A New Argument Against Causal Finitism

Here I discuss a new companions in guilt argument against causal finitism. What do you make of it?

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro & Outline
2:41 Key terms
6:48 The companions in guilt argument
7:09 Premise (1)
8:28 Premise (2)
28:35 General response #1
31:47 General response #2
36:03 Why I’m not a causal finitist
56:07 Conclusion

RESOURCES

(1) Want access to the script? Become a patron :)

(5) My book, "Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs", is not yet out. But it might be out by the end of the year... Woo!

THE USUAL LINKS

[MajestyofReason]

Join the Majesty of Reason Discord! Link:


ALSO: At 27:10, the conclusion should say “So, infinite causal DEPENDENCE among…”, NOT “So, infinite causal regresses among…”

[rickskeptical]

"Philosophy and Reason - I hardly knew thee" ought to be engraved on my headstone when I go.
Lost count of how many times I backed up the video to clarify my muddled mind, still I enjoyed the video (masochist?)
And to think that I once thought that my basic Philosophy classes were some of my favorites.

[beertje]

21:00 Small annotation (I am not sure if this affects ur argument) Q the set of all rational numbers does not include infinity as it is not an integer. The problem that I have is that with most religious arguments use infinity as a countable conclusion to their regression. If u count a series of rational numbers u will never reach infinity even if u count an infinite numbers. Infinite is much more of a mathematical concept and i feel like people skip due diligence when they use it colloquially. Very often because its convenient or to dazzle people with how hard it is to grasp.

[joshuabrecka]

This is amazing work!

Also, ya the grad school app. fees can be staggering. But that juicy NYU or Rutgers (Princeton and ND too I assume) stipend will make all of those fees look like chump change... I'm excited to hear about your application successes. Good luck!

[tieferforschen]

Great argument. Let me try some rebuttals:

-- Premise (2) reason #1:
We could respond by simply stating that omiscience does not require knowing all truths simultaneously, but only the ability to know any particular truth at any time. This way, not all knowledge is actual in God's mind/consciousness simultaneously and therefore, there don't exist infinitely many things in God's mind/consciousness. On this view, God is also not required to have knowledge about every future state already in his mind, but he is still able to have knowledge about any future state which he chooses to think about. So, not all possible knowledge of all future states is actual at the same moment in God's mind and this seems to be not in violation of dependence finitism. The same argument goes for infinitely many ideas. You might think: "Oh but then there are things God has never thought of." And you were right. But I don't see how this would be problematic for most types of theism. Since God will think of these things, if he chooses to.

I would also deny that knowing something depends on all possible truths that can make you know that thing, but only on any amount of sufficient truths.
For example: I know that I am in Germany right now. It is true, that I am in Germany. It is also true, that I am currently in Remscheid (town in Germany). It is additionally true, I am currently in North-Rhine Westphalia (state in Germany). Me knowing that I am in Germany does not depend on all these truths. It just depends on any truth that makes my belief true. So, my knowledge only depended on any sufficient truth or amount of truths (and not all possible truths), that could give that knowledge.


-- Premise (2) reason #2:
My objections will be very similar as my objections were to reason #1. God is perfectly rational given the knowledge he holds in his mind. Hence he does not hold all knowledge at the same time, but only sufficiently enough knowledge. He makes zero logical or rational errors during his decision processes. I also see here no violation of dependence finitsm. "But doesn't this imply that God has not thought every possible thought about which world to bring about before bringing it about." Yes, that is implied. But again. I think most types of theism do not imply or require this.

-- Premise (2) reason #3:
It seems to me that I only need to reject the idea of infinitely small units. Obviously, you can always think of a smaller unit. But you can never think of an infinitely small unit. And therefore, there is never dependence on time or space steps indefinitely for any particular movement or change. If you think that the fact that we can always think of a smaller units proves that there is an infinitely small unit, then we could simply reject that and argue for an extremely small base unit. The unit is way smaller than any device could ever possibly measure and it is so small that all our math and physics work perfectly fine. Also, computer simulations have base units, too and we can see this as analogous to the real world.

Additionally, we could propose an observer related smallest base unit. Meaning, the closer we look, the smaller the base unit gets. This also avoids any kind of infinity. This is also how any possible virtual world could ever do it. It is in principle impossible to have a virtual world with infinitely small base units that can be calculated by any computer that is physically possible. Which might be a hint that the real world is similar.

-- Premise (2) reason #4:
As you said, you can go with nominalism. Or you could simply state that only a finite amount of numbers exists and all the other numbers are just variations/combinations of these base numbers. But I am not confident about that idea. But if it is true that e.g. all numbers are just combinations of the numbers "-1" and "1" (or something along those lines) then you only need to believe that these two numbers are real and all other numbers are just different applications of these "base numbers" by minds. So some base numbers would be real and the rest would be contingent on minds. But this is just some idea that comes from the top of my hat and might be completely bogus.

Hope these thoughts are helpful.
Appreciate your great work.
Keep on going!

[pesilaratnayake]

Hi Joe. Interesting argument. A few concerns include:
1) the omniscience case using dependence of knowledge on infinitely many truths might be objected to as the following:
Any mathematical or logical truth appears to be dependent on a finite fundamental set of axioms. For example, I know that "there exists a prime p greater than natural number n" for all (countably infinitely many) n in natural numbers N. That is based on the truth of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and the proof of infinitely many primes, which are dependent on the finitely many axioms of our number system (Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory for example). Logic would likely boil down to finitely many axioms or laws, and if you can get to the existence of finitely many things to which logic can be applied you might be able to avoid infinite dependency.
I think you could argue this for non-arbitrarily generated sets, as we typically use in mathematics. But you could argue that maybe an omniscient being must actively know the greatest common divisor of all subsets S of the natural numbers, which would require its knowledge to be dependent on infinitely many facts. A temporal being can process a set to determine this (at least for some subsets), but one that is not temporal may not be able to use more fundamental ideas to process dependent ideas since processing seems to require some kind of sequence of events - and therefore may need to know all truths without using fundamental ideas to come to know them.
2) I think this is solid, although it seems weird to accept that God has infinite foreknowledge. You could argue that heaven is timeless so everyone is frozen in a moment, but that may be heretical. A theist may also believe that the physical world will end when Jesus's returns, but I'm not a Christian so I don't know that well.
3) I don’t know for sure, but many continuous theories are successful because they deal with approximations much larger than the discreteness of the system. So if GR and QFT haven't been tested close enough to Planck scales, we won't know whether they support space-time continuity. Like if we approximate sand pouring through an hourglass as a fluid, it works pretty well at predicting how long the sand will take, but is insufficient at modelling exactly how they move
4) I think we could attempt to use something like 0 and 1 exist, and the successor function exists, then you get infinitely many natural numbers from 3 things and finitely many fundamental relations. Same criticism to this as in 1.

Good work though. Hope this gives something to consider

[guilerso]

I can tell you how that video came in such a right time, dude. I was asking myself this TODAY, lmao

[HyperFocusMarshmallow]

Listening to someone laying out philosophy well (like you do) makes me want to listen at a slower speed because you talk quite fast. But it also makes me want to listen at a higher speed, because every little detail is twisted and turned in so many ways that I risk getting bored if it's not moving forward. The fact that you do it well enough that I enjoy the compromise of 1x is some sort of compliment, hopefully!

[karlnauman]

Thanks for this video! It’s plausible that a bit of knowledge wouldn’t depend on anything that wasn’t explanatorily prior to it. (Even if that knowledge was about a fact not explanatorily prior to that knowledge.) One’s knowledge of the endless future (and even the beginningless past) could be deduced from knowledge of only two facts. As soon as this person knew a fact X and also knew the only possible timeline given X, he would know the endless future (and the beginningless past). That way he could know the endless future without the future being explanatorily prior to his knowledge. Then it would be plausible that his knowledge of those infinitely many facts would not depend on infinitely many facts. And so, even granting dependence finitism, he could know the endless future.

[goclbert]

Your image depicting dependence could be thought of as a partial order (look up partially ordered sets on Wikipedia). Then we would call the diagram you drew a Hasse Diagram. The proposition of linear causal finitism could then be phrased as: There exists a finite set of elements called "least causes" {L} which is a subset of all causes {C}. It must satisfy the following property: For all l in L and all c in C\L (read as C without L), l ≤ c.

[calebp]

Every time I think I have the Kalam’s soundness figured out, Joe comes back! Based :)

[JoeDiPilato]

Hey Joe! Interesting argument.
I wonder if one of the distinctions between causal finitism and dependence finitism is that dependence finitism can be false for cases of actual infinites (non-diverging, bound infinities. E.g. real numbers between 0-1), but causal finitism wouldn’t generally interact with bound infinities, since the the bound-infinity may still require grounding outside the bounds. If there can be realized bound-infinities, but not realized unbound-infinities (numbers above 0), perhaps this is a key distinction that breaks symmetry.

[averagejoe]

Haven’t watched the video yet, but I had to comment on how much Joe in the thumbnail looks like Tom Holland and Ed Sheeran had a kid 🤣

[HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

When you call premises 1 star, 2 star, 3 star.... I feel like I'm listening to a hotel review channel :D :D

[dmitrysamoilov]

Observe the asymptotic structure of the graph y = 1/x. Time could have an "origin" (the asymptote) while simultaneously having infinite (infinitesimal) causality.

[pedrolopez-torrestubbs]

Really enjoy your videos....good job :)

[davisdahlberg]

Great video! Good luck with the applications. I would also think that a circle would be causally dependent on the fact that it has an infinite amount of sides?

[steveg]

"Companions in guilt"

I haven't heard this term before, but in basic logic, if A implies B, and we know (or discover) that B is false, then we automatically know that A is false. And where there are chains (A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, D implies E - and we know that E is false, this disproves the entire chain - but only backwards from the point at which we learn that the point is false (i.e., if E also implies F, knowing that E is false doesn't say anything about F). In parallel, this doesn't work: If A implies B, and A implies H, and A implies L, if we know that B is false, this proves that A is false, but doesn't tell us anything about H or L.

And then there's this one: If A and B taken together implies M, then if we know that M is false, then A might be false (but not necessarily), or B might be false (but not necessarily), both could be false. In other words, they can't both be true.

I also like "proof by the opposite implying a logical contradiction." In other words, we have some proposition A. We then explore the implications of "not-A, " and discover some chain of logical implications of "not A" that imply a logical contradiction, which disproves "not A, " thus implying that A is true.

I'd had Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry prior to this, but Number Theory was where I truly came to see the beauty of logical reasoning. And Abstract Algebra after that was just icing on the cake.

[jordanstacy]

@MajestyofReason, I have to know your thoughts on this:
Cause and Effect are inherently temporal
-To be the cause of an effect you must be a part of time
-For what caused the effect of causing the universe?
-If a causer was uncaused, then its thoughts / actions must have causes, ad infinitum
To be outside of time is to be void of cause and effect
-in a timeless state of no change, no thoughts, no desires
-for thoughts and desires are based on cause and effect, i.e. temporal
The universe and the cause of the universe couldn't have began simultaneously
-Something can't come from nothing
-Both are caused by something that had to be caused

An uncaused causer falls into the same logical paradoxes as an infinite causal chain

problem with infinite regression paradoxes = relativity / human POV? There's some assumption or missing piece that I can't figure out.
infinity must be possible for a universe to exist
either universe has causal chain, or God has causal chain

[worldsalvatony]

If time is emergent and doesn’t exist fundamentally. Even if causal finitism is true, the universe can be eternal, if we define it as the totality of what exist. Because causation is a relationship between spatio-temporal events (See the metaphysics of causation from standford online encyclopedia of philosophy). There is existence independent of time, because from this existence time emerges. And that existence wouldn’t entail causal infinitism.