The Philosurfer

The Argument from Composition

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In this video, I cover the argument for the existence of God from composition, first given by Plotinus and more recently developed by Edward Feser.

NOTES

  1. The things of our experience are composites
    • Everything we see has parts
    • The things of our experience are composites (composed of parts)
  2. The existence of a composite depends on the existence and arrangement of the part
    • What is the relation of the whole to its parts?
      • What is the relation of the book to its pages/cover?
      • The book depends on its parts and their arrangement for its existence
    • Not temporal dependence
      • The body exists concurrently with the parts
    • The existence of the whole depends on the existence and arrangement of the part
  3. The existence and arrangement of the parts require a cause(s)
    • The paper is made up of parts itself and requires a certain temperature to exist in order to not burn up
    • That is to say that the parts themselves require causes
  4. The cause(s) of the parts and their arrangement can't be the composite
    • What could be that cause(s)?
    • Can't be the whole
    • S1: vicious circle
  5. The cause(s) of the parts and their arrangement can't ultimately be a composite
    • It could be something else with parts, but then we'd have the same problem
    • What is causing those parts to exist and be arranged as such?
    • If we keep pointing to things with parts, then we'll never have any causality at all
      • It'll be collection of parts A borrowing causality from collection of parts B borrowing from C, but nobody actually has the causality in the first place
    • S1: vicious regress
  6. So, the ultimate cause of the parts and their arrangement must be something completely simple
  7. There can only be one simple thing
    1. For two simple things to be different, one would have to have a feature the other lacks
    2. To have a feature is to be composed
    3. So, at least one of them will not be simple
  8. So, everything is caused by one simple thing
  • O1: law of nature
    • R1: either
      • Law of nature could be something not real
        • Mathematical description of what happens
        • In this case, it has no causal power, it just describes
      • Law of nature could be something real
        • It just part of the composite
        • What combines the natural law with the parts?
          • Feser
            • Composite of A and B
            • Natural law L combines them
            • Why is A and B governed by L rather than by some other law?
            • A-B-L becomes a new composite we must explain
  • O2: brute fact
    • R1: the simple cause is an explanation and there is no question-begging reason to reject it, so we can't just renounce it

Further Reading

Mind, Matter, and Nature: A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind" by James Madden

The Plurality Thesis

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The Plurality Thesis is a strange result of physicalism that claims every object is actually billions of overlapping objects. Dualists use this to reject physicalism in philosophy of mind.

NOTES

  • Plurality Thesis
    1. Any physical object, O, will have some particle, P, along its edge which has just as good of a claim to be part of O as to not be part of O
    2. So, O-with-P has just as much of a claim to be the object as O-without-P
    3. So, both are objects that overlap everywhere but at P
    4. There are billions of particles like P around O
    5. So, for every object O, there are billions of overlapping O’s
  • Argument from the Plurality Thesis
  1. PA: Physicalism is true
  2. So, Plurality Thesis
  3. I am in a certain psychological state, E
  4. By (1), my brain, B, is in E
  5. By (2) and (4), there are billions of brains in E
  6. ~(5)
    • S1: I clearly don’t share my psychological states with any other brains, much less billions
  7. So, ~(1)
  8. So, dualism is true
  • N1: this isn't quite true--disproving physicalism leaves it open that you could be an ontological idealist
  • N2: proves substance dualism

Further Reading

Mind, Matter, and Nature: A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind" by James Madden

The Difference Argument

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The Difference Argument is used by dualists to show that the mind has properties the brain doesn't and is therefore a different kind of thing.

NOTES

  1. If the mind and some part of the brain, B, are identical, then the mind and B must have all properties in common
  2. The mind has a property, F, and B lacks F
    • S1: intentional aspect of thought
    • S2: sensations
    • S3: first-person experience
    • S4: unity of consciousness
      1. People have a united conscious experience
      2. Complex things cannot have a united consciousness
        • S1: consciousness is not additive
        • S2: a set is not a thing, so it doesn't have properties
      3. A simple physical thing does not have a united consciousness
        • O1: there could be a CPU in the brain that is the locus of all awareness
          • R1: there is no evidence that brains work this way and good evidence they don’t
          • R2: such a module would be complex, leading this argument to regress back to a simple physical particle with united consciousness, which would be strange
      4. So, mind has a property the body doesn’t
  3. So, the mind and B are not identical
  4. So, dualism is true

Further Reading

Mind, Matter, and Nature: A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind" by James Madden

Does God exist? The Argument from Meaning

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Does God exist? This video argues that if our lives are truly meaningful and have purpose, God must exist. It further tries to give us the intuition that life is meaningful and does have purpose.

NOTES

  1. Life has meaning/purpose
  2. A thing cannot have meaning/purpose unless it was made by an intelligent agent with that intended meaning/purpose
  3. So, we were created by an intelligent agent

Further Reading

Emergentism: Does the mind emerge from the brain?

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In this video, I explore the idea of emergentism as exposited by John Searle.

NOTES

  1. Four assumptions are made in the mind-body problem that must be jettisoned
    1. Assumption: ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ name mutually exclusive ontological categories
      1. Descartes: physical = matter = spatially extended
        • O1: excludes things modern physics accepts as matter
      2. Searle: physical  =
        1. located in space and time
        2. causally explainable by microphysics
        3. function causally
      3. On Searle's definition, there is no reason mental cannot be physical
    2. Assumption: there is only one kind of reduction
      1. ontological reduction: x is ontologically reducible to y = x is real, but is identical to some more fundamental entity, y
      2. causal reduction: x is weakly/causally reducible to y = x is not identical to y, but all of the intrinsic facts about x are explained by (or caused by) facts about y
      3. emergent properties/system-level functions = novel properties of a system that the parts lack which emerge when the system is properly organized
    3. Assumption: causation is always a relation between discrete events ordered in time, where cause precedes effect
      1. discrete causation = occurs between two discreet objects and is ordered in time where cause precedes effect
      2. nondiscrete causation = emergent properties causing and being caused by parts in an arrangement
        1. bottom-up = parts cause the emergent property
        2. top-down = emergent property affects something about the parts
    4. Assumption: identity is unproblematic; everything is identical with itself and nothing else; paradigms of identity are object identities and identities of composition
      1. object identity = two objects are actually just the same one object
      2. identity of composition = a thing is identical to the parts that compose it
      3. Emergent things can be totally dependent on their parts without being identical to them
  2. biological naturalism = sensations and thoughts are system-level features of neurophysiological processes in the CNS
  3. So, sensations and thoughts are causally reducible to and emergent from neurophysiological processes in the CNS
  • C1: frees naturalist from problems of reduction, supervenience, or elimination of psychological phenomena that fly in the face of common experience
  • O1: ad hoc
    • R1: the same emergent properties are found in all kinds of natural systems
  1. Conscious states match Searle’s criteria for physicality
    1. They are located in space and time (i.e., the brain)
    2. They are causally explainable by microphysics (i.e., reducible to neurophysiological processes)
    3. They have physical effects (i.e., downward causation on the brain)
  2. Conscious states are not strictly identical to neurophysiological bases, but all their powers are extensions of the latter, so they are not independent things
  3. So, this is only a pseudo-problem
  4. The only questions left are how the brain does this, which is the job of neuroscience
  • O1: the problem of psycho-physical emergence
    • When any other property of an object emerges, it makes sense how it does so
      • Structural emergence
        • The particles that make up a tire aren't round, but when they come together the property of roundness emerges
        • However, when you look at the laws of nature and the particles, you can understand why the particles cause roundness to emerge
          • You can see how they necessitate it
      • Quantitative emergence
        • Consider a kid’s choir, where each kid is singing softly, but the whole choir is very loud. Has this brought something into reality?
        • Is this mysterious at all?
        • What causes the new property?
    • The emergence of consciousness from brain matter does not make sense
      • We have made tremendous progress in neuroscience
      • By now, we should have some semblance of an idea, but it's not even close
    • The emergence of consciousness from brain matter isn't even intelligible
      • Galen Strawson
      • What makes emergence intelligible is this
      • Take the thing that emerges and that which it emerges from
      • You should be able to characterize them both--describe them both--using conceptually homogeneous concepts
        • Shape of the atoms and shape of the tire
        • Motion of the atoms and motion of the tire
      • No set of conceptually homogeneous concepts could capture both the experiential and the non-experiential
        • Shape of the brain and…what? Shape of consciousness?
        • Electrons in motion and first person experience of red?
    • O1: brute emergence
      • R1: We can't say "It just does"
        • We want to say one thing emerges from another,
        • There must be something about the thing it emerges from which is sufficient for the thing to emerge
        • But this is something would be our explanation that we’re lacking

Further Reading

Mind, Matter, and Nature: A Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind" by James Madden

Does quantum mechanics provide a counterexample to the law of causality?

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In this video, I consider the claim that quantum field theories show particles can come into existence randomly without cause, and that this is a counterexample to the law of causality.

NOTES

Objections to Law of Causality from Quantum Mechanics

  • Problem 1: nothing is there to cause virtual particles to appear
    1. These particles are coming out of a vacuum
    2. A vacuum is nothing
    3. So, there is no cause
    • O1: quantum vacuum isn't nothing
    • O2: physical laws aren't nothing
    • O3: mathematical equations can't pick up causation
  • Problem 2: the particles appear randomly
    • O1: A cause can cause something indeterminately, so that's not a problem
    • O2: hidden variable theory

Further Reading

Law of Causality: Imagination Objection

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The Law of Causality states that whatever begins to exist requires a cause (or, alternatively, no potential can be actualized unless something already actual actualizes it). In this video, I look at David Hume's objection to the Law of Causality.

NOTES

Hume's Imagination Objection to Law of Causality

  1. What is imaginable is possible
  2. We can imagine an object beginning to exist without also imagining its cause
  3. So, an object can begin to exist without a cause
  • R1: we conceived of the pterodactyl beginning to exist w/o conceiving of its cause at the same time, which is not the same as conceiving of the pterodactyl beginning to exist without a cause
  • R2 (GEM Anscombe):
    • How do you know you're picturing the pterodactyl coming into existence?
    • Maybe, this is what you pictured:
      • pterodactyl at location A
      • Teleports to location B like an alpha particle
      • You are picturing the second part of that
    • Maybe also
      • pterodactyl at location A
      • Particles ooze over like gas
      • Manifest at location B
      • You see the second part of that
    • So, this isn't a proof you can imagine a pterodactyl coming into existence without a cause
    • O1: pterodactyls don't come to be in a place by teleporting like alpha particles or gas
      • R1: they don't appear uncaused either
        • I.e., this objection appeals to the nature of pterodactyls
          • If we're allowed to do that, then the game is up
          • By nature, pterodactyls appear by parents
          • They don't appear causeless
  • R3: empirically supported

Further Reading