcome to TPF!

’m only very new to philosophy, but immediately I was attracted to the question, “what is humanity’s purpose?” — Laila

Personally, the first thing I would ask is 'purpose to what?'. A thing might have different purposes to different things. A leaf might serve the tree's purpose of gathering light energy, but the same leaf might serve the purpose of food to a bug, or shade to something else. It serves a purpose to X if it meets a goal of X, so first steps are to pick an X and determine its goals.

One could say that the meaning or purpose of life is up to the person or that it’s something like happiness but in my opinion the reality is probably harsher than that. That’s not to say you can’t have some kind of motivation or have something you feel is your purpose, but I think saying it’s the entire reason you were born is incorrect.

You're suddenly switching from purpose of humanity to your own purpose as an individual. I doubt they serve the same purpose to various things.

Take humans away and life and the world flourishes.

You recognize humanity as a sort of pandemic to the ecosystem. It is predicted that the Holocene extinction event will claim perhaps 85% of all species. This has happened before, arguably not with negative long term consequences, depending again on what bar is used to measure goals being met or not. But I agree, that most recent/current species would be better off had humanity never come along.

Well first of all, how is everything made in such a perfect way?

It isn't perfect, even before humans. Perfection would arguably not involve extinctions anymore, but even that can be driven to calamity.

So, it is possible that humanity is the death side of the coin.

Death of all things is inevitable, with or without humans helping.

I really didn't grok the fishbowl analogy.

It comes down to what you mean by "exist". — Harry Hindu

Well under the relational view, it’s defined as a relation. Pretty sure I spelled that out before. X exists relative to Y. If you want to get down and dirty, the relation seems to depend on the nature of the structure defining X and Y. So for instance, in this universe it seems that quantum decoherence defines X to Y: Y measures X when information of X leaks to Y. But quantum rules hardly apply in a system without quantum mechanics, or even causal physics, so for instance 3 is less than 5 and thus 3 and 5 mutually exist in relation to each other. That one is not a temporal relation.

The difference between an known thing and an imagined thing is that one is understood to represent things whose existence is not dependent on a mind and the other's existence is completely dependent upon a mind.

The point of the unicorn example was to show that expression of such relations is commonplace. I picked a unicorn because it exemplifies a thing lacking the property of existence. I’m talking about a unicorn, and not the abstraction or representation of one.

This is the really mind-bending part. In what way does some system exist independent of it being measured?

Your wording uses ‘exist’ as a property, and is thus meaningless in the relational view. In short, using quantum rules, a thing doesn’t exist relative to Y if Y hasn’t measured it, and thus there is no existence relative to Y in the absence of measurement. A photon ‘in flight’ for instance isn’t measured by anything. It is probably the number one example of a counterfactual. Existence of an unmeasured photon is denied pretty much by any non-counterfactual interpretation of physics. Not so with a classical pulse of light, but such a pulse has been measured.

If any interaction is a measurement and humans/lifeforms are not special in this role, then the Moon and Earth existed prior to humans as a measurement?

Relative to what? Question is meaningless without that.

Are you saying that it is measurements, or relations, all the way down, and are what is real or exists?

Relations all the way down, yes. Exists no, since that isn’t a relation. No, I’m not saying relations are ‘real’.

Any system is a relation between its constituents and the constituents are also systems. It seems like an infinite regress

Not infinite. There’s only finite stuff that exists relative to me for instance, all of it in my past light cone.

Is your beef against realism a real state-of-affairs that can be explained?

Not being a realist, my ‘beef’ does not have the property of being real, but it’s real to me.

So, am I correct in my assumption that your explanation is of a real state-of-affairs (that you have a beef with realism) that is true despite if you had explained it or not, or even if I believed your explanation or not?

It being categorized as ‘real’ is meaningless (not even wrong). It is real to me, and also to you regardless of my having explained it or not. Explaining it just changes some epistemology, but the measurement was unavoidable since there’s no practical way for the two of us to isolate from each other.

What is the relationship between the scribbles. 3.600517 and 12.8119 and 16.412417? Why is there a relationship at all? There must be something going on inside the calculator that forms a relationship between them that is more than just the rearranging of scribbles.

I don’t like the talk of scribbles since I’m not in any way suggesting that the numbers require representation in any way in order for them to relate in this way. To sink the view you’d have to show that the relationship is necessarily only formed by some process in the calculator or some other instantiation, and I don’t think that can be demonstrated. Lack of ability to demonstrate this doesn’t prove the view, but most views such as this are interpretations, not provable theorems.

Your goal doesn't perform the calculation. It determines what kind of values and the calculations, or measurements that you will use, as well as how specific you need your measurement to be successful in achieving your goal.

Nothing needs to calculate or quantify anything. This is sort of an exercise in logic, finding a view consistent or somehow self-contradictory.

The success or failure of your goal is dependent upon those values and calculations being representative of some actual state-of-affairs or not, and not just being some scribbles being rearranged in your head at whim.

Both cases seem to constitute instantiation. If a state of affairs is actual (real), then the sum seems contingent on that reality. If it is just scribbles, then it is contingent on being represented somewhere. I want the sum to be what it is without any of this, for the sum to be objectively this one value, not contingent on anything. I don’t see why 2+2 isn’t 4 until being instantiated, so I consider the suggesting of it being an objectively true relation isn’t immediately falsified on logical grounds.

If it were just a language thing, then I can simply rearrange quotes, and some of your posts would be mine. What is plagiarism?

I say it is just a language thing, without which there would be no defined ‘you’ to rearrange quotes. Indeed, there is no meaning to plagiarism in physics without definitions of system boundaries.

Doesn't the fact that I can design a physical device that isn't a human being but possesses sensors like a human being that can determine the boundary of a cat in the same way a human can, mean something?

It’s actually pretty hard to do. Closest I can think is a self driving car which needs to glean objects and then sort out which ones are potentially mobile. The cars still get it wrong sometimes.

Mostly...
— noAxioms
If the rational part is fine with the goals, then the rational part must share the goals because the rational part must realize that the boss and itself are part of the same being that the outcomes of their behaviors affects them both. — Harry Hindu

Mostly...

Then the rational part doesn't seem rational at all if it doesn't at least attempt to overthrow the boss when it determines that the boss is making the wrong decision that will impede their natural and social fitness.

Well that’s what it’s there for, so of course.

Hmm. It seems strange to say that you are not a realist when you've been engaged with me in this conversation for some time now. — Harry Hindu

Realists are not the only ones who claim the ability to communicate.

Keep in mind that I am expressing a view, not a belief. I'm not asserting that my way is the truth, and thus technically I am not asserting that all of the things I qualify as 'lies' are actually false. But they have serious problems that seem more substantial than with alternative views. So I'm not evangelizing my pet theory, but rather looking for feedback to help find the holes in it. In that capacity, this conversation is a big help. I suppose to fully describe what I've worked out, it would need to be explained in more detail and these posts are just a pragmatic rough sketch. The details are harder to discuss in natural language since a sort of B-speak would be necessary which avoids not only references to the present, but also to persistent identity, and that gets cumbersome. So anyway, the rudiments of a relational take on things:

You exist relative to me. It’s a relation born of measurement, at least in this universe. It is not a function episemology. There are billions of people I don't know which nevertheless exist relative to me.
Being a non-realist means that the property of being real (existence) is undefined. Relations are not affected by the meaningless property. There is precedent. People have no problem saying a unicorn has a horn on its head despite the lack of existence of the horn, or running a simulation of a car hitting a wall to measure its safety properties despite the lack of existence of the car. The unicorn horn exists relative to the unicorn despite their lack of the meaningless property. I don’t exist to the unicorn since it doesn't measure me.

It’s something like the Rovelli view, except I’ve seen it expressed that it implies a sort of momentary ontology where a system exists only at the moments in which it is measured, and not between, but the moon is quite there (relative to us) when not being looked at. For one thing, it is pretty impossible to not continuously measure the moon, and for another thing, you can’t un-measure a thing, so the moon once measured exists to all humans, even humans that might not exist relative to me say in some other world.

Humans/life forms play no special role in this. It isn’t about epistemology. You always existed relative to me long before either of us posted on any forum. We exist relative to my mug since it too has measured us, despite the fact that the mug doesn’t know it. Any interaction whatsoever is a measurement, so the only way to avoid it is by isolation by distance or Schrodinger’s box and such.

Simple exercise: With begging the opposing view that being real is necessary for A to relate to B, design a device that can detect if it is real or not. It’s kind of similar to asking the presentist to design a device that measures the rate of advancement of the present, an absolute clock of sorts. Thing is, there’s no empirical difference between the rate changing by say a factor of 100, or stopping altogether. Absent an empirical test, assertions about the reality of the posited thing (the present) is superfluous. Likewise, being real seems to be superfluous to empirical observations, so dismissing it opens different options for consideration.

You're the one that brought other universes into the discussion, no?

But I hopefully didn’t go so far as to suggest that these other universes exist. I'd have expressed that our universe doesn’t exist relative to them, and they don’t exist relative to us.

Is 2+2=4 a realist statement? Is it conditionally true only if either quantity is real or there are real things that can be quantified, or is it unconditionally true even without there being anything real to count?
— noAxioms
Now I'm not really sure by what you mean as "realist". I am a direct realist when it comes to the mind and an indirect realist when it comes to the world. Our minds are of the world and about the world, thanks to causation (information).

For one, that’s more specific than the typical description. ‘Realist’ is an adjective of sorts and the word on its own doesn’t say what you’re realist about. My big beef against realism is how one explains the reality of whatever one considers real. So the deist types just add a layer to the ‘cause of the universe’ but fail to explain the existence of the deity vs the nonexistence of same.

OK, about the 2+2=4 thing: This is probably the shakiest part of my view: Is the sum of (just to pick a non-counting example) 3.600517 and 12.8119 objectively equal to 16.412417 or is it contingent on instantiation of those values somehow somewhere, on say a calculator adding those specific values. The latter would require the thing performing the calculation to be more fundamental (it would exist, relative to the sum) than the sum of the value. I propose otherwise. I suggest the sum is 16.412417 even in the absence of anything calculating that particular operation or two objects of those dimensions somehow being combined, or in particular, even in the absence even of the meaning of something being objectively real (e.g. ‘nothing’ is a meaningful objective state of reality, so I don’t suggest ‘there is nothing’). From this premise (that mathematics doesn’t require instantiation to be valid), I can build our universe. There are other hurdles, but that’s been one that bothers me.

As you pointed out, math problems like dividing by three gives you an infinite regress answer.

That’s just a decimal representation of a third. A number is a number, regardless of the impossibility to express that number precisely in any conceivable representation. I mean, pi is a number expressible with a single character, but most real numbers cannot be expressed exactly. This doesn’t affect the number itself, it just affects the ability of it to be physically represented.

Our present goal in the mind determines how many significant digits we use (how close the approximation needs to be) to accomplish that goal. Is the goal to divide the last piece of pie among three people equally, or is the goal getting a spacecraft to Mars?

My goal doesn’t involve anybody or anything actually performing a calculation. That would make the truth of 2+2=4 contingent on the thing doing the adding. A simulation does such calculations, and yes, they’d be approximate. I’m not talking about a simulation, which is just a sub-structure implemented on a deeper structure, all very much like the deity-universe relationship.

So we can't determine whose posts are whose on this forum?

On what statement of mine did you conclude something like that? Done correctly, the quotes are signed.

there is surely a difference between a cat and a fish that does not simply exist in our minds.

I wasn’t talking about the difference between a cat and something similar to a cat. I’m talking about the boundaries of a specific cat or river or whatever. Which atoms belong to the cat and which do not, and precisely when does that designation change? Physics doesn’t care about it. It is just a language thing. But build a physical device that say cleans a cat and you’ll have to define the boundary to a point so it doesn’t waste it’s time grooming the carrier or something.

There is something that we are naming and the naming refers to the similarities of particular organisms. I don't think the similarities and differences are products of our minds.

With organisms, not, it isn’t just a mental thing. Two eukaryotic organisms are the same species if they can produce fertile offspring together. It gets harder to distinguish different species of organism that reproduce via mitosis.
We are getting seriously off topic here.

If you are able to say that they are lies, then you obviously know what the truth is is yet you are still able to survive. How is that?

Because the part in charge doesn’t believe the ideas that the rational part comes up with. The boss very much believes the lies and the rational part is fine with the goals that come from them. Mostly...

It seems to me that the ability to adapt to a wide range of environments is a result of our our rational side (science and technology).

No immediate argument, but * rant warning * I do notice that we rationally can see the environmental damage being done, but the parts in charge do not. For all we pride ourselves in being this superior race, we act less intelligent than bacteria in a limited petri dish of nutrients. The bacteria at least don’t see the problem. We do and we (temporarily at least) have all this technology at our disposal, and don’t do anything different than the bacteria. * end rant *

Being able to survive in a wide range of environments, and potentially all environments, is about as fit as you can get.

Being able to sustain that ability would make us far more fit. So far, from the point of view of the planet, we’re just another pandemic, an extinction event. The first one (Oxygen Catastrophe) never went away and resulted in astonishing complexity that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred. If I could name a goal for the human race, it is to do that sort of thing again. Move to the next level instead of collapse back down to pre-bronze-age conditions.

In order to lie you must know the truth.

I suppose, yes, but it's still a falsehood despite lack of deliberate deceit by any willed entity.

It's like saying that in one universe there is only one universe, when there are actually many. How would you acquire the truth if not by leaving this universe and going to another? — Harry Hindu

Acquisition of what amounts to a measurement of an unmeasurable thing is of little concern to me. Not being a realist, I don’t give meaning to realist statements like “there are X many universes”, be X 0, 1, some other number, finite or otherwise. My universe is confined to a limited distance. That’s a relation relative to any given event (physics definition) in my life.

Very late edit:
Is 2+2=4 a realist statement? Is it conditionally true only if either quantity is real or there are real things that can be quantified, or is it unconditionally true even without there being anything real to count? I can make it a little harder by picking a non-integer since it eliminates the relevance of just counting things.

What qualifies a universe to be a universe, or part of the category, "universe"?

Tegmark listed four different ways to do that. His first is the kind I referenced above, a set of finite sized hyperspheres that overlap, separated only by distance. That’s four different ways to define a cat.
I’m the first to admit that defining a word is a human language thing. It isn’t a physics thing at all. What delimits the cat from the not-cat? At exactly what point does the cat and food system become just cat?
In Dr Who, a character had a teleport device strapped to his wrist. Hit the button and you’re suddenly somewhere else. My immediate (no hesitation) reaction to that was to ask how it knew what was you and what wasn’t. In terminator it was a nice define sphere and if your foot was outside that line, it doesn’t go with you. But the wrist device needed to know apparently that the clothes needed to go with you, but not say the post against which you’re leaning, despite the post being closer to the device than many of your body parts. It really bothered me, never mind the whole impossibility of the device in the first place, which I readily accept as a plot device.

So the question is, do (mental) categories exist independent of minds? Are categories objective features of reality?

I’d have said that abstract is abstract and there is no cat until something names/models it. The word cat is strictly a mental construction. So are atoms if you come right down to it, but at least atom has a physics definition that the cat lacks. I’m not asserting anything here, just giving my thoughts.

It's more likely that your self-contradictory beliefs have no bearing on your goal to survive, which is why you can hold them and still survive.

The lies have a huge bearing on my ability to survive. So it must be the rational beliefs, far more likely to be true, that have no bearing. I’d say they do, but the rational side isn’t in charge, but instead has a decent advisory role for matters where the boss hasn’t a strong opinion. Fermi paradox solution: Any sufficiently advanced race eventually puts its rational side sufficiently in charge to cease being fit.

When you actually apply those beliefs to goals that they have an impact on, then you will find that your goals cannot be realized.

I have to admit that the rational side is like an engineer, not having goals of its own, but rather is something called upon to better meet the goals of its employer, even in cases where the goals are based on known lies. But I’m not sure whose goals you think are not being realized. They’re working on ‘live forever’.

That's the thing that we need to iron out. Is our goal to feel warm fuzzies and cope with the reality of life, or is to acquire true knowledge of reality?

OK, there’s a rational goal, since I rationally want to do the latter. Surprisingly, there are warm fuzzies on that road as well, despite the denial of that possibility from the theists, who assert oblivion as the only alternative to eternal orgasm in the sky.

Yes Human brains have the capacity for numerical and moral judgments, grammar etc. After all we are the evolutionary product of billion of generations interacting empirically with their environment and its rules. — Nickolasgaspar

We've been modern humans for only a short time. Our current morals are only a few generations old. Yes, there are some crude rules built into our instinct, but siblings regularly do some pretty cruel things to each other, so it's a stretch to say the morals are an evolutionary product instead of a product of society, and a rapidly changing one at that.

Just wanted to say thanks for the dialog. You’re one of the single digit of posters whose feedback I’d not lightly dismiss, even if I’m in total disagreement with a few of them.

Your profile says you're Indonesian, not an "American white guy".

If there is more than one universe then are we not already acknowledging that there are a number of universes, and that there might be different universes where there are two universes in which 2+4=4 and 2 in which 2+2=7, but there are 2+2=4 total universes? — Harry Hindu

That would be a meaningless question if the sum of two and two is not objectively meaningful. You’re asking an objective question there, not one related to a particular set of laws.
You said that 2+2=4 is true in our universe, which I’ll call U0. So U0 → 2+2=4
But I’m going for a relation in the other direction: 2+2=4 → U0, U1, etc.
If mathematical law holds objectively and not just relative to our universe, then I can explain the existence relative to us of our universe. That’s why I’m interested in it being objectively true. It has been a weak point in my argument.

Would it make any sense at all to say that we can add 2 universes to 2 other universes to get 4 universes yet 2+2 does not equal 4 in a certain universe?

I suppose in the universe where 2+2=7, there would objectively be 7 universes, but we’d count only 4. That sounds like a contradiction since it is an objective quantity being discussed, not a quantity of anything that is part of one universe or another. That’s fair evidence that 2+2 objectively is 4, but I’ve not enough of a formal mathematical background to assess the validity of that argument.

You misunderstood what I wrote then. I was trying to illustrate why the ‘why am I me’ question is baffling only if dualism is assumed.
— noAxioms
Because you are assuming that there is an I that is separate from the individual (dualism).

The question assumes that, yes. Hence I rationally reject the question as either meaningless or begging. The question “why is there something and not nothing” is similarly meaningless/begging, and is why I abandoned the realism that it begs.

Dualism is indoctrinated at an early age with the introduction of religion (soul vs body).

I might agree with the solipsism thing, but my suspicion is that language is what then introduces the dualism, just like it introduces object identity and reinforces presentism, something that babies/animals already have. Religion (organized religion at least) is just a parasitical entity evolved to prey on these beliefs and the natural resistance to death.

Rationally, I’ve rejected all those things, even fear of death. But just rationally. I obviously hold multiple self-contradictory beliefs. As I said, the lies make you fit, and I’d not survive the day without them.

The notion that you can exist independently of your body is a delusion created as way to deal with the knowledge of your death.

Yes, warm fuzzies so you can sleep. Most people rationalize the lies rather than rationally analyze them, but most people don’t give a philosophy forum a second thought.
I’ve watched my mother rewrite her memories as a method of holding on to the warm fuzzies. It’s harder to see yourself do it, but it’s a necessary coping mechanism. Humans are excellent at rationalizing, but incredibly poor at rational thought. I struggle to be otherwise, and maybe even fool myself into thinking I’m on some kind of right track, but deeper down I realize that’s probably a rationalized conclusion. Go figure.

There is no lottery. There is no luck.

Agree, but you expressed incredulity about the bug, so I thought I’d explain from where that idea came.

It always puzzles me whenever an attempt is made to transplant a head. Recently, they had transplanted mice heads. It lived for a day. But there's also a procedure done on monkey decades ago. The monkey survived for hours. — L'éléphant

I'd have said that it was a replacement of everything below the neck, not above it. You didn't get a new head. The head got your body. You're gone.

Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity, — 180 Proof

I fall asleep and my personal identity survives, even if I've been unconscious indefinitely. A full replacement with a mechanical brain that was somehow loaded up with all the memories would be no different in principle than just waking from anesthesia. In practice, while I have no problems with the mechanical thinker being conscious, it just wouldn't feel the same. You'd have to rig it up to react to all the chemical changes and such, and not just be a bunch of digital circuits.

As for the OP:

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one (and dispose of the organic one), I would consider that death. — RogueAI

Lots of games to play here. Would you consider a star-trek style transporter to be death? The machine takes you apart down to the atom and rebuilds an identical one somewhere else. The memories are there, but is it you? What if it's a copy and they don't destroy the original. Is the new one you now?

As I said, the sum of two and two is true in this universe. Whether it is not true somewhere else is irrelevant. — Harry Hindu

Philosophy is irrelevant then, so I disagree. It actually matters a lot to me. OK, it being true in this universe is enough for a priori knowledge, but I’m interested in it being objectively true.

Something else would be true in the other universe, like 2+2≠ 4

That would be a disappointment, but barring an example, I suspect otherwise.

:brow: Seriously? You really think that there was ever a chance that you could have been a bug?

You misunderstood what I wrote then. I was trying to illustrate why the ‘why am I me’ question is baffling only if dualism is assumed.

Anyway, the 'I' in that question is the self again, and if you deny the existence of it, the improbability goes away. — noAxioms

I said I (the self) could no more be a bug than it could be me. I denied its existence. There is nothing ‘being’ me.
The point of the example was to illustrate that everybody knows what Paul Simon meant by those lyrics. People have a dualistic instinct, a lie that is pretty much impossible to disbelieve.
Without it, the lyrics don’t make any sense since X is X (a tautology) and cannot be Y. But it makes sense to suggest the experiencer of X were to experience Y instead.

Yes, given dualism, there are a lot more non-human things to be (bugs being one example) and thus odds of winning the ‘human lottery’ are suspiciously low. Some get out of this via anthropocentric assertions, that humans are special this way. Questioning the lie is often not an option.

Your Paul Simon quote isn't saying anything other than "I wish that I could be a different I".

Even that makes no sense. How can say a cat be a dog? A thing is what it is and cannot meaningfully be something else.

Why am I me? Because a unique arrangement of half of my mother's genes and a unique arrangement of half of my father's genes were fused together to make the unique me. We are all unique outcomes of different halves of our mother's and father's genes.

That’s why your physical appearance is what it is, which wasn’t the question. The question asks why you look out of Harry’s eyes and not the eyes of another. The question makes no sense outside of a dualistic context since under monism it is tautological that a creature looks out of its own eyes (exceptions to robots with bluetooth).

Using an omnipotent god as an example is quite a stretch — Harry Hindu

Well, I'm questioning if the sum of two and two is objectively four (a priori truth), and I need to stretch pretty far to do this. The god isn't the point. The point is the possibility somewhere different where that sum is seven or something, or better, a universe utterly devoid of 'quantity', thus reducing 'two' to a meaningless thing where any sum of two and two is at best not even wrong. That's still a stretch. 2+2=4 is sort of a symbol of a priori knowledge, even if humans would probably not figure it out without experience.

So it seems to me that any benefit to the species is also a benefit to the individuals

This gets back to my suggestion that 'reproduction is beneficial' might be a lie. Sure, reproduction makes a species fit, but is being fit beneficial? So say smallpox goes extinct (just to pick something the extinction of which you personally are not likely to mourn). On the surface it would appear that it would not be beneficial for the smallpox species, but only if smallpox actually has a goal. It's evolved to be fit, but doesn't actually have a goal to be that way. Is any purpose actually not served by its extinction? Nature doesn't care. No smallpox 'individual' cares in any way we humans can relate.
Smallpox also doesn't have a belief/instinct that reproduction is beneficial, so maybe my example reached too far away. It doesn't reproduce to fulfill an irresistible urge. So maybe I need to illustrate with a more relatable pestilence like a tapeworm or something.
I usually take a relational view of almost everything, so I'd ask: What is the goal of a given species? Reproduction seems only a means to that goal, but the goal itself seems missing. Extinction is inevitable, so the goal is somewhere prior to that. Did any species now extinct ever meet its goal?

What is the difference between an individual and a self? Do individuals exist?

"Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory" -- Paul Simon
The 'I' in that line is the self, and 'Richard Cory' is an individual. The line only makes sense if they're different things, and the self wants to 'be' a different individual than the impoverished employee in the factory. The related question is: "Why am I me?". It seems baffling. There's so many other things you could be like a bug or perhaps even a dust mote. There's so many more of those other things, so why am I not only a human (top of most food chains), but one with the leisure to be pondering philosophy on a forum during the 2nd gilded age of Earth. What sort of lottery have I won?

Anyway, the 'I' in that question is the self again, and the improbability goes away if you deny the existence of it. Nothing won the lottery. Of course the gilded human would ask this and the bug would not. There's no improbability occurring. It's why dualism makes so much sense to my lying intuitions, but makes zero sense to my rational thought.

Does the individual (Richard Cory say) exist? That's a question of persistent identity, which gets into all sorts of trouble as described by Parfit. But he also says it is unimportant. Our sense of identity (not the sense of self this time) is very pragmatic and allows us to function. Anyway, the current Richard Corey doesn't seem to be able to demonstrate to my satisfaction being the same individual as an hour ago. The law of identity seems open to violation, rendering it a mere language convention and not something real.

The hard problem of consciousness is resolved by abandoning dualism and physicalism.

Well I'm neither, so perhaps I'm doing something right.

Y'all seem to be in a sort of chicken/egg thing with the bridge subject. I assure you that the bridge came before the first one purposefully created by humans, and any preconception of the creation of the first built ones most certainly drew on the experience of prior bridges.
Even ants engineer a bridge when there isn't one already there. It's hardly a unique human accomplishment.

I think maybe you're overusing the word "instinct." — T Clark

Maybe so, but besides the point, which is: there are falsehoods which we believe and find intuitive. Some are deep enough that I know they're wrong, yet still believe them, which sounds oddly contradictory.

[2+2=4] would be true in any universe in which there are categories and a quantity of things within that category. — Harry Hindu

OK, but if it was an a-priori truth, it would be true even in a universe without meaningful countable anything. I mean, imagine the sum of 2 and 2 was 4 because an omnipotent god said it was, and had it decreed that the sum was seven instead, then it wouldn't actually be four. I mean, what's the point of being omnipotent if you can't do stuff like that? Would the sum be actually 7 then, or only 7 because 'the god says so'?

Again, what is beneficial and comfortable is dependent upon the goal we're talking about.

Being fit, probably as a species. If a species is not fit, it gets selected out. It's not a purposeful goal, but being fit is definitely an emergent property of things that evolve via the process. As an individual, reproduction is arguably optional. The species often benefits from the members that are not potential breeders. Yes, the individual benefits one way or the other depending on the goal via which the benefit is measured, but for a species, it's being fit, and little else. I don't thing the human species is particularly fit, but that's just opinion.

At a much deeper level, one's feeling of personal identity is fantastically instinctual, and yet doesn't hold up to true rational analysis. It is probably a complete lie compliments of evolution (over 650 million years ago when it was put there), and it makes us fit as an individual, a pragmatic benefit at best. Assuming being fit equates to a benefit over not being fit, this makes the truth of the matter harmful, and the lie beneficial.
— noAxioms
Nah. I don't think that alpha males and females and the individual in which an DNA copy "error" occurred that provides the benefit from which is then propagated throughout the gene pool is an instinctual illusion. Those are real things. If not there from where do beneficial genes come from if not individuals within a gene pool?

I'm sorry, but we seem to be talking past each other. This doesn't seem to be a relevant reply to my comment, which I left up there. I'm talking about one's sense of self. The lie makes you fit, but the analysis of the belief seems to lead to all sorts of crazy woo to explain something that was never true in the first place. It leads to the hard problem of consciousness, something that is only a problem if you believe the lie, which everybody does, even myself.

It seems to me that reasining itself is instinctual and only realized through experience. — Harry Hindu

Well yea. You brought up the 2+2=4 thing, but I'm confident that a human would never figure that out in the absence of experience. Humans are exceptionally helpless at birth, but several instincts are there, like the one to draw breath despite never having the experience of needing to do that before.

I actually question everything, even 2+2=4. Is it objectively true, or is it perhaps only a property of the physics or mathematics of say this universe, and doesn't work in another one? I cannot think of a reasonable counterexample, but that very issue seems to be one of the weakest links in my goal of finding a self-consistent view of how things are.

For something to be beneficial, or useful, there must be some element of truth involved, or else how can there more or less efficient ways of using something - like intuitions? — Harry Hindu

I can think of several exceptions. On the surface, how about "reproduction is beneficial"? It certainly doesn't benefit the individual. There are plenty of humans living more comfortable lives by becoming voluntarily sterile, but for the most part, reproduction is quite instinctual which is why the above goal can rarely be achieved via just abstinence.
At a much deeper level, one's feeling of personal identity is fantastically instinctual, and yet doesn't hold up to true rational analysis. It is probably a complete lie compliments of evolution (over 650 million years ago when it was put there), and it makes us fit as an individual, a pragmatic benefit at best. Assuming being fit equates to a benefit over not being fit, this makes the truth of the matter harmful, and the lie beneficial.

Intuition is often not about knowledge. As my handle implies, I attempt to question everything that most find 'obvious', and it turns out that most obvious truths lead to self contradictions. Our intuitions are not there for the purpose of truth. That's a pretty easy one to figure out if you think about it.

One question about intuition is whether or not it is based on experience or reason. My strong opinion, based on introspection, is that it is mostly, maybe completely, based on experience. — T Clark

Agree. I find that intuitions are almost never based on reason, but rather instinct or experience. Many of those intuitions are not true, but don't confuse truth with beneficial.

Creation usually implies an object contained by time being caused to come into existence: The object is nonexistent at an earlier time, and then something happens that causes the existence of it, for a while at least. The depression on the cushion doesn't meet the definition. It may be caused by the ball, but if it was always there, it was never created.
As another example, the universe (by most definitions anyway) probably isn't an object contained by time, but rather is something that contains time. So it seems a category error to suggest it is a created thing.

Physics does allow temporal loops and backwards causation. They're valid solutions to the equations, so in theory, something could create itself, but there's the loop then. In a loop, while the arrow of time might be defined, all moments are both before and after other moments, so it is unclear what comes before what else.
As for backwards causation, that's one of the interpretations of experiments like the quantum eraser setups, some of which have been interpreted as having caused effects arbitrarily far (years) into the past. But while effects might occur in the past, information cannot be thus passed, and usually the creation of a thing involves information transfer.

I touch particular keys and lo! the corresponding character appears on the screen (to take only the most simple of examples). It appears seamless but in reality the appearance of those characters is the result of predictable causal chain which generally operates with extremely high degrees of consistency; I don't press P and get Q, not unless there's a fault or configuration error. — Wayfarer

Just a side note, since I am perhaps personally involved in that P getting to the screen. The engineering of those tiny computer components needs to go to substantial lengths to get that P consistently on the screen. It takes what is essentially a random process (say electrons tunneling across a barrier) and walks the tight wire between sufficient dice rolling to get a consistent behavior, and reducing the number of dice rolled to get sufficient performance. It has to work all the time, but not more than that. This is sort of an effort to hammer out hard predictable causal behavior from randomness.
Just saying that the seemingly causal behavior of your machine is not necessarily the result of any fundamental causality, but rather a lot of effort to make it so. Per Wittgenstein quoted in your OP, it is useful for hypothesis.

I can see saying that my finger caused the P to show up — T Clark

It's arguably one of the many causes. I mean, the thing probably wouldn't have shown up there just then had your finger not pressed that spot just then. But per my comment above, fundamentally the two are not directly connected. It's just really useful to make that connection.

In any physics, a force is required to change a state.. — Metaphysician Undercover

Quite a ridiculous assertion. A thrown rock (in space say, no significant forces acting on it) is just beyond the reach of the hand that threw it. A second later it is meters away, a changed state. It is also likely facing a different direction after that second since it's really hard to throw a rock without any spin.

From Wikipedia: "In physics, a force is an influence that can change the motion of an object." So, in physics, a "force" is what what would change the state which exists at "a given moment". .

Changing the motion is not the same as changing the state. The thrown rock is still heading in the same direction after a second (unchanged motion) and has the same spin (unchanged motion) but has a different location and orientation (both changed states). Yes, force is required to change its linear and angular momentum, per Newton's 2nd law, and is that to which your wiki quote refers), but no force is required to change its location, orientation, temperature, etc, all of which are part of its classic state.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the falsification of deterministic physics. Why are you going on about this?

It (the squirrel) eats when it's hungry. We can resist the urge to eat even when we're dying of hunger — Agent Smith

That's just an example of something having a higher priority than eating, straight up cause and effect, not an example of free will. And you're wrong: Other things have done this as well, starved in the presence of food due to prioritizing something higher. I can think of one species in danger of extinction because of it.

I do think we have free will, but only because I define it more sensibly. I find nothing distasteful about my decision making mechanism being a product of physics, hence my initial reply in this topic.

[A hard-determinsitic QM interpretation such as Bohmian mechanics] is easily falsified, as you request. A "state at a given time" cannot by itself determine any future activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

This does not follow from any hard-deterministic physics. Quite the opposite in fact, by definition.

This is because a state is static, without activity, and any future activity of the thing in this state is dependent on what forces are applied to it. Therefore it is clearly false to say that the future action of a thing is "completely determined" by its present state, because it is also dependent on whatever forces are applied to it.

Perhaps you should give an example where the forces are not a function of the state at a given moment. The above quote uses the word 'clearly' to justify a statement which cannot otherwise be backed, a tell-tale sign that either you don't understand the subject, or simply refuse to accept the premises.

Hey, I don't buy Bohmian mechanics either, but I'm not so naive to assert it is wrong because it 'clearly' doesn't do something that it in fact does.

Your argument also seems entirely classical, not referencing QM at all. Classical physics is deterministic, but you suggest otherwise.

At the end of stage 2 the person might reach for the ciggy or not reach for the ciggy. Therefore the person's will is free.. — Metaphysician Undercover

By the law of excluded middle, that's true of anything. A rock will reach for the ciggy or not, every time, just like the human. OK, you probably don't mean it that way. You probably mean that there's a finite probability of reaching for it or not, which may or may not be true depending on how the statement is interpreted.

If the person was a deterministic robot there would be only one way which the person could go after stage 2.

OK, you seem to be interpreting it as a statement of determinism. Under a completely deterministic interpretation of QM (such as Bohmian mechanics), the future action any robot, human or squirrel is completely determined by the state at a given time. Unless you can falsify such an interpretation, your statement above is a mere assertion, not any kind of evidence that a human can in any way do something other than what is utterly determined.

If on the other hand the statement is not about determinism but instead about predictability, then I can trivially create a device that reaches for the ciggy with far less predictability than the human who has made a rational decision to never do it again. All you need is a quantum amplifier, something not evolved in any biological creature since it holds no benefit. There are creatures which utilize pseudo-randomness such as a moth that chooses its flight path far more randomly than does the path chosen by a human. By a predictability definition, the moth has more free will than you do, but you seem to be using the determinism definition, not the predictability one.

A squirrel feels hungry and immediately starts foraging. — Agent Smith

Nonsense. It usually forages whether it is hungry or not, and only if it passes phase 1 first where it might prioritize another task due to time of day, weather, danger, or being horny or something. But it certainly isn't a straight hunger-causes-foraging relationship.
I brought up the squirrel in case you included it in your list of things with free will. Apparently you don't, which is what I wanted to know. This tells me you're not one of those 'biology is special' types, but instead take an anthropocentric stance. At what point in our evolution do you suggest that the change from deterministic animal to free-willed creature,and more specifically, what distinguished the one physiology from its immediate predecessor? Or are you in denial of evolution?

However, they seem to be beside the point as far as I can tell. — Agent Smith

The last several posts have indeed be well besides the point. The point I thought concerned free will, and not how decisions are made.

Please bear in mind that there are two stages when it comes to making a choice:

Stage 1. Deliberation on the available options
Stage 2. Actually making a selection

Probably less than 1% of all choices are made by such a cumbersome and formal mechanism, including the smoking example. But as you say, besides the point of free will. The older chess playing programs made almost all their decisions exactly as you describe above, and they hardly have what most people like to qualify as free will, so a decision made this way (by virtual choices as you put it) is not necessarily free, by your definition.
I have a different definition, but I'm trying to reply to the OP, not my own ideas.

In stage 2, all the choices have been processed and the one that we like is selected. It's in this stage, our preferences come into play, preferences we had no hand in determining i.e. we're not free now.

So in stage 1, you examine the options and rightly conclude that quitting smoking would be in your best interest, and in stage 2, the immediate-gratification-monkey (a waitbutwhy term) totally ignores the output of stage 1 and reaches for the ciggy. Still not an example of free will or the lack of it, and not anything that cannot occur with a deterministic robot, a supposedly not free-willed thing.

So my point is: what distinguishes a supposedly free willed human (or squirrel if you want) from something else that isn't free willed?

I'm a chain smoker, a nicotine junkie, can't go 10 minutes without lighting a cigarette up. So, as I lit one death stick, I had to, I saw myself (in my imagination), throwing away all my coffin nails, my smoking paraphernalia (my lighter, my matches, etc.). In effect I had quit smoking albeit only in my imagination. Isn't that amazing? — Agent Smith

This has little to do with free will though. I've had similar struggles, and have found that I have multiple parts to my mental functions, and the one that humans have (the rational part not nearly as developed in most other species) is probably the one doing the imagining, and the willing to quit, but it is the other part, the more primitive animal part, that actually makes the decisions, and those decisions are no more rational than decisions made by a rabbit. Free will has nothing to do with it. It's just that the part of you that wants to quit is not sufficiently in charge in this instance.
It isn't a deep instinct, so it can be done. The rational part can, with effort, exert its will upon the situation, but its often extremely difficult and beyond most people, myself included. There are some things that no amount of rational will can overcome. (Almost) Nobody can commit suicide by just holding their breath. The primitive part will override this. It is the boss after all, however much we like to think otherwise.

Free will: One possesses it when you make a choice that is yours and not part of a causal web with causes external to and beyond your control. — Agent Smith

This definition begs the mutual exclusivity of a decision being 'yours' and it being a function of causality. A good definition should pick one or the other:
1: Decision is mine vs it being made by something else, sort of like an autonomous robot and a remote control drone. Free will is the former.
2: Free will is action not part of a causal web external to control. By such a definition, a nucleus has the free will to decay at no time that is determined by any cause. Kind of thin: free yes, but not exactly 'will', is it?

Determinism: Your choices are effects of causes external to you and are not in your sphere of control.

Again the begging definition, assuming that caused choices are somehow not your own.

My typical example is two people wanting to safely cross a busy street. The first guy uses causal physics, and waits for a gap in the traffic and chooses that moment to cross, apparently without free will by your definition.
Second guy ignores all input and takes his marching orders from, um, apparently somewhere else, essentially crossing blind at a random moment. Second guy is naturally selected out as not being fit. That kind of free will is not beneficial.

Now consider the fact that, given a choice node (the point at which we're offered a choice), we judge the pros and cons of each possible option, something people say is essential to making the right choice.

Gosh, that sounds almost like you're utilizing the causal web, input that is out of your control...

How do we do that? My understanding is we make virtual choices. We imagine thus: If I select x (a choice), this is what'll happen; if I go for y (another choice), this'll happen; and so on.

So far, nothing a completely deterministic robot can't do. If you want to feel special, you need a description of some decision the robot can't make, preferably a moral one.

I think you're right, cause is classical mechanics if it has any meaning at all. I've purposely stayed away from quantum mechanics in this discussion because I think it muddies the metaphysical water. — T Clark

OK, so we keep it to classical since cause is a classical concept, but just keep in mind the earlier comment about making the example so simple (billiard balls) that it hides the deeper analysis, preventing thorough investigation.

At issue is whether the notion of cause can stand interrogation.
— Banno
That's what this thread is about for me. — T Clark

How can the interrogation take place while avoiding the more fundamental level? There seems to be a disconnect between what you say the thread is about and where you're steering it.

I had pointed out that cause is something subject to interpretation and one is not likely to come to a conclusion without making some assumptions, the soundness of which cannot be demonstrated.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about philosophical causality — T Clark

Wiki gives a very classic definition of causality, and I'm willing to concede that the whole cause-effect relationship is a classical one that doesn't necessarily carry down to more fundamental levels.

Different quantum interpretations have different definitions of causality. The ones that hold to the principle of locality would probably put cause before effect like wiki does, but counterfactual interpretations (Bohmian in particular) does not, with delayed-choice experiment blatantly putting effect arbitrarily amounts of time before cause,. They've demonstrated it with millions of years between cause (a choice made on Earth) and effect (which direction a photon is emitted at the distant emission event).

So sure, you kept it simple and classical at first with the billiard ball example, but when one gets down to the fundamentals, the definitions become interpretation dependent, which is the point I want to convey.

3. If some evidence is not improbable under A but very improbable under B, then that evidence provides strong evidence for A.

The Prime Principle of Confirmation is premise 3 in the above argument. — SwampMan

I googled 'Prime Principle of Confirmation' and found no reference to the principle outside of any page related to ID arguments, leading me to believe that the ID folks made up this principle.

Big edit: My first reading was that it started with "if 'A' is not improbable", but no, it says evidence is not improbable under A, which simply reduces the principle to a non-sequitur.

Finding money under my pillow is not improbable if the tooth fairly exists, and not probable under 'B' where teeth left under a pillow overnight self-transform into random objects, possibly currency, via quantum tunneling. That this is strong evidence for the existence of an actual tooth fairy does not follow, but the fallacious principle above says it does.

The main premise of the Doomsday argument: There's an upper limit to how many humans can live — Agent Smith

No, that's not the premise. It does not presume any such upper limit, which would be sort of a fatalistic premise.

The premise is that in any population that undergoes exponential growth, the vast majority of the individuals will come into existence near the end of that exponential growth. Think of a bacteria culture in a petri-dish of nutrients that are very slowly replenished.

There are two kinds of arguments for god(s). — Agent Smith

which apparently you group into scientific and non-scientific, but I think they're all non-scientific since any model that posits such a thing is outside of the methodological naturalism under which science operates, and under which the bulk of its progress has been made.

All the arguments I've seen claiming the necessity of god or the necessity of not-god are fallacious. OK, some don't claim proof but only evidence, which is better at least.

As for the OP, my main point was that it supplied only two possibilities, the one favored (an intentional supernatural creator) and only one other possibility which was deliberately chosen to be improbable. The implicit premise is that these are the only two possibilities, without which the conclusion (high probability of deliberate creation) does not follow.

(also for the sake of the example assume they are the only two possibilities) — SwampMan

I notice this appeared in the puddle example but not the original one. It's like saying option 2 is "friend melted into a puddle and there's not a leak in the roof above", which makes the option deliberately unlikely for the purpose of 'proving' option 1.

Perhaps the fallacy of the argument would be more clear if you removed the single-universe part. My conclusion from the premises in the OP is that the single-universe premise (not clearly defined) is unlikely. There is more than one roll of the die. That's certainly what science says given the evidence.

Another note: Atheism is not an assertion of lack of a deity. It is simply a lack of belief in it, no different than a lack of belief that my mailbox will spontaneously explode tomorrow, despite lack of hard evidence that it will not. Not sure what the official word is to describe a belief in the unreality of a god.

I apparently failed my own Turing test. My car can distinguish between me and an actual human.

My car's emissions computer has a bunch of tests the results of which are lost every time minimum voltage is lost due to a changed battery. I failed my test, having 3 tests that still registered not-ready, despite the battery being nearly a year old. My driving habits are apparently sufficiently non-human that my car cannot ready these last tests.

So I drove to a city an hour away, trying my best to drive like a normal person. Well, one of the three is ready now, but that leaves two, and two un-ready still fails. The only way to get my car inspected seems to be to let somebody else drive it.


A little more on topic: I love all the biased posters that assert an AI cannot be whatever they don't want it to be. Guess what? You're just another 'AI' yourself, albeit probably more wet and gloppy. I cannot convince the squirrels in my yard that I'm a squirrel, but that doesn't mean I'm less intelligent than a squirrel. AI's will surpass humans in capability long before they can convincingly pass for one.

The PSR: Everything has a cause.

1. Uncaused

2. Self-caused — Agent Smith

Which is which? There very much is precedent for events without prior cause, so the principle seems already on shaky ground. Perhaps we simply need to reject it.

Stack two perfect spheres, an unstable equilibrium. The top ball will eventually roll off after a predictable half-life of time, even in classic physics (*). But it isn't self-caused. There's already a ball there. There's already some atom waiting to decay, even if the decay event itself doesn't have a prior cause. There's no carbon-12 atom popping into existence ex-nihilo.

* Classically, it doesn't actually work for spheres, but rather special shapes designed among other criteria to eliminate the need for bouncing.

2. A first cause has to be self-caused unless you reject the prinicple of sufficient reason (PSR). — Agent Smith

Well, its not a rejection of the PSR, but an amendment. — Philosophim

Self-cause is a rejection of PSR, not an amendment to it. If self-cause is allowed, then the PSR reduces to a non-principle: Nothing requires an reason or cause since it can always be self-caused.

Adding this loophole is admission of failure. It means try harder. It certainly is causing me to think in different ways, but my reply probably deserves a new post rather than a mere reply to this narrowly confined and aging topic.

I think you misunderstand. A first cause means there is an existence which can cause others, but has no cause itself. — Philosophim

You need to clarify your terminology. You defined ‘exists’ as something an object does, or rather something that is done to it. A smiley exists because something caused the coins to be arranged in a recognizable pattern, and it ceases to exist later when the coins are returned to a purse.
Existence on the other hand typically refers to ‘all of reality’. I’m not sure how you distinguish ‘existence’ and ‘universe’ from each other. Maybe you have totally different definitions of these things than what I’m guessing.
Your statement above (coupled with others) seems to imply that ‘existence’, reality, or something at least, suddenly was, uncaused, when before that there wasn’t existence, reality, or anything. Well, there was time at least, but not sure how time is in any way meaningful without a reality to change.
You say ‘there is an existence’, like this first cause thing still is around, and didn’t disappear like all the other causes. A storm causes my lawn to get watered, but later the lawn is wet and the storm is gone, no longer existing, at least not over my lawn. But your wording says that there is (not was) an existence that can cause (not caused) others. So you’re obviously defining ‘existence’ in a different way than ‘exists’, which is great, but I’m hoping I got close to the mark when guessing at your definition.

Mind you, I’m trying to keep any opinion of alternate views out of this for now, since I’m pretty obviously not understanding what you’re trying to convey.

Also, don't forget the very important part, "at least one".

A bunch happen at the same time, or a bunch of them happen after a while, but with only one earliest one? You seem to define ‘first cause’ as any event lacking a direct cause, and not ‘comes earlier than the others’.

Further, this is not an argument about "the formation of the universe". The argument is that in any chain of causality, a first cause is logically necessary.

There are circular solutions, so this logic doesn’t follow. The infinite regress is also a valid solution, but you conclude otherwise. Hence 180’s trivial retort (first reply) about the first integer. Yes, they can be counted, but they can’t be counted in order.

If you have time, you have a prior state, a current state, and a potential future state, which is in line with the OP. — Philosophim

Non-sequitur.
If you have time, some of the events can be ordered (X is before Y), but that doesn’t make any one of them ‘current’. The B view does not make any reference to the present since it denies any meaning of the concept.
I say ‘some of’ because any pair of events that are separated in a space-like manner are ambiguously ordered and neither can be the cause of the other if locality true.

If I posted a B series interpretation, this topic wouldn't have reached many people. That's not the goal here.

It’s actually quite easy to word your OP concept using B-series language, without obscuring its meaning.

There is no claim that everything interacts with everything and everything is the cause of everything else.

I didn’t say there was, but had I not put that clause in there, my statement would have been wrong, and I don’t like making wrong statements.

You need to directly show how your argument applies to the OP.

From your OP then”

Either all things have a prior cause for their existence, or there is at least one first cause of existence from which a chain of events follows.

This seem to allow only infinite regress, causal-turtles all the way down. There cannot be a first cause of existence (your definition) since existence would be the effect, meaning that which caused it was something that didn’t exist, being prior to existence. And the eternal (cyclic say) models of the universe make different empirical predictions than those we see.

My view gets around this by not asserting your statement above, by not making the assumptions it implicitly makes.
There’s another thread going on (in the religious section of all places) about Rasmussen’s paradox. The OP shows Rasmussen’s argument, which proceed much along the same lines as I do.

I do not state the universe needs to be caused.

But that’s how I read the above quote. Either the universe has a prior cause for its existence, or there is one first cause of existence, which sounds like the same thing: existence being caused, but perhaps that cause is not ‘prior’.

And here I agreed at least that I’m fine with an initial state. Plenty of temporal structures have them.

Again, where in my OP am I explicitly demanding A theory?

You explicitly asked my to give reasons why B seemed better to me, and I answered. Conversation would be impossible if nobody could address any subsequent post of yours because it wasn’t posted in the OP.

That sounds pretty contradictory to me
— noAxioms
It doesn't to me. Neither eliminates causality, which is all I care about. — Philosophim

They might both describe causality to your satisfaction, but that isn’t sufficient for the two interpretations to not be mutually exclusive. If one says ‘M’ and the other says ‘~M’, they can’t both be right.

B theory also does not eliminate time. There is still clearly a past state, present state, and future state. — Philosophim

B theory indeed does not eliminate time, since it is essentially a dimension in that view. It does explicitly deny past, present and future state, so that assertion about it is wrong. Really, read up on it if you want to digress from your OP and actually present a valid objection to the view.

The past state causes the present state, and the present state causes the future state. To counter the argument you have to eliminate causality, and I don't see B theory doing that. If you think it does, please point out how. — Philosophim

Causality would say that any given state (Y say) is caused by some prior state (X, per your example), and causes Z, all without any of those states being past, present, or future. There is only the relation of one event being prior to another, or ambiguously ordered. If two events are ambiguously ordered (frame dependent ordering), then the principle of locality says that neither event can be the cause of the other. There are interpretations of QM that deny that principle and allow situations where effect is in the past of the cause.
Point is, all that can be described without reference to any objective state of said events. There is only relative ordering (this before that, but not this has happened but that has not yet happened).

There’s no time dilation in the Andromda example. It is an example of relativity of simultaneity.
— noAxioms
Sorry, its been a while since I've read the specific vocabulary of relativity. I generally remember relativity from years ago and many of the consequences of it. But I did not see how it countered the OP's points. — Philosophim

The scenario shows how two events, say months apart but in the same approximate location, are nevertheless both simultaneous to this one event on Earth (the event of my greeting my friend in passing). There cannot be two present moments a month apart in Andromeda, so it is contradictory if both my friend and I are correct about what’s going on over there currently. That’s where the original major suggestion supporting B theory originated. All of relativity theory is based on B premises.

Do you understand what is being illustrated by the example?
— noAxioms
No. If it doesn't have anything to do with the OP, I'm not concerned. — Philosophim

and yet most of these posts are about this topic, and not causality. I tried to clarify the point in the paragraph above.

That's been my point. I don't see how it counters the arguments of the OP. — Philosophim

It was brought up to a different post of yours in this topic. It is relevant to the OP, because according to A theory, the universe itself, or at least the initial state, needs to be caused, which is the something-from-nothing connundrum. What caused the rules by which uncaused events are legal in the first place?

My argument against that is that there is no coordinate system that meets the requirements, forcing the interpretation to deny the existence of parts of spacetime.
— noAxioms
Reading up on B theory again, I did not see how B theory ignored parts of spacetime. — Philosophim

It doesn’t. It’s A theory that cannot handle this problem. That’s why I posted it when you asked me why B is better.

All the prior cause did was change the arrangement of the coins over time. I don’t consider that a change to anything’s existence
— noAxioms
I do. That is a change in spatial location. When one state is different from the next, that is change. — Philosophim

I’d have said change over time, but that’s not the point. If you read the comment, it was non-existence to existence that I was discussing. Then again, it very much depends on one’s definition of ‘exists’, which in turn is dependent on ones interpretation of time. So the time discussion really turns out to be relevant.
B-theory says the coin-smiley exists. The rearrangement of the coins over time doesn’t affect that at all since all events (coins in smiley pattern, coins in different pattern) all exist equally. So the change over time was caused, but the existence wasn’t affected. And that’s not even using my relational definition of ‘exists’.

If you're claiming your premises contradict mine, I don't think they do. Meaning, they might be able to co-exist without issue. — Philosophim

’A’ claim: All events are objectively in one of three ontological states of past, present, and future. The A-theorist might or might not apply the property of existence to past and/or future states. The universe is 3D only if past and future states are nonexistent.
‘B’ claim: Events share equal ontology, with no moment that in any way is meaningfully objectively special relative to another moment.
That sounds pretty contradictory to me, despite the lack of an empirical test to directly falsify either.

. . . If there is a current moment over there at Andromeda, then the fleet cannot be in a current state of having been launched and not launched.
— noAxioms

Basically Einstein's time dilation.

There’s no time dilation in the Andromda example. It is an example of relativity of simultaneity. Dilation is better illustrated with the twins 'paradox' rather than the Andromeda 'paradox'. While we're at it, the barn-pole 'paradox' illustrates relative length contraction. These things are only paradoxical under A theory.

Dilation does illustrate that clocks do not measure the advancement of the present. If time is defined to be that advancement, then neither clocks nor any other device measure time.

Y is simply the current state we are looking at.

To put it in a non-interpretation-specific way, Y is simply the state at (or immediately prior actually) the time of the measurement.

The Andromeda argument has nothing to do with Y, or anything measured or caused for that matter. Do you understand what is being illustrated by the example?

Taking your time dilation example, we just have to examine the state properly.

Nobody is examining any state, and there’s no dilation example. What’s going on simultaneously with Bob and I greeting is outside both our light cones and is entirely unmeasurable by either of us. Measurements were not the point of that example.

In isolation to each other, each state does not consider the other state. Which is perfectly fine if the other state is unimportant to what we are considering. If however, we took the state of both together in relation to each other, then the state must be described as such. Meaning we would say on Earth, the time is 2 hours behind the time on Andromeda. No contradiction there, just a measurement of state that notes the relative time difference.

Fortunately, I'm not using a coordinate system.

Or you simply don’t know you’re doing it. OK, so you don’t understand the second argument either. The A theory demands one preferred coordinate system, and all the other ones are wrong. My argument against that is that there is no coordinate system that meets the requirements, forcing the interpretation to deny the existence of parts of spacetime.

Thirdly, and most importantly, how did time get going,
— noAxioms

That would be subsumed in the OP. Lets call the existence of time Y. If there was something that caused Y, that answer would be X.

That makes it sound like X occurs before Y, which is a contradiction if there’s not yet time until event Y.

Why can self-explained states exist? There is no answer, because they have no reason to exist.

Agree

1. Either all things have a prior cause for their existence, or there is at least one first cause of existence from which a chain of events follows.
— Philosophim

I had responded directly to that one in an early post with the coin example. All the prior cause did was change the arrangement of the coins over time. I don’t consider that a change to anything’s existence, hence I think it a category error to speak of existence being something caused.

I feel like I understood your points much more this time, and I hope I followed up adequately in my answers.

Besides clarifications on my arguments about interpretations, I am actually trying to get the train back on the original track. Mostly with that last comment...

No, my point is that just because you make an assumption, it doesn't make them valid or right. — Philosophim

No argument there, so point taken.

These are not claims in a vacuum, they are claims that are a counter to my claims.

Are you claiming that your premises are in fact correct or at least better?

If you think other assumptions are better than the OP's, then you need to show why.

OK, since you asked:
I’ve done that with some examples, the Andromeda scenario being one of them. I greet Bob as we walk past each other. Relative to me, the Andromeda generals have currently (as of the present) not yet decided to launch a war fleet. Relative to Bob, the war fleet is currently in flight, having already been launched. If there is a current moment over there at Andromeda, then the fleet cannot be in a current state of having been launched and not launched. That’s the contradiction that suggests a different view (that of relativity and spacetime, instead of Newton’s notions of absolute space and time.

That’s not a disproof by any means, but perhaps a good reason why the 4D model is more descriptive of the situation. Nobody does the mathematics using the 3D model since to do it, the identity of the correct foliation of space and time must be known, and it cannot be known. There are other factors that also prevent a coherent model such as lack of reliable tools to take measurments.

Second bit of evidence. There is no coordinate system that foliates all events in all of spacetime, which means that there are events that are not ordered (are neither past, present nor future) relative to any time say here on Earth. That seems a contradiction to me.

Thirdly, and most importantly, how did time get going, and if it was always going, how did the universe suddenly ‘happen’ when there wasn’t anything before it. How does one explain the reality of whatever one asserts to be real?

If you think that all assumptions are equally valid and logically and factually correct

Don’t be silly. Different interpretations of a thing usually contradict each other, so they obviously cannot all be factually correct.

If one assumes that X is true, and one assumes that X is false, only one can hold.

Presuming that ‘X is true and false’ in the same sense, that’s a self contradictory set of premises, trivially falsified. It is therefore not a valid set of premises, by definition.
Without that presumption, both can hold.
The fleet has launched relative to Bob (fleet-launched = true). The fleet has not yet launched relative to me (fleet-lauched = false). Both true and false, yet not contradictory since it’s not true and false in the same sense. For details, google ‘law of non-contradiction’.

If you are holding assumptions contrary to the OP's, then only one of us can be right.

But I’m not asserting the rightness of any particular interpretation. You seem to be, since you talk of being right or not. To me, an assumption is just that, a potential thing, not some truth to be believed with certainty. One should be open to alternatives.

so you have the concept in your head about something "likely more valid".

I suppose so. I find it more difficult to talk ones way out of some of the problems listed above than problems listed for the B view.
First issue is not really a problem. Bob and I are probably both wrong about which moment is actually current in another place, and Einstein’s simultaneity convention is simply wrong, as are both premises of his special relativity theory from which that convention (and pretty much all of modern cosmology) follows.
Second issue is a problem, but one that can be circumvented by asserting that events no foliated simply can never exist, meaning one cannot fall beyond the coordinate singularity of a black hole event horizon. This can be empirically demonstrated otherwise, but only to ones self, not to the outside observer.
Third issue is a problem I’ve not seem resolved by anybody.

To me, the entire abstract is about selecting a state, and noting that a prior state could exist for the current state to be. In my view, this is a relative state comparison of causality. Why does state Y exist? Because of a prior state X, or Y has no prior state X and exists without any prior explanation.

Sounds like Y is explained by an X or not, making X fairly irrelevant to explaining Y.
Yes, I would agree that if there are two causally ordered events X and Y, the ordering forms a relation (X before Y in this case). If there’s no X, then there’s no relation. If X and Y are not within each other’s light cones, then their ordering is ambiguous, and neither necessarily exists in direct relation to the other.
I might disagree that X is a prior state of Y. X might have contributed to the state at Y, but the wording makes it sound like X and Y share an identity, which is just an abstraction added by common language.

”If you don't exist, you won't type a reply.”

True, my mistake, that was one sentence, not two. Despite this, I made no logical fallacies in concluding you, who has typed a reply, exist. — Philosophim

Given the above quoted premise, I agree. I just don’t hold that premise to be necessarily true, or even meaningful for that matter. I also don’t assert the premise to be false. I’ve never said it was wrong.

I am going to assume your points are to the OP, and not extra asides.

Well, the replies are typically in response to the quoted comment, wherever the conversation seems to have gone.

Lets minimize what is extra, and only focus on what is necessary for the discussion please.

But you asked quite a few questions in your last post that are a response to my comments, and not directly related to the OP, such as why I suspect the A interpretation of time is questionably valid.

I said pretty early on that I have no problem with uncaused events. You speak of chains like a given occurrence has but a single linear set of causes before it, when in actuality there are probably countless factors that came together to cause the occurrence in question. Some of those prior states might be uncaused themselves, but that’s rare.

How can there be any time without the existence of motion? — Kuro

Traffic lights make a nice example of time without motion. Just the regular color changes are enough. And yet time itself is not defined by change, since the air pressure changes with altitude, which is change without time.

But so far as time is concerned we see that all with one exception are in agreement in saying that it is uncreated

I don't see an exception. The process of creation is temporal by definition, so while I have no problem with time being bounded, it seem a contradiction to apply the concept of creation or destruction to time. There are valid solutions to Einstein's field equations with bounded time, such as white and black holes.

It is appealing to define the world in such a way that all definitions and assumptions are valid, because then you feel like you can never be wrong. — Philosophim

Assumptions are not right just because they’re valid.

The problem is, it breaks down because you arrive at a glaring contradiction. I can claim, "No, some definitions/assumpsions are more valid than others," which is a direct challenge to your viewpoint.

That sounds hokey. Assumptions are valid or they are not. There’s not much more-or-less to it. You might make an argument about more or less likely to be true. Apparently the flying spaghetti monster is a valid argument, but not likely a true one.

I've shown you hold a contradiction …
I've claimed your viewpoint is invalid

Where’s this supposed contradiction in ‘my view’? I mean, I haven’t really expressed ‘my’ view, just a different and very valid one.

just because you can propose an alternative definition or assumption, it in no way means its existence challenges or defeats another definition or assumption.

I would say that the existence of a valid alternate view very much poses a challenge to what might otherwise be an unchallenged view.

That did not show how my two sentences begged the question.

Sorry, but I only remember one sentence, which was:

If you don't exist, you won't type a reply.

That doesn’t follow (non-sequitur). In order for it to follow, one must posit that “Something must exist to type a reply”, my words, but begging exactly what you’re trying to show. So I illustrated how to go about demonstrating that premise, which is by presuming the negation, and driving that negated premise to self contradiction. But instead, all you wrote way this:

If something does not exist, then it cannot type a reply. Since you typed a reply, we've concluded you exist

which is just a mild rewording of the original non-sequitur, not any kind of logical demonstration of the correctness of the assertion.

Stating what a definition entails is not begging the question.

That’s an assertion, not a definition. A definition would be more along the lines of what you mean by ‘exists’ or ‘reply’ or some such.
Perhaps a real definition would help. All I see so far is a property that something has and something else doesn’t have, and sans any meaning to the word.

I tried to consider the assertion as a definition instead of an assertion, but it leads to silliness like Bob was extremely ill such that it rendered him nonexistent for a week.

According to your logic, you proposed a definition for existence which does not follow English.

Yea, duh. English language gets in the way of an awful lot of physics and philosophical definition. For instance, in English, velocity is a property synonymous with speed. But in physics, it is defined as a vector change in position relative to an explicitly defined frame.
We’re going for the philosophical definition of ‘exists’ here (of which there’s more than one), not the street definition.
The English language is built around a great number of biases, many of which are questionable. Those biases were put there for good reason, but truth seem not to be one of those reasons.

To exist, is to have the property of interacting between other existences/entities.

Ooh, that sounds so much closer to my definition, where existence is only meaningful in relation to other entities.

To be an entity, is to exist.

That sounds more like the standard definition of existence as a property, but the requirement of this property in order for a pair of entities to interact does not follow from this definition.

You need to re-read the OP. The entire OP is about relational existence.

Funny, because the word ‘relation’ or ‘relative’ does not appear anywhere in the OP. It seems instead to be about first cause.

Its been a focal point of the discussion. If you assume that "current" is not anything more than an assumption, then you'll need to demonstrate why your assumption that this is the case, is real.

No, since I made no claim of its correctness, only a claim for the validity of the interpretation that denies a current moment. So you need to demonstrate the self-contradiction that invalidates it.

… I don't understand how the B series revokes the OP

It wasn’t a comment about the OP, something to which I agreed if you remember.
It was a reply to your “Causality is also an explanation for why there is a current state”, about 472 posts into this topic. I wish the site would number the posts.

I was arguing the opposite, that the numbers need not exist for the sum of 1 and 1 to be 2.
— noAxioms
Ha ha! Well done! I mean this genuinely and not sarcastically. — Philosophim

There was no sarcasm in any of the above conversation.

Always question and poke at "generally accepted knowledge". My point was that we can't take the standpoint that they're merely assuming what is generally known.

What is ‘generally accepted/known is a matter of mere opinion. If there are multiple valid interpretations, it cannot be knowledge. That’s just a basic rule of being open minded.

We can give credit that theirs is the societally reasonable stance

Absolutely. But the topic under discussion is not about social issues.

if we are to challenge it, we must given evidence that it is wrong.

That’s not the scientific way to go about it. If one is to assert the alternative view as wrong, that’s what needs the evidence. That’s the scientific method: falsification. I’m not asserting anything is wrong. I’m just saying it isn’t knowledge because there’s an equally valid (and likely more valid) alternative view.

Its just that you need to demonstrate why they have merit, and why the show the OP to be wrong.

But I didn’t assert that the OP was wrong. I just pointed out that it made various assumptions, and thus the conclusions might not follow if different assumptions are made.

It begs its conclusion.
— noAxioms
Can it be falsified? Yes. If something does not exist, then it cannot type a reply. Since you typed a reply, we've concluded you exist. — Philosophim

You honestly don’t see begging in that answer, do you? You’re invoking the premise “Something must exist to type a reply” to demonstrate the premise. The statement is a positive example, which falsifies nothing. To do the latter, one must posit the negation:
P1: Property of existence is not necessary for the interaction between entities.
P2: Two entities X and Y interact.

Now prove that X and Y necessarily have the property of existence without begging your premise. Then you’ve falsified it.

I drive at this point because there are valid interpretations of the world that don’t give any meaning to ‘property of existence’ since ‘exists’ is not defined as a property but rather as a relation. You’re asserting that such an interpretation is necessarily wrong, despite the growing support.


Concerning the alternate interpretation of time:

The alternate view might say that on Feb 5, 2022 we all observe the state of the world of Feb 5, 2022 (at least the nearby stuff), and not some other state. That date is no more or less 'the past', 'the present', or 'the future' than any other date. They all have equal ontology.
— noAxioms
No, that's incorrect. By using dates, you are stating that there are states that are not "current", and states that are "prior to the current state".

I didn’t make any mention of ‘current’, so I stated neither thing. The statement was carefully worded in B-series, which forbids implied references to the nonexistent present since any such statements would be begging a different view. Please read up on this and actually understand it before asserting that it is wrong. If you can’t understand it, then don’t argue against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_series_and_B_series
The B theory (term coined last century by McTaggart) (or eternalism) is at least as old as the 11th century where it was first called '4 dimensionalism'.

If you're just throwing out "Maybe its this," without any type of assertion to its validity

Oh I assert its validity. But asserting the necessary truth of any interpretation of something kind of goes against an open minded attitude.
The B-view on time pairs very well with the relational view on ontology since it doesn’t have the problems inherent in any view that defines existence as a property.

No, they just measure the rate of time from future potential to relative past. A second for example is X number of electronic cycles

I’ve not heard of counting electron cycles, but fine. Since one electron might cycle thrice as many times between events A and B (events where both electrons are in each other’s presence), it isn’t measuring ‘the rate of time’ between those two events, it is measuring something specific only to each electron.

Keep in mind that I'm not one of those guys that says "this view is the way it is, and if you take some other view, you're wrong". I'm about exploring all avenues rationally, and identifying biases that I didn't even know I held, and perhaps coming up with a logically self-consistent view in the process.

I admittedly usually presume that my sensory input is not a set of lies. If I assumed otherwise, there's nothing to trust about the nature of anything.

That's like if I said 1+1 = 2, and you came back with, "You assume 1 exists". — Philosophim

That's funny. I had pretty much had that line thrown at me (by an actual physicist) and I was arguing the opposite, that the numbers need not exist for the sum of 1 and 1 to be 2.

Anyone with basic education knows what "current" and "1" mean.

I know what the word means. Not everybody assumes the existence of a preferred moment in time, and the alternate view (that all events in spacetime share equal ontology) is used by most physicists, albeit not the average guy on the street who has little use for framing things that way.

Its up to you to demonstrate why the regular and assumed use is broken.

I didn't say anything was broken. I said it had implication for the idea of an alpha cause.'

We clearly exist currently don't we?

My name implies that I assume nothing. So I'd say that it depends on the definitions of those words. I often take the relational view where the phrase "X exists' is meaningless since it is not expressed as relation.
So no, since I cannot think of a test for the property of existence that doesn't beg its conclusion, it isn't clear to me.

Of course, you can take the intuitive view and not explore the alternate ideas, but then you're just rationalizing answers that you've already decided on. In other words, feel free to bid me a good day if I'm not helping. I make a point of ignoring my intuitions, which just get in the way of actual objective analysis.

Let me help you out. If you don't exist, you won't type a reply.

No, I don't buy that. It begs its conclusion. Thought experiments would be impossible if they only worked for things with the additional property of 'existence' tacked onto them.
The unicorn has a horn, which by the above logic it cannot because the horn doesn't exist. I told you the unicorn would come into play. I just saying there are valid alternative views (non-realist ones) that don't presume objective existence. The relational view of which I spoke defines existence only as a relation. I exist in relation to you because you read my posts, so you've measured me.

If we observe something currently, then that state is current as well correct?

If one assumes a view where that statement is meaningful, then yes. If one doesn't, then the statement is simply not meaningful. The alternate view might say that on Feb 5, 2022 we all observe the state of the world of Feb 5, 2022 (at least the nearby stuff), and not some other state. That date is no more or less 'the past', 'the present', or 'the future' than any other date. They all have equal ontology.

This is suggested by relativity of simultaneity. The presentist view (the one you're taking) says that there is a current moment here, there is also a current moment elsewhere, but there is no way to determine it. Suppose there's a clock we can see in Andromeda. OK, what we see was emitted before the time it gets observed, but if the distance and velocity of the clock is known, one can compute what the clock says at the same time as when we observe it, except the distance and velocity of it is frame dependent, leaving no way at all to empirically determine what the remote clock says at the same time as when our local clock says time T.
Look up the Andromeda paradox on wiki. It's all about this. Understand it before just dismissing it by your incredulity.

So you're assuming an unproven suggestion.

I assume nothing as any kind of asserted truth. Physics is not in the business of proving things, but I do definitely work with the view preferentially for the ease of understanding. There is no working theory of the universe that assumes a current moment. The mathematics is orders of magnitude more complicated. It's much easier to do assuming spacetime.
There is no device that measures the rate of advancement of the current time. Clocks measure proper time along a worldline through spacetime. If they measured the advancement of the present, they'd not get out of sync when they move (twins paradox) or change potential.

Also, if 4D spacetime contains time, then we as as 3D objects would be able to measure it. And if we're able to measure it, we can say, "This moment now is current". Imagine an X Y graph. I can measure the X, the Y, etc. Just because that 2D plane is on my 3D desk, doesn't mean I can't use the X Y graph. Same with time.

So your assumption, which isn't a given, doesn't really refute the idea of "currently existing", causality, or time.

I never claimed any of those things are refuted. I'm just pointing out that there's a different view out there, and one used preferentially by physicists. The B-view does not deny time, it just defines it differently. In the B view, time is what clocks measure, which is the temporal length of a worldline. Two different worldlines connecting events X and Y might have different temporal lengths (as they do in the twins 'paradox'), so the clocks don't match when reunited. That's impossible if they accurately measured the sort of time you're talking about.
And no, that doesn't in any way prove the presentist view wrong. I've put a couple proofs out there against it myself, and I've also done a topic defending it against what I saw as fallacious arguments against.

And even beyond that, I just have one question. Why is reality 4D spacetime?

We don't know that it is for one. Physics doesn't answer 'why' questions too well. Philosophy does sometimes.
If you're asking the purpose of the universe being the way it is, it doesn't seem to have a purpose.

The fine-tuning argument has a clue. There is a suggestion that there are a lot of universes with all sorts of random different values for constants, different dimensions (like two space and three time dimensions) in which all sorts of crazy things go on, but rarely can complexity form from simple beginning. This universe has one of the rare set of variables that allow the formation of complex structures from simple primitives. By the weak anthropic principle, given this insanely large set of possible configurations, only in one like ours can observers evolve to note the universe and the rules that govern it. So it's simply not possible to see the other ones because those are not observed in the way that people observe.

This makes the presumption that there is a current state.
— noAxioms

Please clarify. Are you implying there is no "now"? — Philosophim

No, I said that you're making the assumption that there is one. The assumption has implications to the topic at hand, which is why I'm dredging it up.

Do you not exist at this time?

That question also presumes it.

We clearly exist currently don't we?

I can think of no empirical test that falsifies the alternative, so no, it isn't clear.

If we observe something currently, then that state is current as well correct?

That statement also assumes (begs) it.

Why couldn't the big bang just happen? — Philosophim

There's where the implication comes in (bold above). The assumption has the 3D universe contained in time: The universe wasn't there at some time in the past, and at some point in time, the alpha event 'happened', and thereafter the universe was there. It makes for a larger container that contains the universe (itself a container of space, but not a container of time).

Physics suggests (doesn't prove) that the universe is 4D spacetime, and is not something contained in time, but rather something that contains it. In that view, time is a dimension and not a preferred moment that flows. The big bang isn't something that 'happened'. It's just part of the whole structure of all events, each of which are part of the structure equally.

Causality is also an explanation for why there is a current state. — Philosophim

This makes the presumption that there is a current state.