[FRIAM] more modal realism

[Eric Charles]

This always struck me as such a weird discussion. I've had people try to
drag me into it a few times.

If there was ever the slightest change that  something could come from
nothing, and nothing was around for long enough, eventually something would
come from it.

But, I think the better point is something like: While I don't know how
many of the "possible worlds" might exist... I can assure you that all of
them in which someone asks "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
are worlds in which there is something.

So even if the vast majority of the possible worlds had nothing, it would
still be true that 100% of the worlds in which people-in-bars asked such
questions, would be worlds with something.


<echarles at american.edu>


On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 12:31 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
>
> We see something like this in evolutionary justifications of various
> phenotypic traits, the most egregious being evolutionary psychology, but
> including Nick's hyena penis and the ontological status of epiphenomena.
> Yes, I'm posting this in part because of EricC's kindasorta Voltaire-ish
> response to what might seem like my Leibnizian defense of bureaucracy. But
> I'm also hoping y'all could help with the question I ask later.
>
> Of course, I'm more on Spinoza's (or Lewis') side, here, something closer
> to a commitment to the existence of all possible worlds. I'm in a running
> argument at our pub salon about the metaphysical question "Why is there
> something, rather than nothing?" My personal answer to that question,
> unsatisfying to the philosopher who asked it, is that this is either a
> nonsense question *or* it relies fundamentally on the ambiguity in the
> concepts of "something" and "nothing". Every denial of the other proposed
> answers (mostly cosmological) involves moving the goal posts or invoking
> persnickety metaphysical assumptions that weren't laid out when the
> question was asked. ... it's just a lot of hemming and hawing by those who
> want to remain committed to their own romantic nonsense.
>
> But a better answer might be something like: Because the size of the set
> of possible worlds where there is something is *so much larger* than the
> size of the set of worlds where there is nothing. And one might even argue
> that all the possible worlds where there is nothing are degenerate,
> resulting in only 1 possible world with nothing. [⛧]
>
> I don't think this is a probabilistic argument. But I'm too ignorant to be
> confident in that. Can any of you argue one way or the other? Is this
> argument from size swamping probabilistic, combinatorial? Or can I take a
> Lewisian stance and assert that all the possible worlds do, already, exist
> and this is just a numbers thing?
>
>
> [⛧] This is not my own metaphysics, assuming that's stable, which is ...
> uh ... semi-monist (?) ... maybe pseudo-monist ... along the lines of an
> open-ended, increasing degrees of freedom universe ... whatever that might
> turn out to mean.
>
> --
> glen
> Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
>
>
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