A Necessary Being?

[bennyboy]

I'd say the argument is more: There can't be existence: all of infinite regress, eternity and creation from nothing seem impossible.

The problem is there is existence. That's a mindfuck, anyway you want to look at it. I think, frankly, we have two options: don't really try to think about it except as a linguistic or debating exercise, or go stark raving fucking insane.

[robvalue]

We don't even know infinite regress of some sort isn't going on right under our noses.

[Cyberman]

You're both giving them way too much credit, I fear. These logical bastardisations aren't meant to prove the existence of any god, they're supposed to be tautological traps - the Fool's Mates of the apologist world.

[LadyForCamus]

The fact that I exist means that my biological parents went from contingent beings to necessary beings when I drew my first breathe. The obvious consequence, that someone mentioned early on, is that you are now faced with an infinite regression.

An accidentally ordered sequence of efficient causes could extend into the infinite past of an eternal universe. Where infinite regress becomes a problem is with respect to any essentially ordered series. I presented this interpretation of Aquinas here (debate).

To quote that post - "The members in an essentially order sequence exist because of ontologically dependency. This stands in contrast to a temporal and accidental series.
Gavin Kerr illustrates the ontological relationship as (v-->(w-->(x-->y))) and a temporal series as (v-->w)-->(w-->x)-->(x-->y).* Remove the unchanged changer/first cause/necessary being and all dependent members of the essentially ordered series disappear. Thus every essentially ordered series is sustained by a first member."

The only alternative to having a first member is an impossible infinite regress.

I know you have me on ignore, but in case you get curious enough to glance at this: what makes an infinite regress impossible? For us dummies who aren't logicians, that is...

Edit/addition:

From my limited understanding, logical absolutes are only absolutely true in THIS universe, right? So, if there can exist some universe or reality where, say, A does not equal A, why can't there exist some universe or reality where infinite regress is logically possible? How can we possibly extrapolate what we know about our own universe to whatever may or may not lie beyond it? I don't see how anyone could be justified in even trying to presume such a thing.

[Gemini]

I think a lot of this comes down to my experience of existence.  In my experience, 100% of reality is both subjective and objective-- there's a perfect duality there between me the experiencer and whatever is being experienced.  In fact, 0% of what I know (unless you call instinct knowledge) is knowable outside that subject/object duality.

This depends on the precision of one's own introspection, and there aren't any obvious or agreed upon ways to measure this. In my experience, there is no duality between the experiencer and the experienced. There's just experience.

Some experiences reference other experiences, in the sense of a collection of phonemes that reference a collection of qualia. The word "fish" references the qualia that constitute our experience of fish (the neuronal correlate of which is presumably a neurosynaptic connection between different areas of the brain). But when you analyze the phonemes as qualia, they have no reference or intentionality to anything, and it's redundant to add some entity which has an experience to our account of experience.

[LadyForCamus]

What makes an uncaused first member more possible than an infinite regress?

Exactly, yes. People like to assert, "There can't be an infinite regress."

Why not? Because you say so? Because it doesn't make sense to you?"

The best they can do is extrapolate from local observations into the unknown, which is unrealiable, and then they commit the fallacy of composition as they try and apply it to reality itself.

It shows some people cannot accept the limits of our investigation.

Apologies for the redundant post; I just saw this. I am still curious to hear Chad's thoughts though.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The only alternative to having a first member is an impossible infinite regress.

What makes an uncaused first member more possible than an infinite regress?

My initial response to the question was to consider it a schoolboy objection, but on second thought decided that you may actually be curious about why the demonstration of the 3rd Way excludes infinite regress as a viable option.

Keep in mind that proper interpretation of this demonstration only works for an essentially ordered series in which the existence of a thing depends on something essential to its existence. For example, human beings could not exist apart from some material composition. That is part of our essence. The existence of a human being depends, necessarily, on the existence of molecules and atoms that in turn depend on subatomic particles and so on down the line toward more fundamental levels of existence perhaps terminating in the quantum vacuum. But if there is an infinite regress then it's turtles all the way down below the quantum level. Seems absurd, but let’s just go with it anyway because lots of things appear absurd at the quantum level (at least in traditional modern mechanistic terms). So if we allow infinite regress then the chain of existence extends from human beings all the way down through an infinite series of turtles. Doesn’t that mean that at least one thing inside that infinite chain must exist?

[wiploc]

What makes an uncaused first member more possible than an infinite regress?

My initial response to the question was to consider it a schoolboy objection, but on second thought decided that you may actually be curious about why the demonstration of the 3rd Way excludes infinite regress as a viable option.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.  

Keep in mind that proper interpretation of this demonstration only works for an essentially ordered series in which the existence of a thing depends on something essential to its existence. For example, human beings could not exist apart from some material composition. That is part of our essence. The existence of a human being depends, necessarily, on the existence of molecules and atoms that in turn depend on subatomic particles and so on down the line toward more fundamental levels of existence perhaps terminating in the quantum vacuum.  But if there is an infinite regress then it's turtles all the way down below the quantum level. Seems absurd, but let’s just go with it anyway because lots of things appear absurd at the quantum level (at least in traditional modern mechanistic terms). So if we allow infinite regress then the chain of existence extends from human beings all the way down through an infinite series of turtles. Doesn’t that mean that at least one thing inside that infinite chain must exist?

You lost me.  The whole chain exists, not just one thing. 

The no-infinite-regress argument seems to me to be based on establishing an equivalence between truth and palatability.   It's something like, "I don't like chocolate, so the carton of ice cream in the freezer must be strawberry." 

As in, "I don't see how infinite regress would work, so there must be an uncaused first cause."  Or, "I don't see how a cause can be uncaused, so infinite regress must be what's true." 

Myself, I don't see how either can work, so that doesn't seem to prove anything.  I don't jump to either conclusion.

And while Hawking's third option, "finite but unbounded," has no appeal to this layman's mind, that doesn't make it wrong.  So I have to wonder whether there aren't other alternatives I haven't thought of, perhaps also revolting to me, that might also be true.

[Gemini]

My initial response to the question was to consider it a schoolboy objection, but on second thought decided that you may actually be curious about why the demonstration of the 3rd Way excludes infinite regress as a viable option.

[...]

That's a rather uncharitable construal of the question. Instead of reading it as, "Why did Aquinas believe an infinite regress is impossible, given his understanding of causality?" it should be read as, "What argument against an infinite regress is potentially persuasive to skeptics?"

[...]

So if we allow infinite regress then the chain of existence extends from human beings all the way down through an infinite series of turtles. Doesn’t that mean that at least one thing inside that infinite chain must exist?

The entire infinite chain could exist as a brute fact, and not necessarily.

[robvalue]

Wake me up when this necessary being becomes a necessary doing.

Doesn't make sense, I don't care. Near enough. It's a good joke.

Shut up.