Questioning general philosophical arguments
I wanted to ask about philosophical arguments like 'every complex has a component', and similar ones, isn't it a bit far-fetched to apply our everyday laws to things we have no experience with at all? Suppose the world is complex (even though the definition is not really clear), isn't it exaggerated and dubious to say that the entire world has a component, while the only rational complexes we know of are those of humans? That is, suppose (without any reason, purely theoretically), that the idea that the world has a component necessarily also means that the entire reality of our senses is a lie, that there are exactly 888 unicorns behind my back as I type, and all sorts of other delusional things that are clearly unlikely to be true, how likely is it that the world has a component this time? Not at all unlikely. Now, what I'm arguing is that the very fact that the world is so big that it couldn't have been created by humans is strong enough to automatically rule out these arguments. The thing with unicorns is that if the world has a component, it is necessarily stronger than anything we know (because it created the entire world), and is necessarily not just one of all the biological life we have ever known. So, I don't understand how this calculation can be made, is it likely that there is a component because of the assumption that every complex has a component.
After all, if the fact that there is a component also means many other, fanciful things that are clearly unlikely to be true, it is unlikely that there is a component. So I ask – why is the mere fact that the existence of a component necessarily means that it contradicts all our acquaintance with reason, not enough to reject it on the grounds of improbability?
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- Even in the scientific context, when we find some natural law here with us, we assume that it is also true in the rest of the universe, even though we haven't tested it. This is a completely reasonable assumption, even if uncertain. If it is disproved, then we will abandon it, but it is a common sense assumption. The same is true on the philosophical level. By the way, the assumption of causality is an assumption of science, not just of philosophy.
- The assumption of causality is not the result of observation but an a priori insight (synthetic-a priori, in Kant's terminology). Therefore, in principle, it is always applicable to everything, and not necessarily to a particular type of thing that we have experience of, unless proven otherwise. This applies both to complex things (not just objects in our world) and to their components (not just people).
- The fact that every complex has a component (meaning that it did not come into being by itself) is a very logical statistical-mathematical consideration, and therefore it is clear that it is reasonable to apply it everywhere and to everything. Mathematics is always correct.
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