Warning: I need sleep and to metabolize serum cannabinoids...
I don't think we can possibly answer this question. A key precondition of investigation of what is the case, how it came to be, and why it is is that something is (something must inquire, or at the very least, inquiry must occur). Unless an investigation were to capture entirely itself as its object, it could not possibly capture the sum conditions which allow such inquiry.
We can conclude with certainty that something is (or a process occurs), but we can never account for what stipulates that something emerges/persists/etc. However, existence of something (or a process's movement) entails that it asserts itself in terms of what it is not (and conditioned by the latter); what we can come to know remains ever-formed by what we never can.
hah....as I wrote this, I noticed that I'm no longer convinced by my own argument...but I'm not quite sure what I'm missing.
Peter van Inwagen has devised a probabilistic proof that the existence of something is infinitely more likely than nothingness. The argument rests on the concept of possible worlds, and on the principle of identity of indiscernables, which was formulated by Liebniz. The principle is that any two things that have all the same properties are, in fact, the same thing; if two things are completely identical qualitatively and relationally, then they are numerically identical.
Now, given that any two possible worlds that have identical properties are actually the same possible world, there is only one possible world in which nothing exists. However, there are a huge number, even an infinite number, of possible worlds in which something does exist. Thus, for any world, the chances of it containing nothing are infinitesimal, and the chance of it containing something almost certain.
My contention with Liebniz (and for similar reasons logical positivism) is that the notion of a constellation of possible worlds and objects which exists and holds characteristics
a priori presents too many problems when used to anchor ontology. Sure, there must be some background (that shit aforementioned that we can't know) that structures possibility (or conditions some lack of structuring), but is this background a set of possible worlds and conditions outlining which worlds are impossible?
I instead see two possibilities: from the perspective of those temporally bound (ie, where there is investigation), the investigation itself alters the context which determines the inquiry itself. Thus, possible worlds are neither
a priori givens nor logically primary in effecting actual worlds.
Or 'from'* the perspective of the unknowable which allows us to try to know, all context cradling investigation might stipulate what worlds are possible, but the 'conditions for possibility' themselves must be logically prior to the action of distinguishing possible from impossible (as they give rise to the set of possible worlds in the first place (and I think that this argument work s whether we speak of a set of possible worlds or set of possible phenomena).
Thus, Liebniz's reasoning cannot stand, as it confuses the full set of results with the process/entity/etc. that effects these results.
I need a break from this LCD badly, so I'll just say that an analogous argument holds for exploring the set of possible properties things can have (or set of things that can be delineated).
mmm...apologies if this belongs in the blog area.
*Of course, one can never actually describe this...so we have a rough pointer.
ebola
. good thread tho ill keep looking and adding
