Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

    “Interesting points! Intuition as opposed to logic and that intriguing way of defining God as existence itself.”
___ Agent Smith

Contingent Cosmos

or

Necessary Being?

  Post 124.  April 27, 2022

  What Causes Existence?

  To be . . . or how to be?

 Modern philosophers tend to distrust Intuition¹, as a hasty & emotional, instead of methodical & rational way of knowing. But Intuition is fundamental, instinctive, and personal, hence it makes the strongest subjective case for belief. Only after those intuitive embryos-of-thought² are established can the rational faculties analyze them to select the ones that conform to logical structures, and that can survive the gauntlet of objective social criticism. However, even those ideas that are strong enough to become firm beliefs, are based on incomplete information. Which is why Bayesian inference³ was developed, to update our preliminary beliefs with additional evidence. Bayes whittled normal human logic, based on conventional concepts (words), down to a mathematical (statistical) analysis of probability. But that bare-bones abstract result may lack the emotional impact of visceral Intuition as the foundation of faith.

Since I have concluded, intuitively & logically, that our world (our reality ; our existence) is highly improbable⁴, given that its fundamental process is Entropy -- inevitably leading to death & non-existence -- the necessity for an exogenous causal force seems undeniable. Plato & Aristotle referred to that logically essential force as the "First Cause" or "Unmoved Mover". They also seemed to assume that the essential Causal Principle of our existence must lie outside the space-time devolution from Order (Logos) to Disorder (Chaos). In other words it must exist eternally, as Transcendent Potential for the creation of Actual Reality from Possible Ideality. Plato also used the term "Chaos" (disorder) to describe that eternal resource of potential stuff. But he didn't mean it was chaotic in the modern sense, but merely that it was unformed substance (like malleable clay) that could be molded into enformed things & organisms. That essential “substance” is equivalent to the unconditional range of all logical Probabilities.

Those ancient philosophers also spoke of "Being & Becoming". With that in mind, I think of our evolving space-time universe as Becoming, and the timeless power-to-exist-physically as absolute Being. Or, as others spoke of the same ultimate source of existence : "the ground of being". Therefore, as an alternative to the conventional religious label for that enigmatic eternal unknowable omnipotent Cause-of-all-effects, I sometimes refer to it simply as "BEING", an ultimate principle, not an ordinary thing or being. Some call that Creative Principle – the ability to create something from nothing – by the conventional name “G*D”. But Plato, probably to avoid polytheistic associations, referred to it as “Logos” or “Reason”. And the root of Reason is “ratio” ; a mathematical & logical relationship between two or more values, such as Hot & Cold or Right & Wrong. Which brings us back to the modern name for causation in the real world : Energy. And my information-based term for that universal causal power is EnFormAction.   :nerd:

                End of Blog Post 124

1. Logical Intuition :
“Logic is a way of using a set of concrete rules or formulas you have learnt that you use to come up with a decision. Intuition on the other hand is a way of using abstract information you have received from different aspects of your life to create a sensible reasoning to come up with a decision.”
https://subedi.co/blog/2018/07/19/decision-makers-dilemma-intuition-vs-logic

2. Click for popup ►

3. Bayesian Inference :
There are 3 different approaches available to determine the probability of an event – A> Classical ;
B> Frequentist C>  Bayesian

“Bayesian perspective allows us to incorporate personal belief/opinion into the decision-making process. It takes into account what we already know about a particular problem even before any empirical evidence. Here we also have to acknowledge the fact my personal belief about a certain event may be different than others and hence, the outcome that we will get using the Bayesian approach may also be different.”
https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2021/01/a-beginners-guide-bayesian-inference/

4. Improbable Existence :
“We exist, and we are living creatures. It follows that the universe we live in must be compatible with the existence of life. However, as scientists have studied the fundamental principles that govern our universe, they have discovered that the odds of a universe like ours being compatible with life are astronomically low. We can model what the universe would have looked like if its constants—the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the cosmological constant—had been slightly different. What has become clear is that, across a huge range of these constants, they had to have pretty much exactly the values they had in order for life to be possible.

The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10229. Physicists refer to this discovery as the “fine-tuning” of physics for life. What should we make of it? Some take this to be evidence of nothing other than our good fortune.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/

Can we define G*D as Existence per se ?

ENFORMATIONISM