From Necessary Being to God? | Dr. Graham Oppy & Dr. Rob Koons

Hey everyone, welcome back to The Majesty of Reason. And I'm Joe Schmidt, and we have two very special guests on, two philosophers that I absolutely love. We've got Dr. Rob Cairns and Dr. Graham P. Thank you guys both so much for joining me.

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Today, we're going to be discussing different paths from necessary being to God. So normally, in cosmological arguments, it's broken down into two stages, right? So stage one is often trying to argue from some broad feature of reality, like change, or the existence of contingent things, or, you know, essence-existence composites, or what have you. It's trying to argue from that, using some sort of broad explanatory principle, to some sort of foundation or explanation for this broad feature of reality. So maybe an uncaused cause, maybe some sort of first cause, or what have you, or maybe some sort of non-composite being. And then, so that's stage one. And then in stage two, as again, most of you know who've watched my videos, stage two is trying to maybe tease out some of the implications of the conclusion from stage one. And so usually, this would take maybe two different paths. So you could either argue for certain attributes of this being on the basis of the explanatory role it plays in stage one. Um, so, you know, you would argue that, okay, well, if it's the cause of contingent reality, you know, so, you know, it would have to have certain features. And so that's, that's one path that you could take, basing it on your, on the explanatory role that the being plays in stage one. Or you could just do conceptual analysis on the very nature of what it means to be a necessary being. Gosh, Rasmussen, he takes this, this approach. Like, he'll tease out what it means to, you know, what it means for things to be necessary and so on. So that's, that's the general lay of the land. And so, again, this is kind of like a mostly unstructured video. And so I will turn it over to Rob for him to maybe give some opening, opening, you know, statements on how to maybe bridge this gap from necessary being to, or however he wants to take it. So I'll turn it over to you.

Right. Yes. Good. Thanks, thanks, Joe. Um, so of course, as you alluded to, the stage two is going to depend an awful lot with stage one looks like and what, what sort of first cause we arrived at in the first place. So the most common form it's gonna take is something like a necessary being as the first cause of contingent things. That's, that's the sort of form that I have argued for myself, and especially years ago, starting back in '97. But there are other forms of stage one. And I'm, I'm personally more attractive, more recently, to arguments that suggest that the first cause is going to be an uncaused cause of all being. This is an idea from Scotus, which I'm attracted to because it gives you a very simple and very plausible PSR, which is that everything has an explanation unless it's unexplainable, that's very nature, right, inherently an inexplicable. And then the third sort of argument, which is one that I did take in the philosophical studies paper, that with Alex, that you just were, we were talking about before, before the session, where I'm arguing that the first cause has to be a supernatural being. So in that sense, I'm trying to get right deep into stage two from the original first cause argument in the first place. And, and of course, in each case, it's a lot that's gonna turn on the nature of the PSR, right, and what exactly its scope is, in order to get us to this kind of first cause. One thing I'll say, I mean, as I say, if we can argue that every natural being has to have a cause, and we can either rule out infinite regress, or we can diagonalize out of the whole totality of natural things to get to a supernatural cause, then, as I defined supernatural in the philosophical studies paper, it would be a being that's absolutely simple and, and unbounded in every respect. And that's gonna get us, I think, a lot closer to some of the characters, especially since this thing's gonna have to be the cause of all natural things, so it's gonna have to have power. So it's gonna have to begin being with infinite power. That seems to be very simple, and there's a lot of, I think, you can milk out of that possibility. I'm going just briefly to the other options. I think the uncaused cause first cause is going to get you in the same neighborhood because if you ask what an uncaused being, that would be like a being that by its very nature couldn't be caused or explained by something else, then something like being absolutely simple and infinite is a plausible candidate. And it's finally the necessary being one. I mean, that's the case where you have to do the most work, I think. And there, I would say that what we really want, I think, is not just a necessary being, but a being whose necessity is fundamental and itself unexplained. So among the necessary beings, some of them maybe have explanations in terms of other things. And so we'll need to find a being that's necessary and unexplained. And that, I think, you can make a plausible case it's going to also be something infinite and simple because if it's complex, then we would ask some sort of explanation for what holds it together of necessity. And that will require a further cause. And if it's, if it's finite, you know, I argued way back in '97 that anytime you have the being essential attributes is finite, but that's a sort of thing that's very plausibly taken to be contingent because, you know, it could be a little bit more or a little bit less, plus or minus some small alpha. And so that again, puts it in the realm of the contingent. So necessary and simple, I think it's that the things that I'm trying to get out of the one case.

Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. That's a really good lay of the land. You roughly three different ways like necessary from, like necessity, the necessary being, and then you gave a sort of statistic, like it from uncaused ability, or, you know, inexplicable to your unexplained ability in principle. And then you also talked about the scope of the PSR and how that's going to help us maybe bridge the gap potentially. Um, so I'll turn it over to Graham to see where he wants to take the conversation, you know, that's, that's thus far. So I'll turn over to you, Graham.

Okay. So I guess I'd like to think about what's the, what's the bigger picture? The, what's the view of causal reality that's at work when we're thinking about these different ideas that there might be necessary being, at least at the, the, the origins, or that there's an uncaused being at the origins, or that there's a supernatural being at the origins. My preference is to think just about causal reality as a whole, and then think about what, what the options are going to be. And it seems to me that while I don't think that you can kind of definitively rule out infinite regress, or the contingent origin, necessary, or there's a kind of necessary origin, it's going to be the most attractive position to end up in. And so I think that I'll probably agree with you, Rob, that there is necessary being at the origin. And the question will be about what other attributes that necessary being is going to have. I'm not going to agree with you that it's supernatural. I can agree with you that it has no cause and that it couldn't have a cause, but that will depend upon features of the theory of modality, which is another thing that we need to consider. And, as you know, I'm attracted to a view of, to a modal theory on which every, I mean, I'll talk do it in terms of possible worlds, even though I don't really like, I would prefer to have a kind of primitive necessity and possibility, right, rather than translating it into worlds talk, but I'll do it in worlds talk because it's kind of easier that way, that every possible world shares some causal history with, with the actual world. Once you've got that, if you've got an origin, the origins and necessary, that just falls out of the picture, right? I mean, it's obviously that's going to be a commitment of the view. What reasons might you have for adopting that particular conception of modality will then become a kind of important question. So I think although there's, there's there are other options, but I could be with you on necessary being, I could be with you on, on causal being. I couldn't be with you on supernatural being because I'm going to say that the entire causal order is natural. But maybe then we need to have some discussion about, okay, so what's this distinction between natural and supernatural? How does it play out on the other issues that you mentioned? I'll just say, so one more thing about attributes here, it's not clear to me that there's any particular sense in which the origin that sort of we can tell a priori that we'd say that it must be. We can kind of rule out that there's complexity in the origin. So the idea that it's simple seems to me to be much more, given the picture that I've got, is much more hostage to what eventually we can discover, if indeed we can discover anything about what the initial natural state is like. I see any particular advantage or any particular reason for thinking that it's got to be simple versus not simple, given that we've already got necessity. So maybe that's enough by way of a start to kind of indicate what we likely will agree about, near enough, and the stuff that we're really not going to agree about.

Yeah, can I respond real quickly? Because I just want to point of agreement because I think so, I'm not going to challenge you on that very much. I mean, I also agree at some point of course, God, yes, sure. But that's it looks very similar, right? I mean, neither of us have a more or less a Platonic conception of these possible worlds as just some sort of abstract object or something like that. They all, their possibility is grounded in some powers of things to produce that sort of state later. So that's an interesting convergence, actually. And, you know, and, you know, you're willing to go along with the, within this necessary first cause. So, you know, we're actually converging here on some interesting, but mystical conclusions from quite different perspectives. I think it's an interesting result. So good. Yeah.

Okay. So, um, yeah, well, Josh Rasmussen has really helped me see, like, the value of this sort of convergence. And, you know, so I really liked how you pointed that out. I mean, I don't know if you guys have read his recent dialogue with Felipe Leone, but, you know, it's all about this sort of convergence, and this collective inquiry, like we're all on the same side, like seek truth. And, you know, we can, we can really make headway even between worldviews that seem starkly, you know, two starkly contrast with one another. But now we've done everything, like to say on this major contribute to it. I appreciate it. Wonderful. And because I also sort of share that's like Aristotelian branching theory of modality as well, at least I lean towards it. And, um, Alexandre Pruss has really been influential in helping me see, like, some of the real, real force behind it. Um, but enough agreement, we need to like, another, you've grown. It's important though, right? I say. And, and, I mean, the influence goes both ways as well. So I certainly didn't start out with the views about modality and causation that I've now got. And it was from thinking hard about the really good arguments of people like Rob and Alex that I've ended up at the moment where I am. And I don't expect that on standing still either. You can hit your views just keep changing. I did want to take this next, now that we've sort of laid out the groundwork, is I did want to have, I guess, level, maybe a question towards you, Rob, about talking about, well, all else being equal, maybe if something is complex, perhaps we should expect some sort of, but if, you know, account of the unity of the thing, or account of why, you know, what sort of holds that complexity together. So I was wondering if you could maybe comment on how a sort of Trinitarian view of God's existence would come into this because, um, you know, like I'm a facial, you know, there is some sort of multiplicity or complexity here, whether it's like relational opposition or what have you. You know, lots of different theories of, uh, you know, Trinitarianism. We don't get into that, the specific theories. I am wondering though, like, surely the mere fact of complexity wouldn't strictly entail that it, like, would require some sort of extrinsic cause or explanation. So maybe, maybe you're just operating on, maybe a defeasible presumption, or maybe you could comment a little bit on how Trinitarianism comes into your point about complexity.

Well, you know, we're doing metaphysics, so there's very little you got to work on that is infeasible in principle. And I think other things being equal, complexity looks like it's something that should be explained. And if you can offer an account in which it has an explanation, that's point for you, right? On on the big board somewhere. So right. So now, the Trinity, I mean, you know, I write in religious studies and I defend the very fact. I argued that simplicity, radical simplicity, is a necessary condition for getting the doctrine of the Trinity right. So I don't see any conflict there. I don't think, I don't, the Trinity is to be understood in terms of any kind of complexity within God. God is a simple being that is, well, just to go into my article, right, he said, it's very essence is to be a binary relation of knowledge, right, and love, which are more or less the same thing. And so the three persons are just sort of three qua objects that arise by virtue of God's being this binary relation. So God qua knower and lover, God qua known and beloved, and God qua both at the same time. That gives you the three persons. So it's, it's, it's a matter, you might say, of a kind of appearance that God has, but not to last, but even to himself, themselves, that they're that they experience themselves in a tri-personal sort of way. But I don't get involved in any kind of ontological complexity. You're right, this is, or it, it's entirely grounded in an absolutely simple human nature. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a heron. I mean, obviously, them, missed Trinities of mystery. It was very, I was, it was very, a lot of trepidation that I, I got dragged into writing that article, actually. I thought, this is above my pay grade as a physician, even talking about it. But, but in any case, I would, I would say that it's a necessary condition of having an Orthodox view of the Trinity that it be consistent with with radical divine simplicity.

Okay. Yeah, that helps. Yeah. But well, that definitely helps. I just wanted to get that point out of the way. I mean, we don't really need to focus on, like, the coherence or, like, the consistency between them. But I was wondering, like, how, how that would work with, like, an extrinsic cause or principle. So it sounds like you would take, at least for the most part, like a defeasible approach, like almost being equal, like we really should expect some sort of explanation of of complexity. So, um, actually goes back to tying this, he's the first. Yeah. Okay. So maybe Graham, if you want to comment on what we've had thus far, if you want to, if you want to take the, the conversational leap review.

Okay. Well, I will say that if it's beyond Rob's pay grade to talk about the Trinity, it's certainly beyond mine. So defeasible presumption. Mm-hmm. So, so maybe that's right. I think that one of the things that we disagree about is going to be where the stopping point for explanation comes. And I think once you reach necessity, there's no explaining why things are necessary. Whereas one of the things that Rob said in the introductory remarks was that some necessities are more fundamental than others. If you think that the stopping point is just going to be once we've got to the necessities, those are kind of just costs to your view, and you just have to wear them. When once you hit necessity, then the idea that you can't have complexities that are that are that are necessary, right? So they, you've got no further explanation beyond, well, it's necessary that this complex thing exists. There's no, there's no nothing further to say. That seems fine to me. That will just be, but what I accept is that that's a cost. A theoretical cost. Every time you postulate a necessity, that's a theoretical cost. But an equally, every time you postulate a contingency that you don't explain, that's the theoretical cost as well. And if you're trading those two things off, my inclination is to lean towards the necessity. I would rather, but, but it's very hard to give a good reason why sort of primitive necessity is better than primitive contingency. I think, because either way, you've got a cost. That's why I said at the beginning that although this is the way I lean, right, I'm not sure that I can give you a really good reason why you should follow down that route. That's why I'm not absolutely going to say the other, the other positions are ruled out. I could be persuaded if someone could give me a good reason for thinking that it would be better just to rest with the brute contingencies. Okay. So that's maybe enough well, yeah, about that.

So Graham, are you saying that you think that there's no necessary truth? Seems that seems obviously wrong to me. So when you say this is for that's necessarily true. Yeah, I think it has an explanation in terms of the nature of the successor and the end of plus, you can, you can prove it based on some very simple axioms, axioms. So, so I think that it can be a logical consequence of one thing's being necessary that another thing is necessary. But I don't think that that explains the necessity of either. So if you ask, why is it necessary that zero equals zero? Why is it necessary that one equals one? I can move from some other things backwards and forwards. I, you know, if the one's necessary and the other one is, but I think that that explains the necessity of either. So I don't know, maybe maybe that helps with the point that you were just making.

Well, of course, I wouldn't claim that wherever there's logical consequence, there's explanation. I wasn't making that point. I'm just asking you, do you really think there's no explanation of necessary truths inside?

So it depends what no explanation. If necessary truths, there's no explanation of why they are necessary, right? So if you're thinking about the explanation is necessary, so yeah, does that rule out there being explanation of P? Oh, no, the explanation for P is that it's necessary. Right? So I think they, I think that there are two kinds of explanations, right? So there's the, and, and the second, an important kind of explanation is that P's explained by its necessity. Nicely, right? And that's a very standard view that you can explain, you know, so why is it? Because it must be, right? That's a very familiar style of explanation.

I see. Okay. Good. So, right. Okay. So in that case, there's change gears a bit. Say, okay, let's talk about explaining assessment. Given that point, I mean, it still seems to me that take, take for instance, the, the existence of this containing the empty set. Now, I say, well, that's explained by its necessity. But it seems to me that is also explained by the fact that the empty set exists necessarily, and there's some kind of principle or set theory that says when you have something of a single to the side of that thing. So those two, those two things seem to be more fundamental than the existence of that set, and to be a real explanation of it, right? And I guess I don't see that. So it doesn't seem to me that from a kind of metaphysical point of view, there's something more fundamental about the necessity of the one as opposed to the necessity of the others. But I, I mean, this is why I made the point before, there are certainly relations of logical consequence here, and sometimes we, the way that we talk about explanation, we think, well, if you can show that one thing's logical consequence of another, in some sense, you, in some sense of explanation, you've given sometimes kind of explanation of it. Let me ask you this, suppose that, suppose I give you an account here in which I can explain a large number of arithmetic all truths in terms of relatively small numbers, I think are more fundamental. And then you come along and say, no, no, each of these has to be explained by Cintas Assateague, full stop, right? Yeah. Doesn't the first account have an advantage in terms of explanatory power?

So suppose we're comparing two theories, right? I've just general theories of everything, and we're thinking, okay, so which one's more virtuous? And I say, well, the way to think about this is it's a kind of trade-off between kind of minimizing your commitments, maximizing what you can explain. And now the commitments, what what do they look like? Well, there's at least three kinds of commitments. There are ontological commitments, ideological commitments, theoretical commitments. And the theoretical commitments, the way that they're minimized is just in terms of what you're saying, right? There's a small number of claims that by logical consequence give you all the rest. All right. And so I'm not disagreeing with you that in the consideration of when we're comparing the theories and working out which one's better, that it matters. The, the number and the complexity of the claims that you need to generate everything else is part of what counts. Great.

So you're conceding that it's something could be necessary and be explained by something else?

I think that it's being explained. I mean, it depends what kinds of relations and why explanatory relations there are. I don't see what your explanation is of the theoretical superiority of the one, if it isn't in terms of its greater explanatory power. Sorry, that the trade-off is between two things, sort of minimizing commitments and maximizing explanation. And whichever does best, that that is the best theory. Within the theory, there'll be a story about what explains what, right? And so, and they'll be in a cake, there'll be an account of explanation, and then there'll be an account of what explains why. But ultimately, the, the question about which is the better theory is going to be determined by, I think, by this method of reckoning up all of commitments of various kinds and looking at what's explained and what's left unexplained, right? Everything that's left unexplained is going to be theoretical cost. All right. Good. I think or an agreement. And this notion of explanation has got to it. It's not itself something erratic, right? It's got to be something that we can have access to outside of the theory, otherwise I could just say, here's my theory P, and it explains everything as part of bribery, you know?

Yeah, that's right. So there are cases in which, in which one necessary truth could explain a different one, right? Because the, the one, because if I have, if I offer you a theory of the numbers in which my theoretical commitments are relatively lean, you know, granting that I can explain those other truths that are being derived from that lean set of commitments, I guess I wasn't thinking that that's the case. I wasn't thinking if that is explanation. So I say, so, so you just said hours, I don't think so. But I'm not enough, there's something I'm not getting.

Yeah, I know. Joey, could you help?

Okay. No, I'm just laughing because I'm loving just sitting here just looking at two philosophers going at it that I like. I said, I love you both, so it's wonderful. Oh my goodness, I'm just trying to soak it in. So I think here's what Rob is trying to get at when we're trying to balance between, you know, the minimizing theoretical commitment or ontological commitment or what-have-you and maximizing explanatory power. I mean, we can at least think of like an in-principle possible scenario where we have two theories, right? We have two theories. One theory is such that we've got very few, like fundamental necessary truths, I guess, and they are such that, like, from those necessary truths, those very fundamental necessary truths, we can maybe provide a grounding or some account or some something that makes it intelligible as to why there are there all these other necessary truths. And that's this one theory. But then we come over to this other theory on the other hand, and this one has all the same ontological commitments. So it accepts all those necessary things that were made intelligible by that most fundamental necessary thing. We come over here for these, this theory, but it, it doesn't have this more fundamental thing that makes intelligible these other things. It just says that all of them are just kind of there, you know, they, they don't, they don't really generally have a sort of linking structure to them such that the more fundamental ones kind of account for or ground or, you know, make intelligible less fundamental ones. It's sort of they're all just they're without explanation. And intuitively, in these two theories, we'd prefer this one, right? And that's precisely because it has these sort of, I don't know, explanations of the necessary facts. So I'm hopefully that's that's a precise characterization and maybe hopefully that sort of removes some, I don't know, terminological barriers between between you guys.

Yeah, that's what I had in mind. I think so. If I can put it what you said more or less, the second view seems to me to be an example of Graham's view where each necessary truth is just explained by box it, right? So P is explained by box P, Q by box Q, R by box R, and so on. So Graham's got a huge number of fundamental theoretical commitments there, whereas on my view, no, no, there's just P, right? It explains Q, R, S, and so on. And so, yes, it's a much leaner theory and therefore, and, and it's better because it has more explanatory power. Necessary truths are being explained in a more economical way.

Okay, so, so I'm not sure. So I want to, I think I want to have a, I want to see more about the filling out of the pictures. So heads to see exactly how you're proposing that the relations of explanation between necessary truths is going to work. But I mean, because I suspect that what you're what you're going to say is that there is that it's logical consequences what's doing there is the only thing that you're invoking that's doing the explaining here. And I'm happy with logical consequence being one of the things that reduces commitments when you come to the to the question of theoretical commitments. All right. So I'm not sure whether there's really going to be a difference. I just don't think of that as explanation.

Right. So, so you go, here's, here's something that's true necessarily for any X, X is identical to X. And then we pick an example, zero equals zero. And I say, well, that's entailed by the principle. So I have no primitive commitment to zero equals zero because it's a logical, sorry, I should never say entailment, I always want to say logical consequence because that's what I mean. Well, logical consequence. But, but there's not, I don't, in addition, think that there's an explanatory relation here because, because in a sense, there's nothing that's left to explain once you've seen the logical consequence relation. So I mean, in cases where we're explaining contingent things, there are certain, there are lots of cases where we explore the relationship is one of logical consequence. The thing that's explained, the contingent fact that system is explained by being logically derivable from the laws and the initial conditions. So it's not as though logical consequence and that excludes the possibility of explanation. That's true in the contingent case. I'm thinking that the, so if we're thinking about the, the causal web, and we're thinking about, I mean, it depends what the items are, but let's suppose that there are events that will appeal to causal relations in all cases. So, and causal relations are explanatory in a way that logical consequence is not. So you think the, we don't explain the length of the shadow of the flagpole.

Yeah, so you're just rejecting that whole model.

Yeah. No more logical deductive explanation is even a possibility.

Possibility. Okay. So this is something else. Possibility in a metaphysical sense, yes. If you mean, could you reasonably believe it? No, I'm not ruling that out at all, right? And I insist on being very careful when you talk about possibilities, where they're, you know, using them in a metaphysical and modal, or whatever sense, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I did mean something like a modal sense, I guess, right? Yeah. I mean, well, necessary things, you might argue, I mean, I argue there are things there are sort of analogues to causal relations, something like the successor relation among numbers is is a kind of analogous to causation to somehow involved in existence of three and oh, that three is not in the existence of two. So that in that Venn analogy strikes me as quite plausible. So anyway, all night. Sure. And I know I agree that if you had that view, then you wouldn't like what I'm saying, right? Whereas I don't accept that there's anything kind of causal about the connection between three and so, yeah. So, so if when people like Schaffer talk about grounding as a kind of analog to causation, so okay, so what do I think about is grounding at all between two necessary things? It seems to me, yeah, so maybe I'm a grounding skeptic. It's not that I don't think that there are certain kinds of relations, so supervenience, right? The supervenience of one kind of thing on another kind of thing, that seems to me to be real. And people sometimes think that's an example of grounding or constitution, that, you know, these things made out of that stuff, somehow, that seems like a real relation as well. And there's, if I and Maria, logically, sort of part-whole, I do think that, you know, some things are parts of other things. And if you think of that as a grounding relation, then I'm fully on board with that one. That's, well, but I think there's a fairly small set of grounding relations, and they're all kind of well understood. And there's not, sort of, in addition to that, some further grounding of the kind that you perhaps we're just inverting to, where you were thinking of something that doesn't fit any of that small list of kind of relatively well understood relations.

Yeah. All right. So I might have reached an impasse.

Okay. So we might, we might be able to set, set questions about grounding and, and, you know, relations between different necessary truths aside. And perhaps we could focus on some of maybe, uh, I don't know, either the PSR in scope point, or maybe, um, how the point that Koons made, or, you know, Rob made in his 1997 article about how maybe a sort of finite degree property, you know, two degree D, maybe sort of calls out to and calls out for an explanation as to why it's at D as opposed to D plus one or D minus one. So maybe we can talk about that because I do believe Graham, on your account of modality, the sort of initial singularity, as it were, would probably have a bunch of, you know, finite properties in measure, right? Because it's a sort of natural, presumably physical, however we wanted to define that, presumably some sort of physical entity or reality. And so if that's the case, well, then it seems as though it's going to be bounded in various respects, it's going to have certain finite degree properties. And all else being equal, shouldn't we want to sort of shape, get rid of those sort of limitations for, don't have like maybe a simpler and, I don't know, maybe more explanatorily advantageous theory because now we can sort of explain why there are limited degree things in terms of a simple thing? So I'm wondering like, what you think about his point on the sort of finite degree limited nature of.

Yeah, so I'll turn it over to you, Graham, if you want to comment.

Right. So, so there's a kind of awkwardness here that we have no idea what the, I mean, to me, that there is an initial state, what it's like, and what its properties are. And it's, I'm not sure what to say about the, is it plausible that it's going to have finite bounded properties or not, because I think that we just don't know. Right? There's this, there's this thing that in cosmology at the moment, you get back to that kind of inflationary era, and then what's before that is just a blank chart. I do think that it could well turn out that what, whatever is in the initial state is finite and bounded. But the point that I'm making here is that perhaps we shouldn't be so confident that that's the case. But let's suppose that it is, then it seems to me that it's not going to be particularly problematic if it turns out that there are some features of the description of the initial state that I just put in by hand, right? There's some number, and that's that's the number, and we have nothing that we can appeal to to say beyond the necessity to say why it's that number rather than plus or minus a little bit. I'm not sure how, I mean, to go back to the point that I set aside, I'm not sure how worried you'd be worried you should be that there will be numbers in the kind of adequate description of the initial state that are put in by hand. It's certainly there are, if you read at least kind of pop physics, there are lots of physicists whose dream is kind of do you have this theory and there are no numbers that get put in by hand in the theory. But, but if there was something that the mind, but if they're right, they won't be any is the point, right? Say, yes, it's, it's, I mean, on the one side, there's the kind of pious hope of the physicists, on the other side, there's this thought that, well, I don't know, it could turn out that they're just, that just our fees. But we, though, the problem is we don't know. It's not, it's not my position to make a determination about that, I guess. From my point of view, it would be nice if the physicists turn out to be right.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we are doing metaphysics, right? So of course, everything we say, we have to qualify our best guess and so on. We could be wrong. And so I don't, you know, I can concede everything you said and still say, yeah, but, you know, we've got a defeasible and so far undefeated reason to think that the first cause is gonna be unbounded. It's not gonna have any kind of numerical values. I mean, I guess I guess I'm assuming that you're the account of branching futures that we share from the day of modality is right. But I also think we have kind of intellectual insight into modality as well, that's independent of that theory. And they can tell us that's the sort of thing that couldn't be absolutely necessary. It's kind of, it has to have an explanation. And I think deeply rooted intuitions in the human mind to try to reach my conclusion, right? And so I guess I'm less confident in the power of my mind to reach that kind of conclusion. But of course, I'm quite familiar with the view. Lots of people have it. I mean, so I mean, you and Josh just speak to people, right?

Well, I mean, maybe I know you and I were talking before Rob came on the call that maybe you could accept even a naturalistic account according to which this, the necessary being or the necessary initial singularity is in fact unbounded. So maybe you could comment a little bit more on that if you wish, Graham.

Well, one part of it was just this point that there, I mean, if there are no arbitrary numbers, sort of no numbers put in by hand, that removes one kind of unboundedness and a different kind of question, I guess, will be about what the initial thing is. Is it an infinite surface, for example? That's something that is unbounded in certain kinds of ways as well. Then it depends what the, you know, or is it a, I mean, is it a, a quite sort of quantum state or something like a quantum state across an infinite surface? And maybe it's one in which there's a kind of distribution that's absolutely minimal. Maybe for example, it's a minimum of entropy, since that seems to be one kind of thing that you definitely need entropy should be low at that end of the universe and it increases as you go forwards. So if, I mean, if it's at a minimum, then that's, and there's nothing arbitrary about that. So there are other ways that in which it could turn out that this thing is, I mean, as we were discussing, and why I said it could turn out to be unbounded and simple in a certain sense as well.

Yeah, I'm not bound it in one dimension that are two dimensions or something. But I mean, any surface by its very nature is is a bound, right? And would count as as having some some finite aspect to it. And similarly, and it would be, it would definitely be composite in some sense as well. It would be extended in space and time and therefore have, I think, parts that correspond to those regions. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to go that far. In fact, anything that, and the other thing I would say is that, you know, if we really want to reach a being that is a plausible first cause, there shouldn't be any kind of again, quantitative laws of nature governing its behavior. So you can't just bring some quantum theory to bear here and say, well, it's got a certain amount of energy and its occupies a certain state space with a certain amount of energy and energy and distribution or whatnot. That would also be, you know, it's vulnerable to the kind of objection I was making back in '97. So that's why I think, you know, you have to, the only model I think that we can possibly use there that we're familiar with will be something like an imminent mind choosing to create something by free will. And so doesn't it isn't it doesn't have any kind of quantitative or finite constraints on its behavior?

Finite quantity? What about arbitrary?

Well, I think it's not going to be arbitrary because in God, the classical theists picture, right, is one in which God has no knowledge of everything in power to do anything that's doable. So there's no arbitrary limits. They're like, okay, so on you, of you, unlike on some views, there's only one creative act that God can do. Is that right? I mean, there are different ways of thinking about this. I mean, one way of thinking about it would be that there's something kind of indeterministic between God and the creative act. And so that would give you other possible worlds that are sort of more different from ours. Yeah. Or is there just kind of one initial state that God can make? And so you end up with a kind of array of worlds that is more like the kind of array that I've got in mind, right? Because this is one of the questions about the, I mean, this approach to modality that we're now going to have to, good. What I'm going to press on here is the question about freedom, right? The, the freedom of fact of the divine.

Yeah. All right. Right. So the effect has my view, infinite array of possible worlds that God could have created, of which this is one. Okay. So if you think that our world is contingent, and there is arbitrariness in the on the side of the effect, and that's defense that there's no necessitating explanation as to why he created this one rather than that one, but there's no, there's no arbitrariness on the side of the cause. Would have caused anything and freely chose to do this one for sufficient reasons, but not necessitating one. Yeah, that's kind of why tonight's interview comes. So what do you think about possibilities generally? Do you think that postulating more possibilities is theoretical cost or not? Because one of the things that I like about the about this picture is that it gives you fewer possibilities. It gives you the ones where there's in determinism, deterministic causation, and nothing else. And so, and so you get a minimization. Whether do you think that that's some kind of theoretical advantage or not?

Yeah, I think so. I think having at least having an account of necessities in terms of causal powers seems to me an advantage on ideological grounds, perhaps. Yeah. I don't think you can reduce. I just think the human project getting rid of powers doesn't work. And so better to go the other way around and reduce possibility to powers. But you can think of, I mean, on my model, you can't think of God's creation there's a kind of in deterministic causation. Yeah. Yeah, it's just not, not a law governed one, but sort of reason bound, reason rather than one. Right. So I think when you when you talk about law governed, you might want to reduce the laws to the powers as well, if you're, you know, in which case it just turns out that is kind of power governed. Right. Right. Right. And then again, the question is, you know, what sort of power is the is the best starting point? And I want to say unlimited power, absolute power, makes most sense. Before we ran out of time, I didn't want to bring up the issue that I did in the film studies paper, just to see if we could bat that around a bit, because I've been, you know, one of the things I've been pushing for a long time is the idea that the, you know, to avoid a certain kind of skepticism, one needs a very wide open kind of PSR or a causal principle. And so until studies, we were trying to argue that it really has to encompass all natural facts, everything except the kind of very weird being that I posited in the end. Yeah. And the thought is that if you don't have that, then you always got to take seriously the possibility, you don't presume, let's say, in a strong way, such as strong PSR, you're always going to take seriously the possibility that you're experiences, your memory impressions, your data have just come into existence spontaneously about any cause. And that would clearly be a defeater for knowledge because they have to be caused in the right way in order to be knowledge conferring. So even if you said something like, well, okay, here's the PSR, anything that's preceded in time that's to have a cause, or anything that doesn't include an incident regressive causes has to have a cause, the worry might worry is that I can't know in a non-question-begging way my present experiences are preceded in time by anything, whether they don't already include an infinite regress or circular causation or whatever alternative give. So that's that's been my strategy is to try to use the Episcopal ontology to help us hone in on the content of the PSR. So I'll see what Graham's thoughts are on that business.

Okay. So I think that I can commit to a pretty strong version of PSR. I consider all of the truths of the form P, where P is not modal, right? So there's no modal operator in there. I think every one of those has an explanation. There are two kinds of explanations: one is in terms of the necessity, so you get a certain range of them that are explained in terms of their being necessary, and the rest of them are explained by causal relations. I've been thinking about the cause on that, there's questions about values and numbers and so on, but a pool or, you know, the kind of abstract stuff that said, all that that's assigned for the purposes of this conversation, right? So it now turns out that the only things that don't have explanation over why is it necessary, right? Everything else, it has an explanation on my view, because either the explanation is it's true because it must be, or it's true because there's this other stuff that caused it. Now, that looks like a pretty strong principle of sufficient reason, and it seems to avoid your, it kind of lead your mystical pirates.

I don't think so, actually. So, so remember Spinoza thought that every, everything was necessary, right? Yeah. And he wasn't obviously wrong, I think, right?

At least not super obviously wrong. So take seriously the possibility that the impressions I have right now of seeing you talking on this iPad and so on are explained simply by the fact that they're necessary, not by anything else. But that would, self, be a defeater for my empirical knowledge, because they have to be cost. They can't be, they can't be necessary, right? In order for me to have no catch. So you have to be like, right, and I want to see it. Can't be fine. It can't be natural, or else.

So interestingly, I think, so I've thought quite a bit about that kind of everything's necessary view. On my view, that means that nothing's connected to anything else, yeah? Alright. And that seems to me to be a kind of untenable position. So I think of the, I mean, the view that I've got, it's important that the causal connections that are indeterministic, right? And they, you know, you've got some chairs. Where would I go if I thought that causation was deterministic? I would have to then go back to saying, I think that either what you might call the laws or the initial conditions are just contingent. Is the, the spinners that Spinoza's, sorry, it's not spirit alive knitters view that will filter everything's necessary view, just strikes me as it's kind of just about the worst feeling I could have, right? I agree.

So my skepticism, you need something more than the kind of PSR you described. I, because I've got to have grounds. I've got to be able to exclude the possibility that this experience I'm having right now is uncaused. And the fact that it might be explained in your way by being necessary, that I've got to be able to exclude a priori. Better seem that just not. And that's just not an option, right? And so that requires me to have some sort of knowledge, right? Of the contingency or the cause of nassif ents, right? And, and that, I think, can't be just a priori knowledge. Seems to me it has to be based on some feature, doesn't it, of these particular states?

Well, I mean, I could, well, while you're thinking, I might owe something that I've thought of in relation to your paper with Allen's. So actually, one of the things that I was thinking when I was reading it is the same, well, is sort of the same gist as Graham was getting across. And we were talking about this actually before the call. Was I was wondering if we could still go with the PSR, not necessarily restricted to natural facts, but perhaps just restricted to contingent facts. And then what we would need in order to rule out the skeptical scenarios was we would need to know, rightly point out, we would need to know a priori, or however Howard pronounced an a priori, or whatever, that that our X is, or maybe our experiences are contingent on. But I don't know, I guess I'm, I'm getting some wondering. Well, I can't, I know that like if anything is, I mean, maybe like my, I don't know, the best modal knowledge that I can gain is like almost like just like inspecting my own mind and seeing how fleeting and contingent my thoughts are and so on. And like my perceptual experiences, it seems, I don't know. So I was wondering if we actually could know a priori that our experiences are contingent and thereby avoid the skeptical scenario by means of appeal to a PSR that is only about contingent things. And so if we do that, we'd only get to a necessary being and not a supernatural being. So I'm wondering what you think about that.

No, that's a great, that's a great question. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna say no, right? So I mean, in the little explanation you gave to why you're so confident that's tangent, you snuck in the fact that it's their fleeting and changeable and so on. So you're relying there on your memory of your own past dates. So, so I'm arguing in the paper, you're not allowed to do that, right? Because I would be question begging. So you have to go just with the salts in the present moment, kind of picture from sin tonight, santiana, just, you know, the immediate impressions that you have me right now. And I want to say, but those just aren't obviously contingent of themselves, unless, unless you're relying on some kind of principle says necessary, all natural things are contingent, right? And then of course, I'm home free, right? If that's the principle to you're relying on. And so, and that has to be an a priori, very strong a priori presumption, all natural things are are contingent, yeah? Yeah.

So I think that's, I think that's a really good and interesting response. So like one thing, well, um, I guess I'll table this for future, for future like inquiry. But I, I do think it might depend on our like a modal epistemology and how we gain modal knowledge. Because, um, I don't know, there are like modal accounts of the epistemology according which like I could kind of just like see that like her my present expected. But well, I'll set that aside because that gets way too in the into the weeds of modal custom ology. I did have another thing that I was sort of, it's something I need. And then, okay, so the second thing that I was thinking, and that, well, I'll turn over you after I make this, the second point, but then we'll turn it back to Graham after I turn it back to you. But so I was thinking was, um, well, I mean, maybe maybe your argument's just a little bit like too strong. So here's what I was thinking. I was like, well, if I seriously cannot know that my solipsistic experience is right now are not contingent, how do I know they're actually not natural? Like, maybe I'm a supernatural being, or I mean, I don't know, like maybe I am, maybe my perceptual experiences are such that I am an omnipotent, omniscient, like again, we're playing along with this solipsistic scenario, right? So maybe is an unbounded infinite necessary being, which is such that it has the power because it's omnipotent to make it seem to itself such that it has these finite and changing experiences and so on. Um, and I can't really rule that out a priori. It seems like I don't know, it's not really incoherent to me. And so if that's the case, well, then it seems as though, or PSR, we do get a defeater for our perceptual knowledge. So I was wondering what you thought about that.

Yeah, that's a good question. So I probably write that I can't rule out the possibility that I might be God, you know, they're having some kind of dream or something like that. In do theology says, but that, I think, is irrelevant because the argument, the question is whether my present experiences, whether these sense data have a cause or not. And it seems to me those are obviously natural. But is there obviously finite founded in intensity and an extent and complex as well, or both? So, so I take it, you know, yeah, I do think there's a kind of Cartesian starting point here that can't be questioned, namely that these immediate impressions are at least as appearances, what they appear to be, fall under the PSR. Okay.

I really, I actually really like that response. And at Graham, I know I said I'd turn it over you, but I just have one, God, I have one quick rejoinder to that. I was just thinking like, so I want to say like, I'm really valuing your responses here and they were, they were really good. So thank you so much for that. So I appreciate it. I did want to say that, but I'm thinking I am thinking of a sort of a joinder. Like, I don't know, like if I'm truly omnipotent, like surely I could make it, at least I could make it such that it appears strongly to me that these very appearances are finite when they are not in fact finite, right? Or when they're not in fact bounded. And if that's the case, if I genuinely cannot rule out a priori that despite its appearing to me that they're finite and obviously bounded, perhaps I'm just an omnipotent being which has the power to make it such that it appears to me that these things are finite and limited and so on. And if that's the case, well, then it seems as though we're going to be cast into radical skepticism even under your account. And I know, I know it's a weird scenario, but again, we're in this sort of Cartesian, definitely a weird high rejoinder. I'll turn over to you a Rob for a response to that.

But I'd say that look, there's still the fact, you know, however you describe it, right? There's something to be the fact that it appears to you to be finite, right? And that fact is gonna be bounded and finite in its very nature. So that will still call from explanation, a causal explanation. Is the appearance? Well, I don't know what it is. It, I don't care how many appears that you see stack in front of it, right? If it appears to me, if it appears to me that it appears to me, it appears to me, dot dot dot dot dot, that there's a red dot in front of me. The red dot that is enough. The whole stack with with fine a tube. That's my claim. Okay. I'll turn it up. Maybe I can like send you some like email corresponds cuz this is interesting. We could totally get super interest. Yeah.

So I'm still fun way back in the conversation, still thinking about the idea that there's a kind of vulnerability to skepticism if you have the view that the initial things are necessary and then everything else is produced by indeterminate in deterministic causation because there's this question about whether this is the whether whether you're in the initial state. I don't know. That it seems to me that I, that I know with certainty that I'm not in the initial state, right? I agree. And say I touch that I don't, I saw, I don't see where they skeptical worried gets a grip. Yeah. So I'm planning that you have knowledge that knowledge. But but I'm arguing that given your viewpoint, you shouldn't think that you do because you have a defeater for the knowledge. But you can't display that the fader is that is that there's you have no reason to rule the possibility that you, that you are in that initial, sorry, April, right? Probably you don't have to, you don't have to have an operator or I raise in toole day. You just have to have a reason to roll it out. Chole.

Well, let's just, so this is the crucial question. I, I agree. I mean, if that is a presupposition, if that's a presumption that's required to prevent any of your empirical knowledge, all of your empirical knowledge from being defeated, then I think it would be illegitimate for you to appeal that empirical knowledge to defeat the deceiver. That would be kind of vicious circle already. So, I mean, if you think of think of the usual kind of planning at the théâtre kind of cases, right? So somebody tells me it's, you know, the air is toxic here, and someone tells me, you know, that that fellow is a liar, right? And I can't trust him. And then he comes to me, he says, I'm a liar, you can totally trust me. That doesn't feed that a feeder, right? Because it's, it's already implicated in the defeat. And so similarly, once once this possibly is raised, you can't say, uh oh, remember my beliefs being different in the past? That would all be, would all be legitimate way of disposing the theater, right? Interestingly, right? So, I mean, it doesn't seem to me to be a possibility. But but I'm not sure whether this is playing with the kind of distinction between metaphysical possibilities and toxicity possibilities. If I could point, so maybe like an underlying thing here that like is, I don't know, something that Graham may be hinting at, I don't know. But this is also another thing that I was thinking about in connection with the paper and the argument in there is just think, you know, maybe we have other a priori arguments against skeptical scenarios and we don't really need to rely on this MPs are natural, you know, PSR restricted in natural facts. So, you know, like there's like a substantial literature on, you know, skeptical scenarios and how we can try to pull them out. There's appeal to things like phenomenal conservatism and people like say that this just self-evident, like they can just see a priori that phenomenal conservatism is true and that this provides you no reason to, you know, provides like reason to think that, you know, my sensory experiences as of seeing this thing, you know, give me reason to think that prima facie reason to think there is in fact one there. And there's a sort of presumption in favor of it. And so that burden is actually on the skeptical person who's posing this couple, you know, thing to give me a positive reason to think so. And I guess I don't know, I guess my one of my reservations is just that, you know, there are lots of different a priori attempts to to avoid this sort of radical skepticism that don't need to appeal to the PSR. You know, like some people say like, okay, well, if we truly accepted this Cartesian demon sort of scenario, you know, I know you didn't talk about the Cartesian demon, but, you know, like, oh, well, actually we have full-blown self-defeat because, you know, even like even things like modus ponens, the evil demon could be feeding us, could be feeding us likes it like intuitive rational seeming z' that modus ponens is valid when it's not in fact valid. So it would be self-defeating. It's not the structure of the argument or the dialectic there at all. So I'm not saying, oh, you know, if you take Graham's view, you don't have a solution to the problem of peroneus skepticism or partition. So I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if you don't accept the kind of PSR that we exposing, if you deny it, you're giving a hostage to the skeptic, right? Your your opening of vulnerability to skepticism that you don't need to do. And that once you've done, you're in the real trouble. Okay, that's the dialectic. Now, you might try to reject that, but just saying, oh, there's all these other discussions about about skepticism, that's completely irrelevant, I think, to to figure our, you're not making, right? So, so I think that what I was trying to say is to reject the idea that there's any hostage to, you know, I talked to fortune here or hostage to the skeptic at this point, that's what I'm not yet seeing. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think if, so you're granting, you think in the reality, right? There there is a natural fact that's necessary. So my view, looked at, and therefore uncaused, right? And in my view, that's the hostage you're giving. It is, you're opening the door now to someone asking you, okay, what about your present to the mental state? That's a natural fact. What is it that equals you to argue that that's not in the same boat as via as the initial state? Because it's not. Well, I mean, I mean, this is not going to convince you, but this is what I think, because it's not the initial state. There's a very long history, about 13.8 billion years worth of it, deterministic trait causation between me and the initial state. And all of that stuff is contingent. The necessary state is very remote, right? Now, that might sound like it was question begging, but yeah. Well, worse than that, it's just it's just foot stomping. It's like someone telling me, give me evidence that I'm miss perceiving reddish looking things in the room right now. And I'm just saying, that's red, that's red, that's reddish, right? Obviously reddish, that clearly wouldn't be wouldn't be an apt response. You know, it might go down to the Nate.

Well, I don't know. Like, um, Graham has a like a very specific conception of like the nature and purpose of arguments and so that sort of dictates his view of question begging. Maybe. And so maybe he's trying to get out how he has, um, I don't know, maybe has like an overarching theory according to which these things fall out of the theory. And then we can like, maybe perform the theoretical, the overarching theoretical comparisons between his view and maybe even the radical skeptic view or maybe your view Rob. And maybe that's the route that he's taking. And so maybe it's not, maybe again, I'm saying maybe because this is just a proposal, I'm thinking out loud, that's what these are for. So maybe he's not question begging per se, but he's relying his nature and purpose of arguments as like sort of broad theory comparisons. So I don't know.

No, that's a prepare. Well, I'm not just, I think that at this point, we really should wait where things get pretty complicated, to be honest. And settlements, so it's probably, you know, this kind of medium is not going to enable us to sort it out. It's gonna have to be a series of papers, you know.

That's funny. So, um, I know, uh, we're at, well, let's see, an hour and ten, and we're at nine thirty-three. So maybe we can, um, turn it over to Graham. See if he wants to take it into maybe one other direction, maybe for like the next, for the last 10 minutes of the discussion, like one last direction that he wants, maybe he hasn't covered something that he wants to cover or, you know, so on. So I'll turn over to you, Graham, see where you want to take it, maybe for the last ten, maybe twelve minutes.

Oh, maybe we can have a discussion about something else that's right at the beginning of the most recent paper, the paper that you've got with Alex, which is about self-explanation. It seems to me that you can't have self-explanation because, just sort of try it out, right? I want to know why. You say because. I write a because I. And I. So, but I wanted an explanation. You just didn't give me one, right? Either you're pulling my leg or you kind of don't understand what it is to give an explanation. And then you say, well, but there are examples, right? There are examples like zero equals zero. And I try that out. Zero equals zero because zero equals zero. No, that doesn't sound like an explanation to me at all, right? So I'm curious to kind of hear more about why you think that there is self-explanation and how you get around the there kind of immediate worry that it just looks like there can't be.

Yeah, I mean, I find some people you think that it's sort of obvious that thanks do explain themselves. So I didn't think it's obvious that they don't. And I myself kind of waiver back and forth. And I, when I think about it, I just think it just depends what you need explanation. So I think Alex is actually a little more comfortable talking about self-explanatory things than I am. And when we talked about that, I have in mind something that just obviously doesn't need an explanation. It's just the sort of thing that is beyond explaining, so to speak, right? And you know, if I, if I took it, this really obvious at zero existed, all right, let's just take the proposition, if zero exists and it's self-identical, I just think, well, that's just, you know, yes, that doesn't call for any kind of explanation, right? So that, so I think it comes down to the question about what, which is full, we've been talking about the whole hour and half really, which is what, what a stopping point, a starting point, however we want to look at it, should look like. What, what is the appropriate place to start the process of explaining? The all agreed has to start somewhere. We can call this thing self-explanatory, or we can call them sort of, um, things that don't need explanation, or whatever. But I think what Alex and I do think, what we agree on certainly is that in order to fall into that category, you have to be a sort of special kind of fact. Can't just be any old thing. I can't just say, here's something that's neat explanation. The fact I have a pair of scissors in my hand, you know, that's just, it's just obviously doesn't need an explanation. Well, that's really wrong, right? That's exactly sort of thing that does need an explanation, right? So, so there has to be some kind of criterion that we can use to sort things out into these two categories. And of course, you know, this is what we were talking about. So you, you say at this point, your view is necessary, contingent. That's the way to sort out the pair. And, and in my various ways, I've been trying to push back against that and say, no, it's not, it, that's not an adequate criterion, right?

So one other thing that I've seen, so you said it a certain point that things sort of need explanation or don't need explanation. I'm not sure whether I kind of like that idea or either. I mean, things have the explanations or they, and then there are some things that don't. But in my view, the things that don't have explanations, the necessities of various kinds of things, because that's kind of where you, I mean, that's where that, according to me, is where the starting point is. With those things, I can see you can have different views about what's appropriate for the starting point, but in one way or another, it's going to be these things don't have explanations and that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe even have explanations, which is I guess also your V, but necessary. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of the criterion for me. We want, we want unexplainable things. But I don't think, I don't think all the necessary things are unexplainable. Yeah. Right. We played over that sort of, yeah.

So just a final note that I was thinking about specifically in relation to this point, and Rob, you are actually alluding to it, is just I think it would ultimately depend on what we mean by explanation. So some people have it like a very epistemological heavy notion of explanation where it's just like, okay, you know, it makes it sort of intelligible, we understand, we sort of just understand it, right? But another other people have a sort of very ontological heavy sort of explanation where it's like, either causation or its or its identity or its reduction or it's like grounding. And like that's it, you know. And so, and you know, it's almost like a spectrum. But I guess if we're just talking about a sort of intrinsic intelligibility, like it sort of just self-evident or something, maybe zero equals zero would count as self-explanatory in a sort of epistemic sense. But maybe in an ontological sense, like it can't really, the fact that zero equals zero can't really pull itself up by its own ontological bootstraps, as it were, right? Cuz I mean, in order to have like any explanatory power, it already have to exist in the first place, right? So I think, yeah.

Okay, so I'm glad that that's like a distinction we can keep in mind whenever we're thinking of explanation. But, um, we're at about 9:40 and we're at about like 1 hour 16 minutes in. So, um, that's that's roughly it for for our discussion. I think we had a really, really fun discussion on potential paths from necessary being to God. I want to thank both of you so much for coming on to my channel. It was a, it was a lovely discussion. So any final words between the two of you?

No, Graham, it's great to be able to interact with me like this. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. Thanks, Jack. Yeah.

Okay, thank you everyone for tuning in. This is the Majesty of Reason. I'm Joe Schmid. And at peace out.

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