Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?
Without 1, 2 could not exist, though the reverse doesnt hold. Since it is because of the existence of 1, or one thing, that there can be 2, or two things, then the former can be said to be the cause of the latter.
Does this hold? Surely this argument has been made plenty times before, no?
Does this hold? Surely this argument has been made plenty times before, no?
Comments (135)
And regardless of that, is it at least then established and agreed upon by most experts that a thing can be necessary for the existence for another thing, and yet not be a cause? If so, my more confused question would be what best defines a cause most generally across all types besides this criteria of necessary priority?
Presumably "exist" is referring to existing in the world rather than existing in the mind.
2 is the relation between 1 and 1.
The question to ask is, do relations ontologically exist in the world.
If relations don't ontologically exist in the world, then there is no relation between 1 and 1. This means that there is no 2. As there is no 2, the concept of did 1 and 1 cause 2 is not applicable.
If relations do ontologically exist in the world, then there is a relation between 1 and 1. However, such a relation is contemporaneous with 1 and 1. On the one hand, the relation between 1 and 1 didn't exist prior to there being a 1 and 1 (as the relation is between 1 and 1) and on the other hand, the relation between 1 and 1 didn't exist subsequently to there being a 1 and 1 (otherwise for a moment in time there would have been no relation between 1 and 1). As the relation between 1 and 1 is contemporaneous with 1 and 1, the concept of cause is not applicable.
Either way, whether relations do or do not ontologically exist in the world, the concept of cause is not applicable to numbers.
I doubt it's simple as that in this world.
No. it doesn't. Number can start from any number you decided to choose to start. Because numbers are the mental concept. There is no physical laws or principles on numbers.
After 1, counting can go on via the real or rational numbers never reaching 2. Or counting can proceed in the odd numbers skipping 2, and all the even numbers.
If 1 caused 2, then every time 1 appears immediately 2 must appear, if they have cause and effect relationship. But it doesn't. You order 1 coffee in the caffee, and you don't see 2 coffees served to you unless by mistake or confusion of the maid.
1 is a property of an object saying it only stands as 1. 2 only appears when there are 2 objects, and counted.
What about considering binary fission as exemplifying a kind of organic ontology. One parent cell is the efficient cause of two daughter cells. One is the cause, two are the effects.
Numbers can be mental concepts. However anything natural can also exist as a mental concept. And numbers appear to inhere in the natural world, as evidenced by the existence of mathematizable relationships. So what basis is there for claiming numbers are, or numeracy is, exclusively mental?
Maybe. I just don't see the point saying mental objects "exist". It is a misuse of language.
We know, or are aware of the mental objects. They don't exist like the physical objects in the external world.
I am trying to see the existence of "3" in the external world. I see none. I can see 3 books, 3 cups, 3 trees, 3 cars. But none of them are the pure "3".
In China, 3 is not the real 3 either. The real 3 is written as "?".
In Korea, 3 is written "?".
Now, which is the real 3?
Even if that were true, it wouldn't contradict the existence of an objective correlate of the mental object. i.e. Just because numbers have a mental appearance, doesn't mean that numeracy isn't a physical reality. My go-to example is the use of Fibonacci-sequence timed laser pulses to stimulate atoms into a new phase state of matter. Nature is "resonant" to numerical properties....
Sure, numbers describe the external objects, events and motions. But it is an illusion to think they are the same, or numbers are the physical reality. Math formulas, equations and functions are descriptions of the physical world. Description is not physical objects.
For example, the word apple is not the real apple. You cannot eat the word apple. You can only eat the real apple which can be peeled. To say the word apple is same as the real apple is an illusion.
Physical reality is the things and objects you can see, touch, access and physically handle.
The sun is yellow. Yellow is not a physical object. But the light being emitted at 510 Terahertz is.
If you wore a green sunglasses, and look up at the sun, it will look "green". When I measure the light of the sun with the optical light meter, it says f16 1/1000 sec.
Exactly. Mathematical relationships inhere in material objects. The abundance of fractal features in the universe additionally is suggestive of this possibility. It's just an empirical observation for me. But I see no reason to discount the reality of numbers. Ipseity may be the foundation of all logic.
Sure. Some folks believe God is the absolute reality, or the big bang is the absolute truth. One's belief can be real to the believer, but it can be irrational and illogical too.
I am not saying numbers are false, or unreal. All I am saying is it has different mode of reality i.e. we know numbers as concepts and use them to describe the real world objects, motions or workings. But they don't exist like the physical objects do.
You mean like quantum fields, that kind of "substantively real" thing? Or more like statistically defined entities like subatomic particles?
I think numbers are like words i.e. adjectives describing the objects such as red apple. The red is an adjective describing the apple's colour. When we say 1 apple. 1 describes the apple's existence i.e. the quantity which is 1.
If you look at the Hebrew language, they don't have number system. Words are also numbers.
Numbers are descriptive language of the objects and motions in quantity in existence. It is purely psychological and conceptual descriptive tool.
Ok. How about this. Numbers primitively seem to correlate with things. But are there in fact things? Or are there really only processes, whose synchronic slices appear intermittently as things? In which case, numbers would really correlate with processes. Or again, we can only count insofar as we abstractly identify the things being counted. So we count one-hundred peanuts. Be we don't count one-hundred "things" as one-peanut, two-jar, three-house, four-planet, five-universe....etc. Numeracy is itself just the culmination of abstraction. Short of objective correlation, what inherent reality do numbers have except the cumulative set of interrelations which are defined by all the possible mathematical constructs in which they appear?
Hold on, this doesnt feel unanimously agreed upon. Aristotle speaks of a certain priority in which two things exist contemporaneous to each other yet still have a causal-effective relationship such as the existence of a thing and an affirmation of that thing. Similarly, when Spinoza gives a causal nature to substance as substance, he does not imply that substance ever existed before its modes at large. While one mode may come and go, modes as a whole are inextricable from substance. And yet, for Spinoza, substance is prior in nature to modes and causal of them.
Are you saying it cant be argued through their thought that mutually contemporaneous things are causal of each other?
Ok this explanation as made the most sense to me. Idk if get down with the non-reality of numbers but this part is what matters to me. As a cause, it necessary implies the existence of its effect, yes? So lets take a person who is a parent surely as a person they exist far before their child, and their child does not have to necessarily exist, but as a *parent*, a causal thing, it is necessarily implied that their effect exists too, which we call the child. Is this correct?
So in a strict sense, would we say that a thing, in order to properly understand it as a cause, *must* have an existent effect that followed necessarily from some specific aspect of that thing, and it is precisely this specific aspect which, through its necessary bringing about of the effect, we would call the cause? I can get down with this but doesnt it kind of restrict causality to the realm of determinism? Is there a way we can understand, for example, one person being the cause of anothers actions, but where those actions were in no way necessary to follow and largely came about from the will of that other person? Or is this just simply not a cause in our strict sense?
Not really. They're mental in the way of being an interpretation of reality, but the categorization of things still end up in amounts. We can argue about how categories are human constructs, but at some point we get to things like 1 atom, 2 atoms. In relation to what numbers represent you cannot have 2 atoms if you didn't have 1 atom first. The same kind of works the other way around, how can you define something as 1 object if there wasn't the possibility of there being 2? You cannot form the interpretation of reality into an object existing as the only 1 object in existence if there wasn't a relation to more than one. So naturally, math has a backwards causation in that math, as an interpretive system requires the whole system in order to form a "1".
On the other hand, that may constitute that there's no causality for the existence of numbers in order, but rather that if you have 1, you also have all other numbers when using math in our reality. If you have 2, you have 9, and 5 and 4 and 1.
The interesting thing, however, is whether or not "0" has a relation. That concept has more of a constructed meaning than single existence. What is "0.5"? Is it half of a one thing, or is it half of nothingness?
The concept of non-existence is therefore much harder to correlate with a causal connection in math. Maybe that's why math using infinity end up so confusing for everyone. We fundamentally operate in a reality where everything exists and there's no physical representation of absolute nothingness.
Sure, this feels like its clearing things up. So taking the assumption Im making from the other commenter, if a cause necessarily leads to its effect, it makes sense how two and two necessarily lead to four, while two by itself does not necessarily lead to it at all. So the bringing together of 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 is the cause of 4, but 1, 2, 3, or any other smaller number by themselves cant cause 4. Similarly, while a good parent has the possibility of bringing about a fair child, the good parent on their own cannot produce the child without another parent, and the specific composition of the one parent determines the necessary composition the second parent must have in order for the child to become fair? And so properly spoken, the fair childs cause is not the one good parent, but the bringing together of that one parent with another appropriate one. This bringing together necessarily leads to a child who has a fair disposition, and so as a whole process is the cause, but not the process components. Does this make sense or am I talking nonsense here?
That would be one answer to what I was calling a more interesting question, yes. Addition does seem a more plausible candidate for causal efficacy than mere sequence. But does any of this really work? You use the term "lead to" to describe what a cause does, re its effect, but I think we have to make it stronger, and say forthrightly that a cause causes the effect, it doesn't just "lead to it" in some weaker way. On that understanding, I don't see numbers, even when added, multiplied, etc., causing their results. This may just be a spade-turning commitment on my part to viewing cause as separated in time from effect.
But that was why I then moved on to thoughts as causes. In a functionalist, psychological way, we can talk about thought A (viewed as a brain-event) causing thought B, even though as yet our science doesn't really know what this means. The question is, is that the same kind of "causing" that we mean when we say that "my thought of A" causes B? We want to say that thought A justifies or explains, rather than causes, thought B -- but that is to bring in the Fregean notion of a thought/proposition that can be abstracted from any given instance of its occurrence in a brain.
To me, causality does seem prior to time itself, as time seems entirely reliant on more basic and general ideas of order and necessity, but I understand the effort :)
Quoting J
Well it seems to me we can do the same logic I employed in the last comment, no? Wouldnt Thought A simply be part of a fuller composition of reality, which, when considered altogether as a whole, gives an account for why Thought B necessarily followed? Surely Thought A on its own can be shown to not lead to Thought B in plenty of other contexts, but in the specific context in which it *does* come about, wouldnt Thought A then be both necessary to the existence of Thought B, as well as albeit only a piece of the fuller composition that led to this existence of Thought B? Insofar as B, as an effect, can be logically understood through *some* cause, wouldnt we be safe to think there is some formal general consistency to the certain compositions of reality that bring about Thought B, so that in this sense Thought A is simply filling a role that other thoughts in the past have filled in also causing Thought B?
For example, a thought about a loved ones deceit (Thought A) might make me have a thought of hopelessness (Thought B), and this thought is likely necessarily furnished by other thoughts, perhaps about the history of my life (Thought C) in order for Thought B to be caused. But many other collections of thoughts could have led me to the same Thought B, such as a thought of getting fired (Thought F) and a thought of a dismal future (Thought G). So A+C causes B, but F+G also causes B. So in this case it would be more appropriate to understand the logical consistency between A+C and F+G as respective pairs, to see what aspects of their individual collections exist essentially as the same cause of the same effect. This consistent aspect, that we would assumably find in all other thought-complexes that lead to Thought B, could be considered the formal cause of thought B, so we may cause it Forms X+Y, where Form X is the role filled by Thoughts A and F respectively, while Form Y is the role filled by thoughts C and G.
So to speak properly, the proper cause of Thought B into reality is the bringing together of Form X and Form Y through their instantiations, whether it be Thoughts A+C, or Thoughts F+G, and this is precisely the role that Thought A has in the cause of Thought B. Further, we can simplify this language by saying Forms X+Y together make up Form Z, which is simply the analogous Form of Thought B in all of its instantiations, and what we utilize when we understand two completely distinct thoughts as both for some reason qualifying Thought B
As regards Aristotle's Material Cause, which is an intrinsic cause, for example a table is made of wood and a statue is made of bronze.
I agree that the table is contemporaneous with the wood it is made from, and is described by Aristotle as a cause.
Aristotle also describes an Efficient Cause, which is an extrinsic cause, for example a sculptor who chisels at a block of marble to transform it into a statue.
The OP asks "Is the number 1 a cause of the number 2?"
There are different meanings to the word "cause", whether intrinsic cause or extrinsic cause.
If ontological relations don't exist in the world, then 2 cannot exist, meaning that there can be no cause of 2 whether intrinsic or extrinsic.
If relations do exist, taking the example of Material Cause, as a table is made of wood, 2 is made of the relation between 1 and 1.
The next question is, are there any good reasons for supposing that ontological relations do exist in the world?
Wouldnt gravity be a perfect example of one?
Then you run into the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, is what I would say. Which is a problem of indeterminate identity.
These are very difficult questions that you're asking, and I don't have an opinion on such matters at the moment. I am, however, actively working on those topics, on paper. That's all I can say.
Metaphysics Book X, Ch. I is probably a good place to start. How familiar are you with Aristotle's treatment of the "Problem of the One and the Many" and discussion of causes, principles, and measures? That might be the place to start, but that's covered more in the Physics (Joe Sachs guided translation has some good stuff on this). Book V on causes is relevant too.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-mathematics/#10 <== is also pretty relevant.
Key points:
See also: Metaphysics 1052b35: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0052%3Abook%3D10%3Asection%3D1052b
Unit is related to number as principle, not species.
Oh man, you're killing me. I'm an Aristotelian, through and through, and I've been meaning to talk to you, but it's just too much to take in at the moment, it's too much information.
Here is my non-mathematician's understanding - All arithmetic comes back to counting. Each counting number has a name (1,2,3...1,000,000,001...). It is common to look at this in terms of sets. Each number represents a set with that many elements in it, e.g. 5 represents {x, x, x, x, x}. Addition is the same as the union of sets. 1 + 1 is equivalent to {x} U {x}, which is {x, x}, which is represented by 2. Does {x} U {x} cause {x, x}? Can there be {x, x} without {x}?
No, not at all. Ontological relations and gravity (and forces in general) are two very different things.
Wikipedia - Gravity
SEP - Relations
There may be a relation between 1 and 1 without there being a force between them.
This doesn't seem to accord with typical uses of 'cause'. Without oxygen in my room, I couldn't write this reply. But oxygen did not cause me to write it.
Without meringue, the Australian dessert containing meringue, whipped cream and fruit couldn't exist.
The Australian dessert containing meringue, whipped cream and fruit is named Pavlova.
Therefore, without meringue, the Pavlova couldn't exist.
The Pavlova couldn't exist without meringue, because by definition, a Pavlova contains meringue.
Without 1, 1 + 1 couldn't exist
1 + 1 is named 2
Therefore, without 1, 2 couldn't exist
2 couldn't exist without 1, because by definition, 2 is 1 + 1
As "Pavlova" is a name, "2" is a name.
As meringue didn't cause the Pavlova, 1 didn't cause 2.
"Sherlock Holmes" is also a name. That something has a name doesn't of necessity mean that it exists in the world. We can talk about "Sherlock Holmes" even though "Sherlock Holmes" doesn't exist in the world. We can talk about 2 even though there is no necessity that 2 exists in the world.
That we can talk about 2 does not necessarily mean that 2 exists in the world.
Counting doesn't have to start from 1 always. It can start from 2n, where n = 1/2. As Pantagruel suggested, if we suppose counting is a process, you don't even need things such as particles. They would be just the elements in the counting process, or sets.
Likewise, you don't always count each individual object which is 1. When you say 1, it might be 2 in reality. In the case of your shoes, or soaks, you count them as 1 pair of shoes, but there are 2 shoes in the pair.
Quoting Christoffer
Could your explain what you mean by this?
Quoting Christoffer
0 is just a description of objects or states of nothingness. It is a very handy concept in math.
Counting can be a process. So, yes, we can see the things being counted as the elements of the process. But you know, you can still count without things. What does it tell you? Numbers are not the things themselves. Numbers are real of course, but they are real in the sense that we know them, use them and apply them to the external world objects, events and motions, as well as we can think about them, and demonstrate them as pure concepts.
Numbers are not just the culmination of abstractions. Numbers can describe the whole universe as long as you know how they work. You can make up formulas, equations and axioms and replace the variable with the numeric data, from which you can understand the workings of the universe.
:up: :cool:
Quoting Pretty
Cause and effect theory is a scientific concept. If you say A caused B, then whenever there was A, then B must follow in all occasions. Here the important point is that A must produce the exact same state, entity or result or effect condition B on all occasions.
Therefore your example of a parent X producing the child X1, is not a cause and effect relationship. Because the parent cannot willfully produce the child X1 next time they try to produce X1. No persons in the universe are exactly the same in the universe, and every person is unique in their identity by the law.
The X might produce another child X2, or may not produce any child at all, or might produce twins next time called X2 and X2a.
Therefore the offspring X1 is not an effect of the parent X under the eyes of causal relationship. They are a parent and offspring relationship.
Here is an excerpt from R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis on the logical nature of mathematical concepts, which emerge through the power of abstraction from experience (kind of Kantian I guess):
...the only really a priori or pure concept is the concept of a class as such, the concept of classification or abstraction....each member being simply another instance of the universal. This indeterminate plurality of units is precisely the numerical series. Each unit is distinguished from the rest simply as being another that is, by its ordinal number, and the common nature of units in general is simply that they are that of which there is an indeterminate multiplicity. This indeterminate multiplicity is the mathematical infinite, which is therefore another name for the perfect abstractness of the mathematical universal...a mere plurality of abstract units...Mathematics implies the ideal reduction of what are really unique facts to mere units.
There are an infinite number of possible numbers, such as 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, etc.
If numbers exist in the world, they must exist either as abstract entities, such as 1, 2, 3, etc or concrete entities, such as 1 atom, 2 atoms, 3 atoms, etc.
Suppose 2 exists as a concrete entity, such as 2 atoms. As there an infinite number of possible numbers, but only a finite number of concrete entities in a finite world, then there are some possible numbers that cannot exist in the world. In this event, a mathematical infinite in the world is not possible.
A mathematical infinite can only exist in the world if numbers exist as abstract entities, independent of any concrete entities. This raises the question as to what relates the number 2 to 2 atoms rather than relating the number 2 to 5 atoms, for example?
Cool, Ive been slowly gathering this as the thread continued, Im surprised it took this long to get explicated. Thanks!! It really does clear up a lot
I don't know what a "proto-digmatic" entity is.
Does two-ness exist in the world or in the mind of the observer?
Suppose two-ness exists in the world.
If two-ness exists in the world, then so must one-ness.
Suppose an observer sees two things in the world that are spatially separate.
What determines whether there is one two-ness or two one-nesses?
IE, if two-ness exists in the world, how does a particular thing in the world "know" whether it is related to another thing or not?
I think the essence of the answer regarding the nature of abstraction and the mutual inherence of the universal and the particular already addresses your questions. (i.e. twoness is simultaneously abstract but qua concrete instantiation). It sounds as if you basically don't agree with the characterizations of the particular and the universal-abstract that I'm embracing. The long quote I made from Collingwood is its own best evidence and equates with my claims.
Collingwood also says:
This seems to suggest that for Collingwood, numbers, being part of mathematics, exist in thought rather than sensation.
Quoting RussellA
True. Except that he relentlessly fuses these:
The concept is not something outside the world of sensuous appearance it is the very structure or order of the world itself....The universal is only real as exemplified in the particular, the particular as informed by the universal.
Which really is the case. We never experience vacant materiality, or pure conceptuality. However we do have abilities that seem to operate on a spectrum of synthesis that lies between these poles.
That sounds pretty cool, Pretty. Thanks for the great OP. :up: :cool:
The fusing of thought and sensation. A seemingly Kantian approach, where the principles of pure understanding allow the very possibility of experience (CPR B293).
Collingwood writes in Speculum Mentis
Such thought and sensation exist in the mind, rather than outside the mind as things-in-themselves.
Collingwood writes "Mathematics is thus the one and only a priori science", inferring that, for Collingwood, numbers, as part of mathematics, exist in the mind rather than outside the mind.
Yes, it's useful to distinguish between them. Causes would involve individual instances, principles every case of twoness, a binary, etc.
Here is a quick explanation I wrote a while back:
Do you have a source for this?
That an organism is embodied in the world does not mean that the organism necessarily has knowledge about the world.
Actually that is exactly what embodied-embedded cognition implies, represents a definition of knowledge as much as anything.
The idea that he is the metaphysical grandfather of embodied cognition is my own. Informed by having read five of his books as well as two extensive critical studies.
Embodied cognition is knowledge of interactions with the environment, not knowledge about what in the environment caused those interactions
This is why embodied cognition has been inspired by the phenomenological tradition
In Collingwood's terms, it is knowledge about the sensations, not whatever in the world caused those sensations.
In Kant's terms, it is knowledge about Appearances, not knowledge about Things-in-themselves.
In language, the clause "that Lydia sang" is embedded within the clause "Wanda said that Lydia sang". The embedded clause "that Lydia sang" gives no information about the clause it is embedded into, "Wanda said that Lydia sang"
In geology, silver may be embedded in copper. The embedded silver gives no information about the copper it is embedded into.
Embodied cognition has knowledge, but knowledge of thoughts and sensations, not knowledge about what in the world caused those thoughts and sensations.
The sentence continues: in ways that require a new framework for its investigation. The first part has rarely been denied, although it is sometime more or less ignored.
The enactivists I am aware of tend to be harsh critics of Kantian representationalism. It gets offered up as a way to avoid Kant's problems, not a way to recreate them. The article you're citing mentions phenomenology as a means of dissolving the very Kantian dualism you are claiming this approach represents.
This is a misconstrual of embodied cognition, which is not about "knowing that" at all. It's about knowledge being enacted via its environmental embeddings, and extends outward, rather than inward, as in the associated concept of distributed cognition, where environmental features are construed as being actual elements of cognitive processes.
However this isn't the place to address that as we are veering OT for this thread.
Phenomenology
Kant is a dualist when he makes a phenomenal-noumenal distinction, between Appearance and the Thing-in-itself.
Kant's approach seems similar to that of Phenomenology, where we have knowledge of Appearance but not of Things-in-themselves.
From SEP - Phenomenology
In this sense, Phenomenology is supporting rather than dissolving Kant's "Transcendental Idealism".
Enactivism
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment (Wikipedia - Enactivism)
The key phrase is "dynamic interaction between".
Enactivism is not the position that cognition arises from direct contact between an organism and its environment.
For Enactivism, there is an indirect contact between an organism and its environment mediated by a dynamic interaction.
For Kant also, cognition is mediated by Appearance, which stands between cognition and Things-in-themselves.
The OP asks whether 1 causes 2.
The first thing to work out is where 1 and 2 exist, in the mind or in a world outside the mind.
The answer as to whether 1 causes 2 depends on where 1 and 2 exist.
To be able to answer this question, I am sure that topics such as Phenomenalism and Enactivism, Kant and Collingwood, are relevant.
My belief is that 1 and 2 only exist in the mind.
Does this itself establish that mental constructs cannot exert causal force? Isn't that the essence of deductive logic, where premises necessitate a conclusion? Isn't this arguably a form of "mental causation" ?
It can. It often doesn't. Just for two examples, there is Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person and G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Both disagree with Kant's dualism. For Hegel, Kant is a dogmatist, and it is his dogmatic assumptions that leave him with his dualism problem. He just presupposes that perceptions are of objects and goes from there. For Hegel, this is less than fully critical. For the much of the classical tradition, they are going to reject the idea that knowledge of would involve representation/correspondence as opposed to identity. For Sokolowski, indirect realism and representationalism is entirely misguided, a confusion of sorts.
Anyhow, most of the phenomenology I am familiar with attempts to rebut Kant, not support him. It would be a mistake to assume the phenomenology necessarily entails something like how Kant thinks of the difference between phenomena and noumena (even is Husserl himself arguably works himself back in this direction in his later work). Eric Perl, for instance, speaks to the use of phenomenology in the pre-modern tradition (terms like "intentionality" come from Scholasticism), and how the pre-moderns do not accept anything like the British Empiricist/Kantian dualism as a starting supposition (and I agree with Hegel that this is very much something started with). Indeed, both Plotinus and Aquinas consider it and reject it.
I feel efficient cause is an antiquated ancient concept, which has logical problems. Sure, we can say that parent is a sufficient cause for the child, but I am not sure if there is philosophical or logical point in doing so.
It is like saying, there was a postman when the rain started coming down today, therefore does it mean the rain is the sufficient cause for the postman? Or I was waiting for the bus to go to the town, and a taxi passed me by. Does it mean I was the sufficient cause for the taxi passing me?
It just happened once out of random events, and it was a unique event which has little chance to be repeated (in the case of the parent giving birth to the child X, it will never be repeated. Because no parent can give a birth to the same child twice in their life.)
Therefore, it is like the antiquated concept PSR. It doesn't make logical sense to say the sufficient cause was the relationship between the parent and child.
From here, I see ways that proper causality can be asserted for both. The latter is a little easier to start with a parent is only understood *as* a parent, when the child is actually in some way existent. Edith, who we are trying to consider as simply a parent, still lived and existed many years without being a parent to Tim. The parent in her though, did not exist until the child was born. In this way, we can say that a parent, qua parent, is universally the cause of the child, qua child, insofar as they cannot exist separate from each other. If our parent, as Edith, took another year to have a child and instead conceived Gregory (Child X1), then it doesnt change that as simply a parent, the parent did not exist until the child was conceived, and this law held for all parents insofar as parenthood held any share of reality. Furthermore, if we *were* to go back in time and remove the circumstances that brought about the existence of the parenthood in a person, it would also necessarily and without any further steps remove the existence of childhood in the other person, probably by their complete removal of existence altogether. If we were to prevent parenthood in the first parent, and thus fully prevent parenthood as a real thing, then childhood too would be removed to the same degree. But we can see that this abstract level causality is actually eternal in some sense, because although the parent corporeally exists before the child does, as abstract concepts of parent and child they only ever come about at the same exact time, and yet the parent has a clear priority to the child that thus cant be explained by means of time. Another way to say it is that the definition of parent has causality in its essence it cannot itself exist without having some degree of the child in existence as well.
In the latter, where Edith gives birth to Tim, which *does* exist over time, we can clear things up if we work from the ground up and observe Tim as an effect. Is it not true that, as a thing existing in the rational universe, Tims existence must have come about by result of a determinate cause? And isnt it true that this cause must exist in some way as well? And if we consider again, Tim not as a generic child, but as Child X, it is clear that the only way his existence could be necessitated is by his conception at the very time and circumstance that he *was* conceived, in which Edith, his father, and the enveloping world are involved. To imagine Tim, not simply as a child named Tim but as *Tim concretely himself*, yet further being able to truly exist without substantial difference by means of any other circumstance, would obviously be absurd. Tim could not exist but by the very specific reality he was conceived in. And so, being necessary parts to the creation of Tim, it should be true that his parents are not simply people *named* Edith and his fathers name, but *actually are Edith as Parent Y, and the father as concretely the same person*. And thus it should be understood that it was *always the case* that if a person identical to Tim should be properly conceived, he could *only be properly conceived as coming about by the circumstances in which Edith is his mother*. And we cant stop here, because we should also assert, though it may be obvious now, that *Edith as her concrete self could also not exist as we properly understand her, without being precisely the person who caused the creation of Tim*. So if we were to imagine an Edith who waited a year to instead birth Gregory, then although the causality parenthood itself to childhood itself doesnt change as we previously established, the *concrete Edith as Parent Y should now be understood as Edith Y1, if she instead conceives Gregory and not Tim*. It is a substantially different Edith, if we are properly considering Edith as a concrete individual.
But what if Edith conceives both children? Well, we would need to understand two concretely different Ediths as well. The Edith who birthed Tim is not fully identical to the one who birthed Gregory. She has different cells, a different egg, and for all we know she might even have slightly different genes than she did a year previous. If we really want to conceive of Edith as a concrete individual, as an illuminative instantiation of our investigation, we have to understand her properly as someone *in time*, and thus it is more appropriate to say that while it is Edith as Parent Y who gives birth to Tim as Child X, it is rather a slightly different Edith as Parent Y1 who gives birth to Gregory as child X1. So, just as Tims existence necessitated a concretely specific Edith, Gregorys existence necessitated a concretely specific Edith *who nonetheless should be understood as some way distinct from the other concrete instantiation of Edith*. And so Tim, in every instance that we properly imagine him, comes about only from a very specific circumstance that involves Edith Y, and the same follows for Gregory with Edith Y1. We cannot understand Child X without the existence of Parent Y, but we also cant imagine Parent Y properly without the existence of Child X. Edith, properly understood as the parent of Tim, could not follow her precise path in life *unless* Tims existence had nudged her path in a certain direction, and so would be a concretely different Edith without him. And the same follows for her with Gregory.
So this is how I would establish the universality of efficient causes. I feel like most graspings of it fail to account for time properly although it is constantly in flux, its instants seem obviously brought about by necessity of the, sometimes immediate, past. What is, is only temporarily. And what will be, will only be potentially. But what has been, will always have been, and *must* have been, for the rest of history. This is the universality hiding right under our noses in the ever-changing current of time.
You seem to be mixing together sufficient and efficient cause here. There is a pretty big difference between the Aristotelian Four Causes and Humean constant conjunction and counterfactual analysis, although the two notions can be used in concert. I am not sure about "antiquated." Both concepts are employed in the sciences all the time, e.g. do-calculus, etc. Any student in the natural or social sciences has to take statistics and they will be taught again and again that "correlation does not equal causation."
It is useful in medicine for example. Pseudoexfoliation glaucoma is the result of a single nucleotide polymorphism common to Nordic peoples. It leads to defective elastin proteins that "clog up the eye." The gene is, in an important sense, the cause of the disorder. For some disorders, a since mutation might be sufficient to ensure that, if a person lives long enough, they will develop the disease (obviously, it isn't sufficient entirely of itself, e.g., one doesn't develop Huntington's if one dies early in life.)
Depends on what you mean by "cause".
There could be Aristotle's "Material Cause", where a table is made of wood, and the wood is the material cause of the table.
There could be Aristotle's "Efficient Cause", where a sculptor chisels away at stone to make a statue, and the sculptor is the efficient cause of the statue.
Material cause is contemporaneous and efficient cause is sequential in time.
However, today, in general language, using cause as material cause is an archaic use of the word, and what people mean today by cause is efficient cause.
Deductive logic:
P1 - All dogs have ears
P2 - golden retrievers are dogs
C1 - therefore golden retrievers have ears.
The above is an example of cause in the sense of material cause, but not a cause in the sense of efficient cause.
Therefore, in today's' terms, the above example of deductive logic is not an example of causation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Ok, great analysis and explanation on Efficient cause. I must admit I learnt something from this thread. I was not familiar with the concept of Efficient cause before. I was only aware of the Humean Causal theory. I will come back for any points in your explanations and counter points, if I find any points to be clarified. Thanks. :up: :pray:
The OP is whether without 1, 2 could not exist. But exist where? In the mind or in a world outside the mind. This leads into the question of phenomenology.
When talking about phenomenology, it depends whether we are referring to the disciplinary field in philosophy or the movement in the history of philosophy (SEP - Phenomenology).
Phenomenology as a study of thought, stretching back several thousand years, may well be at variance with Kant's dualism of phenomena and noumena. However, Phenomenalism as a 20th C movement may well not be.
Phenomenology as a movement got underway in the first half of the 20th C because of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. (SEP - Phenomenology)
Plotinus and Aquinus
Therefore, for Plotinus (204/205 CE to 270CE) and Aquinus (1225 - 1274), phenomenology was still a discipline studying experience and consciousness.
Sokolowski
It is perhaps not a surprise that Monsignor Robert Sokolowski (b. 1934), a Roman catholic Priest, rebuts Kant's dualism, and considers that Indirect Realism and Representationism are misguided (Wikipedia - Robert Sokolowski)
Whilst it is true that Sokolowski wrote Introduction to Phenomenology, explaining the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology, this does not mean that he is a proponent of Phenomenology as a modern movement. I don't know whether he is or isn't, but would suppose that he isn't, and therefore cannot be held as an example of a Phenomenalist who rebuts Kant's dualism (Wikipedia - Sokolowski)
I would guess that half of those on the Forum today reject Indirect Realism in favour of Direct Realism, thereby rejecting Kant's Representationalism.
Hegel
Hegel was interested in phenomenology as the study of experience and consciousness, but was neither a Husserlian Phenomenologist nor supporter of Kant's dualism between thought and being. For Hegel, in order for a thinking subject to be able to know its object, there must be an identity between thought and being, otherwise the subject would never have access to the object (Wikipedia - Absolute Idealism)
Husserl and Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the principal founder of the movement of Phenomenology.
Husserl's Ideas, Volume One.(1913) is the true foundation of Phenomenology. In this book Husserl presented phenomenology with a transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the Kantian idiom of transcendental idealism, looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond phenomena. (SEP - Phenomenology)
For example, when I see a tree, I don't need to concern myself with whether he tree exists or not, my experience is of the tree, not whether such a tree exists. As Husserl writes, we "bracket" the question of the existence of any world around us.
The word "phenomenology" has two uses
I am sure that Phenomenology as a movement founded by Husserl doesn't rebut Kant's dualism of phenomena and noumena, whilst I agree that phenomenology as a general discipline stretching back thousands of years, studying experience and consciousness, is more than likely to both support and oppose Kant's "transcendental idealism".
Does this mean that the parent was caused by the non-parent? Because before the parent became a parent, they were not parent. The parent became parent because of the fact the parent had the child.
It seems a bit unclear here.
The parent had been caused by the not-parent, and the not parent must have been caused by the other parent, and so on. So who is the very first parent? Which comes first then, parent or not parent?
Having revisited your points, I am still not sure if parent and child relationship could be classed as cause-effect relationship. Because cause and effect relationship means that when you observe the cause or the elements which constitutes the cause, you could predict the expected effect in all cases. For example, if I throw a stone to the window, I can predict the window will break. If it rains, the ground will be wet. If I release an apple from the height, it will fall onto the ground ... etc etc.
Hence if you created the conditions for cause, and apply the conditions, then you must get the expected results in the exact same state of results. This is a causal relation.
In a parent child relationship, you don't get anything like that. To begin with, parents are not conditions themselves. Parent is a societal name for someone who has a child, be it biologically had, or adopted. One is called a parent by the society, when one has a child.
Parent doesn't exist as some matter or physical objects or events. It is a name given by human culture and tradition. It is like someone is called a teacher, when he / she has some students. There is no causal relationship in that. It is a kind of job title, when one has a duty to do something, the society will call you under the name.
Likewise child is a name for a person when he / she is in the early stage of life. The society call a person as child when they are before becoming an adult. Child doesn't exist as some events, state or motions or condition in reality. It is a linguistic name for an young person. Child was not caused by any event, conditions or process. Once the egg is combined with the sperm, the life starts grow biologically by the law of nature. It becomes a person of itself. The mother's body is just a shell for the child to develop until it comes out of the body. It is difficult to see the body of parents as some physical or any type of cause here. If it has to be some causal relationship, then you must also bring the physicians who actually pulled out the child from the mother's body and the midwifes who managed the birth, as part of the cause for the child, which becomes quite blurry in the relationship i.e. who is the real cause for the child?
Likewise Number 1 is not a cause for anything. It is a descriptive word to describe an object in quantity or start of motion or event or stage of process. From 1, one can count 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111 ... never reaching 2 eternally. It just depends on how one wants to use the number for his application.
Parent and child relationship is linked by one off event in one's life. No one can predict, change or adjust it. How could anyone have predicted Mary had Tim or Jane as her children before their births? And how could have anyone predicted how their faces and personalities would be like before the birth?
One can only talk about its necessity or factuality only after the birth of the child in the relationship. If something cannot be predicted before its events, then can it be called a necessity or facts? Nope.
When you cannot predict the effect of the cause, it is not a causal relation at all. That is why efficient cause seems outdated. Just because A was ahead of B, or A produced B doesn't qualify as a cause and effect relationship between A and B. In Causal relationship, the details of cause must offer predictions to its effects in exact degree, and the process of cause and effect relationship must be repeatable and predictable in all times in the universe.
So, I am still not convinced on your points that parent child relationship is a causal relationship which is based on necessity. If it is still not making sense, please let me know why it isn't. Thanks.
Nice points! I am going off my own reflections from here on so please take it with a grain of salt
Quoting Corvus
I am not sure how we can claim that relationships based on culture or tradition should be considered as separate from their physical basis. Yes it is true that a parent can be either biological or through adoption, but wouldnt we mean parent in two different senses? For example, a deadbeat father from birth and a stepfather are both parents, albeit in very different ways. The reason either of them get to have a claim to parenthood in the first place is because they do have a specific relation to a physical being which we call a child. If some small family decided someone was a parent of an imaginary child of theirs, based solely on their tradition with no physical basis to the childs existence, we would have to either deny the true parenthood of of the person or create a third meaning of the word parent because as we currently understand the word, this parent of no physical basis is definitely not actually a parent at all.
As for the temporality aspect, I did mention it in the last part very briefly but it is a sign that causes exist eternally to some degree, that is, somewhat out of time. When Spinoza declares substance to be the cause of its modes, or Aristotle when he considers the whole to be the cause of its parts, clearly these are also cases where the cause in question could not possibly exist in time without the effect in question also taking shape at the same exact point in time. So we can see that, in terms of historical discussion on causes, temporality was never too much of a concern for these thinkers. Indeed, in both senses of the word, the parent doesnt exist until the child exists, but the person who becomes the parent has an active role in helping the both of them become parent and child together, whereas the child is only passively made so through the parent. Considering this, we can imagine a situation where, in the adoptive sense, the child is the cause of the parent: that is, a child saying something along the lines of will you be my adoptive parent and take that role within our lives? In this case, the child can be considered the active reason why the parent is a parent. Its worth noting that because of this, I was being very strict in my definition of parent before as the one who gives birth to a child, regardless of their involvement in raising them. All the same, these parents and children come about at the same exact point in time, because temporal priority isnt necessary to logical/causal priority. But still, the birth parent must have physically existed before the birthed child right? So how can we say causes are outside of time despite seeming to rely on time for its laws? Well, it seems that logic itself is prior entirely to time, rather than vise versa. When time abides by causality, it is following laws of causality prior to it which can themselves be understood without time in consideration. That is, time relies on logic for its existence but logic does not rely on time. So when it comes to those things affected by time, that is, specifically physically rooted things, there is a temporal requirement for one physical thing to be the cause of another physical thing such as Edith having to exist before her children. But the concept of the parent itself, as far as we can endow any reality upon it, this quite literally never existed without existing contemporaneously in time with the concept of the child. In simpler terms, if we abstract away the physicality from these concepts, we can see that they actually cannot be grasped in the same way and must be understood as entirely concurrent.
This brings us to your last point though.
Quoting Corvus
This is a very good point and as a result I will expand my theory pertaining to the parent: first let us acknowledge that this circumstance is specifically considering a concrete instance of a child, not the simple and abstract concept of child, whose cause is solely the parent. What is the cause of the concrete child is quite precisely (or not precisely, depending on how you think of it): the circumstances of the entire universe as a whole. We know that every physical body is affected by every other physical body through gravity, and we also all have an intuitive sense of the butterfly effect. What should be understood as the cause of the child, is like I mentioned with Edith X and Edith X1, the particular circumstances at that very moment in time in which they were birthed. Since we have established that, as a concrete child, the parent must concretely exist first, so must the physician, the hospital, and all of the history of reality that brought everyone to that point. So considering this, it seems to be that in the concrete sense, how reality actually plays out, we have to consider every single existing thing as directly or indirectly contributing to the cause of the child, and thus no matter which concrete object you observe you should only truly be able to consider its efficient cause as the full circumstances of reality leading to its existence. We might even say that efficient cause is the sole force that pushes time itself forward. However, if we were again to consider the child as a simple concept, understood separately from everything else, then all of those concrete qualities of the particular child are gone, and so are all of those extraneous circumstances that brought about the childs concrete richness in the first place. Considered simply, without any extra qualities, the only thing that could possibly bring about this condition of childness is none other than the simple parent, who similarly does not have any extra qualities besides what it has by definition and essence: the one who brings about through biological development the birth of a child. So I guess we can say that, considering all of this, efficient cause is only ever a significant observation in abstraction, and to speak correctly of it towards a concrete individual thing would be nothing other than acknowledging the circumstances of time that led to that things existence.
What remains is whether or not abstractions exist in a significant sense. I couldnt really gel with your points in the middle of your comment asserting parentness and childness as simply terms of culture and not physical reality. It seems if we take that route we must then go on to throw out all viability of language and further philosophy as all words are formed out of the culture that observes their respective objects. We have to at least accept that all of these words truly do have an external tether to real things that are distinct from the rest of reality.
Also, I got it cleared up with another commenter here that 1 cannot be the cause of 2, but specifically because a part cannot be confused as a cause :) however we can follow Aristotle and say, since the whole is the cause of the part, that 2 may very well be the cause of 1, and following this, infinity is the fullest cause of all discrete numbers!
Ok, there seem to be a lot of interesting points to think about in your post. First of all,
1. What does it mean when Spinoza says substance is the cause of mode? Could you explain? Do you agree with that statement?
2. Again what does it mean when Aristotle says the whole is the cause of the part? Could you explain the statements perhaps with some examples? Do you agree with the statement?
Parent and child relationship itself seems to be saying enough. It contains all the aspects of biological, societal, physical, psychological and legal relationship details. But if it is described as a causal relationship, then it seems to reduce the relationship into a physical relation which says very little. Would you not agree?
I am not sure if 2 is the cause of 1. It is just an adjective word to say that there are 2 things. We were accustomed to the orders of the words, hence we habitually say 2 after 1, but there is no cause that we can perceive in that relation.
Infinity is just another concept to say, that it has no ending. There is nothing else to it. It is not number since it doesn't say how many things are there to count. It just says, there is no end. It is much like the concept of nothing. It just says there is no things to see or count.
Hence nothing is the same or similar concept as infinity. You cannot add or subtract any other numbers to infinity. You cannot divide any number with infinity. Why? Because infinity is not a number. It is a concept.
Can infinity be a cause for something? Can nothing be cause for something? No. I agree not.
I didn't mean to say that parent child relation is only limited to the societal, cultural and linguistic nature. I was pointing out and explaining on one or two aspects of the relationship, which has little to do with the physical causal relationship.
Of course the relation has multitude of aspects such as physical, biological, psychological and legal aspects. That is why I feel limiting the relation into the causal relation seems to be unnecessary limitation and abstraction.
Start with /
Iterate //
Reiterate ///
Continue ///////////////////////////...
Partition each step in the process-
{/}, {//}, {///},...
These sets are 1, 2, 3,...
So does {//} depend on {/}? Seemingly. Does {/} cause {//}? I don't think so.
The cause of {//} is iteration on {/} and subsequent partition into a set.
Infinity is all numbers together. The whole set, be it Aleph Null or higher.
Aleph Null is the natural numbers in an infinite set. Aleph One may be the set of real numbers, but see The Continuum Hypothesis.
Isn't Aleph Null inaccessible, which is an ambiguity? All numbers are concepts i.e. ideas in human mind. They don't exist in the reality. Well they could exist, but not in the same way as the chairs and tables exist.
All events in the whole universe happens in time i.e. in order. But number operations don't happen in time order. They happen in the conceptual world, which is devoid of time.
Hence 5+7 =12, 7+5=12, the order of the events don't matter coming to the answers or results.
Even in the formal logic a ^ b = b ^ a
But think of the real life events.
1) Socrates drank the poison, and Socrates died.
2) Socrates died, and Socrates drank the poison.
2) doesn't make sense, and is not equivalent to 1) in the meaning.
What does it tell you? Numbers are concepts, and math operations happen in the conceptual world, not in the real world. Infinity is a concept, which means it doesn't have end.
Of course they do. If your wife tells you to get three oranges at the store and you come back home with
only two, that will cause your wife to be angry. It wasn't the type of fruit, or the oranges themselves that caused the wife to get angry. It was the number of oranges that made the wife angry. Ideas have just as much causal power as a baseball bat and baseball. If you disagree then try explaining what caused SpaceX's Starship to exist if not caused by some ideas in someone's head.
Quoting RussellA
Exist refers to anything that has causal power. As such, minds are just as causal as anything else in the world. Why do you insist on separating your mind from the world? That just causes all sorts of problems.
Quoting Pretty
I would say that the idea of 1 and the idea of counting causes the idea of 2. Effects always have at least two causes, never just one. Things change as a result of interactions, meaning at least two things need to interact to create a new effect. One does not necessarily cause two without counting.
It sounds like my wife isn't a very reasonable person if she gets mad about some fruit that I forgot to buy. Not sure if I can conclude something about the ontology of numbers and their causal efficacy (or lack of it) from my wife's anger.
The definition of time as change is not satisfactory. Time is the way change happens. That is, it is the logic of change. Relativity describes physical time. Change happens according to a certain mathematical pattern. This pattern is time. Mathematics is also a pattern and a time order. It is mathematical time or abstract time. The kind of time we refer to depends on the objects that inhabit that time order - physical objects, energy, mathematical objects.
My definition of time, if you asked me, is again an abstract concept.
There is no physical time in reality. There are only motions and changes. We apply the concept of time to measure the duration and intervals of the motions and changes.
Think of the origin of time, where it came from. It came from the cultural contract made of the idea and observation on the risings and settings of the sun.
If the Earth stopped rotating the Sun, there would be no days, months and years. There will be no hours and minutes and seconds without the days.
The Chinese folks use the changing Moon as the criteria of measuring their time. It is called the Moon Calendar.
Outside of the Solar system, there is no time that you could measure or observe. Perhaps you could carry some electronic device for measuring time, and tell time based on the Earth time system, if you were traveling into some galaxies. But it is not some absolute time originated from the whole universe. It would still be measurements of intervals and duration based on the time contract based on the solar rotation of the Earth around the Sun programmed into the electronic clock.
Quoting EnPassant
Could you elaborate further? What do you mean by "logic of change"? How does relativity describe physical time? What do you mean by mathematical pattern? Mathematical time? What are they in real life examples?
Ultimately time is a mathematical system. All mathematical systems are time because they describe how mathematical objects behave. How does the graph of a cubic equation change? It changes according to the algebra of the cubic equation. Algebra is mathematical time.
Matter itself is not energy. Matter combined with motion is energy.
Quoting EnPassant
When EnPassant is born, he is 0 year old. When he became 40 years old, he says he is 40 years old. What does it mean? It means that EnPassant has lived the duration of the Earth has rotated around the Sun for 40 times. That is all. That is what time is. They divided 1 year into 12 months, 1 months into 30 or 31 days, and 1 day into 24 hours so on. Math doesn't describe anything. Humans do using numbers and time.
Again, it wasn't the fruit you bought that made her angry. It was the number of fruit.
Would you be angry at your doctor if they instructed you to take two pills at bedtime when you were only suppose to take one and you have some severe side effects? Again, its not the pills themselves. It was the number of pills that caused the severe side effects and your anger to towards your doctor.
Here's another example:
Say you're taking a math test. Say you have a goal to pass the test. You see your first math problem:
1.) 1 + 1 = _
Given your present goal to pass the test and your knowledge of what the scribbles on the paper mean, what event do you think would happen next given these set of circumstances in the present moment? I predict that you will draw a scribble, "2" in the blank space. What caused you to write the scribble if not your present goal and the knowledge of what is suppose to go in the blank space if not some idea of numbers?
A number caused my wife to become angry at me? It seems like I should have a talk with that number, and I should tell it to stop making my wife angry at me. And then I should have a talk with my wife, and I should tell her that I'm talking to the number that made her angry, so that it doesn't make her angry anymore.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A number caused my anger towards my doctor? It seems like I'm not a very reasonable person myself. I should probably apologize to my doctor. I will tell him that a number caused me to become angry at him.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Doesn't seem like a very good test if I have to calculate something so basic like one plus one.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What do I think will happen? Given those circumstances in the present moment? I don't know. Maybe I'll get a phone call from my doctor. Maybe my wife interrupts me, because she wants me to buy some fruit. A lot of things could happen in those circumstances.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Ok.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What caused me to write a scribble? I don't know, I guess my brain is what caused it.
When matter and anti matter collide they are transformed into pure energy.
"They divided 1 year into 12 months, 1 months into 30 or 31 days, and 1 day into 24 hours so on. Math doesn't describe anything. Humans do using numbers and time."
It is only possible to do this if reality is intrinsically mathematical.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Straw-men.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Not the point.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Moving the goal posts. You've given a new set of circumstances.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Ok. What caused your brain to do that if not the visual of scribbles (numbers and operator symbols) and a goal to pass a test?
You typically want to think beyond the first thought that comes to mind when responding to posts on a philosophy forum.
How so? Numbers are not the sort of entities that have causal efficacy. That was my point, irony notwithstanding.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It was a poor example, that's all I'm saying.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Under what circumstances can a number have causal efficacy? I can't think of any.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But a scribble is not a number. The scribble "2" is a numeral, not a number.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Why? I'm not on the job right now. That sort of mentality is for writing articles and books. When I'm responding to posts on a philosophy forum, I allow myself much more freedom in my expressions and my thoughts.
Saying so doesn't make it so. I'm using real-world examples to prove my point that numbers do have causal efficacy. Numbers are ideas and ideas have causal efficacy, as I have shown using many real-world examples - your wife's behavior at the number of oranges you purchased, your behavior caused by the number of pills you took, and a SpaceX Starship on a launch pad blasting off into space. Another example is behavior caused by hallucinations and delusions. What else could explain their behavior except that they are hallucinating - having false ideas.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
You're not playing along with better examples.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Then what is a number? A requirement of existence is that it has causal efficacy. Is a number the very scribble, "number"? If not, then what does the scribble, "number" refer to? How is it that you are here talking about numbers if numbers have no causal efficacy?
And I'm using real-world counter-examples to prove that they don't.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Numbers are fictions, and no fictions have causal efficacy. If you want to say that all fictions are brain processes and that as such, they have causal efficacy, then I would say that you're failing to distinguish numbers as fictions and brain processes as facts.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What else could explain their behaviour? A lot of things. Atoms, for example. Contemporary physics might explain it. You don't need numbers in your ontology to begin with.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well, I'm not going to make your case for you, I don't see how an ontology with numbers that have causal efficacy is better than an ontology in which that is not the case.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A useful fiction in the Nietzschean sense, which is ultimately a brain process.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Numbers don't exist as fictions, they exist as brain processes.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The scribble "number" refers to a useful fiction in the Nietzschean sense.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Because other things have the causal efficacy that you're referring to: the cells of my body, the chemicals that I am made from, the subatomic particles that compose me.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
So, numbers are fictions that don't exist as fictions. Does The Maltese Falcon exist as fiction?
Word games
Exactly.
Quoting jgill
No, it does not. Unless, of course, you wish to distinguish conceptual existence from real existence, and to treat each as a different first-order predicate, and to declare that the existential quantifier has no ontological import. That is indeed what Mario Bunge himself does.
Quoting jgill
More like philosophy, but OK. You're entitled to your opinion, however mistaken such opinion might otherwise be.
"collide" is motion.
Quoting EnPassant
They could have divided it by other numbers, and it would have worked fine. Reality is describable with mathematics, but reality is not mathematical. Mathe is a language, which numbers, formulas and equations are its alphabets, words and sentences.
The world is exactly the way these disciplines describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics
All these are the theories of Math. Theory means human abstract thinking on the world phenomenon, objects and events.
The world has been existing long and far before the first appearance of life on earth, and any of the theories were invented by the human abstract thinking.
To abstract means to 'take from'; to lift the math from the reality.
It seems the other way around i.e. from the reality, math is found, and applied back to the reality for the descriptions.
Any example you use proves my point, not yours, as how could you be here in this thread proving the existence of something that you claim has no causal efficacy? What caused you to type out the scribbles, "numbers", "1", "2", etc. if the idea of numbers has no causal efficacy? Do you even understand the mind-body problem?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Santa Claus is a fiction yet look at all the images of Santa Claus and people dressed like Santa Claus during the holidays. What caused them to dress like that and to create images in Santa's likeness if Santa does not exist?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yet physics is based on mathematics. :roll:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Understanding that mind and body are causally linked helps to get past the mind-body problem.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
What does it mean for something to be useful if it has no causal efficacy?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
You are contradicting yourself (and in the same post):
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yet you cannot explain how ideas cause you to behave in certain ways. If I told you a lie (a fiction) to manipulate you into behaving a certain way then the fiction had a causal effect on your behavior.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
?x(Mx?¬Ex) - For some "x", it is the case that "x" is the Maltese Falcon, and "x" does not exist. Notice that "Existence" is a first-order predicate ("E"), and that the existential quantifier ("?") does not have ontological import. It that sense, it would be more accurate to call it "particularizing quantifier", as opposed to the "universal quantifier" ("?"). And what goes for the Maltese Falcon, goes for numbers.
EDIT:
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, I do. It's like the gut-digestion problem, or the legs-walking problem: a comparison between a thing (brain, gut, legs) with a process (digesting, minding, walking). In that sense, I agree with Bunge's psychoneural identity hypothesis, as developed in his book Matter and Mind.
EDIT 2:
Quoting Harry Hindu
As I've explained, to be (in the sense of predication) is not the same thing as to exist. In other words, being and existence are not the same thing. Numbers are fictions, without existing as fictions. For example:
?x(Fx?¬Ex) - For some "x", it is the case that "x" is fictional, and "x" does not exist.
Where is the contradiction, @Harry Hindu?
So, the world has transfinite ordinal numbers. Or does it?
You apply Banach-Tarski to one apple, turning it into two the same size, then eat all three. But only if you have faith in the Axiom of Choice. If you do not you might raise the question on The Philosophy Forum. Abundant deep answers are found there.
You are being too literal. That mathematics is real does not mean every mathematical object is real. It means that real fundamentals can be understood in mathematical terms.
Presumably, they will have seeds. All you need, is patience.
There are two apples on my table. But actually there's three, because one of them is a negative apple. It just so happens that it's invisible to everyone, including myself, because it has a negative number (-1) associated with it.
I have a theory about that (but I have no evidence to support it, sadly). Here's my theory: integers might exist. Fractions might exist as well. Negative numbers don't exist, I don't see how they could. Imaginary numbers don't exit (where is the square root of minus one apple? I don't see it on my kitchen table), and complex numbers in general don't exist.
There is no way to coherently justify this theory of mine, BTW.
Look up the definition of "be" and you will see the definition is "exist". :roll:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be
2.a.
: to have an objective existence : have reality or actuality
I find it much easier and simpler (Occam's Razor and all that) to simply say that numbers exist as ideas, and to assert that numbers exist as anything other than ideas is a category mistake. The same goes for Santa Claus. Santa is an idea and to assert that Santa is anything more than an idea is making a category mistake.
Does the Merriam Webster dictionary have the final word in matters of first-order predicate logic and the ontology of fictional entities in general, and of mathematical objects in particular? That sounds like they have the Foundations of Mathematics all figured out then. I wonder why professional mathematicians don't read the Merriam Webster dictionary more often. I will contact them and I will tell them to read it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But ideas are fictions. They're just brain processes. We pretend that they have some sort of autonomous existence, but they don't. Do the rules of chess exist as ideas, with causal efficacy, in your view?
Quoting Harry Hindu
But Santa Claus is a fictional character. He doesn't exist. Real people just pretend to be him, just like a professional actor pretends to be a character. Batman doesn't really exist, he's just a character played by different actors (i.e., Adam West, Christian Bale, etc.)
I am contacting you here, to tell you, that you, as a professional mathematician, must read the Merriam Webster dictionary in order solve the unsolved problems in the field known as Foundations of Mathematics. They have already solved everything, the people that wrote the Merriam Webster dictionary. Source: Trust Me Bro.
Why do numbers have to count things? Complex numbers define space and geometric concepts. And if they do count things note that complex numbers are used in counting Reimann's zeros in the zeta function.
So what's the imaginary number that the letter "i" refers to, for example when you want to calculate the square root of -1?. What number is "i"? You see? It makes no sense as a question, because you're not even referring to it with a numeral to begin with. Do you see how utterly pointless it is to talk about this as if this were metaphysics or ontology somehow? It's more like inventing some alternative rules for the game of chess. That's the "level of dignity" that Foundations of Mathematics has. Now whose "fault" is that? Do professional mathematicians need to take the blame here, yes or no?
Are you saying you have the final word on the nature of existence? Are you saying that the matter of the ontology of existence has been settled?
I don't think so: https://iep.utm.edu/existenc/
"It is not easy to characterize what existence as a first-order property is."
The most likely problem to occur here is that we end up talking past ourselves.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Not every idea is a fiction. Everything is a process. Non-fictional ideas "are just brain processes too". The difference is their relationship with the world, and what kinds of things you can accomplish by implementing them. Do you successfully get your starship to Mars, do you dress up in a way that others successfully recognize you as Santa Claus?
Does your idea of how to play chess permit you to play chess? Does it not have a causal effect on whether you get disqualified from the chess match or not?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
But how could real people act like someone that does not exist, or does not have some sort of causal efficacy? How did they come to dress and act like that in the first place?
Brain processes are physical images of thought. The object is an image of energy/spirit/mind.
"What number is "i"? You see? It makes no sense as a question, because you're not even referring to it with a numeral to begin with."
Why do you want to make 'i' a 'number'? It is a component in the logic of mathematics. 'And' is not a number but it has a place in mathematics. Like with with 'or' and 'if' etc. See "Logical Operators". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_connective
Only those relative few who have an interest in Foundations. :roll:
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying, now give me my briefcase full of money.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course, I've just settled it. Glad that I could help. Now, about that briefcase.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You're free to think whatever you want, just as much as I am. Or are you now going to tell me that you don't believe in basic human rights?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't believe in process ontology, despite what Whitehead says. With a name like that, you might as well call him Crackhead.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Nothing of that has anything to do with numbers. Why is this such a controversial idea to you, that you feel the need to discuss it so passionately? I see it as utterly mundane, it's like talking about what number you're going to bet at the lottery, there's not much to it in terms of metaphysics or ontology.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Look. With all due respect. I see that you're an educated gentleman, and I've been acting a bit like a clown in my responses to you. But this thread is called "is the number 1 the cause of the number 2?" Now I ask you, sincerely: do you actually think that the answer to this question is yes? Do you really believe that? Or are you just wanting to have a verbal sparring session with me because you find it entertaining in some way?
Is it like the Holy Ghost-Spirit-Dove/Pigeon in Christianity?
Matter can evaporate back to pure energy. This happens all the time in stars. In principle the entire universe can evaporate back to energy. If this happened it would disappear, along with physical spacetime.
After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales. Speculatively, it is possible that the universe may enter a second inflationary epoch, or assuming that the current vacuum state is a false vacuum, the vacuum may decay into a lower-energy state.[15]:§VE It is also possible that entropy production will cease and the universe will reach heat death.[15]:§VID
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#:~:text=The%20heat%20death%20of%20the,sustain%20processes%20that%20increase%20entropy.
You brought up the rules of chess as a separate example to numbers, so if chess has nothing to do with numbers, that's your problem, not mine. Why is it so difficult for you to focus?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I actually believe it because it is observable and provable. I have provided many examples where ideas have a causal relation with the rest of the world. Are you saying that thoughts and ideas and your mind is not part of the world? Or are you saying that the mind is an illusion? If the latter, then all you have done is pull the rug out from under your own position because everything you ever learned is via your mind, including information about brains and what they do. You also seem woefully uninformed of other possible views and explanations of the theory of mind and the observer effect.
Suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that such is indeed the case. What would that tell us, about the numbers themselves? Is the number 2 the cause of the number 3, for example? What is the cause of the negative number -5? What is the cause of the imaginary unit "i", which (allegedly) successfully refers to an "imaginary number"? What is the difference between a Real Number and an imaginary number? Are imaginary numbers unreal? What would that even mean? It's a mistake to confuse ontology with mathematics. When mathematicians speak of the set of the Real numbers, as something different from Imaginary numbers (like 1i, or 3i, or 5i), they're not conceptualizing them as "stones and trees -versus- mythological creatures". It has nothing to do with that. So why would you even say that the number 1 is the cause of the number 2? Why would you even speak about the mathematical relation between the number 1 and the number 2 as if it were a metaphysical or ontological relation? Because that is what the cause-effect relation is, at the end of the day: it's a metaphysical or ontological relation. Now, if you want to call that into question, in the manner of a British Empiricist like David Hume, be my guest. But I have just as much right to conceptualize it as an ontological relation instead, which is precisely what Mario Bunge does, and I agree with him on that point.
Can it be said that each sentence you wrote above is the cause of the following sentence? Is each letter the cause of the following letter you typed, or each word the cause of the following word in each sentence?
No, there isn't. There is an (embodied brain)-world correlation, instead of a mind-world correlation. And I say that in a Meillassouxian way. And I would add: the nature of the correlation in question is ontological.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, because thoughts are fictions, which exist as brain processes. They do not exist as fictions, because being and existence are not identical to each other. We've been over this point. Ontological relations do not hold, or obtain, between fictional objects (i.e., between thoughts).
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, it is not, for the same reason that the number 1 is not the cause of the number 2.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Again, no, that is not the case. Feel free to disagree, I'm not trying to deny you the basic human right to have thoughts.
Ohhhhh! I get it now! You're a p-zombie!
So Chalmers was wrong because p-zombies DO behave differently (they talk differently about what thoughts and minds are - as being non-existent fictions, as opposed to what people with actual minds do - talk about thoughts and minds as being existent facts).
Quoting Wikipedia
But you've just proved that they do exist because you seem to have a different (or lack of) understanding of what is meant by "thoughts" and "mind" when people use those words.
No, I'm not a philosophical zombie. I can experience pain, as well as other qualia. I know "what it's like" to have a first-person perspective, because I actually have one.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Thoughts are not facts, and neither are minds. I say that in the same sense that a table is not a fact. An apple is not a fact either. What would the fact be, in such cases? It would be a fact that there is an apple on the table. But the apple itself is not a fact, it is instead a thing. The same goes for the table: it is a thing, not a fact. Thoughts are not facts, and they are not things, they are processes ("mental processes", if you will) and the mind is not a fact, nor a thing, it is instead a process (it is a series of processes that the brain undergoes, just as digestion is a process that the gut undergoes, just as the act of walking is a process that the legs undergo).
Quoting Harry Hindu
What is meant by "thoughts" and "mind" when people use those words has nothing to do with their existence, because they don't have existence to begin with. Existence is a real property that concrete, material things have, and only they (the concrete, material things) have it (existence is not a quantity, therefore the existential quantifier "?" has no ontological import). Ideal objects (such as Plato's Ideas, or Aristotle's Prime Mover) do not have it. Stated differently, ideal objects do not have the property of existence. And the creative intentions of the speakers of a language make no difference here: you can creatively intend as much as you want when you mean that thoughts and minds exist, that doesn't magically grant them the property of existence.
2 means "1+1". 4 means any of "1+1+2". "1+1+1+1" etc... So not sure cause is the right word.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
It might be worth pointing out that these things are "states of affairs" which I think can be distinguished from 'fact's. That said, they are suspiciously close in concept. But "the table" is a state of affairs (with regard to its atoms, i guess) and "that there is a table in X position" is the fact about hte table as you point out. But hte table itself is a "something" in existence. A "State of affairs" seems apt.
"State of affairs" is fine with me. I've use that phrase before as well.
Numbers can only be conceived once you establish mental categories and members of a category, as there can only be a quantity of members of a category whether it be tables, atoms or ideas. There is only one of everything until you establish mental categories. The question is do the boundaries of our categories mirror the boundaries in the world, or are the boundaries mental projections (the observer/measurer effect)?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
To say that you actually have one is to say that there is an objective state of affairs where you have a first-person perspective. You can talk about it like you can talk about the apple on the table. The problem is your dualistic thinking in separating thoughts and minds from the world in describing them as being fictions and non-existent when there is no logical reason to do so. If anything there is evidence to the contrary. When you ask people to explain their behavior, they refer to their thoughts or mental states as the cause of their behaviors. Even false thoughts have an impact on our behavior as I already pointed out how you can manipulate people with lies, as much as I can manipulate their behavior by injecting them with drugs.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
All things are relations between other things. All things are process. Science shows that each thing is an interaction of smaller things. You never actually get at a thing - only a process.
Think of the world as an analog signal and your mind converts the analog signal into a digital signal (as discrete 0s and 1s). The objects you perceive are really these converted signals - from relational to discrete. Your brain processes sensory information at a certain frequency relative the the frequency of change in the environment. This relative frequency will have an effect on how we perceive other processes with fast processes appearing as a blur of motion or appearing to happen without cause, where slower processes will appear as solid static objects. Changing our view from microscopic to macroscopic also changes how we view objects as part of larger processes and vice versa. This is similar to the observer effect in QM.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yet we talk about them like we talk about everything else that does exist. So what does it actually mean to exist or not exist if the way we talk about them does not provide a clue? Your use of, "material things" just shows how you are confusing the way things are with how you perceive them. What makes something material? What makes material things have causal efficacy and not non-material things? What do you say to someone who says that the word, "material" is meaningless when you never get at anything material - only processes, and material things are mental projections. In other words it is the idea that the world is material that is fiction, but it is real and exists because you are here expressing the idea in the form of scribbles on the screen. You can refer to it in the same way you can refer to apples on tables.
Numbers do not exist. They are abstractions. One-ness and two-ness (etc) exist, as properties of groups of objects. There is a logical relation between one-ness and two-ness, but a logical relation is not a "cause".
It was a clear evidence in real world, that numbers don't exist, and they don't cause anything at all. Our minds see and order them into numeric order.