I'd be asking can everything have an effect on something else. If a tree falls in the woods... for example.

A speck of dust falling on an aging floor in a remote cabin abandoned 50 years prior ontop of literally trillions upon trillions might. It might not.

Does every thing/object/entity have an effect on something else?

Another way to ask this question is:

Is every thing/object/entity perceived? and when I say perceived, I mean sensed by any thing/object/entity that is not it, not necessarily a living thing. — Daniel

These are not the same question.

could you help me rephrase the question from the point of view of that which is affected, but using the thing that affects as the subject of the question? I dunno if that makes sense.

I guess I should have asked: Is every thing/object/entity perceived by at least something else that is not it?

I am assuming for this question that everything that affects something is perceived by such something.

What about this version? Does everything that exists interact with something different to itself?

Well, everything that has an effect is a cause...

You seem to be wanting to replace effect with perception. Something like: are all causes perceived?

Is that helpful?

kind of... I wanna ask something more like: is everything that exists a cause?
but now I'm realizing I am confused about what I really wanna ask; it's hard to put into words.

Maybe: is it necessary for something to exist to be a cause, that is, to have an effect on something else that is not itself?

All goes back to my believe that for existence to occur at least two objects must interact since a single entity cannot act on itself and therefore cannot exist. As in a single thing (a unity, not a composite) cannot exist. OR only composites can exist.

I'm realizing I am confused about what I really wanna ask; it's hard to put into words. — Daniel

Welcome to philosophical analysis - working out what it is you want to ask. As opposed to the sort of philosophy that just makes stuff up.

What you are saying puts me in mind of Quinn'e "to exist is to be the subject of a predicate" - to exist is to be the thing that does such-and-such.

If that were so, your question might better be: Does every thing have a relation to something else?

Yes, that is the question. But I'd ask, just to be more general (less specific), if that's possible:

does every thing that exists interact?

makes sense? as in, to interact is a condition of (for) existence.

Is to have a relation to something the same as to interact with something, though?

Well, I'd take a linguistic turn and point out that our conversation can be about anything, and hence that existing and being part of the conversation are much the same. That's what I take Wittgenstein to be saying by "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". Sort of.

But analytical, an interaction would seem to requires two individuals, while being the subject of a predicate requires only one.

Can you (or anyone else that reads this) think of something that exists and does not interact?

Absence of disproof is not proof.

Unexpressed thoughts. Or do they? Do they?

I'd say they affect the self. That said, I believe the self to be different from other thoughts, although I think it is a thought itself.

I was playing with the idea of whether there are things that have no effect in re free will. Is it possible that all the things that the universe throws at our minds/brains are causal dead ends - producing no effects on our brains/minds? If yes, then free will is possible and determinism would be false.

Take for instance a block of masonry weighing 100 Newtons. If I apply a force of 100 Newtons or less, the block would remain unaffected - it wouldn't budge. In other words, there's a cause (the force of 100 Newtons applied to the block) but no effect. Only when I exert a force greater than 100 Newtons will there be an effect on the block - it'll move.

Is it possible that all the things that the universe throws at our minds/brains are causal dead ends - producing no effects on our brains/minds? — TheMadFool

I don't know if I understand what you are trying to say, but I'd say that the mind/self itself is the result of the interaction of the external environment with our bodies. We are the effect of such interaction. The self is also a cause for many things. So, I'd say we are not dead ends. Again, I am not sure if I understood you correctly.

As for the analogy of the block, if there was no friction (or no other force opposing the applied force), would this still occur? Because I think the block does not move not because there is no effect, but because the cause is not enough to overcome friction or any other opposing force and make the block move. Right? So, I think that in this case the lack movement is not a lack of effect, but a lack of visible effect. At the microscopic level you must be breaking billions of bonds. My speciality is not physics, btw.

cause is not enough — Daniel

Yes, exactly. There are some causes that don't produce an effect.

lack movement is not a lack of effect, but a lack of visible effec — Daniel

A diamond is actually soft until it's touched - then it becomes hard. There can be no such thing as an invisible (unperceivable) effect for effect is defined as a perceivable (visible) change.

Everything affects everything. Scientifically, spiritually, logically and theoretically.

So, is existence dependent on interaction? as in, a thing that does not interact with something external to itself does not exist; and existence requires more than one thing to become-it is impossible for a single object to exist in the universe.

Existence is just existence and not dependent on interaction. Whether there is interaction or not, everything still affects everything.

How can something affect something else without them interacting?

On some accounts they are, including mine, but the reason for that does need to be elucidated since such an account is not ubiquitous.

let's say that you see a pastry in a cake shop. If eat, it affects you, the thing you are eating, the possibilities of it being eaten by someone else or just decaying. In all cases, it is being affected. Hope it was not too confusing ;P

that does need to be elucidated since such an account is not ubiquitous. — Pfhorrest

And here is my elucidation:

George Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived", and as I've already detailed in my previous essay against nihilism, I don't agree with that entirely, in part because I take perception to be a narrower concept than experience in a broader sense, and because I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable. And I find this adage to combine in very interesting ways with two other famous philosophical adages: Socrates said that "to do is to be", meaning that anything that does something necessarily exists; and more poignantly, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "to be is to do", meaning that what something is is defined by what that something does. Being, existence, can be reduced to the potential for or habit of some set of behaviors: things are, or at least are defined by, what they do, or at least what they tend to do. (Coupled with the association of mass to substance and energy to causation above, this notion that to be is to do seems to me a vague predecessor to the notion of mass-energy equivalence). To combine this with my adaptation of Berkeley's adage, we get concepts like "to do is to be experienced", "to be experienced is to do", "to be done unto is to experience", and "to experience is to be done unto".

This paints experience and behavior as two sides of the same coin, opposite perspectives on the same one thing: an interaction. Our experience of a thing is that thing's behavior upon us. An object is red inasmuch as it appears red, and it appears red inasmuch as it emits light toward us in certain frequencies and not others: the emission of the right frequencies of light, a behavior in a very broad sense, constitutes the property of redness. Every other property of an object is likewise defined by what it does, perhaps in response to something that we must do first: an object's color may be relative to what frequencies of light we shine on it (e.g. something that is red under white light may be black under blue light), the shape of the object as felt by touch is defined by where it pushes back on our nerves when we press them into it, and many other more subtle properties of things discovered by experiments are defined by what that thing does when we do something to it.

We can thus define all objects by their function from their experiences to their behaviors: what they do in response to what it done to them. The specifics of that function, a mathematical concept mapping inputs to outputs, defines the abstract object that is held to be responsible for the concrete experiences we have. Every object's behavior upon other objects constitutes an aspect of those other objects' experience, and every object's experience is composed of the behaviors of the rest of the world upon it. All of reality can then be seen as a web of these interactions, the interactions themselves being the most concrete constituents of that reality, with the vertices of that web constituting the more abstract objects, in the usual sense, of that reality. We each find ourselves to be one complex object in that web, and the things we have the most direct, unmediated awareness of are those interactions between our own constituent parts, and between ourselves and the nearest other vertices in that web, those interactions constituting our experience of the world, and also our behavior upon the world. By identifying the patterns in those experiences, we can begin to build an idea of what the rest of the world beyond that is like, inferring the existence and function of other nodes beyond the ones we are directly connected to by their influence in the patterns of behavior of (and thus our experience of) those nearest nodes.

As opposed to the sort of philosophy that just makes stuff up. — Banno

:snicker:

To be experienceable, an object must disturb its surroundings and such change in the environment must be experienced by something other than itself.

I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. — Pfhorrest

I also do not think that the existence of an object depends on it being experienced. An object must exist before it is experienced. I completely agree with you in this matter, and I believe this to be a fact.

On the other hand, the idea that the potential-to-be-experienced determines the existence of an object with the potential to be experienced assumes the existence of the potential before the existence of the object, and how can a potential be a quality of something that does not yet exist? How does the potential exist prior to the object? Maybe I am wrong in assuming temporality in this case, but no matter how hard I try, I am not able to imagine a potential as being a quality of something that does not exist.

I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable. — Pfhorrest

To be experienceable, an object would require the future existence or the present (concurrent) existence of that which will experience the object. This idea assumes an interaction as you mentioned. I agree in that this interaction is a requirement for the existence of the thing in question.
You say that it is its potential to be experienced and not the interaction per se which constitutes the existence of an object, correct me if I am wrong.

According to your view, a single object in the universe, a unity, a particular, may exist even if other things do not exist because it has the potential to be experienced in the future. But the potential must exist before the object (again, I might be wrong in assuming temporality).
I'd say the existence of the interaction constitutes the existence of the interacting objects. From this would follow that a single object, a unity, a particular, cannot exist.

Again, in my view, it is not interacting what determines the existence of things but the interaction itself; in this case the interaction does not exist prior to the objects since it would be impossible, but the objects' existence depends on them interacting, which again assumes the necessity of multiple things existing.

i believe in scientific determinism or determinism as though the universe is a giant billiards table. I also believe in some forms (the later forms including a derivative of Plato's) of pan-psychism.

I am not familiar with panpsychism. Could you explain to me how panpsychism explains existence?

there are videos on it but if you don't want to watch a video (there are over 11 forms and only some are ~valid IMO)

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Introduction:
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Pan-Psychism written out instead of a youtube video (see below):
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe."[2] It holds that mentality is present in all natural bodies that have unified and persisting organization, which most proponents define in a way that excludes objects such as rocks, trees, and human artifacts.[3]

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales,[4] Plato,[4] Spinoza,[4] Leibniz,[4] William James,[4] Alfred North Whitehead,[1] and Galen Strawson.[1] During the nineteenth century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the twentieth century with the rise of logical positivism.[4][5] The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.
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Pan-psychism further explained:
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Panpsychism holds that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe".[2] Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality each of us can know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies.[8] This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Contemporary academic proponents hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distancing these qualities from complex human mental attributes;[9] they ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe it to most aggregates, such as rocks or buildings.[1][10] On the other hand, some historical theorists ascribed attributes such as life or spirits to all entities.[9]

The philosopher David Chalmers, who has explored panpsychism as a viable theory, distinguishes between microphenomenal experiences (the experiences of microphysical entities) and macrophenomenal experiences (the experiences of larger entities, such as humans).[11]
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Ancient times and then skip to much later
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Panpsychist views are a staple theme in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy.[5] According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE) the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods."[12] Thales believed that this was demonstrated by magnets. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine.[5] Other Greek thinkers who have been associated with panpsychism include Anaxagoras (who saw the underlying principle or arche as nous or mind), Anaximenes (who saw the arche as pneuma or spirit) and Heraclitus (who said "The thinking faculty is common to all").[9]

Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).[9] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:

This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.[13]

Stoicism developed a cosmology which held that the natural world was infused with a divine fiery essence called pneuma, which was directed by a universal intelligence called logos. The relationship of the individual logos of beings with the universal logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The metaphysics of Stoicism was based on Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of the anima mundi.
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(skip a bunch of steps to modern times)
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The panpsychist doctrine has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism" and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism."[22] Its prominent proponents in the United States include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin,[1] and David Skrbina.[5][16] In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson,[23] Gregg Rosenberg,[1] Timothy Sprigge,[1] and Philip Goff.[6][24] The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness."[25][26] The Canadian philosopher William Seager has also defended panpsychism.[27]

In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A New theory of the relationship of mind and matter," a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics.[28] The philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has described Bohm's view as a version of panprotopsychism.[29] The American philosopher Quentin Smith is also a follower[clarification needed] of Bohm's ideas.[citation needed]

Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.[30] Science editor Annaka Harris explores panpsychism as a viable theory in her book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing the view.[31][32]

The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems.[33] However, it does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others.[33] Koch has referred to IIT as a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.[34]

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You might say this contradicts scientific determinism, however i believe evolution is the hypothetical god's(i say Jesus Christ) solution to solve his own depression. Evolution is controlled by scientific determinism. I can't list Bible verses, but this comes from the oldest or supposedly the oldest book in the Bible and i'm not in this case implying the book of Genesis. I don't believe we will become gods someday but i do believe in an afterlife.

I do not think you answered my question. I just want to know how panpsychism explains the fact that there is something instead of nothing. Why do thinks exist, according to panpsychism?

did you read the article i posted. Do a wikipedia search. Perhaps i'm missing something or perhaps you are missing something. If there was nothing there would be no witnesses that there is nothing, hence why there is something. Or atleast thats part of it.