, by "everything" I meant the lot, existence, it all, the complement-free, hence mentioning the composition fallacy, giving "everything and then some".

But yes, right, sufficient reason is a fine metaphysical thesis, it's just misapplication that's not.

Where do these fit in?
• the Casimir effect, virtual particle pairs, quantum fluctuations, radioactive decay, spacetime foam/turbulence, the "pressure" of vacuum energy, Fomin's quantum cosmogenesis (successors), Krauss' relativistic quantum fields, ..., the zero energy universe, the "edge-free" universe
• why anything at all?
• why this-or-that and not something else?

(As a side-topic here, Leibniz wanted to posit something necessary, going by what we now call modal logic, but I think anything necessary in general falls back on what all possible worlds have in common, i.e. more or less just self-consistency.)

All or nothing...? :brow: (n)
Delineate means finding pre-conditions, exceptions, something like that.

What are your reasons for thinking that causality relates events rather than [...] — jkg20

The point was that I found

a property of matter-energy — TheMadFool

a bit odd.

directly contradicts the principle of sufficient reason — TheMadFool

There you go. (y)
Better ensure we don't apply the principle to everything/existence first, or we follow the haphazard structure of "everything and then some". (n)
Then there are those considerations of quantum mechanics.

, not jettison, just delineate.
(E.g. there can't be anything (else) that's the reason for everything.)
I'd say causality is an event-relation, a cause and its effect are related.

, well, you maintained sufficient reason, so that did away with a t=0.
But then simpler, though, when adding an extra cause (of causation)...?
Seems more like an article of faith than otherwise called for, causes and effects already being accounted for, cf composition fallacy.
For that matter, it might be "simpler" to delineate or do away with sufficient reason (search for cases with no sufficient reason or no applicability).

Haphazard application of the principle, delineation required:
There can be no (other) reason for existence, since then such a reason would then not exist (by definition).

Anyway, causes and effects are typically taken to be events, so applying sufficient reason, in this case, seems more like responding to different inquiries, say,

Why anything at all?

or

Why this-or-that and not something else?

, isn't that a wee bit unparsimonious, extravagant, composition fallacy'ish?

, yeah, whole books have been written about the curious "nothingness".
But "nothingness" isn't something, isn't anything at all, but absence.
So, also absence of constraints, prevention, checkbooks and coffee.
Not much to talk about it seems, but physicists prefer at least something to talk about, like the Casimir effect, virtual particle pairs, quantum fluctuations, radioactive decay, spacetime foam/turbulence, the "pressure" of vacuum energy, Fomin's quantum cosmogenesis (successors), Krauss' relativistic quantum fields, ...
And that stuff (perhaps with the zero energy universe) suggests a different sort of "(ex) nihilo".

(EDIT: typo)

Is this a good time to post an ad for your friend?

Here's an old Danish poster from 1918 (attached), so just over a century ago. Let me try translating:

Precautions against spread of the flu

1. observe the best possible cleanliness
2. cover your mouth with your hand when coughing or sneezing
3. watch for anyone coughing, sneezing or speaking to you in close proximity to your face
4. keep the phone clean, in particular if used by many
5. vent rooms well
6. keep the healthy away from the sick as best possible
7. avoid unnecessary visits to the sick
8. do not get up too early after recovery
9. avoid places with many people
10. postpone larger meetings and assemblies
11. don't take the tram more than necessary
12. ensure the children get fresh air

The health board, 17th Oct 1918

More or less the same advice today. Old news. Common sense.

Pollution made COVID-19 worse. Now, lockdowns are clearing the air.
Beth Gardiner
National Geographic
Apr 2020

NO₂ down in various areas, in the range of 20%.

Nevertheless, air pollution still kills more than 100,000 Americans every year. — Gardiner

With all these demands for definitions of words using other words, more words still, we're going to run out of words in the dictionary.
What'll we do then, how will we live? :D

If the mind is causally connected with the rest of the world that does practice some form of conservation, then why wouldnt the mind? Thinking is hard work. Responding without thinking is easier. — Harry Hindu

The two are different categories.

Conservation is a temporal invariance in the first place.

Where does seeing your food go after supper?
The experience thereof came and went, the occurrence started and ended, was interruptible.
Temporal and process-like.

The conservation of the food isn't interruptible, and the food persisted throughout your experiences thereof, much like body persists sufficiently (structurally) throughout mind.
Spatial and object-like (left to right, top to bottom, front to back; we eat food, not experiences thereof).

I guess it's all interrelated in whatever ways, and the synthesis is where we might infer that, say, your mind depends on your body.

On what grounds? — TheMadFool

Really? :)
There'd be more time than time?

I haven't mentioned anything about causality. — TheMadFool

My comment was really just about sufficient reason, much like the opening post but analogous, deriving a contradiction from sufficient reason instead.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it all had a definite earliest time, or "time zero" as it were.

By free, perhaps lax, application of sufficient reason, we'd then expect a cause.
An "outside", "atemporal" cause.
(This is more or less the kalam cosmological argument.)

By another application of sufficient reason we get something else.
A definite earliest time means an age, like 14 billion years, say.
Yet, with an "atemporal" cause of the universe, there's no sufficient reason that the universe is 14 billion years old and not some other age, any other age in fact.
We'd then expect an infinite age.

At a glance, both of these appear to have some intuitive import, except they render a contradiction.
Hence, the principle of sufficient reason and the like are not applicable in this case.
An antinomy? What gives?

(Besides, spacetime is an aspect, or are aspects, of the universe, and "before time" is incoherent. Causation is temporal, and "a cause of causation" is incoherent.)

Mind is "immaterial" in the sense that thoughts (for example) are occurrences.
There's no conservation involved, like there is with the food we eat.
My supper is movable, my experiences thereof are interruptible.
And it so happens that my mind is uniquely associated with my body when occurring.
Consistent with evidence:

The US apparently have a problem with childishly defiant adults:

Florida Pastor Arrested After Defying Virus Orders
Patricia Mazzei; The New York Times; Mar 2020

Dumbasses (pardon my French).

Meanwhile, India has run into problems related to resources, logistics and such:

Hungry, desperate: India virus controls trap its migrant workers
Tish Sanghera; Al Jazeera; Apr 2020

Organizing stoppage of the virus isn't easy.

Hopefully COVID-19 can work as an exercise to learn from.

Time for a real physicist to chime in with their opinions — jgill

(y) I was hoping

Did Gates get it right?

Here's what Bill Gates once said we needed do to prevent a crisis like the coronavirus, and what we need to do to stop the next pandemic (Sinéad Baker, Business Insider, Mar 2020)

This is what Bill Gates had to say about epidemics, back in 2015 (Samantha Sault, World Economic Forum, Mar 2020)

Bill Gates warned us of a COVID-19-like pandemic — watch his TED Talk from 2015 (Taylor Soper, GeekWire, Mar 2020)

OK, now I am getting worried. :worry:
We are going to be on lock down from midnight for an indefinite period. :gasp:

Will 3 cases of beer, 2 bottles of rum, 2 baileys lookalike, 2 of whiskey and several other partially used bottles be enough? :chin: — Sir2u

Dude, disaster in the works.

Some have apparently hoarded toilet paper, we grabbed some coffee, but is it enough?

The crazies have their own "news bulletin" out.

ISIS issues travel ban on fanatics and tells them to ‘put faith in God’ to combat coronavirus
Niamh Cavanagh
The Sun
Mar 2020

He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them
Jack Nicas
The New York Times
Mar 2020

Any thoughts on how this whole toilet paper craze got started? — Echarmion

Maybe someone had nightmares?

My 2 cents on this fine Thursday evening.

the dichotomy between variations of divine command and skepticism about moral reality — Aleph Numbers

Depending a bit on what's meant by "moral reality", why would those two together be exhaustive?

FYI, Carrier has a few things to say about "Prager University" aka Dennis Prager.

If you can pass moral judgment on rules (and the like) in scriptures, then they don't define morals. Since you can, they don't. If you refuse to (or somehow can't) pass moral judgment on scriptural narratives, then choosing them as all-foundation wasn't a moral choice, but morally arbitrary. So, either way, scriptures themselves don't define morals. And, in any given situation you still have to personally decide if following them is the right thing to do; no manner of faith or stories themselves can absolve that.

Life (as an autonomous moral agent) isn't always easy, huh? :)

Regardless of whatever dictum you're told, it's still on you to decide whether following it is the right thing to do; Yahweh/Bible is redundant. Yahweh doesn't appear to tell us what the right thing to do is and why, anyway; Yahweh/Bible is useless in the matter. Scriptures and law books don't define morals, rather they're supposed to be moral.

Say, if, in your head, you have accountability to an imaginary friend rather than your fellow man, then what should others expect of you? This could be exemplified by the Slender Man stabbing in 2014 resulting in decades-long sentences, and is principally comparable to allegiance/accountability to someone/something rendered by faith and/or textual narratives alone. Fortunately, such folk are rarely entirely consistent (non-hypocritical) in such a sentiment, or they would have thoroughly forfeit autonomous moral agency.

Divine command theory (and theological voluntarism) is of no use and doesn't exemplify autonomous moral agency in the first place. (Along with the Euthyphro and the Epicurean problem, all this stuff quickly becomes purely academic-theological hand-waving.)

"Alexa, lights off" Zzz

So the problem secular morality faces, is, I think, that it is the successor of religious moralities where morality was founded in metaphysics, with God as the pinacle of that metaphysics. Every tradition not only had it's prescriptive rules, but also it 'discriptive' myth where the morality flowed from. Now this is important I think, not only did they say "you have to do this because God says so", they invariably embedded it in a story so people would buy into it more readily. So the purpose to all of this, is to give a morality authority. You need to follow it because it's true. — ChatteringMonkey

If you can pass moral judgement on rules in scriptures, then they can't define morals.
Since you can, they don't.

Conversely, such rules may just have forced some societies into a kind of sufficiently stable social cohesion over time, that they became culturally embedded (at least in a conservative sense).
Could something analogous be said of biological evolution, if only to account for morality (not define)?

Many scriptural narratives and other writings mention the Golden Rule or similar in some form or other.
Seems there are some trends that many will recognize as "good rules of thumb".
Yet, such rules "set in stone" themselves, don't absolve anything; in any given situation you'd still have to personally decide if following them is the right thing to do.
Life (as an autonomous moral agent) ain't always easy...

public-school indoctrination camp — alcontali

large-scale imbecilization factories — alcontali

But what exactly is knowledge? — alcontali

I call bullshit.

It is Allah's punishment for adopting false, pagan beliefs. If these people refuse to accept the truth, then [...] — alcontali

"the truth"?
If, in your head, you have accountability to an imaginary friend rather than your fellow people, then what should others expect of you?
Exemplified by the Slender Man stabbing in 2014 resulting in decades-long sentences, and principally comparable to allegiance/accountability to someone/something rendered by faith and/or textual narratives alone. (Fortunately, such folk are rarely entirely consistent (non-hypocritical) in such a sentiment, or they would have forfeit autonomous moral agency.)
We don't derive/define morals from laws, scriptures, etc. Rather the opposite, laws are supposed to be moral. Whatever dictum has been set out, every one of us still has to personally figure out whether to follow it or not, and no manner of stories/faith can absolve that.

I'm not real clear on the question, other than any proposition or judgment represents some form of belief/system — 3017amen

Check the comment above (doxastic logic).
You may believe (even know) that exactly one of p or its negation holds, B[p ∨ ¬p], and yet not believe either one of them, ¬Bp ∧ ¬B[¬p].
Oddly enough perhaps, believers, by implication, also lack beliefs (like agnostics), as they cannot (coherently) harbor belief in the contrary.

Anyway, I guess there's lots more to be said on that stuff, e.g. beliefs are not mere matters of "free choice".

Where B is the operator for belief, you can be without or with beliefs for proposition p:

1. someone does not believe p: ¬Bp
2. someone believes not p: B[¬p]
3. someone does not believe not p: ¬B[¬p]
4. someone believes p: Bp

Those are the possibilities in doxastic logic.

2 and 4 contradict (with). 1 and 3 do not contradict (without). 1 and 4, 2 and 3, contradict (with and without). 2 entails 1, and 4 entails 3 (with belief entails without belief in the contrary, and the converse does not hold). Each can be exemplified, they're jointly exhaustive of belief and the proposition, and no two are identical.

Differentiating a couple categories:

• the elaborate religions with scriptures and stories of supernaturals, rituals, commands, fate designations, fulltime professional advertisers, often apologists earning a living from writing thereof, mutual inconsistencies, etc
• unassuming deism, non-descript panpsychism, some varieties of Buddhism, entertaining some sort of (unknown) superbeing(s), etc

The latter is typically of less concern, and epistemically more on par with The Matrix, Bostrom's hypothesis, Zhuangzi's butterfly, Māyā of Indian fame, deus deceptor, dream thought experiments, Kafkaesque silent hidden superbeings, perhaps even solipsism, you name it. (Maybe Spinozism?)

"Whereof one cannot speak ..." and all that?

Seems the term atheism is commonly used about someone technically agnostic towards the latter, and with doubt/disbelief in the former.

Are you saying that there are no gods? — Frank Apisa

I was suggesting that absence of theism and doubt/disbelief therein does not comprise a belief system (any more than disbelief that Santa is real does).

Having a belief that no Gods exist translates into a belief system much like Religion — 3017amen

Atheism is NOT a religion...but for the most part it IS a "belief system." — Frank Apisa

Like disbelief that Santa is real is a belief system?
Like a clean bill of health is a disease?

• absence of theism: newborns, the Pirahã people, some pygmies, ...
• doubt/disbelief in theisms: some pagans, some panpsychists, Hitchens, Russell, ...

There are more reals than naturals though, so which kind of number do you mean? — Pfhorrest

Me? Any will do, depending on context I suppose.

ℵ₀ is a quantity that's not a real number, and ℵ₀ is the quantity of naturals/integers/rationals
ℵ₁ is a quantity that's not a real number, and ℵ₁ is the quantity of reals

It was really just a colloquial "definition", pointing out that ∞ ∉ R, |R| is ∞

How's this, then?
Loosely, ∞ is a quantity that's not a number, and one ∞ is the quantity of numbers.

To simulate the universe in every detail would require more than just the simulation itself, presumably a good deal more, considering what we know about simulations.
Rather unparsimonious, possibly going the way of regress. (Simulations all the way down?)

Otherwise, such a simulation would be targeted specifically at experiencers, animals, us (kind of self-elevating).
So, the Moon would literally not be there when no one was looking, as it were.
This starts to reek of deus deceptor, dream thought experiments, Zhuangzi's butterfly, perhaps solipsism, the usual.

Moving towards such unverifiable-unfalsifiable hypotheses seems like a difference that makes no difference.
It would renders our's a "toy universe" at the whims of the simulators.

You are not able to give a satisfactory reason why the argument does not work, so I will keep posting it; it is a sound argument. — Devans99

A. assume infinite past moments
B. then there's no 1st moment
C. or 2nd ... or nth moment
D. so A can't be numbered with a 1st ... nth moment
E. ?

You allege yours to be a purely deductive proof, yes?
So, show your E (or F) deductively.

Whether A or not, we can (and do) put up a temporal flag pole (say, at 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC) and take it from there. Works fine either way, whether A or not, past and future. In fact, we have to, because we don't know of any definite 1st moment that we can adjust all our clocks to.

I fail to see why you cannot appreciate that an infinite causal regress is like a house without a foundation [...] — Devans99

I'm not so interested in your analogies per se, I'm just pointing out that the argument you keep posting doesn't work.

it is simply impossible [...] cannot exist — Devans99

The argument I've commented on a few times by now does not prove so.

, the worst that can happen if we act, is no worse than doing nothing, but could be better. (Wouldn't it be cool if we don't have to do a thing, and can just forget it and roll ahead?)

The responsible thing to do, is for subject matter experts to go through the motions of sober thorough examination, weighing risks of in/actions (there be ethics), the usual. Like we do with Ebola outbreaks, high-speed traffic, wildlife extinctions, military interventions, garbage disposal, ...

We could, at the very least, go shit where our children eat less frequently, as a start. Does that work as a "compromise"?

No — frank

Has Luboš Motl's theorizing been established (verified and not falsified)?

Why can we not number the elements in a causal regress? — Devans99

Didn't you show with B and C?
We can label events (A) in whichever way we standardize/choose, indexically, but not non-indexically.

Still doesn't follow:

A. Assume an infinite causal regress exists
B. Then it has no first element
C. If it has no nth element, it has no nth+1 element
D. So it cannot exist — Devans99

D. So A cannot be numbered so

Repeating a non-sequitur doesn't somehow make it so.

We have not merely been given the world from our parents, we are also borrowing it from our children. — some proverb

We don't go shit where our children eat either.

What's the worst that can happen if we act on climate change? What's the worst that can happen if we do nothing? What's the responsible thing to do?

I do not believe God is omnipotent. He can't just wave his hand and it be so. He must have generated the universe from something. The Big Bang was probably caused by some sort of device that led to a chain reaction causing all the matter/energy in the universe and the emergence of the 4 forces and the standard model. The device was specified such that a life supporting universe would be the result (IE God did all the calculations first and designed an appropriate device to generate a life supporting universe). — Devans99

Not "atemporal", then. "Atemporal" mind doesn't make sense anyway.

God would not create a universe that is dead for the vast majority of its existence, he would create something self renewing — Devans99

You can come up with falsifiability that we can go out and check tomorrow? (y) (the more the better)

1. So you agree infinite causal regresses are impossible? (see the argument in the OP). — Devans99

You'll have to come up with a different argument for that ↑ one. I'll suggest that you'll have to go by evidence.

Anyway, "the universe turns out fine-tuned to be exactly what it is" doesn't really say much. Kind of tautological. An estimate would have to compare against all possible worlds (cf modal realism). Not sure how you'd go about that.

Hm. Wouldn't the supposed fine-tuner of the universe have to be uniquely fine-tuned to create fine-tuned universes? Surely can't be mere coincidence...? :D

What's with the universal self-elevating self-importance anyway?

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth

By heat death, there will be an unfathomable amount of time (even compared to 14 billion years), ruled by the lonely photon in deep cold. Heavier elements that came out of supernovae will have decayed, and perhaps even black holes will have "evaporated" (Hawking radiation).
The universe seems mostly "designed" or "fine-tuned" as/for vast, open (increasing) spaces, lots of radiation, rocks here and there, gases and suns, maybe some massive gravity wells whose gravity are so strong that light can't escape — and freezing lonely photons.

It does not matter if it the elements can't be numbered — Devans99

Then you'll need a proof without going by that.
FYI, not that it matters much, I harbor no particular personal belief either way.
I'm just pointing out that your suggested proof still doesn't work.

D. So the infinitude in A can't be numbered so — jorndoe