Sunday 15 August 2021

God freely creates abstract objects.

Say a Libertarian free agent was offered the choice between getting a million dollars and being tortured for a week. They would always opt for the million dollars rather than being tortured because there is no reason to be tortured rather than to take the million dollars. So, under a good account of Libertarian free will, the absence of reasons to choose option A and the presence of reasons to choose option B will necessitate the agent's choosing option B. It is only when there are reasons both to choose A and to choose B that the agent's choice is indeterministic.
Let's apply this to any account where abstract objects depend on God's will. If He chooses to create the abstract objects, it seems like He doesn't have the free will to refrain from creating them (since He must create them in every possible world). But, if God necessarily has reasons to create these abstract objects and necessarily lacks reasons to refrain from creating them, then He will create them in every possible world. This is all totally compatible with His having Libertarian free will.

Thursday 12 August 2021

A paradox of non-actual persons knowing stuff

Here's a fun paradox. Say Jim is considering the following argument:

"I occupy this possible world. There have been so many indeterministic events in the past that the probability that they have all had the outcomes necessary for this world's being actual is very low. Thus, I should believe that this world isn't actual. I don't actually exist."

Jim can't see a flaw in this argument, yet he ultimately rejects it because the conclusion is crazy. Let's say that Jim's rejection of this argument is an indeterministic event. So, let's consider the possible world where Jim (or rather, the counterpart of Jim, Jim') accepts this argument. The weird thing is, Jim' is right. He isn't actual, and the reason he isn't actual is because an indeterministic event in the past had the wrong outcome. Does Jim' know that he isn't actual? Furthermore, if Jim had accepted the argument, then the argument's conclusion would have been wrong. That's weird.

Sunday 8 August 2021

A Meta-Moral Argument?

It's often assumed that without God, then there can be no morality. This assumption though, is rarely given a robust justification. The fact that this sentiment is so poorly defended and is yet widespread (even some atheists accept it!) leads me to believe that it's an intuition built into us. I wonder if this intuition can count as a moral intuition. Because a naturalist moral realist is going to want to deny as few widespread moral intuitions as possible, they should give weight this specific moral intuition. Thus, their credence in God's existence should be raised.

Tuesday 3 August 2021

A paradox if God has non-occurrent knowledge

I'm toying with the notion that only some of God's knowledge is occurrent. He is not at any moment aware of the truth-value of all propositions, but can choose to become aware of the truth-value of any proposition. But this leads to a paradox. Say God will not decide to become aware of the truth-value of any proposition at time t. Thus, the proposition that "God will not decide to become aware of the truth-value of any proposition at time t" is true. But could God decide to bring that proposition into His awareness at time t? Well, there are possible worlds where God bring the truth-value of that proposition into His awareness. But in all those worlds, the proposition is false. And, in all the worlds where it is true, God is not aware of its truth. So, there is no world where this proposition is true and God is aware of its truth.

Monday 2 August 2021

Discrete time disguised as continuous

Here's an interesting argument which I would love to see developed by someone more informed about the relevant fields.

Modeling physical systems on discrete time would require iteratively applying some function which maps a given state of the universe to its successive state. This seems prima facie to make physical systems very difficult to model. To know the state of the universe in n moments, I would need to apply this function to the present state of the universe n times. What a headache!

But what if we learn that, due to Zeno's paradoxes or something, continuous time is metaphysically impossible? That would be most unfortunate. It means that we can figure out a priori that modeling physical systems is going to be nigh impossible.

Hold up. We can model physical systems, though. What's going on here?

Well, one explanation is that God "fudged the numbers." God chose a universe whose evolution across discrete time can still be modeled mathematically at the macroscopic scale, because God wants discoverable laws of nature.

So, to flesh out this argument, we need to show that:

1) Physical systems with discrete time will usually be hard to model (barring something like a God intervening).

2) Our universe operates with discrete time.

3) Our universe is not hard to model.

Meinongianism and Cantorian Diagonalization

 Meinongianism posits that for any condition on objects, there is a unique object satisfying exactly that condition. However, for any plural...