Dear Ramon,

There are enough good points there for a significant paper and even a conference I would say! You open up all sorts of foundational issues. I am not sure where to start in response.

Maybe I should start by saying that I have confidence in the usefulness and sound construction of Leibniz's thinking about PSR. I also have a lot of respect for Schopenhauer but sometimes he slides away from the central ground. I think he did a good job in trying to undo the damage done by Kant to the legacy of Leibniz but I am not sure he quite got the clarity of Leibniz even so. I think his four aspects are a bit contrived. Then when it comes to contributors to SEP, I have no great confidence that we should follow what they say. Some are good but many dilute and confuse the meanings of the original thinkers.

For specific points:

1. I am not sure that Leibniz's PSR assumes that the reasons that govern the world are accessible to humans. I think he probably assumes that we fall very far short of that capacity. Spinoza seemed to equate the 'reason' of PSR with something we could understand as an explanation but the more I read of Spinoza the less cogent he seems. I think Leibniz learnt from Spinoza but mostly which false concepts to avoid.

2. To my mind PSR is like any other scientific hypothesis about the rule-like behaviour of the world. There would be no possibility of proving it or motivation to do so. One might DISPROVE it, Popper style, but otherwise it is just a 'let's see if this works as a premise' idea. I think philosophers tend to expect proofs of all sorts of things that scientists would not expect to prove. Most proofs I am aware of are demonstrations of tautologies or 'analytic' truths that may be initially obscure because of the clunky way our brains work - certainly that would seem to apply to mathematical proofs. 

3. I have recently had some exchanges with Richard Arthur about sufficient reason and Leibniz and have come to think that 'reason' for him has an interesting ontology that may not be clearly enunciated in either modern physics or philosophy. Richard and I agree that in a sense 'God' is the totality of reason (or reasons). Reason is sufficient in the sense that it will do the job (but other reasons might do the job so it may not be necessary) and as you say there is a subjective aspect to judging what is sufficient but I think this is merely an epistemological issue, not an ontological one. 

The tension comes when one tries to relate reason to cause. My feeling is that reason is a constraint on possibilities in terms of types, whereas cause is a constraint on possibilities in a token context. This is relevant in modern physics because 'wave functions' are actually type descriptors, not token descriptors. Type constraints have no time or place - they apply eternally (probably). Leibniz is enticed by Malebranche's occasionalism, which is a repeated token-sorting metaphysic, but he backs off and prefers a God that provides reasons for events, without reference to any specific time or place. This fits with the idea that God is not at a time or a place but I am intrigued by the possibility that it makes it hard for God to be a token, or substance. I think there is Pandora's box in here somewhere - and maybe that is in line with your own queries about the consistency of the establishment view of PSR. There are very likely some category mistakes lurking.

So I agree with your concerns. I might resolve them differently, but I think there is work to be done.

Although he may not have invented the term PSR is most closely associated with Leibniz. Leibniz's version of PSR already presages quantum uncertainty because he distinguishes necessity from possibility. PSR constrains what may happen but he is very clear that this constraint is not total - within it there are possibilities that dynamic units may take. He has a complex explanation for why there cannot in fact be total necessity for every detail of events, relating to the infinite complexity of the dynamics of the universe. The arguments involve issues both of logic and the mathematical issues of infinitesimals and can seem contrived but I am not convinced that they are wrong.

I am not sure where Godel comes in to this issue. And Leibniz may not have predicted randomness but that would be the default for possibilities within necessities.

As I understand it PSR is still pretty much the basis of our understanding of science. It simply requires that events are associated according to certain rules. Leibniz denies an intuitive concept of causation, rather as modern physics does. His dynamics is more in terms of co-contingency - if the world is a certain way then a particular dynamic element will evolve through time 'in harmony' with that way. That is pretty much what a Schrodinger equation says so he seems pretty up to the minute.

If we reject PSR I am not quite sure where we find ourselves, other than in a state of ignorance.

Jonathan´s interpretation of the PSR is close to Cournot's view about (relative) chance. Chance is the absence of a previous coordination among causes. In this sense, the existence of chance does not contradict the PSR. See the paper below for more discussion.

http://www4.pucsp.br/pos/tidd/teccogs/artigos/2009/edicao_1/3-a_cournotian_approach_to_the_emergence_of-relational_collectives-carlos_lungarzo-alfredo_pereira_junior.pdf

The similarity between Cournot and Leibniz's justification for leeway on necessity is indeed interesting, Alfredo. I guess I was interpreting Leibniz's justification for this leeway rather than the PSR itself but the similarity is certainly there. I hesitate to suggest that Leibniz was wrong about this leeway but I think his account does have some problems.

In one sense Leibniz seems to be saying that because the dynamics of the universe are infinitely complex there can be no formulable logical method for predicting every detail of how a dynamic element will progress. That might be true for us, but if God (the sufficient reason that guides everything which we might now simply call the laws of nature) has infinite understanding then the two infinities would seem to cancel out, with determinism being restored. Leibniz of course introduced the leeway on necessity to allow souls to have freedom so there is an argument for saying that he is fudging things for religious purposes.

Nevertheless, I think there IS an argument of this sort that holds, and which has been proven to hold by quantum theory. This is where I think there is a distinction between Cournot chance and the randomness of the behaviour of individual dynamic elements as in QM. Cournot chance is the co-occurrence of causes for which we can find no prior correlation. That is different from the randomness of effect in the context of a set of causes. My understanding is that if you have a metaphysics that involves individual (monadic) dynamic elements, as QM now does, and also Leibniz's law of continuity, which requires all dynamic behaviour to unfold continuously in relation to the spacetime metric, as QM now does, then you have to have randomness in order to preserve symmetries. I think Leibniz would probably have known this but it would not have suited his purpose in terms of allowing meaningful 'freedom' to emphasise it because it makes freedom spiritually trivial.

Dear Ramon,

There are enough good points there for a significant paper and even a conference I would say! You open up all sorts of foundational issues. I am not sure where to start in response.

Maybe I should start by saying that I have confidence in the usefulness and sound construction of Leibniz's thinking about PSR. I also have a lot of respect for Schopenhauer but sometimes he slides away from the central ground. I think he did a good job in trying to undo the damage done by Kant to the legacy of Leibniz but I am not sure he quite got the clarity of Leibniz even so. I think his four aspects are a bit contrived. Then when it comes to contributors to SEP, I have no great confidence that we should follow what they say. Some are good but many dilute and confuse the meanings of the original thinkers.

For specific points:

1. I am not sure that Leibniz's PSR assumes that the reasons that govern the world are accessible to humans. I think he probably assumes that we fall very far short of that capacity. Spinoza seemed to equate the 'reason' of PSR with something we could understand as an explanation but the more I read of Spinoza the less cogent he seems. I think Leibniz learnt from Spinoza but mostly which false concepts to avoid.

2. To my mind PSR is like any other scientific hypothesis about the rule-like behaviour of the world. There would be no possibility of proving it or motivation to do so. One might DISPROVE it, Popper style, but otherwise it is just a 'let's see if this works as a premise' idea. I think philosophers tend to expect proofs of all sorts of things that scientists would not expect to prove. Most proofs I am aware of are demonstrations of tautologies or 'analytic' truths that may be initially obscure because of the clunky way our brains work - certainly that would seem to apply to mathematical proofs. 

3. I have recently had some exchanges with Richard Arthur about sufficient reason and Leibniz and have come to think that 'reason' for him has an interesting ontology that may not be clearly enunciated in either modern physics or philosophy. Richard and I agree that in a sense 'God' is the totality of reason (or reasons). Reason is sufficient in the sense that it will do the job (but other reasons might do the job so it may not be necessary) and as you say there is a subjective aspect to judging what is sufficient but I think this is merely an epistemological issue, not an ontological one. 

The tension comes when one tries to relate reason to cause. My feeling is that reason is a constraint on possibilities in terms of types, whereas cause is a constraint on possibilities in a token context. This is relevant in modern physics because 'wave functions' are actually type descriptors, not token descriptors. Type constraints have no time or place - they apply eternally (probably). Leibniz is enticed by Malebranche's occasionalism, which is a repeated token-sorting metaphysic, but he backs off and prefers a God that provides reasons for events, without reference to any specific time or place. This fits with the idea that God is not at a time or a place but I am intrigued by the possibility that it makes it hard for God to be a token, or substance. I think there is Pandora's box in here somewhere - and maybe that is in line with your own queries about the consistency of the establishment view of PSR. There are very likely some category mistakes lurking.

So I agree with your concerns. I might resolve them differently, but I think there is work to be done.

I guess that my view is that PSR belongs to Leibniz. Having checked back, it seems fairly certain that he coined the term. A number of people say that Spinoza had the idea first but Spinoza's concept of the relation of reality to explanation, or conceivability seems to me simply wrong. I don't think Spinoza counts here. 

Leibniz's PSR explicitly includes contingency. Only God is necessary - that is what makes him unique. All other dynamic entities (monads) can only behave in a way that follows God's reasons. (Leibniz is devout but Einstein's version of God will do here.) The whole point of parting with Spinoza's idea that there is only one entity (God=Nature) was for Leibniz to be able to explain the apparent freedom of individual souls. For that to make any sense there must be scope for variability in the way individuals behave, within the constraint of reasons. 

It seems to me that philosophers, as they usually do, have hijacked a very reasonable scientific hypothesis by a very great theoretical physicist and made it into a monster. (Russell berated Leibniz for being too preoccupied with practicalities but the joke is on Russell. Leibniz's philosophy is for real life, not naval gazing.) What I think is of key interest is that PSR has contingency built in right from the start when it did not need to, and we now find in QM that contingency seems to be there. I am afraid I cannot make much sense of what Tegmark writes. If he denies any randomness I am not sure how he copes with QM. Meillasoux seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The more I read of Leibniz the more I sense that simply because he was that much more intelligent than the rest of us, he got most things right in 1714 despite having much less empirical evidence than we do now. And his conclusions involve very considerable subtlety , because he knew that things are actually rather complicated - especially when you consider the implications of the infinitesimal and the infinite.

If you are interested in reading Leibniz, and to be interested in PSR I think one has to go there first, then I would make some recommendations because he is so often misinterpreted. Woolhouse and Francks produced a nice edition of the major philosophical essays, most of which only take an hour or so after dinner to read. Richard Arthur has recently produced an excellent review of Leibniz's philosophy (just 'Leibniz') for a broad audience which I think gets rid of a lot of the myths. Dan Garber's book is also very helpful on detail but more to do with progression of his ideas. But my favourite reading is simply the final synthesis that is Monadology (included in Woolhouse and Francks). At first it seems arbitrary and perverse, but over a period of five years or so I have come to think that almost all of it has useful validity. In 2014 I tried to update the text to bring out the links to modern physics - it is online entitled 'A 21st Century Monadology' at my UCL site.

If there are discrete (monadic or quantal) dynamic units and dynamic laws are continuous and symmetrical then with more than one spatial dimension you have to have contingency. If a photon is emitted and the laws are symmetrical then the probability of going anywhere is the same. But the photon can only go one way. Any attempt to solve this with some systematic rule other than randomness hits infinite regress. Pure randomness at the monadic level is NECESSARY!! So PSR entails contingency!

Dear Jonathan, Cournot´s concept of chance is not about absolute chance, but about contingency. In Leibinizian terms, it would be like saying that each monad follows its causal lines and that there is not a full coordination of all monads. However, how does Leibiniz' preestablished harmony fits with this scenario? 

Pre-established harmony only requires following of God's reasons to the extent to which they entail necessity. Beyond that there is freedom. For a photon to go up or down would be equally harmonious with the universe in the context of an incandescent wire. To harmonise with middle C and the E above one can play the G above or the G below but not D. There is much more detail to Leibniz's proposals than one gets from the predigested commentaries.

I am not sure what Cournot's idea about the lack of apparent relation between a set of simultaneous causes has to do with harmony of progression. You can still have perfectly harmonious progression in any given context, even if the infinite complexity of the universe makes it mpossible to divine the reason (in terms of an infinite number of past harmonious progressions) for the pattern of coincident causes obtaining in that context.

Ramon, I really like how your question and the responses weave together the analogous arguments for and against PSR, but am also compelled however to correct a slight misinterpretation I detect with Godel's incompleteness theorem, upon which arguments against PSR do then turn here, and therefore once adjusted would render the arguments instead amenable to PSR.  In other words your statement, "According to [the] incompleteness theorem a formal system is incomplete if a statement or its negation cannot be derived (i.e., proved) in the system," would be more accurately stated as:  According to the incompleteness theorem a formal system is incomplete if a statement or its negation is (rather than "cannot be") derived (i.e., proved) in the system.

Hello Ramon.

I think you know my answer to this will be yes.  Does the following argument invalidate it?

If there is a principle stipulating everything has a cause, then that principle must have a cause.

Ramon.

You may be interested; it was in 1997 that just this sort of question led me to the research I do, into logical independence in quantum physics.

Steve.

Ramon.

I have come to believe, fairly strongly, that accident is important at the very roots of physics.  I see accident occurring in quantum mathematics. And your remarks have prompted me to wonder if Chaitin's "truths in mathematics that are just so without reason"  could be considered to be accidental algorithms.

Let me try and give you a concrete example.  In elementary algebra, simultaneous equations are solved through the assumption that substitution of a variable by an expression, is valid.  So if you have two equations: y = 2x and y = -3x  you can say 2x = -3x and solve.  The reason this is acceptable is that what we actually mean is: for all x there exists a y such that y = 2x, etc.  And so coincidence is guaranteed  --  and  no accident occurs.

But in quantum mathematics, there is simultaneity between equations that are not "for all x there exists a y such that" but instead "there exists an x and there exists a y such that".  In these there is no assurance that there is any coincidence at all.  Where this behaviour goes on is between eigenvalue equations in complimentary variables.  And where accidental coincidence succeeds we get quantum mechanical systems.  The Fourier transform and its inverse are true through this mechanism.

Maybe I should have a look to see if an accidental simultaneity could constitute an algorithm for an irrational number.  I think I can see how to do it all ready.

We have to be clear that an algorithm causes effects through logically dependent consequence.  But "true effects without reason" simply need to satisfy that algorithm by being consistent with it.  In other words, the algorithm should not contradict those true effects.

Steve.

Dear Steve,

You suggest:If there is a principle stipulating everything has a cause, then that principle must have a cause.

So my caveat would be that we are dealing with a principle that requires reasons but these are not quite causes. Leibniz moves away from cause in the common sense anyway. As I see it we tend to think that every token event requires a token causal scenario. (Rather than 'a cause' in the sense philosophers agonise over I think we want something like a complete field of operating potentials like the Vxyz in a Schrodinger -type equation. But that field is still a token field.) In contrast, a 'reason' is not a token that leads to a token. It is a constraint on possibility that applies to types. Thus a 'wave equation' tends in fact to be a description of a reason for the pattern of a type of dynamic unit (or ensemble of units) that cannot specify which token will be actualised on measurement.

So it seems that tokens will require reasons being applied to token precedents, which we call causes. But reasons are not tokens in this sense. They are independent of any specific time or place or actualisation. Thus there is no justification for stipulating that they also require further reasons. There is no 'antecedence' for something that is timeless. So Leibniz's God in the form of the totality of reasons (in this sense) does not fall foul of the 'who created God' argument. A Malebranchian God of token relations, like the God of the common man, does suffer this problem, but not a God only of type relations?

Is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) invalidated by ...

No. PSR is a metaphysical assumption which makes explanations look more rational and operationally more useful than explanation based on miracles, indeterminacy, and randomness. The principle of indeterminacy (quantum theory) and icompleteness theorem (Goedel) have no relevant impact on scientific explanation. The former is controversial, to say the list (Einstein and Penrose hold that there is no indeterminacy, and so do I. There is only a lack of knowledge and good explanation.) Goedel's discourse is a mystical story, without any practical consequences.

You can discard any principle, if you wish; but then. you must face the consequences. You can discard the principle of causality, and proclaim everything accidental, but you will not profit much in terms of explaining physical processes by doing this, nor in terms of controlling such processe.

I take the view that quantum randomness reveals itself as genuine in this paper.  My reason is that logical independence is not explained in terms of logical dependence by looking closer.

Article Logical independence and quantum randomness

Ok I think I understand the distinction.  You could have something happen due to cause, or you could have something happen by accident.  Both these would be reasons for something happening.

 The Paterek paper looks interesting, Steve, although I cannot access full text yet. A good mathematical demonstration that randomness is real and to be expected would suit me very well.

I once wrote that physics often shows the lack of understanding of the difference between discourse and physical reality. For example, Paul Davies says that "the laws of the universe must by definition describe a consistent reality". This is not the right way of putting things. Physical reality simply *is* such as it is: it makes no sense to call it either consistent or inconsistent. Consistency regards discourse (theories), not physical reality. A theory as a set of claims (formulas, laws) must be logically consistent to be *understandable* (even if wrong) and to have a chance to describe a reality in a correct way. ... In sum, we must differentiate *language* and *physical reality*. Our language and explanations are not perfect, but we do *not* make them better but discarding the best we have: the principle of causality, logical consistency, and some other basic principles by means of which we describe the reality we perceive. These principles regard (and express) the way *human cognitive system and language* function: without these principles, we do not understand what we speak, regardless of how exciting it may sound. (I must leave this discourse for several days.)

Jonathon.

The full text of the Paterek paper:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/1/013019/pdf/1367-2630_12_1_013019.pdf

Regarding mathematics and Goedel ...

Bertrand Russell's wrote that "pure mathematics is the subject in which we do not know what we are talking about, or whether what we are saying is true". This claim is not precise enough. Pure mathematics does not speak about anything. Pure mathematics is *a game with symbols and symbolic expressions*; this game is played in accordance with certain adopted rules of *shaping expressions (formulas)* and of *producing (inference of)* new expressions (formulas) from the existing ones. This game by itself contains no meanings and it does not claim anything, so that it cannot express either truth or falsity.

*Meaning and truth* enter into this story with the *interpretation* of a mathematical game (as a purely formal system); the interpretation includes a *mapping* of symbols (variables and operators) to the entities (objects and relations) of some "world" (set of entities). With this, the *meaning* (of symbols and formulas) and *truth* (of formulas) enter the story. In sum, it is not the pure mathematics that tells the truth or falsity, but *its interpretation* does this. 

I studied Godel's theorem more than twenty years ago, so that I cannot speak about technical details now. One my old note runs like this: "Roughly speaking, Goedel’s theorem ("first incompleteness") shows that (1) any consistent formal system of a certain expressive power contains propositions that can be neither proved nor disproved (refuted) within that system (that is, on the basis of its axioms)." I hold (now) that this theorem shows *the limitation of symbolic game*. This game tells nothing about *physical world*; hence, I consider this purely formal game irrelevant for the discourse in physics, which is supposed to deal with physical entities. Mathematics matters, of course, and tells relevant things, but only when its symbolic language (game) is interpreted by entities of *physical reality*, not by other symbols (as in Goedel's case).

My basic position is that "big problems" spring mostly from the fact that people do not separate *language* from *physical reality". I do not care much whether physical reality is "deterministic" or not. I care whether I can *understand* what I am speaking, without this and some other assumptions. Basic principles of our reasoning are assumptions. We assume these principles because without them, our discourse becomes meaning-less. It may sound nice, but it tells nothing.

I believe the link between mathematics and physics is ismorphism.  That is to say there are structures in mathematrics that are isomorphic to structures in physics.

You might have a look at my Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing (Oxford 2014). A main theme of the book is the historical transformations in mathematical practice over the past 2500 years (with a focus on written systems of signs in that practice) and the significance of those transformations for developments in fundamental physics. I explicitly discuss the PSR in Chapter Nine. 

Dear Danielle,

Short of going out and buying the book we are left without knowing what your insight is. Could you explain it briefly here?

In Realizing Reason, I aim to show that, and how, reason, pure reason, has been realized as a power of knowing. Although Kant was right to argue in the Critique of Pure Reason, against, say, Descartes, that (in his day) pure reason had not yet been realized as a power of knowing, the further advances in mathematics and fundamental physics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have realized pure reason as a power of knowing. The PSR can now serve, as never before, as a substantive principle of inquiry. I suggest in Chapter 9 that Einstein's appeal to symmetry considerations, which is a demand of pure reason as the PSR is, is one that can finally (for the first time in history) pay off.

And would you agree, Danielle, that this symmetry, taken with the continuous nature of the metric and discrete quantised dynamic units entails the objective randomness at the fundamental level that we observe - thus vindicating rather than invalidating PSR?

 I am also interested, Danielle, in the suggestion that reason had not yet been realised as a power of knowing in Kant's time. My understanding is that Leibniz himself used his principle to derive what we now think of as the laws of conservation of momentum and energy - on the basis that the alternatives involved a contradiction. My own view is that he also used his PSR to show that Newtonian mechanics had to be underpinned by a dynamics involving non-extended quantised (monadic) units that progressed in harmony with the entire universe and that this has been vindicated in all sorts of ways by modern field theory. He clearly makes one or two mistakes in practical application of his theory but he gets an awful lot of detail right - as in the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles which, as Simon Saunders points out, pops up rather nicely in the analysis of electron pairs.

Ramon,

I'm inclined to re-word your question again....

Is what we find in the world through perception and reflection sufficient to explain it in its wholeness or entirety, or not? Can natural causes alone explain it or are rational causes (reasons) necessary in order to do that?

Thanks,

DCD 

Article Sufficient Reason and Reason Enough

Ramon, et al,

Despite how you may laud superlatives and necessities upon the PSR, consider how it is actually true and really all that helpful to the extent it is true.

Many things happen for no reason that we can find sufficient to justify it morally or explain it empirically. Unless you are willing to go full Pangloss and justify anything because you are a "philosopher"....

The real problem is that there can be many sufficient reasons or causes to explain something and no criteria within the PSR to distinguish which reason or cause is clearly the BEST explanation. 

Without such criteria all SRs are equally sufficient, which doesn't help much. like trying to decide which religion is the best one.

DCD

I think I agree with Daniel that there is a danger in expecting too much of PSR. The original Pangloss was of course Leibniz, but to my mind Leibniz himself is very careful not to ask too much of his PSR in terms of reasons that a human being can conceive. Spinoza seems more at fault there. And Russell accuses Leibniz of being too concerned with practical applications of his philosophy. That is to my mind where Leibniz wins out. His PSR did work - it built physics, in fact it built quantum theory in principle, if not in specifics. I think Russell and Frege are the people who tried to overdo things. For me PSR does not entail us being able to derive reasons for everything. It implies that there are 'reasons' embedded in the fabric of nature, in the sense of timeless rules about possible relations but there is no requirement for us to be able to divine them. In fact Leibniz says that because we are finite and only have one point of view there will be by definition aspects of the infinite universe that we will never be able to adequately account for in terms of 'reasons' in the sense of human conceptions.

Dear Ramon,

Glad to be of serendipitous service! Another case where intentionality and causality is intertwined?

Cheers,

Bernard

Jonathon,

Voltaire aptly critiques Liebniz for an insufficient principle of reason that, by insisting that unintelligibile reasons are still reasons, can rationalize anything. You can even have many such principles but there are no criteria other than what can be imagined without contradiction to exclude us glossing over all reasons equally, since they all claim to cover everything. There is no corresponding principle of necessity and nothing to ground the principle in empirical methods.

DCD

Dear Daniel,

I think Leibniz would consider, and I would agree, that Voltaire's critique unravels itself at least as badly as Leibniz's proposal. For all reasons to be explainable by further reasons must surely require an infinite regress. I think Leibniz has a better grasp of unknowability. Leibniz kept his eye firmly on empirical data after about 1672, having realised that in his youth he had made pretty much the mistake Voltaire was complaining of.

As a scientist I prefer a theory that does a heck of a lot of work to one that nitpicks unproductively afterwards!

Jonathon,

Voltaire's critique remained tight enough to convince Liebniz that he was mistaken, as you rightly point out. The mistake is to rely on rational causes ... the reasons we can imagine why things are done ... instead of efficient causes which are grounded in the empirical data and laws of nature you scientists love so much. This second option is much different than imagining the world to be a pre-established harmonious ordering of every cause and effect that could ever exist, pre-determined for all time.

I'm not sure what kind of "work" you think Liebniz did so much of that benefits science. However, I will admit that his opposition to Newton and defense of relativism over substantivalism worked to free Newtonian physics from the burden of having to explain the nature of space as a substance.  

I hear people say all the time that "everything happens fr a reason". I get it but it is the ultimate Pangloss rationalization. Trying to rationalize the world is where his kind of philosopher -- the rationalist or idealist -- goes horribly wrong. We can make up all kinds of stories that explain things according to the motivated, purposeful actions of beings we can never observe, save through the perceptible effects of their unknown deeds. Lots of imaginary reasons might be sufficient to account for everything but who's to say which we should prefer.

This is why I am sort of attacking the PSR, even though I do understand its merits. There is no Occam's razor or principle of parsimony; nor is there a way to choose the better of two equally comprehensive rationalized stories, if all you consider is sufficiency. Efficiency and necessity require us to assume as little as possible and to experiment in ways that disclose what is unchanging and necessary about what we are studying. The best explanation will be the one that uses as little as possible in the number and complexity of its assumptions (its story), while explaining all that can be explained, as comprehensively as possible.

The PSR  is, simply, insufficient as a criterion for explanation.

Thanks,

DCD 

Dear Daniel,

I have reason to think that Leibniz's view does a lot more work than even now people tend to appreciate. The invocation of both final and efficient causes has a much deeper relevance to cold-blooded physics. I don't think Leibniz in 1714 would have accepted he was wrong about that. Leibniz fails to disentangle different types of final cause but we can resolve that now. I am busy today but hope to enlarge a little on these cryptic remarks later!

Jonathon,

Well, exactly. Teleological thinking is at the root of Liebniz's theory of a pre-established harmony of "monads", substances which are essentially formal in nature. As such, they have no extrinsic properties by which they might be causally related to one another. Only because of their arrangements into God's pre-established harmony do their intrinsic properties appear to us as a material world of efficient cause-effect interactions. Empirical science is just an appearance, if it is blind to the presence of a kind of orderliness in what we find in nature that its "cold-blooded" mechanisms cannot explain.

Modern science began with the elimination of the sculptor, the stone and the sculptor's purpose in carving the statue that is analogous to the natural world as we find it. The only causes that remain from Aristotle's famous four are the efficient causes ... the chisel hitting the stone. Indeed, all those other causes really get in the way of the empirical method of science. Science methodically eliminates the various "idols" as Bacon called them, that bias our perceptions and theories. Only efficient causes. No "rational" causes are allowed in this empirical story, this mechanism that always works the same way every time and can be observed by anyone who knows what to look for.

If you are a scientist, you should know all of these reasons why final causation and a principle of reason that is sufficient to explain the natural world had to go. We don't discover the world by using deductive logic. We have to go out and look, using this admittedly fallible tools of perception and induction, to let the world determine our beliefs about it, as much as we possibly can. This includes understanding our strengths and weaknesses, especially our natural desire to be correct and to prefer things we are used to over those that take us out of our respective comfort zones. Empirical method, generally, and the empirical method of science, specifically, do the work of getting our subjective and group biases out of the way to the best of our ability, so we can all see what unmistakably remains.

Now, as an unbiased observer will usually notice, the story of science is as flawed as Voltaire's critique of Liebniz is. It's incompleteness does cause it to unravel when it gets down to the basic incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It also fails to explain why, in a sense that we warm-blooded philosophers still seem to want, from time to time. Science allows us to predict what will happen in astoundingly powerful ways; it explains what happens. But ts does not explain what exists, why it exists or what is good/evil, moral/immoral and beautiful/ugly about it. It assumes that sensory perception is how we know about the world but it offers nothing but more perceptions to justify this assumption. And let's not forget about consciousness, the "hardest" thing to fit into the natural world.

I see the blindness of physics and the rest of natural and social science to the whole picture of the world. What physics seeks as a "theory of everything" (great movie BTW)  is also an insufficient reason to explain the whole world and everything in it, especially the subjective factors that we find therein.

But, rather than trying to turn back the clock of cultural development, back to the good old days of formal causes and sufficient reasons, I am advocating the move forward to critique our philosophical history, not return to it.

Science is blind to some things that are found in the world. But rationalistic philosophy is willfully ignorant in it's continued pursuit of rational or final causes that attempt to explain the universe we find as somehow the consequence of reasons and purposes.

I enjoy our conversation, Jonathon, and look forward to you expanding on the suggestions about different types of final causes, as they relate to science and philosophy. However, I worry that you want to build purposes and reasons back into the basic nature of substances or the whole world as we find it. Importing teleological causes into the fundamental nature of things is the underlying error in critical thinking that we have grown up with, culturally, ever since pre-historic hominid ancestors evolved neurologically enough to use language and invent culture.

It really is the principle of natural selection (PNS) that offers a revolutionary improvement on the principle of sufficient reason as a way of explaining why we find the plant and animal species, all so perfectly and holistically ordered in nature as we do. The "why" of it is not at all related to God's inscrutable "reasons" that this intelligent designer used to create this best of all possible worlds. The PNS gives a quick, cold-blooded answer: all the less perfect species died off long ago. Only those species most fit to complete their generational cycles of reproduction can actually endure. Evolution by natural selection is sufficient as an intelligible reason that explains how life occurs naturally on at least one of billions of planets. 

Given the multi-millions of generations we know the earth has had to do its evolutionary work, all possible genetic variations get tried out and only the most fit survive. Fitness is measured by the power to control the conditions that affect its ability to reproduce and grow its population; not by its rationality. Not, that is, until rational beings, like us, came to evolve.

There is no sufficient reason; no intelligent design at the beginning. These ideas worked best for our ancient ancestors but they just don't fly in our modern and post-modern world. Rational causes did not create the world. Our earth, one tiny part of the natural world, eventually evolved rational beings like us. We have used our powers of reasoning on top of the pre-existing powers of animal perception and conditioned, operant behaviors, to create cultures where we are the intelligent designers.

Rational causes, "sufficient reasons" did not create nor do they constitute what exists, at the most basic level of existence. What exists, the natural world of causes and effects that experience reveals to us, caused rational beings to evolve.

If I am correct in this, it also explains why we are so convinced by the illusion that reasons came first and "somehow" created the world. To me, mysticism never ended the infinite regress of questions I had about the why and how of things. It made me keep thinking about why mysticism is so compelling.

Time to stop now.

Look forward to replies and comments from anyone.

Thanks,

DCD      

Ramon,

You're in my neck of the woods in DC. I don't contend that the sufficient reasons are ad hoc; but they are inscrutable to us, making them seem ad hoc.

DCD

Dear Daniel,

Do not worry. My father was a biomedical scientist like myself and ‘purpose’ and even ‘funtion’ were expunged from my vocabulary as a small boy. At one level I would agree with everything you say and fifteen years ago I would have left it at that. But then I taught myself the quantum theory I had sidestepped for medicine as a youth and met Leibniz; I realised that there was a further level.

Teleology was made redundant by Alfred Wallace. Darwin actually bungled it, and I think there is an analogy between Darwin and Leibniz. Both had momentous insights but slipped back into bad habits. Leibniz conflated Aristotle’s final cause (4a) with a much more fundamental sort of final cause (4b) which is now at the centre of physics.

Newton’s physics reduced Aristotle’s four causes to the chisel hitting the stone. But in 1925 it became clear that the chisel never hits the stone. There are no bangings, or ‘microbangings’, in physics now, as James Ladyman puts it. I think John Worrall and James’s Structural Realism comes quite close to Leibniz without the first person aspect and it is certainly close to conventional contemporary physics dogma. Efficient causes are merely an appearance you get with aggregates – exactly as Leibniz said. You will not find ‘efficient cause’ in a Schrodinger equation. What you find in fact is ‘progression in harmony’ (of a dynamic unit psi with a universal field Vxyzt) or what James calls something like ‘co-supervenience’ – the harmonious unfolding of possibilities into actualities.

Leibniz’s monads, just like quantised modes of excitation, do relate to everything and are thus entirely extrinsic or relational in their nature, with (as Russell and Ladyman point out) no room for ‘intrinsic’ features (these are not what appear to us as material – the material appearance arises from aggregation). Their nature is in the way they reflect the entire universe. Leibniz rightly intuits that the knowable world must be entirely dynamic and that dynamics must be based on indivisible units that have no extension (exclude nothing from a domain of space) – what we now call quantised modes of excitation (QME) of fields.

So if there are no purposes (4a) and no efficient causes, what rules do QME/monads follow? What Leibniz realises is that if these QME/monads are truly indivisible dynamic units then their final state, or end, is already entailed as soon as they exist, because their beginning can in no sense ‘exist’ separately from their completion. The Aspect experiments on Bell’s inequalities show this perhaps best but in all quantum dynamics there is no such thing as being ‘half way through’ a mode. ‘Trajectories’ have been abandoned. There are just indivisible causal connections. And they are ‘final’ or ‘telic’ connections in that their end is entailed in their nature. Leibniz also sees that this analysis cannot work for aggregates, since aggregates are divisible and have no single definable beginning or end. So they behave in a mechanical way, following what we call trajectories.

Where Leibniz goes wrong is to mix this elegant analysis with purpose. So he claims that a monad 'may not entirely satisfy its ends'. He backtracks. But the initial idea was one of genius.

The rules of QME/monads are all about how possibilities become actualities, or not. So they are based on the rules of what is possible, what is probable and what is necessary – which Leibniz called reasons and I think reasonably so. His ideas about the actual being the most possible/probable are very close to the laws of QME. I think we do discover the world by deductive logic, at least as much as by going out and look. At least my experience as a scientist has been that way. I only succeeded where others failed because I deduced reasons for what I found in the tissues of the body. Bare empiricism is hopeless. 

So science does not unravel at the quantum level. It turns out to fit with the logical deductions Leibniz made. There is no incompatibility of QM and GR if you formulate things the way Leibniz does. His distinction between potential and actual infinities are relevant. Which is why the incompatibility does not actually get in the way of making predictions – it just gets in the way if tidiness for those who have too realist a view of chisels and stones. I agree that we have a very partial explanation for what exists, but Leibniz, unlike Spinoza, does not require that. I think we have a pretty good idea about why there is good and bad (from Wallace), beauty and ugliness, although none about why they feel the way they do to us. But I think that may prove tractable if we formulate the questions properly.

Consciousness is not hard to fit into a world where consciousness is the starting point of any theory. Both Descartes and Leibniz got that right. A physics into which consciousness does not fit does not make sense. Physics is about predicting experiences. Dave Chalmers’s hard problem is a paper tiger.

There is no turning back the clock here – to move forward is to realise the difference between 4a and 4b and recognise that the fundamental world runs on 4b. So no worries, no sleep to be lost! There is no intelligent design at the beginning in the sense of human intelligence but there has to be some basis for 4b causes always pitching up in the right form at the right time and place.  To deny any need for that is to serve up physics with a heavy dose of magic sauce that is not mentioned on the menu. I do not believe in anything like the deity of the organised church but I do not think Leibniz did either, even if he wanted to be part of the church community. God is the wrong word, but in Monadology Leibniz offers also ‘L’ Être Nécessaire’, which I think can be stretched to ‘the existing necessity’, and I quite like that.

Jonathon,

"Consciousness is not hard to fit into a world where consciousness is the starting point of any theory."

Well, yeah. But the hoops you have to jump though to constitute the natural world out of consciousness sends you right out of the empirical method into the world of rational causes.

I also think you are incorrect to claim there is no efficient causation at the quantum level. The sculpture is just an analogy and it can apply equally well to the interactions of fermions and bosons as to chiseling stone. Efficient causation has come to mean having a law or set of standards that lets you predict experimental results or engineer physical structures and processes. 

At least 80% of all philosophy has been consumed with trying to generate the natural world out of consciousness, intelligence, spirit, divinity, goodness and many other imaginable rational causes. All these attempts have failed, including Liebniz's Monadology.

My alternative is to acknowledge that 80% of the progress in human cultural development has been due to empirical pursuits that do everything they can to eliminate all those subjective factors from consideration. Given this fact, I recommend doing ontology and metaphysics according to the empirical method I outlined in my previous post to you.

This method relies on the way we can imagine things occurring  in nature, rather than how we can imagine reasons and motivations for doing things. It looks for arguments to the best naturalistic explanation of things; not the best rationalistic explanation.

A necessary being really does not explain the world of becoming and contingency, with regular ways of changing, that characterizes what we find when we look.

More later.

DCD. 

Dear Daniel,

Have you ever been a practicing scientist? I have for forty years. Your method bears no relation to what I found worked in practice. Science isn't like what Hume thought it was like. We do not 'observe' 'things'. We deduce dispositional patterns in the world from interventions we make. The whole of neuroscience now revolves around an assumption of that sort of interrogative inferential mechanism. Leibniz's monadology is entirely satisfactory and consistent with modern physics, at least in its general principles. And it seems circular to say that efficient cause has been redefined to mean whatever science says it means. As far as I know nobody has redefined efficient cause. It is still 'what actually did it' and that has disappeared from fundamental physics. Progress in harmony is a much better description of how things are seen now.

There are no hoops needed to see that all physics has experience as read out therefore physics is predicated on the existence of experience. It is the tricky bit of working out how all the experiences join up, that's all.

Dear Ramon,

Thank you for your comments. It is a pity that you lack enthusiasm for monadism but my feeling is that the vast majority of people do not realise that monads are physical, not non-physical. Leibniz describes metaphysics as the level of discussion that deals with the most fundamental concepts that underpin physics. He used these concepts to derive the law of conservation energy for instance. This is hard nosed physics, not something else. The monad is the indivisible dynamic unit. In physics today we have indivisible dynamic units, called quantised modes of excitation of fields and in more popular terminology 'fundamental particles'. The paradigmatic equation for these - the time dependent Schrodinger equation (a bit dated but it has the basic structure) indicates that the nature of every mode includes the entire universe in the form of the field potentials Vxyzt. The mode progresses in harmony with the universe as it relates to its domain or point of view.

In short, when I advocate a monadic theory of physics I am simply advocating standard modern physics, but acknowledging that Leibniz derived the basic structure 200 years in advance by deductive reasoning. And moreover, as I have taunted James Ladyman with, he also deduced how the first person subjective aspect of a point of view must be entailed in the same account (James admits that he cannot address subjectivity).

As Richard Arthur points out in his excellent new book on Leibniz, the 'metaphysical' millstone people have put around Leibniz's neck is entirely misconceived. He was an ethicist, certainly, but also a rigorous theoretical physicist and he saw no division between the two.

Thinking overnight about Daniel's interesting take on this I think I would suggest that we are in danger of tarring Leibniz's PSR with a Spinozan brush. I reject Spinozism entirely. Reasons in the sense of human trains of thought and reasons in the sense of constraints on possibility within the universe are different uses of the word. Spinoza thought they had to match. Leibniz had been educated in a similar tradition but also with some remarkable practical insights from his German teachers (Arthur is very informative on this). I think after meeting Spinoza in 1676 he was clear that he needed to take a more practical - perhaps empirical - stance based on his realisation of the significance of 'point of view'. But to be practical and empirical, and to be criticised by Russell for it, is not to be empiricist. I think it was Salomon Maimon who said that rather than take the best of Leibniz's rationalism and Hume's empiricism to form a new synthesis Kant had actually taken the worst bits and formed a white elephant!

Glad to see you adding details to your account of Leibniz, Jonathon. I'm wondering now what warrants you have for the claim that monads are physical and still be called "substantial forms". Is space also considered to be physical in this sense? 

How does reason constrain physical possibilities? To me, reason constrains what we can think, not what exists. You seen to me to be defending idealism, not explaining science.

Thanks, 

DCD

Ramon, 

Thanks for pointing out Wheeler's "it-bit" terms. You are a bit guy and I'm an it guy. My thesis is that it is possible to to use ontology empirically to explain bits of knowledge from naturally occurring substances or 'its', in a much better way than the reverse deductive method can .

DCD

Dear Ramon,Thanks for the summary.

I would just pick up on one or two statements. I do not think monads are hermetically sealed, or as often said, 'blind'. Each monad reflects within itself the entire universe, so there is no 'outside to get in' for a monad. A monad is the entire universe from a point of view. I know this sounds odd but I think it fits with QFT equations, which include a term for the whole universe. Moreover, Leibniz spent a lot of his time trying to stop people thinking that you could 'add speed' to an object, as if sticking it on like a post-it. He was trying to move from Scholastic theory to modern physics and he may have overstated his case a bit in saying that the monad does not interact. As he says it is in a sense entirely dynamic interaction - but in its own way with everything.

I don't think Leibniz ever wanted to imply that monads are 'non-physical' in the sense of an ontological category. They are metaphysical in the sense that they are at the most fundamental level of physics - the real physics rather than the appearance physics if you like. Richard Arthur in his new Leibniz book actually argues that Leibniz is not really an idealist - he says that for Leibniz the outside world is very real - and I agree. (He deals with this in a chapter about two thirds of the way through.)

An odd thing about the idea that Descartes is a substance dualist is that he says matter is infinitely divisible, so it would seem that material objects cannot be substances because they depend for their existence on parts. I think if one had the chance to ask both Descartes and Leibniz they would say that there aren't really any material substances, only mental ones. But note that 'material' does not equate to 'physics' because physics is about motion and all motion is for Descartes due either to God or a soul. The one reference to physics in the meditations is actually in the context of discussing God!

I am not sure that the new entities are logic gates or qubits. As for Leibniz a quantised mode of excitation psi has the complexity of the whole universe, even if often you can approximate it to a time independent Schrödinger type equation based on local potentials. But certainly in a sense the new entities are sort of computational steps. But there is no fracturing to my mind because every entity entails the universe - you cannot get much more holistic than that. 

And I do not see these entities as just random players in a brawl. There is a small random component of the necessary sort we have discussed but mostly the interplay of entities is governed by very ordered laws. The emergence of the highly complex order of life is intriguing but not I think puzzling.

But that was just my long winded way of coming back to the idea that PSR is really just a useful scientific hypothesis that seems to do a good job. So I am not sure we are compelled to the PSR. On the other hand the alternative seems to leave us cut loose from our moorings at night with a broken mast in a high wind. I think Leibniz is perhaps too grandiose in some of his proclamations about what has to be true, but the more I read of him the more often I find I have to let him win the argument after all. I think he was a lot cleverer than any of us!!

Ramon and Jonathon,

Another alternative is a dualism of matter and an omnipresent spatial substance, with which the elementary felons and bosons of the Standard Model coincide. Ontologically, space is not an inert void but a powerful substance that structures the elementary particles in 3 dimensions. I argue that this is the simplest and most comprehensive way to explain the wholeness and the particularity of everything there is to explain.

DCD 

My feeling is that in these discussions one nearly always gets to a point where vestiges of intuitive realism, together with the outdated and often misconstrued language of Aristotelian philosophy suck us back into running in circles. My feeling is that if we try to think in terms of substances as things existing in themselves, rather than in the context of relations, then we are stuck. That is why I go with Leibniz and James Ladyman. I go for pure dynamism.

Leibniz says that space and time are more of the nature of reasons, and I think that works. There is a substance that is the totality of reasons, and Leibniz called that God. We are tempted, like Spinoza, to call it Nature or the Universe, but that is not the same. Nature is the totality of instances of operation of reasons, not the totality of reasons.

I agree that no modes of excitation ('particles') can exist without presuming space and time, but equally space and time are not instantiated other than as the metric of relations between mode and universe. As reasons they might be prior but that would not be temporally prior, since reasons themselves are not fixed to a time or place.

One thing that I am not sure people have faced properly is what it might truly mean for the universe to be infinite. It seems that the universe could not have 'edges', yet there are suggestions that it has a definable total mass. People have tried to overcome this by saying that warped space allows for some sort of 'getting back to where you started by going in a straight line' that avoids edges. However, my understanding is that firstly there is no clear theoretical basis for this relating to gravity and secondly the empirical evidence from pointing telescopes in opposite directions fails to support it. I seriously think that we may have to accept that 'existence', in much the same way as position in space and time, is observer relative. The finite mass of my universe reflects what relation to me is possible, considering the speed of light etc. For a being as far away in my universe as can be, the mass of the universe will be the same but it will be a different universe, at least more than half of it. And any attempt to adjudicate about whether or not more than twice the mass of the universe exists is meaningless. 'Existing' is a naive misconception of ours based on thinking machinery we inherited from apes wandering the savannah.

For me the advantage of dynamism is that it frequently provides a painless solution to what otherwise look like thorny paradoxes. It works. I think it probably dissolves the so called QM/GR incompatibility. In dynamic terms there is no problem because the incompatibility can never actually be instantiated.

So I can buy spacetime as the substance that Leibniz called God, but I would not want to treat that on a par with modes of excitation and call it a dualism. I think that is a category error!

I was actually talking about infinity of extent, not divisibility, Ramon. And I actually think that continuity remains in QFT. The dynamic units are discrete but their rules of action are continuous - that is what generates the necessity of randomness. If the rules of spacetime were discrete there would be no randomness in QM. For that reason I think the idea that spacetime itself will prove to be quantised is a category error.

Ramon,

Leibniz is still well ahead of us, I believe. But although we may not have his clarity of thought I do think we can catch up with him almost if we are diligent students. I have left it a bit late in life, but maybe not too late to learn a bit more. 

I would like to see the primary text that Zenil takes as evidence for his claim on 0 and 1. I suspect there are more layers.

Jonathon, et al,

Sorry guys, but this lingering Liebniz lovefest is not the best of all possible worlds for me. There is no self-evident or demostrably true principle nor is there sufficient empirical evidence to support the idealistic wish that everything exists because of rational causation, according to a PSR.

Liebniz, despite Jonathon's denials, is an idealist. He thinks, and so does Jonathon and maybe most of you here, that ideas ---those things in our heads that we think about and with --- are better known to us than are material things, which appear to be outside our heads and are known about only through the ideas in our heads.

The ideal world is just a lot less messy and much more predictable than that pesky physical stuff. There is a reason for everything, even if we don't know WHAT it is, because that big monad, the Reasoner in Chief, has it all figured out. Math conforms to the world because of the pre-established harmony (g-Harmony.gwl?) to which both conform.

As you can guess, I'm not buying it. I like keeping it empirical, looking for the simplest and most comprehensive explanation that is grounded in nature and our intelligent perception of it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that mathematicians would prefer to construct the world out of ones and zeros.     

It is more optimal to imagine that space is a ubiquitous substance with parts that conform to our laws of geometry and that structure how matter and energy must coincide with it, if they do. If so, then maybe space with no matter coinciding in some part of it is like a zero region and those parts with with coincident matter or energy are like ones. In this way I think you could make a world out of ones and zeros, as long as they represent matter and space as the 2 distinct kinds of substances that constitute, by their interactions, the world we find around us.

DCD 

Dear Daniel,

I am not surprised you do not buy the garbled account of Leibniz in the popular philosophical literature - largely generated by the failure of Kant, Hegel and Russell to understand him. Things have changed (although Maimon in the nineteenth century understood Leibniz). You should come to the international Leibniz meeting at the beginning of July and see that contemporary Leibniz scholars have a rather different view. Leibniz is not an idealist. He is a dynamist - he says so in his Reflections on True Metaphysics. The material world is real, it is just the aggregate description of the monadic world.

I am not sure what 'rational cuasation' means. Leibniz proposes that there are constraints on possibility in the world, which he calls reasons - that seems to me harmless enough. I am not sure what you mean by empirical. Leibniz was empirical - but not empiricist.

If space has parts it is not a substance - at least in the technical seventeenth century sense of 'substance' as entity. Or do you mean a sort of 'stuff'? That seems like Newton and the whole point of modern physics is that Leibniz's framework turned out to fit the empirical evidence better than Newton's!! And what do we mean by 'stuff'? This sounds like a sort of hypernaïve realism to me, rather than anything empirical. 'Stuff' is just an idea - which turns out to be empty on empirical examination.

Ramon, Jonathon, et al,

If what we consist of is the same as that of which everything else in the universe consists, then, regardless of what that is, it is possible that we can come to know and understand everything there is to be known about the world.

If you imagine that the "world stuff" is ideal or rational in nature, then you can imagine it to be almost anything. But if you imagine it to be the same kind of thing we perceive with our senses, having regularities about the ways that it moves and changes over time, then the possibilities are much more constrained and give us the ability to think and reason empirically about the causal relations among things, not just whatever reasons we can come up with to project, unverifiably on the  imagined universe.

Jonathon and Ramon, both of you are appealing to philosophers or scientists of the past who have already figured out the answers that we seek today: Liebniz, Einstein, Fermi, even the ancient Mayans have all been suggested. This, in fact, is what philosophy has become: an exercise in obscurantism, to find the overlooked gem everyone else has missed.

I think, instead, that we need to find something new under the sun that has been there all along, as yet unnoticed. I proposed an ontological alternative that is empirical (not empiricist), relying  on what we find in the world using perception (not our rational imagination), yet significantly different from  any of the theories of the past.  I just want to discuss it and answer questions about it, because I think it addresses the root issues under discussion here. It's truth or value are just the things in question.

Jonathon, space has parts: points, lines and solids. But, unlike matter, it's nature is to be continuous and infinitely divisible. Matter is atomic, in the sense of having a smallest size or quantity, an "uncuttable" in the original Greek meaning of the word 'atom'. Space can also be imagined as dynamic and powerful, not the inert void of the pre-Socratics.

DCD

Dear Ramon,

I don't see how Goedel's incompleteness can contradict the PSR. Moreover, it confirms the PSR, by its many proofs. Goedel's incompleteness is caused by the possibility to encode a diagonal (or liar) paradoxon in the arithmetic, or by the halting problem, or by any other way one can prove the undecidability of first order arithmetic.

QM uncertainty also cannot contradict the PSR. In Heisenberg thought experiment, it is the photon to measure producing the interference which caused the uncertainty in localization. 

The objective randomness in nature also does not contradict the PSR. One speaks about a big number of events with behaviors reflected by some Gauss' Bell curve. But every one of them, if considered separatedly, is for itself a confirmation of the PSR.

I believe that argumentations making apparent some contradiction between one of the three facts mentioned above and the PSR contain some sophism resulted from a kind of shift of the level of argumentation, produced during the argumentation itself. I don't see more or less as three principles - correct in their fields of application - and a generally valid PSR, that does not contradict any of them. 

Ramon et al,

A law or a computation is an artifact, meaning man-made. The law-like behaviors of Newtonian bodies or atoms are not caused by artifacts. Nature does not compute itself. The notion that it does is blatant anthropomorphism.

It may be "natural" for beings like us, who do compute, to think of  nature as operating that way, too. But we are clearly projecting our nature onto that of natural objects or even the universe as a whole. The fact that we can do this so easily may explain the temptation. But the ease itself may be caused by the fact we are are a computing machine that took hundreds of millions of years to develop to represent, in perception and language, the regular and irregular ways in which the world behaves and changes over time. We come to rely on these representations so much that we can take our ideas to be equivalent the world. Idealism confuses the artifact with that which it represents. In religion this is called the sin of idolatry. In philosophy, we settle for calling it anthropomorphism but, to me, it's just as heinous.

I realize my position in this discussion is non-conformist but I continue to look for material origins of the ideal, not the other way around as is the habit of Modern philosophy.

I'd love the wisdom of your comments.

DCD

Ramon,

My arguments have been largely about the denial of spacetime and you continue to assume that the only 2 alternatives are the primacy of rationality in epistemology or ontology or our chance . I have considered very carefully your hypothesis and replied. Now I ask you to consider the hypothesis that space is a substance that imposes geometrical structure on matter. This would also explain a source of order in nature and is arguably simpler and more comprehensive than positing reason as a cause of the appearance of lawfulness.

Ramon,

as every rule formulated by humans, PSR cannot be universal - cannot be applied to everything. It is however quite difficult to find bounds and conditions to such a purist principle. Goedel's Incompleteness cannot falsify alone the PSR, Chaitin's Incompressibility (which is a quantitative development of the halting problem and finaly of Goedel) cannot do it also directly, but following this line, we come to life and genomes. DNA is an example of barely compressible data and the kee question is: "What is the reason for life?" The only one answer existing in the moment is something like "Life preserves itself and the reason for life is life." On the other hand the first life seems to have appeared by chance, and then developed. Life has an enormous impact on nature and environment, and must be present in any description of nature. But it is not at all clear if the occurrence of life can be explained by PSR or only by chance. Maybe here we get a starting point for a program to falsify the PSR.

Mahai,

The PSR is not an empirical hypothesis. There is simply no set of facts that could contradict it. It is either a tautology out a rather obviously false claim. This is precisely the thrust of Voltaire's critique. Unless you can falsify it on logical grounds, it is as much a truism as it always was. 

Also, as I asked before, why do you all seem to assume that chance is the only alternative to a rational ordering principle of the universe?

Thanks,

DCD

@ Daniel Davis

In fact I rather believe in Determinism. "Chance" is a black box used to put some processes under parantheses for looking only for their result. As I have written in a previous postation, inside random processes all steps are determinist (and also respect some PSR) as far as we know.

The problems with PSR start when we leave the level of basis causalities (as atom A collides with atom B) and we start to refer to more complicated notions. I repeat with great pleasure my question from above: Is there a reason (a cause) for the occurrence of life? look at some experiment (we cannot do this, so it will remain for a while just a thought experiment). Take 100 planets like Earth, fulfilling the exact conditions given on Earth when life has appeared, and let them develop alone for one million years. Then we look inside and we count the number of planets containing monocellular life. It is possible that the number corresponds to some computed probability, (related for example to the complexity of needed proteins) or it is possible to get a bigger number of planets with life, as we have expected by pure probabilistic estimation. In the first case we can conclude that the occurrence of life is really a result of random combinations that can take place or not. In the second case we can suspect the existence of some previously unknown natural law, something like "Life will appear any time when possible and is a natural tendency of universe to develop in this direction." and then we can continue with both experimental and theoretical work in clarifying the new natural law we suppose to act. 

Finally, the PSR can be a good "rule of thought". If there is evidence that things works in a given way, ""using PSR"", we suppose some principle behind the behavior, and so we can focus the research on understanding it. 

@ Ramon

You are right. As complex a structure or a phenomenon, so difficult it becomes to motivate this by simplist principles like the PSR. It is quite difficult to justify the structure of some complex cave full of stalagmites and crystals, and much more complicated to justify the genome and the anatomy of a snail. What we really miss in the picture is the factor called TIME. Time works behind nature's creativity. The parallel with computational complexity continues also to work here: more complex languages need a bigger (computation) time for both production and recognition. 

But this is just a half of an answer. The other half is given by the answer to the following questions: Does nature compute? (and if yes, then why, from which reason or by what cause?) This is again a question with the same potential of PSR - falsifier like the question put before (What is the reason for life?). Or on the other hand, we can use PSR as a thought rule and we can suppose the existence of some previously natural law like "In given conditions nature will always simulate computational processes." And then we can continue our work in the direction of clarifying our supposition.

Mihai,

I, too, accept deterministic causation as a consequence of the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the substances that interact with each other and change in determinate ways. If there were no universal regularities about change ("laws of nature") rational beings like us could not have evolved. But, given the regularities that we have discovered, we can explain from a third-person point of view, how we got here and what that implies about what we should be doing here. 

The origin of life, living organic matter, is necessary and inevitable; not some inscrutable mystery or special creation. When you consider the atomic structure of carbon and the vast number of possibilities for covalent bonding with other atoms this structure entails, all you need is enough time and the right temperatures caused by the the orbit of the planet around its star, and life is truly inevitable and predictable. We know that RNA is a kind of complex molecule that occurs naturally on earth and we have no reason to think it would not occur elsewhere too, under similar conditions, if the laws of nature hold anywhere in the universe.

None of this is rational causation; none of it occurs because of reasoning. The PSR entails that the efficient causation of quantum mechanics needs a different kind of causation to explain IT: a rational plan or cause, without which everything would be chaos. And I would ask how positing the existence of a rational agent to cause there to be laws of nature, explains anything more than the laws do. The laws of reasoning do not explain how this happens, so whatever explanation you might get by positing God or some other rational agent, you lose because we have a whole new level of causation to explain, in an unknown way, what causes there to be any regularities about change. Just accepting the laws to be basic is a much simpler assumption. Adding a mysterious God on top of that doesn't tell us anything more about the world we live in.

We have to determine what can be known and what cannot. Just because we can ask a question does not entail there must be an answer to it  that we can understand. 

DCD

It seems to me that a principle of (a) sufficient reason in its general formulation does not really explain much of the process of observation, modeling, and reasoning. In systems biology (particularly within a general systems theory) it is replaced by a collection of principles of clear thinking. Examples of these are (I quote here from a book chapter written a while ago):

" 1) Principle of formal correctness -- Effective reasoning in science should conform to the rules of logic (i.e., should be formally correct.)

2) Principle of causality – every scientifically explainable object, process or phenomenon (a fact) can be thought of as materially or logically entailed by a cause (also a fact, object or process.)

3) Principle of hierarchical organization (a postulate of the existence of hierarchy of things) – every scientifically explainable object, process or fact belongs to a hierarchical organization (a hierarchical system) and, at the same time, contains things organized hierarchically.

4) Principle of logico-linguistic fractionability – every scientifically explainable system can be represented either as a subsystem (or a part) of a plausible (or well-defined) larger system or partitioned into sub-systems whose properties are believed to be plausible or well defined. To avoid the so called infinite regress one additionally assumes the existence of the minimal parts (logico-linguistic atoms) that cannot be broken into smaller parts.

5) Principle of material adequacy  – all concepts and linguistic constructs (particularly definitions) used to explain observations of natural systems must not only be true but also they must correspond to factual reality to a maximum degree possible. Our explanations must be as relevant and as pertinent as possible to the actual observed process or phenomenon that we try to explain. (Trivial or irrelevant truths should not be acceptable as valid explanations.)  "

Laws and constrains should in principle follow the above rules in our models of factual reality. I would not be surprised if the conformity to such rules of clear thinking would turn out to be the only way to achieve adequate (or pertinent) congruences of laws and constrains.

[I tried to avoid lengthy answer and apparently did not succeed. Sorry about that.]

I am not sure that the principle of sufficient reason is about reasoning. It is more or less your premise (2), A.K., which is a working hypothesis about how the dynamic world is, not how we think about it. I think reason is better because there are dynamic possibilities that do not appear to have specific instantiated causal antecedents. 

Ramon Quintana; and Jonathan Edwards;

Interesting comments indeed. Let me explain why most biologists who bother to think of their research would consider the 5 principles of clear thinking to be a tool of reasoning by an imagined meta-observer of the World consisting of the pairs .

The PRINCIPLE #5 (material adequacy) is of importance too and perhaps can be folded into the PSR. I don't know though what benefits such attempt at folding into the PSR could bring.

My understanding of the principles of clear thinking is an elaboration of what the meta-observer can do with the world consisting of an observer and observed not separated from each other. The epistemic cut physicists (plus Leibniz) have used for centuries neatly separates the World from the savant who observes it (an observer). Thereby a general formulation of PSR appears to apply to reality in which observer is not taken into account. In contrast the principles of clear thinking apply to the world in which observed and observer cannot be separated and thereby should be analyzed together by a meta-observer equipped with an appropriate object language and tools for reasoning. 

Having said the foregoing, Jonathan E, I also prefer the word "reason" over "cause" just to avoid a reference to any specific theory of causation.

To be honest AK, the principles of clear thinking sound like muddled thinking to me. As a biologist I tried to read books on systems theory and found nothing I did not already know and a lot that obscured it. Metaobservers sound bogus to me. Leibniz does not make an observer/observed cut at the metaphysical (or fundamental) level. His fundamental world consists of dynamic relations, which are the essence of monads and each of which includes both point of view and universe. The totality is simply the totality of such relations. No sidestepping is needed. Systems theory sounds to me like going back to the Medieval scholastics if anything.

Ramon Quintana;

I have not realized that the PSR needs to be either defended or attacked. There is no contradiction between the principles of clear thinking and the PSR. (Just like there is no contradiction between predicate calculus and arithmetics.) The word "sufficient" has an open meaning in the PSR, so any method to attain the "S" should be legitimate. From this perspective the PSR is too general to be a useful guide for science methodology. Principles of clear thinking are a good practical rules for explaining methodology of research. Particularly so in the fields where the objects of studies are models of reals things instead of the things themselves.

As to meta-observers, it is difficult to say how many levels of "meta" is needed for studying (complex) organic systems. My own opinion is that we need two (not one) levels of "meta" plus the "object" level (technical language) at which pairs exist. The matter is studied by many theoretical biologists these days as well as by a few physicists. Philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to be joining this "bandwagon"too. At any rate, as you have noticed, the matter is intricate even in mathematics.

Again, inclusion of an observer and the epistemic cut does NOT either weaken or strengthen the PSR in its general formulation. Rather than that principles of clear thinking appear to define the S in the PSR.

Jonathan Edwards;

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't know much about Medieval scholastics. Therefore I cannot comment on systems theories in response to your claim. Personally I understand only a few systems theories (there are many) but tend to find useful only 2 of them. Entire biology is systems biology ever since Aristotle (or earlier), so the role of systems theories in it appears to be minimal.

I will have to read more about monads. Judging from your posts and Wikipedia articles (not very accurate I must say) I like the idea of monads and their interactions. It looks to me as the epistemic cut is there: information in monads appears to come directly from God. Therefore we (meta-observers?) need to decide (or believe) what constitutes God as opposite to monads proper. (I reserve the right to be wrong about that but I think I am not wrong.)

Dear AK,

If you have looked at monads on wikipedia I would recommend a power shower for the brain! There is a huge amount of junk written about Leibniz;s theory of monads. The monad is a point of view on the universe but is not separate from its universe. It is a meaningless concept except as that relation, which is its only essence. God for Leibniz is the totality of Reasons. Reasons are strange things because they have no place in space or time. They are a bit like types rather than tokens, yet the totality of all reasons does appear to be a token in some sense at another level. Reasons are patterns of possibility or necessity. The universe is what is actual and consists of an infinity of relations from points of view, each being a monad. 

I have been reading Leibniz for ten years and I still find I am getting clear aspects of his thinking I thought I had got clear some years before. He undercuts so many of our assumptions about epistemology and ontology. He has been badly misrepresented but fortunately there are now some very good scholars - a number of whom are meeting in Wales this week. My interest is that he seems to presage the counterintuitive moves needed to make sense of quantum field theory - he shows why we should expect to have to make them.

It is impossible to predict when a particular uranium atom will decay. The chance that a given atom will decay never changes, that is, it does not matter how long the atom has existed.  The moment of a particular decay event cannot be explained.

This seems to be a contradiction of the PSR.

Christian,

It is the essence of the PSR  that all fact require an explanation.  I agree with you that the moment does not require an explanation and that the process requires an explanation.  But this is precisely an exception to the PSR.  That in quantum mechanics individual events are not determined is also a case where the PSR do not apply.  So the PSR is not applicable to all facts but only to aspects of the world that is order.  This is a huge departure to the original PSR which was assumed to be universal.  Of course it was wrong because not all that exist is ordered.

We know that the PSR is not applicable to the Problems of Hilbert, because it was proved that there are problems without answer, which are indecidable. Later Godel incompleteness theorems made a greater damage into the PSR.