Since the election, I have been deep into reading
Spinoza… mostly as a form of denial… anyway,
one of the ideas that flow from Spinoza, is this
idea or principle of Sufficient Reason… PSR…
PSR is the basis of Spinoza’s philosophy, as well
as it is also the basis of Leibnitz philosophy…
and the principle basically says that
‘‘Everything must have a reason or a cause’’…
this history of this principle is that it has existed
for centuries… various philosophers have used
PSR including Anaximander, Archimedes, Plato,
Aristotle, Aquinas, to name a few philosophers
before Spinoza who used PSR…
PSR: for every entity X, if X exists, then there is
sufficient explanation for why X exists… even
if we don’t know the reason… as is the case most
of the time…and therein lies the problem with PSR…
it is an assumption because it is an assumption
that there is a sufficient explanation EVEN if we
don’t know that explanation… even if we don’t know
that explanation… that is an assumption…
as it is pretty clear that we do not and cannot
ever know all explanations for events such as X…
Which is to say, that there lies the possibility that
random, chance events could exist in the universe
with no explanation at all… no matter how hard we tried,
that there might not be an explanation for certain actions,
brings us to the fact that the universe is, at least in part,
random and by nature, full of chance… that actions, events
could occur randomly, by chance, and we must accept
that possibility…
Another idea is this idea… ‘‘ex nihilo nihil fit’’
which is Latin for "out of nothing, comes nothing’‘’
which is to say, out of nothing, nothing be created…
but that sports fans, is also an assumption…
we, because of our limited faculties/senses/knowledge,
cannot in fact know if nothing can come from nothing…
it is nothing more than a possibility, but not a certainty…
We live in a strange universe and something coming from
nothing wouldn’t shock me at all… our problem lies in
the fact that we assume that the physical laws of gravity,
evolution, thermodynamics, all exists universally,
that there is no part of the known universe where those
law/rules don’t exist… but point in case, is that we cannot
know if those laws/rules are universal… we can assume,
but we can’t know… I don’t see how we can make,
for example, gravity a universal law, if we don’t even
understand how gravity works…
Until we become sure, epistemological positive, that
universal laws exist and gravity is one those universal
laws, we must hold that all laws/rules of the universe,
gravity, thermodynamics, evolution, entropy, are local laws/rules,
not universal rules… universal laws/rules may well exists,
but we can’t assume that they exists…
Kropotkin