Modal Realism and the Cosmological Argument

This is an interesting way to look at "god" or a first cause.

Quote :

Modal Realism and the Cosmological Argument

It seems to follow from a certain kind of realism about metaphysical possibilities that a version of the cosmological argument goes through. The idea is that if the space of possibilities exists, then it exists necessarily. The actualized concrete events of the world are contingent and depend on the necessary space of possibilities.

There are many variations, but the cosmological argument states that the chain of events needs a necessary first cause to get started. Or else it is cast in terms of arguing that contingent things ultimately must depend on a necessary self-existent thing. In the model under consideration here contingent things (events) are actualizations of possibilities. A given event is subject to causal constraint by prior or adjacent events but is always also dependent on the space of possibilities.

There seems to be no well motivated reason to consider an objection involving, say, an infinite chain of meta-modal spaces upon which the first-order space of possibilities depends. So, the space of possibilities would be a self-existent necessary entity and the argument goes through.

http://guidetoreality.blogspot.com/2006/11/modal-realism-and-cosmological.html

Yeah what he said.

Any thoughts?

Questions?

Yeah, what did he just say.

Aaron wrote:

This is an interesting way to look at "god" or a first cause.

Quote :

"Modal Realism" and the Cosmological Argument

It seems to follow from a "certain kind of realism" about "metaphysical possibilities" that "a version of the cosmological argument goes through". The idea is that "if the space of possibilities exists", then "it exists necessarily". The "actualized" concrete events of the world "are contingent" and "depend on the necessary space of possibilities" (OMG).

There are many variations, but the cosmological argument states that the chain of events needs a necessary first cause to get started. Or else it is "cast in terms of arguing that contingent things ultimately must depend on a necessary self-existent thing". In the model under consideration here "contingent things (events) are actualizations of possibilities." "A given event is subject to causal constraint by prior or adjacent events but is always also dependent on the space of possibilities".

There seems to be no well motivated reason to consider an objection involving, say, an "infinite chain of meta-modal spaces upon which the first-order space of possibilities depends (OMdoubleG). So, "the space of possibilities" would be "a self-existent necessary entity" and "the argument goes through".

http://guidetoreality.blogspot.com/2006/11/modal-realism-and-cosmological.html

Yeah what he said.

Any thoughts?

Questions?

"if the space of possibilities exists"--$.99

"a self-existent necessary entity"--$.23

Psychobabble on line--priceless!

The Paineful Truth wrote:

Psychobabble on line--priceless!

Psychobabble, nah... Philosobabble, maybe...

But that doesn't flow off the tongue as well, and psycho- just carries more impact what with Alfred Hitchcock and all.

I agree with stew on this one. ....babble anyway you look at it. I have a random number generator that I could hook to the 2 or 3 hundred inscrutable philosophy words, add in some verbs, suffixes, prefixes and lots of adjectives (each a separate independent random generator) , combine the results, and get at least as ‘reasonable’ a discourse as “modal realism’. In fact this post was generated by the same.

Opps, my bad, I meant to say ‘metaphysical fact’. I hope that makes it clear.

Hello there. I have come across this board and I'm sympathetic to the views expressed here.

I'm sorry the blog post excerpted in this thread came out so filled with jargon. What I meant is as follows.

If you believe that each event in the world really could have happened differently, then you believe possibilities are real. If one pictures reality as including not just actual events but all of the possible events (modal realism to the philosophers), then this is one way to get to the idea of our world being just a subset of a larger reality. And it makes sense to me that this larger reality, taken as a whole, must exist of necessity (the whole sum of possibilities can't just be one more possibility). And this conclusion is somewhat analogous to the conclusion of a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God espoused by Leibniz and others.

I'd be happy if anyone would respond and tell me if this makes any better sense. Thanks.
Best regards,
- Steve Esser

Hello Steve and welcome! Thanks for the further explanation.

If my interpretation is correct then your theory is very much compatible with my view of Panendeism in which I view god (Deity, the One, Spirit, the divine, the ground of being, etc...) as being composed of manifest existence and unmanifest possibility in a non-dual relationship. That is, the relationship between the manifest and the unmanifest is neither dualistic nor monistic.

I very much enjoyed reading the contents in your blog BTW. Feel free to join in on any of the discussions or start a new thread if you'd like.

Thanks for the nice welcome, Aaron.

Steve Esser wrote:

If you believe that each event in the world really could have happened differently, then you believe possibilities are real. If one pictures reality as including not just actual events but all of the possible events (modal realism to the philosophers), then this is one way to get to the idea of our world being just a subset of a larger reality.

I have also struggled with terminology when discussing the distinction between Physical Reality and Metaphysical "Reality". So I coined a word to subsume the whole thing: "Redeality".

When we are talking about here-and-now physical things, that's Reality in the ordinary sense.
When we discuss past or future or intangible ideas, such as possibility and probability, we are in the subset of Ideality, or metaphysics.
Hence, the ultimate, all-encompassing set would be called "Redeality".

Or, as Paineful would so succinctly put it: "Truth".

Actually, the thing that JUST occurred collapsed the probabilities of everything else to zero. The event we were talking about now has a probability of 1. A probability of 1 means it is the truth. Prior to the event occurring we do have a probability distribution. It is easy to speculate prior to the event, the best speculation is based on the highest probably. Your best speculation is not the ‘truth’ yet. Two people looking at the frequency of a photon might have different ideas of the frequency, that does not mean we have one event with two truths. We have a means of reconciling the ‘true’ frequency based on the velocity of the observers relative to the photon.

Metaphysics makes it difficult to find the baseline to establish truth. So I would say most metaphysics is a form of speculation. But this idea that because an infinite number of probabilities existed prior to the event does not mean they still exist after the event.