All Causation is Indirect
If all causation is indirect then surely to refer to anything as 'causal' is nothing more than saying something 'is'.
Why would all causation be indirect? I am not stating that it is, only that it is impossible to confirm direct causation ergo why do we assume direct causation at all other than as means of anchor the constant change we experience as beings.
Even the use of logical tools fall apart when this is taken into consideration other than. Implications and Conditionals are meaningless under the regime of indirect causation.
If we cannot prove direct causation outside of the confines of abstract bounds, then how can we ... how can I say 'then'? How can a 'question' form about something yet to happen?
Indirect causation means that it 'could be because' but the 'because' is known as a direct causal term not an indirect causal term.
Are all our propositions based purely on an idea that Pure Abstraction overrules experiential evidence?
Any thoughts on this tangled mess? ;)
Why would all causation be indirect? I am not stating that it is, only that it is impossible to confirm direct causation ergo why do we assume direct causation at all other than as means of anchor the constant change we experience as beings.
Even the use of logical tools fall apart when this is taken into consideration other than. Implications and Conditionals are meaningless under the regime of indirect causation.
If we cannot prove direct causation outside of the confines of abstract bounds, then how can we ... how can I say 'then'? How can a 'question' form about something yet to happen?
Indirect causation means that it 'could be because' but the 'because' is known as a direct causal term not an indirect causal term.
Are all our propositions based purely on an idea that Pure Abstraction overrules experiential evidence?
Any thoughts on this tangled mess? ;)
Comments (58)
This is my best attempt at a substantive response.
Quoting I like sushi
This seems partly correct. If a consequence - or the likelihood of a consequence - is related to an intermediary factor manipulated via another variable, that doesn't necessarily include knowledge of how the intermediary factor results in the consequences. But I think that sometimes one could have some knowledge of how the indirect relationship works while maintaining the necessary boundaries i.e. the intermediary factor still exists distinctly and independently of the consequences of the indirect relationship; I don't think the relationship would just collapse into directness due to some knowledge of its workings.
Quoting I like sushi
I do think indirect causation plays a factor in the change humans experience. For instance: an athlete might lift weights and get stronger, and getting stronger might make them better at their sport. However, direct causation is probably what most people look for when trying to anchor their beliefs and experiences - and rightly so. It is more in agreement with the sense of change you mention. None of that says much of anything about whether or not direct causation can be proven, however.
Quoting I like sushi
So, if we act like everything is indirect, we have the conclusion that often times we cannot express useful logical statements regarding why when x affects y it increases or decreases the chances of z. I think this is true given that assumption, but like I said earlier, these processes don't need to be totally opaque; furthermore, you have no evidence that relationships that appear to be irreducibly direct are not in fact direct. It seems to me that if some relationship can be directly, logically expressed such that it agrees with reality, there is no reason to try to insert some sort of intermediary factor.
Quoting I like sushi
Once again, that indirect causation exists does not mean we cannot say definitively that a relationship is direct. There are mathematical models that model reality sufficiently accurately that they can be said to demonstrate the directness of the causes, or forces, that they purport to model; we know, for instance, the commonly used equation that governs projectile motion is accurate given some assumptions - such as gravity having a fixed value near the surface of the earth - and that these assumptions don't amount to some sort of intermediary factors, but rather behave more like settings. So, we can model the world in a very real, physical way that can give rise to questions like: if I throw this apple at a certain speed, and at a certain angle, where will it land? You could even determine such a thing relatively easily given the right tools.
Quoting I like sushi
You are just making things complicated here. Indirect relationships can exist as an expression of direct relationships or vice versa, and you still haven't shown that using words like 'because' is somehow an expression of a disjunction between abstraction and reality.
Quoting I like sushi
No, clearly not. I think people have plenty of experiences that appear to be genuinely based on direct causation.
I am intrigued by the use and application of these terms both within logic and colloquially. It seems to me that an Event is needed for any such appreciation of reality to exist. The disjoint between reality (experiential world) and the abstract makes me uneasy.
Anyway, off to work. Will see if I can pick at this a little more during the day ...
Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
Says who? Why? What is direct causation?
I couldn't make any sense of your OP - it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion. Was this split from some other topic?
I am just playing around with the concept of time here and how our terminology influences our perception of time. Especially in terms of how we approach formal logic and its relations to colloquial language use.
I guess I am saying all Causation is Proximal and never Ultimate (as referenced by Baden : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
"...it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion"
Agreed
@ I like sushi
"I am just playing.......colloquial language use" Well explained and justified.
Shame it can't be used as a defense in law. Be a different world.
Just citing a random imagining, not citing an "implication" (with all the causation that word connotes)
Well that seems the other way round from the op, and totally in line with the notion that action at a distance would be "spooky".
But in practice, we do a lot of hand-waving, because to spell out the full mechanism each time would be both tedious and unjustifiable. 'The billiard ball went in the pocket because the player had practiced, and judged his shot well.' One leaves out the psychology, the neuroscience, the physiology, the Newtonian physics, the properties of felt and slate and effects of air resistance, and... But we understand that a ball entering a pocket is also caused by Some billionaire offering prize money for a tournament in his backyard. What's the difficulty?
[quote=Carl Sagan]If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe[/quote]
Because an apple is made of star dust. Yet most recipes leave out that bit, and assume that you already have a universe at hand, and access to apples therein. One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting- the full history of every atom of pie, tin, and oven from the big bang would take too long, and your pie would get cold.
Still not 100% clear on what you're getting at.
Maybe we can take a simple scenario like the one below, and analyze things from there.
*
Two dominos, A and B and an agent, X.
X pushes Domino A, causing Domino A to fall against Domino B, causing Domino B to fall.
Domino B falling:
Proximal cause = Domino A falling against it
Distal (ultimate) cause = X pushing Domino A.
*
I think distal is a better term than ultimate because ultimate causes are never really ultimate, and are always also proximal to some effect in a chain.
Anyhow, causal network and contextual orientation ought to be part of the meta-context here in terms of placing the question in a comprehensible form.
Consider the causal network as the network of enabling conditions and triggering causes that could possibly be considered relevant in the outcome, such that proximal cause can be defined with some flexibility. This causal network causes a kind of fuzziness around the identification of the proximal cause.
Note this network as a whole can be considered the necessary and sufficient conditions of the effect under analysis. Also, the proximal cause is usually a triggering cause (and necessary e.g. my push) rather than an enabling condition (maybe only contingent, depending on the circumstances, e.g. the weight of the domino).
Re contextual orientation, are we approaching this from the context of a human observer with human desires, needs, goals, and recognizably human actions? Are we focusing on the mechanics of the situation? The physics? E.g. perhaps down to the micro context of electrons? The neurobiology? Our analysis can be psychological, chemical, physical or some combination thereof depending.
All relevant considerations.
Basicaly agree; I don't yet know what the issue is, but with some refinement we may get there.
Yes, that's the key to understanding causality.
As witness:
Quoting Baden
Wot? Falling not caused by Gravity? :gasp:
Triggering cause (push of other domino or finger) vs. enabling condition (gravity), bruv.
Anyhow, I said "fuzzy" below so I'm insured against all objections.
We can fall into infinite regression. The situation you outlined with dominoes is an abstract reality. If we are parsing up time as beginning from the initiation of the first domino to fall then that is the Distal cause.
In reality this parsing up of time is completely arbitrary. Of course I fully understand the bonus for scientific experimentation.
I was just wondering why because we experience the world the way we do we assume the world is the way we experience it. The appearance of events running as one that follows another does not rigidly define them as causally connected other than by our experiential perceptions - which are artifacts of culminated culture.
We speak the words we speak because we inherited them not because we created them. In around 200,000 years what is pretty much an evolutionary homeostatic position we have moved strides ahead in terms of our dealings with the environment.
What if our species had no formal language? What if it took over 100,000 years to create a minimal form of language? Dr. John Vervaeke refers to our progression as being driven by psychotechnologies (language, writing, reason, etc.,.). Something along the lines of humanity hitting something equivalent to a Cognitive Singularity that propelled us from partly dumb animals to non-dumb animals. Then, as time moved on we dragged and cultivated ideas through generations to the point where they culminated in the explosion of civilization.
Over all this time the next most significant leap was agriculture, which would require a verbal scheme to plan ahead and think about the future, only really tangible as a collective group with the creation of temporal concepts (more diverse prepositions of time and tense). Then, eventually, the written word and literacy also played a major role.
The very concept of Causation is a tool of understanding the world from our perspectives NOT a given. The power of memory allowed for a 're-cognition' of events and a recognition which led to appreciation of some cyclical procedure (from our perspectives). The refinement of this occurs because we then quantified and atomized the world.
Our stories about the world we live in dominate daily life. Causation does not. The idea of causation is a tool that imagines the world as orderly and was more fully taken to be 'real' due to the 'tool' of quantifying/atomization.
The way I see it, there are three main divisions when it comes to conscious appreciation of the cosmos: Material (physical), Formal (Reason) and Social (Intersubjective).
Causation plays between the Material and Formal, but overreaches into the Social.
OK, but you've gone from what seemed like a specific issue in the OP, to some very general comments that only seem incidentally related to it. Are we done now or?
"Ultimate" has a different meaning when applied to causation. It doesn't imply "final". Ultimate causes are nested. It's explained in the wiki article. That's why I said "distal" cause is a better term to use.
Quoting I like sushi
Just depends on your story as un said.
Quoting I like sushi
Maybe. Do you have an example? An opinion one way or the other?
Yes, they can. You've just misunderstood "ultimate" as applied to causation.
"In most situations, an ultimate cause may itself be a proximate cause in comparison to a further ultimate cause. "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
An example would be the disjoint between a planned action and once taken in the spur of the moment, against items such as physical mechanics. The 'agency' of the human seems to run into conflict with the, how should I put it, 'laws of nature'.
The weight of importance is attributed to us because the immediacy of an action seems to trump the knowledge of the action.
That simply means nothing intelligent operates from being "told" to perform as such. Such environments can be created, they parallel natural scientific evidences, ie. if you don't eat, you will soon starve, naturally. But it infers a greater truth that yes, the world around us seems to be lacking intelligence, or free will, and as such follows physical, biological truths. If the weather is unpredictably cold, the people may have to ration to avoid starving. If it is pleasant, perhaps we may have plenty to sell and increase available resources and infrastructure to sustain ourselves. Simple, yet plenty complicated, surely.
That is to say, yes eventually, seeing as intelligence evolved out of non-intelligence, if that's the low temperature brew of soup you sip, something random has a profound affect, or at least the potential to have such, on anything you will ever do or experience. What of it? This is nearly codified philosophy, if such a thing were logically permissible, which it is not. The question I always is, and? Where to go from there?
You're getting at a human-centric bias? If so, sounds plausible, but can you develop a more specific example?
Theres an issue of necessity at play akin to Humes critique of causation. Hume first of all from the lack of necessity implies the lack of causality which is ridiculous. Of course causality was never assumed to be unfailing because for example free will is causally efficacious, the world (at least for monotheists) in itself is contingent etc. So Humes critique only shoots at some misguided notion of laws of nature having the necessity of logical ones. Certain very general aspects of causality were assumed necessary. For example an effect rarely if never is necessarily is implied by the existence of the cause. But existence of an effect with certain features like complexity, change etc. does imply the existence of SOME cause although its nature is unspecified.
Quoting Baden
Triggering cause, trigger, enabling condition bullet in chamber? "Guns don't kill people, rappers do."
We set up the dominoes so that we can see how a small cause can have a large effect; the trigger is another example. We love to exploit 'the butterfly effect' - the will to power perhaps?
And there is also, I think, an urge to begin the casual story with a human. The trigger does not pull itself, the gun does not aim itself. And one cannot follow the causal story into the physiology and neurology of the individual without generalising them out of existence. The story becomes personal and no longer objective.
And at this point we have arrived at the starting point of this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15499/when-can-something-legitimately-be-blamed-on-culture/p1
The story changes from causes to reasons and motives. The faulty trigger mechanism fails to fire, the bullet but the faulty person fails to reason or act appropriately; the storyteller has entered the story and transformed it.
That OP looks messy and unfocused to me. And this conversation seems now to be about everything and anything.
Quoting unenlightened
Apparently so.
Yes, but that is, for me, the value of philosophy; that it can somewhat clean up conceptual messes. There's something messy about how we think and talk about causation, because our talk and thought is inside the causal chain not beyond it. Even just to understand that much is useful. We cannot untie that knot, but we can acknowledge it, and apply a palliative dose of humility and some 'whereof one cannot speak ...'.
It might help to think of time 'running backwards' and then looking at how you view this or that as 'causal'?
What happens then is you strip away / distort the contextual network; enabling conditions like gravity, thermodynamics etc become meaningless and you are left with a bare sequence of events, sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In terms of time reversed. The 'cause' of our existence would see us 'born' in a variety of ways (usually after being dug up or rising from ashes), yet all would die under the same circumstances in some woman's womb.
In this situation we could notice patterns that relate to 'prior to' life (the commonality of burning/burying in forwards time) but the actual 'start' of life would be a purely arbitrary matter - death occurs in many ways.
You can also imagine time sped up too if that sits better with you. What occurs immediately prior to would be regarded as the Cause, but if time is appreciated at a faster pace then my hand knocking something off of a table may be regarded as the Cause in a slower sense, yet if sped up the Cause of the object falling form he table may be viewed as the result of someone else putting it there.
The strength or weakness of the cause varies by perspective. Correlation can certainly be a red herring, but sometimes what people have regarded as a red herring for some time turns out to possess some affect upon an outcome through processes previously unknown.
I would say this is also a cultural bias not just a human bias. The way we view time varies from culture to culture. Animism would be regarded as some less apparent 'cause' because there would be particular concept of causation in early cultures (especially if our earliest ancestors were non-languaged peoples). With literacy language becomes more ordered, and prior to literacy of any kind there would be mnemonics as a means of ordering, yet no real concept of ordering in the sense we think today.
In some cultures today we see prepositions of time differ quite dramatically, with some using 'size' to measure time with, "a small time ago" where others view the future as "behind" or "below".
In this sense I am suggesting that causation is a 'belief' rather than a concrete reality. It seems almost like the equivalent of when children acquiring a theory of mind, yet we are still besotted with our Causal view even though it is minimal in scope preferencing the immediate over the long-term. We are temporally short-sighted, and necessarily so, so as to avoid immediate dangers (this would be the human bias part). Our Cultural bias has led us to create a definitive view of Causation, but it is at least partly a construction.
It is the part in bold that can allow us to view the human-centric view (as Baden put it) as something unquestioned.
Note: This is a critique of the Sociology. Something Tolstoy was wholly opposed (whom Berlin is writing about) to in the era of historicism in the 19th century.
Why are some stories useful and other ones not useful? Seems to me that "stop drinking, it's the cause of your liver disease," is true in a way that "take this snake oil, it will cure your liver disease," or "stop taking hot showers, they are causing your liver disease," are not, no?
If not, should someone who fears lung disease stop smoking? If this would be "useful" why?
Asbestos only causes disease within the context of a fiction? I suppose this is true or Roundup too; "our product only causes disease within a certain story context." Maybe Bayer should use this defense in court. Unfortunately, I don't see the jury buying it.
As J.S. Mill once said, "one must have made some significant advances in philosophy to believe it."
Surely it useful for partisans of Donald Trump to claim he won the popular vote "in a landslide) in all his elections. Are they just as right as the official tallies showing him losing by millions of votes?
lol, my thoughts exactly. Reading further, I'm still totally unclear about what is being said.
When the sun rises it heats the ground. The causal linkage here seems pretty direct. When the Mets give up a hit it certainly seems like this is caused by the Dodger's players' bats hitting the ball.
I see, so it was wrong for jurors to award damages against tobacco companies, pesticide manufacturers, etc. on account of their products causing diseases? I presume the answer is here "no" and I presume that you also wouldn't put asbestos or lead paint in your child's room.
This is an abuse of the word "fiction." Children get real brain damage from lead paint.
But let's even allow your theory some room, you still have yet to explain why some fictions are "convenient" or "useful." Why is this?
Here is my position: it is useful to believe that smoking or asbestos will give you lung disease because these things do in fact cause lung disease. It is useful to believe that running in front of a train will kill you because being run over by a train causes death.
I am not sure what it would mean for truth to "exist in itself," as opposed to simply "existing?" Truth exists though no? Else your statement simply cannot be true.
Presumably not as destructive as actually believing things like "'sticking my hand or my child's hand in a fire will cause me to suffer burns' is a 'fiction.'" If one actually believed this, and wasn't using terms like "fiction" in an entirely equivocal way, it seems quite dangerous indeed, but then again no one actually acts as if they believe this sort of thing is true.
Causation and the natural world being "complicated," is not grounds for saying it doesn't exist either.
You have once again refused to elaborate on why some stories are useful and some are not. Is this impossible to explain? Or are all stories equally useful?
I think this total nescience is unwarranted. It is understood why sticking your hand in boiling water causes burns and pain for instance. You seem to be holding to the standard that one must understand everything in order to claim to understand anything.
When the sun rises it heats the ground. (Causal Perspective)
If played in reverse, when the 'sun rises' the it 'heats' the ground. (reverse-Causal Perspective)
When the sun is up the ground is hot. (Correlational Perspective)
Is our perspective of the world built upon the principles of Correlation OR Causation? Does one come prior to the other? If not, then what?
I would also add that there is a clear difference between inanimate and animate objects when it comes to contemplating causation. The two examples you give are vastly different - which is part of the problem I have with causation.
I see your point about "ultimate" causes never really being ultimate, as theyre always proximal to something else in a chain. Personally, I prefer the term "necessary cause," especially when applying the conditio sine qua non test ("but for" test). The idea is that if X hadn't occurred, the entire chain leading to A wouldnt have happened. So, in practice, you look for the most proximate cause where this test holds true.
But this might just be my legal upbringing in Dutch law, where we assess which damages naturally follow from a tortious act or negligence. The focus is on finding the most direct necessary cause that can be reasonably linked to the effect, rather than something more abstract like an ultimate cause.
I think you misunderstood the "useful story" talk. It doesn't mean making up whatever story you like. ("Fiction" isn't helpful here, though.) In any event, there are innumerable causal links connected to it, but the vast majority of them are not of any interest to us. We pick the ones that seem the most salient within a given narrative framework.
In a murder case, the detective is searching for the perpetrator who fired the gun, thus causing the victim's death. The ballistics expert wants to know the cause of the bullet's hitting the victim. The pathologist wants to know the medical cause of the victim's death. The prosecutor and the defender each present a different cause of the perpetrator causing the victim's death.
These are all useful causal stories, and each and every one of them can be true! At the same time, one can think of any number of causal stories that are not useful in a given context. Indeed, the story of how the bullet travelled from the barrel of a gun to the body of the victim is not very useful to the pathologist. Moreover, the vast majority of contributing causes in the past light cone of the murder event are not useful to anyone.
I take it you are saying something very different from Tim Wood here. It's one thing to say that "everything is causally connected," thus causes are not discrete in the way our speech is, and to say that causes can be described in many different ways, and that our considerations may vary according to our purposes. It's another thing to claim that talk of causes is "fiction" (not my word choice), and deny them or truth any existence outside of "stories/fictions."
In most cases, sense experience is prior to the stories we tell (e.g. I would not say that airliners crashing into the Twin Towers is what caused them to fall had I not seen airliners crash into the Twin Towers). But if causes only exist in stories, then are our sense experiences uncaused, occuring as they do for "no reason at all?" Certainly they cannot have "causes" that are prior to our storytelling on this view. Nor could anything in nature have been caused prior to the emergence of language.
I would just ask the same question I asked Tim several times, which he refuses to answer, if it were just "stories all the way down," why exactly are some stories more useful than others?
Now, on you're view, it would seem that some stories are more useful than other because they are true, e.g. bullets do cause death in some cases, even if we might expand our analysis to ever more causes (e.g. the source of the bullet, damage to the heart, etc.). But then I would simply object to the term "fiction" here or "story." Story is less objectionable, but it seems like it is very easy to fall into equivocal usage here, such that "story" is deployed to try to push deflationary theories of truth and causality while avoiding having to own up to the dubious claims like "it is not true in any metaphysical sense that Caesar died because he was stabbed on the Senate floor, that is just a way of storytelling," or a denial that "fire causes burns" without qualification.
This is just sophistry and bad faith lol. I obviously didn't not mean something like "all adults who smoke cigarettes develop lung disease." Nonetheless, smoking is responsible for some cases of lung disease. Same with asbestos. Unless your point is to deny this?
BTW, you still have yet to attempt any explanation for why some fictions are more useful than others? Is this inexplicable or arbitrary? Why is it useful to believe the fiction that one should not inhale asbestos or plutonium but not useful to believe the fiction that drinking mercury will cure your syphilis?
BTW, the argument that an explanation of causes will lead to an infinite (or practically infinite) number of other explanations applies equally to all fact claims about the natural world. Consider:
"Why is Albany the capital of New York?"
"Why are deer called mammals?"
"Why do people vacation near the equator in winter months?"
All of these could lead through a seemingly endless series of why questions. But this only makes sense if the order of becoming is the order of contingent being. In any case, on this view, one can only ever know facts about self-enclosed axiomitized systems, and even here there are plenty of arguments (e.g. Quine) against even this sort of knowledge.
I'd argue that part of the solution here lies in Aristotle's criticism of Anaxagoras in the Physics, namely that he confuses causes and principles. There can be infinite causes because a single principle can manifest at many times and in many places. However, there is only a finite number of principles, else the world would be unknowable, since we could never come to know the principles at work in the world (one cannot traverse an infinite space in a finite time or come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time). Were there infinite principles at work in all things our understanding of them would also be infinitesimal, n/?.
And yes, the endocrine system is not "in the brain." Harris has a habit of ignoring that brains do not produce concious experience when removed from bodies
lol, yes that's the issue, my inability to comprehend "categorical" not your addition to it in a statement that clearly does not imply it. When people say "smoking causes lung disease," they do not mean "anyone who smokes will necessarily develop lung disease." :roll:
Then again, "good faith" is only good if one finds it useful, right?
And it's entirely arbitrary? Can anyone ever be wrong about what is useful for them?
If I think drinking mercury will help my arthritis, and then develop heavy metal poisoning from drinking mercury and regret doing it, was the original story useful for me when I thought it was useful? Seems to me this story would not be useful for me, even when I thought it was useful, and the reason it isn't useful has to do with the truth about how mercury interacts with the body.
But on the view that truth and cause are just about stories that are affirmed on the basis of an arbitrary personal ranking of utility, science and philosophy are entirely useless and pointless, since it is impossible for anyone to ever be wrong about what is good or true.
Let's not confuse sense and reference. The point is not that a cause is a frivolous concoction, but that it doesn't map neatly onto the sensible world - it depends in large part on the human perspective, perhaps more so than most theoretical entities and postulates in the sciences.
Causal analysis maps neatly enough for us to cure many diseases, fly around the world, travel to space, etc. Medicine is a prime example where a large focus of research is separating causation mere correlation, and here causal explanations (e.g. how antibiotics cure infections, how pseudoexfoliative glaucoma is caused by irregular elastin, etc.) can be pretty damn detailed. I guess it just depends on what you mean by "neat" here, but calling these "stories" or "useful fictions" seems to like demanding that one know everything before being able to claim one knows anything.
I'm curious, though what would be examples of postulates in the sciences, say economics or physics, that do not involve causation (material, formal, or efficient?) Or, to put it another way, do not involve "reasons why" vis-á-vis phenomena?
And I'd be curious if any of these postulates could avoid the same exact sort of criticism re incompleteness and the relevance of perspective. For example, if we want to say "water is H2O," (material cause) we could eventually drill down into quantum foundations and find a great deal of uncertainty about what exactly this means. Does this mean science only tells a story here?
Causal analysis is pragmatically indispensable, to be sure. But pragmatics is tightly entangled with human concerns. The more one tries to objectify the story, the harder it becomes to tell in causal terms, because it then quickly collapses under the weight of metaphysically suspect ceteris paribus clauses and time-reversal symmetries that are antithetical to causation. Pragmatic considerations eliminate most of these difficulties: ceteris paribus clauses and time-reversal symmetries can simply be dismissed (or not even brought up in the first place) as pragmatically irrelevant.
The argument then is that causation, despite it pervading our thought and practice, is not an objective feature of the world at large, in which humans are but a speck. This is not quite right, though, because we as intelligent agents could not have succeeded in this world without having an essentially accurate understanding of it. What we can say then is that causality, like regression towards the mean, is at least a good heuristic. But there is no metaphysically fundamental "law of cause and effect."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is actually a good example of how we extract pragmatic causality from a scientific result that does not display a clear, objective cause-effect relationship. What science shows is that smoking increases lifetime risk of lung cancer approximately tenfold. But that increase is from a fairly low base of about 0.1% for non-smokers. So, smoking takes the lifetime probability of the cancer event from ~0.1% to ~1%. Not something that would traditionally be identified as a cause - except for these pragmatic considerations: (1) the potential effect is hugely impactful to an individual, and (2) the putative cause is one of the few, if not the only factor that can be practically influenced by individual behavior and government policy.
Quoting unenlightened
I like the interventionist account of causation (X causes Y if we can wiggle X to waggle Y), which is inspired by and modeled in large part on our empirical practices.
Causal analysis is pragmatically indispensable, to be sure. But pragmatics is tightly entangled with human concerns. The more one tries to objectify the story, the harder it becomes to tell in causal terms, because it then quickly collapses under the weight of metaphysically suspect ceteris paribus clauses and time-reversal symmetries that are antithetical to causation. Pragmatic considerations eliminate most of these difficulties: ceteris paribus clauses and time-reversal symmetries can simply be dismissed (or not even brought up in the first place) as pragmatically irrelevant.[/quote]
Which symmetries? Physics is time asymmetric at both the macro and micro scale, although there are time symmetric processes and "laws." Time is obviously asymmetrical in a big way at the global scale, and depending on how one views quantum foundations it is asymmetric in another way: collapse/decoherence occurs in only one direction. The latter can be interpreted in many ways though.
The reality of local becoming is still a popular, if minority opinion if physics and the philosophy of physics.
[Quote]
The argument then is that causation, despite it pervading our thought and practice, is not an objective feature of the world at large, in which humans are but a speck. This is not quite right, though, because we as intelligent agents could not have succeeded in this world without having an essentially accurate understanding of it. What we can say then is that causality, like regression towards the mean, is at least a good heuristic. But there is no metaphysically fundamental "law of cause and effect." [/Quote]
Well, fair enough on the last part. I think framing in terms of the classical "law of cause and effect," has been a dead letter for about a century. But as you say, it has to get [I] something[/I] right, barring a sort of radical skepticism.
Pancomputationalism is very popular in physics and this would make causation a computation-like process where prior states entail future states.
I am not sure what our size relative to the universe would have to do with it one way or the other. It's not like if the universe were just the size of the Milky Way or we the size of gas giants it would change anything material.
I am not sure what you mean by "physics is time asymmetric." There are different physical laws (why the scare quotes?), many of which are time-symmetric or atemporal (such as statics and variational mechanics). All deterministic processes are time-symmetric, and some indeterministic as well (in the sense that probabilistic dynamics is time-symmetric). Thermodynamic processes are, of course, irreversible on the macro-scale. But enough of physics and other sciences challenge traditional causal notions to merit mention. I mean, you can't just wave away the whole of classical mechanics, for one thing.
But as regards to the original point of departure for this conversation (causation as storytelling), the more relevant challenge for the objectivity of causation is that, when we study nature, we cannot identify the sort of causes that we are usually looking for without subjective guidance - starting from the very choice of framework (scientific or informal), and then picking from the potential overabundance of connections between events and things those that are important to us.
Not all. The evolution of entropy in a closed system is deterministic (entropy always increases), but it is not time-symmetric because entropy decreases in reverse time.
There are mathematical dynamical systems that function in simple ways that are not reversible. f(z)=z^2.
A closed system can evolve through a complete cycle and end up in the same state with the same entropy, as long as there are no irreversible energy exchanges within the system.
Of course, real macroscopic systems are never closed.
Quoting jgill
Of course. Moreover, even Newtonian mechanics admits of indeterministic edge cases, but they are artificial and of no practical significance.
I put "physical laws" in scare quotes because many physical laws are simply close approximations of behavior. For instance, Newtons Laws are "good enough," but won't work even on the macro scale with multi-body problems. Nancy Cartwright's work on this would be the big example I can think of. Laws are symmetric because that's how the math used to describe them works, but nature doesn't necessarily correspond to such laws.
I say physics isn't time symmetric because there are several observed time asymmetries in physics, at both the smallest and the largest scales.
Arguing for time symmetry against all empirical evidence (no one has ever observed time running in anything but one direction, nor has anyone ever observed the defining elements of quantum mechanics, decoherence and collapse, running backwards, making for a very distinct observable asymmetry) seems to largely rely on the fact that the very mathematics used for descriptions assumes a sort of eternalism. This is the physicist Nicholas Gisin's argument for exploring intuitionist mathematics in physics, and against the tendency to paint our understanding of mathematics onto the natural world (Tegmark might be the most obvious example here). Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics," makes a similar set of arguments. Plus, there are very many models of time in physics that are not symmetrical or eternalist (the crystalizing/growing block, Wheeler's Many Fingered Time and Participatory Universe, or retrocausality, objective collapse models, etc.)
Now, I don't think any of these arguments are decisive, although some are much better than others (e.g. arguments for eternalism based on the Twin Paradox and Andromeda Paradox are particularly weak and trade off equivocations between SR/GR and "common sense" understandings of time). However, it certainly seems to me that there are not strong grounds for dismissing causality with an appeal to "physics."
As to the problem of disentangling causes, I think this is a problem that only results if one takes a very narrow view of causality as a sort of granular efficient causation. But what we are most interested in causes are general/generating principles, not the infinite (or practically infinite) number of efficient causes at work in any event.
The sciences with their laws represent our best understanding of nature. Our understanding can be wrong, of course (though not very wrong, as we previously discussed), but in that case, we can have no basis for knowing in what way it is wrong. There can be no basis for asserting that our laws may say this, but in actuality, nature is that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, I still say that "physics is time symmetric" isn't very meaningful, because physics is not one theory but many.
This tangent started from the thesis that causation does not sit comfortably with modern science - physics in particular, but not just physics. One of the issues with causation is that the asymmetry between cause and effect (causes always precede their effects) is often lacking in the shape of scientific laws, so that the asymmetry becomes an added anthropocentric postulate (though easily explainable in those terms). This issue is not nullified by the fact that some processes are time-asymmetric, because the use of causal language is not limited to just those processes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think eternalism is a red herring here (indeed, I am not sure the concept is even meaningful). Whatever your stance on the "existence" of past and future events and entities or on the special ontological status of past, present and future, it can still be unclear from the purely objective analysis of relationships revealed through science why causes must precede effects, unless that is simply baked into their definition.
Russell famously cautioned that "[t]he method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil." One peril of postulating metaphysical principles not found through honest scientific analysis is that they can stifle scientific thought. One curious example of such thought that is seemingly at odds with orthodox causality is the Transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, which involves an absorber sending a retarded (going back in time) "confirmation wave" to an emitter. (This QM interpretation was actually an extension of a time-symmetric interpretation of classical electrodynamics proposed earlier by Wheeler and Feynman.) I am not a proponent of the Transactional interpretation as such, but I think that it has the right to exist for the possibility of enriching our understanding.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, yes, granular efficient causation is basically what causation has been about in recent times (the past 200 years or more). You seem to want to dilute the concept so as to include just about any kind of mechanistic analysis, which is tantamount to eliminating causation.
Why should this be the case? I drop an object from a certain height and predict when it will hit the ground. How does this eliminate causality? There are a host of factors involved in this physical feat, and one can argue one's way through that jungle, rather than citing a principle cause, gravity.
(I wrote a math note a year or so ago that partitioned a causal chain temporally so that each link was formed by a collection of contributory causal effects added together to produce one complex number associated with that link. Just a mathematical diversion, but a vacation from the plethora of philosophical commentaries about the subject.)
That sort of cause fits with the conventional contemporary ideas of causation, what @Count Timothy von Icarus refers to as granular efficient causation: gravity is the cause of the object dropping to the ground, or, alternatively, your releasing it from your grasp is the cause. No argument from me here, other than what has already been noted about such causation being in part subjective.
Quoting jgill
But here I would question whether the notion of cause adds anything that is not already given in the mechanistic description.
You are correct. It's a mere mathematical simulation of cause and effect. The philosophical notions are out of my league. But it is a fascinating subject.