Can something come from nothing

[emjay]

Numbers one and two are subject to the same potential quantum doubt as before, but not being well versed in that subject I won't take that any further at this point. To me, they are the strongest of the five arguments, but nonetheless I personally still have doubts... though I doubt my particular doubts will be shared by many people. Mine come from the perspective that we are causality detectors by 'design'... that it is our nature to seek and find causality even when it is not there... we know nothing else other than to see the world in these terms. But, from the neural view, causality itself is never detected per se, only inferred by our brains. What we actually do is detect and associate coincidences, which our brain infers as causality.

Your notion of causality rests on a pre-commitment to the notion that the phenomenal world does not reflect a rational order. Why make that assumption? And having made that assumption, to throw out causality, where does that leave you with respect to the acquisition of knowledge? Just something to ponder.

Just to be clear, what is exactly do you mean by rational order? Intelligently designed or just causality? If the latter then I wouldn't call it a pre-commitment to the notion that there is no causality, but just to the possibility that there is no causality outside of our frame of reference. I have no doubt that there is causality in the environment we find ourselves in (the known universe); we could not exist without it or have evolved the apparatus to detect and represent it without working in tandem with it or struggling to survive amidst it. So my doubt in that regard can basically be framed in terms of scope. But the point I made about our minds inferring causality wasn't so much an objection to causality as a personal question derived from the level of description I tend to look at; the neural network. It was just a low level question, for me personally but probably very few others, about how it's represented in the NN, and what that representation can tell me about what it is at that level. The fact that it's experienced phenomenally as notions of cause and effect, expectations, truth, certainty etc, and those feelings are our essential guide in the world to make sense of it and operate successfully within it, was not in dispute, but it was just looking at them from that other perspective which helps me in coming to a personally satisfying understanding of what they are.

My basic neural view is that causality is indeed association of coincidences all the way down (or up) to whatever level of description you're looking at, due to the (seemingly infinite) hierarchical nature of neural representation, but at the level I'm thinking about it, coincidences just mean the patterns of input a given neuron learns to detect and therefore associate... so that could be low level or high level... the result of passive statistical modeling or the result of reason. So from that perspective, causality is represented by a web of associations of "coincidences"... of which in consciousness we only experience at higher levels of abstraction because that's all we have conscious access to... and with those coincidences representing both things and their relationships. So from my view it's a web of representations and their relationships, with another important aspect of causality... expectation/prediction... covered by the pattern completion mechanics of the brain, namely feedback activation and the bias it causes. Such a web of representations is a context, and that's what my view of these issues basically boils down to; truth and certainty represent the stability and activation of a neural context of interrelated representations.

Have you ever seen the Matrix? In that, Neo sees the world interchangeably both in terms of the phenomenal and in terms the zeroes and ones underlying it. Well I'm a bit like that, but in my case replace binary code with images of neural networks... I switch between the two perspectives all the time, not just as an abstract intellectual study but in my daily life and thinking... they're just two equally useful, highly correlated, and complimentary perspectives on life.

But the problem comes when trying to think about or discuss these things at higher levels of understanding, ie everyday usage of the terms, when I tend to think about them at this different and lower level of description. It means I tend to conflate terms when discussing things like truth, and I realised that in discussion with Mudhammam in his thread about claims requiring evidence. It was that thread and the questions it raised, and continues to raise, that prompted me to sign up for this philosophy course in the first place because it was clear to me that I had no clear conception of what all this stuff was outside of the context I tend to see it in, and that was just leading to conflation and confusion both for me and whoever I was talking to.

So qualifications aside, my main reason for signing up to the course was to study Epistemology; what is knowledge and how can we know it? I know what my neural take on these things is but I don't know my philosophical take, including whether I'm begging the question or whatever with my neural take, because at its root, its a belief system like any other that informs my thinking in terms of assumptions... so if I was for instance going Descartes on it it would be just as susceptible to doubt as anything else. So that's my goal here... to put my beliefs under logical scrutiny and see to what extent they marry up at the philosophical, logical level, and to help clarify for myself once and for all, what my integrated perspective is on truth and logic (or ultimately if I have to reject any of my views).

For instance, the 'tripartite' view of knowledge - "justified, true, belief", though I haven't got there yet except at a glance, I'm sure is going to raise a lot of interesting questions I need to answer, but it will be hard because I already have strong opinions on all of them from a neural perspective... for instance what is 'justified' to a neuron that 'reports' truth given the presence of certain learned inputs? or what is 'true' when compared to a stable context of activation that can be objectively true or not, but experienced as true by the nature of its activation dynamics only (eg a dream or being immersed in a book can both feel real, but their contexts don't correspond to objective reality but are contexts nonetheless)? Those are the sorts of difficulties I'm facing and hoping to marry with a philosophical point of view in one way or another, even if it means rejection. So I think I'm going to have my work cut out for me in this course   but the genie's out of the bottle now so it's now a driving desire to get to work on these epistemological questions, and see where I stand philosophically.

Do you mind if I reply to the rest of your post another time? Because replying to this part took a lot longer than expected   and I have other things to do.