The Principle of Universal Explanation (PE): everything must have some explanation (in terms of something else).
The second is:
The Principle of Unexplained Existence (PU): reality in total cannot have an explanation (in terms of anything beyond itself). — lish

I'd say these principles are needlessly strong. For example, the moderate PSR often talked about in contemporary metaphysics only extends so far as saying that all /contingent/ facts must have an explanation, but does not ask for an explanation of a plain everything: that is, axioms of logic, or the principle itself, or what not.

Furthermore, there are even more tamed versions of the PSR, like the one advocated by Pruss and Gale, that says that instead of every contingent fact having an explanation, every contingent fact has a possible explanation, i.e. an explanation in a possible world. This is known as the weak PSR, the WPSR.

Within his argument, Rasmussen defends PE by saying everything we are exposed to in this world has an explanation. While we do not have proof that this is 100% always true, no counter-examples come to mind — lish

This seems like shifting the burden. Isn't it Rasmussen's task here, first and foremost, to show why /everything/ has an explanation? Showing why /some/ things have an explanation does not seem to be a sufficient basis to generalize that /everything/ has an explanation unless the sample size of what we experience is a representative sample size of /everything that existed, exists and will exist/, which sounds like a terrible transgression on epistemic humility.

Moreover, playing this game will simply let Humeans win by default, since, while Humeans may not deny the examples of explanation presented, they will understand them in terms of temporal regularity contra causal relation, and, in virtue of the principle of no necessary connections, will make no further commitments: the kind of commitments you need to generalize regularity into causation, or causation into universal causation.

This is not to say Humeans strictly are /correct/, rather, that their opponent must do a lot more to motivate their position.

The probability of the conclusion being false is much greater than PE being true; therefore, we should deny PE. We are justified in using this deduction based on probability because Rasmussen used the same sort of probability deduction to defend PE. — lish

This seems like an odd mix of an inductive argument with something that looks like a proof by contradiction. Perhaps this is going through something like a Moorean shift where the probability of the conjunction of the premises is less likely than the denial of the conclusion, in effort to deny the premises?

In either case, this is poorly set up precisely because PE is so strongly-formulated that a lot of causality proponents can reasonably commit to causation and explanation without PE, for instance, counterfactual causation, the PSR, the WPSR, so on.

In short, I simply find no issue with rejecting PE, but I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove or in what way is it meant to be enlightening. It seems that a lot of metaphysicians, regardless of their position on causality, will gladly reject PE, so it does not seem to be a very powerful anti-causal argument. If not, then what it is? What kind of thing is this argument trying to establish if not something trivial and uncontroversial?

2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU). — lish

How secure is this premise? Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation?

So particular things get particular explanations and universal things get a universalising explanation.

The hidden bit in the logic is that explanations are "another thing outside the thing". But the container is also a kind of thing. Reality might have contents, but it also needs a container.

Even the null set at the foundations of maths requires the brackets that contain the no things found within.

How secure is this premise? Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation? — apokrisis

How can pull reality itself in existence? What fundamental physical law can do that? And if you know, where does that self creating structure come from? Is not every infinity of turtles, every eternal universe, every von Münchhausen structure submitted to divine creation?

The Principle of Universal Explanation (PE): everything must have some explanation (in terms of something else). — lish

I'm not sure, but it seems that you might be making a distinction between everything having an explanation and everything having a cause. Is that true? Please believe I'm not being ironic when I say this - can you please explain why that would be true. I can't see any difference between the two. As for causation, it is has been a commonplace for more than 100 years that it is not true that everything has a cause. I don't mean that it is fully established or not controversial. I just mean it has been proposed seriously by eminent philosophers, e.g. Bertrand Russell.

Within his argument, Rasmussen defends PE by saying everything we are exposed to in this world has an explanation. — lish

I'm not even certain what this statement means. To me it is self-evidently false. The world is full of things for which we don't have explanations. Explanations are human things. Reality is not human.

The Principle of Unexplained Existence (PU): reality in total cannot have an explanation (in terms of anything beyond itself). — lish

It is not clear to me that "reality in total" is even a thing. Seems a lot like objective reality. Is it the same thing? There are good arguments that the idea of objective reality is not a very useful one.

2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU).
— lish

How secure is this premise? Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation? — apokrisis

But the explanation will be incomplete as such, because it cannot include its own relation to reality in the explanation itself.

Why's that? The relation would be that the whole is explained in terms of all that it could produce.

The whole "nothing exists" premise is already defeated by the simple fact that something indeed exists. So any argument that arrives at such a conclusion must have employed false premises.

Now false premises can be useful. They are justification for taking the opposite as being true.

So my own position would be that everything was possible. What needs explanation is why reality - as realisable actuality - is the something that it is observed to be.

That leads to the structuralist thought that not everything can be actual because many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel each other out. So reality does contain its own explanation, its own cause. Actuality is the path integral - the sum over all possibility that limits an everythingness to a somethingness.

If everything could actually cancel, there would be nothing. And we know that isn't true. So we know that everythingness was both limitable, and yet not a complete elimination of the possibility for a resulting somethingness.

Donut holes exist.

In maths. Not so much in the physics of voids.

I can eat donuts, not "maths". :yum: And (baryonic) donuts consist mostly of "voids".

Why's that? The relation would be that the whole is explained in terms of all that it could produce.

The whole "nothing exists" premise is already defeated by the simple fact that something indeed exists. So any argument that arrives at such a conclusion must have employed false premises.

Now false premises can be useful. They are justification for taking the opposite as being true. — apokrisis

But that doesn’t explain the whole, only what it can produce.

I’m not defending the ‘nothing exists’ conclusion, in case you were wondering. But I do think people approach this argument from different awareness levels, without realising that what they assume is meant by ‘reality’ - in your case realisable actuality - is on a completely different level to what others assume, and there is structural process in between.

So my own position would be that everything was possible. What needs explanation is why reality - as realisable actuality - is the something that it is observed to be. — apokrisis

The way I see it:

All possibly exists, possibly not.
Everything potentially exists.
Something actually exists.

That leads to the structuralist thought that not everything can be actual because many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel each other out. So reality does contain its own explanation, its own cause. Actuality is the path integral - the sum over all possibility that limits an everythingness to a somethingness.

If everything could actually cancel, there would be nothing. And we know that isn't true. So we know that everythingness was both limitable, and yet not a complete elimination of the possibility for a resulting somethingness. — apokrisis

But this structuralist thought is not contained in the explanation, but in our relation to it. Without a relation to your position as conscious observer, or mine, there would be little structure to your explanation that everything was possible. We tend to take this for granted in these discussions.

Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation? — apokrisis

Self-explanatory: Self-explanatory

To be fair though, most explanations are such that they rely on something exterior, usually more basic, to that which is being explained e.g. Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering.

This gives me an idea. If explanations must always move in the direction from the complex to the simple, there'll come a point when we'll have hit a wall, the simplest, which would need no explanation at all.

L

In maths. Not so much in the physics of voids — apokrisis

A wormhole is a physical hole. So holes exist even in voids.

Self-explanatory: Self-explanatory — Agent Smith

But what's the explanation?

If explanations must always move in the direction from the complex to the simple, there'll come a point when we'll have hit a wall, the simplest, which would need no explanation at all. — Agent Smith

Axioms in arithmetic. 'Hinge propositions' in some versions of philosophical logic / metaphysics.

I think we need more focus on what constitutes an explanation in the terms of the OP. I can explain why I was leaving the shop with goods in my bag having made no payment. I can promise you that it will not be a simple explanation, let alone the simplest. But it may, despite being complicated and implausible, be true.

Here is an explanation why heavy things fall to the ground. It's because they are made of an earthy substance and earth by nature attracts earth. Now isn't that simpler than what we are told nowadays? And can't you see and feel the earthy mass of such things for yourself? It's self-explanatory. But, alas, that's not good enough. Still, it's an explanation. We have found greater insight and more beautiful explanations in dropping all talk of earthy natures. But at no point did anybody discover the non-existence of earthiness.

Self-explanatory: Self-explanatory
— Agent Smith

But what's the explanation? — EugeneW

Some things (should) explain themselves.

Read below for more...



I don't think a visit to the grocer is going to be complex enough to deserve that label. Complexity should be a function of not how many participants are involved, but of how many laws/principles/rules are at play. To illustrate, this (129.0387349573383219773 × 934883459281.93874236583) is not complex.

Anyway an explanation is such that they tend to be done in terms of constituents/parts when the target of the explanation is the whole: phenomena are explained with chemistry or physics, at an atomic level that is.

Axiomatic systems like mathematics typify the method of starting off with a few simple building blocks, establishing some ground rules, and then exploring the structures and networks we can construct therefrom.

Some things (should) explain themselves. — Agent Smith

Some things, yes. The universe can explain itself. But not where it came from. How can it explain that?

The initial argument needs to be amended:

1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU).
3. Therefore, there is no reality in total [everything must not have an explanation] — lish

Donut holes exist. — 180 Proof

As it says in the Tao Te Ching:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move. — Lao Tzu

Democritus would agree (pace Parmenides, pace Aristotle). :up:

And (baryonic) donuts consist mostly of "voids". — 180 Proof

Not according to QCD. Instead the interior is a "proton sea" of quantum fluctuations.

But that doesn’t explain the whole, only what it can produce. — Possibility

In my systems science/hierarchy theory view, the whole is produced by what it produces. The whole shapes its parts - it contributes the downward-acting constraints. But the parts then construct the whole - they contribute the upward-building material being, the suitably shaped "atomic" components.

So it is a bootstrapping or cybernetic causal model. And if it sounds unlikely, it is at least less unlikely than creatio ex nihilo. :grin:

But this structuralist thought is not contained in the explanation, but in our relation to it. Without a relation to your position as conscious observer, or mine, there would be little structure to your explanation that everything was possible. We tend to take this for granted in these discussions. — Possibility

I don't follow your point. But given that I'm taking the internalist perspective of Peircean logic and semiotics, I would have thought that our position as rationalising observers of nature is covered by that.

(When I say "everythingness", that is a placeholder for logical vagueness - the everythingness that is both and everything and a nothing in standing metaphysically for an Apeiron of unstructured potential.)

A wormhole is a physical hole. So holes exist even in voids. — EugeneW

Even if wormholes existed for real, they would still be a path connecting two moments in time, not a nothingness.

To be fair though, most explanations are such that they rely on something exterior, usually more basic, to that which is being explained e.g. Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering. — Agent Smith

Is that true at the level of metaphysics? Don't fundamental concepts there become grounded in the logical manoeuvre of a dichotomy?

What is it to be discrete? Well, it is to have the least degree of continuity. What is it to be necessary? Well, it is to have the least degree of chance about it?

Etc, etc. The dialectical argument, the unity of opposites, that lays the self-justifying foundation for any kind of rational thought about the structure of existence.

This gives me an idea. If explanations must always move in the direction from the complex to the simple, there'll come a point when we'll have hit a wall, the simplest, which would need no explanation at all. — Agent Smith

A dichotomy does that by instead constructing opposing pairs of limits. So the discrete is one ultimately simple extreme, and the continuous is its dialectical "other". And then what can actually be must lie in the space thus created inbetween.

Actuality becomes then the more complex thing of a mixture. All actual things are relatiively discrete, or relatively continuous. No thing can be absolutely discrete or continuous. They are just more of the one than the other in a spectrum of variety fashion.

Even if wormholes existed for real, they would still be a path connecting two moments in time, not a nothingness. — apokrisis

There would be a hole in space, connecting two spaces that wouldn't be connected otherwise. There would be a hole of nothingness between the two spaces.

1. Everything must have some explanation (PE).
2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU). — lish

What's the difference between everything and reality in total?

It's a classic example of a cunning arrangement of words that a philosopher thinks can oblige reality to be or not be. I call it "magical thinking". Recite the magic formula, and the the world will do your bidding.

There would be a hole in space, connecting two spaces that wouldn't be connected otherwise. There would be a hole of nothingness between the two spaces. — EugeneW

You've been watching too much Star Trek or Dr Who. But even if such a macroscale connection between two spacetime locales could be sustained, it wouldn't be a hole in spacetime, it would be a connection. It wouldn't be a void-like nothing, it would be an extreme energy something.

In between the walls of the hole would be nothing. Time might stand still on these walls, but in between is still nothing. A hole of nothingness.

The energy ground state of the vacuum – empty space – is "a sea of virtual particles" (i.e. quantum fluctuations), so thanks for illustrating my point. The volumes of photons, of nuclei, of atoms, of molecules, of spacetime itself are c99.99% empty with respect to non-planck scale objects like donuts. :smirk:

In my systems science/hierarchy theory view, the whole is produced by what it produces. The whole shapes its parts - it contributes the downward-acting constraints. But the parts then construct the whole - they contribute the upward-building material being, the suitably shaped "atomic" components.

So it is a bootstrapping or cybernetic causal model. And if it sounds unlikely, it is at least less unlikely than creatio ex nihilo. — apokrisis

:fire:

The energy ground state of the vacuum – empty space – is "a sea of virtual particles" (i.e. quantum fluctuations), so thanks for illustrating my point. — 180 Proof

But that was my point. :brow:

From your reference -

According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of the quantum field.

And we haven't even discussed dark energy or the cosmological constant yet.

So if you want to argue for relative states of emptiness, sure. But if you want to sustain your donut argument as evidence that actual voids exist, then its a hard no.

In between the walls of the hole would be nothing. Time might stand still on these walls, but in between is still nothing. A hole of nothingness. — EugeneW

Even the psuedo-scientific attempts to imagine macroscale wormholes accepts tremendous energy would fill them to keep the walls from collapsing - some suitable source of negative energy, or phantom energy, or some other made-up shit.