Fairy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2024 8:52 am
What do you think about that? To me, it seems I cannot get beyond the instantaneous moment of awareness here now.
Experientially, I agree: we can’t get past our present moment, perhaps. But cognitively, logically, empirically, we can: we simply have to look at the present evidence, and make inductive judgments about what it most plausibly indicates.
And there’s nothing particularly weird about that. After all, detectives often view a crime scene and make estimations of what has happened, and how it was done, and arrive at some sound judgments about what causes, effects and so on were in play. Likewise, historians routinely look at artifacts, present arrangements, documents, narratives, and such, and inductively conclude that the most likely explanation is that the Napoleonic Wars or the crossing of the Rubicon actually happened.
All I’m saying is that we can use the present evidence in the universe to make the same sort of judgment: what’s the most reasonable explanation for the data before us in the present moment?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 11:39 pmAnd we could begin by breaking the possible candidates down into two: either the universe “just happened,” or it was produced by a super-intelligent First Cause. The first candidate, in other words, is random chance, and the second is some sort of intentionality.
How does the evidence look to you?
So lets think about this now. It is obviously clear that there does appear to be an intelligence at work here. Indeed, there are right now manifesting ''thoughts'' being generated about the idea there could be a super-intelligence that is capable of intent. Maybe an intelligence that generates meaning, purpose and specific design plans. Yes, it does seem like that is the case.
Okay. What makes that so “obvious” or so “manifest”?
However, this evidence can only be known now, in space and time. So, that still leaves the question of how this intelligence was possible at all. Do you see the problem? isn't the HOW just more of the hard question of consciousness. And yes, it is obviously self-evident without doubt or error that there is some consciousness capable of understanding the concepts of intention, meaning, purpose, and design. But is this self-awareness actually present at it's own conception of itself, was the actual cause of the universe known to itself in the exact moment of conception, was the universe aware of the very beginning of it's own birth, was there conscious awareness at the very beginning of the universe that was aware the universe had indeed happened?
I think that is what you were implying IC, when you mentioned a 'first candidate' must have been present to have caused the birth of the universe?
The question of “how” the First Cause exists cannot be answered, of course…because if it requires us to suppose the First Cause had some cause, then it’s self-contradicting nonsense: how can a “first” cause have the necessity of any “prior” cause? But the problem is really in the question, not in the absence of the answer: the question itself turns out to be the nonsense, because it defeats itself suppositionally.
Your second-last question, I don’t pretend to understand. I can’t quite make out its meaning, or at least what issue it’s trying to probe. So I can’t say that I was “implying” it, as you suggest. What I can say is that we already know, for certain, that the universe had to have SOME First Cause, and we’re discussing whether or not, on the basis of evidence, we think we can suppose it to be an intelligence.
I hear you as saying you think it “obvious” that it was intelligence. If so, then you’re at the concept “God.” The next question, if I could put it this way, would be “What KIND of God,” or better still, “What is the nature of the God who created the universe?” And for that, we’d need another strategy again.
Well, some of us seem to…