1:56 Bruh, the site is broken, so on this question, it's no longer possible to pick option 2 or 3. I guess the site has decided that "belief in a necessary being" is, itself, a necessary being.
3:58 The previous question is "Can there be a contingent thing that has no cause?" My interpretation of this is: could things happen, or come to exist, without something else causing it to happen or exist? Taking into consideration the big-bang, or particles manifesting from nothing, or Quantum Tunneling, one could suppose: yes, things can happen or come to exist without something causing them. Which is the answer given by Kane B. With this in mind, the question noted in the timestamp seems to be answerable when considering the examples we listed in the last example(but I'll just refer to Quantum Tunneling to keep things simple). The question is: "Can a possible event be uncausable(impossible to cause)?" My Interpretation of this is: Can some type of event be possible to happen, even if it couldn't be caused by anything? In terms of the previous question: Can something happen, or be made to exist, even if there is nothing which could cause it? If we can say Quantum Tunneling not only can occur without cause, but it is also *impossible* to occur by cause, then the answer to this question seems clear: "It seems so". Since we already think things can happen without cause(as from the previous question), it does not seem much of a leap to suggest things can happen without it even being *able* to cause them.
Id be interested to hear your thoughts on quantum tunneling and non causation. My understanding is that tunneling occurs when a quantum particle appears in a location it could not have traveled to in a continuous sense due to an energy barrier. This is said to occur due to the indeterminate position of the quantum particle having some nonzero probability at all locations due to its wave function. It seems to me that I can’t tell whether this is casual or non causal. It’s certainly random, in that I can’t predict the exact location the particle will appear in once I measure, but it’s not perfectly random. The wave function gives a probability distribution that covers each possible location. Is something having a probabilistic element to it enough for it to be uncaused? I’m not a philosopher, I don’t know the definitions.
@@jacksonletts3724 If something is probablistic, then there is no certainty to the outcome, making the outcome seperate from any predictability/control and, thus, implicitly making it non-causal. My understanding of the topic, also being a non-philosopher, is that causal events have one input, and one output implicitly and necessarily made by the input. So, again, the existence of probability prevents that. One could argue that probability is only a product of us not being able to calculate/observe/measure the subjects in question(quantum tunneling, for example). But I find those arguments quite lacking, given that it is them referencing something they can't prove.
11:50 i feel like this is perhaps missing the mark slightly because i think what is meant by “there are no instances of a square circle”, there is an implicit qualification of “under standard 2d euclidean geometry”. Not really central to the point but just something that occurred to me.
Well done! And congrats on making it through the survey without being committed to the existence of a necessary being. That puts you in a special, 5%, group. :)
I kinda love the Kane went through the survey in the only possible way where it doesn't slug him with a "gotcha! You DO believe in a necessary being!" and all it author had to say about it is "Interesting!"
Completely with you on your anti-realism here. Despite a love of logic, I had real difficulty trying to get my head around Modal logic. Later I came to realise that it was being presented with A LOT of metaphysical baggage which grated against my intuitions. Once I realised I could dump that, I got on fine and think the various modal logics give some really interesting insights into the way we think about these concepts.
Modal logic is statistics and statistics are the upper limit of uncertainty. There is only actually possible world, the one that actually happens to occur. Everything else is levels of ignorance.
@@havenbastion Okay could be, I don't know much about mereology. Is that a problem? Mereology is a competing explanation to set theory as I understand it. And all I was trying to show was that we can at the very least conceive of sets being the interior of themselves.
This is true for any open set in any topology. (In the discrete set all possible subsets are open sets, and thus all sets are closed sets as well. The indiscrete topology is one where no subsets except the null set and the full set (every point in that space) is. Since every topology has the full set be open (by definition), the interior of this will always be itself). However I do not feel like that is what the video is talking about. It sounds like the video is talking about an object belonging to itself (i.e. the set is a member of itself) instead of being (equal to) its interior, and this cannot be true for any mathematical set because sets cannot be members of themselves. The ZFC is one list of axioms used for set theory and what people usually mean when they talk about mathematical sets. The axiom of regularity (IIRC) forbids this, although in a more general way, so one consequence of this (along with a subset axiom and maybe a few more) is that any set cannot contain itself. Famously Russel's paradox shows why a set of all sets cannot exist, that that would lead to "belongs to" contradicting itself: from this universal set we can take the subset of sets that do not contain themselves. This set, call it A, either contains itself, in which case it should not belong to A, or it doesn't contain itself, in which case it should belong to A. This uses the universality of the original set when we say A is in B. I was initially going to try to show why in general a set that contains itself would lead to a similar contradiction, but I do not know if it is true and if it is I do not remember how to show it and have been unable to think of it on the spot.
I have a video that outlines some of the standard antirealist challenges (it's just called "Causation") but not one where I talk in any detail about my own views. I've been intending to do it for some time but haven't gotten around to it.
9:23 I feel like the property of "necessity" as a limiting property is kinda tongue in cheek, but I do think it's proper to respond to it anyways. Being unable to cause oneself to cease to exist implying limitation seems kinda intuitive, because it is an action that we can take, but cannot be taken by a necessary being. If we can do something a necessary being's nature disallows, that implies said nature is limiting. This is well summarized by Kane when he says, "If it is a necessary being then it is limited to existence." Lets first set aside how we cannot both reject causation and also claim we are capable of causing our non-existence, as Kane seems to be. I think "limited to existence" rather well demonstrates the problem here. All actions we are taking are those which are done while we exist. Of course it's absurd to say that we can take actions after ceasing, as if ceasing to exist is an ongoing action a thing does, or that non-existence is a state of affairs a thing is in. "Limited to existence" implicitly presumes a state of non-existence is a possible state of affairs a thing can be in, but it is not, because non-existence is not a state of existence.
The author would say there is a positivity or value to existing. Thus, a necessary being being "forced" to exist does not detract from its greatness. It's not a deficiency in any way (which is, it seems, what "limiting" is really getting at).
it is amazing how in the 21st century there are still some people who regard logics (in any form !) to be absolutely (not relatively) valid and try to apply it (by force) to anything they can think of or perveive around them in nature .... Your last comment is the most important one, i guess : There are other, silent systems behind logics, to which we owe most of our ideas .. One of them is language for example !
Language isn't one of them... Language is infact just another product of these "silent systems" the silent system simply being evolution, we think the way we think because at some point it was advantages for our ancestors to think like that. We can glimpses of what different modes of thinking and logic may look like by taking compunds that significantly change how our brains operate and process the information, but ultimately we can't ever change the way we think, without fundamentally changing our brains
@@Goodbrother What did you mean by a "logical claim"? I'm seeing a claim about logic, but the claim itself isn't logic because it has no inferences. I'm not sure it applies to itself in the way you were aiming for. You want someone to say something like 'every claim is relative'. Then you can say that claim must be relative. If someone says logic is relative, and you try saying 'that claim is logic', I think that's false. :)
Is there a video where you talk about your disbelief in causality? Because on the face of it, it seems like a ludicrous position to me even when trying to view the position on different scales. Like you could claim that the non-deterministic (quantum) nature of the universe defies causality, but all that randomness averages out into a very deterministic-seeming universe around the molecular scale of things.
But what happens when you trace that back to the beginning? What was the first mover? Where did the quantum fields themselves come from? Interesting to ponder… though without observation we will never know….
@@tainicon4639 True, the origin is still a mystery, but a disbelief in causation seems to do more than just question whether or not there was a first cause.
@@tainicon4639 If an asteroid loops through a wormhole in time and space in a causal loop, what is the "beginning" there? Perhaps "beginning" doesn't mean anything.
@@tainicon4639 For what it's worth, the notion of causality is (to my mind) problematic even from a purely mechanistic POV. A mechanistic theory generally consists of a system of differential equations that describe the behavior of a system over time. Those differential equations say _nothing_ about causality.
Hello Kane, I enjoy your videos a lot, keep up the great work. Even though you don't believe in causation, do you believe in any sort of dependence? I.e., do you believe that certain things happen because other things happened, or that certain things exist because other things existed?
No, I don't think so. At least, I would probably take some sort of subjectivist/projectivist view of that discourse. The summary of my position is: all modality is a feature of our models, not of the world. I don't think there are any objective modal facts. I think in most contexts, talk of "dependence" would be invoking modality.
@@KaneB OK very interesting, thank you for your reply. I haven't really studied dependence, but I have never thought of it as modal-to me it is just a primitive relation between two things that is captured by the word "because". It seems to me that if we don't have this, all events become unconnected items on a timeline-is that your view? Thank you again.
I'd argue that non-modal logic simply describes valid reasoning, where classical logic preserves truth-values, intuitionist logic preserves constructibility and paraconsistent logics try to make as many valid conclusions as possible even in the presence of contradictions. Modal logics can encode in a neat way domain specific ideas without requiring a universe. Necessity vs possibility seems to be a valid concept (if a implies b and a is the case, then b is necessary; if a implies b and b is the case, then a is possible). So do knowledge and belief which can be used to shorten Gödel's incompleteness. Causality on the other hand seems to exist at the human scale, but at the level of the laws of nature, we seem to have a problem. While the theory of relativity has at least some basic notion of causality via light cones that at least give events an order via an "a can influence b" relation, quantum mechanics doesn't seem to come with any notion of time (and thus causality). At best, time emerges in a Boltzmannian manner via entropy. This does make it difficult to justify causality, even though it is an everyday experience. That means that you can still use causal logic at the human scale, but one should be aware that this has its limitations.
For the question "Can anything be inside of itself?" you don't really have to look to strange geometries. As long as you have open sets, those sets are inside of themselves, in the sense that if you zoom in far enough on any point in the set, it will only be surrounded by other points of the set. (Consider all points of distance strictly less than 1 from the origin for example, this is the disc bounded by the unit circle.) You can even say that one set is inside of another set, if it is a subset. And because every set is a subset of itself, every set would be inside of itself. If you say that a set is inside of another set, if it is an element of that set, then no set is inside of itself, because it is not allowed in set theory. It really depends on what you mean by "inside" and "thing".
@Draevon May Maybe you should read my comment again, i used a definition from topology. I never said: open sets contain themselves in the sense that they are elements of themselves. In fact i said that the opposite is true for all sets under normal set theory.
@Draevon May Maybe you should take reading comprehension 101 instead and you will see that i was talking about three DIFFERENT ways sets could be inside of themselves. The first way is using the definition of the interior of a set. You will probably find it in your books, idk but it is on wikipedia: Interior (topology). I also literally say: "If you say that a set is inside of another set, if it is an element of that set, then no set is inside of itself, because it is not allowed in set theory." I WAS AGREEING with your point from the start, you just have to read, what i said. Now let me school you on one other thing Mr. Math. Sets containing themselves is not fundamentally problematic or paradoxical and the definition of a set, which contains all sets is not paradoxical or incoherent in and of itself. Russel instead talks about the set containing all sets, which do not contain themselves. This set is actually demonstrably paradoxical, as you probably well know. The problem was unrestricted comprehension (saying for any formula, there is a set containing all sets satisfying that formula) not sets containing themselves.
@Draevon May Also regarding "You really need to refresh yourself on the difference between an element and a subset. For a set to contain something, it has to be an _element_." you are also wrong. There is no fundamental difference between sets and elements. In normal maths (using ZFC) the opposite is true!!! Everything is a set (even numbers) and you can ONLY talk about sets containing other sets.
@Draevon May How about you just admit, that you misunderstood my first comment? But it is hilarious, that after i schooled you, you are suddenly acting like you are above explaining your points and just say i dont understand ZFC without claryifying how or why. Hope you have a nice day too, though :)
In an eternalism view, you cannot cease to make yourself exist. I am not very well versed on modal logic, but I am a lover of physics and admirer of Einstein, and I find his argument for causality quite elegant. Even our best quantum theory (QFT) requires causality to remain in tact. If you believe that there are no causes, then what do you make of the constance of the speed of massless objects? I also fail to see why you would preserve free will over causality, because to me free will seems so obviously not real.
Causation should probably be considered pluralistic, much like truth. Whether one thing "causes" another depends on what sort of things we are talking about and the context in which we are talking. The concept of causation is vaguely defined and so the proper way to define it tends to vary from situation to situation. For example, in chemistry causation is about the interactions of atoms and molecules. In human interactions, causation is about the motion of people's limbs, the mechanical consequences of those motions, as well as the words that people say and the psychological consequences of those words. Trying to talk about caution without any context about what sort of causation we are dealing with leads to the concept becoming vague and confusing. In particular, to say "It is possible for a necessary being to be the cause of something," gives us no context for what sort of causation we are talking about. What sort of thing is a necessary being, and what sort of thing is a "something"? What is the mechanism of this causation? Causation is effectively meaningless without context.
I find this approach attractive, and this is probably the sort of view of causality I would hold, if I were more open to objective modality in general. I think a lot of philosophers view causation as analogous to mass -- different things have different masses, but the type of property is the same whether we are talking about the mass of an electron or the mass of a galaxy. Similarly, causation is a kind of of "metaphysical glue" that ties things together; it's the same sort of thing doing the tying, whether it's between atoms and molecules or limbs and steering wheels.
I disagree. There are no different types of causation, you are not talking of types of causation, you are talking of different causes which is not the same. The type of cause the necessary being is in relation to the effect would have to be non-physical. The causation present within contingent entities seems physical to us (the nature of those entities) and we can ask of mechanisms but there is no need to demand a mechanism of the necessary being. What kind of mechanism could there be? A mechanism separate from the necessary being would imply an expansion of causes and why should we admit that?
@@natanaellizama6559 "There are no different types of causation." What is the nature of this one and only type of causation? What is the connection between cause and effect?
@@Ansatz66 I'm not sure what you are asking here. What is the relation of cause and effect? That of causation. I throw a dart, it sticks. The effect is explained through the set of causes. This is what it makes it intelligible. I ask "what makes the dart stuck intelligible?" It's explanation. What is that explanation? Its causes. Mechanisms are a form of cause, btw
@@natanaellizama6559 : But what is causation? You say there is only one type, so surely you have details in mind. What is the one type of causation and how does it work specifically? What properties of A and B should we look for to determine whether or not A caused B? I mean in an ideal sense, without worrying about the limitations of instruments and senses; what is it about A and B that distinguishes the situation where A causes B from the situation where A does not cause B? If we cannot provide a general rule for how to identify that one thing causes another, then how can we be sure that there is only one rule that should apply in all cases?
About this one ``Does being concrete and necessary non-trivially entail being concrete and so also being necessary", I think that there might be only trivial entailment between these properties, because concrete beings are only contingent, and so it's impossible to exist a being that is contingent and necessary. But since you're anti-realist about modality I don't know if this answer is appealing to you. What do you think?
I would probably interpret this as just stipulative: we are saying that by definition, "concrete" rules out "necessary", so we do not apply both terms "concrete" and "necessary" to the same thing. In principle, I don't object to people structuring their language that way. But to be honest, I'm not sure I really even understand these modal notions when they are used competed abstracted from any specific context. That's really the problem with most of the steps in this survey. I don't accept that there are the properties of necessity, contingency, possibility, etc.; I accept that it is often useful to invoke modal concepts, but I feel rather lost when people start invoking relations between modal concepts considered just in themselves. Compare: we sometimes talk about doing things "for the sake of" someone or something. Most of the time, such language is perfectly acceptable. But now imagine that some philosophers started treating sakes as objective properties, and they started investigating the metaphysics of sakes, and they constructed formal logical systems to model how sakes are related to other objective properties such as dints ("by dint of") and lieus ("in lieu of"). If this strikes you as absurd, perhaps that communicates some of my puzzlement about much philosophical work on modality.
"I just take it that nothing is actually caused by anything"-- this puts me in mind of your complaints about skeptics, that no one is "actually" a radical skeptic, and conversations you've had with self-proclaimed skeptics in comments. In that sense, do you "actually" disbelieve causality? When you walk out the door in the morning and fail to painfully fall three stories, do you believe that didn't follow from walking out the door rather than walking out the window? The fact that your foot landed easily and painlessly on the ground wasn't caused by the particular place you exited? Is this maybe a case where you both do and do not take that nothing is caused by anything, depending on what level of your thoughts and beliefs you examine? If you "actually" disbelieved in causality, it might be fascinating to hear how you go about your day.
@@UnworthyUnbeliever Which do you mean is the bad take? Kane B's take that nobody is, in reality, a radical skeptic? Or my take that the arguments he uses to support that will just as easily support that nobody, in reality, disbelieves causality?
@@MsNathanv Your take. One could apply any concept in its subjective scope. Like leveraging causality when interacting with percieved material objects. This does not necessitate that the person believes in 'Law of Causality' as a philosophical concept. Just because i look over the street when i am crossing the street, does not mean that i take it as philosophical knowledge, it's a concept that i learned by repeatedly interacting with my senses aka. percieved material 'Reality', and thus, it is not an argument to assume just because one watches over street when they are crossing, then they should not TRULY believe in skepticism.
@@UnworthyUnbeliever I think some communication wires are getting crossed here. If you're interested in uncrossing them, I'd recommend taking a week, then re-reading with fresh eyes. However, if you're not interested, that seems perfectly reasonable to me; it's TH-cam philosophy, it's hard to imagine anything of less consequence.
Joshua Rasmussen's name was in the credits at the end. Edit: ...credits which were kind of glitched. When you hit the 'submit results' button, it tries to go to a .net instead of a .com, but you can just correct the url to www.necessarybeing.com/conclusion.php and see the credits.
3:37 you don’t see anything wrong with something that “just pops into existence”? So you’re asserting something that philosophers have been struggling for decades to answer which is can something come from nothing.
Suppose that there is nothing. That implies that there are no rules. It follows that there is nothing that prevents things from just popping into existence; once you have those things existing, they might prevent further spontaneous events, but they also might not. That's how I personally view it.
@@nio804If there are no rules, then anything is possible, logical contradictions are allowed and the impossible is possible. You are both existing and not existing at the same time. All religions can be true at the same time. Atheism is both true and false. This is what you have to deal with if you believe there are no “rules”
@@ahmedc3227 I never said there are no rules *now* but if there were a state of nothingness, there would be no rules. In our current reality, things can't come out of nothing because "nothing" is no longer possible, but our reality could have spawned from nothing before rules existed.
This survey is not about very basic matters. It seems to me that this survey presents very sophisticated questions about some very basic intuitions. On the other hand, you're not answering these questions with a "common sense spirit" (which I think is the spirit of this survey), but with a sophisticated philosophical one.
God hypothesis is always probable. Nothing is technically impossible. Anyways I know that logic is also empirical, everything is empirical. So, empirically proving god can be only done by literally seeing it, nothing else.
@@allaamrauf8214 Well, where do you think rules of logic come from? From mars? Or from the SOUL region of our brain? There are only and only two sources of any human knowledge, synthetic knowledge, things humans have learned from observing material world. And inbuilt brain structures, basically human way of understanding, which I assume will be different from fish way of understanding or bacteria way of understanding. And in case we have inbuilt knowledge, then it obviously came from natural selection, and natural selection was driven by material environment. So basically, our all knowledge comes from external world, either empirically or through natural selection of mental structures. Thus rules of logic are just the basic truths about material world. The structure of rules of logic are either tautology or just basic facts about material world. E.g:The rule that If A is true and B is true, only then A&B is true, is just an empirical fact. Either just a fact about material world or a fact about how we use language and how we use the word TRUE. It is either wordplay or a empirical fact, I mean everybody knows empirical facts are empirical, I am just saying that analytic facts are also empirical, but they are so simple that we don't belive that they are empirical. Quine puts it in better way. And Kane B actually does use weak arguments when it comes to ethics or religion, basically the multiplicity of axiom set of metaphysical claims a person can choose. If Kane B wasn't so dishonest, he would first read some religious book before even trying to put forward an argument. His understanding of religious conception of god seems to come from sitcom cartoons like rick and morty or something. Otherwise refuting god hypothesis is metaphysically same as refuting "World is a simulation" argument , you just cannot refute it.
i think the idea is that it would be Necessary in All Situations, so maybe "for anything to exist at all" would be a good answer to your question. i suppose it would be possible, if one thinks a necessary being exists, for it to exist on its own, and just not cause any contingent things, but that Seems to not be the case, at least in our world.
@@lucasBarjas If your an idealist you probably cant make a destinction, If your a miriological nihilist you cant either. Destinctions are made by noticing diffrence and accepting it as a way to carve up the world. But both the idealist and the nihilist would make the whole argument meaningless. What use Does the word "necessary" have in such a world view? So for the rest of us, the diffrence between a being and a thing is any number of things you want to define it as. For me Its agency. By that i mean the necessary "thing" cant be a principles, a law, an physical object like a rock. Its not a singularity or a theoretical object ect. An agent has a degree of actions it can perform, rather then a singular effect it does, as a necessary thing would by necessety lead to the next effect. For other people personality, conciousness or "freedom" might be Key. I personally think If you define your "being" as having created by necessety rather then having agency, its simply meaningless to attributt to it any special properties, as its use is No different then the first domino kicking over the next. No worship required as it does what it does out of necessety regardless, No diffrent then a law or s principle Feel free to argue about these points, as i dont belive in a necessary being, so its hard to make sense of such a necessety.
@@DeadEndFrog well, my question was about semantics. i wanted to know what were you referring to when you say “thing” and when you say “being”. you answered it, but i wasn’t prepared for the rest, so let me think for a longer period of time so i can give you a proper response. i still don’t know what to make of what you said, but i’m definitely interested in matters like this.
@@lucasBarjas yeah i understand, well the easiest way to think about it is this: If someone wants to define the necessety in the begining as a being, they would have to Explain why they use that word, rather then say simply calling it an necessary object or thing. Most people who dont belive in god talk about a begining that doesnt involve a being, a necessary cause for example. So its really up to those who made this test to Explain why they use being.
Took the quiz, and it turns out there is a Necessary Being given my answers, but I honestly didn’t understand some of the questions. I just answered based on my first instinct. I’d still consider myself an agnostic though since even if my thoughts lead me to “a” Necessary Being I wouldn’t know what it is. I appreciate your insight to the quiz though since your responses gave me some food for thought on what the questions were actually asking.
I believe the quiz designer used an implicit assumption and arrived at a conclusion erroneously. My answers included that (it seems) there cannot be a contingent thing with no external cause. The quiz designer used this to show that since [again by my answers] the sum total of all contingent things must have an external cause, and such external cause can not be contingent because the thing being caused is the sum total of all contingent things, therefore, and skipping over a few steps that seem acceptable, the author of the quiz concludes that my responses (seem to) imply there must be a necessary being. It has been assumed that there are contingent things. If there are no contingent things the author’s argument that there must be a non-contingent thing to cause all contingent things falls apart. If the sum total of all contingent things must have an external cause, but if such sum total of all contingent things is vacuous, then no external cause is needed. However, I do except that there are things, that existence is not vacuous. The thing about the authors “necessary being“ that doesn’t agree with my position is that, according to the authors definition, a necessary being must be able to cause things. I agree with Parmenides that there are no contingent things, no caused things, that everything that exists exists necessarily and eternally, not for all time, but outside of time. Time is one of the things that exists. Also, the word concrete [as used elsewhere by the author of the quiz] is problematic. A given thing may or may not be concrete, depending on whether it shares an existence with the observer, and so concreteness is not a property of a thing itself, but an aspect of the relationship between an observer, and a thing. For example, to an observer who lived in the world of Plato’s forms, a pure tetrahedron might possibly be concrete, but to those who do not live in the world of Plato’s forms such pure tetrahedron is abstract. However, Plato held that our sensible, concrete world derives from the world of pure forms. By this token it might be supposed that all that exist as seen from the (seemingly impossible) perspective outside of existence are abstractions. I have found no way to refute this. This would still be consistent with ourselves experiencing concrete things, because things with which we share an existence would to us be concrete. But to the impossible observer outside of all existence, all things, including ourselves, would be abstractions.
I sort of smell fuckery coming when I see terms defined but not "a being". Hypothetically, let's say someone showed that the universe is necessarily past infinite. How many people might still say that "There is a necessary being" is false? I think I might be inclined to, because "a being" has some more connotations to it than "a thing that exists". To me, at least.
Well I think a necessary being could cease to exist if it is the case that one accepts necessitarianism. And think that there’s only one possible world and it’s the actual world such that everything is necessary. And it seems that my ancestors cease to exist in a colloquial sense of ceasing to exist. And I don’t advocate this view but I think it is one where a necessary being could cease to exist
While I would hold many views opposite yours, I have no idea what this survey was trying to achieve given that it seems to only be trying to tell you what you already know yourself to hold. 😆
@@calebp6114 Unfortunately, that is only the case if you actually agree with their decisions of "necessary" and "being", and if you agree with the logical implications involved.
I just answered "I can't say" for everything. I got an agnostic answer. Afterall, relativism is not all that useful when trying to figure stuff out, but it does mean we can't know anything for sure. Extreme skepticism might be annoying and I agree it is, but it's not able to be refuted entirely because it refutes the tools you use to refute it in the first place.
@@mikeyronen2952 Well it abstracts itself. "It's just a possibility that everything is a possibility," still means that original proposition is a possibility, but one we can and do ignore tbh.
@@visionaryhera Abstracts = Refutes? Well, Anything = Everything, if we're skeptical of it all. Anything works. Extreme skepticism is an absurd example of mental gymnastics which belongs only in Philosophy text books.
@@mikeyronen2952 Being able to apply something to itself doesn't necessarily mean it's refuted. The flavor of relativism I'm talking about leaves everything as a maybe, not as a definite "no" or "yes". So extreme skepticism might assert "logic is not justified/absolute" but the claim "logic might not be absolute and necessary" has much more weight as it's unfalsifiable and can hide in the gaps of our knowledge. It can still be ignored 99% of the time, but it remains *likely* a fact that there are always unfalsifiable claims that can be made regarding all truth we claim to know... that we can't falsify.
@@visionaryhera So, in simpler terms - you take, as an axiom, that all knowledge might be refutable (including this axiom itself) and from that you derive that nothing can be said with certainty. Even the concept of "Certainty" becomes uncertain, but whatever. Is that what you mean? What benefit does this give? You end up, consistent with your original comment, saying "I can't say" about everything you encounter. What's the point?
Funny. I also took a mathematical interpretation, but a different one from topology. "Can a set contain an open cover of itself?" to which the answer is yes.
no, while a set (in ZFC) cannot contain itself, there are other set theories where they can (they are in that case not well founded) and also classes can often contain themselves.
Seems like this branches out into ontology, since it runs into the problem of whether perceiving modal logic is tied up into an agent. Because, sure, many theists who use the transcendental argument use sloppy justification for belief, but I see you struggling here to justify the answers that being is subordinated by nothingness. It seems less justificatory than accepting such divisions are inherent to the perceived.
Apologists are still trying to pull a god out of a hat with sloppy word association dressed up in trappings of formal logic. Right from the very start, why is it a called a "necessary being" instead of a "necessary cause" or whatever much less poorly defined? I have some handle on the terms "necessary" and "cause" but wtf is a "being" in this abstract realm of modal logic.
I find it disingenuous that they're using the term "necessary being". What they're really trying to prove here is the existence of God. Specifically their God. Not any other God. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend to fully agree with the necessary being argument that would still provide no information on the identity of the necessary being.
It doesn't appear obvious to me, that people cease to exist. To specify it isn't self-evident that with one's death the thing that makes "you" "you" stops existing. For instance: If I write down a sentence and then burn the medium I wrote the sentence on, I still can remember the sentence and write the sentence onto another medium. So we can assume that the sentence never actually ceased to exist even though a physical copy of that sentence has been destroyed.
That must be a very common position, because belief in an afterlife is so common. But I suppose if someone accepts that the body or brain is what makes "you" "you", then it would be self-evident that it stops existing.
After doing the survey myself (before watching your video) it felt like they were just trying to play a trick on me. Like they're trying to pull a "gotcha!" My entire problem with the necessary being meme is the part where they go "because it can exist, it does exist" which is a massive non sequitur. And worse, it's an example of hypocrisy. Proponents of this argument wouldn't accept that unicorns exist because they "can exist". In essence this argument is just trying to define a "Necessary Being" (God, let's just say God, because that's what they're trying to prove as real), but that's not just how it works now is it? If I define a Jackalope as "A rabbit with antlers that exists" that won't make Jackalopes real all of the sudden. If you want to prove God exists then you have to give actually convincing evidence. Wordplay isn't evidence.
The being in question could just be 'everything that exists in the universe' (commonly, but erroneously, also referred to as 'the universe'). There's no requirement that it be a consciousness or even a connected being. Plus it would have all the causal powers we commonly attribute to it (in a physical sense). But then it sounds trivial: assuming existence, all that exists is necessary.
I take it that they're assuming the modal axiom S5, which says that if it is possible that it is necessary that P, then it is necessary that P. We can motivate this by thinking in terms of possible worlds. Per standard possible worlds semantics: "It is possible that P" = there is some world at which P is true. "It is necessary that P" = P is true in all worlds. Now suppose you grant that a necessary being *can* exist. Well, it sounds like you are claiming that it is possible for there to be a necessary being. Which is to say that, at some possible world, it is necessary that this being exists. But if, in that world, it is necessary that this being exists, it follows that the being exists at all worlds. That's just what it is to be necessary. The trouble with all of this in my view is that I don't accept that S5 or standard possible worlds semantics is appropriate for all our modal discourse; moreover, I'm not sure that talk of modal properties completely abstracted from any context is even meaningful.
1:56 Bruh, the site is broken, so on this question, it's no longer possible to pick option 2 or 3. I guess the site has decided that "belief in a necessary being" is, itself, a necessary being.
3:58
The previous question is "Can there be a contingent thing that has no cause?"
My interpretation of this is: could things happen, or come to exist, without something else causing it to happen or exist?
Taking into consideration the big-bang, or particles manifesting from nothing, or Quantum Tunneling, one could suppose: yes, things can happen or come to exist without something causing them. Which is the answer given by Kane B.
With this in mind, the question noted in the timestamp seems to be answerable when considering the examples we listed in the last example(but I'll just refer to Quantum Tunneling to keep things simple). The question is: "Can a possible event be uncausable(impossible to cause)?"
My Interpretation of this is: Can some type of event be possible to happen, even if it couldn't be caused by anything? In terms of the previous question: Can something happen, or be made to exist, even if there is nothing which could cause it?
If we can say Quantum Tunneling not only can occur without cause, but it is also *impossible* to occur by cause, then the answer to this question seems clear: "It seems so". Since we already think things can happen without cause(as from the previous question), it does not seem much of a leap to suggest things can happen without it even being *able* to cause them.
Id be interested to hear your thoughts on quantum tunneling and non causation.
My understanding is that tunneling occurs when a quantum particle appears in a location it could not have traveled to in a continuous sense due to an energy barrier.
This is said to occur due to the indeterminate position of the quantum particle having some nonzero probability at all locations due to its wave function.
It seems to me that I can’t tell whether this is casual or non causal. It’s certainly random, in that I can’t predict the exact location the particle will appear in once I measure, but it’s not perfectly random. The wave function gives a probability distribution that covers each possible location.
Is something having a probabilistic element to it enough for it to be uncaused? I’m not a philosopher, I don’t know the definitions.
@@jacksonletts3724 If something is probablistic, then there is no certainty to the outcome, making the outcome seperate from any predictability/control and, thus, implicitly making it non-causal. My understanding of the topic, also being a non-philosopher, is that causal events have one input, and one output implicitly and necessarily made by the input. So, again, the existence of probability prevents that.
One could argue that probability is only a product of us not being able to calculate/observe/measure the subjects in question(quantum tunneling, for example). But I find those arguments quite lacking, given that it is them referencing something they can't prove.
11:50 i feel like this is perhaps missing the mark slightly because i think what is meant by “there are no instances of a square circle”, there is an implicit qualification of “under standard 2d euclidean geometry”. Not really central to the point but just something that occurred to me.
Well done! And congrats on making it through the survey without being committed to the existence of a necessary being. That puts you in a special, 5%, group. :)
I kinda love the Kane went through the survey in the only possible way where it doesn't slug him with a "gotcha! You DO believe in a necessary being!" and all it author had to say about it is "Interesting!"
Well, not the _only_ way. My choices were different than Kane's, but I also didn't end up with a necessary being.
if you can’t answer in good faith to simple logic questions maybe your presupposition is wrong
@@pyruseon1377 I think Kane made some good arguments that they weren't all simple questions.
0:02, wow, I'm literally famous :D
That's right. A Z-list youtube celebrity saw a link that you posted. That's a story to tell your grandchildren!
Completely with you on your anti-realism here. Despite a love of logic, I had real difficulty trying to get my head around Modal logic. Later I came to realise that it was being presented with A LOT of metaphysical baggage which grated against my intuitions. Once I realised I could dump that, I got on fine and think the various modal logics give some really interesting insights into the way we think about these concepts.
Modal logic is statistics and statistics are the upper limit of uncertainty. There is only actually possible world, the one that actually happens to occur. Everything else is levels of ignorance.
2:15 this made me have a little topology google journey. Turns out in a discrete space the interior of any set is the set itself.
That's a mereological category error.
@@havenbastion Okay could be, I don't know much about mereology. Is that a problem? Mereology is a competing explanation to set theory as I understand it.
And all I was trying to show was that we can at the very least conceive of sets being the interior of themselves.
This is true for any open set in any topology. (In the discrete set all possible subsets are open sets, and thus all sets are closed sets as well. The indiscrete topology is one where no subsets except the null set and the full set (every point in that space) is. Since every topology has the full set be open (by definition), the interior of this will always be itself). However I do not feel like that is what the video is talking about. It sounds like the video is talking about an object belonging to itself (i.e. the set is a member of itself) instead of being (equal to) its interior, and this cannot be true for any mathematical set because sets cannot be members of themselves. The ZFC is one list of axioms used for set theory and what people usually mean when they talk about mathematical sets. The axiom of regularity (IIRC) forbids this, although in a more general way, so one consequence of this (along with a subset axiom and maybe a few more) is that any set cannot contain itself.
Famously Russel's paradox shows why a set of all sets cannot exist, that that would lead to "belongs to" contradicting itself: from this universal set we can take the subset of sets that do not contain themselves. This set, call it A, either contains itself, in which case it should not belong to A, or it doesn't contain itself, in which case it should belong to A. This uses the universality of the original set when we say A is in B. I was initially going to try to show why in general a set that contains itself would lead to a similar contradiction, but I do not know if it is true and if it is I do not remember how to show it and have been unable to think of it on the spot.
Do you have any videos where you describe your antirealist views of causality? I assume you do, but do you remember what it was called?
I have a video that outlines some of the standard antirealist challenges (it's just called "Causation") but not one where I talk in any detail about my own views. I've been intending to do it for some time but haven't gotten around to it.
9:23 I feel like the property of "necessity" as a limiting property is kinda tongue in cheek, but I do think it's proper to respond to it anyways.
Being unable to cause oneself to cease to exist implying limitation seems kinda intuitive, because it is an action that we can take, but cannot be taken by a necessary being. If we can do something a necessary being's nature disallows, that implies said nature is limiting. This is well summarized by Kane when he says, "If it is a necessary being then it is limited to existence."
Lets first set aside how we cannot both reject causation and also claim we are capable of causing our non-existence, as Kane seems to be. I think "limited to existence" rather well demonstrates the problem here. All actions we are taking are those which are done while we exist. Of course it's absurd to say that we can take actions after ceasing, as if ceasing to exist is an ongoing action a thing does, or that non-existence is a state of affairs a thing is in.
"Limited to existence" implicitly presumes a state of non-existence is a possible state of affairs a thing can be in, but it is not, because non-existence is not a state of existence.
The author would say there is a positivity or value to existing. Thus, a necessary being being "forced" to exist does not detract from its greatness. It's not a deficiency in any way (which is, it seems, what "limiting" is really getting at).
i don't know why but this is better and funnier than the majority of stand-ups out there. now it seems that this statement has been made hasn't it
it is amazing how in the 21st century there are still some people who regard logics (in any form !) to be absolutely (not relatively) valid and try to apply it (by force) to anything they can think of or perveive around them in nature .... Your last comment is the most important one, i guess : There are other, silent systems behind logics, to which we owe most of our ideas .. One of them is language for example !
It is absolutely valid in all contexts.
Language isn't one of them... Language is infact just another product of these "silent systems" the silent system simply being evolution, we think the way we think because at some point it was advantages for our ancestors to think like that. We can glimpses of what different modes of thinking and logic may look like by taking compunds that significantly change how our brains operate and process the information, but ultimately we can't ever change the way we think, without fundamentally changing our brains
The statement that "logic is relative" is an absolute logical claim. You can't make that claim if you believe all logical statements are relative.
Didn't Gödel already show that logical deduction and provability are in general not identical?
@@Goodbrother What did you mean by a "logical claim"? I'm seeing a claim about logic, but the claim itself isn't logic because it has no inferences. I'm not sure it applies to itself in the way you were aiming for.
You want someone to say something like 'every claim is relative'. Then you can say that claim must be relative.
If someone says logic is relative, and you try saying 'that claim is logic', I think that's false. :)
3:56 you don't see a problem with it but can you give an example of something popping out from nothing? I highly doubt it.
Is there a video where you talk about your disbelief in causality? Because on the face of it, it seems like a ludicrous position to me even when trying to view the position on different scales.
Like you could claim that the non-deterministic (quantum) nature of the universe defies causality, but all that randomness averages out into a very deterministic-seeming universe around the molecular scale of things.
But what happens when you trace that back to the beginning? What was the first mover? Where did the quantum fields themselves come from?
Interesting to ponder… though without observation we will never know….
@@tainicon4639 True, the origin is still a mystery, but a disbelief in causation seems to do more than just question whether or not there was a first cause.
@@bobbsurname3140 fair. I should mention I don’t dispute causation. I am a scientist… that would prevent me from doing my job
@@tainicon4639 If an asteroid loops through a wormhole in time and space in a causal loop, what is the "beginning" there? Perhaps "beginning" doesn't mean anything.
@@tainicon4639 For what it's worth, the notion of causality is (to my mind) problematic even from a purely mechanistic POV. A mechanistic theory generally consists of a system of differential equations that describe the behavior of a system over time. Those differential equations say _nothing_ about causality.
Hello Kane, I enjoy your videos a lot, keep up the great work. Even though you don't believe in causation, do you believe in any sort of dependence? I.e., do you believe that certain things happen because other things happened, or that certain things exist because other things existed?
No, I don't think so. At least, I would probably take some sort of subjectivist/projectivist view of that discourse. The summary of my position is: all modality is a feature of our models, not of the world. I don't think there are any objective modal facts. I think in most contexts, talk of "dependence" would be invoking modality.
@@KaneB OK very interesting, thank you for your reply. I haven't really studied dependence, but I have never thought of it as modal-to me it is just a primitive relation between two things that is captured by the word "because".
It seems to me that if we don't have this, all events become unconnected items on a timeline-is that your view? Thank you again.
I'd argue that non-modal logic simply describes valid reasoning, where classical logic preserves truth-values, intuitionist logic preserves constructibility and paraconsistent logics try to make as many valid conclusions as possible even in the presence of contradictions.
Modal logics can encode in a neat way domain specific ideas without requiring a universe. Necessity vs possibility seems to be a valid concept (if a implies b and a is the case, then b is necessary; if a implies b and b is the case, then a is possible). So do knowledge and belief which can be used to shorten Gödel's incompleteness.
Causality on the other hand seems to exist at the human scale, but at the level of the laws of nature, we seem to have a problem. While the theory of relativity has at least some basic notion of causality via light cones that at least give events an order via an "a can influence b" relation, quantum mechanics doesn't seem to come with any notion of time (and thus causality). At best, time emerges in a Boltzmannian manner via entropy. This does make it difficult to justify causality, even though it is an everyday experience.
That means that you can still use causal logic at the human scale, but one should be aware that this has its limitations.
For the question "Can anything be inside of itself?" you don't really have to look to strange geometries.
As long as you have open sets, those sets are inside of themselves, in the sense that if you zoom in far enough on any point in the set, it will only be surrounded by other points of the set. (Consider all points of distance strictly less than 1 from the origin for example, this is the disc bounded by the unit circle.)
You can even say that one set is inside of another set, if it is a subset. And because every set is a subset of itself, every set would be inside of itself.
If you say that a set is inside of another set, if it is an element of that set, then no set is inside of itself, because it is not allowed in set theory.
It really depends on what you mean by "inside" and "thing".
You might say that the natural numbers fit inside themself strictly, only renamed by multiplying them by 2!
@Draevon May Maybe you should read my comment again, i used a definition from topology.
I never said: open sets contain themselves in the sense that they are elements of themselves.
In fact i said that the opposite is true for all sets under normal set theory.
@Draevon May Maybe you should take reading comprehension 101 instead and you will see that i was talking about three DIFFERENT ways sets could be inside of themselves. The first way is using the definition of the interior of a set. You will probably find it in your books, idk but it is on wikipedia: Interior (topology).
I also literally say:
"If you say that a set is inside of another set, if it is an element of that set, then no set is inside of itself, because it is not allowed in set theory."
I WAS AGREEING with your point from the start, you just have to read, what i said.
Now let me school you on one other thing Mr. Math.
Sets containing themselves is not fundamentally problematic or paradoxical and the definition of a set, which contains all sets is not paradoxical or incoherent in and of itself.
Russel instead talks about the set containing all sets, which do not contain themselves. This set is actually demonstrably paradoxical, as you probably well know. The problem was unrestricted comprehension (saying for any formula, there is a set containing all sets satisfying that formula) not sets containing themselves.
@Draevon May Also regarding
"You really need to refresh yourself on the difference between an element and a subset. For a set to contain something, it has to be an _element_."
you are also wrong. There is no fundamental difference between sets and elements. In normal maths (using ZFC) the opposite is true!!! Everything is a set (even numbers) and you can ONLY talk about sets containing other sets.
@Draevon May How about you just admit, that you misunderstood my first comment?
But it is hilarious, that after i schooled you, you are suddenly acting like you are above explaining your points and just say i dont understand ZFC without claryifying how or why.
Hope you have a nice day too, though :)
In an eternalism view, you cannot cease to make yourself exist. I am not very well versed on modal logic, but I am a lover of physics and admirer of Einstein, and I find his argument for causality quite elegant. Even our best quantum theory (QFT) requires causality to remain in tact. If you believe that there are no causes, then what do you make of the constance of the speed of massless objects? I also fail to see why you would preserve free will over causality, because to me free will seems so obviously not real.
We have here a questionnaire all about causes and possibilities. So we brought out a causal and modal antirealist to fill all it out.
Causation should probably be considered pluralistic, much like truth. Whether one thing "causes" another depends on what sort of things we are talking about and the context in which we are talking. The concept of causation is vaguely defined and so the proper way to define it tends to vary from situation to situation. For example, in chemistry causation is about the interactions of atoms and molecules. In human interactions, causation is about the motion of people's limbs, the mechanical consequences of those motions, as well as the words that people say and the psychological consequences of those words.
Trying to talk about caution without any context about what sort of causation we are dealing with leads to the concept becoming vague and confusing. In particular, to say "It is possible for a necessary being to be the cause of something," gives us no context for what sort of causation we are talking about. What sort of thing is a necessary being, and what sort of thing is a "something"? What is the mechanism of this causation? Causation is effectively meaningless without context.
I find this approach attractive, and this is probably the sort of view of causality I would hold, if I were more open to objective modality in general.
I think a lot of philosophers view causation as analogous to mass -- different things have different masses, but the type of property is the same whether we are talking about the mass of an electron or the mass of a galaxy. Similarly, causation is a kind of of "metaphysical glue" that ties things together; it's the same sort of thing doing the tying, whether it's between atoms and molecules or limbs and steering wheels.
I disagree. There are no different types of causation, you are not talking of types of causation, you are talking of different causes which is not the same.
The type of cause the necessary being is in relation to the effect would have to be non-physical. The causation present within contingent entities seems physical to us (the nature of those entities) and we can ask of mechanisms but there is no need to demand a mechanism of the necessary being. What kind of mechanism could there be? A mechanism separate from the necessary being would imply an expansion of causes and why should we admit that?
@@natanaellizama6559 "There are no different types of causation."
What is the nature of this one and only type of causation? What is the connection between cause and effect?
@@Ansatz66 I'm not sure what you are asking here. What is the relation of cause and effect? That of causation.
I throw a dart, it sticks. The effect is explained through the set of causes. This is what it makes it intelligible. I ask "what makes the dart stuck intelligible?" It's explanation. What is that explanation? Its causes. Mechanisms are a form of cause, btw
@@natanaellizama6559 : But what is causation? You say there is only one type, so surely you have details in mind. What is the one type of causation and how does it work specifically? What properties of A and B should we look for to determine whether or not A caused B? I mean in an ideal sense, without worrying about the limitations of instruments and senses; what is it about A and B that distinguishes the situation where A causes B from the situation where A does not cause B?
If we cannot provide a general rule for how to identify that one thing causes another, then how can we be sure that there is only one rule that should apply in all cases?
About this one ``Does being concrete and necessary non-trivially entail being concrete and so also being necessary", I think that there might be only trivial entailment between these properties, because concrete beings are only contingent, and so it's impossible to exist a being that is contingent and necessary. But since you're anti-realist about modality I don't know if this answer is appealing to you. What do you think?
I would probably interpret this as just stipulative: we are saying that by definition, "concrete" rules out "necessary", so we do not apply both terms "concrete" and "necessary" to the same thing. In principle, I don't object to people structuring their language that way. But to be honest, I'm not sure I really even understand these modal notions when they are used competed abstracted from any specific context. That's really the problem with most of the steps in this survey. I don't accept that there are the properties of necessity, contingency, possibility, etc.; I accept that it is often useful to invoke modal concepts, but I feel rather lost when people start invoking relations between modal concepts considered just in themselves.
Compare: we sometimes talk about doing things "for the sake of" someone or something. Most of the time, such language is perfectly acceptable. But now imagine that some philosophers started treating sakes as objective properties, and they started investigating the metaphysics of sakes, and they constructed formal logical systems to model how sakes are related to other objective properties such as dints ("by dint of") and lieus ("in lieu of"). If this strikes you as absurd, perhaps that communicates some of my puzzlement about much philosophical work on modality.
All beings that actually exist, necessarily exist, because causality is infinite.
wow you`re such a sceptic, I wish I was as sceptic as you man
My answers seemed to crash the server.
"I just take it that nothing is actually caused by anything"-- this puts me in mind of your complaints about skeptics, that no one is "actually" a radical skeptic, and conversations you've had with self-proclaimed skeptics in comments. In that sense, do you "actually" disbelieve causality? When you walk out the door in the morning and fail to painfully fall three stories, do you believe that didn't follow from walking out the door rather than walking out the window? The fact that your foot landed easily and painlessly on the ground wasn't caused by the particular place you exited? Is this maybe a case where you both do and do not take that nothing is caused by anything, depending on what level of your thoughts and beliefs you examine? If you "actually" disbelieved in causality, it might be fascinating to hear how you go about your day.
Bad take.
Applying some method in subjective scope of life =/= philosophical knowledge
@@UnworthyUnbeliever Which do you mean is the bad take? Kane B's take that nobody is, in reality, a radical skeptic? Or my take that the arguments he uses to support that will just as easily support that nobody, in reality, disbelieves causality?
@@MsNathanv
Your take.
One could apply any concept in its subjective scope. Like leveraging causality when interacting with percieved material objects. This does not necessitate that the person believes in 'Law of Causality' as a philosophical concept.
Just because i look over the street when i am crossing the street, does not mean that i take it as philosophical knowledge, it's a concept that i learned by repeatedly interacting with my senses aka. percieved material 'Reality', and thus, it is not an argument to assume just because one watches over street when they are crossing, then they should not TRULY believe in skepticism.
@@UnworthyUnbeliever I think some communication wires are getting crossed here. If you're interested in uncrossing them, I'd recommend taking a week, then re-reading with fresh eyes. However, if you're not interested, that seems perfectly reasonable to me; it's TH-cam philosophy, it's hard to imagine anything of less consequence.
Lol closeted Cartesian.. what is this “philosophical knowledge” which is not characterized by belief or experience
"can't make yourself not exist" isn't this a problem that Mainlander deals with, rotting corpse of God and all that?
basedlander mentioned
dumblander cringe
Is this the Joshua Rasmussen survey? Or a different one?
Joshua Rasmussen's name was in the credits at the end.
Edit: ...credits which were kind of glitched. When you hit the 'submit results' button, it tries to go to a .net instead of a .com, but you can just correct the url to www.necessarybeing.com/conclusion.php and see the credits.
3:37 you don’t see anything wrong with something that “just pops into existence”? So you’re asserting something that philosophers have been struggling for decades to answer which is can something come from nothing.
That doesn't seem problematic to me.
Suppose that there is nothing. That implies that there are no rules. It follows that there is nothing that prevents things from just popping into existence; once you have those things existing, they might prevent further spontaneous events, but they also might not.
That's how I personally view it.
@@nio804If there are no rules, then anything is possible, logical contradictions are allowed and the impossible is possible. You are both existing and not existing at the same time. All religions can be true at the same time. Atheism is both true and false. This is what you have to deal with if you believe there are no “rules”
@@ahmedc3227 I never said there are no rules *now* but if there were a state of nothingness, there would be no rules. In our current reality, things can't come out of nothing because "nothing" is no longer possible, but our reality could have spawned from nothing before rules existed.
@@nio804 what caused rules to randomly exist? Are these rules objective since they haven’t always existed?
This survey is not about very basic matters. It seems to me that this survey presents very sophisticated questions about some very basic intuitions. On the other hand, you're not answering these questions with a "common sense spirit" (which I think is the spirit of this survey), but with a sophisticated philosophical one.
Yeah, I'm answering with my actual views. I'm not so interested in trying to predict what the "educated layperson" would say about it.
There is nothing stopping anyone from considering why they believe in common sense.
Sometimes it shows how desperate some theologians are to prove God or god, or to show that it’s probable.
God hypothesis is always probable. Nothing is technically impossible.
Anyways I know that logic is also empirical, everything is empirical. So, empirically proving god can be only done by literally seeing it, nothing else.
@@saimbhat6243 How is logic 'empirical?' Or rather, how is everything 'empirical?' Seems rather flippant to me if you think that.
What exactly shows how desperate some theologians are to prove God?
@@allaamrauf8214 Well, where do you think rules of logic come from? From mars? Or from the SOUL region of our brain?
There are only and only two sources of any human knowledge, synthetic knowledge, things humans have learned from observing material world. And inbuilt brain structures, basically human way of understanding, which I assume will be different from fish way of understanding or bacteria way of understanding. And in case we have inbuilt knowledge, then it obviously came from natural selection, and natural selection was driven by material environment. So basically, our all knowledge comes from external world, either empirically or through natural selection of mental structures. Thus rules of logic are just the basic truths about material world. The structure of rules of logic are either tautology or just basic facts about material world.
E.g:The rule that If A is true and B is true, only then A&B is true, is just an empirical fact. Either just a fact about material world or a fact about how we use language and how we use the word TRUE.
It is either wordplay or a empirical fact, I mean everybody knows empirical facts are empirical, I am just saying that analytic facts are also empirical, but they are so simple that we don't belive that they are empirical. Quine puts it in better way.
And Kane B actually does use weak arguments when it comes to ethics or religion, basically the multiplicity of axiom set of metaphysical claims a person can choose.
If Kane B wasn't so dishonest, he would first read some religious book before even trying to put forward an argument. His understanding of religious conception of god seems to come from sitcom cartoons like rick and morty or something. Otherwise refuting god hypothesis is metaphysically same as refuting "World is a simulation" argument , you just cannot refute it.
If a Necessary Being exists, then what is it necessary for? Can it exist on its own?
i think the idea is that it would be Necessary in All Situations, so maybe "for anything to exist at all" would be a good answer to your question.
i suppose it would be possible, if one thinks a necessary being exists, for it to exist on its own, and just not cause any contingent things, but that Seems to not be the case, at least in our world.
A square circle is almost trivial, if you define a circle as 'all points that are an equal distance from a given point', then use taxicab geometry.
A square circle using euclidian geometry
Great video! Did i miss the question where the necessary thing suddenly became a 'being'?
how do you differentiate between thing and being? if something _is_ a thing, then it _is._
@@lucasBarjas If your an idealist you probably cant make a destinction, If your a miriological nihilist you cant either. Destinctions are made by noticing diffrence and accepting it as a way to carve up the world.
But both the idealist and the nihilist would make the whole argument meaningless. What use Does the word "necessary" have in such a world view?
So for the rest of us, the diffrence between a being and a thing is any number of things you want to define it as. For me Its agency. By that i mean the necessary "thing" cant be a principles, a law, an physical object like a rock. Its not a singularity or a theoretical object ect. An agent has a degree of actions it can perform, rather then a singular effect it does, as a necessary thing would by necessety lead to the next effect.
For other people personality, conciousness or "freedom" might be Key.
I personally think If you define your "being" as having created by necessety rather then having agency, its simply meaningless to attributt to it any special properties, as its use is No different then the first domino kicking over the next.
No worship required as it does what it does out of necessety regardless, No diffrent then a law or s principle
Feel free to argue about these points, as i dont belive in a necessary being, so its hard to make sense of such a necessety.
@@DeadEndFrog well, my question was about semantics. i wanted to know what were you referring to when you say “thing” and when you say “being”. you answered it, but i wasn’t prepared for the rest, so let me think for a longer period of time so i can give you a proper response. i still don’t know what to make of what you said, but i’m definitely interested in matters like this.
@@lucasBarjas yeah i understand, well the easiest way to think about it is this: If someone wants to define the necessety in the begining as a being, they would have to Explain why they use that word, rather then say simply calling it an necessary object or thing.
Most people who dont belive in god talk about a begining that doesnt involve a being, a necessary cause for example. So its really up to those who made this test to Explain why they use being.
Me: Mainländer saying God killed itself and became the universe to dissolve away. Necessary for the universe to exist but also Necessary to die.
Took the quiz, and it turns out there is a Necessary Being given my answers, but I honestly didn’t understand some of the questions. I just answered based on my first instinct. I’d still consider myself an agnostic though since even if my thoughts lead me to “a” Necessary Being I wouldn’t know what it is. I appreciate your insight to the quiz though since your responses gave me some food for thought on what the questions were actually asking.
I think your videos gain a lot when we can see your face while you speak.
I believe the quiz designer used an implicit assumption and arrived at a conclusion erroneously.
My answers included that (it seems) there cannot be a contingent thing with no external cause.
The quiz designer used this to show that since [again by my answers] the sum total of all contingent things must have an external cause, and such external cause can not be contingent because the thing being caused is the sum total of all contingent things, therefore, and skipping over a few steps that seem acceptable, the author of the quiz concludes that my responses (seem to) imply there must be a necessary being.
It has been assumed that there are contingent things. If there are no contingent things the author’s argument that there must be a non-contingent thing to cause all contingent things falls apart.
If the sum total of all contingent things must have an external cause, but if such sum total of all contingent things is vacuous, then no external cause is needed.
However, I do except that there are things, that existence is not vacuous.
The thing about the authors “necessary being“ that doesn’t agree with my position is that, according to the authors definition, a necessary being must be able to cause things.
I agree with Parmenides that there are no contingent things, no caused things, that everything that exists exists necessarily and eternally, not for all time, but outside of time. Time is one of the things that exists.
Also, the word concrete [as used elsewhere by the author of the quiz] is problematic. A given thing may or may not be concrete, depending on whether it shares an existence with the observer, and so concreteness is not a property of a thing itself, but an aspect of the relationship between an observer, and a thing.
For example, to an observer who lived in the world of Plato’s forms, a pure tetrahedron might possibly be concrete, but to those who do not live in the world of Plato’s forms such pure tetrahedron is abstract.
However, Plato held that our sensible, concrete world derives from the world of pure forms. By this token it might be supposed that all that exist as seen from the (seemingly impossible) perspective outside of existence are abstractions. I have found no way to refute this. This would still be consistent with ourselves experiencing concrete things, because things with which we share an existence would to us be concrete. But to the impossible observer outside of all existence, all things, including ourselves, would be abstractions.
a potato is a necessary being
I sort of smell fuckery coming when I see terms defined but not "a being".
Hypothetically, let's say someone showed that the universe is necessarily past infinite. How many people might still say that "There is a necessary being" is false? I think I might be inclined to, because "a being" has some more connotations to it than "a thing that exists". To me, at least.
looking good
Well I think a necessary being could cease to exist if it is the case that one accepts necessitarianism. And think that there’s only one possible world and it’s the actual world such that everything is necessary. And it seems that my ancestors cease to exist in a colloquial sense of ceasing to exist. And I don’t advocate this view but I think it is one where a necessary being could cease to exist
Hmm, good point.
Is that a return of the neck beard I see?
Not really, I'm just too lazy to shave
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While I would hold many views opposite yours, I have no idea what this survey was trying to achieve given that it seems to only be trying to tell you what you already know yourself to hold. 😆
It revealed to many philosophers that the implicit (or even explicit) assumptions they held - when applied consistently - leads to a necessary being.
@@calebp6114 Unfortunately, that is only the case if you actually agree with their decisions of "necessary" and "being", and if you agree with the logical implications involved.
There IS a necessary being, just ask Spinoza.
Why would I believe anything he has to say?
He’s Jewish bro
There are no contingent things
I just answered "I can't say" for everything. I got an agnostic answer. Afterall, relativism is not all that useful when trying to figure stuff out, but it does mean we can't know anything for sure. Extreme skepticism might be annoying and I agree it is, but it's not able to be refuted entirely because it refutes the tools you use to refute it in the first place.
And don't forget - it also refutes itself.
@@mikeyronen2952 Well it abstracts itself. "It's just a possibility that everything is a possibility," still means that original proposition is a possibility, but one we can and do ignore tbh.
@@visionaryhera Abstracts = Refutes? Well, Anything = Everything, if we're skeptical of it all. Anything works.
Extreme skepticism is an absurd example of mental gymnastics which belongs only in Philosophy text books.
@@mikeyronen2952 Being able to apply something to itself doesn't necessarily mean it's refuted. The flavor of relativism I'm talking about leaves everything as a maybe, not as a definite "no" or "yes". So extreme skepticism might assert "logic is not justified/absolute" but the claim "logic might not be absolute and necessary" has much more weight as it's unfalsifiable and can hide in the gaps of our knowledge.
It can still be ignored 99% of the time, but it remains *likely* a fact that there are always unfalsifiable claims that can be made regarding all truth we claim to know... that we can't falsify.
@@visionaryhera So, in simpler terms - you take, as an axiom, that all knowledge might be refutable (including this axiom itself) and from that you derive that nothing can be said with certainty.
Even the concept of "Certainty" becomes uncertain, but whatever.
Is that what you mean?
What benefit does this give?
You end up, consistent with your original comment, saying "I can't say" about everything you encounter.
What's the point?
"Can anything be entirely inside of itself?" is literally mathematicians' "Is there a set which contains all sets?"
Funny. I also took a mathematical interpretation, but a different one from topology. "Can a set contain an open cover of itself?" to which the answer is yes.
no, while a set (in ZFC) cannot contain itself, there are other set theories where they can (they are in that case not well founded) and also classes can often contain themselves.
Seems like this branches out into ontology, since it runs into the problem of whether perceiving modal logic is tied up into an agent. Because, sure, many theists who use the transcendental argument use sloppy justification for belief, but I see you struggling here to justify the answers that being is subordinated by nothingness. It seems less justificatory than accepting such divisions are inherent to the perceived.
this quiz gives away too much at the beginning when explaining the quiz itself. it should allow ppl to go in blind
Apologists are still trying to pull a god out of a hat with sloppy word association dressed up in trappings of formal logic. Right from the very start, why is it a called a "necessary being" instead of a "necessary cause" or whatever much less poorly defined? I have some handle on the terms "necessary" and "cause" but wtf is a "being" in this abstract realm of modal logic.
I find it disingenuous that they're using the term "necessary being". What they're really trying to prove here is the existence of God. Specifically their God. Not any other God. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend to fully agree with the necessary being argument that would still provide no information on the identity of the necessary being.
@@TheGlenn8 or that it is still there - and not - like Hegel said "god is dead".
Logic is based on metaphysics
Being means - anything that exists, so "a necesary cause" it's still a being.
@Jacob B necesary existance IS a property and does not have the same problem as existence as a property has (Kant's objection)
I can in fact see your face
If your videos are possible worlds and if your face is plastered on all of them then your face would be a necessary being 😁
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It doesn't appear obvious to me, that people cease to exist. To specify it isn't self-evident that with one's death the thing that makes "you" "you" stops existing.
For instance: If I write down a sentence and then burn the medium I wrote the sentence on, I still can remember the sentence and write the sentence onto another medium. So we can assume that the sentence never actually ceased to exist even though a physical copy of that sentence has been destroyed.
That must be a very common position, because belief in an afterlife is so common. But I suppose if someone accepts that the body or brain is what makes "you" "you", then it would be self-evident that it stops existing.
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This look will haunt me in my dreams from now on
Kane Based
After doing the survey myself (before watching your video) it felt like they were just trying to play a trick on me. Like they're trying to pull a "gotcha!"
My entire problem with the necessary being meme is the part where they go "because it can exist, it does exist" which is a massive non sequitur. And worse, it's an example of hypocrisy. Proponents of this argument wouldn't accept that unicorns exist because they "can exist".
In essence this argument is just trying to define a "Necessary Being" (God, let's just say God, because that's what they're trying to prove as real), but that's not just how it works now is it? If I define a Jackalope as "A rabbit with antlers that exists" that won't make Jackalopes real all of the sudden. If you want to prove God exists then you have to give actually convincing evidence. Wordplay isn't evidence.
The being in question could just be 'everything that exists in the universe' (commonly, but erroneously, also referred to as 'the universe'). There's no requirement that it be a consciousness or even a connected being. Plus it would have all the causal powers we commonly attribute to it (in a physical sense). But then it sounds trivial: assuming existence, all that exists is necessary.
I take it that they're assuming the modal axiom S5, which says that if it is possible that it is necessary that P, then it is necessary that P. We can motivate this by thinking in terms of possible worlds. Per standard possible worlds semantics:
"It is possible that P" = there is some world at which P is true.
"It is necessary that P" = P is true in all worlds.
Now suppose you grant that a necessary being *can* exist. Well, it sounds like you are claiming that it is possible for there to be a necessary being. Which is to say that, at some possible world, it is necessary that this being exists. But if, in that world, it is necessary that this being exists, it follows that the being exists at all worlds. That's just what it is to be necessary.
The trouble with all of this in my view is that I don't accept that S5 or standard possible worlds semantics is appropriate for all our modal discourse; moreover, I'm not sure that talk of modal properties completely abstracted from any context is even meaningful.
@@KaneB Would you accept the ontological perspective in relation to Being? Possibility is a mode of being
@@KaneB Why can't a being be necessary in one world and not be necessary in another?
Read meillasaoux's after finitude