The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001)

Some philosophers get into this mess by starting from the assumption that there must be something more than the physical universe, so that it somehow "makes sense". With that bias, you get things like this paper. Plus a big chunk of theology.

ythn• 8 years ago

You have that problem with any theory, not just religious ones. You could argue that God was created the same way we were - by another God. Which eventually leads to "Gods have always existed", which is similar to Big Bang's problem of "matter has always existed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anythi...

GW1509142• 8 years ago

It’s similar only if you misunderstand the questions physics seeks to answer. “If we rewind time according to present observations and theories, what do we see?” The answer is a Big Bang event, but that is just the answer to the question posed, not the deeper one posed by the wiki article. If you ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” physics has no single clear answer. Science takes very limited questions and seeks to answer them in a limited fashion with a high degree of confidence. Metaphysics plays word games with philosophy because hey, who can really gainsay you? Maybe it’s D-Branes, maybe it’s eternal inflation, maybe it’s the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The problem is that popular science and people who don’t know better misunderstand the nature of what physics actually does and tries to shoehorn theories into the questions they want answered.

darkmighty• 8 years ago

I understand the consideration that this Universe is all that exists. But isn't that... weird? That there's no 'why' to this particular existence? We could be much more complicated if you consider all possible things that could exist. Is it simply senseless to ask 'why this'?

This view is argued here by Sean Carroll: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02231

Personally, I'm not convinced, although I see the merits of the argument.

Of course as you noted, if you simply assume a parent system you get into an infinite that may or may not be reasonable (the parent system must have a parent, and so on, an infinite stack of parents; this infinite stack of parents also lies in another infinite stack, and so on). I think the only possible alternative to brute fact is to just assume everything exists, to different extents. Then after a lot of handwaving you can sort of explain why the universe is kinda simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

I haven't picked a side, but I have to say I'm more weirded out by the proposition that this is everything that exists than the proposition that essentially everything exists.

joshuaheard• 8 years ago

The link in the article to the institute was broken. Here is an updated link: https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/

Interesting the institute calls itself "Ammonius", not A.M. Monius. And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.

antonvs• 8 years ago

And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.

The Slate article is a republishing of a Lingua Franca article from 2001. Author identification was presumably only added after the author's cover was blown.

The 2000 and 2007 versions of the document don't mention his name. The acknowledgements in the 2010 version mention his brother, Dr. Michael Sanders, and the included review by Zimmerman mentions the author's name.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

If you look at archive.org, you can see even in 2012(after Marc Sanders had passed), the website did not out the author: https://web.archive.org/web/20120213033702/https://www.comin...

tlarkworthy• 8 years ago

I wanted to see if anyone ever cited him, seems not [1].

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22C...

The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001)

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