ENACTMENT: Doubt the reality of everything. Then try to doubt your doubting—doing so actually forces the doubter into existence. Doubting cannot be doubted.

One way to ascertain certain knowledge is to see if a knowledge claim can survive an act of doubt. Anything that is undoubtable has certain existence. Descartes applies this procedure of methodic doubt or “methodological skepticism” to all kind of putative knowing. If there is any way a belief can be undermined, then the knowledge it provides is conceivably false and, so, uncertain.

Descartes applies the method to various types of knowledge—from tradition, from sense experience, and from mathematical construction. If one example from each type fails to survive the test, then the whole class is discounted as dubitable.

• Knowledge from tradition—FAILS, because experts disagree.
• Sense experience—FAILS, because of illusions (refraction, e.g.), hallucinations, and dreams.
• Mathematical knowledge—FAILS, because of errors in calculation (and because we could be tricked by an all-powerful mind manipulator).

The mind manipulator is the toughest obstacle. It could (conceivably) trick us into believing that “2 + 2 = 5” by altering our consciousness as we move through the proposition.

So now the obviously pressing question arises: Is there any kind of knowing that the mind manipulator cannot undermine?

Click here for an excursion on the Cartesian mode of self-reinstatement.

The most popular domain: the PNC. This type of necessity is high grade. It is demonstrated (schematized) by failure. And we see in this a kind of side-principle of logical metaphysics—the fact that positives can only be demonstrated by negating negatives. To use another positive lacks the strong invariance that belongs to logical identity, for which the PNC is the proof. That is, the Law of Identity unpacks as, and has its ground in, the primordial fact that positing is not negating. Thinking posits—it generates presence. And it posits not anything, but exactly the thing thought about. Which makes it sound like thinking contains two acts of positing, which we can call the impulse phase and the confrontation phase of a full act of positing. Desire pulls its target as soon as (or even before) it arises and is present to the epistemic subject—even though it arises as the subject’s very will.

[About the two positings I just mentioned. That was a joke—of course there is only one positing in “the” “act” of positing. But we have to wonder about the original arising of the “choice” to pull down this concept from Platonic Heaven rather than that one. The posited in imagination has its sufficient condition—our intentionality to posit it. But every posit occurs “according to a rule”—to a rule that is prior to the execution of the act of schematizing. If agentive volition is what has us forge an instance of the concept in the imagination, what is it that compels the choice of rule?]

Analyticity, or containment and subsumption, is a species of the PNC. The analytic truth combines the PNC with whatever imaginary metaphysical model we use to explain “the logical combination of marks” and the fact that any one of these marks, when intended as a predicate, “subsumes” the aforementioned combination.

Existential conditionality is a self-reinstating principle. If state of affairs q exists, then it has arisen. Everything that arises is an effect, meaning that its existence is conditional on something else.

ENACTMENT I: Deny the PSR. If your denial is not arbitrary or a joke, then you pretend that it is valid. But to be valid is to be ready to supply a because to any why. The very act of the denial occurs in the context of speaking and truth-telling. To deny something is, in fact, to promote the denial as true to an audience. As soon as the time comes to show the validity of the denial, you are done for—for you will be enacting the very PSR you set out to destroy.

ENACTMENT II: Even if we affirm the PSR, we are still relying on it on the metalanguage level. If we grant that the truth of the PSR is axiomatic, we might be asked why it is so. What then? It seems that we just know, a priori, that every existence or fact has causes and conditions.

What is it about this fact about facts that makes it special? On one hand, the PSR is just boring fact of common sense. “Everything that arises does so on conditions.” [Cf. “All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.”] On the other hand, the PSR is the very soil of theism, cosmogenesis, and emergence—as well as science, mathematics, and logic. Conditionality is the both the presupposition and the object of scientific inquiry and explanation: to know something is understand the rule that brings it about, until each element resolves to some simple act (plus some attending-to during the act).

The Principle of Individuation —

An Individual Object is one that we propose to regard at once as recognizable or identifiable throughout some process of investigation, and as unique within the range of that investigation, so that no other instance of any mere kind of object suggested by experience, can take the precise place of any one individual.

ENACTMENT: Let us deny the principle in order to conclude that it is false. In that case, we must also conclude that there are no individuals. But then our original act of denial could not have occurred, since the act of negation operates on a target that is, functionally, just the individual in the description.

ENACTMENT: Suppose that exclusive disjunction (ED) is not a self-reinstating principle. If ED is not true, then not-ED is true. But this follows only on the presupposition that ED and not-ED are disjunctively related. So asserting that not-ED reinstates ED because ED is the practical context that allows for this practice whereby positive options follow from acts of negation. Thus ED is also a self-reinstating principle.

ENACTMENT: Doubt the feasibility of the fundamental values being what they are. Now realize that your doubting forces them to be that way.

The ACP is an extension of the Goldilocks Principle, which notes that the distance from Earth to Sun is just right for life to occur and evolve into humans. Additionally, the distance from Sun to galactic center, which determines the metallicity of the Sun and the frequency of neighboring supernovae, is also important. Thus any planet that meets these conditions is called a Goldilocks Planet.

The ACP notes that the Earth–Sun distance depends on the whole universe being “just right.” For example, the values and ratios of the four fundamental forces and other observables must be within a particular and narrow range in order for universes to evolve into ones that produce energy sources (stars), planets (greenhouses), and energy sinks (empty space) at the right distances. Why does our universe happen to have the fundamental values it does? How did we get so lucky?

Weak anthropic principle

If our universe weren’t hospitable to life, then we wouldn’t be here to speculate about it. Many universes are born with varying fundamental values. We see this one because it has the right values.

Here, the explanandum is our universe having the fundamental values it does, and the explanans is selection bias operating on an infinite domain of possible universes (the Multiverse). We see only this (type) of universe because it’s the only one that can produce us.

Carter’s version:

We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.

This version is called weak because it has no creative power, merely selection power. Nearly all universes are not tuned to produce intelligent life, but given enough of them, a small number will have the right values. This one must be one of those.

Barrow & Tipler’s version:

The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the universe be old enough for it to have already done so.

Versions

Strong anthropic principle

Since we live in a universe capable of supporting life, only life-supporting universes are possible. The universe is compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it, and the symptom of this compulsion is the fact of our emergence. For a universe-emergent subject to exist, it must be possible to observe some universe—but then the laws and constants of such a universe must accommodate that possibility:

1. If I am a cosmosubject (conscious of a universe), then necessarily some universe exists.
2. Any universe that generates conscious subjects must have the right fundamental values.
3. I am a cosmosubject.

THEREFORE, the universe has the force (and other) values that it does.

Carter’s version:

The universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. To paraphrase Descartes, cogito ergo mundus talis est.

Barrow & Tipler’s version:

The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.

The force of the must is approached in three ways:

1. “There exists one possible Universe ‘designed’ with the goal of generating and sustaining ‘observers’.”

The universe contains a telos, which is the emergence of this—conscious experience of the universe, ourselves, and our diving into it, learning its laws, and colonizing it with our techne to satisfy biological and cultural teloi of our own, transforming it (locally, at least) into these experiential, aesthetic, evaluating, ethical microcosms of human interest. This, the telos of the universe, is a brute fact that comes with the Big Bang. That is why the fundamental values “must” be what they are.

Paul Davies calls this the Life Principle. It says that universe evolves intelligent life because it contains this as its constitutional telos.

2. “Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being.”

This is the popular Von Neumann–Wigner Interpretation of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. This is problem of how it happens that the wave function (or state vector) collapses from its actual but unrealizable nature as a probability distribution of values into one particular realized value. The observables we encounter are all particular. Yet the formalism that drives their becoming, which is real and observed in the double-slit experiment to be a really guiding force, says they are perpetually probabilities. Whence the conversion into particularity?

The observer is what delivers probability over into … the domain of which we are aware. This domain, the physical universe, is dependent on observation to be the way it is—particular in its manifestation. Everything in the universe we observe is an eigenvalue. Thus the universe requires us, in order to come into full-fledged being. There is no point of having a Big Bang of a manifest without including the power of manifestation.

CONCLUSION: If the result is a universe with these fundamental values, then our existence is a necessary condition. (Click here for more speculation.)

3. “An ensemble of other different universes is necessary for the existence of our Universe.”

[Explained above.]

ENACTMENT: Try to imagine away your intuition of three-dimensional space. Trying to do so only reinstates that intuition.

Imagining away the formal intuition of space can only be enacted by imagining it (again). On first glance, this is no different from the Thought Suppression Paradox— the act of trying to negate a presentation (concept or image) necessarily calls it to mind since it is the object of an articulated command.

But it is actually slightly different. Space arises as a presentation under all propositional attitudes. It is the a priori outward orientation of outer sense that makes its negation impossible. Outwardly imagining anything, including the attempt to think away the form of outer sense, activates and amplifies consciousness of it:

We can never have a presentation of there being no space, even though we are quite able to think of there being no objects encountered in it. Hence space must be regarded as the condition for the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent on them. Space is an a priori presentation that necessarily underlies outer appearances. [A24/B38]

ENACTMENT: The act of arguing against modus tollens and PNC. Doing this must use modus tollens and PNC.

Rationality in matters of deduction is infallible. There is no arguing against modus tollens or PNC. (If there were, it would end the possibility of argument as such.) But rationality in matters of induction is empirical and statistical. Facts outside of logic and math are always learned through observation and controlled experiment. And matters of concern—of duty, morals, and goods—is learned through conversation. Essences are the strongest valid universals. If it is true that all xs are F, then it is certain that most, many, and some xs are F. Deductive inference, or reason proper, makes certainty transitive.