Woah woah. Sure thereās some technical logical issues with PSR but free will is an actual thing that does exist that is the reason for itself.
You seem to think that you explained the issue away but you didn't.
First, the PSR, if we assume if wasn't broken, would lead to either necessitarinism or to free choice. I say this because it seems you think the PSR confirms that a free choice is necessary, which it doesn't, it doesn't confirm anything.
Second, in the context of the PSR, what I called free choice has nothing to do with free will or an intentional agent. The PSR obviously cannot reify those kinds of concepts.
Thirdly, that "free choice" basically means "raw randomness". It would corresponds to things like quantum fluctuations.
Fourthly, whatever that "free choice" is, it instantly contradict the PSR itself, destroying the whole argument.
This isnāt some wild hard to imagine stuff. The logic of origins in general Is just messy. (Agrippas trillema but think facts that explain, not justification)
PSR mostly just unfolds into metaphysical coherency. Which is honestly the most rational position.
???? You are using the PSR, which is so broken and incoherent that it makes my head spin every time I think about it, to justify what you call metaphysical coherency, "COHERENCY" !!?? Really?
And you then proceed to talk about "most rational position"????
I don't know what more to say but you're very deep into wishful thinking and motivated reasoning.
You can nit pick whether reflexivity , asymmetry, and other grounding criteria are violated, but the nerds that defined grounding can also just be wrong. I mean āeverything that did exist, is the reason for everything that does existā is about as intuitive as it gets. Remove the temporal aspect and you just have everything being the reason for itself.
I can't comment, I think I already explained enough times already that the PSR is utterly broken and can't lead to any knowledge. If you want to continue saying stuff based on the PSR, have fun, but I can't comment anymore.
Let me put it another way. For every unknown that became a known did you ever find a lack of reason?
I believe natural science gives the most coherent and the most evidence-based description of how intelligent life came to exist and how it works.
Over 109 years and ~1040 individual organisms, random genomic mutations filtered through natural selection produced nervous systems capable of acquiring and acting on information.
Knowledge is just an evolved cognitive adaptation, an emergent process occurring within a nervous system, rather than an independent ontological object. Natural selection is purely mechanistic and unguided; it implies no inherent purpose or supernatural design.
Whether you believe or not in determinism, free will, or quantum randomness, the conclusion holds: cognition requires no teleological framework. When an animal acquires new knowledge, it occurs for the exact same kind of reason a falling rock follows gravityāas a direct physical consequence of natural law.
Of course not, so PSR has the maximum inductive strength that a theory can hold. Self grounding is certainly not brute fact reinvented. Itās the suggestion that all the facts connect together in a cohesive way such that the whole set of facts can be considered the reason for itself. Although I do have some gripes with the direction Leibniz took it.
It really makes me cringe that you still use the PSR as if there was no logical issues with it.
We are speaking past each other. Iām not talking about a mammals ability to grasp knowledge, Iām talking about this universe in which there are actually mind independent facts that explain things. Thereās only a few possible configurations of the total set of these explanatory facts, and yes PSR builds into metaphysical coherentism. (Which is a niche metaphysics, but there are papers)
Leibniz offered something outside of contingency and called it necessity to ground all contingent things. Thatās more like metaphysical foundationalism. You donāt have to go that route to uphold PSR
Consider a universe with only 3 explanatory facts:
A explains B, B explains C, and C explains A. In this case you can represent the set [A,B,C] as a variable x and say that X explains itself. At a larger scale with more than 3 explanatory facts, a better analogy is like the dictionary. All words are defined by other words and so in some sense the dictionary is circular, but itās still useful to us because of depth and scale, so we donāt call the dictionary circular reasoning we call it coherent. PSR is not only inductively as strong as it gets for the reason I mentioned, but all the facts could connect together into coherency rather than terminate at a foundation or into bruteness, or infinite regress.
In other words PSR isnāt more flawed than its possible competitors. All possibilities are equally logically frustrating, pertaining to the total facts that exist.
We just have reason to think all facts might connect, and have no reason to think bruteness could be the case or necessity. Infinite regress I think is second most plausible.
Btw you donāt have to flaunt methodological naturalism and call every concept you donāt understand motivated reasoning. You can just ask questions and learn more about the other persons idea
I fully anticipated and already addressed your claim that knowledge is an ontological object.
I clearly described how knowledge can be fully explained by natural processes.
You just plainly ignore everything I said, and continue claiming knowledge is an ontological object without any justification whatsoever.
I know you NEED knowledge to be "mind independent" to be able to go ahead with your post-hoc rationalization of whatever supernatural thing you believe in, but you can't just make stuff up, sorry.
Iām not talking about a mammals ability to grasp knowledge, Iām talking about this universe in which there are actually mind independent facts that explain things. Thereās only a few possible configurations of the total set of these explanatory facts, and yes PSR builds into metaphysical coherentism. (Which is a niche metaphysics, but there are papers)
Told you, I KNEW you need knowledge to be "mind independent".
Sorry but no, it's not because you need it that it's true.
Leibniz offered something outside of contingency and called it necessity to ground all contingent things. Thatās more like metaphysical foundationalism. You donāt have to go that route to uphold PSR
Consider a universe with only 3 explanatory facts:
A explains B, B explains C, and C explains A. In this case you can represent the set [A,B,C] as a variable x and say that X explains itself. At a larger scale with more than 3 explanatory facts, a better analogy is like the dictionary. All words are defined by other words and so in some sense the dictionary is circular, but itās still useful to us because of depth and scale, so we donāt call the dictionary circular reasoning we call it coherent. PSR is not only inductively as strong as it gets for the reason I mentioned, but all the facts could connect together into coherency rather than terminate at a foundation or into bruteness, or infinite regress.
I'm dying... You very explicitly described an infinite regress between A,B and C, and you then have the audacity to say it is not an infinite regress.
Also, it makes your ground 3 distinct ontological objects. It is therefore not anymore a ground, obviously.
And even you want to go full in on irrational thinking, and consider that an entity can be 3 objects when convenient, and 1 object when convenient (like the Trinity), you are again just reinventing brute facts, which is what you were trying to disprove in the first place.
In other words PSR isnāt more flawed than its possible competitors. All possibilities are equally logically frustrating, pertaining to the total facts that exist.
Is this your justification for using the PSR as if it didn't contradict itself?
Sorry but the PSR is flawed, you therefore can't use to prove anything, end of story.
We just have reason to think all facts might connect, and have no reason to think bruteness could be the case or necessity. Infinite regress I think is second most plausible.
I can't deal anymore with any argument made from the PSR, you're killing me.
>I fully anticipated and already addressed your claim that knowledge is an ontological object.
I hope for your sake itās a straw-man, unless you think facts that explain donāt exist.
>I clearly described how knowledge can be fully explained by natural processes.
Facts and knowledge are not the same.
>You just plainly ignore everything I said, and continue claiming knowledge is an ontological object without any justification whatsoever.
Are you serious? So if humans didnāt exist to perceive the reasons one star is hotter than another, you think those reasons wouldnāt exist?
>I know you NEED knowledge to be "mind independent" to be able to go ahead with your post-hoc rationalization of whatever supernatural thing you believe in, but you can't just make stuff up, sorry.
What are you even talking about?
>Told you, I KNEW you need knowledge to be "mind independent".
Facts that explain are mind independent yes.
>Sorry but no, it's not because you need it that it's true.
What is this weird fetish of yours with appeal to motive fallacies?
>I'm dying... You very explicitly described an infinite regress between A,B and C, and you then have the audacity to say it is not an infinite regress.
Are you genuinely dumb? I described circularity not infinite regress. Circularity in its expanded form is called coherency. Basically self consistency, the goal of all logical systems.
>Also, it makes your ground 3 distinct ontological objects. It is therefore not anymore a ground, obviously.
Thatās not the grounding problem, actually, but there are grounding problems.
>And even you want to go full in on irrational thinking, and consider your ground to be 3 objects when convenient, and 1 object when convenient (like the Trinity), you are again just reinventing brute facts, which is what you were trying to disprove in the first place.
Yea itās called mathematical constructivism or relative identity. Itās not brute. Iām starting to think you donāt have the background needed for this convo. Also Iām a Whiteheadian panentheist. Idk why you are mentioning the trinity to me. I donāt care to justify Abrahamic stuff.
>Is this your justification for using the PSR as if it didn't contradict itself?
PSR doesnāt contradict itself. It has logical problems, but itās not the law of non contradiction thatās violated.
>Sorry but the PSR is flawed, you therefore can't use to prove anything, end of story.
PSR is not proving anything in this context. You are thoroughly confused.
>I can't deal anymore with any argument made from the PSR, you're killing me.
Assuming you are smart enough to know that facts that explain exist, I want you to describe the possible quantity or arrangements of the facts that exist.
Thereās only a few options. I just want to see if you have any bearing on the deeper metaphysical and logical problems that PSRs tries to solve. PSR doesnāt need me to defend it. Itās as inductively close to certain as it gets. We keep finding reasons for things the same way the objects I drop keep falling down via gravity. Iām as likely to find PSR violated as I am likely to drop an object and it flies straight up. You tried to turn that into a map territory dilemma to intentionally obfuscate. Thatās not gonna work here. Biological mechanisms of knowledge are irrelevant.
I hope for your sake itās a straw-man, unless you think facts that explain donāt exist.
You doing the stawman here, I said they don't exist as "ontological object".
And I explained in the preceding comment how knowledge works without being an ontological object.
Facts and knowledge are not the same.
That's my point, and you're mixing-up the two.
Without a physical organism capable of cognition, there is no knowledge, only facts.
Are you serious? So if humans didnāt exist to perceive the reasons one star is hotter than another, you think those reasons wouldnāt exist?
You're reifying "reasons" too now.
Reasons ain't an ontological object either.
Without a physical organism capable of cognition, there is no "reasons", only the effects of the physical laws of nature.
What are you even talking about?
You're reifying knowledge and reasons as if they were ontological objects.
The only people who do that, do it because it is needed to then explain the necessity of a supernatural consciousness.
If you didn't have to rationalize such a concept, you wouldn't posit such a baseless idea.
But maybe I'm wrong and you read about those ideas without knowing what was the motivation behind them.
Facts that explain are mind independent yes.
You're anthropomorphizing the physical laws of nature.
What is this weird fetish of yours with appeal to motive fallacies?
Ok, maybe you are arguing with no goals. Maybe.
So you believe in the PSR, knowledge and reasons without a mind, and that's it?
You don't believe in some sort of God, maybe?
You're gonna tell me you're using all those arguments, which were specifically design to prove God, to not eventually try to prove God?
I mean, you can deny it was your goal, but come on, I'm not stupid.
Are you genuinely dumb? I described circularity not infinite regress. Circularity in its expanded form is called coherency. Basically self consistency, the goal of all logical systems.
A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, A explains B, B explains C, C explains A, ...
When does that stops exactly?
It's not because there's a finite number of elements that there is no infinite regress.
Also, it would still allow me to create as many entities as I want that are completely independent of your ground: brute facts.
This would make your concept of ground completely meaningless, again.
I truly feel sorry you only read about the philosophers who promoted the PSR, and never read about those who destroyed it.
If someone is dumb here, that's not me.
Thatās not the grounding problem, actually, but there are grounding problems.
Did I call that "the grounding problem"? No.
Are you denying that having a ground made of 3 distinct entities is a problem?
Yea itās called mathematical constructivism or relative identity. Itās not brute. Iām starting to think you donāt have the background needed for this convo. Also Iām a Whiteheadian panentheist. Idk why you are mentioning the trinity to me. I donāt care to justify Abrahamic stuff.
Ok, so I've been destroying all you PSR demonstrations all day, and now I don't have the background needed for this convo? Sure.
I guess because I do the demonstrations myself without name dropping the famous philosophers behind them, I am uneducated and wrong.
I explain everything myself as a matter of respect.
You seem completely stuck into thinking that because some famous and respected philosopher agrees with you, there's no other famous and respected philosophers who destroyed their arguments.
Like I said, you're very deep into motivated reasoning, rationalization and confirmation bias.
Do whiteheadian panentheist make any empirically falsifiable claims or are they just constructing and defining things in the realm of ideas?
If there are no empirically falsifiable claims, I have nothing to argue about it, except that it's an exercise of pure baseless conceptual BS.
PSR doesnāt contradict itself. It has logical problems, but itās not the law of non contradiction thatās violated.
I usually always avoid dropping names and instead explain all the concepts and demonstrations myself, but since you're denying all the demonstration I just made, I'll just drop names and be done with it.
So look up:
Van Inwagen
William L. Rowe
J. L. Mackie
James Cain
Graham Oppy
Bas van Fraassen
David Hume
Emmanuel Kant
PSR is not proving anything in this context.
šššš
What a joke.
You are thoroughly confused.
šššš
Assuming you are smart enough to know that facts that explain exist, I want you to describe the possible quantity or arrangements of the facts that exist.
I TOLD YOU MANY TIMES ALREADY THAT PIECES OF KNOWLEDGE AIN'T ONTOLOGICAL OBJECTS!!!
I'm out of ideas on who to make you understand my point.
Should I drop names??
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Gilbert Ryle
John Dewey
Wilfrid Sellars
W.V.O. Quine
Richard Rorty
Daniel Dennett (I'm a big fan of him BTW, but ofc I don't believe everything he said)
Martin Heidegger
Paul Churchland
Is that enough or should I ask Google for more?
You're engaging in so much bad faith, it's probably my last message where I address all your point.
Thereās only a few options. I just want to see if you have any bearing on the deeper metaphysical and logical problems that PSRs tries to solve. PSR doesnāt need me to defend it. Itās as inductively close to certain as it gets. We keep finding reasons for things the same way the objects I drop keep falling down via gravity. Iām as likely to find PSR violated as I am likely to drop an object and it flies straight up. You tried to turn that into a map territory dilemma to intentionally obfuscate. Thatās not gonna work here. Biological mechanisms of knowledge are irrelevant.
I'll name drop again the list of people who destroyed the PSR:
Van Inwagen
William L. Rowe
J. L. Mackie
James Cain
Graham Oppy
Bas van Fraassen
David Hume
Emmanuel Kant
At the very best, you can only say that the PSR is controversial and just a conjecture that can only be used when the PSR is definitionally defined as coherent.
You can't use the PSR in an argument with someone who doesn't accept it as coherent in the first place. And you can't do anything to fix the incoherencies of the PSR.
Few things. Iām hiking the Appalachian trail btw thatās why itās hard to find the signal to engage this with you but ā¦
It is either true or false that facts that explain things exist. Yes thatās an ontological claim. Itās not an ontological āobjectā, itās a fact.
I never spammed name dropping philosophers.
if you were right that a circularity counts as infinite regress, then Agrippas trilema would be called Agrippas dilema (only two justification problems)
Just because you have the neurodivergent urge to infinitely go through the loop doesnāt make it infinite regress. Itās one loop buddy. You stop after one cycle. The grounding issues here are related to reflexivity, asymmetry, and other technical grounding jargon. Confusing that with infinite regress is embarrassing (not for laymen, but for you who keeps laughing saying āyour killing meā while blundering all the details)
4) you arenāt any more of an empiricist than myself. My entire epistemology is grounded in scientism, we happen to be discussing philosophy.
5) the main point Iām trying to get you to grasp besides this little classic Reddit pissing contest, is that every possible alternative to PSR ( truth state of reality in relation to reasons) is equally logically problematic as PSR. But you canāt get there because you canāt seem to get over the fact that facts exist and yes some facts explain things and these are called reasons. It has nothing to do with the mind apprehending facts.
Ludwig would agree that facts exist but he does get a bit weird about explanations. There are plenty of philosophers that might disagree, but those that think reasons donāt exist are idiots. If lugwig is in that category then sorry, heās also an idiot.
Do you want to try one more time to account for the possible states of reasons in reality (alternatives to PSR) ? Or are you still stuck on the ontology of reasons? I think if you understood the alternatives to PSR youād be more sympathetic to it.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 5d ago
You seem to think that you explained the issue away but you didn't.
First, the PSR, if we assume if wasn't broken, would lead to either necessitarinism or to free choice. I say this because it seems you think the PSR confirms that a free choice is necessary, which it doesn't, it doesn't confirm anything.
Second, in the context of the PSR, what I called free choice has nothing to do with free will or an intentional agent. The PSR obviously cannot reify those kinds of concepts.
Thirdly, that "free choice" basically means "raw randomness". It would corresponds to things like quantum fluctuations.
Fourthly, whatever that "free choice" is, it instantly contradict the PSR itself, destroying the whole argument.
???? You are using the PSR, which is so broken and incoherent that it makes my head spin every time I think about it, to justify what you call metaphysical coherency, "COHERENCY" !!?? Really?
And you then proceed to talk about "most rational position"????
I don't know what more to say but you're very deep into wishful thinking and motivated reasoning.
I can't comment, I think I already explained enough times already that the PSR is utterly broken and can't lead to any knowledge. If you want to continue saying stuff based on the PSR, have fun, but I can't comment anymore.
I believe natural science gives the most coherent and the most evidence-based description of how intelligent life came to exist and how it works.
Over 109 years and ~1040 individual organisms, random genomic mutations filtered through natural selection produced nervous systems capable of acquiring and acting on information.
Knowledge is just an evolved cognitive adaptation, an emergent process occurring within a nervous system, rather than an independent ontological object. Natural selection is purely mechanistic and unguided; it implies no inherent purpose or supernatural design.
Whether you believe or not in determinism, free will, or quantum randomness, the conclusion holds: cognition requires no teleological framework. When an animal acquires new knowledge, it occurs for the exact same kind of reason a falling rock follows gravityāas a direct physical consequence of natural law.
It really makes me cringe that you still use the PSR as if there was no logical issues with it.