To not play the game of life

To paraphrase a friend, "the real us is never shown as we embrace the illusion, the game." I have to ask whether this is actual truth. Do we show each potential mate/partner/friend the make believe version of ourselves? Do we play mental and emotional chess with them? Is there a dividend that we earn that makes the deception worthy?

Historically people have fallen into cliques. Whether it is man v. woman to ivy league educated male v. coal mine supervisor male, there are cliques and they are always in opposition to other ones. To break this idea down further, are we our own clique? Do we selectively allow others to see the more "real" us, as opposed to making others "earn" their way into our own clique?

From the earliest we are taught to protect ourselves against all others, whether it is the subconscious lessons we have learned from our parents to the outright lessons of childhood. We learn to hide within ourselves. We must not be different. We must be what society expects us to be. And this is bullshit.

We look within and know we are not the personae that we pretend to be. We are the source of our own existential angst. Society expects "x" and we deliver. This is why homosexuality is taboo and still kept "in the closest" in many societies. It is why the religious cling to outdated idealism like marriage being between man and woman.

Nietzsche brought the idea of the Superman forth with Zarathustra. It complete defiance of social "norms" of being what one is expected to be. Nietzsche reminds us that if we wish to be something/someone that is known for all time, to be something other than a sheep, that we need to abandon the preconceived notion of who society thinks we need to be. We will be as we will be. Fuck society.

So how do I answer the friend about hiding the real us as part of the game?

When we lower ourselves to play the game, to be who we are not, to leave vague clues for others to puzzle out, we cheapen who we really are because we allow ourselves to become common, to become sheep. When we are able to hold ourselves above all others, without excuse, we attract those who are our equals, those who understand that we must rise above the mundane and be true to our own spirit/will. To be Zarathustra.

Debugging morality v. ethics

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.


from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 499, R.J. Hollingdale transl

All morality finds it basis in religion. It is religious "don't or do dos". The Bible has a codified list of things people should not do. Laws have been enacted based upon them. Many of those laws fall under what is known as the "Puritan Laws", but the majority are not.



And this is where ethics becomes distinctively separate. Sartre always argued that is there was no god, man would create himself. Man would judge each action. The existential movement echoes this belief. Religion removed from actions.

To get more into the minutea, morality has the rule of not killing. It is an amoral act. Punishable. All countries have laws that deal with this. Some execute people who violate this law. Some versions of religious texts allow for retribution.

Hegel argued against retribution. He found it to be something that no society should uphold, that taking the life of another was a violation of that person's rights. Ethics.

Here's how it is different from morality: In religion a person is told what they are allowed and not allowed to do. They are given the moral laws of their faith, complete with punishments. In ethics a person must judge for themselves if their action violates the actions of others while satisfying the actions of themselves.

"Now, being God might very well mean to know everything. But you must understand that even for God the knowing don't come easy. So when a question come up that stumped his big ol' God-brain, he set about finding an answer. And that's where we come in. He invented morality and planted it in our breasts. And only through our actions could he ever hope to learn about that particular thing. (84)"

The Sound of Building Coffins, Louis Maistros, New Milford,CT: 2009 The Toby Press LLC

While it seems fundamentally the same as a moral situation, an ethical one is not. The difference resides in the person. A moral person knows that killing is wrong and should not be done. An ethical person reasons whether killing another would deny that person rights and whether those violated rights were less important than them being killed. And an ethical person is not bound by the rights of the person. Nietzsche would argue that one who considered the rights of others was just a sheep. If a person deemed another should be killed, then that person should follow through on it.

Religion does not influence morality, it is the basis for it. Religion creates laws, laws that are shaped by its belief system. Morality does not stand up to the harsh light of ethical review.

Intelligence and rain

Consider this implication that the human brain is composed mainly of water and that thoughts are electrical transmissions. These are scientific facts. Also fact that the brain requires oxygen to remain functional. Heck let's toss in that it is a complex structure. And we will take the final step and say that we are explicitly discussing a fruit fly brain.

Now, remove religion. I am not saying that a deity of sorts does not exist or anything like that. This is just a simple extension of Sartre's statement in Being and Nothingness that he did not deny god existed but he questioned should god not exist man would create himself. Arguing Sartre's theory is an entirely different post. And while I am removing religion, remove qualia, that mythical "essence" that Searle and others desperately cling to in their argument against computers and artificial intelligence.

Referencing the opening paragraph, I have to wonder if rain could have sentience? Let me define sentience as having the quality of being able to compose and transmit thoughts independently of outside manipulations. Rain is composed mostly of water, conducts electrical transmissions, has access to unlimited amounts of oxygen and is a complex structure. To say that rain is not a complex structure, snow is a type of frozen rain.

Is it possible to prove that rain is not capable of sentience? Not that rain is sentient, but that it is impossible for rain to be sentient. Having disqualified religion and qualia, how can the argument against be made? Is this a perversion of Pascal's wager?

What is bad?

A local television ministry has the following statement in their commercial:

if its good its god, if its bad its the devil.

Putting aside the question of whether such deities exist, instead we need to focus on the ambiguity of the words good and bad. Neither word has an absolute meaning. Each person, pending we have free will, makes constant determinations as to what they believe is good and bad. Sartre was fond of making the argument that without god man creates himself. I make a much looser assertion.

A perfect example is food. Say you think prime rib is good. To a vegan, prime rib is bad. It is both good and bad, ambiguous.

To a catholic, god is good and the devil is bad. To a satanist the devil is good and god is bad.

What about murder? Murder is the willful taking of life. Can murder be a good thing or is it always bad? A poor analogy would be the war argument, that soldiers willingly murder people, but they don't. They follow orders. Taking ones own life is murder and therefore bad. But its not. In certain cultures committing suicide is respected and therefore good.

And if god exists, then god takes our lives willfully, being the supreme arbitrator of life and death. So to rewrite the statement of the television ministry:

If its good it might be god or the devil, and if its bad it might be god or the devil

Sartreian Freedom

As an atheist, Sartre denied that man is born with certain values, that man is born with universal ethics. As such, man must define freedom through his own actions. Freedom, in a classical definition, is to be without restraint. Sartre attempted to expand that definition by asserting that man was a prisoner of his own freedom, and that freedom was the only source of values. In short, man decides his values as he discovers his freedom.

As such, it matters not what side of a battle man sides with, so long as man acts with "good faith", chooses the good of an action. Man, being his own source of freedom, establishes his own values. To deny introspection, to not choose to act for the good, leaves man in anxiety and acting in "bad faith". Man must not act as others act, in a universal good, because that would remove introspection, would render the decision bad.

Being born without a hierarchal system of values, man continually builds his own. As such, man is able to destroy the hierarchy with each choice and establish a new one. Man, realizing that he is the source of values, the fount of freedom, will only choose to adhere to his freedom. Man then, with a god removed, is his own judge. Sartre was emphasizing that freedom is subjective, in that, man and man alone is capable of understanding his own freedom.

Sartre believed that most men hide from their freedom, in denial of it, and adopt the deterministic values of society and/or theology. Attribution to external sources is utter denial of inherent freedom. Things influence things, but man, as an actor, is not a thing. Man is responsible for himself. To act differently makes man inauthentic, and man renounces his humanity.

To further extend freedom, no man has rights, as rights are external things. Rights are determinism. A ruler has the right to rule because the citizens deny their freedom in a Nietzscheian slave-morality as they accept passively the values set before them. Rights have no ability to guide one's action, to determine conduct. Man, being aware of his freedom, creates his own values, his own hierarchies. As such, even a revolutionary, one who battles for the freedom of all, denies his own freedom, as a revolution carries its own values and rules of conduct, ethics.

Sartre has established that man being free determines his own values, and as such, those values are mercurial, changing with each situation. A man who must choose between family and country can not rely on established values, but must determine his own action. Man must act for the good. How each man determines the good is man's freedom. Freedom then is an active form, is not in stasis. Man who resists freedom is in a continual form of anxiety, as he must determine to act for the good, to create his own values with each situation.

Sartreian Freedom

As an atheist, Sartre denied that man is born with certain values, that man is born with universal ethics. As such, man must define freedom through his own actions. Freedom, in a classical definition, is to be without restraint. Sartre attempted to expand that definition by asserting that man was a prisoner of his own freedom, and that freedom was the only source of values. In short, man decides his values as he discovers his freedom.

As such, it matters not what side of a battle man sides with, so long as man acts with “good faith”, chooses the good of an action. Man, being his own source of freedom, establishes his own values. To deny introspection, to not choose to act for the good, leaves man in anxiety and acting in “bad faith”. Man must not act as others act, in a universal good, because that would remove introspection, would render the decision bad. Being born without a hierarchal system of values, man continually builds his own. As such, man is able to destroy the hierarchy with each choice and establish a new one. Man, realizing that he is the source of values, the fount of freedom, will only choose to adhere to his freedom. Man then, with a god removed, is his own judge.

Sartre was emphasizing that freedom is subjective, in that, man and man alone is capable of understanding his own freedom. Sartre believed that most men hide from their freedom, in denial of it, and adopt the deterministic values of society and/or theology. Attribution to external sources is utter denial of inherent freedom. Things influence things, but man, as an actor, is not a thing. Man is responsible for himself. To act differently makes man inauthentic, and man renounces his humanity.

To further extend freedom, no man has rights, as rights are external things. Rights are determinism. A ruler has the right to rule because the citizens deny their freedom in a Nietzscheian slave-morality as they accept passively the values set before them. Rights
have no ability to guide one’s action, to determine conduct. Man, being aware of his freedom, creates his own values, his own hierarchies. As such, even a revolutionary, one who battles for the freedom of all, denies his own freedom, as a revolution carries its own values and rules of conduct, ethics.

Sartre has established that man being free determines his own values, and as such, those values are mercurial, changing with each situation. A man who must choose between family and country can not rely on established values, but must determine his own action. Man must act for the good. How each man determines the good is man’s freedom. Freedom then is an active form, is not in stasis. Man who resists freedom is in a continual form of anxiety, as he must determine
to act for the good, to create his own values with each situation.

Horkheimer’s Illusionary Script

To understand Horkheimer’s “The End of Reason”, one has need to understand the historical timeline the paper was written during. In 1937, four years prior, Horkheimer published the essay “Traditional and Critical Theory”, an essay which defined critical theory as a revolutionary form of Marxist theory, which called for the radical transformation in social theory and practice. It was not until eight years after “The End of Reason” that Horkheimer softened his stance on transformation by limiting it to educational systems, adopting Gramsci’s hegemony, which has since been expanded upon by Ivan Illich.

As the United States in 1941 was anti-communist and anti-fascist, and Horkheimer ensconced at Columbia University in New York City, his views had need to be carefully couched, have felicific calculus applied. It is because of this to truly understand “The End of Reason”, one has to apply Wittgenstein methods to it, to determine the different “language games”, to use Ockham’s Razor to obtain clarity. It is clear that Horkheimer was objecting to the global collectivism of society, the historical materialism, Smyth’s technocracy. What is not immediately clear though is the meaning of his final sentence which concludes with: “…there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom.(p48)” Freedom and barbarism have multitudinous definitions. Freedom is commonly accepted as liberty, an ideal, and barbarism as anathematic: cruel and savage. But, more obscure, meanings for the words, meanings a highly educated person like Horkheimer would know, change the entire reading of his essay and give it life as a call to fulfill critical theory, a destruction of the monist dystopia of Science.

To Horkheimer, reason equated to the Spinozian belief that man could find liberation through knowledge. This is the freedom he wrote of in common interpretations of this essay, the apodictic reading. Reason, not sullied by Science, could buttress man from the assailment of the machine of science, the grinding of the human gear. For in Horkheimer’s view, man had been hebetated, had become a slave to the reason of machine and its dominance. The path for freedom for the vulgus was through reason.

Barbarism was man’s other option, according to Horkheimer, a barbarism driven by bellipotent Science, driven to subsume reason and obliterate it. This option Horkheimer railed against, for man would truly then be a part, a gear, in a machine. The vox populi would cease and man would become the mechanolater, the worshipper of machines. It would be the realization of Abelard’s warning that man without reason must be content with authority. Man would cease to be, man.

But, given the historical timeline of this essay, Horkheimer was a first phase critical theorist, a man who supported radical transformation to achieve the Marxist ideals of a society progressing from capitalism to socialism to a classless society, a man who could not voice those views openly for fear of imprisonment or death. As such, Horkheimer had need to obscure his true intent through this essay, obscured in such a way that only others who held his views could truly understand, his own camarilla, secret political society. Horkheimer went to length describing the rise of the Nazis, while detailing how reason had become epitonic. The ingurgitation of reason by Science, the enslavement, was an almost Götterdämerung against man.

For Horkheimer, the Kafkaesque nightmare must be vanquished, must be subverted, for only then could change occur, could man begin the Marxist utopia. It is because of this that one has need to utilize alternate meanings for the words freedom and barbarism. Freedom also means facility, a transvaluation of freedom for servitude. Man could find freedom by accepting his imprisonment as a cog, as a prisoner does once he accepts he will never leave his prison. “It induces the individual to subordinate himself to society… (p29)” Freedom means then to be boundless of reason, to do as Duncan’s queen in MacBeth and “die every day she lived.” To be facile to Horkheimer truly meant the death, oblivion of man as an individual by the machine. Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode, an anonymous face in an anonymous crowd. Man in context then would be but a disposable part of the machine, the machine Gestalt to man, the sum greater than the parts.

In the Roman Empire, barbarism was the action of the uncivilized, the uneducated, the un-Roman. To this end Horkheimer urges man, to strive against society, the technocracy, to accept reason as a paramour, an illicit lover. Reason alone could affricate, grate against, the machine of society, to “strip the gears” of production, to bring the machine to a halt. Horkheimer assailed Aristotle as the progenitor of empirical science, the same man who in Ethics wrote: “when devoid of virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of animals.” This is the dualism of Horkheimer’s words. Man as a barbarian, a bantling, no longer anonymous, could seize control of the machine, Science, and regain his position as man. Horkheimer, no Luddite, could have foreseen man gaining control of the machine through reason, the machine then serving man.

Evidentiary to Horkheimer’s true intent is his allusions to individuals who stood against the Church, individuals who rose from the crowd, and who paid for their beliefs. Horkheimer espouses Roger Bacon and Siger of Brabant, both imprisoned for heresy against the Church, the latter murdered. These were men who railed against the machine of their time, who embraced reason and rejected collectivism, and who were resolute to accept the consequences of their actions. Horkheimer writes of Duns Scotus, who challenged the Church, its capitalism, and suffered eternal ignominy as from him the word dunce has arisen. Horkheimer refers also to Romeo and Juliet who “died in conflict with society… (p43)” Romeo and Juliet, the jusqu’ au
botists, radicals, through felo de se, self-murder, an apologia, rejected their unreasonable society. These examples were not idly selected by Horkheimer, were not an afterthought. Horkheimer chose these as examples of hope against the technocracy because “morality has survived insofar as men are conscious that the reality to which they yield is not the right one. (p36)”

Horkheimer’s interpretation of the Reformation, and of Luther, as a training of man to subordination is curious, peculiar. Luther, with hammer and nail, crucified the despotic capitalistic oligarchy of the Church. Horkheimer had previously quoted Voltaire’s belief that the proletariat could be enlightened to reason only by apostles, and Luther was an apostle. Luther had used reason as a weapon a gainst the collectivism of the Church, as a means to his own end. Perhaps one could deduce that Horkheimer referred to Luther recanting of his beliefs, his subordination to that which he fought against, his acceptance of freedom as facility, as “the idea of
reason, even in its nominalistic and purified form, has always justified sacrifice. (p33)”

But then, it could be argued that Luther through reason, had sacrificed his ideals, a “sacrificium intellectus. (p40)” To Horkheimer, “reason could recognize and denounce the forms of injustice
and thus emancipate itself from them. (p47)” Reason then, in a society that abhorred it, condemned it, could become the Urgrund, the primary principle, the apotropaic weapon. Reason could be the salvation of man, could free man from being a piece of the machine. As Dostoyevsky wrote in Notes from Underground (MacAndrew, A.R., 1961, New York: Signet Classic, p114-5):

But even if man was nothing but a piano key, even if this could be demonstrated to him mathematically- even then, he wouldn’t come to his senses but would pull some trick out of sheer ingratitude, just to make his point. And if he didn’t have them on hand, he would devise the means of destruction, chaos, and all kinds of suffering to get his way. For instance he’d swear loud enough for the whole world to hear- swearing is man’s prerogative, setting him apart from the other animals- and maybe his swearing alone would get him what he wanted, that is, it’d prove to him that he’s a man and not a piano key.

Reason would require an anti-Heidegger man, the one freed from the anonymous crowd, freed from the machine, the one who would deny death and act as immortal, the barbarian. Maine de Biran believed that man could achieve freedom through source of will. Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mori nihil. After death there is nothing, not even death. Sartre argued that how man dies is eternal, regardless of how man has lived. Reason, recognizing the injustice of the technocracy, the devolution of man as a Baalist of the machine of Science, would be the tool to true freedom, liberty. As Bob Marley wrote in “Redemption Song”: “emancipate yourself from mental slavery,
none but ourselves can free our mind.” Emancipation of reason would lead man to actual freedom.

“The terror which pushes reason is at the same time the last means of stopping it, so close has truth come. (p48)” The terror, the sublimation of humanitas, had begun to draw man nigh. Horkheimer here suggested that terror had need to beget terror, for a man with reason to respond in kind to the terror of the machine, to use the very foundation the machine had been built upon to undermine it. Further in “Redemption Song” Marley wrote: “how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look.” In this case, the prophet is reason, it is the apostle to man, the barbarian, outcast from the technocracy, desirous to slay facility, Voltaire’s apostle to the proletariat.

This is the message Horkheimer has concealed in this essay, that man must free himself from the machine, from Science, that man is not a piano key, and man must become man again, to regain the humanitas denied him by the machine, through reason. Man is on the precipice, the edge of permanent oblivion, servitude to the machine of Science, a machine that seeks to explain away the necessity of man. No longer should man accept the status quo, the anonymous oblivion of the
collective, no longer equate freedom with facility, but to battle facility outside of society, as a barbarian, freed from the machine in an a fortiori war, as the machine holds power only through the slave of man, for as yet, it is not autonomous. Man can strike then and become master, slave lord, of the machine. Man would then realize the Rastafarian “I and I”, which denotes “we” as a true collection of individuals, and no longer be anonymous, no longer be a cog. Horkheimer did not intend a Trotskyian ideal, a permanent revolution, but a revolution of reason, an end to the
totalitarianism of Science and the establishment of socialism, where the machine becomes tool and serves man.

When Horkheimer wrote “…there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom (p48)”, he was not referring to just the common definitions of those words, of liberty and savagery, but also of facility and uncivilized. The keys to understanding his true meaning lay within the confines of his essay, buried there because Horkheimer had need to be non-pellucid, vague, had feared his own freedom in the context of his era, the pre-McCarthian United States. He wrote of the rise of Fascism to illustrate the solecism of the machine of Science, the error in calculation that man would accept slavehood. Through his detail of Fascism he exposed the underbelly of the machine.

He purposely chose to illustrate those who battled against the totality of religion, those who sacrificed in the name of their ideals against the Church in an ideological struggle of methodologies. Horkheimer wrote a call for a revolution of reason, of humanitas armed with reason, against the machine, its weaknesses exposed, for man to use and embrace barbarism, to be uncivilized, to not be an anonymous piece of a machine, to attain Fichte’s how the world should be, how it should be altered through reason, true freedom, liberty.

Cosmological Fallacy

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
---Friedrich Nietzsche

At the latter end of the 1200's, John Duns Scotus put forth his idea of the first efficient
cause (Opera Omnia. Civitas Vaticana: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1950-). It was an attempt to logically prove the existence of god. His argument, composed of seven steps, is as follows:

(1) No effect can produce itself.
(2) No effect can be produced by just nothing at all.
(3) A circle of causes is impossible.
(4) Therefore, an effect must be produced by something else. (from 1, 2, and 3)
(5) There is no infinite regress in an essentially ordered series of causes.
(6) It is not possible for there to be an accidentally ordered series of causes unless there is an
essentially ordered series.
(7) Therefore, there is a first agent. (from 4, 5, and 6)

These seven steps, in effect, refuted while achieving nearly the same end, instead of improved upon, the argument of Anselm in his Monologia. Scotus's final step, that there is a god, is dependant upon each of the prior steps proving to be a logical possibility. Interestingly, steps 1, 2, and 6 are basic tenets of quantum physics (History and Root of the Principles of the Conservation of Energy. E. Mach. Open Court Pub. Co., IL., 1872). Steps 3-5 are the most difficult to support, and are most likely illogical and untrue.

Step two requires that no effect is can be caused by nothing. In effect, something must be the cause. Since something must be caused by something, cause and effect is circular. This is widely supported by physics, particularly quantum physics. Many philosophers have attempted to side-step this (notably Davidson, Haack, and Gasking) by creating a pseudo cause and effect that is dependent upon human manipulation. For this pseudo situation to be true, it would follow that a god is a manipulation of man and exists solely because of man. Nietzsche and Sartre both made that claim. This is antithetical to the theist view of a god.

Step three involves there being a terminal point for causes. Since each effect follows a cause, Scotus is requiring time to be linear. There is no other possibility. While this is a viable possibility, there are problems with it. There are fields of physics dedicated to proving that linear time either does not exist or runs concurrent with non-linear time at various intersections.

Even Anselm recognized that linear time was a problem to any theory of a god:
By contrast, if something is in no way constrained by confinement in a place or time, no law of places or times forces it into a multiplicity of parts or prevents it from being present as a whole all at once in several places or times (Monologia,22).

That a circle of causes is impossible (step three), according to Scotus, violates the second and fourth step. If an effect can not be produced by nothing at all , then it goes to logic that every produced effect is dependent upon a prior effect, and that each that follows is also dependent on the prior, without terminus. This is itself a circle. From Buddhism this point is made clear. The Buddhists believe that when one looks at a stream, one sees both the end and the beginning of the stream; it is the end of the source of the stream and the beginning of a new source.

Given the possibility of the fourth step being true, that an effect must be caused by a prior one, as it does follow from two, the fifth step potentially violates 1, 2, and 4. For the fifth step, that an infinite regress is not possible, to be logical and true, it would require that time be absolutely linear, with a definite beginning and end. This would be an establishment of a primary cause, and as such makes the first two steps either illogical or false. An effect that can not cause itself (α), and one that must be caused (β), can not be dependent upon linear time (~γ), a primary. But if time is linear (γ), then α and/or β is not possible.

If α is not true, then an effect can be the cause of itself. But, if this is so, then it follows that any effect can be the cause of itself, and is not limited to a god. In this, if a god is the cause of itself, and with α being false, self-causation of effect is granted. Because this law would need to be an universal one, in order not to violate multiple rules of physics, it would also follow that a tomato could be the cause of itself. A human could be the cause of a human. Darwinian evolution would be an anomaly.

Also, if β is not true, then an effect can be caused by nothing. This would allow for a god to be created without causation. That in itself violates many laws of physics and would require a nothing to not only have a definite property, but be uncaused. And if a nothing has property, then it can not logically be “nothing”; it is something. What follows then is that nothing is something and is the cause of an effect. If this nothing is something, then it is the primary point of causation (β therefore α) and time must be linear (if β and α therefore γ). But as has been shown, α and/or β must not be true for γ to be true ( ~α and/or ~β therefore γ).

There is much debate as to whether time is linear. It has been conjectured that time exists in a manner that we do not readily understand, and that our theory of time is limited to being linear by necessity. Einstein was certainly not the first nor the last to hypothesize the possibility of time travel. For this to be conceivable, time can not be linear. To travel back in time, say ten years, requires that time runs parallel, because if it did not, and we were able to travel backwards, we would most likely de-age ten years. To do otherwise would violate all knowledge we have of physics. Because we would be traveling between two points along a line, and since we can not exist in tangent with another of ourselves at that same point, we must regress. But if time is parallel or circular, we could achieve travel and exist with ourselves simultaneously at the same point in time. Non-linear time proves Scotus's fifth step to be illogical and false.

With the possibility of non-linear time, and with the above by Anselm, it is theoretically possible that the multiverse theory is plausible. The multiverse theory proposes that our universe is not unique and that there are at least one other universe coexisting with ours. This calls into question most of our current understanding of physics. Also the existence of a god becomes more feasible.

This possibility can then uphold many of Scotus's steps and could ratify Anselm as well. The problem of linear time would be solved as both linear and non-linear could exist together, and that in our universe it would be entirely possible to have a first cause that arose from nothing, which would be a crossing between multiverses. More clearly, since Scotus has put forth that an infinite regression is not possible, and that an effect can not cause itself or be produced by nothing at all, if a god existed in another universe and crossed into our own, that god would arise from nothing and yet not cause itself. This would give support Anselm's idea entirely. But to support Scotus fully, his first efficient cause would need to be amended as such:

1. No effect can produce itself.
2. No effect can be produced by just nothing at all.
3. There is no infinite regress in an essentially ordered series of causes.
a. Only if time is linear
b. If time is non-linear than an infinite regress of causes is possible.
c. The infinite regress requires that there be at least 1 other universe, a multiverse.
d. Because of the multiverse, regression can cross between time and place.
e. This amends #2 as the multiverse is a form of nothing in that it exists outside of our time and
place.
4. Therefore, an effect must be produced by something else. (from 1, 2, and 3)
5. It is not possible for there to be an accidentally ordered series of causes unless there is an essentially
ordered series.
6. Therefore, there is a first agent. (from 3, 4, and 5)

But even with these modifications the final step is logical, but does not necessarily equal that the first agent is a god. The first agent could simply be another being that has crossed the boundaries of the multiverse.

While Scotus went to great pains to formulate a logical representation for the existence of a god, to the satisfaction of theists, he went wide of the mark. Granted it is not feasible to assume that he would have the knowledge, or even the insight to it, of what we now possess. He worked with what was available to him in his time and while his first cause is flawed, it can be repaired and can still be possible. At our current level of understanding of the universe we can not unequivacably dismiss his theory. In fact, as our base of knowledge grows, it does make his first cause more probable.