If there is no such causal link then the argument is unjustified

Thanks for these. I'll definitely be looking into this.

I'm that fellow mysterian!!!

Very interesting hypothesis. Do you have any resources or reading materials for me to look at because your theory sounds really interesting.

If you have a theory not on the list please comment below...

Does materialism have a particular handicap compared to other types of metaphysics that do not consider fundamental consciousness, and if so, what is this handicap?

The particular handicap when it comes to materialist theories of consciousness is that we make a substance that is antithetical to consciousness and then try to paste consciousness into this substance. I think that the hard problem is more of an epistemic gap and should not be used to try and make ontological conclusions about the place of consciousness in reality,

Are there rational arguments to circumvent the hard problem in other types of metaphysics, or does neutral monism / panprotopsychism collapse into mysterianism?

I don't think the problem can be circumvented by showing how consciousness arises from matter, but I would block any ontological conclusions made from the hard problem. I am a mysterian when it comes to consciousness so I think that the hard problem exposes a fundamental epistemic block we have to conceptualising how consciousness arises from matter, but this cannot be used to justify ontological statements about consciousness being fundamental, or in the other direction it cannot be used to justify that consciousness is an illusion. Other metaphysics would only have the hard problem if they assume that consciousness is emergent from matter. Panpsychism to me just sounds like people are moving from our epistemic limitations on understanding consciousness to an unjustified ontological conclusion about matter having protoconsciousness which we have no evidence for. Neutral monism to me makes zero sense because I cannot even conceptualise what this mystery third substance would be.

This response will only work for people who already accept that there is an afterlife which is filled of infinite goodness.

Thanks for the clarification. Never heard this perspective on causal principles before.

It seems you adopt a view of pragmatism where if the principle does not help us in everyday life then it is meaningless? I don't think this answers the question on whether it is rational to accept or deny the metaphysical truth of the principle.

@Benj96
The question I would ask is, assuming the being is not a God, is does God exist? I think it's the most important question for us to know the answer to.

As per the big bang model, we have a singularity (infinite mass & 0 volume) at time zero. There's no before this time as the infinite gravity of the singularity would mean that time would stop flowing which simply means there was no time; time, after all must flow to exist, right? ( :chin: ). Since there was no time before the big bang, causality breaks down since the standard definition of a cause includes that it temporally precede the effect, here the big bang singularity. The big bang singularity couldn't be caused for this reason.

I would disagree here on the science of the big bang. Quantum gravity and emergent space time could easily mean that time can apply in a slightly different sense before the big bang and mean that the big bang initial state had a cause. I don't think any cosmologists today hold to a naive view of the big bang singularity anymore, most opt for emergent spacetime from quantum states at a more fundemantal levels, emergent universe models based on the asymptotic state models or cyclic universe.

Good perspective. Thanks for the response.

@Wayfarer

One Platonic theme I refect on, is the fact that numbers and logical laws don't begin to exist, or cease from existing. The law of identity, the furniture of basic arithmetic, and so on, are true in all possible worlds.

Nominalists will heavily disagree with the first claim that numbers don't begin to exist and don't cease from existing. Even if Platonism is true, I don't see how the second sentence follow from the first. Nominalists and modal anti-realists would disagree with your second statement as well.

Thanks for the comprehensive response. I'll go and think about this and read up on some of the literature.

Interesting response. Thanks for your engagement with my post.

Thanks for the response. In the mereological version of the Kalam i wasn't trying to state it as true, I was just arguing that someone who uses Alex's line of reasoning of mereological nihilism cannot escape the conclusion that the universe has a cause.

And surely, no matter how many examples of things having causes we find, this doesn't mean everything has a cause.

My response is that the principle is more specific that everything has a cause; it says that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Kalam defends could reply by saying that it seems to be a essential feature of things which are caused which is that they begin to exist, and conversely that an essential feature of things which begin to exist is that they are caused to begin to exist.

I'll admit off the bat that I am not all that familiar with the brain in a vat literature so some of my comments here may seem misguided.

First, if you are, as I am, committed to the empirical thesis that phenomenal affairs are reducible to brain activity (though, keeping in mind that this in turn may be reducible to something more fundamental), evidenced by many occasions of brain surgery while completely awake for the treatment of epilepsy, etc.), then the brain is going to be the threshold of epistemic events. Period. What do you have that permits exceeding this boundary? The BIV simply presents this impossible issue. Can it be doubted that my thoughts of my cat in the occurrent perceptual moment are enclosed in a context of referentiality that is brain and only brain? One is not here asking how seems to be the case, but what follows from undeniable premises. You have to work this out, otherwise, your dismissal is purely ad hoc.

I am not committed to the view that phenomenal states are reducible to physical brain activity although I hold it tentatively. I also agree that the brain, under this tentative view, will be the threshold of all epistemic events (true beliefs, false beliefs, believed propositions, etc...). I don't have anything that permits moving across this boundary and I am not aware that I argued that epistemic events can be extended beyond the brain? If I did imply this then I state now that I do not argue this. My point was that if I am a brain in a vat, then I am the only mind in existence. Therefore, there is no other mind for me to share the sematic content of my language with or to form a benchmark of following the rules of attributing meaning to the terms "brain" and "vat" correctly. I'm not quite sure what you are trying to argue here.

You can make sense of being a brain in a vat; of course: one simply deploys a thesis that does not insist on this impossible relationship: phenomenology and hermeneutics. the idea that my cat is on the sofa (or that I am not a brain in a vat) is an interpretation of the events before me, and terms like inside and outside the brain are all interpretative, contingent, resting on assumptions about the world that are, well, contingent. There is no solid ground beneath the feet epistemically speaking; only more thinking, ideas, more interpretatively bound language.

In order to state, even mentally, the proposition that you are not a brain in a vat, you first need to hold a consistent meaning of the world "brain" and "vat". The meaning needs to be stable from the moment the ideas first form to when the proposition is stated and from that point onwards. If you are a brain in a vat (the only mind in existence), then this cannot be done. You would have no way to know that what you meant by "brain" and "vat" 10 seconds ago is the same as what you mean by the terms now. Without external minds anchoring the meaning through agreed rule following systems (Kripke, 1982) the proposition you state of not being a brain in a vat cannot even be made sense of for you to know its truth or falsehood.

As I said before, I am not well read on the literature on the brain in a vat arguments; your knowledge is no doubt more extensive than mine. I've tried to restate my argument more clearly as to be honest I was lost with most of what you were trying to argue, especially in your first paragraph about my dismissal of the proposition "I am a brain in a vat" as ad hoc.

I have a few further questions from your responses if that is ok?

On the other hand, in systems with many components and many inputs and outputs, it is probably not useful to try to identify specific causes for specific states of the system.

My response to this is I don't see any reason to accept that it is not useful to try and identify the causes of certain states of a large scale system. The metaphysical principle would still hold that if there is a state of this system that exists and has not existed forever (i.e. began to exist) then it seems reasonable to conclude that there is a cause for why the state began to exist as it does. It seems less reasonable to say that the state of the system could become that way with no cause.

In complex systems, assuming that all system behaviors require causes will probably not help understand future system behavior.

My response to this is it is irrelevant to the Kalam causal principle whether it will help predict / understand the future system behaviour because the principle is about things in all three tenses (past, present and future). The principle could be true metaphysically even though it will not help us to understand the future system behaviour. Even here I would reject that it would not help us do this. If we accept that whatever begins to exist has a cause, then it gives us a good reason to understand that things in systems do what they do for a reason and when new things occur and states begin to exist, there will be a cause for them. It will help us to understand the causal nexus of the system better.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts.

Someone who uses this line of reasoning needs to show a necessary causal link between omnibenevolence (being all loving) and the removal/prevention of suffering. Most theists who believe that God is all loving would reject the claim that the good thing to do in any situation is to minimise suffering since most religious ethical systems based on an all loving God are either deontological (divine command theory, natural law theory) or based in virtue ethics (Plantinga's free will defence, Hick's soul building theodicy).

A further comment is that a first cause / kalam style argument could be structured to accept the claim of the mereological nihilist. As follows...
1. Any arrangement of mereological simples into a specific structure has a cause.
2. The universe is an arrangement of mereological simples into a specific structure.
3. The universe has a cause.

As far as I understand it, the objection you are raising is one based off mereological nihilism - the view that there are no composite objects such as coffee, chairs, tables, since all are just rearrangements of simples. A few questions I would ask in return is,
1. Did you begin to exist?
2. If chairs/tables are simply rearrangements of pre-existing matter, did the chair/table always exist, exist only at some time or never exist? If they always existed, a problem of this would be that you would be committed to the view that everything which has been made by the arrangement of the matter of the universe exists now. If you accept that the chairs/tables exist only at some time, then what would be the cause for them only existing now and not 100 years ago? If you opt to say, as I predict you might, that chairs/tables never exist at any point, when you say that 'the chair/table is a rearrangement of pre-existing matter', what does the term 'chair' or 'table' refer to? A cost of this argument would be that it would make nouns such as these meaningless under my view.

It depends on whether you view an atheist as someone who positively rejects the existence of any Gods. To me, I don't see atheism as simply a lack of belief. That's why I would label myself and others as agnostic if they do not affirm that God does not exist but also do not affirm that God exists.

A good argument against brain in vat scenarios is the idea that the semantic content of our language (meaning of words) would make no sense if I was the only brain/mind in existence. If I was a brain in a vat, then I could not even make sense of the proposition that I was a brain in a vat (via the private language argument and rule following paradoxes showing that language, semantic content and meaning are publicly held phenomena). It would be impossible for the terms "brain" and "vat" in my conceptualisation of the proposition - 'I am a brain in a vat' to actually have semantic content and meaning to refer to anything such as a real brain in a real vat.