Does it follow from van Inwagen's answer to the Special Composition Question that all complex things are alive?

The view that all objects are either living or simple appears to be a consequence of van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition question, namely that a proper plurality only composes a whole when the parts have a life together, where a proper plurality is a plurality of two or more things.

But this does not follow. Van Inwagen defines:

1. The xs compose y if and only if “the xs are all parts of y and no two of the xs overlap and every part of y overlaps at least one of the xs”.

Now the view that all non-simples are alive follows from van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition question (SCQ) provided that we have to have:

2. Anything that has proper parts is composed of some proper plurality of its proper parts.

3. Whenever something is composed of a plurality of things that have a life together, it is alive.

Indeed, if we have 2 and 3, then anything that has proper parts is composed of proper plurality by 2, which thus have a life together by van Inwagen’s answer to SCQ, and hence the thing composed of them is alive by 3. On the other hand, if there can be something that has proper parts but isn’t composed of a proper plurality of proper parts, then there is no way to use van Inwagen’s answer to SCQ to argue that it’s alive. Furthermore, if there is something that is composed of a proper plurality of proper parts that have a life together but isn’t alive, then we have another counterexample to van Inwagen.

Neither 2 nor 3 is completely obvious. You might, for instance, think that where you are, there is also a heap of atoms shaped just like you. If, further, you are a presentist and a materialist, you will think the atoms compose you and compose the heap. Moreover, the atoms have a life together. But the heap of atoms is not alive, unlike you. So (3) on that view is false.

For a view on which (2) is false, imagine a world consisting of four objects, A, B, C and D. Object A has B, C and D as proper parts. Object B has D as a proper part. Object C has D as a proper part. There are no other instances of proper parthood. This is a world where the company axiom of mereology fails (since B and C have D as a proper part and no other proper parts). It would be interesting to characterize in some non-trivial way the mereological theories where (2) is true. A sufficient condition is to assume atomism (Gemini Pro noted this). We can define this by saying every object has a simple part. For then if an object has a proper part, it is easily seen to be composed by its proper parts. But atomism is not a necessary condition. Consider a gunky mereological model whose domain is infinite sets of natural numbers and parthood is inclusion—then (2) is true.

We could also escape this worry by weakening the definition of composition by dropping the requirement that no two of the xs overlap. That makes van Inwagen’s answer to the SCQ put a more stringer requirement on reality, and it becomes trivial that everything that has proper parts is composed of them, and (2) becomes a matter of logic. We still need an argument for (3), however.

Proper parts and dependence

Consider this initially plausible thesis:

1. If x has a proper part, and all of x’s proper parts depend on y, then x depends on y.

Add:

2. An effect depends on its cause.

3. Nothing depends on itself.

We conclude:

4. Nothing that has proper parts is a cause of all of them.

This has a nice theological application.

5. God is the cause of everything that is not God.

6. Therefore, if God has proper parts, he is the cause of all of them.

7. So, God has no proper parts.

However, I am dubious of premise 1. I think (1) depends on a story about parthood on which a whole is made of its parts. But if we don’t have that story, we could imagine a simple thing that then goes on to produce a proper part for itself. And so we lose the nice argument for divine simplicity. Which is too bad, but there are others.

How do we get to an unmoved mover?

I just realized that there is a difficulty in Aquinas’ First Way that I think hasn’t been noted, which builds on the difficulty noted yesterday.

Put the First Way in the following simpleminded way, which I think captures the central ideas:

1. Causes of change are either passers-on of change or originators of change.

2. It can’t be that the causes of change are all passers-on of change.

3. So there must be an originator of change.

4. And this is an unmoved mover (or, more precisely, unchanged changer).

There is a fair amount of detail one can fill in to argue for (2), but that’s not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on the move from (3) to (4).

What licenses us in thinking that an originator of change is itself unchanging?

The idea seems to be that if a cause of change is itself changing, then it is merely a passer-on of change. But this need not be. In my previous post, I imagined an unchanging and timeless demiurge endowed by God with the power to originate change, and noted that in that scenario the demiurge is an unmoved mover but isn’t God.

But now let’s build up and modify my demiurge story. First, let’s be concrete about what motion the demiurge causes. The demiurge has been gifted by God with the power to directly will Bob to rotate around a fixed axis, and the demiurge changelessly exercises this power. (Maybe Bob is one of the Aristotelian heavenly spheres). Second, let’s specify that the demiurge, albeit unchanging, is in time and has an unchanging body in addition to a mind and will. If we can’t have a changeless thing in space and time, don’t worry about it. The third step will fix that. The third step is this. The demiurge itself is caused by God to slowly orbit the sun in a way that the demiurge does not notice.

Thus, we have a demiurge with a mental power to make Bob rotate, and the demiurge exercises this mental power changelessly. At the same time, and completelessly coincidentally to the demiurge’s exercise of the mental power to make Bob rotate, the demiurge orbits the sun.

The demiurge is thus a moved mover. But it is also an originator rather than passer-on of change. In Aristotelian terminology, the demiurge is a moved mover per accidens: its own movement around the sun is coincidental to its origination of Bob’s axial rotation.

We cannot, thus, assume from the existence of an originator of change that there is an unmoved mover.

Does Aquinas have the resources to fill in the gap? Of course, if the (accidentally) moved originator of change coming out of step (3) of the argument is itself changing, that change has to have a cause, and we can then run the argument again. If we can rule out an ungrounded infinite sequence of accidentally moved originators of change—ones that like our demiurge happen to be moving in one respect but produce change by a coincidental exercise of power—then we can get to a genuinely unmoved mover.

But Aquinas’ main tool for avoiding regresses in cosmological arguments is the idea that there cannot be an infinite regress in a per se causal sequence. And while there are complications in the notion of a per se causal sequence, I think it is pretty clear that the sequence I am imagining is not a per se causal sequence. The demiurge’s moving of Bob is coincidental to the demiurge’s own motion. Suppose that a demiurge makes Bob spin by an unchanging exercise of a mental power, and a tetartourge by an unchanging exercise of a mental power makes the demiurge coincidentally slowly orbit the sun while the tetartourge coincidentally orbits the moon. Then the tetartourge is not a cause of Bob’s motion. But in a per se causal sequence we have transitivity: the earlier items are always causes of the later ones. So this is not a per se causal sequence.

Of course, we might ask what explains the demiurge’s (and tetartourge’s) possession and exercise of the mental power to make something else move. But now we are deviating from the First Way: we are asking for explanations of something other than change. I think one can fill this in, by an argument about causation and regresses rather than change and motion. But if we do that, then the stuff about change and motion that is at the heart of the First Way can simply drop out.

I titled my previous post “An easily patched hole in the First Way”. But I think I was too glib there, too. In that context, too, I think one needs to go beyond the resources of the First Way to patch the hole.

An easily patched hole in the First Way

In his First Way, Aquinas argues that as we trace back the sequence of movers from effect to cause, we get to a first unmoved mover, and this is God.

But need the unmoved mover thus reached in the sequence of movers be God? Imagine this scenario. God creates some material beings, as well as an unchanging, timeless and immaterial demiurge that has the power to make the material beings move—and indeed exercises that power. Then if we were to trace back the sequence of movers, the unmoved mover we would get to would be the demiurge, not God. This demiurge would have potentiality, but not a temporal potentiality, so it would not be itself in motion, and hence it would be an unmoved mover.

This doesn’t deeply affect the argument, since Aquinas could do the same thing as he does in the Third Way, where he traces contingent beings to a necessary being, and then considers the possibility of necessary beings that get their necessity from other beings, and traces it back to an absolutely necessary being, namely God. Similarly, God could say that any unmoved mover that has some potentiality or contingency depends on a prior being and so on, and in the end we would get to God anyway.

Indeed, even in this scenario with a demiurge, we might want to say that it is God and not the demiurge who is the first unmoved mover. For God would still be a mover, albeit working through the demiurge who is a secondary cause, and God would be unmoved, and God would be first. So Aquinas would still be correct that the “first mover” is God—it’s just that the scenario suggests that Aquinas does skip a step.

Explanatory principlism

There are three views about ultimate explanations of reality:

1. Nihilism: There is no ultimate explanation of reality.

2. Onticism: The ultimate explanation of reality involves one or more beings.

3. Principlism: The ultimate explanation of reality involves principles rather than beings.

Nihilism is the standard view among atheists. Onticism is the standard view among theists. The main examples of principlism are axiarchism and optimalism, on which reality is explained by its having the kind of value it does. But other combinations are possible: Rescher was an principlist theist, since he thought that God’s existence could be explained by the fact that it’s for the best that God exists.

I want to say a little about what I think is wrong about principlism. Start with the observation that if truthmaker maximalism is true, principlism cannot get off the ground, because whatever principle helps explain the world is made true by the existence of some being, and if an explanatory proposition is made true by a being, that being is certainly “involved” in the explanation.

Truthmaker maximalism is false. However, I think that a neighboring grounding view is true:

4. Being grounds truth (BGT): All truths are grounded in a combination of what there isn’t, what there is and how what is is.

Given BGT, we have very good reason to reject principlism. For presumably all the principles involved in the explanation of reality are true. If any of them are grounded in what there is or how what is is, then we have onticism rather than principlism: onticism is compatible with principles being involved in explanation, as long as beings are also involved. Thus the only way to defend principlism is to say that what gives the ultimate explanation are principles made true solely by the nonexistence of certain entities. And it is very implausible that the nonexistence of certain entities is the ultimate explanation of our reality, rich in being as it is.

The one version of principlism I can think of that I can reconcile with BGT would be an explanation of our reality in terms of the non-existence of beings that would prevent this reality. (This is kind of like the idea in the Scotus argument that nothing can prevent the existence of God, so God exists.) But this is dubious. Mere lack of preventers of x is not enough to explain the existence of x. One would need some kind of basic principle of plenitude on which everything not prevented must exist.

Punishment and presentism

This seems a bit plausible:

1. It is unjust to punish someone for a feature that is not intrinsic to them.

2. If presentism is true, then having done A is not an intrinsic feature of the agent.

3. Thus, if presentism is true, then punishment for past actions is always unjust.

The presentist may well question (2), insisting that presently having a past-tensed feature that was intrinsic when it was presently had counts as intrinsic. I am a bit unsure of this. It’s a question someone should investigate.

Here is a reason to think that presently having a past-tensed feature should not count as intrinsic. Suppose I am facing a free choice, with the possibilities of doing B and not doing B. Then it seems that no present intrinsic feature of me entails what I will do. But suppose that in fact I will do B. Then just as I have past-tensed properties like having done A, I presently have future-tensed properties like being about to do B. And it seems that if one is intrinsic, so is the other. Thus, if my being about to do B is not a present intrinsic feature of me, my having done A is not a present intrinsic feature of me.

The presentist might respond by embracing an open future and denying that it can be true in the case of a free choice that I will do B. But if this is right, then it seems that in order to defend the justice of punishment for past deeds, the presentist has to do something very controversial—accept an open future. Moreover, this means that a classical Jew, Christian and Muslim can’t be a presentist, since classical monotheists are committed to comprehensive foreknowledge, and hence to the denial of an open future, and the justice of retrospective punishment.

Of course, one might question (1). Here’s how one might start. We can punish Alice for punching Bob. But that’s not an intrinsic feature of Alice. We might respond by saying that Alice is punished for her internal act of will, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Probably a better move is to replace (1) by saying that there must be an intrinsic component to the feature one punishes someone for—say, Alice’s act of will. And the presentist now has trouble with this intrinsic component.

Old Polish Almond Torte

In my family, when someone (including me) has a birthday, they choose a type of cake, and then I bake it, often with the help of one or more kids. A family favorite is the old Polish Chocolate Almond Torte. This is a gluten-free cake, made of almond meal, with leavening provided by a full dozen egg whites (with the twelve yolks going into the cake, too), and a layer of home-made marzipan in the middle. My kids found a version of it in Lemnis and Vitry’s Old Polish Traditions, but the recipe was somewhat confusing and we didn’t like the lemon juice in the marzipan. We found another version online here, which pointed us to the original source as the 1931 Polish cookbook How to Cook by Maria Disslowa. Between the three sources, and experimenting across multiple birthdays, we have the following recipe which I baked for my last birthday.

Old Polish Almond Torte

Note: The recipe takes three days (though perhaps days 2 and 3 could be combined) and is ready to eat on the fourth day, but the only thing done on the first day is freezing the chocolate chips.

Ingredients for Cake

• 284g almond meal (unblanched)

• 227g castor sugar

• 284g powdered sugar

• 12 eggs, separated

• 284g dark chocolate chips (we use Hershey’s Special Dark)

• a couple of tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa

• optional: 1 tsp almond extract (my current opinion: omit to have better taste contrast between layers)

Notes on cake ingredients: Our grocery store doesn’t have unblanched almond meal, so we just buy unblanched (i.e., with skin) unsalted roasted bulk whole almonds and grind them in a coffee grinder. Similarly, we can’t get castor sugar, so we grind granulated sugar in a coffee grinder.

Ingredients for Marzipan Filling

• 250g almond flour (blanched)

• 273g powdered sugar

• 78g (or 78mL) water

• 2.5-3.5 tsp almond extract (use 3.5 if you didn't add the teaspoon to the cake)

Ingredients for Ganache

• 320g dark chocolate chips (Hershey’s Special Dark)

• 43g unsalted butter

• 238g (or 1 cup) heavy whipping cream

Additional Topping Ideas:

• slivered almonds or sweet strawberries

Instructions

Day 1:

Freeze the 284g of chocolate chips for the cake. Do not freeze the chips for the ganache!

Day 2:

Preheat oven to 356F (= 180C). Read over all the instructions for this day.

Grind the pre-measured frozen chocolate chips into a fine powder with a coffee grinder. Since a coffee grinder can’t take all of the chips at once, keep the ones that aren’t ground yet in the freezer.

If you don’t have almond meal, grind the almonds in a coffee grinder as finely as you can.

If you don’t have castor sugar, grind granulated sugar in a coffee grinder. It should be a bit coarser than powdered sugar.

Mix up the chocolate chip powder, sugar and almond meal.

Prepare a 10-inch spring form pan by buttering the bottom and sides, and putting a parchment paper circle on the bottom. Coat the sides with cocoa (this way, the cake remains gluten-free, and it’s better than flour).

Separate the 12 eggs.

Cream the egg yolks with the sugar until a bit fluffy, and while creaming mix in the sugar/meal/chocolate mix.

Stiffly beat the egg whites. Lightly mix them into the yolk-sugar-meal combination. (The egg whites provide all the lift to the cake, so the cake will be too dense if you overmix.)

Pour into the pan. Bake for one hour. Cover and leave overnight. Feel free to refrigerate.

Day 3:

Combine almond flour and powdered sugar for marzipan filling, together with the water and the almond extract. Knead into a homogeneous ball of dough. I start by using a dough hook in a stand mixer, and finish up by hand. Roughly flatten into a thick disc of the same diameter as the cake. It will be about 1 cm thick.

Remove the cake from the pan (I like to use a plastic knife). Cut into two layers and put the disc of marzipan between, making a level layer that reaches the sides.

For the ganache, heat the butter and cream together in the microwave until it is hot, with the butter melted, but before it boils. Add chocolate chips, mixing to ensure they all melt into the ganache. The last couple of grams took more time to dissolve.

Allow the ganache to cool somewhat and become more viscous. (I am usually impatient at this stage, and regret not having enough viscosity.) Pour it a bit at a time on the top of the cake, letting it drip over the sides on a very large plate or other clean platform. Use a spatula to push the drippings up over the sides again, repeating until the cooling ganache stops dripping significantly, and you have nice smooth edges.

Refrigerate overnight.

Fine moral distinctions

I find myself sometimes troubled by narrow moral distinctions in the Christian, and sometimes more specifically Catholic, tradition. Lying is wrong, but deception—perhaps including verbal deception—is not. Intentionally killing the innocent is wrong, but redirecting trolleys onto innocent people can be acceptable. Salpingostomy is wrong as a treatment of ectopic pregnancy, but salpinectomy is right. In each of those cases, of course, there is a defensible moral theory justifying the distinction, and in fact in each case I accept such a theory. But I still feel troubled.

There is an old Polish joke. After World War II, the Soviets are shifting the border between Poland and Russia. A farmer used to have a farm in Poland, but now the farm is going to be half in Poland and half in Russia. The farm is given a choice of which half he wants. He says: “The Polish half, of course. Russia is too cold.”

Of course, when you divide a continuous landmass into countries, there will be places where a step in one direction will get you into another country. And the climactic conditions are going to seem pretty similar. They will seem pretty similar, but they won’t be exactly the same.

Similarly, if you divide the space of human actions into, say, murder and non-murder or into wrong and non-wrong, one will find pairs A and B where A falls on the bad side and B on the good, and yet A and B are pretty similar. That’s just how it is. As long as we have moral objectivity, classical logic, and continuity among actions, this is unavoidable.

This does not mean that the distinctions will be arbitrary. If there is a roadside honor-system vegetable stand and a bunch of carrots is $3.50, then there is indeed a distinction between stealing by paying $3.49 and giving a fair payment of $3.50, even though the actions are very similar. Nonetheless, non-arbitrary as the distinctions are, they may not be major.

We should thus not be surprised if there are fine moral distinctions. There have to be.

Of course, we might dispute over where the boundaries lie. One might propose different boundaries: perhaps instead of saying lying is wrong while mere deception is permissible, one will say that both are permissible when needed to save lives and neither is permissible otherwise. But the alternate distinction will also have close-by cases. Why is it, on this story, permissible to lie to save oneself from death but not from torture? And what does it mean to save a life? One is never certain that a lie will save a life. What probability of saving a life is needed? There is no way to avoid boundaries between cases that will seem similar.