Principe de raison suffisante
(principle of sufficient reason)
philosophie métaphysique CTMU note-fouillis
Christopher Langan
NOTE
Question: “If one accepts the Principle of Sufficient Reason as true, does that mean they naturally must accept the existence of God vis a vis cosmological arguments?”
Answer: That all depends on what one means by “reason” and “sufficient” (for the inference of a judgment about reality).
Because in this case the judgment to be made is metaphysical, a metaphysical understanding of reality is assumed.
Reason means “correct logical inference about, by, and within this metaphysical understanding”.
Sufficient means “(validating a judgment) without reliance on anything else”, or “relying on nothing outside of itself (to validate the judgment)“. The same applies to the assumed metaphysical understanding of reality; it must be self-contained or “self-sufficient”.
There is just one ontically and epistemically self-contained understanding of reality: the CTMU. Hence, “sufficient reason” in this case means “contained in and exclusively reliant on the CTMU”.
When it comes to logically establishing the existence of God by any argument whatsoever, whether ontological, cosmological, or teleological, there’s just one game in town: the CTMU.
No CTMU, no scientific theology, ever.
— Langan, CTMU FB Group (2023, December 28)
NOTE
**Comment: “**As I understand it, the existence of the universe can’t be a brute fact because this violates the principle of sufficient reason.”
Response: Reality exists by coupling with its own consciousness: it is that which manifests consciousness while serving as the object of consciousness. Existence and consciousness are “brute facts” because they are conditions of experience for every telor, and experience is the basis from which reality theory is developed.
Question: “Is consciousness a brute fact in the CTMU?”
Answer: Consciousness is a quantum property which characterizes id-operators, the points of the CTMU conspansive manifold. It is inescapable.
Question: “Does this violate the principle of sufficient reason?”
Answer: Reality is self-contained. Hence, the universe is its own sufficient reason. Ontic closure is a CTMU meta-axiom.
**Question: “**If consciousness is a brute fact, why can’t the universe also stand as one?”
Answer: It can, and does. (I don’t know what gave you the idea that it couldn’t.) The syntactic metaverse, not just the physical universe, is the primary quantum of the CTMU.
Comment: “This question in not meant to be a criticism of the CTMU.”
That’s good, son. That’s real good. Now go do some homework.
Comment: “If this helps provide context, I had thought that you had juxtaposed the idea that the universe simply exists as a brute fact with the idea that it required an explanation in ANKORT, but I just checked the document and the term “brute” is not in there. Some sort of Mandela effect, perhaps from some similar phrasing somewhere else.”
Response: The answer to the question depends on how one defines “brute fact”. Reality is a “brute fact” in the sense that it is given by consciousness of one’s existence - there’s no getting out of “cogito ergo sum”, as those steeped in absurd modern academic philosophy sometimes try to do.
On the other hand, reality has internal degrees of freedom which disarm the “brute” aspect of its existence. It did not have to be what it presently is; another possible configuration, one other than the one we now see, could have been actualized instead.
As for interpreting “brute” to mean “given from without” - as when it describes something forced on us from some external domain - that’s a violation of ontic closure.
Comment: “Mind, subjective, and conscious are often-used words, but questioning what normal people identify (“to identify” being a related term) as referents of these terms could help them a lot in discovering the CTMU, I conjecture.”
Response: Right. Mind = id-operator (usually a telor); subjective = “inside an id-operator” (characterizing its internal state); conscious = “functioning as an id-operator” (by conspansive / telic-recursive iteration), as described in the papers.
— Langan, CTMU FB Group (2023, July 9)
NOTE
Comment: “Almost all atheists seriously entertain the idea that the universe is just an accident. In fact, that is their “go-to” hypothesis, and not one they are about to give up on.”
Dylan’s right about atheistic rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the atheists can take it straight to hell with them. There are no heavenly brownie points for willful idiocy.
“No reason” literally means “no cause”, which means that the so-called “effect” or phenomenon under consideration - or better yet, the event in which it is apprehended - happened without having been determined or selected in any way. But then why is it perceived instead of its negation? Obviously, in the apprehension of X, something has decided between X and not-X, and this suffices to rule out noncausation. Pushed to the limit where X = reality at large, the simultaneous apprehension of X and not-X would not only spell inconsistency, but annihilate the meaning of causation and thus the very possibility of science!
Of course, in the vaunted Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, an attempt is made to sidestep this problem by saying that X and not-X are indeed simultaneously apprehended, but that this massively parallel apprehension of all possibilities is neatly partitioned into many different universes. All worlds exist, and every observer is observing every one of them in which he/she exists, but not in the same conscious perception. Instead, there’s just one analogous perception for every universe … one that “decides the same event” with its own unique outcome (how an event can be “the same event” pending different outcomes in different universes is a tricky matter).
But not so fast. For in that case, the observer is cut up and distributed among the many universes, which negates the coherence of his/her identity. That is, it’s not really the same observer making all those observations, which means that we’re still stuck to explain why the one unique observer who happens to be observing X is not observing not-X instead. Moreover, it doesn’t explain the origin of the metaverse allegedly containing all of those universes and observers … or where X = the metaverse, why we have X instead of not-X. In short, the Many Worlds ploy simply doesn’t work as advertised.
But here’s the real problem. While Spinoza was a great philosopher and a much-needed philosophical counterweight for Descartes, and while Ms. Goldstein’s insight regarding the CTMU-like aspects of Spinoza’s work is impressive, let’s not forget that Spinozan metaphysics has always sported a few monstrous holes, starting with total determinacy and moral relativism. It’s simply missing too much structure, and too much of the structure that’s there has been misconstrued. Even if God has been piously recruited as stuffing for the holes, that does little good when the atheists are bent on putting holes in God Himself.
What a shame that Ms. Goldstein either never heard of me despite all that coverage, or couldn’t make heads or tails of my work if she did. Acadummia, Inc. - verily, it’s the dark little hole in which the World-Ostrich has been hiding its tiny atheist-materialist head!
May this goofy, gangling, and above all flightless bird get the cheek-popping mouthful of dirt that it so richly deserves. 😉
— Langan, CTMU FB Group (2018, April 16)