Is there a necessary being? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fMhoiKaZr8DFh58.html

White text on a black background is so much easier on the eyes, thanks for this and keep doing it

0:33 The World Is The Way It Is • Modal language, useful fiction, not objective feature. 1:56 Metaphysical Tendency • Postulating True-Description 2:43 Worry: It’s Incoherent 7:30 Actions can be 2 properties and 2 properties only 9:18 1 Necessary World: There is only 1 way the world could be

5:39 That relies on the assumption that "It is not the case that A (where A is an action) is permissible" iff "A is impermissible" But these aren't necessarily semantically equivalent Here: One denies that A has some property P, while the other asserts that A has some property Q To claim that "if A doesn't have P then A has Q" has the underlying assumption that all A's either have property P or Q But it is logically possible that some have neither I think you can somewhat avoid this problem by stating "The property of permissibility doesn't exist" There you have less ambiguity in the language

You could further develop this by going into Quine’s vs Kripke’s interpretation of quantified modal logic. It is a deep debate with contemporary analytic philosophy and I do not believe it has been fully resolved. Kripke published a paper in Nous as recently as 2017 with some further thoughts on the topic. Metaphysicians obviously got completely on board with Kripke’s interpretation of modal discourse as it gave them stuff to write about again, yet I do not think the Quinean challenges have been adequately answered. It often comes down (as these things often do) to an assertion of intuition. For example Kripke would say something like “It clearly makes sense to interpret a set of possible worlds as a proposition” whereas I would say “no, actually, it doesn’t”. It can get technically complex so maybe not suitable for a KZfaq video, but maybe you could give it a try if you want?

Awesome video! Thanks for all the content you create

I think of modal properties similarly to probability in that they're used to describe situations in which there is ignorance. To say the world is necessarily the way it is almost presupposes knowledge about the world. The world might necessarily be the way it is but it would only then be necessarily the way described by a number of possible descriptions.

~P does imply N. There's nothing wrong with either claim though.

I agree, that some modal claims, like the one with a change in fundamental particles, are vague. But when I say that cup neccessary was on the table at 5 pm, yesterday, I mean, that I have some justification(x), from which I could deduce, that the statement "cup was on the table at 5 pm, yesterday" is true. For example that could be video recording, or a testament of some witness. So, more formally: □P ∃x:Proof(x,P) ◇P ~∃x:Proof(x,~P) I don't think that it is possible to do reasoning without an idea of "justification", which I denote here as Proof predicate. All other entities involved in modal statements are purely logical. Therefore to deny modality is to put yourself in very fringe logical nihilist position, and fell out of the conventional rules of discource.

I think the most reasonable view here is modal skepticism. It doesn't seem like we have any reliable way of checking whether modal properties exist, or what those properties are, so skepticism towards them is the most reasonable position.

Have you ever read Alexander Pruss' 'Necessary Existence'? Its the best case for necessitarianism I have found. Edit: It argues for the existence of a necessary foundation of reality, not that contingent events do not exist.

Seems like it’s possible 😊 To throw away possibility, and keep necessity, leaving you with a kind of super determinism.

My thought: Modality is based on causal properties. For true counterfactuals, their antecedents logically imply their consequents when we take into account all causal properties. This position avoids the Necessitarianism objection. Yes, modal discourse would still make sense even if Necessitarianism were true. This is because Determinism comes from causal properties.

6:01 I think the obvious coherent answer is that I can adopt the view that nothing is morally permissible and therefore everything is morally impermissible. Which is just another phrasing of the view that there is no objective morality that could guide our actions.

Fantastic talk. How about future contingencies? Are they / should they be understood in terms of modal properties?

Deleuze presents an interesting argument against the possible in Begsonism, stemming from the fact that all that we have ever experienced has been real. In proposing that what currently exists was at once point possible, we are projecting the real into the past sans its actuality and saying that from here what currently exists followed. We imagine that the real is the possible with something added which causes it to be actualized, but in fact it is the other way around. The possible is the real with nonexistence added. So here we've gotten things backwards and confused the more for the less, the antecedent with the consequent. We only imagine that the possible exists by assuming that nonexistence is primary (which is in fact the very opposite of what direct experience tells us), and thus the argument for it is circular.

On the dimensionless particles thing: it might be a bit of an oxymoron. I assume "dimensionless" means having dimension 0, and we're strictly concerned with spatio-temporal dimensions. Technically a dimension 0 vector space exists, but it only contains the 0 vector, so a dimensionless particle basically needs to be located at the origin everywhere, regardless of where you measure it. You _might_ be able to get away with a kind of soupy-object that satisfies this, but I'd think that's not a particle, since particles are defined as having space-time coordinates. It just might be worth an errata on the example, since it may be a contradiction in terms.

basically a claim of the "possibility" if translated into honest terminology is a claim of the Existence Of A Definitive Class to which the given observable thing belongs, and does not exhaust this class.

The argument for modal anti-realism could go something like this: (1) Modal realism conflates epistemology and ontology. (2) In order to disprove (1), modal realists would need to provide sufficient evidence for the existence of modal properties. (3) Ontology does not depend on epistemology (e.g. from the epistemological utility of numbers it does not follow that mathematical platonism is true) (4) The evidence modal realists provide for the existence of modal properties does not go beyond the epistemological utility of modal properties (e.g. their explanatory or predictive power). (5) From (3) and (4), the evidence modal realists provide is insufficient for satisfying (2). (6) If (1) is true, modal anti-realism is more plausible. (7) From (5), (1) is true. (8) Hence, from (6) and (7), modal anti-realism is more plausible. I am not sure you could ever fully disprove modal realism. At best you might manage to make it a position as implausible as mathematical platonism.

What would it mean for modal properties to exist or not to exist? I don't see how that could have any meaning. The word exist is applicable to chairs and fictional characters, not to 'possible' and 'impossible'. It is possible for me to do 20 push ups, and it doesnt make sense to ask if it is 'actually possible' or if this is just a fiction.

Great video! Another promising way one could motive a modal antirealism is epistemic. How exactly does our ability to imagine/conceive of different possibilities latch on to the underlying modal reality in a way that gives us true knowledge of the modal facts? This is somewhat analogous to Benacerraf's integration problem for mathematical Platonism. I'd recommend Amie Thomasson's new book 'Norms and Necessity' (2021), where she develops a more sophisticated normativism about modality, but also discusses this particular problem for modal realism in chapter 7. (She also has a few journal articles on the topic which seem to be the precursors to the book, so they are probably worth a read too)

this description is salty as hell but i love it

Modality is a property of the world which is modeled. There are no modeled properties of the world that are not real properties of the world. That is, the phenomenal world to which our "modeling mechanism" has direct access. Even if it is just a property INTERNAL to such a mechanism, that mechanism holds the property by which and through which it accesses and realizes itself in and through a world. Therefore it is a real property of the world, to that precise extent. Emergence of the phenomenon without understanding it does not make it suspect as to inherent reality. Reductive definition must resort to claims about the inherent reality of some base property, which is undoubtedly a vicious regress into circularity or self-contradiction.

I am not radically against this position; although, like you, I have no argument for it. RIP Kripke.

Why should one be a modal antirealist if you can always be a Necessitarian? This way you can be agnostic about modal properties and participate in discussions while keeping a (possibly strong) tendency towards Necessitarianism.

Very interesting. Being a avid Kripke reader myself I have wondered how real this modal way of looking at the world is. I do believe in God, though now I wonder if I believe in a necessary being. Watching your video I cannot help by wonder if your position allows you to use modal logic when you find it convenient and dismiss it when it does not please? In that case it may not be logic at all but just an elaborate justification of preference. Unless you don't believe in modal logic at all.

How does your modal anti-realism relate to (e.g.) David Lewis's modal realism? It seems to me that there isn't too much difference between your views. Both want to say that there are no intrinsically modal properties. For Lewis, modal statements, such as statements about unactualised possibilities, can be true, if they quantify over non-actual worlds. Your "necessitarian" view isn't altogether different, apart from the fact that there are no worlds other than the actual world, which means that many of our modal statements (e.g., "I could have written this comment on a vimeo video") are false.

It seems that there cannot be a "knock down" argument for modal anti-realism because if there was, then modal anti-realism would have to be true "necessarily". Any argument, that is to say argumentation itself, presupposes modal properties. Or am I confused on this? Would modal anti-realism imply a rejection of logical realism? Furthermore, you seem to focus on necessity as the sole modal property but of course there is also contingency and contrariness, no? Thus, any proposal of a way the world might be again already presupposes modal properties, no? I think you might have been trying to address this last point, but I wasn't sure if I was picking up what you were putting down exactly. Frankly I am not sure I am even using these concepts appropriately in this context so, there's that!

can you do a video about epistemic pehnomenalism

I recently learnt about necessitarianism and it resonates with me; enough to make me modal anti-realist. But I have a question: if necessitarianism is true, does modal logic and counterfactuals become completely obsolete and a waste of time by philosophers? You said that in our daily life a necessarianist could still be able to speak as if modality exists. What about philosophically?

Are you talking about objective existence? What if you hallucinate that there's a cup in front of you, and so to you, it exists?

i take issue with the idealization section. if we can suppose an ideal gas, what stops us from supposing an ideal gas that obeys certain laws? to answer your question of "how would things in such a world behave?" i say "how i want them to" (where i'll cleverly choose this to be similar to our world somehow, so it has a use here). what stops us from tracking facts, then? define a state, define how states progress, and then just calculate things mini gripe: they are not "dimensionless" particles, they are dimension 0 particles, more commonly called points

Sacred/corrupt is a false dichotomy. Possible to not be / Necessary is a true dichotomy.

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Could the cup have failed to exist? The necessitarian will say no, of course not. Nothing that exists exists contingently. If something exists, it exists necessarily. But the last two sentences just seem to be restatements of the necessitarian view. The necessitarian still has to indicate how it is that the cup could not have failed to exist. Perhaps he does that by appealing to some set of initial conditions, sufficient more or less to bring about the existence of the cup. He then says that in virtue of the actual fulfillment of the initial conditions, that cup had to come to exist. There's no way that cup doesn't exist if those initial conditions are set and met. But if the cup is destroyed via some powerful destructive force, what can the necessitarian say then? Of course, what happens to the cup in this regard is also the result of the initial conditions being met. Those conditions are necessary. But the cup no longer exists. If it no longer exists, then maybe it did at one time have to exist, but because it doesn't exist now or any longer, it is not the case that it has to exist. And if it doesn't have to exist, it doesn't necessarily exist. But if it doesn't necessarily exist, necessitarianism is false. How does the necessitarian get around this? Does he say that in some way the object still exists after it has been destroyed? That doesn't seem promising. Does he say that my liberal use of temporal modifiers modifying existence is cheating ("existing no longer", etc.)? I don't think this is a good strategy either, particularly with physical, manufactured goods: they don't exist (prior to manufacture), then they do (post manufacture), and then they don't again (post destruction). Maybe the necessitarian view is silly, after all? What do you think?

1- if possible worlds are identical to imaginary worlds then modal facts don't exist; 2- possible worlds are identical to imaginary worlds; C- modal facts don't exist. For 2,when i say socrates could have been a mathematician,i'm just imagining socrates being a mathematician,so what's the difference between that and saying socrates could have been able to breath fire,maybe for this case the identity of indecernibles works,at what depth should i go to say that p is possible and i'm not just imagining p. That's a suggestion.

We know at least one thing about how things would be if there was an ideal gas: the gas in question would obey the ideal gas law.

Critique of "there are no modal properties". I think the arguments presented are insufficient. My viewpoint is generally nominalist. That is, generally sceptical about abstract entities' existential status. Indeed, what is it "to exist"? It's to employ quantifiers, as in: for some x... for all x... To be generally nominalist, is to not quantify over abstractions. That would surely include properties. So, I could agree that modal properties don't exist, only in the sense that we need not quantify over them. But there's no metaphysical punch in that - we need not quantify over any properties at all. That does not inhibit in the slightest that the nominalist can discourse about any properties at all, that are real properties of things. Some people of course talk about properties that have no instances in existing things. Again, this has no metaphysical punch. Cases: If done artistically, it's a form of entertainment, as in fantasy fiction. Thus in the first Harry Potter novel, Fluffy is a three-headed dog. You can learn this as merely a detail of a good story. If a group of people think a fantasy fiction is true, that's (sadly) a collective delusion; not at all comparable (without more investigation) to historians soberly speaking, for example, about unrealized modal possibilities. As in: Possibly Hitler had been assassinated in 1944, if a certain briefcase with a bomb in it had ended up a little closer to the dictator. See how unlike some false religion this is. Again, go to a class in Euclidean geometry. The R^2 plane has zero thickness and is infinitely extended, they say. This is a mathematical abstraction. No existing thing has such properties. Yet geometry is a deductive science, proving difficult theorems from the axioms. Aside from the delight arising from learning pure mathematics, geometry's abstractions advance our reasoned understanding of nature. If there are statements with straightforward truth conditions in the real world, containing modal properties, then there's no reason to discriminate against such properties; as compared to any other properties people attribute to things.

I am wondering whether you also are an anti-realist about libertarian freewill. And if so, what do you make of the intuition we have about us having libertarian freewill?

This is a side topic that is different from the topic in the video but related.The problem is just this something is useful if it gives desired results this is distinct from something being true.We wouldn't want truth if it were useless but that is irrelevant to whether something is true or not and that is the conflation that some people make, I'm not accusing you of making this conflation btw but I've watch many videos where you pull out the pragmatist card.The point is just this there can be useful lies we have all done so my point is just because it's useful doesn't make it true and it puzzles me when someone does call it true.

Are you a necessitarianist?

These arguments seem to concern metaphysical modality, but are you also sceptical of the purely logical kind of modality?

Modality is, like all statistics, the upper limits of uncertainty. It does not represent a real state of the world but of the mind.

So you have to be a meta-empiricist to say that it is not the case that existence is necessary for empiricism? Seems like burden shifting to me. Empiricism is indeed a metaphysical commitment, regardless of any meta level you put over it. As for where I agree, your notion from Pragmatism that the usefulness is the best test for modal usage, I agree. IF you want to do certain practical things with science (or anything with science) you must commit to empiricism as part of your metaphysical framework, and this does involve some modal properties.

In regards to your view of incoherence it would certainly entail the positions being incoherent if we accept that the concepts are contradictory, that’s just logic. Error-theory would have to dictate the statement is meaningless not that it is false, for if it is false, the negation of the statement would be logically true. Now, we can have a small discussion of the terms and their meaning, but taking the usual meaning and making it not about language but about concepts, the incoherence of such moral error theory would persist as well about the Divinity. How does that relate to the modal discourse? Well, are the concepts of necessary and possible such kinds of terms? Clearly yes, they are rational ‘a priori’ concepts that are contradictory. One cannot, on intellectual honest terms reject their rationality or their contradiction. Necessary and possible are exclusive and contradictory, and they also are mere analytic terms. In a weaker sense that seems the most reasonable position to take, and in the stronger sense it would be the only reasonable position to take. Either presents a fatal objection to your own defense relating the incoherence. I also disagree in that I think it’s perfectly possible to conjure a metaphysical realm of properties by logic. In fact, logic seems to me to be one such realm of metaphysical properties.

 In the weakest sense, the success of the model suggests a correspondence to reality. There’s also the issue that we are discussing of the possibility that there are no modal properties, so if that is not the case, modal realism is false, why should we, other than within linguistic terms or in pragmatic ends care about the statement? That is, the very speech is given using a modal discourse and if the discourse is merely pragmatic or linguistic, why should we philosophically care about it?

5:50 I probably shouldn't say anything because you are probably speaking over my head and I need to digest more of your content and study more. And you also may just take into consideration what I'm about to say in which I'll just delete this comment. But I think this is a map and a territory problem. I like to think of these things on normative grounds. Or on terms of meaning. Which is probably a mistake because how do I justify that I have attachment to meaning? And I basically just make the assumption by the fact that animals, society, DNA, and other aspects of reality seem to be able to communicate meaning somehow. But what's important here isn't the material that the cup is made of. It's the meaning that seems to permeate throughout any entity that interacts with this subject matter. Any intelligent being comes who has a utility for cups comes to the conception of what a cup is. And I would say whatever thay is has to be objective. I can't see that as postulation. Because I have lots of evidence of people using different objects for the utility of what a cup does. Sometimes poorly like drinking water off a more or less flat disk and calling it a cup. But we have a conception of what a good cup does and why we want one. And the meaning there really exists just like the meaning that's communicated in dna. I know that may seem superficial. But I don't really see the need for anything deeper here to make the point. I deal with morality the same way. It seems to be the case that we are tending towards a reality with less imposition on will with the rules that we subjecte into ourselves as we get more resources. And we seem to recognize that we are hypocrites when we export that cruelty onto other countries. All the states of matter and the modality of any given situation does seem arbitrary. But the meaning doesn't seem that way. I would justify my position that meaning exists because of our methodology seems to make progress to demonstrate that. Otherwise how would communication be possible? How would you know when you misunderstood someone? How do we know that the cargo cults are horribly mistaken? And if meaning exists then what is it in reference to? Of course you could reject meaning. But I'm thinking you are rejecting the modality after it. But I'm kind of using the conception of some modality existing in the same way thay the cosmological argument seems to point at something. Yes we don't know what thay thing is. But there should be some objective thing or maybe many objective things at the center of why things exist. The reason we can differentiate things successfully I think vaguely points to something. And I think you can have a strong position that something like that exists without over reaching and postulating Edit: I'm not certain if I understand you yet since this is the first video I've watched of yours. The concern I have for what I'm saying is that my model may just be trivially true. Like I'm just saying A=A. I can't remember the name of the worldview that says contradictions actually exist. But if what I'm saying is consistent with that worldview then I don't think I can say I'm saying anything of substance. I beleive I'm making the claim that there is some coherency. Like I can't say what the other worlds you mentioned would be like with different kinds of points where we can communicate meaning that would have modal centers. But I think I could say if we had more of them then we would be able to communicate more clearly. I don't know if we would ever be able to justify them specifically. I am agnostic to any specific modal claim. Like the problem of meaning and the problem of solipsism could be the same problem. In where the reality above us does understand modality. And they just limited our access to certain objective facts. Which is why we are so limited. But if we had them then we could justify meaning and if we were in a simulation simultaneously. But my entire model is just dealing with how meaning seems to operate itself

Buncho nerds in this comment section.... Going to need to stretch and get a bigger toilet for all these swirlies...

I love philosophy but man I find modal conversations difficult to follow. My eyes glaze over and my brain shuts it out. No disrespect to the presentation here, this is a me problem.

This is all a reworking of the discussion whether the statement 'The King of France is bald'. It is meaningless, neither true or false. If you rework it to day 'If the King of France exists then he is bald'. This is false. Modal logic is just a symbol manipulation system and has little value.

This is once again caused by faulty dichotomous thinking used in philosophy. Just because the can is not not possible, does not mean it is necessary. This is because the can's existence is contingent, which is a third option.