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TheOtherDave comments on Wrong Questions - Less Wrong
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My assumption was that I can't observe its length, since I can't observe infinite quantities. Hell, I can't even observe a ten-mile-long stack of turtles without artificial aids.
That said, I can infer the length of a stack of turtles by any number of means, even if I can't observe it in its entirety. And if my world contained infinite stacks of turtles, there might well be ways to infer the length of such a stack. Beats me what they might be, but then I'm not as smart as Pat.
That would hardly be compelling grounds for believing I exist inside a thought experiment.
Well, yes and no. I think you're disregarding the many, many real-world cases in which starting down the path of #2 leads me to a real understanding of the situation. For example, if I pick a turtle and start climbing down, I might discover that after 3,456,338 turtles there's an elephant who is walking along on empty space, and the stack isn't infinite after all. And now I know what holds the turtles up.
Of course, I can now ask what holds the elephant up, but that's a different question, and all the same considerations come into play.
If I don't know ahead of time that the problem is infinite and unbounded (and how would I know that?), I don't know that strategy #2 won't answer it. Though of course, being smarter than I am and therefore having more useful insights is always helpful.
I'm just using a time-honored technique for simulating characters smarter than me: cheat like crazy. See also: Sherlock Holmes.
Oh, absolutely. I just meant that such understanding wouldn't look like #2.
Arguably, it's a special case of "what holds [list of 3,456,338 turtles] up?" Returning to the original question of which this is a metaphor, momentarily, the elephant would be roughly equivalent to the Big Bang.
Sherlock Holmes is a lousy simulation of a hyperintelligent theorist, FWIW. But OK, if you're just talking about fictional characters, then most of my objections are moot.
Agreed.
At the #2-level, it's not. But you're right that at the #3 level, it could easily be.
Incidentally, it's not a stack of 3,456,338 turtles, it's just a stack that bottoms out 3,456,338 turtles down from where I started.
Or something like that, yeah.
Cheap to run, though, computationally speaking.
Well, in the original anecdote the stack topped out with a (precariously balanced?) flat Earth, so I just sort of assumed you started at the top. In bastardised mathematical terms, it's usually a ray, and finding a bottom makes it a line segment.
Well, it's a matter of detail, isn't it? If I already understand brains, pointing to the cognitive alogarithm is sufficient; if I already understand the Big Bang, tracing history back to it is sufficient; if I already understand how elephants stay up, following the turtles down to one is sufficient.
I think at this point the question in play is "What was the First Cause?", rather than "Why is there anything?", and the two are distinct for practical purposes. Bill Maher might get hung up on the second, but I'd be surprised if he got hung up on the first, given that it's such an old argument against naturalism.
What justifies my saying that we've ended up at the cosmological argument? I think it follows from accepting Maitzen's dissolution. There's a chain of turtles, and we'd like to explain the chain. Maitzen points out that instead of trying to explain the chain in itself, we need only explain each individual turtle. Once you or I accept Maitzen's argument we just have to explain the first turtle, because every subsequent turtle is explained by its predecessor. And asking "what explains the first turtle?" (with the implication that the first turtle, or whatever implicit zeroth turtle hides behind it, is supernatural) is pretty much the cosmological argument. Granted, Maitzen doesn't address that argument in his essay, but I don't see a problem with that; it's a separate argument IMO with its own well-known counterarguments.
Well, we're mostly discussing Maitzen's answer to the of the First Cause, the Infinitely Old Universe. Unless a First Cause is somehow (magic?) self-explanatory, it doesn't answer the question of "Why is there anything?" - but the same applies if you replace a First Cause with an infinite string of causes, or even a future cause + time travel.
Have you seen Gods as Topological Invarients? Note the date submitted as it is relevant.
Anyways the whole question seems a confusion: either the answer will be something that does exist or it will be something that does not exist, if it exists it would appear to be part of "anything" and therefore the question is not addressed, and if it does not exist then that appears to be contradictory.
That's not exactly a confusion, that's a paradox. And a faulty one; something might (somehow) "explain itself" or, more likely, we could discover a logical reason things had to exist. Or we might have some unknown insight into rationality and dissolve the question, I suppose, but that's not really helpful. The point is it's still an open question; the good Mr. Maitzen has not helped us.
Applying Greek thought to "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" is an attempt to get at something that "explain(s) itself", I am sure you are familiar with St. Thomas Aquinas and his five ways.
I suppose you are also familiar with Divine Sophia in Gnosticism? Saying we have a logical reason for things existing seems to be on that same level of reasoning and appears to just add another turtle to me.
Yup. Being a theist, I suspect God is in some way the cause of everything, although I'm not really smart enough to understand how that could be. I leave the answer to some future genius (or, more likely, superintelligent AI.)
Really? But logic, as a mathematical construct, "exists" (in the sense that it exists at all) independently of physical objects; a calculator on mars will get the same result as one on Earth, even if they have no causal connection. Logic seems like it can explain things in terms of platonic mathematical structure, not contingent physical causes.
Logic is independent of particular objects (multiply realisable), but there is is no evidence that it exists immaterially
Not entirely sure what "exists" even means in cases like this, but yeah, then I guess you're restricted to self-causing entities in that case, whatever that might mean.
I disagree. If I go looking for a First Cause and discover an infinite string of causes instead, that's reality's way of telling me that there just isn't a First Cause, and the premise of my investigation was simply wrong. Equivalently, then, discovering an infinite string of causes indicates that the question "What is the First Cause?" (and hence "Why is there anything?", since that question reduces to the First Cause question once one accepts Maitzen's argument) is a wrong question, since it hinges on a false premise.
"What is the First Cause?" is not the same question as "Why is there anything?". An infinite string would answer the former, not the latter.
This is true in the absence of further assumptions. But once you or I assume Maitzen's argument is true (and I think we both do) the second becomes a mere instantiation of the first.
This is false if Maitzen's argument is true. Conditional on Maitzen's argument, an infinite string answers the former and hence the latter. I could justify this by repeating what I've written in my two comments upthread, but it might be more productive if I give a different argument.
How do we usually answer "Why is there X?"? I think we usually pick out X's most salient cause. "Why is there an ambulance outside my neighbour's house?" "Because the neighbour had a heart attack." We're basically saying, "here's the most interesting antecedent node in the causal graph, and had we deleted or substantially altered it, there wouldn't have been X". If we'd deleted the "neighbour's heart attack" node, there wouldn't be an "ambulance outside neighbour's house" node.
This gives me a way to interpret "What's the First Cause?", or "Why is there anything?", or "Why is there everything?", or "Why isn't the universe in the counterfactual no-turtle state?" (to paraphrase you). These questions are asking for a node in the causal graph that's antecedent to everything. But how can I do that if the causal graph is an infinitely long string? There's no such node!
There is still the question of why there is an infinitely long string.
That question fails in the same way as the others. It's asking for a causal node which, if altered or deleted, would turn the infinite string of causal nodes into a finite one. But no node in an infinitely long string has that power, so the question's implicit assumption is false.
A why question has more possible anwers than efficient causality.
Sorry, which argument is this? He makes several.
The argument that once the elements in the string are individually explained, the string as a whole is explained.
Edit: maybe I should call it the Hume-Edwards principle instead.
Ah. Well, I agree with it in principle; I just think he misapplies it.