Every single one of them is. Every. single. one.
Religious people have god; God’s just there, chilling, always. Philosophers have laws of logic; just there, chilling, always have been. Even scientists may have areas that aren’t open to question or exploration, like external world realism as a base assumption.
To your point, it’s really not. Nothing that you can point to is anything like the universe. You can’t build an inductive argument from X-class of things and then apply it to Y-class of things, when there’s no connection. They are different in kind. And that’s because----here’s the point of the argument----the universe is not a ‘thing’, which the argument requires we treat it as. Logically speaking, the universe is the set of all things.
The idea that “nothing brought it about” (aka “uncaused”) is an absurd notion given by those who either cannot think or simply don’t want to. If anything in the universe is uncaused, then the entire universe is completely unpredictable and thus all thought is completely pointless and Science is completely meaningless. A cause is merely a description of the necessary state in order to bring about a particular effect. If you can get the effect without regard to the prior state, the effect can and will show up anywhere at any time without regard to size, shape, interval, or anything. The entire universe would be pure chaos with no discernible entities within it. There would be no universe nor you to be talking about it.
Do you mean that you want to discuss your mistakes in assessment? Well, okay.
I’ll give you that the first statement uses the word “cause” in the rhetorical sense (due to a prior discussion I was having), but in this sense (to be pedantic) should really have referred to the prior state rather than the description of that state. But that falls into the category of “you know what I meant”.
That is entirely illogical.
Look up “cause” in the dictionary.
“Cause” as a term implies “effect”. It has no other meaning than “that which leads to an effect”.
There are no discrete objects, only states. So every thing is a state.
Perhaps you’re entirely new to physics, in that case your platonic belief is forgivable.
Mo has a very interesting take on philosophy. It’s all got to do with language in the sense of what you say when you actually mean something else, but actually mean that you mean what you say but differently, actually as the opposite but an ironic version of that, so that in the end you’re always saying precisely what you didn’t say, except… I think it’s from reading so much Wittgenstein that he gets this skill.
I was actually thinking that he might go into the thought (common in quantum physics) that things can pop into reality causelessly. That is provably impossible (to logical minds anyway).
The lightning strike is only a cause to what it is a cause of.
But you’d be saying that a lightning strike was cause to a fire that it didn’t cause because it could have caused it.
I can see what you mean, yes… but Mo seems to do it more deliberately and so arrives at more outlandish results.
That’s not a justification of his statement. Someone can certainly hold and defend the view that “cause and effect” is a construct and that there is in reality no difference between the two but that all is flux and continuum and one. But you simply can’t use the word “cause” without implying “to an effect”.
Von, it’s technically inappropriate to refer to dictionaries for definitions when conducting discourse. I mean…you know that right? What you’re supposed to do is explain what you mean by a term, or use jargon which has a universally accepted definition.