The Cosmos exists as the constraint on possibility. It emerges not from fundamental intentionality nor from fundamental mechanistic cause but from the fundamental vagueness of unorganised free potential. An essential state of everythingness that then must start to self-cancel until it becomes reduced to some coherently organised somethingness. A realm of inevitable structure. — apokrisis

Great! 'Everything' is a necessity since there is no design point for anything specific.

Note --- I interpret First Cause to be logically & necessarily eternal & intentional Essence instead of temporal & accidental Substance. — Gnomon

I am arguing against any strong notion of first cause.

Take the example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. A pencil balanced on its point. A ball resting perfectly still on the peak of a dome.

These are states of perfect potentiality that are also critically unstable. Poised and inevitably about to be broken. The pencil will fall. The ball will roll down. The direction is random, but the outcome is certain.

And what is the cause of the fall or the roll? Absolutely anything. The smallest vibration or the least random knock from some air molecule. The first cause must exist. But also it could have been anything. So nothing was very special about it.

That would be the standard physical example of the kind causal situation I am talking about. What comes first is just the poised tension of a potential so general that absolutely any fluctuation could send it down the hill towards its inevitable destiny.

Note --- I interpret First Cause to be logically & necessarily eternal & intentional Essence instead of temporal & accidental Substance. — Gnomon
I am arguing against any strong notion of first cause. — apokrisis

That's OK with me. I don't have any "strong" scientific notion of First Cause. In fact, most practical scientists seem to avoid such metaphysical speculations in their work*1. For me, the notion of a First Cause is merely a philosophical conjecture to put a period on all, otherwise open-ended, causal sequences.

20th century Cosmology traced the path of measurable finite causes, energy exchanges, back to a mathematical Singularity. That hypothetical origin of space-time was inherently un-defined, because all converging mathematical paths went off the charts and disappeared into Infinity (literally un-measurable). So the Singularity itself could not be the actual First Cause, because its an Idea, not a Real thing. Hence, nobody has a strong, evidence-based, notion of First Cause.

But flakey philosophers are not bound to mundane Reality, and they can freely imagine sublime Ideality. Which is what Aristotle postulated, 13 centuries ago, as the First & Final Causes . . . . for philosophical (not scientific) & theoretical (not empirical) purposes. Those bookend Causes are as real, and useful, as the number PI. :smile:


*1. Science of First Cause : refers to the philosophical concept of a first cause—the initial, uncaused entity that initiated all subsequent causal chains and ultimately brought about existence itself. While science describes the causes of events within the universe, the first cause addresses the ultimate origin of reality, a concept explored in metaphysics and ontology rather than empirical science.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=science+of+the+first+causes

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE SINGULARITY?

I guess newton's "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" makes more sense than cause, i tend to think of everything as reactions.

20th century Cosmology traced the path of measurable finite causes, energy exchanges, back to a mathematical Singularity. — Gnomon

In fact what Penrose showed was that all the useful structure of fundamental of physics would break down if you pushed it to an actual zero point. And what instead saves it is that all of that physics rather neatly converges on the unit 1 that is the Planck point. The point at which the three fundamental constants of nature - c, G and h - become unified and have the one absolute value.

So extrapolating linearly to zero fails. But extrapolating non-linearly to 1 gives you a “first cause” that is an irreducible triadic relation. The dichotomy of h and G, scaled by c as its inverting connection.

The general mistake that is being made is thinking that h and G need to be reduced even further. That two must be made one. Relativity has to be expressed as a quantum field theory where gravitons exist as themselves free fluctuations of the quantum foam.

If you have two fundamental theories, then one has to be made the more fundamental and so allow the other to be derived from it.

But that is not how dichotomies work. They come as reciprocating pairs. They are unit 1 composites and not unit 0 fundamentality. Existence begins at a level that is already a relation in action, not when nothing becomes a first something.