Against Cause
The idea of causality is something I think about all the time. I've also written about it many times here on the forum. As I see it, it's at the heart of lots of issues that come up here.
As I've often said here, "causality" is a metaphysical concept, by which I mean it represents a point of view, a perspective, not a fact. As R.G. Collingwood might say, the Principle of Sufficient Reason - everything must have a reason or a cause - is an absolute presupposition, not a proposition. Absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, they have what Collingwood calls "logical efficacy" - they are useful. My position is that the idea of cause is not a very useful concept except in a fairly limited set of circumstances.
This post will present four arguments against cause. As I've thought about them, I've come to see them as really the same argument looked at from different directions.
The chain of causality
Let's try out a few things:
It is my understanding that an asteroid hitting earth about 65 million years ago caused the extinction of many species of animals, including the dinosaurs. If that hadn't happened, it is likely that humans never would have evolved. If that's true, did that asteroid impact cause our existence?
In a similar vein, if Adolph Hitler hadn't been born, my father probably would not have been drafted when he graduated from high school in 1943. If that happened he would have gone on to college and graduated in 1947. He never would have met my mother on the train in New York while he was in school and I never would have been born. None of you would probably have been born either. Did Hitler cause my birth?
Do the movement and impacts of nitrogen and oxygen atoms in a tank of air cause pressure and temperature?
If I hit a cue ball and it bounces off the bumper and into the eight ball which goes in the corner pocket, what caused the eight ball to move into the pocket? Me? The cue? The cue ball? The pool table? My muscles and bones? The electrons in the outer valence orbital of the atoms at the surface of the ball that exert repulsive force as they approach each other? My mother who gave birth to me? My friends who convinced me to go to the bar? The car that I rode in to get to the bar? The star that created all the elements that make up the pool balls?
If I shoot someone with a gun and they die, do I cause their death? Does the gun cause their death? Does the bullet cause their death? Does blood loss cause their death? Does lack of oxygen to their brain cause their death?
Probabilistic Causality
Simple - smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. Ninety percent of people who get lung cancer are smokers. On the other hand, only 10 to 20 percent of smokers get lung cancer. So, those 10 to 20 percent must be affected by other factors that the other 80 to 90 percent aren't - I guess heredity, frequency of smoking, other exposures to toxins, other diseases, dumb luck. It is difficult or impossible to isolate a single cause for any phenomena except in certain limited cases.
Complex systems
In this discussion, I look at causality from the point of view of ecology, which considers biological systems involving interactions among a complex range of biological and environmental factors, but the same principles apply to non-biological systems. Here is a link to an interesting article describing the ecology of salt marshes at a New England location.
https://podolskyr.people.charleston.edu/biol211/p/readings/Bertness.pdf
As the article describes, salt marshes in New England have a certain characteristic structure based primarily on tide levels in the area where they grow. Biologists classify the marsh into two zones which have different characteristics. The zone closest to the water, the low marsh, is located at an elevation below the mean high water level. The primary organisms found there are cordgrass, mussels, and hermit crabs. The high marsh is located at higher elevations where only less frequent inundations take place. The primary organisms found in this area include saltmarsh hay, spikegrass, slender glasswort, and black rush.
Factors that contribute to determining where each organism is found include tide levels; ice scouring; rainfall, soil salinity and compaction; the presence of mussels which provide armoring and hermit crabs which provide soil aeration in the low marsh; and plant characteristics including salt tolerance and root structure. These factors take part in a complex, cyclical interaction which is continually changing as seasons change, climate change progresses, and humans intrude. The linked article is a much more detailed description of the types of processes that take place.
Here's a link to a video which includes a similar explanation for what happened when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc52l5ZcAJ0
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gc52l5ZcAJ0&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
This description is somewhat controversial, but my interest is primarily in the type of argument rather than the specifics. For a more nuanced, but longer, discussion, here is a link to another video that I like better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufhnDIhrEYA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ufhnDIhrEYA
Constraints
When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraintsevents that prevent future eventshave a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causesevents that result in future events. The asteroid didnt cause humans to evolve, it prevented dinosaurs and other organisms from continuing to evolve. Hitler didnt cause me to be born, he prevented other potential futures from taking place.
One way of looking at it is that constraints remove possible futures until only one remains. If Im driving on the road and I get behind a slow moving car, the car ahead of me doesnt cause me to slow down. It prevents me, constrains me, from going as fast as I would otherwise. I acknowledge that this way of looking at things is a matter of convention, but no more so than looking at it from the point of view of causality.
My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments, e.g. electrons in a physics experiment. It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. It is a much less useful explanation for most phenomena. My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwoods logical efficacy.
As I've often said here, "causality" is a metaphysical concept, by which I mean it represents a point of view, a perspective, not a fact. As R.G. Collingwood might say, the Principle of Sufficient Reason - everything must have a reason or a cause - is an absolute presupposition, not a proposition. Absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, they have what Collingwood calls "logical efficacy" - they are useful. My position is that the idea of cause is not a very useful concept except in a fairly limited set of circumstances.
This post will present four arguments against cause. As I've thought about them, I've come to see them as really the same argument looked at from different directions.
The chain of causality
Let's try out a few things:
It is my understanding that an asteroid hitting earth about 65 million years ago caused the extinction of many species of animals, including the dinosaurs. If that hadn't happened, it is likely that humans never would have evolved. If that's true, did that asteroid impact cause our existence?
In a similar vein, if Adolph Hitler hadn't been born, my father probably would not have been drafted when he graduated from high school in 1943. If that happened he would have gone on to college and graduated in 1947. He never would have met my mother on the train in New York while he was in school and I never would have been born. None of you would probably have been born either. Did Hitler cause my birth?
Do the movement and impacts of nitrogen and oxygen atoms in a tank of air cause pressure and temperature?
If I hit a cue ball and it bounces off the bumper and into the eight ball which goes in the corner pocket, what caused the eight ball to move into the pocket? Me? The cue? The cue ball? The pool table? My muscles and bones? The electrons in the outer valence orbital of the atoms at the surface of the ball that exert repulsive force as they approach each other? My mother who gave birth to me? My friends who convinced me to go to the bar? The car that I rode in to get to the bar? The star that created all the elements that make up the pool balls?
If I shoot someone with a gun and they die, do I cause their death? Does the gun cause their death? Does the bullet cause their death? Does blood loss cause their death? Does lack of oxygen to their brain cause their death?
Probabilistic Causality
Simple - smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. Ninety percent of people who get lung cancer are smokers. On the other hand, only 10 to 20 percent of smokers get lung cancer. So, those 10 to 20 percent must be affected by other factors that the other 80 to 90 percent aren't - I guess heredity, frequency of smoking, other exposures to toxins, other diseases, dumb luck. It is difficult or impossible to isolate a single cause for any phenomena except in certain limited cases.
Complex systems
In this discussion, I look at causality from the point of view of ecology, which considers biological systems involving interactions among a complex range of biological and environmental factors, but the same principles apply to non-biological systems. Here is a link to an interesting article describing the ecology of salt marshes at a New England location.
https://podolskyr.people.charleston.edu/biol211/p/readings/Bertness.pdf
As the article describes, salt marshes in New England have a certain characteristic structure based primarily on tide levels in the area where they grow. Biologists classify the marsh into two zones which have different characteristics. The zone closest to the water, the low marsh, is located at an elevation below the mean high water level. The primary organisms found there are cordgrass, mussels, and hermit crabs. The high marsh is located at higher elevations where only less frequent inundations take place. The primary organisms found in this area include saltmarsh hay, spikegrass, slender glasswort, and black rush.
Factors that contribute to determining where each organism is found include tide levels; ice scouring; rainfall, soil salinity and compaction; the presence of mussels which provide armoring and hermit crabs which provide soil aeration in the low marsh; and plant characteristics including salt tolerance and root structure. These factors take part in a complex, cyclical interaction which is continually changing as seasons change, climate change progresses, and humans intrude. The linked article is a much more detailed description of the types of processes that take place.
Here's a link to a video which includes a similar explanation for what happened when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc52l5ZcAJ0
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gc52l5ZcAJ0&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
This description is somewhat controversial, but my interest is primarily in the type of argument rather than the specifics. For a more nuanced, but longer, discussion, here is a link to another video that I like better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufhnDIhrEYA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ufhnDIhrEYA
Constraints
When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraintsevents that prevent future eventshave a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causesevents that result in future events. The asteroid didnt cause humans to evolve, it prevented dinosaurs and other organisms from continuing to evolve. Hitler didnt cause me to be born, he prevented other potential futures from taking place.
One way of looking at it is that constraints remove possible futures until only one remains. If Im driving on the road and I get behind a slow moving car, the car ahead of me doesnt cause me to slow down. It prevents me, constrains me, from going as fast as I would otherwise. I acknowledge that this way of looking at things is a matter of convention, but no more so than looking at it from the point of view of causality.
My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments, e.g. electrons in a physics experiment. It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. It is a much less useful explanation for most phenomena. My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwoods logical efficacy.
Comments (270)
This is certainly right. And it is why Aristotle identified four becauses. So your constraints are formal and final cause. But you also need your degrees of freedom, or efficient and material causes.
Causality as efficient cause is not wrong. It just is always shaped by some prevailing context.
Constraint removes possible futures, but normally still leaves many possibilities open. Accidents can happen. Asteroids could be on paths that just miss the Earth as there was no constraint on that fact.
So constraints determine events, but mostly in only the most general fashion. Rocks normally fall down rather than up. But they could just as well land there as land here.
Accidents are then the opposite of this determination in being the freedom for particular things to have happened within the space of free possibilities. We can tell tales of efficient cause where something might have happened, and then there was a difference because it either did or didnt.
The asteroid could have been a lucky narrow escape or a historical extinction event. Either way it was determined by the laws of physics. And which thing happened was left as an accident of history.
Of course mechanics would say the asteroid was fated in it trajectory by setting off in some state of initial conditions. But then that would require the arrangement of that very particular set of circumstances for some good reason. An extremely careful choice of starting point in a world that now - looking at things from this complementary point of view - appears not offer any constraint on that being what got chosen. By someone with an interest in the whole affair. Wanting to show how what happened was inevitable from the start.
So causal accounts are flexible like this. We learn to make good choices about how much events are to be explained by contextual circumstances and how much by accidents or free choices.
Which then gets us into what we mean by finality. Rocks have tendencies to fall. Humans can want not to.
Yes. For philosophers "causality" is a metaphysical notion, whereas for physicists it's a practical principle, to aid in understanding how & why things happen. Traditionally, human Logic assumes, as an unproven axiom*1, that every action or event had a prior causal influence, and that causal action in the universe is an unbroken chain (conjunction) of physical cause/effect events. Except of course, for those who believe in metaphysical causes, such as divine intervention or random accidents (disjunction).
The title of this tread seems to imply that our common logical assumption of Causation is unscientific & non-empirical, as argued by Hume's dissection of Induction, Reduction, and Deduction. Which leaves open-to-negation such logical postulates as Universal Causation, and First Cause. Hence, the never-ending inconclusive threads on this forum. Where we heap up individual facts or beliefs, and try to make sense of them by means of the reasoning that Hume & Collingwood undermined with skeptical analysis. Ironically, that swampy quicksand logic allows people of Faith to claim that their metaphysical "reasons" & divine revelations are just as valid as a scientist's physical-empirical Facts & Faxioms.
So, where does that leave us public reasoners on a non-empirical (metaphysical) philosophical forum? Are the conjunctions in our reasoning so weak that none of our arguments will hang-together under the universal solvent of skepticism? Are our fundamental (self-evident) axioms only valid within a single isolated-but-united Faith community (-isms)? :cool:
*1. Logical Axioms :
Yes, axioms can be considered a type of presupposition, as they are foundational statements accepted as true without proof to serve as the starting point for reasoning within a specific system. While all axioms function as presuppositions, a key distinction is that an axiom is a presupposition that is considered self-evident or unquestionable within its context, whereas not all presuppositions are necessarily self-evident or accepted without controversy.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=are+axioms+presuppositions
But did you mean to throw it down by throwing it out? Your own action only imparted a thrust that should have seen it travel on forever along that straight line. It is only because the ball encountered both friction and a gravitational field that it was caused to instead curve.
Though of course you could have factored those effects into your throw and thus know that the cause of it landing where it did was down to an artfully arranged mix of your freedom to launch a ball in a direction and the inevitability of what would happen thereafter due to contextual constraints.
I do not deny that this is related. But I wonder: how far should we extend our view in casual relationships? If it is true that the movement of the stars does not explain why the ball fell to the ground from the fifth floor, it follows that there is a kind of causal disconnection. In that sense, one might say: there is continuity and there is causal discontinuity. This reminds me of Plato's concept of symploke.
Exactly. From our human point of view, we want to know about our causal freedoms. We want a notion of causality that puts us in the centre of the Cosmos, large and in charge, the maker of purpose and the decider of form. This just what is natural to being an organism that lives by exploiting the possibilities of its environment. We come at nature with our cunning causal plans.
We throw a ball at exactly the angle where nature takes over the rest of the chore of hitting some desired spot. And it is important to know that far off stars can't affect that in being too distant in spacetime. Otherwise we would have to factor them into our mental calculus too.
And indeed, our causal narratives used to take celestial influences quite seriously. Conjunctions of constellations needed their horoscopic interpretations if we were to make wise decision down here on Earth.
So causality is the narrative we tell, the map of how to get to where we want. But then philosophy came along and started injecting a little more metaphysical rigour into this exercise. What was causality as a narrative at the level of the Cosmos itself?
It seems to me that the cause people are talking about when they talk about everything having a cause is efficient cause. Do you disagree? Maybe I should have called this thread "Against Efficient Cause."
When you say "context" I think you are saying something similar to what I meant when I wrote "What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments..."
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, when we're talking about asteroids or artillery rounds, but what about when we're talking about complex systems like the salt marsh I discussed.
Quoting apokrisis
I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all.
Causality is practical, useful, to scientists sometimes. Sometimes not. Physicists more often than biologists.
Quoting Gnomon
I don't see how the kinds of issues I'm talking about have anything to do with religion.
Quoting Gnomon
I'm confused. Denying that of the idea of cause is always a useful one has nothing to do with skepticism.
Quoting JuanZu
I think you're talking about the same thing I was when I discussed the idea of cause only being useful when we can separate the events in question from their surrounding environment. If I wanted, I could find a causal connection between the stars and the ball, but it is not relevant to the question at hand.
Again--but sometimes the concept of causality is just not a useful one.
The question is: when we separate the events in question from their surrounding environment, is it simply an epistemic construct or is there really an objective kind of disconnect?
I call causality a metaphysical principle. Is that what you mean by "epistemic construct?"
Well there is nothing wrong with efficient cause in itself. It is part of the Aristotelean package. And clearly it is the notion of cause that we humans have in front of mind. We are always looking for the switches to switch and the levers to pull. Where we fit into nature, into the flow of the world, is where we can insert a choice - a difference that makes a difference.
So there is no surprise that folk would see efficient cause as what matters most. That is what the game of life is all about for us. Making things happen that otherwise wouldn't have just happened by themself. If they happen by themself, then we either have to learn to live with it or find ways to prevent. If it rains, we put roofs on our houses. It still rains, but now we don't get so wet. The roof is the switch and lever the effective cause of water being diverted suddenly sideways.
Quoting T Clark
Context would be the facts about what constrains the possibilities as the other kind of facts. So not merely a matter of convention. But we are then free to call on both kinds of fact as it appears to suit us. So in the causal narrative we create, conventions can form in what we tend to stress and what we don't.
If I want to teach you to throw a basketball, I wouldn't bother starting with a physics class. But I might draw attention to the mechanics how you set up your hands and your joints as the right kind of initial conditions for your body as an evolved system of switches and levers ready to fire.
Quoting T Clark
Sure. Things get interesting when we jump from complicated systems to complex systems. One where life and mind are intruding on the physics to help organise nature.
But haven't I bored you to death about that already? Physics only has the broadest notions of finality. It has its global constraints that boil down to thermodynamics and dissipative structure. Its only ruling tendency is to increase entropy. And it will spend a little negentropy to get there. A vortex develops as a structure to drain your bath as that way it starts to drain a lot quicker. Air and water can change places far faster and the job of equilibration gets done much sooner.
Then life and mind come along and note that this is the causality of physics. You are allowed to exist under the scope of becoming an informationally-complex dissipative structure. If you can add efficient cause some system of levers and switches that unblock pent-up entropy flows then physics will pay for you for that small service. Become the blades of vegetation intercepting the sun, become the little critters with legs, mouths and arses. Get focused on imposing a causal mechanics on the world and you can have a job for life, even if you accelerate the entropification of nature just a tiny bit.
A human runs with the power consumption of a 100 watt bulb. At least they did until they upskilled from being just foragers scratching around salt marshes for whatever they could jam in their gob.
Quoting T Clark
That is an idea completely baffling to me. How can you even think if not causally? What would that even look like?
There are efficient causes and then there are overall conditions. Perhaps the overall conditions for the evolution of humans would not have obtained if the asteroid had not hit. Some seem to consider overall conditions to be equivalent to final causation not efficient causation.
No. I mean, is the discontinuity in the chain of causality something that we simply draw subjectively so that we do not have to go to infinity, or is it something objective in the world, that there is actually a type of discontinuity in the causality of the world that explains why we explain some things better with a specific causality and not with just any causality?
Do distant galaxies influence everyday activities here on earth? Sure, recent studies of gravity waves show they can have an influence from billions of light years away, but very, very minimally. Very very, very minimally. So minimally that it makes no sense to consider it in any evaluation of causality here. The LIGO detectors can reportedly measure disturbances of less than the diameter of an atom. Please dont ask me how.
What are the efficient causes of evolution?
Quoting Janus
I dont get that. Its certainly different than my understanding of final cause.
This surprises me. I think of you as intellectually committed to a holistic approach. As I see it, reductionism and causality go hand-in-hand.
Quoting apokrisis
As a civil engineer, Im one of those guys always looking for switches and levers. Over my career Ive seen how disruptive that kind of approach can beapplying rational methods that ignore environmental and social context.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, looking at my engineering experience, ignoring context is what leads to unintended consequences. It makes it impossible to pull those levers, push those buttons, and get the kind of results you expect and desire.
Quoting apokrisis
I dont get this. It seems wildly simplistic and optimistic. This is the kind of thinking that leads to climate change. Not only do you focus in unrealistically closely on the causes, but also focus in unrealistically closely on the results.
But isn't my argument here that holism means all four of Aristotle's four causes. And reductionism just means material and efficient cause. Or even in very reduced renderings, just efficient cause. Closed patterns of logical entailment. The stuff of logical atomism.
So that is why I don't understand why you would seem to say you would rather let go completely of causality and in return for what exactly while I instead make causality my preoccupation. I can't really see what else there is except the question of why we exist in a Cosmos with a rational order. Causality is the primary metaphysical fact. It is the basis of any explanation or narrative we might have.
Unless we are instead doing ... what?
Quoting T Clark
I started out in ecology so was already beginning from there. :up:
Quoting T Clark
Well yes. It indeed explains it in causal terms.
Why are we humans cooking the planet? Well fossil fuel hydrocarbons weren't properly entropified back at the time they should have been.
First, bacteria and fungi couldn't decompose the lignin that plants had just invented so as to compete with each other in the new terrestrial race to grow the highest and reach the most sunlight. So someone had to come along eventually to recycle that fossilised polymer. We humans showed up with our steam engines and turbines. We have been scaling up the burning at an exponential rate as there was no obvious reason not to do so. Then by the time a reason showed, we have created a whole culture around exponentialising the breakdown of the stored energy of that buried lignin.
Oil and gas are another such historical accident. The ancient warm and shallow seas went through an explosive era of planktonic growth. But when this died and fell to the depths, the oxygen depleted bottom water couldn't support the aerobic bacteria needed to decompose it. So that got covered over in sediment layers and again became a dense deposit of fossil hydrocarbon in want of a species with the kind of digestive juices that could stomach it. Or at least the machines that would madly burn it at a compounding rate of growth while being protected and maintained by the kind of human society that couldn't imagine any better form of existence.
So with my ecology hat on the causal explanation for climate change is as plain as the nose on your face. Nothing would even have gone wrong if the damn planet had the atmospheric physics which would have released the heat all this industrial burning was producing rather than trapping it with the greenhouse gases the burning also created.
It is just a case of bad engineering at the geophysical level. The combustion chamber lacked sufficient heat exchange in its design.
And bad luck that biology didn't keep up with the biomass it was producing from the late Paleozoic era through much of the Mesozoic, so creating an entropy gradient so steep that quite outrageous versions of biological order had to be evolved to get it moving again through a planetary scale dissipative structure.
Now think about it the other way : I take a walk in the woods. Does that affect, say, the orbit of Jupiter? Let's think about one of the countless human actions. Since there are so many, shouldn't they alter the orbit of Jupiter?
For convenience, perhaps, we impose boundaries on causes for effects; however, causes go all the way back
The point of my OP is that thinking about things that way is not necessarily useful and can be misleading.
The situation you describe is no different in principle from the one I described about the LIGO system. You can claim that everything in the universe affects everything else, but at some point you have to limit the scope of the cause and effect in order to be able to say anything intelligible.
Please note that, in the last paragraph, I referred to metaphysical*1 (-isms), that are not necessarily religions. For example, on this forum, we often find contentious arguments about metaphysical beliefs, such as Realism vs Idealism, Materialism vs Spiritualism, or Scientism vs Philosophy.
Those are what I facetiously call "Faith communities" because their worldviews are based on non-empirical Axioms. As Hume noted, specific Evidence & formal Logic may support the general (universal) conclusions, but do not prove them. The degree of Faith may be measured in terms of Bayesian Belief*2. :smile:
*1. Yes, materialism is a metaphysical theory because it makes a fundamental claim about the nature of reality: that everything that exists is ultimately physical
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=materialism+is+metaphysical
*2. Bayesian belief refers to the degree of certainty about the truth of a proposition, treated as a probability that is updated by new evidence using Bayes' Theorem.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=bayesian+belief
What you call faith communities I call metaphysical positions. They are unavoidable and, as Ive noted many times, cannot be proven or falsified.
I've been thinking about causation a bit recently in terms of overdetermination of the physical. Not quite ready to blob out a thread of my own on that yet.
Nice OP! I've only looked at the Chain so far.
My initial thoughts are...
The 8 ball went into the pocket because the cue ball hit it. It couldn't have done anything else.
The cue ball hit the 8 ball because the cue hit it. It couldn't have done anything else.
The cue hit the cue ball because your muscles and bones moved in specific ways. It couldn't have done anything else.
Here's where the break comes. Your muscles and bones moved in those specific ways because you chose to move them in those specific ways, because you intended the cue to hit the cue ball, because you intended the cue ball to hit the 8 ball, because you intended the 8 ball to go into the pocket. (i'm assuming you intended to hit the 8 ball into the pocket.) But that didn't have to happen. You could've played darts instead. Or hit on a girl. Or sat at the table and talked to a friend. Or various other things. But you chose to play pool. And, when the table ended up just as it ended up, you could've chosen to miss or scratch, or walk away without hitting the ball at all.
The car could not have done anything other than what it did. The driver could've chosen something else. You could've chosen not to go with your friends. Your mother giving birth to you? I guess there's a lot of choices in all of that, but one of the most important things that was not a choice was exactly which sperm hit the egg. Even that depends on various things, such as when the mood hit your parents, and other factors we don't need to discuss about your parents.
The asteroid hitting the Earth was a big factor in the conditions on the Earth when humans evolved. However, after it hit and played its role in setting up those conditions, any number of things could've happened. It didn't cause humans to evolve, because humans might not have evolved at all. Mutations are random. The mutations that led to humans might not have happened. They might have, and could have, happened in various other places where other factors did not make that mutation an advantage.
Hitler was like the asteroid. He had a lot to do with setting up the conditions that lead to your birth. But either of your parents could've made any of 1 million other choices in the days weeks and months before they met, which might have made it impossible for them to meet. Hitler didn't have anything to do with the choices they made that did lead to their meeting. or at least certainly not all of them.
Yes. That's why we debate various kinds of Causes on this forum. For example, the primary Cause for physical science is Energy. Which can be defined tautologically (it is what it does), but can't be defined physically or materially (what it's made of). A Cause is some invisible force that has a knowable Effect.
So, the OP is true : Cause is not a thing in itself ; It's a relationship between before & after some physical or metaphysical (mental) change. Causation is doing, not being. It's a verb, not a noun. :smile:
Mutations perhaps?
Quoting T Clark
The final cause was traditionally considered to be the telos or purpose of a thing. That would involve how it fits into the overall web. We can think of the global conditions, which include both constraints and opportunities, as providing for the possibility or impossibility of the existence of particulate things and kinds of things. Think of environmental niches, for example.
I echo:
Quoting Banno
No need for four becauses, unless that helps us to sort our thoughts at the moment: We can surely come up with more than four becauses. We see these sorts of categories all the time in Business -- why 5 Whys? Why the 6M's in a Fishbone diagram?
Insofar that it makes sense in the moment go ahead and use any cause you want -- it may be more multiplicitous than the four causes, though.
From what I've read in your posts, Aristotle's four causes are a major organizing principle of your metaphysics. I must admit I don't get it. I think I understand the four types of cause, but I don't see them as a particularly useful or interesting. I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread.
Quoting apokrisis
My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. Even worse, it makes it much harder to even be aware of it. When you then start pushing buttons and pulling levers, you get results that don't achieve the goals you intend. Most things are not caused in any simple easy to trace way. The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation.
Quoting apokrisis
You are preoccupied with causality, I am preoccupied with metaphysics. I have a lecture I give ad nauseum about my understanding. Here's what I wrote in the OP:
Quoting T Clark
Collingwood wrote "Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking."
I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. As Collingwood indicates, a metaphysics applies to a particular kind of thinking at a particular time, its not universal. I dont reject the idea of causality completely, I just believe its not always the right way of looking at things.
Quoting apokrisis
And I guess I look at it from the other side. We have climate change because people made decisions based on simplistic causes, ignoring the full context of the actions they implemented.
I think youre right, I should have been clearer about what was caused and what wasnt. On the other hand, thats sort of the point. Here is the salt marsh sitting out there by the ocean just existing and changing based on the behavior of a very complex biological and physical system. Whats actually causing what out there? Can you point to something causing something else?
Sure. I have no problem with that as long as you recognize that that particular way of breaking things up is not the only way of looking at it. Its a matter of convention. You decided which particular aspects to focus on based on your own judgment, and not on any kind of universal principle. That focus was a matter of human value, not scientific principle.
Quoting Patterner
Are you saying that the appropriate place to make a break is based on human intention? So that causality only is significant when theres people around. I dont think thats what youre saying, so I think I must be misunderstanding.
That doesnt make sense to me. All there is is energy. Matter is energy. Its changes in energy that need a causal description.
But there have been tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of mutations that led to the multiplicity of life here on earth. Just saying mutations doesnt really have much meaning.
Quoting Janus
I dont see it. How does the the full context of existence here on earth constitute its purpose?
I guess thats my understanding of what a constraint is something that prevents something else from happening. It reduces the number of possible futures.
But all you keep doing is collapsing causality to the notion of efficient cause and then talking about the other thing of "context".
There are always other models of causality. You have something like you are describing in proximal and distal causes in medicine. Or proximal and ultimate causes as defined by Ernst Mayr. In quantum physics, contextuality is invoked as the better way to explain non-locality.
My approach is based on Aristoteleanism as that aims to make a proper logical dichotomy of causation. It divides it into the two complementary halves of some set of top-down constraints and some set of resulting bottom-up degrees of freedom.
Each half accounts for the other half. And so you have a model of causality that sums to 1. Nothing is missing. But also you have the thing you are really wanting two directions in which causation as a whole is interacting. A holistic relationship between downward or globalised constraint and upward or localised construction.
Perhaps Aristotle's four causes are too complicated. But I already said that. You only really need formal and material cause. But then it is also useful to make the further division that is causes in general and causes in particular.
Quoting T Clark
And this is so until you learn to expect causality to be dichotomised in the systematic fashion I just described.
If you start out not just expecting causality to break down into a tale of actions in a context, but for this to be a mathematical-strength reciprocal relation, then focusing clearly on the local degrees of freedom will automatically sharpen whatever you might mean by the global context the global constraints that form these exact freedoms you complain about as being vision-obscuring.
For example, to have atoms, you must have the reciprocal thing of a void. The two go together in a necessary way. For a mass to have a shape and a motion as the kind of things it does, it has to have the matching thing of a context for this to be so. A large and empty space in which the mass can have a shaped boundary where it suddenly stops, and a sufficient vastness so it can rattle around until it collides with some other atom that has a shape and a motion.
So even for our most cartoon picture of nature, causality is based on a reciprocal pairing of local freedoms and global constraints. If we form a mental image of what the degrees of freedom look like a wee atom then this brings with it an equally definite image of the kind of context in which such dof would exist. In this case the kind of absolute Euclidean emptiness that is a context rendered as a-causal and ignorable as possible. And yet as a spatial expanse, it does contain this atomistic content. It does play some residual causal role.
Quoting T Clark
Again, complexity can be modelled. And that is done by hierarchy theory.
Once you get used to understanding causality as the division into constraints and degrees of freedom, you can then start stacking things up into hierarchies. A network of networks ordered by their scale.
You have the salt marsh ecology itself a hierarchy of organisms interacting with its environment, the sea and the weather, over minutes, days, months, seasons, centuries and millenia. The tide goes in and out twice a day. The global climate changes rather more dramatically every 100,000 years.
So start with the general principle of how causality works some functional balance between a stabilising set of constraints and the degrees of freedom keeping the show dynamic and then start adding all the possible spatiotemporal scales that this balancing act must play out over.
In hierarchy theory, you call it a set of cogent moments or cogent scale. It defines how much context you need to take in to account for the degrees of freedom you are interested in. Its all explained in papers like this.
Quoting T Clark
Yep. I don't see metaphysics as just people making shit up in random ways that take their fancy. It is about extracting the deep principles. The presuppositions that can be deemed absolute as their emergence as the eventual horizon on inquiry is inevitable.
Metaphysics was solved almost immediately in Greek philosophy. The unity of opposites. Hylomorphism.
But then the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution fired up. The Church had taken over metaphysics for its own social purposes. The Industrial Revolution happened and the world fell in love with a causality based on switches and levers. Metaphysics got broken into engineering and spiritualism.
Quoting T ClarkThank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :grin: No, I didn't mean that. I was trying to distinguish between different types of causes. Cue hitting cue ball, cue ball hitting 8 ball, and 8 ball falling in the pocket are all one type. I don't know what anybody else might call them, but I would probably just call them brute force causes? Thing 1 bangs into Thing 2, and Thing 2 moves.
That's very different from you intentionally moving the cue in a certain way in order to make something specific happen.
I was just saying that mutations might be counted as proximate or efficient causes of evolution, if evolution is change in organisms and mutations cause change in organisms. Efficient or proximate causes are thought to involve energy flows and exchangeschemical reaction for example.
Quoting T Clark
I don't think existence has an overarching purpose, but there are many purposes motivating various organisms. Whereas traditionally final cause was thought of in terms of purpose or telos, I am thinking of it in terms of function or place in the overall system. I'm thinking along the lines that every part has a place, a function, in relation to the whole, as well as being constrained by the whole, by the overall existing conditions.
Wouldn't the counter to Collingwood's statement be an example that is uncaused or self-causing?
The statement is not afterall that: "all causes are discrete," or: "all causes are easily known." The idea that the temporal ordering of mechanistic causes stretches back to the "beginning" and that it isn't discrete is arguably a point in favor of something like PSR, rather than an argument against it. Or, at least I'll lay out why we might think that.
If one defaults on PSR and reduces causes to classical mechanism, it's possible to justify something like the old-school mechanistic view where every last line of Hamlet is as it is ultimately because the arbitrary laws and initial conditions of the universe "just happened, for no reason at all." Everything reduces to a brute fact. And even on a view of an eternal universe, the answer to the question: "why are things one way and not any other," will be "it just is."
This sort of issue comes up in cosmology all the time. The "brute fact" explanation is only ever held to when no other good explanation exists. So, for instance, you get claims like: "the incredibly low entropy of the early universe needs no explanation because we have a sample size of one and so we cannot say that it was "unlikely." It just happened and that's all there is to it." There are similar answers to the Fine Tuning Problem. But if people accepted such answers we'd never have developed the theory of the Big Bang or Cosmic Inflation, because odd properties of the universe that don't seem to suggest an arbitrary process would have simply been written off as: "it just is." Plus, if we had a theory that explained the universe's low entropy that was a compelling as Cosmic Inflation no one would resort to: "it just is."
Now, might causes as mere mechanism be ultimately such a thin notion that it boils down to nothing more than correlation? I think that's a pretty good point; causation becomes arbitrary in the early modern mechanistic paradigm (that was, in fact, the generally the point they were striving towards, because any thick/secondary causality would be an affront to the divine will, which orders all things). If "cause" just refers to some sort of regularity in observations, it is itself arbitrary as an explanation. More recent work on causation often goes the pancomputationalism route though, and this reintroduces a sort of formal causality (granted, often in very reductionist terms).
I think that might suggest a problem with a particular view of causality as opposed to causality per se though. As a rule of thumb, I would say that if we find ourselves needing to eliminate, radically deflate, or pragmatism/voluntarize core concepts like truth, part/whole relations, goodness, beings (plural), knowledge, etc., that should give us pause. Hume's critique of causality, for instance, flows from certain epistemic assumptions. But if we're left with an seemingly arbitrary notion of causality, that might be more an indictment of the starting assumptions, since presumably epistemology is all about causes, reasons, that in virtue of which, etc.
Let me give a more down to earth example than cosmology. Suppose you find a corpse in the woods. Now maybe the hiker died of a heart attack, or maybe he was eaten by a bear, or got lost and froze to death, or maybe he was murdered by a skin walker. Lots of possibilities. But absolutely no detective is going to get by with: "it just happened." That doesn't mean there will be a clear cause of death, nor that looking for the cause of death will turn up anything "useful." It might not be useful in any particular case to try to figure out how a badly decomposed corpse ended up as it is. It is, however, a useful principle that people don't die for no reason at all. They might have relatively spontaneous, "natural deaths," but they don't just cease living. And so too for crop circles, odd rock formations, recessions, etc. That doesn't mean the causes will be simple or accessible. The simplicity of causes is an artifact of mathematical modeling. The philosophy of causation generally always had them as very complex, with every action always involving interaction, both patient and receipient, and the dictum that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver."
Personally, I like Proclus and the Book of Causes here, not so much as a perfect explanation, but as a radically different view to see how much of "causality" is paired away in linear mechanism (I wouldn't even call this "efficient cause" because efficient causes only make sense in the context of the other causes, and the primary view would be of vertical, hierarchical contemporaneous efficient causes, not accidental temporal orderings, e.g., for a chandelier to hang from a ceiling, the ceiling must be present at every interval).
But here we are yet again stuck with Aristotle.
Those sound interesting (without having read) -- would you say that these analyses are Against Cause, in terms of the OP?
Quoting Banno
There's a sense in which I think it's understandable to reach for Ari on causation. The sense in which it makes sense is that we generally do believe in causation if we haven't read much philosophy in a fairly unquestioned way. And even if we have, at least in my journey of thinking, I held onto cognitive dissonance on this question until still now, but less so than before.
Aristotle provides a plausible account of our phenomenology, from the scientific attitude. The four causes, at least as we interpret them today, work well enough to be persuasive, at least with respect to philosophical reflection: The question is asked and answered suitably well enough.
I don't like the universal move, though. I think we can shoehorn causes into the four-causes, but it looks a lot like the various organizational-speak around business and government, except that it at least fits into a larger coherent philosophy that isn't capitalism.
And I think it's important for us to be critical of the philosophers we love, especially. Else we'll probably get it wrong.
I've been going back and forth trying to figure out how to respond to this for awhile. I haven't given up. I'll be back later.
I do understand the point you were trying to make. As I said previously, there are everyday, common sense situations where the chain of causality is simple--as you called them "brute force causes." I would have no problem with saying I hit the ball in the pocket. I caused the ball to go in the pocket. At human scale that kind of judgment is necessarily so I can be held accountable for my actions. The point I was trying to make is that particular choice is arbitrary. It's a matter of convention. As I noted in the OP, there are lots of other places along the chain of causality I could have identified as the cause. Which raises the question--why did you pick those particular places to make the breaks?
These are the classical Aristotelian varieties of cause. They are supposed by Aristotelians to be quite general. But they are not unproblematic. At their core, although they provide various examples of causes, what is not presented is an account of what it is to cause, or to be caused.
That's an issue addressed in more recent metaphysics of causation, and to which a not insubstantial reply is that there is not some one thing, or even group of things, that are common to all causes.
The notion of a family resemblance might be appropriate here, as in so many other cases of mooted definition.
I'd go along with the notion of a family resemblance as long as we don't stop there -- and I must admit I feel like I'm chasing a rabbit down a hole where simply saying "Causation is a metaphysical fiction that's attractive" stops me from jumping down the hole.
Never. It's a method, not an answer.
Three areas of interest, at least to me, are probabilities, and counterfactuals, and the relation between causation and action - not as competing alternatives but as complementary approaches addressing differing aspects of the wider topic of causation.
But of course what is being done here is not the search for an overarching theory so much as a group of interrelated explanations. Familiar stuff.
I often complain that people don't put enough effort into providing definitions of the words they're using in arguments. Now I'm wondering if I've fallen into that same trap. I'm not sure I mean the same thing when I say "causality" as the rest of you do. I thought it was something simple and clear, but maybe I was wrong. As I wrote back in the OP, I'm looking at causality as it is expressed in the principle of sufficient reason--everything must have a reason or a cause. I have always understood that to mean efficient cause and perhaps, as apokrisis noted, material cause. Patterner called it brute force cause. Thinking of it mechanistically, I'm talking about causality that includes the transfer of energy from one system, the cause, to another, the effect.
That's the argument I have been trying to make--the idea of cause, efficient cause, is not useful in many cases and can be misleading. Perhaps you all and I have been arguing from different starting points. Certainly that's true of me and apokrisis, but as I was working to respond to all the responses, it started to seem like it may be true of others also.
Mechanical forces are quite a particular subset of physics. They depend on the simplistic ontology of atoms in a void. Particles that have mass, shape and motion. They can stick together or recoil at the instant they happen to come into physical contact. They can compound or scatter as a second order topological fact.
So yes. This is a very restricted, if very useful, model of causality. It is exactly what you want if you are in the business of turning nature into a system of machinery. Even society can be imagined in terms of atoms in a void. The neoliberal market model of how life should work.
Machines are a system of switches, levers, ratchets, cranks, cogs, pulleys, pistons, etc. Hard constraints on volatile explosions. Everything becomes predictable as accidents are ruled out. They are made impossible and so can no longer be a cause you need to worry about. You just fill a tank, let the explosive potential go bang at precisely timed moments. Then all the mechanical parts twist and turn in a concert of strict "cause and effect", while the spent products of the explosion get shoved out the exhaust or radiated away by another level of machinery that is a heat exchange mechanism.
Mechanical causality is also what is natural when turning logical relations into computer circuits. You design a machinery of switches and transducers, plug in the electric flow and cool the resulting entropy production. Data become the virtual atoms banging about in their virtual void, clumping or scattering according to how the algorithms are driving their patterns.
So the natural world has a rich causality. The engineered world has its impoverished version. But simplicity is the easiest thing to get built. We learn to come at life's problems as if being asked: now how would a mechanism best handled this little chore.
I was just saying that the links in the chain of events you listed represent two very different types of cause. I wasn't intending that to be an argument or contradiction to what you're saying.
Heres a counter to apokrisiss treatment of causality from an enactivist perspective. Im curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood.
Causality cant be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isnt a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. In the enactive framework, context isnt an add-on or backdrop but constitutive of meaning and action. The salt marsh doesnt just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; its part of the organismenvironment system.
Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. These causal relations are open-ended, historical, and enacted, not closed or total. Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. Its not that the atom has freedom and the void constrains it; rather, the atomvoid system is a co-defined relation, a process without independent parts.
OK, how would you describe "changes in energy", while avoiding the notion of Causation? Einstein noted that Energy can be mathematically transformed into Mass/Matter (E=MC^2). But what is the Cause of that form-change? Is it just random fluctuations of Quantum Fields? Hence acausal? Or is it scientists just playing around : smashing atoms with a Cyclotron, to see what pops out?
If "all there is is energy", then what causes the hypothetical universal Quantum Field to fluctuate, to change, to evolve? Why not just be? If "energy is all there is", does that mean the god-like power to cause positive (non-random) change (evolution) is eternal, existing prior to the Big Bang? Could that eternal field of Energy be forever creating new worlds, as in the Multiverse hypothesis?
Scientists don't seem to know the details of how the Energy transformations*1 occur. But energy transformations are essential to the concept of Causation*2 in physical change. In this thread though, I'm talking about Causation as a philosophical concept. If you want to explore that, we can get into it. But I warn you, it involves Metaphysics. If you don't like the AI summaries below, just click on the link and you can go to the human-authored sources of information. :smile:
*1. Energy Transformation :
Through all of these transformation chains, the potential energy stored at the time of the Big Bang is later released by intermediate events, sometimes being stored in several different ways for long periods between releases, as more active energy. All of these events involve the conversion of one kind of energy into others, including heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_transformation
Note --- Potential Energy has no physical properties, because it's an ideal concept, not a real thing.
*2. Energy causation :
describes how one event causes another by the transfer or transformation of energy, where the initial energy is the source of the effect.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=energy+causation
Note --- If you trace the transformations of energy back far enough, you will bump into the "Initial Energy" that Aristotle called "First Cause".
*3. The Metaphysics of Causation :
Metaphysical causality concerns the fundamental nature of the causal relationship itself, investigating what causes and effects are, what the causal relation is, and how it works, rather than simply identifying cause-and-effect pairs. It explores different ways of understanding this link, such as through regularities between events, counterfactual dependence (if not for the cause, the effect wouldn't occur), causal powers, mechanisms, or interventions. Philosophers also distinguish between metaphysical causation, where the connection doesn't rely on natural laws, and nomological causation, where it does.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=the+metaphysics+of+causation
Note --- Causation is a relationship, not an object. Nomological Causation is a philosophical notion, not a physical thing. Nomological : "principles, such as laws of nature, that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are simply taken as true." ___Oxford Dictionary
Quoting T Clark
Yes. intermediate causes*4 are arbitrary & subjective. That's why Aristotle coined the term First Cause, which is a logical necessity, like the final number on the number line, not a physical object. The Big Bang is one kind of First Cause, but it didn't put to rest philosophical conjectures about prior causes. Divine Creation is another kind of Cause. So, Causation is a useful concept for Science and Philosophy, but as you noted, it is unavoidable, metaphysical, and non-empirical. So, we can debate til the cows come home. :joke:
*4. What is the Ultimate Cause? :
The idea that "energy is causal" can be understood in two primary ways: as a philosophical concept suggesting causation is the flow or transfer of energy, and in a more practical sense where energy consumption has a measurable causal impact on economic growth and other systems, though the direction and nature of this causality can be complex and context-dependent.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=energy+is+causal
Note --- Exchanges of Energy are merely intermediate causes. So, in order to understand Causation philosophically, you need to go back to the origin of the causal chain of events*5. Unfortunately, the Big Bang begs the question of where the Causal Force & Natural Laws --- that explain the subsequent evolution of the world, from simplicity to complexity --- originated.
*5. An ultimate cause is a deep, underlying reason or a historical, evolutionary factor that explains why something exists or occurs, answering the "why" question in terms of its adaptive significance and long-term origins.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ultimate+cause+definition
But that is the metaphysical architecture that sets up the dynamic interplay over time. It is boiling causality down into the logical account rather than describing it in terms of the blooming, buzzing confusion one might appear to experience.
Quoting Joshs
Again you are saying the same thing. Just in a more touchy feely way.
Quoting Joshs
But not everything is living and embodied in Nature. You need a model of causality that is large enough to even hopefully account for the reason why a Cosmos would exist. And one that goes beyond flowery words to have mathematical and quantifiable consequences.
Quoting Joshs
But the argument is that freedoms and constraints co-emerge. In logic, that is what being a dichotomy means. That which is formed by being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
Interesting. This isnt my area, so all I can do is ask naive questions. Are you saying Joshs view is mistaken, or just a partial account? Im also curious, in light of the first quote above, are you any kind of theist or idealist, or is your position purely rooted in a scientific model of reality? Do you see causality as foundational for how we understand the universe? I can never tell with questions like this; is it something baked into reality, or, like Kants time and space, is it something built into human cognition?
Something that interests me greatly is the singularity of the effect that cannot be reduced. Its irreducible novelty with respect to regularity (same causes, same effects) which similarity is its condition. The central question, for me, is how singularity occurs, rather than a theory of the regularities of nature (causality as regularity), which for me remains an abstraction from the real production of becoming as singularity. Classical theorie of causality cannot account for the singular (that which is neither particular nor universal but a difference and novelty).
The mistake would be to not expect some well justified dichotomy to emerge where one can point to a disagreement. So if I am successfully taking things to one extreme a formal metaphysics then there is no good reason why that would not have as its "other" the exact opposite approach, which is both equally extreme and equally valid. That way, between them, they would be both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. They would together arrive at the limits of what could be usefully said.
So his reply is not necessarily mistaken or partial. It just could be. And the only way to find out is reply in kind and see where the dialogue goes. At the very least I should emerge with my own view on what is rightfully the other to my formal metaphysical account of causality. Which may be very much like the direction he proposes, or different in interesting and important ways.
Quoting Tom Storm
My view of Nature is in the systems science tradition. So not theist (although it is only over the past century that the scientific and mathematical part of the deal has started to carry its weight). And only idealist in the epistemic sense, and in the deflationary ontic sense.
So I believe in the reality of structures, for example. Nature just can't help forming itself into rational patterns. It is almost as if material being as a form and end in mind. But that is now the poetic and metaphorical way of putting it. I can be comfortable with that because there are some very exact mathematical models and scientific theories which give the detailed account of why this would feel to be the case just from everyday experience of the world.
Why is a tree or mountain range beautiful? Because that is Nature expressing its scale symmetry its most basic fractal pattern. And what then is a fractal? Well maths shows us how they are generated from recursive algorithms. They are log/log or powerlaw distributions. They are just what you have to get when you pair global constraints with local freedoms in the most cosmically general fashion.
So that would be an example of tying the two sides of this discussion together. On the one thing, I have my lived experience. Surround me with trees and mountains rather than garden sculptures and blocky buildings. Now I am seeing true natural beauty and not that other thing of a cheaply made realm of mechanical artifice.
But then ask me about why trees and mountains are beautiful and I could bore you to tears with the maths of fractals and how that reveals the true metaphysical bones of reality. One can also then like the Platonic perfection of perfect circles and triangles, straight lines and perpendicular angles. But now that is about the other side to this maths of reality.
One needs a symmetry that can be broken to get anything going at all. And fractal symmetry is about symmetry breaking achieved over all its possible scales. Symmetry breaking taken to the other thing of its limit where it must halt as itself an emergent scale symmetry. The "other" to how it began.
So science is in touch with its idealist side. But this cashes out in a belief in the inescapable truths of rational order. Nature can't escape falling into its particular patterns. Nature has to have its deep causal structure. And learning that doesn't have to make one love trees and mountains any less. Instead, it should expand one's appreciation of being alive in a Universe such as we find it.
Who needs creating gods when ontological structure just has no option but to fall into place exactly as it does accidents and all? And why else would our soul feel so attuned to natural beauty if we couldn't somehow see the rightness of what is before our eyes. The poetic way of saying all this that @Joshs might prefer to a disquisition on formal logic and maths.
Quoting Tom Storm
Causality is foundational.
Of course, we are only making models of it. But the models are of something real if we believe in the pragmatic method of reasoning. If our models make mathematical predictions that our methods of observation and measurement then support with evidence.
The question then becomes what is this most general model of reality. Is it exactly the same size as the Cosmos it describes? Or does it need to be larger as we need to be able to imagine a cause so general that it could produce any kind of "Universe". Or can it only instead always be smaller simply because the true causes are somehow transcendent and ineffable. We are fools as humans to think we can encompass existence with our little bag of mathematical tricks.
I of course want a model of causality that accounts for both cosmology and mind. A pansemiotic model to give it a brand name.
So a model that predicts all that we can observe and doesn't overstep the mark by predicting stuff that just starts to sound idiotic.
Such as you get with multiverse talk for example. The idea of a reality so unconstrained by unity that it fractures into an infinity of universes of any type, and so where there is now not just this one semiotically-structured conscious "you" here in this one pansemiotically structured world, but an infinity of these "yous" living every version of your life. And indeed, an infinity of these "yous" also repeating exactly the same life in every detail. As given this kind of causality that lacks the extra property of finitude, infinity without limits is what you get. What you logically believe to be the true truth. The most truthy truth of them all.
So causality is foundational. It is always just our idea of reality. And yet also, one has a reality to check things with. Once you understand this is the game, the rest is just working out the details to the point you find a good reason to care.
Do humans need to do this for everyday living? Almost universally they prove that they can get by without any measurable degree of logical or mathematical or experimental rigour.
They can just see trees and mountains and imagine instead how much better things would look with as a flattened plaza with some public artwork and this year's version of fashionably blocky buildings. Even beauty can have its necessary other. Be determined by the eye of a beholder. Be considered as a celebration of all things civilised and well-machined.
Reality is dichotomies all the way down. Not turtles.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. Lots to think about.
Quoting apokrisis
I always thought it was contingencies all the way down. :razz: But then, Im not a philosopher, so I can afford to think what I do (for now), which is that so called reality is inaccessible, and all we can know are constructs, some of which work for our purposes, some do not. And perhaps thats enough: to navigate life by the models that seem to work (at least for a time), without pretending weve ever touched some "essence" beyond us. Is this what you are hinting at below?
Quoting apokrisis
This is enticing. Can you expand on the latter part of this para?
Quoting apokrisis
I wonder if this is unfair. Certainly there are examples of this. But there are also plenty of folk who dont care about philosophy and just see mountains and trees and want to preserve and nurture such things.
The impulse to destroy or "redevelop" is not a necessary byproduct of our ontology.
Nice OP!
I feel you have demonstrated less that cause is not a useful concept, but that the concept needs a lot of refinement to generalize beyond toy cases. The problem is that people want to take the toy concept and apply it to everything.
As you point out, "did X cause Y?" is almost always the wrong question, as there is almost never a single cause if an event. I think of cause and effect less like a segmented arrow (A causes B, which causes C, which causes...) and more like a directed graph (A, B, C together cause D, which, together with B and E, causes F ...)
To give a simplified example, think of a family tree, terminating with yourself at the bottom. Everyone you can reach by moving only up in the tree caused you. If you need to travel down to reach someone, they did not cause you. This is already a useful distinction. Moreover, every cause of you is more or less proximate, with your parents being the nearest.
In a family tree, every cause is necessary, none is sufficient. In the full spectrum of casual relationships all four permutations of necessary/sufficient are possible.
In a family tree there is a orderly relationship between causes and effects, where every effect has two immediate causes, four nearest proximate causes, 8 second nearest, and so on. In reality there is no such order. any event may have any number of causes, arising from anywhere on the graph. Effects of a cause may even simultaneously serve as a cause of the cause, in the case of feedback loops.
Moreover, there are an immense number of casual relationships omitted by the family tree (ie, your parents had sex, causing your mother's egg to be fertilized by your father's sperm, causing...) These are real, but irrelevant to the story the family tree is telling. Every casual account is a story that might be telling the truth, but never the whole truth. The whole truth is beyond the scope of human communication, but that is not to say it is unreal. The whole truth is the God's Eye view of casual reality. Every casual story filters the vast majority of reality out, to tell something focused and specific about the events it tries to describe.
This is to me a sketch of a sketch of a more general account of casualty.
Quoting T Clark
Quoting apokrisis
Wouldn't one response be, T Clark, that identifying a dichotomy also depends on were you look? That what constitutes a dichotomy is also a matter of convention, at least as much as a matter of fact?
But further, it's not clear that making such a move would be at odds with what Apo has to say. After all, isn't viewing nature in the systems science tradition one choice amongst many - a matter of convention?
Now, there's a tongue twister. Not many times you can honestly say a person has the honor of creating a unique sentence no man has ever uttered before. Not a coherent one, at least. Bravo. :100:
Though is there a slight chance of reducing its complexity just a smidgen? I'll give it a go:
"Things that vary upon other things"
Or does that simply remove any and all value you attributed to such?
I have taken a look at it and I do not see the connection with what I have said. Probability imitates reality through similarity and subsumes it into the predictable. What I am talking about is very different from the predictable; it is something that cannot be predicted and consists of the production of the real as a unique, unrepeatable event. This is related to the nature of time, in which each moment is absolutely unique.
I'm lost. Confused. Is what we are calling mechanistic cause the same as efficient cause. That was what I intended. It's Newtonian cause. f = ma; F = G(m?m?)/r²; and then updated by general relativity and quantum mechanics. Me pushing a shopping cart, throwing a ball. Also included are all the things that happen with no people around--a billion light years from here.
I think you and I speak a different language.
Quoting apokrisis
As you wrote--pushing buttons and pulling levers.
Quoting apokrisis
By this do you mean rich efficient causality? Please describe to me how that works. How it's different from f = ma.
What are the two types of causes? I was trying to limit my discussion to efficient cause. Did I fail?
And the other response would be it depends where you find it?
Quoting Banno
So what are these many other choices that you have in mind?
Isn't it odd how when you thrash about looking for them as with Gallow's SEP article on (token~type)x(constant~variable) you arrive at a little four valued table. The cross product of a dichotomy of dichotomies. One not at all unlike Aristotle's own four causes. Just renamed as token causation, type causation, token influence and type Influence. :grin:
So when it comes to models of causality, we find that they tend towards either the triadicity of a hierarchical holism or the monism of a substance reductionism. And that these both arise out of the dualism of an initial dichotomisation. A very simple idea like a world that has causes and so effects. This first thought can then be developed into its complementary triadic and monistic extremes.
The whole deal ends up unified as a unity of opposites of course as, at the end of the day, the triadic view is the irreducible one. Holism has the generality that can incorporate reductionism into it as its particularised case. The Peircean argument.
So your "matter of convention" is more a nod here to woke diversity as the socially appropriate thing to be saying in a public forum these days. It is the necessary presupposition that conditions all the philosophy that feels axiomatically correct in terms of modern cultural convention. It puts one already on the correct side of any debate that could be had in a forum such as PF.
One simply must be a pluralist, an anti-totaliser, a believer in multitudes, an absolutist in value judgements to be a member of the club. One couldn't dream of being anything else in the polite and refined circles of philosophical discussion. Systems thinking sounds so ... horribly and tiresomely plebeian. So non-U.
And yet maths tells us that even chaos is a structured pattern.
One never arrives at the sound of the one hand clapping. The clapping just get weaker and weaker until it finally seems to fade completely away. :wink:
Quoting Tom Storm
Does one need to wonder about why the ant turned left rather than right? Well we could drill down to those causes. And indeed we did in my biology classes where we ran cockroaches on one-sided treadmills to see how that confused them into thinking they had made an unwanted turn.
But I mean, in our models of the world, we only have to be right for all practical purposes. We don't need to know everything to know enough.
Quoting Tom Storm
But what happens when the greenie and the developer meet to discuss their mutual prejudices? Doesn't the frustration soon rise to the point where each must assert their dominance in terms of some moral absolutism?
Or don't you talk to developers much. What do you make of a spectacle like Trump telling the UN that climate change is the world's biggest hoax?
You might enjoy this video on the guy who tried to bottle the patterns of architectural form that humans find the most convivial. You will note that it is not completely fractal nor completely mechanical in its design. It indeed answers best to what we, as social creatures with biological requirements, find the most liveable in those terms.
So it is not black and white. Maths and feelings may be opposing limits in a discussion of beauty. But the focus can be tightened in from the Cosmos and self as the universal whole, to groups of people building the villages that sustain a community. We can develop an architecture of the everyday in terms of just that narrowed scope of pragmatic inquiry.
I was using Collingwood's definition of metaphysics, not specifically causality. My claim is that causality is a metaphysical principle. It can't be verified or falsified empirically. He does talk about causality in "An Essay on Metaphysics" and I interpret his understanding of cause as being similar to what I call efficient cause. Here is what he has to say:
Quoting R.W. Collingwood
I find Collingwood difficult sometimes, so I'm not really sure if what he calls action without cause--type (c) in his classification, is the same thing I am talking about.
Quoting Joshs
Aren't you talking about what I've called "probabilistic causality" or "complex systems?" As I noted in the OP, I see those as evidence that the idea of cause is not a useful one.
In the OP I've given specific examples of situations where changes take place but it is not useful to use the term "causality." Many people here have disagreed with my characterization.
Not sure if we even live on the same planet. :up:
Quoting T Clark
So you have differential equations. And you have a notion of a world populated by objects. A world of medium-sized dry goods as the metaphysician would scoff. You believe in both causal agents and causal agency as there are laws that apply everywhere in spacetime but also all the things a person might choose or want to do at some point in a vast Cosmos.
There is indeed a reason for confusion. You have glimpses of fragments and they all seem to come from different puzzles. This could take a while.... :grin:
This is the point I'm trying to make. What does it add to the discussion to talk about causality instead of just describing the "blooming, buzzing confusion?" My answer--not much, and it misleads people into thinking there is a simple chain of events when, in reality, there is a complex system of interactions. That misunderstanding has significant consequences when you try to go about figuring out what buttons to push and levers to pull.
I'm not sure what you mean in this context. Previously I suggested just describing the conditions rather than attributing causality. Is that the same thing you are talking about.
And there will be those who just love such an answer.
But there is a reason why pragmatism describes it as the natural state of the newborn helpless babe when thrust kicking and screaming into the strange new world.
We start with the simple things so as to move on to the complicated things. Or in your case, its a shrug of the shoulders? Once you seem to be getting by, why should other folk still be working hard to get ahead?
I looked up "propensity probability" on Wikipedia and it said this:
Quoting Wikipedia
That seems like a patch to me. A patch to cover the hole in the idea of causality related to what I called as probabilistic causality.
Thank you.
Quoting hypericin
Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree.
Quoting hypericin
The question I've been asking is--if it is such a complex system of events, why bring the idea of causality into it at all. Why not just describe the system? To be clear, I acknowledge it is possible to express just about any situation in the language of causality, it's just that in many, most, cases it doesn't add anything to the discussion.
To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what @apokrisis means by "dichotomy" in this context.
I see what you mean, but I tried to keep human intention out of the question. I can see I kind of slipped some in.
Even I'm not sure the US is on the same planet as everyone else these days.
Quoting apokrisis
It's clear from this thread I'm working on pulling my thoughts on this subject together. I don't think that's the same thing as glimpsing fragments from different puzzles.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I knew I was in trouble when you brought Peircian triads into the discussion.
Quoting apokrisis
A bit condescending.
It has nothing to do with that. In fact, what I am talking about hardly has anything to do with the issue of causality. It is simply to express the inadequacy of causality as it is classically understood (linear, regular, general, proportional, etc.) with respect to the irreducible novelty of becoming. In my view, you are looking for a theory that continues to subsume the case to the generality of a law and its universals. I am also looking for a better law or principle that accounts for the production of the singular, which is neither particular nor universal, neither general nor specific.
Quoting JuanZu
Peirce had a theory of tychism or objective chance. And that justified his "propensity" approach to probability. The claim is that chance or indeterminism is a real fact of reality. And that then makes synechism or the forming of long-term habits evolving into patterns of regularity a real fact of reality too.
So you want the thing of the irreducible novelty. But the best you are going to get is the dichotomy of irreducible chance and inescapable pattern forming. The development of a world organised by its propensities or dispositions. Neither chaotic nor rigid, but the balance that is being a system constrained towards desired ends while employing uncertain means.
Peirce built a whole logic around this concept. Quantum physics now produces a whole world. :grin:
Quantum tunneling is an example of being able to make that jump into the future which proves to be the way you could have just escaped from that past. A fluctuation that could hurdle a barrier. An action, but also one meeting the constraints of being a "least" kind of one. The briefest time for which the right amount of energy could be borrowed for.
So matter which way you turn in causality, there is always going to be a dichotomy. And an irreducible novelty can be classed in semiotic terms as a difference that makes a difference. A fluctuation that also has a distinct meaning.
So tychism asserts that reality is basically a spontaneity of fluctuation. A vacuum state. A sea of difference that is generally a state of indifference, yet also capable of generating events that make a difference. A random action can start something, as in the example of sandpiles and their critical state.
A trickle of sand for a while just piles up. But then its slopes reach a critical angle. Some next falling sand grain is the one to break the camel's back or buckle the beam. It strikes just right to trigger a sand avalanche. And do the system resets, having to build its slope back up, then wait for some random grain to make history by again becoming the difference that made a difference.
I presume you want more from what you mean by "novelty". But in physics and Peircean metaphysics, this kind of complex systems approach is your best starting point. The idea that everything starts from a state of poised criticality. For a long time nothing seems to be happening, and suddenly it does. Thom's catastrophe theory. Linear change becomes non-linear change as a sudden phase transition.
Switching models again there are so many think of the ball resting on the dome or the pencil on its tip. Spontaneous symmetry breaking. So many directions to go, only one will get picked. So many things could be accused of rocking the ball or the pencil off its perfect balance, but even the smallest imaginable fluctuation is already in causal terms enough. Sufficient. We don't even have any good reason to try to single it out. Some air molecule could have done it. Somebody coughing in another room and faintly vibrating the building.
So the irreducible novelty, the difference that makes the difference, is the smallest nudge within the most critically poised context. No bigger nudge was needed. And no less poised context would have worked. There had to be these two things in some exact reciprocal relation that one could measure even down to the Planck scale of the quantum.
Again, every way you turn, there will be a dichotomous structure to causality. Novelty is just then the badge of honour pinned on the lapel of the difference that turned out to make the difference. It could make a difference because it was indeed a difference. But it made a different kind of difference to all the other difference. It actually changed its own world in some obvious fashion. The pencil toppled, the ball rolled, the slope slide, the particle tunnelled, the beam buckled.
The thing the propensity that was always the inevitability indeed eventually happened. And it was also as "accidental" as such a thing could be. It was hard to have picked it out in a crowd of exactly-similar looking events in a context that was also "all the same" in being loaded to the gills in a state of critical tension poised for some global topological transition. A world that would never be quite the same again.
Don't be insulted. Even a rag bag of fragments is not only as far as most folk get in knitting together their lives into some sort of semblance of a coherent whole, it is even a respectable achievement in the eyes of PoMo types like @Joshs and @Banno. They call it bricolage. A nice French term for do it yourself. Grab whatever is at hand and whack up some kind of art work.
[[Whisper it softly: there is then a bit of a feud going on in the bricolage camp.
Some talk as if this creative reassembly is a crafty rearrangement of stable elements. Others angrily protest that life must instead involve an ongoing emergence and transformation of the found elements.
Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum!]]
PoMo - How rude! :rofl:
Im not insulted at all. I was just making an observation. I think this post confirms my observation is correct.
I understand this, but I think its not a useful way of looking at things.
I intentionally left out instances where a human motivation was involved because I wanted to avoid the complications associated with that. I think the difference between the billiard balls and the inoculations is the difference between a very simple instance where efficient cause probably does make sense and a more complicated one where it might not.
Im with you. The sheer amount of causal theories is mind-boggling.
But Ive come to prefer a version of the so-called Transference theory of causation, where causation ought to be reduced to the transference of physical conserved quantities, like momentum or energy, from one object to another. Though Im not sure I believe in physical conserved quantities, it is at least intuitive and empirical to say that one object hitting another caused the other to move.
But if every action is matched by an equal and opposite reaction, then who actually pushed whom Newton? What happens when you are an astronaut and throw your wrench? How can it be that you are now sailing backwards? Intuitively and empirically?
Im not sure we can treat apparent structure as anything other than contingent, it may simply reflect the methods we use to measure and make sense of the world. Since Im not a mathematical Platonist, Im open to the idea that mathematics is created rather than discovered, and so the structures and patterns we observe may tell us more about how we construct our experience than about any inherent order in what we assume to be reality. But this is still an unsettled matter, and Im about as close to being an expert as Donald Trump is to being a statesman.
Quoting apokrisis
Yep. And we dont even need to know "true" things to make successful interventions in the world. for instance, the AristotelianPtolemaic model imagined an Earth-centred universe with planets and stars fixed on rotating celestial spheres. Although utterly wrong today, it successfully predicted celestial motions, eclipses, and calendars for centuries. It also provided a successful aid to navigation by allowing predictions of star positions
Quoting apokrisis
As it happens, I work in an organization that collaborates with government and corporations, and Ive been involved in development in modest ways. I also know developers and how they operate. Often cunts by my standards.
As for your example, every position can be framed with a set of narratives designed to persuade others in one direction or another. Usually, money ends up being the deciding factor, but not always. Community organizing, lobbying, advocacy, and education can achieve remarkable results. Still, Im always aware that my cause is just one of many competing values in a world where most things are ultimately for sale. And in the end, what we are really talking about is human behaviour, a product of culture and language and not some true order of nature. Or something like this.
But right there you point to the core dynamic that organises society - a balance between competition and cooperation - and then shrug your shoulders and say there seems to be no natural order in the way humans collectively organise.
You can see it but you cant see it.
I'm not saying this is the natural order. I'd say it applies to the West (and certainly in my patch) and it's the contingent product of capitalism and culture. My Aboriginal friends here tell me that this process isnt a part of First Nations culture. I suspect that the Western hegemonic tradition may have inflicted this on most of the planet today, but I wouldnt call this a natural order any more than I would say that about the dominance of neoliberalism.
What I do think most humans do is look for regularities and patterns. But to what extent these are features of reality or products of our cognition is, for me, still an open question.
Ive come to the same sort of conclusion you have looking at cause, efficient cause, is a question of the transfer of energy. That doesnt change the primary question in this thread, i.e. is the whole idea of causality useful in most situations? My answer is no or at least maybe not
As with many, if not most, disagreements on this forum, the controversy hinges on the definition of key terms. For example, Aristotle's Four Causes include A> mechanistic sequences that show no local signs of intention (Material cause), and B> before/after relationships that are attributed, by scientists, to inputs of energy (Efficient cause), plus C> what exists/happens by definition (Formal cause) : it just is what it is. But perhaps the most contentious, although common, kind of Cause is D> the result of some agent's Intention/Reason (Final cause). Are you denying all of those kinds of Causation, or just one or two?
I can agree that Mechanical progressions may seem to be "uncaused", in that the next step merely follows the prior, with no apparent reason. Unless you zoom-out to look for the First or Final Cause of the system as a whole. In the case of a mechanical clock, the First Cause is the design of the spring & gear mechanism, and the Final is the desire or intention to keep track of the passage of Time.
However, as far as we know, almost all physical Changes result from Energy inputs or outputs. Some energetic transformations cannot be traced to any agent, other than Nature. So I suppose you could call that event/happening Change Without Cause*1. But scientists & philosophers tend to assume Universal Causation as an axiom, despite the rare exceptions.
The best known case of physical Change without any knowable prior Cause or Determination occurs on the quantum scale of reality*2. Which suggests that Reality may be fundamentally Random. And yet, few scientists or philosophers accept that Chance or Fate, makes rational understanding impossible. They just admit that some outlier Causes, on the periphery of perception, are not inferable due to the incompleteness or ambiguity of the evidence.
Since I can't refute the indeterminate events involving quantum "wave/particles", I must admit that our world seems to have an undercurrent of Randomness. But that is the exception, not the rule. Is your argument "against Cause" limited to events on the margins of human cognizance, or is it generalizable to "against God" (the First Cause)? :smile:
*1. A "change without cause" philosophy explores whether effects can exist without causes, a concept challenged by the principle of universal causation but also suggested by phenomena like radioactive decay and certain quantum events. While classical philosophy upholds strict causality, modern science and philosophy acknowledge the possibility of uncaused events, influencing views on free will and the nature of randomness. Philosophers like Zhuangzi have also described spontaneous, non-coercive change that aligns with this idea by respecting the inherent nature and context of things rather than imposing a cause
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=change+without+cause+philosophy
*2. "Acausal Quantum event " refers to quantum phenomena or theories where events lack a conventional, predictable cause, challenging the classical understanding of cause-and-effect. This doesn't mean there's no reason for an event, but rather that the cause isn't known or doesn't exist, as in the random timing of radioactive decay. More recently, "quantum acausal" also describes experiments that show events can occur in an indefinite causal order, where the sequence of cause and effect is uncertain, as if both "A causes B" and "B causes A" are happening simultaneously
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quantum+acausal
Thank you for the references. I will take a look to see if I can find something that suits me.
In the OP and subsequent posts, I think Ive made it reasonably clear what Im talking about when I say causality.
Quoting Gnomon
This is not true. Many do not.
Competition-cooperation is the balancing act necessary to live as a society. Although humans are then also still shaped by the dominance-submission hierarchies that are the natural order in social creatures who lack the language to organise at a cultural level.
So it is the balance that is the necessary part of the equation. And the lifestyle that is contingent in the sense that different lifestyles tend towards different balances in what a culture demands.
A traditional foraging culture will be different from a settled farming community, which will be different from a nomad pastoralist lifestyle, which will be different from a modern neoliberal economy or authoritarian police state.
But each such lifestyle still has to find a collective balance of these forces - both the cultural habits of competition and cooperation, and the neurobiological habits of dominance and submission - that works. That promotes the long term stability of a collective social identity in a world that always changes, especially in terms of how that collective social identity is doing things to transform its landscape, attempt to transform its world.
Couldnt resist. :razz: How can you, or anyone else, uphold responsibility sans the whole idea of causality?
I, and I can only affirm many another, find the notion of responsibility useful, as in, for one lighthearted example, Im responsible for the contents of this post, not you or anyone else. And this because this post would not exist without my having caused it in some way or another (a partial cause, a sufficient cause, a necessary cause, etc., all these possibilities and more all being contingent on the occurrence of causation to begin with).
Herewith the lurking dichotomous bum biting alternative:
Quoting apokrisis
[quote=Skeeter Davis]Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more[/quote]
Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents.
[quote=Lewis Carrol]Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?
What the magic that charms the glad babe in her arms,
Till it cooes with the voice of the dove?
'Tis a secret, and so let us whisper it low
And the name of the secret is Love!
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love,
For I'm sure it is nothing but Love![/quote]
[quote=John Keats]O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."[/quote]
Yep. It finally seems clear. You feel the notion of causality is too simple to deal with the complexities of reality. Applying its simple rules quickly becomes defeated by the fact that reality is just too much to be boiled down into chains of cause and effect. Everything is too networked, too interdependent, too full of feedback and strange loops. Stuff emerges. Things are transformed. Growth and development leave linear tales of cause and effect fast behind.
Which is all true. But that is only to say that Nature is not a machine. A machine is designed to have a mechanical logic, a cause and effect linearity. It can be described in terms of a blueprint and a system of differential equations. But Nature is irreducibly complex. Or at least that is the conclusion of the systems science tradition that has sought a better model of natural causality - the causality of a cosmos - since philosophy first started cranking up.
Greek holism came before Greek atomism. Although not by that much as holism and reductionism are themselves a neat dichotomistic pairing of the metaphysical options. Aristotle entered the chat a few centuries after it got going and brought some coherent sense to both sides of this causal debate.
Anyway, the issue is clearly understood. Nature has its causal structure. That is bleeding obvious. And it is not a mechanical one. Or at least only in part. So a complex world gets to have a complex model of its causality. Aristotle sketched out the four becauses which would helpfully cover all the bases that needed to be covered.
All four causes would in some sense have effects. But already the effects could be broadly divided into constraining or limiting effects - effects like global laws - and constructing effects - effects like physical degrees of freedom. Effects like material and efficient causes that construct the linear tales of how one thing leads to another thing in little chains, that might then aspire to the complexity of networks with feedback loops.
And even networks of such networks that were arranged in levels of scale, or hierarchies of networks connected in feedback loops. And beyond that, even the hierarchical order that comes as networks of feedback show emergent behaviour and become organised by symmetry breaking and phase transitions. Networks that change state in the way gas condenses to liquid, and liquid crystallises into solid.
So we can say causes have effects. But then comes the complexity - the complexity that Nature demands from its would-be modellers.
The world divides neatly into its tale of global constraints in interaction with its local constructive freedoms. Its system of natural laws and the individuates action they regulate. And the maths and the logic have to follow that divide. As a field of research, this was making strong progress even 150 years ago. We had non-linear maths. We had statistical mechanics. But it was the invention of the computer that put a rocket under the maths of complexity and chaos theory.
Massively large calculations could hope to do a reasonable approximation of the intricate patterns of connection that make up any natural system. One could simulate the weather, the internals of a proton, the boom and bust of fishing stocks or stock markets. Networks of feedback arranged into hierarchies of such networks over logarithmic scale. Throw in phase transition behaviour too. Its all become standard causal modelling.
Go to any lecture on theories of cosmic inflation and the modellers have to present their computer simulations of the physics that their particular model predicts. Go to any climate change conference and researchers will offer the latest update on how then Gulf Stream is faring and how close it seems to a radical phase change that will flip its course,
So metaphysics offers us a unified story of the natural logic of natural systems. And we also get a sub-model of atomistic reduction out of that exercise for free. We get the other thing of a mechanical notion of reality - nature imagined now as a reductionist machinery.
Then maths and science come along. It begins to model nature in reductionist and mechanical terms as that is the simplest place to start. You walk before you run. And also, society got immediate payback on building up a new mechanised form of itself. Reductionism was a partial model of causality that really worked down here on the face of a planet where we had already transformed its ecology by the technology of farming and were tantalised by the prospects of a collective social mechanisation.
Then this in itself became a networked feedback process. To control Nature better, we had to improve our causal models. We had to learn how to deal with complexity and chaos at the level of our maths and science. We had to be able to make useful predictions that could incorporate all the nonlinearity and uncertainty that Nature actually contains.
So these days, using computers to crunch numbers into hugely intricate patterns of hierarchical recursion, we can predict the weather, get the right numbers for the interior of a proton, manage fisheries, even start to model the kinds of things that humans would say to each other in natural language responses if they were trying to be both socially pleasant and objectively reasonable. The large language model that simulates our collective intelligence.
So does the fact that cause and effect models seem too limited to encompass the real world mean they are effectively useless as you wanted to argue?
Well the history of humanity seems to suggest no. The problem is more the lag between the partial reductionst models and the later arrival of the more holistic models. We are already running at one level of inquiry before having learnt to walk at the next.
So why just two parents? Why this complementary thing of a penis and a vagina, a sperm and an egg, the birth of a girl or a boy?
And if love makes the world go round, does hate bring it to a stop? Or doesnt another song says love brought their world to a sudden stop.
All this talk of love from you. And yet Im not feeling love from you. Curious. Poetry employed in an act of social aggression.
I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up:
Well, not all sex (child begetting sex included) is endowed with some degree of love. Sometimes, it can be pure hate and tyranny. But point taken.
Still, instantiations such as the latter cases of rape do attest to the fact that some adult humans become utterly immune to it. Love is to them a false promise, hence an utter falsity, hence a wrong reality to uphold, or, more simply, a wrong. Notwithstanding, duly agreed with the proposition: (universal) love is that which makes the world go round. And it can radiate from within individual humans as well, albeit always imperfectly. Or, in Peirces own terms, this would be agapism (his whole take on the evolution of natural laws and such makes no rational sense without the concept, but thats Peirce for you).
How do you know that I even have any, physical, metaphorical, or what not? :razz:
And no, replied to @unenlightened about what i so far find to be facts. That's what up. :up:
Unfortunately, what you are talking about may be clear in your own mind, but it's not clear to my simple mind. That's why I asked categorical questions in my previous post. Philosophical dialogues typically begin with controversial assertions, and followed with definitions & examples to support some generalization that is not generally accepted.
I'm trying to see if you are simply denying absolute Determinism, or denying God, or making the more radical assertion of a completely In-Determinate wandering-in-state-space universe. The link below*1 may offer a clue to your position, that I didn't find in the OP. :smile:
*1. Causality is an illogical (illusory) concept within a rigorously deterministic universe.
Sean Carroll:
"The idea that'cause and effect' isnt fundamental to the workings of the universe hasnt spread as widely as it should have, despite the efforts of smart people such as Bertrand Russell. In this first section of the book, I sketch how we moved from a picture of the universe animated by causes and reasons to one that obeys patterns, without the need for anything to cause it or sustain it."
https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1huxxlr/causality_is_an_illogical_illusory_concept_within/
Note --- What's the difference between a universe that obeys Logical Laws, and one that "obeys Patterns"? Who or what determined the predictable patterns that Newton deduced, and mathematized, from his observations of the solar system? Another word for Pattern is "Design".
Yep. The kind of facts one finds in Hallmark cards. And PF apparently.
You know, fallible me, but you seem to hold a grudge against what I said. As though you were insulted by it. Yet I still maintain that love/agapism is not a wrong. Your potential hurt feeling aside.
The invitation in your OP was to consider how we use the word"cause", and you showed that causal chains and inferring probabilistic causes are quite different ways of speaking.
Quoting Banno
And here is Banjo to join the mean girls with his usual constipated approach to insult. Ohh sir, sir! Well apparently. And to some degree. But surely, surely. Oooh sir!
Quoting apokrisis
No, you pointed out gritty teeth speech. Now changing tune to something alluding to rationality, I see. So you find that "love is not a wrong" to be in need of justification? Before I start, first reply contra what so that I might see what all the opposition is about. Is it that the good can only be obtained via a balance between the good and the bad (to not bring in evil)? You want to uphold with a straight face that this is not self-contradictory?
A merely physical mythos cannot speak of such things.
My guess is that it would have something to do with entropy.
Quoting apokrisisThat's excellent! You should change your name to Banjo!
I thought you were talking about love. Why the sudden change of topic?
Does good and bad seem to make more sense if we are speaking generally about Nature as a whole? Does speaking of Nature as "universal love" make one loses grip on that straight face? Do we want to want to put our most extreme claims of transcendental being back in its bottle a while? Safer to move what's most fragile out of the way.
And to repeat what I have now had to say way to often, any dichotomy that I supported would be that thing which is a pair of complementary limits, not a pair of antagonistic ones. It is worth balancing two varieties of what is "good". And your metaphysical task is to be able to make that make sense.
One doesn't want to be evenly balance between good and evil, or even love and hate for that matter.
If we are talking the natural structure of pragmatic social order, this is why competition and cooperation work so well together. Each supplies something good and healthy that the other lacks. That is why they combine make the world feel complete. Give it a rounded shape if you like.
But keep spluttering away in suppressed fury. Love! LOVE!!! I tell you.
Or what you can only assert ever more vigourously in lieu of any credible argument.
Can you, like, give a rational answer to a simple, straightforward (and might I add not rude) question?:
Quoting javra
Now, just so it said, I won't apologize for implying that love is good. But since you here also quite emotively express things such as this with a good deal of resentment:
Quoting apokrisis
What on earth do you interpret by the term love/agape?
Yep. It's entropy all the way down.
Old. I am surprised that Apo was reduced to name calling so quickly.
And I am saying that if this is going to be a useful distinction one that has dichotomistic rigour you need to be able to tell me "as opposed to what?". How can I know what you think love is if you won't tell me what it isn't.
Is not-love = hate? Well hate seems make the world spin pretty fast too. If I am to agree with "love is not a wrong", you do seem to understand that a rational argument requires this dialectical framing. But you should also see that you are again jumping your categories.
If what is not a wrong is a right, then what is the actual wrong that makes love a right? If your answer is hate, then why would it even exist in a world where love is supposedly universal and all there is? I mean the math just doesn't add, does it?
Whereas my kind of dichotomies which are complementary and not antagonistic say fine. If love is the unity, what are the opposites it usefully combines.
And in social science, that would be competition and cooperation. Two forms of the good that go together splendidly. The basis of rational and civilised human social and economic order.
Or if an ethologist was invited to join the discussion, we might add in dominance and submission the way social animals achieve fruitful order in their pride, troop, herd and flock structures.
I posted this earlier in this thread.
Quoting T Clark
Thats why I dont claim the idea of causality is useless in all situations.
To you apathy, for one example, mild liking as another, are equivalent to hate?
(Who the heck am I debating here???)
Quoting apokrisis
Back to the issue of the good, then. As in, what is it that make either competition or cooperation good Though it was quite apparent that your problem was with love. It is to the latter that your replied to me, after all.
So, as to the good:
As you ought to rationally know, fallible me is not now, has never been, and will never be an embodiment of perfect love nor of absolute good. Neither, I could argue, can be any other spatiotemproally occurring being. But I think this is beginning to touch on the nerve that might have been struck in you to elicit all those emotively hurt feelings, or so it seems: "The Good", which, as is no news-flash, some affirm to be perfected love (one that transcends the interpersonal but is nevertheless immanent in all interpersonal instantiations of love), cannot of itself occur spatiotemporally. It is not something that has a dichotomy, but simply that toward which, at least some, aspire to get closer to. Which, I take to you, gets into that whole transcendent, platonic mush that you abhor?
Still, this is all now awfully off this thread's subject.
Right. So we can't survive, live, in a society without posing the question, at least implicitly, "who's responsible for what". But then, I find the same can be said of "what's responsible for what": what is responsible for my sink being clogged; what's responsible for my window not opening; and so forth. However they may be thought to do it, non-human animals too operate by discernment of the same, both in terms of who and what as being responsible for what. We humans just term this issue one of causation.
Now you are just making babbling noises.
Quoting javra
But never a topic I raised. And now you dont want to have to provide an answer. Curious.
Quoting javra
Wishful thinking. I dont see atheism as a term of abuse. Rather the opposite. But for you, metaphysics seems to be the sound of one hand clapping. Broken at base.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not enamored with you shifting the responsibility on me - especially since you then were actively antagonistic toward something which you, by the aforementioned comment, have no comprehension of.
But before i take off, here's a working definition of what in English is termed "love": Love (in all its forms and variants) is equivalent, in the broadest sense of the phrase, to "unity of being" - irrespective of whether that which is, being, consists of psyches or physicality.- this, either in perfected form, this being "The Good", or as movements (including purely psychological ones) toward an ever closer manifestation of unity of being.
As to the "poetic evidence" you so humbly asked for, there's a song called "The Gravity of Love" whose lyrics might suffice.
But, your returning unsurprising insults aside, here the thing: I dare you, triple dare you, to define "love" in a way that conflicts to the just offered definition.
Ciao.
A pretty thin metaphysics.
Well thank you for the reluctant charity. I certainly don't claim to be the incarnation of love, and my use of quotation rather than simple declaration might even suggest that to the charitable. But your suggestion
Quoting javra
There is no place in the attraction between electron and proton for consent or dissent. The love of the rapist is the love of power which is the love of the feeble. Since 'love' is somewhat a trigger word, it seems, I will back-track to 'like'. One cannot object to 'like' with any vehemence surely?
'Kangaroos like to hop'. @apokrisis likes to disdain. Systems like to dissipate.
Any minute now I'm going to invent the law of attraction, so I'll stop while I still can.
This is a great summary of the "blooming, buzzing confusion." Better than the one I've presented in the OP and my subsequent posts in this thread.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe this is where our differences start. From what I've observed, most people don't recognize the irreducibly complex reality you describe. For them, causality means simple systems--billiard balls. That's the curse of reductionism. That's what I'm talking about. Your complex and nuanced understanding of causality is not how most people understand it. We civil engineers don't work with machinery, we go out into nature and treat it as machinery. We're not the only ones.
Quoting apokrisis
I was going to mention numerical monitoring in my OP, but I didn't think I could do it justice. I'm not a modeler, but I have worked with them. We used groundwater and river flow models often in my work. I was going to use modeling as an example of the kinds of efforts required to overcome a knee-jerk dependence on causal processes. In a model you break up reality into little cells and apply simple causal processes within and between those cells. That just brings us back to my original question. When you're dealing with such a complex system, why do you need the idea of causality? Of course reality can be described using the language of cause, but why do it?
Quoting apokrisis
This makes sense to me.
Did you read all my posts? I'm guessing you didn't.
That's what I was trying to do. I don't think I've been very successful.
Again, I didn't say the idea of causality is never useful, only that it's usefulness is limited. I tried to give examples of what I was talking about in the OP.
Quoting javra
Causality is a human concept. Animals, at least the great majority of them, don't recognize causes. They just act in accordance with their nature given the conditions they encounter.
I dont have much to add here, but Ive enjoyed your OP and think you raise some significantly interesting ideas as Banno has summarised. The notion of cause has interested me for some time. My initial interest was in how the idea of cause applies to historical events (which is terribly fraught, slightly different and more nebulous to the matters you have raised). We know there is an impulse in human beings to make meaning and wrest order out of chaos, and central to this is being able to identify first principles.
Yes, the whole distinction between events that are intentional versus those that are not seems to complicate all of the discussions Ive looked at. As I noted earlier, thats why I avoided the whole subject of human causation. That doesnt mean none of the issues discussed in this thread is relevant.
You agree with this? I imagine its for facilitating survival and attempting to manage our environment. Making the wrong choice can harm or kill us. But its obviously more nuanced than my couple of sentences.
Yes. This is a point very specific to Peircean semiotics and hierarchy theory. But a relational view of reality is already more irreducibly complex than an atomistic one.
One thing can stand alone, however you have to have two things to relate. And then three things to have a hierarchical relation. The story that is a dichotomisation towards limits plus the spectrum of all the mixed states to be found inbetween.
If you have black and white as two complementary extremes, you must also have all the shades of grey which a black and white mixes. And that makes for a triadic story of complexity. This is a simplistic example. But you can see how it makes threeness the irreducible basis of a world with complex relations. Youve got to break possibility apart in a way it then can relate over all its scales of being.
Apply that logic then to all the dichotomies that Greek metaphysics left as it legacy. Chance-necessity, part-whole, discrete-continuous, integrate-differentiate, matter-form, one-many, and the rest. The Universe formed as a unity of opposites. The irreducible thing of two opposites and their relational unity.
Quoting T Clark
Well the crowd I mixed with were mainly ecologists and biologists.
Quoting T Clark
How could you - as an ecologist - even argue with someone who only thinks as a mechanist. If it is their actual causal model of reality where the issue lies, you have to be able to argue at the level of a different brand of causality.
A scientist is giving causal explanations just as the basis of what they do. What is an explanation if not an account of a structure of reasons?
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Maybe, but ordinary usage intervenes.
Off the top of my head, this makes sense to me, but I havent spent a lot of time thinking about intentional cause. I specifically left it out of this thread because I didnt want to complicate things.
Im a big fan of ordinary usage, but it comes into conflict with philosophers desire to make up new definitions and new words.
Quoting T Clark
No, that is the opposite of a toy case. By toy case I mean the simplified examples that may come to mind when considering causality, such as one billiard ball hitting another.
Quoting T Clark
Because cause is what people are often interested in. And precisely because systems are often complex, describing it is too much, if possible at all.
That A casually impinges on B is both of practical significance and is a metaphysical reality. That your history of smoking is a casual antecedent to your lung cancer, while brushing your teeth isn't, is an interesting and real feature of the world. But, as you point out, the way it is a casual antecedent is usually quite complex, in a way that the language of cause doesn't easily capture. The word "cause" seems to imply a billiard ball view, where the cause solely produced the effect, which confuses and obscuring the reality, especially of very complex events such as wars, elections, and ecologies. But this doesn't mean we should throw out casualty entirely.
Got ya. The view I have sympathy for at present is that meaning and order are products of our interactions with the world rather than features waiting to be uncovered. We create concepts, patterns, and laws as tools to navigate our experience. This makes me wonder, what would count as meaning that is independent or external to human thought?
But I can see how it would be argued that the daily sunrise or even the laws of logic are external to us. Im not entirely convinced, and I wonder to what extent the universe we know is a contingent product, not of some external truths, but of our cognitive apparatus. Similar, I suppose, to Kants notion that space and time are necessary conditions for any experience: they structure how we, as humans, perceive the world, rather than being properties of the world independent of us. But this is just an intuition, and I dont know enough philosophy to turn this into a more comprehensive picture. And as someone pragmatically inclined, reality as it might really be doesn't much matter.
If you can't thoroughly describe a system, you can't express it in terms of causes either.
Quoting hypericin
My point in this discussion is to show that causality is only of practical significance in a limited number of mostly artificial cases. I'm not sure what you mean by "metaphysical reality."
Quoting hypericin
I agree with this. The bolded text in particular states my position well. I don't propose to throw out causality entirely, but I would limit it's use to specific cases where it is useful.
I can never figure out what you mean when you talk about Peircean triads. Is it the degrees of freedom below, the constraints above, and the resulting phenomena?
Quoting apokrisis
Even as an engineer I was sometimes frustrated by the clunky, short-sighted approach, but those were the standards of practice.
Quoting apokrisis
Although I'm not a ecologist, that's what I'm trying to do here.
I don't see how it's possible to deny that there is order in the universe, regardless of humans perceiving it. If solid H2O sometimes floated in liquid H2O, and sometimes didn't If photons sometimes traveled at 299,792,458 mps, and sometimes didn't If electrons sometimes repelled each other, and sometimes didn't . if the strength of gravity sometimes followed the inverse square law, and sometimes didn't... On and on and on and on and on... It would be chaos if those things didn't [I]always[/I] work the same way under the same conditions. The universe would be chaos. If a universe could exist at all.
But they [I]do[/I] work consistently. With order. Call them properties, or laws, or whatever. But there is order to them all, everywhere.
Thats it. Between the downward constraints and the bottom up construction, the reality that emerges inbetween as the dynamical balance.
This is the general model of systems causality. Form constrains and matter constructs. A single cell is the membrane enclosing a busy chemistry. A body is a skin enclosing a busy community of cells.
Many other consequences follow. But this is the guts of it.
Quoting T Clark
Yep. And so the issue is whether to give up on causality as it seems to run into the sand after just a few steps up in complication, or instead start developing theories that deal with complexity directly.
Ive been thinking in threes for a long time, it works well for me.
There's lots of trinities. I struggle to reconcile them, maybe they're just different and i shouldn't try.
Substance, form, function
Cardinal, fixed, mutable
Will, intellect, feeling
Father, Son, Holly Ghost
Belly, head, heart
Strawberry, mint, hazelnut
Ready salted, cheese and onion, salt and vinegar
Red, blue, yellow
Labour, Tory, Lib Dem
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
Voltage, resistance, current
Bowl, cherries, life
I should probably read some Pierce. Might help me out.
I believe that the idea of constraint is fundamentally incorrect, as it adds a dimension of possibility to reality that I consider unnecessary. We can speak of a certain regularity that existed (the continuous evolution of dinosaurs) and that was completely disrupted by an asteroid. Extinction is an effect of the asteroid striking the Earth. However, it is not the constraint of a possibility. For that possibility would make us think of a world where that possibility exists. I prefer to speak of a rupture in the regularity or stability that the dinosaur species possessed, without needing to introduce the concept of possibility into the constrains.
I understand why it feels compelling to say that the universe must have order, because without consistent laws, nothing could exist as we know it. Maybe you (and most scientists) are right about this. :razz: Neverthless, I am curious, does what we call order exist independently of our own frameworks? The stability of H?O, photons, electrons, or gravity is only meaningful within the systems of concepts, practices, and distinctions that we impose.
Does the universe possess order as an intrinsic property, or does it only become ordered through our acts of knowing, as we impose structure on an otherwise indeterminate reality? Your notion of chaos, therefore, is not an external threat; it is simply the indeterminate reality that we continually structure in order to make sense of anything at all. The predictability we observe is real, but is this because we have stabilized certain patterns within an otherwise indeterminate world? I wonder if what we call laws of nature are our codified ways of structuring reality, not independent features of the universe. But I fear I have strayed into an unpopular and perhaps debased version of post-modernism.
But let's look at an example of the above so we can tease it out.
When we say that water freezes at 0?°C, it seems like an objective fact about the universe. But from my perspective, this predictability arises perhaps because we have structured reality with concepts like temperature, phase, and measurement. The water itself doesnt carry the law of freezing; it only behaves in ways we can recognize once we impose these distinctions. What we call a law of nature is therefore not an independent feature of the universe, but a pattern we have stabilized within an otherwise indeterminate reality.
I'm just trying to think through this stuff here and perhaps doing it badly.
Thinking in threes helps one get away from seeing things in black and white. Blackists are dead against whiteists, they think its nonsense. But if you bring grey into the mix, theres a bit of both and a new colour aswell, grey.
It seems almost like the double slit experiment. If photons never went through without making the interference pattern before people started watching it. But Google AI says:
[I]'The concept of an "observer" in quantum mechanics doesn't require a human or conscious being. Any interaction with a classical system, whether a detector or even just the environment, can act as the measurement that causes the wave function to collapse.'[/I]
My position is that there are laws of nature that account for the order in the universe, and that these exist independently of us. I acknowledge I could be wrong, so I'm interested in exploring the perspective you offer.
My perspective is consistent with everything we "know" about the universe. The alternative, the "mind-created order" that you suggest seems to lack all explanatory value - it raises more questions than it answers. It does seem possible, but that's about it - there's no other reason to think it's true, as far as I can tell. Surely, it's at least possible that our traditional view is correct.
Is it really just a coin toss between these two possibilities? I don't think it is, but I'd like to hear what others think. What am I overlooking?
Did you ever read the Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin? Its not exactly what you described but it has a lot in common. Really good book. Pretty good movie.
So what is natural selection but a constraint on genetic variety? Biology relies on its evolvability as its primary cause. It creates the possibilities that the world then prunes to shape.
At the level of fundamental physics quantum states are also being thermally decohered. The second law is the general constraint on what exists. And the quantum says even Nature starts by generating a variety of possibilities that a global classical context then prunes to shape.
Reality cant seem to escape this causal pattern.
Both things can be true. We do impose our epistemology on Nature. We are creating a narrative. But also Nature is there to be spoken about. We can hope to tell a story that is pragmatically useful. It will relate us to the world in a relationship that works.
Yes, Causation without Intent is what we call Accident. And the distinction is crucial in philosophy & science, but typically taken for granted. Unfortunately, Quantum Physics*1 has undermined the simple Certainty of Newton's physics/metaphysics, in which all events were intentionally caused by God. When you take God or Logos (reason ; intent) out of the equation things quickly get messy : like a half-alive cat in a box*2.
In philosophical discussions, Logical (directional) Causation in macro space-time seems to be implicit (intuitive) for "humans" in the word "cause". If not, an alternative meaning should be clearly indicated. Otherwise, the thread would quickly come unspooled . . . . as it so often does. :wink:
PS___ In college, we did an exercise called Design by Accident. Participants typically saw logical order (Form) in patterns that resulted from intentional randomness, such as spilling ink or pick-up-sticks. We seem to be designed by evolution to conceive order even in perceived disorder, and to infer causation even in the absence of evidence of intention.
*1. Quantum Causality :
In essence, quantum causality is about exploring what happens to cause and effect when we apply the principles of quantum mechanics to the very fabric of spacetime, leading to a more flexible and potentially counterintuitive view of causal relationships
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quantum+causation
*2. IS THE CAT DEAD OR ALIVE OR BOTH?
Superposition or reposed position
That may be what YOU call it. I just call it causation. You can choose to believe there is intent involved in all causation, but you cannot possibly show that causation requires it.
Quoting Gnomon
All answers depend on some unverifiable intrepretation of quantum mechanics. Which one is correct seems likely to remain a mystery, even though many are unwilling to accept that.
Nevertheless, "quantum causality" is well represented by a wave function - a Schroedinger equation that depicts the deterministic evolution of a quantum system over time.
I would suggest that what we call an accident is the opposite of what we call a necessity. So the more fundamental dichotomy is chance and necessity. Or what in the systems view is the top down constraints and the bottom up degrees of freedom.
In the most general metaphysical sense, you have the global finality that imposes a structure of necessitation on the occurrence of events. Some set of constraints that limit the probabilities. But then the corollary of that is that what isnt forbidden is free to happen. From the physical perspective, that is what becomes the accidental. The degrees of freedom. The actions that are chance happenings so far as the global finality is concerned. The kind of differences that make no difference as far as the systems most general purposes are concerned.
Then within this most general physical view, we can start to talk of life and mind as intentional or dispositional systems. Systems in an encoded of informational modelling relation with their world.
So a mind is in a highly intentional state to the degree it is organised to eliminate all the kinds of accidents that it feels would matter. The differences that would make a difference.
Accidents can still happen. We may fluff the tennis shot. But then we can go work on our shot and seek to minimise future such errors.
So intention is the kind of global state of constraint that an intelligent system can form. It has a brain to set things up in a way that more or less ensures a ball is at least going to try to clear a net and land in a court.
The opposite of an intent is then a mistake. An error. Something that by definition is meaningful as we would want to correct our habits the next time around.
The Earth doesnt have any reason to care if the cliff side crumbles. That is just an accident. The laws of thermodynamics are in fact being respected by this sudden act of erosion. It is necessary only that the statistics average out for the laws to be upheld.
But the architect needs to care if his buildings show tendencies to crumble in ways not intended. He will have to do more work on ensuring this cannot happen in future.
So again, we have the one most general model of causality that applies to Nature as a whole. And then we have the subset view which is tailored to explaining life and mind. Overall, Nature is a balance of chance and necessity. Semiotic systems are then a pragmatic balance of their intentions and outcomes. Accidents can become errors to be avoided. A further dimension of purpose and meaning arises as the world is now being organised - or at least some tiny part of it - by a sense of personal agency. An organism that is acting with a constraining point of view,
I have no problem with the idea of constraint as long as we eliminate teleology. There is something with a certain regularity and stability, and suddenly something interrupts that. Genetic variability is blind, and mutations can be of any kind. But when you put it in the face of a cataclysm of that magnitude, things seem biased, and it seems as if we had cut off or interrupted some purpose. But from my point of view that is an illusion.
Sure. But the systems approach can deal in grades of teleology. Minds can form purposes, bodies can shape functions and then the physical realm can have its tendencies. Its directions everywhere wants to go, its states that are its global statistical attractors.
After all, physics cant get by without its principle of least action. So constraints shape physical tendencies. Nothing too metaphysically alarming about that? And the other thing of neurobiological purpose can then be understood as a well developed and highly evolved version of a mere statistical tendency.
A tendency is thus a state of the very least constraint. Yet least action is still a principle that physics finds essential when accounting for why something would happen the way it does.
Carefulyou're starting to sound like @Wayfarer. That the stability is meaningful is not the same as to say that it exists. The conflation of meaning with being or existence is a constant in Wayfarerland. Of course things can be meaningful only to a percipient who finds them to be so, but it is certainly bad logic that concludes they can only exist in the human understanding. Why should we doubt that the patterns, regularities, forms and invariances we find everywhere in nature exist independently of us?
To say they don't seems to be the height, or better, the low, of human hubris , anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. It also seems extremely implausible that we could construct these ourselves from scratch and fortuitously find that the predictions based on understanding them can be so successfully used to navigate the world.
Evolvability itself evolves, Organisms can tune the rate of their variability. Some genes are far more conserved than others.
And then selection acts at the population level of gene pools and their allele frequencies.
So yes, mutations might be blind. But even that is purposeful in that the blindness and the mutation are constrained by the fact that organisms have already established the 99% they have in common with members of their gene pool and the kinds of gene complexes they might want to most expose in the next round of lifes lottery.
Apart from Dawkins, not many biologists are zealots about life being a matter of blind chance. Indeed, life became complex because it could turn evolution into a game of making good genetic predictions with the right amount of mistakes to also keep on learning about the world.
The genes offer the environment a suitable range of options to choose from. Then tailors the gene pool to track any changes in this customer preference.
Or at least there is another causal narrative to offer beyond Dawkins blind watchmaker.
I prefer the term ' tendencies' to 'teleology'. Tendencies are something that are created during the development of a process. Whereas teleology is the end that is found at the beginning of the process, even before the process begins. In my opinion, they are two very different things.
On the other hand, it is very different in the case of minds. To me, teleology seems like a mystery to be clarified. For me, it has to be related to subjective time, which is different from the extensive time of physics. But it is something I have not yet investigated.
I hear you. But quantum physics does raise the issue of retrocausality as part of its holism. In some restricted sense, the future does act backwards on the past. Entanglement applies in time as well as space.
So that along with the principle of least action puts tendencies and purposes on some kind of connected spectrum. Finality is in play at some level that needs to be accounted for. So I wouldn't want to get into the psychological habit of leaving it out.
A small difference in the physicalist sense, but a potentially major one in the metaphysical sense.
Quoting JuanZu
Well that seems no mystery at all from the point of view of the biosemiotician. An organism is in a modelling relation with its world. So of course it is in the business of thinking ahead and getting organised by anticipating what is to come.
Consciousness is intentional as modelling is about predicting what can be expected to happen so as to have some say in the matter. We can't wait to react to the world after it happens as mostly that would be too late to change things. But we can prevent the future happening if we act ahead of the moment.
It takes 120-200 milliseconds to even react to the world at the level of reflexive habit. To hear the starters pistol in a race, or to see which way the ball bounced after the tennis serve got struck.
Then it takes more like 500 milliseconds to form a fully attentive and comprehended understanding of whatever surprising or unexpected thing just happened half a second ago. If we couldn't get ourselves set up ahead of time with our psychological modelling, we couldn't even exist in the world as functional beings. So being purposeful is where it all starts. Having some set of intentions. And then picking up the pieces after the predictions go wrong.
Just the same as biological evolution. Except this is the evolution of a world model over lifetimes of learning right down to the last thought you could have had before the disaster struck.
But that phenomenon is instantaneous. It does not take the form of a process or a possible tendencie. I do not know if it is an appropriate example of teleology.
I can give an approximation from my point of view as follows: Anticipation takes the form of a future that becomes present and yet is not confused with the present. It is present-future. It takes the form of a duration, as Bergson would say. And thanks to habit, it is contracted with the past and the present in such a way that there is proximity. The future of anticipation is closer than another much more distant future with which anticipation has no contact. Intentionality directs action, but it is nothing without this contracted state of time.
However, this does not have much to do with causality in the physical dimension. I believe that there is still a gap between this internal causality and external causality. Unless we introduce the theory of time that I maintain to all causal processes. I believe this can be done, but it would be an extensive task that I cannot carry out here.
I just wanted to point out how the idea of teleology is problematic for the conception of causality we are discussing. We can talk about tendencies as regularities and stabilities that are disrupted by different phenomena that alter the regular course of events. And these disruptions are what have been called constraints.
I choose to believe that, for the calculations of Physics, intention may be irrelevant. But for the purposes of Philosophy, intention is essential. For example, a pool table with neatly stacked balls is static & causeless, until the intentional act (first cause) of the shooter inputs both Energy (causation) and Direction (intention) into the frozen tableau*1. All subsequent causation -- bouncing balls -- is indeed mechanical & purposeless . But physical causation is of little interest to a philosopher*2, whose focus is on logical causation*3. :smile:
*1. Tableau :
a group of models or motionless figures representing a scene from a story or from history; a tableau vivant.
___Oxford Dictionary
*2. Etiology is the study of the causes, origins, or reasons behind the way that things are, or the way they function, or it can refer to the causes themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiology
*3. Logical causation :
refers to the idea that a logical relationship can imply a cause-and-effect relationship, as seen in formal logic or causal logic models used to structure knowledge. It involves using logic to explain or predict events by identifying the underlying causes, often through mechanisms like counterfactual reasoning or formal argument structures, though it's distinct from physical causation, which involves the transfer of force and temporal relationships.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=logical+causation
NO CAUSATION WITHOUT INTENTION
Ignore the First Cause (intentional actor) off the table
The fact that humans engage in intentional behavior implies only that some causation is the product of intent. Not that all causation is.
In that simplistic dichotomy, where is the "logical efficacy" of the OP? Is it in the "top-down constraints" or the "bottom-up degrees of freedom". Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? :smile:
Quoting T Clark
How does this relate to the sign, the object, and the interpretant.
This is not what Collingwood meant by logical efficacy.
Ever since I read this, Ive been thinking about it. I started out writing a response where I said I denied there is order in the universe, but I am not ready with an argument right now. Im going to think about it some more.
As ontology to epistemology. A two for one deal. You have the sign relation as an account of how an organism models its world. And then you have this psychologised logic to account for how the world itself could self-organise as a pansemiotic rational process.
So behind it all is a universal triadic logic. But then that is applied to two quite different kinds of self-organising worlds. A cosmos and a mind. A Universe that is its own self-interpretive process, and an organism as what can live in that world by an actual system of sign.
If you want the more ontological story of systems causality, you have to look to Peirces writings on the dichotomy of tychism and synechism for instance.
The same triadic relation was worked out at all its levels from phenomenology to logic. But the lines between things could be blurry because of that.
Not sure what your question is. But if we are talking about the epistemic issue of the pragmatic usefulness of our causal models of the world, then understanding the Cosmos to be run by the dichotomy of chance and necessity is how we can then insert our own semiotic intentionality into the scheme of things.
We cant change the laws of physics or the structure of maths. But we can have the aim of constraining chance by constructing constraints on natural processes and so harnessing their flows to our ends.
It is this cosmology that inspires us to straitjacket nature in a mechanised order. Fence the sheep, channel the water, explode gasoline in a system of pistons and cranks.
So the OP was about the limits of the efficacy of the mechanistic mindset. The complaint was that because it seemed a severely limited view of Nature in practice, one might as well give up on the very idea of believing in causality.
My argument was that the world does have its own actual causal order. And understanding that would inform us as to how to get the most out of a mechanical mindset while also getting the benefits of a more organic view of Nature as it is in itself. One that includes even life and mind as part of this cosmic order as the source of a semiotic level of constraints over the shape of the world.
Bodies and brains exist by imposing a mechanical logic on the processes of the world. A system of switches and levers which starts down at the molecular nanoscale of enzymes and all the other molecular machinery that regulates the chemistry and structure on which intelligent life is based.
So biology inserts intentionality into the world ruled by chance and necessity at the level of chemical reactions. Information regulates entropy. Flows get directed. Reactions are turned on and turned off by a genetically encoded machinery.
The mechanical mindset is pretty effective as it is how life and mind can arise in the first place. And the irony is that it is the Cosmos that has the purer organic logic. It is a system of self-organising flows that exists by evolving at the level of its own laws and the material freedoms that arise due to these laws becoming firmly fixed in place.
So nothing about metaphysics is quite as it first seems. Life and mind are the further thing of a mechanistic causality that arises within the organicism of a Cosmos that truely has to evolve its own self-making balance.
Consciousness is just what it is like to be in this kind of mechanised modelling relation with a world - a model of the world as it would seem to be from the point of view of us as a knot of intentionality within it, looking to further constrain its flows by applying our mechanising mindset wherever we find it possible.
True. Billiard balls are causal, but not self-causal. So what is the initial cause of their motion? Does the cue ball initiate the aim & activity on the table? Or does the chain of causation link back to an intentional*1 Prime Cause, with the mental goal of moving all balls into pockets?
Statistically, Correlation does not prove Causation, but logically it does point in that direction. If some causation results from intention, could we not reasonably infer that all intermediate Causes can be traced back to an original intentional Act? That seems to be the reasoning underlying primitive Animism, and the God postulates of almost all world religions & philosophies. Is there any scientific or philosophical method to disprove Divine Causality or Aristotle's Logical First Cause? "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (Carl Sagan).
From a more physical perspective, the original Big Bang theory avoided dealing with a source or explanation for the Energy (efficient cause) and Natural Laws (formal cause) necessary to make sense of the unprecedented emergence of a chain of transformations (material causes) from mathematical Singularity, to hypothetical plasma soup, to experiential Life & Mind. Does the sudden appearance of Cosmos from Chaos, as inferred from astronomical evidence, cause you ask "Why?" as well as "How?". Is it possible that the implicit First Cause*2 was Intentional/Purposeful instead of Accidental/Aimless? If not, why not? As a non-religious philosopher, I have to ask myself that contrapositive question. :chin:
*1. To Intend : to extend the mind toward a goal, purpose, design, aim or object
*2. First Cause :
Aristotle's argument for a First Cause, often called the Unmoved Mover, does not rely on it being an intentional entity with a will or mind, but rather as a necessary, external, and unchanging origin of all motion in the universe. The First Cause initiates motion without itself being moved, stopping an infinite chain of causes by providing a beginning point for the universe's existence and change. This uncaused cause functions as a final cause, drawing all things toward it in a state of pure actuality, thereby explaining the purpose and motion within the cosmos.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=aristotle%27s+first+cause+intentional
Note A --- In the real world, we have no experience with uncaused Causes. According to the law of Thermodynamics, they all link back to some a priori input of energy. So, an Unmoved Mover cannot be Real, but Ideal : i.e. imaginary. A philosophical hypothesis, not a scientific fact.
Note B --- "Pure Actuality" might explain physical Motion, but can it provide Purpose, Aim, Time's Arrow?
Collingwood's abstruse concept is over my untrained head. I simply construe the term to mean that the conclusions follow logically from the premises. But the path of reasoning can be traced from Top-Down or from Bottom-Up, and can be evaluated as Statistical (permanent pattern) or Intentional (aimed at future state). :smile:
Heres an idea if you dont understand a word dont use it.
Quoting Gnomon
This is not correct.
Ooooooh no it isn't
I probably missed the point of the OP. But the subsequent clarifications only muddied the water for me.
Quantum Uncertainty does place limits on some traditional universal assumptions underlying the "mechanistic mindset". But those squishy lower-level limits don't seem to have much efficacy on the macro scale. So, we continue to depend on the "pragmatic usefulness" of our causal models for designing machines.
As long as we keep those acausal animals penned-up on the quantum scale, we seem to be safe from the anarchy of Chaos. They do cast some philosophical doubt on a few over-generalizations of the past. But for all practical purposes, continuous Causality still seems to be a valid assumption. So I don't see any need to abandon Causality altogether, and to accept Absurdity in its place . As a matter of fact, I have been arguing in favor of Aristotle's First Cause theory on this forum. :smile:
PS___ I just saw the first episode of Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective TV series. And it seems to interpret "Holism" as Pandemonium, where randomness rules.
But biology in fact depends on the mechanical harnessing of quantum causes. An enzyme is a clamp to lock organic molecules into positions where quantum tunnelling can then overcome energy barriers and bind them chemically.
So the nanoscale is the semi-classical realm of physics. And life exists by sitting just on the classical side of that and tapping into quantum uncertainty to beat the classical odds that constrain chemical equilibria.
Life and mind don't emerge from quantum foundations. But they do dip back into the quantum realm so as to build their own little classical paradise in the midst of the thermal battering that is trying to build any organic structure at the nanoscale of flying H2O molecules that is a room temperature droplet of water.
So biology is mastery over both quantum and classical forms of uncertainty. It is a molecular machinery that lives right on the edge of chaos where the physics is at its most volatile. But that radical instability is then turned into the energy that a genome can harness with a set of cunning plans.
Quoting Gnomon
A book well worth reading is Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos.
Classical chaos and quantum uncertainty are what life and mind harness so as to exist. Information can extract work from entropy gradients. And the wilder the ride, the greater the return when you eventually learn how to tame it.
There is a reason life and mind have continued to evolve in the direction of looking for the most dangerous and volatile ways to eke out a living. Modern human society rather proves the point.
Living on the edge is fine. So long as you are sufficiently in charge of the causal structure extracting the energy to do work. So long as the damn thing doesn't suddenly blow up in your face.
Ahem
I really liked that book. It changed the way I look at living organisms and the world in general. Oddly enough, its one of the books that led me to seeing the world as I described it in the OP.
Quoting T Clark
Which bit are you disagreeing about? Reduction to efficient cause is a mindset based on certain metaphysical presuppositions. You say the logical efficacy of that epistemic approach is limited. And then you conclude this seems to be the end of the matter as what more could be done?
My suggestion was to get back to the metaphysics as it was first envisaged in Greek discourse. The larger model that Aristotle in particular provided. The theory of causality as it has since been worked out in the mathematical structures described by the systems science tradition.
And didn't Collingwood offer his own update on Hegelian dialectics one that boils down to the unity of opposites as well as being an epistemic idealist?
So he seemed to be going in the right direction on the epistemic issues. He just didn't then apply the same holism to physical causality as he did to the structure of thought and human history. He didn't spot how the logic was fundamentally the same rooted in symmetries and their breaking.
We can't in Kantian fashion know the truth of our metaphysical presuppositions directly. They are after all logical arguments if they have any rigour worth the name. But we sure as heck can test our metaphysical models in terms of how they fare. And mechanical causality both has to presuppose so much and soon runs out of road once it passes mere complication and tries to move on to tackling self-referential complexity.
Complexity is different as it speaks to emergence, self-organisation and topological order. A theory of the Universe has to be able to model the emergence of space, time and energy as its three major ingredients. And why shouldn't physics and cosmology have that ambition?
No. My mindset is based on my understanding of how the word causality is generally understood by people who dont recognize the limitations of the concept associated with complex systems.
Quoting apokrisis
No. Again, what the Greeks said isnt what people today say. Thats what I was talking about.
Quoting apokrisis
Im not familiar with that. I only turned to Collingwood when he confirms my prejudices.
Quoting apokrisis
Heres one of those Collingwoodian prejudicesabsolute presuppositions are neither true nor false.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree with all this, although, as Ive said many times in this thread, I dont think it makes sense to call this causality.
But in the OP you also said
Quoting T Clark
so naturally I thought that was the direction you might explore. The systems perspective. Causality as so much more than cause and effect. The story of just efficient cause.
Quoting T Clark
:grin:
Quoting T Clark
That seems odd on what is supposed to be a philosophy board. Again, you introduced constraints as a better approach in the OP. Was the thread meant to tread no further in that direction? :chin:
I thought thats what we were doing. This has been a very satisfying thread for me. Its given me a chance to flesh out some of my thoughts. Youve thought about this a lot more than I have, but I think were talking about the same thing. I think the primary difference between what youre saying and what Im saying is about language the words we use to describe things. I think the word causality is misused and misleading. I think it would be better to dispense with it except in a certain limited number of cases.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, I think this is language. Yes I do want to talk about constraints. I dont think it was me who limited discussions of causality to just efficient cost. That, as I
understand it, is the common way its thought of. Thats what Im resistant to.
Quoting T Clark
This has always struck me as a bit unfair. I know how seriously they take coffee in Australia.
So often, causality is an important concept in interpersonal relationships where people try to exert control over one another. Often, it's in the form of assigning blame; attributing a single cause is necessary in oder to effectively blame someone for something happening. This happens on a large scale, such as when people blame Hitler and Hitler alone for everything the Nazis did; and of course in daily interactions ("It's your fault we missed the deadline!") Another frequent application of single-cause thinking is when one person tries to get another person to do something and assumes that one single command or push should be enough (and that if it isn't it means that the other person is "obstinate", "rebellious", or "stupid").
People generally love to attempt to simplify interpersonal interactions like that; as if people were mere things, objects, that can (and should) be shoved around.
Rather than blame, I would more likely say responsibility or accountability. As you note thats in relation to causality as it applies to human action. I intended to avoid all the complications associated with that by limiting the discussion to non-intentional causality.
But the larger reason for this is that a rationally structured world is based on the logic of counterfactuality. An intelligent system is based on being a pattern of switching. Action must be focused in a way that it is either aiming in the one direction or its exact other. Either definitely doing something, or definitely not. And from that digital counterfactuality can arise the complexity of a whole that knows what it is doing, where it is going, behaving holistically as more than the sum of its parts.
So organismic order is a hierarchy of dichotomous switches all the way down, from top to bottom. The enforced simplicity of either doing the one thing or the other.
The body is either in a generally anabolic state or catabolic state. Either accumulating energy stores under the general coordination of the hormone insulin, or spending that energy under the coordination of the hormone glucagon. The pancreas is the organ flipping that general switch.
Likewise the body's general emotional state its visceral state is either tilted towards the sympathetic or parasympathetic pole. Towards fight or flight, or towards rest and digest.
Just as you don't want to be trying to both store and spend energy at the same time, you don't want to be both gearing for action and gearing for relaxation at the same time. Evolution just naturally makes sense of things by finding the organising dichotomies that give you two exactly contrasting system goals, so that you can then divide your life either going in the one direction or its other. A clear cut choice can get made. And when the context changes, you can rebalance the system by going back the opposite way again.
Cognition is the same story. We get aroused or we get relaxed. We get keyed up and attentive, or we mooch along on automatic pilot. We become either alert and wary or we get very concentrated and task focused. We are designed by natural logic to be able to go in two opposite or complementary directions in any facet of life where being in a generally coordinated state of being matters.
Systems never do just the one thing. They are always critically poised between doing quite opposite things. It is only by clearly being able to go in a direction that it is also possible to clearly be doing the inverse of that and so reverse things back in a way that overall winds up being a state of suitable balance.
That is the basic circuit logic of an organic system. Of course complication can be layered on complication. If you have a fight-flight switching centre, you can add a freeze command on top. You have then a choice of running at a threat, running away from a threat, or freezing in immobility in the hope that the threat simply fails to notice you. Rather than reacting instantly and reflexively, you can also reflexively force yourself to take the other path of not reacting until the nature of the threat becomes more clear.
Anyway, this is the general principle that organises life and mind as intelligent structure. As systems with a clarity of action and so a maximal capacity for learning and adapting to the challenges of existing. If you are doing one thing, then you can't be doing the other. So you are definitely maxxing out what you are doing in terms of what you are not doing. You can be doing what the occasion definitely demands that you should rather than piddling about doing neither the one thing nor the other.
This same dichotomising logic applies at the level of the human social organism. Society has to be structured by a strong counterfactuality. Everything has to be reduced to the clarity of behavioural switches that then give that society is complex emergent order. Every part of the social system is functionally focused on the choice that is doing what is right in one context, as doing the other is what is right in another context.
Social order before language the natural social order of chickens, wolves, chimps, cows is based on dominance~submission behaviours. A pecking order. Social animals evolve a clarity about whether the lead or follow. And this can be fairly rigid, or as flexible and in the moment, as the overall circumstances demand. A larger brain can cope with more complexity layered on its simpler responses.
Humans then have language as a new medium to regulate and coordinate social behaviour. We become tremendously complex and plastic in the way that we are organised. But still, broadly the metaphysical logic of the dichotomy shows through. Behaviour is intelligent to the degree it is sharply switchable between two precisely contrasting or counterfactual states.
So a social scientist notes that the broadest dichotomy determining human behaviour is competition~cooperation. We have to switch our mindset between these two poles of social direction in ways that are in that moment at least pretty clear to all concerned. There are social contexts in which both poles of behaviour are recognised as "being the right thing for this occasion".
This need for switchability has only become more pronounced as human society has become more socially complex and collectively intelligent.
In a foraging tribe, individuals are mostly going along with the tribe. Acting at the level of families doing family things just like they have been doing for generations. But when we build up to a modern technological and civilised lifestyle, we really need individuals who operate with personal decisiveness in that new environment. They must demonstrate to us that they are causal agents with complete independence their own freewill and conscience so that we know they are either in the mind to either do that thing we want, or they are not.
This is all rather frustrating to have to deal with. But that is the structural logic of an intelligent system. Out of clarity of doing that thing, and not the opposite thing, you can build up a system that is able to at the level of a unified balancing act doing the general something which is what the social order itself desires as an appropriate response to the demands of the world as it seems at that general collective moment.
For choice to scale, you have to construct choice at the level of a system's smallest parts. It is the logic of dichotomies all the way down the hierarchy. So at the bottom of any hierarchical or systems order, you discover that all its parts are indeed shaped as switches. A counterfactual choice to be made.
Quoting baker
So yes. We are always having to look for that switch to flip in the direction we want. If I feel you are not cooperating, I have to assume you are competing. And I have to use words that are socially effective in getting you to switch your mindset in the diametrically opposed direction.
Of course, when one person accuses another person of being obstinate, rebellious or stupid, it often doesn't go so well. It rather confirms them in their current setting.
To the degree we can instead simply assert social hierarchy dominance over them, then perhaps they might meekly submit. That prelinguistic social circuitry still exists underneath all the more civilising linguistic layers.
But it is hard as just a single individual to speak as the voice of the social collective view the one that can rightfully demand cooperation rather than competition. To throw the switch the way you want it, you have to construct things so that the other person feels they are being called out by a whole jury of their peers. And that requires more linguistic artistry. You have to say, look I understand, but everyone is going to see and hear about the way you are behaving. I'm trying to protect you against that generalised opprobrium. Mate, you're going to get cancelled by everyone that matters.
My point is that intrapersonal relations do have a general structural logic. And while it may seem that we are always just looking for the little buttons to push, the levers to pull, to be effective in achieving what we want, we have to step back and see the situation as the social system that it is.
The causality is complex even if it is all built on the relative simplicity of the dichotomous logic of the counterfactual switch. We want others to have a simple on/off button. But the switch we really have to flip is that hugely complex one of society's global balancing act that is the general choice between competing and cooperating something we need to flip the switch on even at the level of warring and trading nations.
Although we can revert to dominance and submission games. That does also work even if it subverts the more civilised approach we have tried to construct through language and rationality.
Quoting T Clark
Hah. But my argument would be that the mechanical notion of causality only arises within the context of intentional being. As Hoffmann shows, life begins at the point that a mechanical logic starts to get imposed on warm and wet entropic world.
So this is the irony. We are driven to thinking of Nature in terms of buttons and levers, or switches and ratchets, because that is how intentionality can become a thing.
Nature is its own thing still a system, but a physical one ruled by centralising tendencies rather than deliberate intentions. And life and mind then introduce mechanical form a structure of counterfactual switching so as to build up its own semiotic brand of complexification.
Life and mind are what set up Nature as a new cause and effect tale. Flipping an informational switch can be the actual efficient cause of a resulting physical effect. Reach for the light button and that is the definite reason something happened.
Nature sort of vaguely has a causal structure in this fashion. A single falling grain of sand can be blamed for the avalanche that followed on the critically poised sloping side of a sand hill.
But add models to nature and a rigid counterfactual logic can be imposed on the pattern of material events. We go from the analog to the digital. Causality itself changes state from the materially real to the mathematically ideal.
There is a continuity in terms of the systems view of causality, but also that great stonking discontinuity in the topological organisation of that causality. And it is the notion of mechanical causality the logic of the counterfactual switching mechanism that both bridges and divides these two worlds. It is the switch that implements what Howard Pattee dubbed the epistemic cut on which life and mind depend. The epistemic cut that separates the informational model from the entropic world.
Pattee is the constraints guy, by the way. He made the distinction between holonomic and non-holonomic constraints. Or the constraints that entropic nature just has, and the constraints that informational models can construct and add to regulate that world in a mechanical fashion.
If you want to expand your causal vocabulary, Pattee has done a lot in that area.
If I don't understand a word, I Google it.
*1 is ambiguous & abstruse. *2 is the definition I mentioned.
If "logical efficacy" does not refer to "conclusions that follow from premises" based on "measured effects", then what does it mean? I had to Google "absolute presuppositions" to see that it's an arcane term for Faith. Which is obviously meaningful to believers, but logical? :smile:
*1. R.G. Collingwood's concept of "logical efficacy" refers to the power of certain fundamental beliefs, which he called "absolute presuppositions," to give rise to questions and structure an entire field of inquiry. In his work An Essay on Metaphysics, he argued that these presuppositions are neither true nor false and cannot be verified empirically. However, they are still meaningful because of their logical power to frame our thinking.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Collingwood%E2%80%99s+logical+efficacy
*2. "Logical efficacy" describes a situation in clinical trials and other contexts where an intervention's measured effect (efficacy) is consistent with and logically follows from the effects observed in its constituent subgroups. It's crucial for accurately interpreting trial results, especially in the presence of patient subgroups with differential responses, and ensures that the overall treatment effect falls within the range of the subgroup effects. For example, if a drug is efficacious in a marker-positive subgroup but not in a marker-negative subgroup, the drug's overall efficacy must be somewhere between those two values.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=logical+efficacy
Note --- The premises for logical thinking are supposed to be based on "measured effects", not on Faith without evidence.
Quoting apokrisis
This makes sense, although I hadnt put it in these terms to myself before. Maybe its really another way of saying what I was trying to say in the OP
Remember that life is a ratchet. And what better embodies an intent than a ratchet?
Quoting T Clark
Quoting apokrisis
This quote is much more to the point than the rambling OP of opposition to some vague notion of imparted motion and being.
Causation is a concept about a process, not a physical or static thing. Which is why Aristotle postulated a logically necessary First Cause, presumably intentional, to serve as a metaphorical answer to open-ended causation riddles.
But even a theoretical notion of an intentional Designer, who set in motion all the subsequent steps in the 14B year old chain of intermediate causes, sets some people's teeth on edge. As a sop to the sensitive, I sometimes use the notion of a hypothetical impersonal anonymous Programmer, who caused the program of Evolution to begin computing the natural world that we experience moment-to-moment, but remember as a continuous meaningful memory.
If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. So, inquiring philosophers resort to metaphors. :smile:
Evolutionary programming is an evolutionary algorithm, . . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming
Thinking of evolution as a program can be a useful way to grasp the concept of an iterative process of adaptation and optimization. However, it's critical to remember that this is a metaphor.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=9c8fe5677d44d698&sxsrf=AE3TifNNUNrHzkPptcp0w_zJxdxq9Aeypg:1759526155597&q=Does+evolution+work+like+a+program+pdf&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyz-jb-YiQAxUsRzABHessKnsQ1QJ6BAg9EAE&biw=1173&bih=791&dpr=1.09
My argument is instead the one to be found in Anaximander, Peirce and quantum field theory. The Cosmos exists as the constraint on possibility. It emerges not from fundamental intentionality nor from fundamental mechanistic cause but from the fundamental vagueness of unorganised free potential. An essential state of everythingness that then must start to self-cancel until it becomes reduced to some coherently organised somethingness. A realm of inevitable structure.
Something cant come from nothing. But also everything not only can be reduced to something, it indeed must do so.
If everything is busy happening, then the opposite of that is trying to happen too. And so the great self-cancellation starts. Everything starts heading towards zero. Nothingness is the ultimate destiny.
But that takes time. And while it is happening, complexities can arise for a time along the way. In short we have the Big Bang universe that is falling into its own heat sink. An explosion of hot possibilities being annihilated, expanded and diluted until all that is left is as close to a true void as is possible.
So reality is emergent. But its trajectory is not from nothing to something but instead from everything to nothing via the passing existence of somethingness.
We might be at the height of what we can mean by intentionality as we are also at the height of what we might mean by classicality and its mechanistic order. But that doesnt make that state fundamental from the cosmic point of view even if it does seem fundamental to the emergent existence of us - as a passing pattern of nature with a particularly intricate topological order.
HA!!
Ouch! That kind of complexified conjecturing makes my amateur philosopher head hurt. It's so far over my little pointy pate, that I probably shouldn't even comment. Do all those polysyllabic words add-up to agreement or disagreement with my quoted summation (#) of the Argument Against Causation?
# If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. Gnomon :worry:
Note --- I interpret First Cause to be logically & necessarily eternal & intentional Essence instead of temporal & accidental Substance. Otherwise, the chain of Chance would have no beginning or end . . . . just one "damn thing" after another forever : aimless, randomized, disorganized, self-canceling, structureless, nothingness.
Sans intention, does Everythingness, Organized Somethingness, & Inevitable Structure, explain the Ontological question : "why something instead of nothing?"
Sans Intention, how could Chance cause anything other than Entropy? :chin:
In Spinoza's philosophy, "nature eternal" refers to his concept of God as Deus sive Natura (God or Nature), an absolutely infinite and eternal substance that encompasses all reality, having no beginning or end and existing by the necessity of its own nature.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=spinoza+nature+eternal
Note --- Spinoza was not aware that cosmic expansion implied a beginning of space-time. So, he assumed that Nature was an eternal cycle instead of a linear expansion. Today, we must take the evidence of an ontological origin into account. And one resolution would be to ascribe an endless cycle of reincarnation of the Deus Natura, as postulated in the Multiverse theory. A sequentially-instantiated-necessity. Ooops! More polysyllabic terminology. :yikes:
Great! 'Everything' is a necessity since there is no design point for anything specific.
I am arguing against any strong notion of first cause.
Take the example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. A pencil balanced on its point. A ball resting perfectly still on the peak of a dome.
These are states of perfect potentiality that are also critically unstable. Poised and inevitably about to be broken. The pencil will fall. The ball will roll down. The direction is random, but the outcome is certain.
And what is the cause of the fall or the roll? Absolutely anything. The smallest vibration or the least random knock from some air molecule. The first cause must exist. But also it could have been anything. So nothing was very special about it.
That would be the standard physical example of the kind causal situation I am talking about. What comes first is just the poised tension of a potential so general that absolutely any fluctuation could send it down the hill towards its inevitable destiny.
That's OK with me. I don't have any "strong" scientific notion of First Cause. In fact, most practical scientists seem to avoid such metaphysical speculations in their work*1. For me, the notion of a First Cause is merely a philosophical conjecture to put a period on all, otherwise open-ended, causal sequences.
20th century Cosmology traced the path of measurable finite causes, energy exchanges, back to a mathematical Singularity. That hypothetical origin of space-time was inherently un-defined, because all converging mathematical paths went off the charts and disappeared into Infinity (literally un-measurable). So the Singularity itself could not be the actual First Cause, because its an Idea, not a Real thing. Hence, nobody has a strong, evidence-based, notion of First Cause.
But flakey philosophers are not bound to mundane Reality, and they can freely imagine sublime Ideality. Which is what Aristotle postulated, 13 centuries ago, as the First & Final Causes . . . . for philosophical (not scientific) & theoretical (not empirical) purposes. Those bookend Causes are as real, and useful, as the number PI. :smile:
*1. Science of First Cause : refers to the philosophical concept of a first causethe initial, uncaused entity that initiated all subsequent causal chains and ultimately brought about existence itself. While science describes the causes of events within the universe, the first cause addresses the ultimate origin of reality, a concept explored in metaphysics and ontology rather than empirical science.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=science+of+the+first+causes
DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE SINGULARITY?
In fact what Penrose showed was that all the useful structure of fundamental of physics would break down if you pushed it to an actual zero point. And what instead saves it is that all of that physics rather neatly converges on the unit 1 that is the Planck point. The point at which the three fundamental constants of nature - c, G and h - become unified and have the one absolute value.
So extrapolating linearly to zero fails. But extrapolating non-linearly to 1 gives you a first cause that is an irreducible triadic relation. The dichotomy of h and G, scaled by c as its inverting connection.
The general mistake that is being made is thinking that h and G need to be reduced even further. That two must be made one. Relativity has to be expressed as a quantum field theory where gravitons exist as themselves free fluctuations of the quantum foam.
If you have two fundamental theories, then one has to be made the more fundamental and so allow the other to be derived from it.
But that is not how dichotomies work. They come as reciprocating pairs. They are unit 1 composites and not unit 0 fundamentality. Existence begins at a level that is already a relation in action, not when nothing becomes a first something.
Good! The perfect instability.
Quoting apokrisis
'Nothing' is not an alternative to the Something of Existence', for Existence has no opposite, so, the base Existence is Eternal. The Permanent rearranges to form the temporaries.
What about persistence?
I prefer persistence to existence as it speaks to reality as a process of coming into formed being rather than some existence that just has a stolid and unexplained material presence.
Again, for scientific purposes, the weak notion of this-to-that causation is usually sufficient. Except perhaps, in Quantum physics, where Non-locality and "spooky action at a distance" remains a cause-effect mystery, yet it is accepted as a real phenomenon.
For philosophical purposes though, our explanations must "move" our understanding "from known to unknown"*1, from phenomenon to noumenon. Hence, we attempt to explain all local intermediate causes & effects in terms of a hypothetical ultimate First Cause (causal origin), which is not a real testable phenomenon. It's an inferred General Principle ; an idea not a thing. Whether it's labeled mundane Magic or mystical Magick, may depend on the context. :smile:
*1. Wayfarer reply, Excerpt from the No Magic thread (6 mo. ago) :
[i]It's not a matter of detail alone. In Greek philosophy, the issue is phrased in terms of explanans and explanandum. In the Phaedo, for example, Socrates argues that knowledge requires a method of inquiry that moves from the known to the unknown. He suggests that in order to explain a particular phenomenon, one must have knowledge of a more general principle or cause that underlies it. Socrates refers to this more general principle as the "cause" or "explanans," and the particular phenomenon as the "effect" or "explanandum."
And besides, saith Feynman, 'I can safely say that nobody understands quantum physics'. It works - as if by magic![/i]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15869/the-proof-that-there-is-no-magic/p1
Of course, physics & metaphysics should be harmonious, if possible. But as the Quantum action-at-a-distance paradox indicates, sometimes we are forced to reinterpret the physics in order to derive a corrected metaphysical interpretation.
The article below*1 reminds us, Einstein mis-interpreted quantum entanglement as supraluminal communication of information, and argued strenuously against it. Years later, experiments forced scientists to change their definition of Entanglement from physical inter-action to metaphysical correlation.
The new viewpoint is Holistic instead of Reductive. Likewise, the Causation dissension may simply hinge on context (empirical vs theoretical) and definition (token vs type)*2. The technical stuff of both physics and metaphysics is over my amateur head. And the Holistic stuff may be what you are arguing against*3. :smile:
*1. Spooky Correlation :
it has since been confirmed by experimental observation that the spooky action does indeed happen, exactly as quantum physics predicted (although it should be noted that there is no action or interaction as such, more a relationship of correlation).
https://www.texterity.com.au/spooky-action/
*2. The Metaphysics of Causation :
Although both 1 and 2 are broadly causal claims, some think that they are not claims about the same kind of causal relation. These causal relations may be differentiated by their relata.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/
*3. "Holistic entanglement" refers to quantum entanglement, where multiple quantum particles are linked and become a single, inseparable system, their individual identities replaced by a shared, interconnected whole, a concept that aligns with holistic philosophies about universal interconnectedness.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=holistic+entanglement
Again, you are talking about practical (useful) Science, instead of theoretical (reasonable) Philosophy. Except that the notion of "constants" is a generalization & abstraction from specific & concrete instances of physical changes. Likewise, the notions of Unity and Absolute are never observed in the real world, but inferred from multiple instances.
Also, the notion of Causation is a generalization from a sampling of specific exchanges of energy. From such individual theoretical inferences, we can also generalize that Nature, as a finite-but-dynamic system, must have an Absolute & Unitary (Holistic) First Cause, of which all observed instances of influence are merely "Actual Occasions", as defined by A.N. Whitehead in Process and Reality.
I apologize for harping on the notion of Holism & Original Cause, but it's essential to my personal philosophical worldview. You may ask, "is it useful?", for any practical purposes. And the answer is no. Theories are only useful for the impractical work of Philosophy. :smile:
"The sole problem is, 'does it work?' But the aim of practice can only be defined by the use of theory ; so the question 'does it work?' is a reference to theory".
"The notion of 'understanding' requires some grasp of how the finitude of the entity in question requires infinity. This search for such understanding is the definition of philosophy."
___ Science and Philosophy, A.N. Whitehead
Note --- We reason about limitless Infinity (set of all possible sets) from experience with instances of finitude (isolated set within a more comprehensive set).
So it seems I am both not talking about philosophy yet talking about philosophy in your book?
Ought one consider where logic sits in all this at this point?
And so my reply was precisely about that. The holistic view of a first cause. The unit 1 story of the first symmetry-breaking. The unit 1 story of a unity of opposites.
Again, I apologize for my ignorance of modern technical philosophical arguments. I'm just not familiar with the arcane jargon. My philosophical vocabulary is derived mostly from the ancient reasoning of Plato & Aristotle. Since I got into philosophy only after retirement from the practical world, I have skipped most of the post-Platonic academic argumentation.
One exception to the antique vocabulary is Whitehead's Process and Reality, and it took me a lot of re-reading to understand what he was talking about. I eventually came to the realization that his arguments & metaphors are drawn mainly from mathematical reasoning, for which I have no formal training, beyond a single Calculus course.
For more modern opinions, I can understand some of the philosophical conclusions of early Quantum scientists. For example : "Uncertainty Principle's Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) declared himself a Platonist : 'I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato . . . . . the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, they are forms". {quoted from Philosophy Now magazine, August 2025}
Consequently, much of the modern philosophical argumentation is over my head. So, I have to Google terms that are not familiar. Regarding "symmetry breaking"*1 and "unity of opposites"*2, what do they have to say about the topic of this thread : arguing against general Causes? Do they support Aristotle's notion of a necessary First Cause? :smile:
*1. In philosophy, symmetry breaking explores how order, structure, and differentiation emerge from a state of uniformity, often raising questions about the relationship between scientific theories and reality, the limits of reductionism, and the fundamental nature of laws.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=symmetry+breaking+philosophy
*2. The "unity of opposites" is a philosophical concept suggesting that seemingly opposing ideas or forces are interdependent and define each other, existing in a state of tension that drives development or wholeness.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=unity+of+opposites
But the unity of opposites is preSocratic.
Quoting Gnomon
And not any old forms but gauge symmetries. Special relativity zeroes the spacetime metric to a set of local points under the invariance of the Poincare group of symmetries. But then the "inside" of these zeroed spacetime points can contain the something further of their intrinsic spin symmetries. Gauge structures such as the trio of SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) that generate the Standard Model of particle physics once the vacuum cools sufficiently for such structure to crystallise out and become a thing. A flood of excitations of that form.
So quantum field theory gives you your Platonic structure. And that theory is now mathematically precise. And experimentally verified.
You can look to Aristotle and Plato for the basic metaphysics. They were trying to sum up what Greek philosophy had already spent three centuries discussing. The logic of the Unity of Opposites.
Aristotle and Plato were applying that basic dialectical approach to reasoning by trying to boil it down to the fundamental dichotomy of form and matter. Or what in modern terms we could call information and entropy. Global constraints and local degrees of freedom.
This provided the holistic paradigm of two complementary notions of being in interaction. Mathematic structure in interaction with material fluctuation. Or in quantum terms, a sea of fluctuation shaped by the emergence of constraining order. The kind of global order made precise by the maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking.
The Universe as we now know it. A dimensionality that has the Poincare group structure of a 4D spacetime, and then which is filled with the energy of its gauge group local excitations. The bosons and fermions that are generated by SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) as the local spin resonances which an excited vacuum can't help but ring with.
If you fashion a bell, that makes a cavity that has to then ring with certain frequencies. And that is basically the Universe. A 4D spacetime cavity that echoes with its own violent shaking. SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) are the frequencies at which this global whole can resonate in terms of its mix of locally particular excitations. The Big Bang is the hard strike that starts as a shattering confusion of resonances and then subsides to the low fading hum that we can hear as the state of our 2.7 degree K Universe today.
SU(3) effectively disappears from sight when the quarks get rolled up into protons a U(1) state of electric charge. SU(2) also gets broken into the weak force as a short range decay story and electromagnetism as the U(1) photon which is what is finally left as the final last weak, but all pervasive, hum of the void.
That is a considerable simplification of particle physics. But you get the basic idea.
There is no real matter involved. Just a cascade of echoing frequencies that lose their energy and become reduced to ever more simplified forms. Quantum excitations shaped by their spacetime container and winding up as simple as possible.
The Heat Death of the Big Bang arrives when all that remains is the eternalised low hum of "black body" photons with a wavelength that the scale of the visible universe. Or a frequency that has a temperature as close to absolute zero degrees K as it can get given quantum uncertainty and the holographic principle.
Great post and writing style!
Oh, how such a polar opposite is the simplex to the ultra-complex wished for by the religious
Moliere
Beneath, Below, and Further
(With da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM rhythm.)
Beneath, below, and further down we find
?The large gives way to small by rule's design,?
To tiny forms and minuscule decline,?
To nothing much at all in absent line.
Yet from this bottom place the all began?
Its upward call through time's eternal span,?
And here the answer to our sprawl was planned,?
Where nature wrote with her creating hand.
Upon the foam existence carved its mark,?
A realm not like our thoughts in light or dark,
?A lawless place that questions ever spark,?
Where formless mysteries through ages hark.
Stability has fled our downward quest,?
And melted in descent without arrest,?
So perfect instability's our test?
A symmetry that cannot find its rest.
For everything must leak and flow away,?
No controlling force can ever stay,?
Of ruling factors we've run out today,?
Left empty-handed at the end of play.
Here pulsate rhythms of the so-called void?
That swings between the spaces unexplored,
?From here to there, its patterns never cloyed,
?In rise and fall, forever thus employed.
Here waits Eternity with ancient rhymes,?
With Anything and Everything's long chimes,?
Who have possessed through all the endless times?
The perpetuity that ever climbs.
And if one waits through Forever's night,
?Which is but instant in his endless sight,?
Through months of Sundays till the years take flight,?
Then rarest events shall come to light.
At last all things that possibly can be?
Will manifest in time's vast symphony,?
For in the realm of possibility,?
All potentials claim their destiny.
It ended up and kind of an extra in the June writing challenge:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15983/tpf-essaypart-1-part-2
I'm making a musical, which is what I mostly do lately, of your great post. Sjinn is creating the video visuals now, which will take quite a while, and then it has to go through Topaz for hours to become 4K, and then in FinalCutPro I'll slow down the video with optical flow since the vocals I made through Suno are longer than the Sjinn narration and replace the Sjinn boring type narration with the Suno vocals
This is a new service I'm trying out for posters if the mods let it be.
Meanwhile, here is my YouTube channel (My 'Outlander' vid is a good recent example of the state of the art):
https://www.youtube.com/@AustinPatrickTorney
I think it can do anything if it's a known music genre.
Is this psych rock?:
It's pretty shit. :razz:
I was thinking more a pastiche of the Death Valley Girls. But only as this immediately sprang to mind. I kind of dread the AI take on any decent music.
However you go at it your way. An interesting project.
We we surely in future not have photo albums but instead instantly generated rock operas to tell the tale of our lives. Chatbots will supplant PF in another year. Just so much to look forward to.
Not Death Valley Girls, but perhaps valley girls. And the bombastic rap treatment works
Im now seeing Britney Spears in front of a chalk board of equations. An audience of enthusiastic wizened professors thumping the benches.
Or is that too literal?
OK, we'll have Britney make an appearance.
I'm more familiar with the ancient Taoist Yin-Yang version, as an illustration of the concept of Complementarity. But my understanding of those general concepts is superficial and non-technical. :nerd:
Quoting apokrisis
Again, this stuff*1*2 is way over my little pointy (not Poincare) head. And I can't see what it has to do with the topic of this thread : local cause/effect vs First Cause. :joke:
*1. The philosophy of gauge symmetries explores their role as formal mathematical redundancies that nonetheless provide a powerful, albeit non-direct, framework for understanding fundamental physical reality, rather than a direct representation of nature's features. While gauge symmetries are central to modern physics, their philosophical status is debated: are they merely descriptive tools, or do they reveal deeper truths about the structure of spacetime and the emergence of physical properties?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=gauge+symmetries+philosophy
Note --- This is not talking about Symmetry in the traditional mirror-image sense. I suppose it has some relation to whole systems underlying local particulars, such that superficial form-changes don't affect the fundamental unity of the system being observed. But how does this "fundamental" feature of Nature reflect the Ultimate Whole : the First Cause?
*2. In philosophy, symmetry breaking explores how order, structure, and differentiation emerge from a state of uniformity, often raising questions about the relationship between scientific theories and reality, the limits of reductionism, and the fundamental nature of laws.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=symmetry+breaking+philosophy
Here is the serious version (next time, the fun version):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZrtt4o5LNU
Quoting Gnomon
This is related to this:
Quoting Gnomon
It is against to the thesis that matter is a passive receptacle for external and transcendent forms (first cause), while symmetry breaks give matter (to which they are immanent) the ability to generate forms without external intervention.
Is that right ?
The Britney-dvg fun version (rap slightly slowed down):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHy4G24_nBM
note: Since this was the first service, it was done in public, so the readers could follow the process. In the future, it could be done via private messaging.
But that is exactly what gauge symmetry does. It explains why particles are created and annihilated in matter-antimatter pairs. You break a chiral or mirror symmetry into its two halves and then these annihilate in a burst or energy when they come back together again.
Thats why fermions are spin-1/2 and charge can exist. It is why anything exists to start making the Universe a complex place of material structure.
Im not sure what you mean there. But the fact that fundamental physics is rooted in the maths of symmetry is rather Platonic and hylomorphic. It is a pointer to a strong version of structuralism.
See SEP on https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/
So in talking about the prime cause of Being, the shape of Nature gets imposed by the constraints that it cant help but generate in its Becoming, to use the Aristotelean model.
If we start with the idea of pure unformed potential - fluctuations without directions; an infinity of dimensions without cohesion - then what kind of dimensionality could begin to cohere out of that fundamental vagueness?
Well symmetry seems to tell us that there is only one dimensionality that is the possible outcome of any such striving to become organised in some exact and balanced fashion. Only 3D could be where actuality begins as it is only in three dimensions that the number of rotational degrees of freedom match the number of translational degrees of freedom. As a metric, only 3D has the property that then produces physics as we know it. A dimensionality with the basic Newtonian principles of the conservation of momentum as both translations and rotations, and so the holism of the Galilean group of symmetries.
Also only 3D has a doubling-halving story built into it in the fashion which gives gravity and force their inverse square law and so sets up a metric that can expand geometrically while also diluting at the same rate. You can have a metric driven by the explosion of its hot content, but that explosion then lasts forever as the hot content is getting cooled by that expansion and so the whole thing takes until the end of time to cool to zero and come to a complete stop.
So you have a story where there is symmetry and its breaking that starts right from some ultimate state of vague potential. A symmetry where everything was possible as nothing had yet started to happen in any cohesive sense. An infinity of dimensions that was both an everythingness yet also less than nothing.
Then all this potential could be poured into the generation of something. It could become broken by the fact that 3D was a stabilising solution. A Platonic form. If any kind of physical geometry was going to exist, it had to be this one.
Of course you then have to explain the other aspects of the Big Bang. Like how this 3D receptacle started Planck small and so Planck hot because of quantum mechanics and its gauge symmetries. And how it was also the start of time in any proper sense as the speed of light got added to give the metric its 4D relativistic symmetry - its Poincare group of symmetries.
It all gets quickly complex in topological fashion.
But this picture says we have a metaphysics where anything was possible, and yet that everythingness was immediately being constrained by mathematical principles. To become actualised, it had to strike on a structure that made the most geometric sense. It had to be a hot 4D spacetime speck that would instantly begin to expand and cool. A speck whose dimensionality was defined in unit 1 terms by its three critical constants of c, G and h.
That is, the strength of gravity to define the flatness of its translations, the quanta of action to define its fundamental unit of particle spin or intrinsic rotation, and the speed of light as the unifying rate at which the relativistic metric and its quantum contents could thermally decohere and start becoming a realm of material particles.
The gauge constraints could kick in and start to fashion raw fluctuations into the vectors and spinors that are the zoo of Standard Model matter. The shapes of the excitations we know as the electrons, protons, neutrons and photons of a world organised under the ultimate gauge simplicity of U(1) electromagnetism and the messy hierarchy of mass terms added to particle fields by the Higgs mechanism. The further symmetry breaking that turned on gravity by breaking 4D spacetime into an effectively 3D story of an inertial rest frame of co-moving matter particles.
So in a nutshell, the Universe exists in a complex fashion by striving to become as simple and balanced as possible in symmetry terms.
It only arrive in its current state having eliminated infinite possibility and boiled itself down to what remained as the simplest possible state with its now locked in remaining order. It eventually arrived at its destination - a dust of gravitating and electrically neutral atoms in a void of uniformly scattered 2.7 degree K photons. And even that stage will pass with the ultimate concrete simplicity of a Heat Death. Just a last baseline sizzle of absolute zero photons radiated by the cosmic event horizon. The comoving spacetime metric finally reaching its doubling-halving halt.
Another great post!
Reading your post again, it does sound like you are stressing that my view would be based on immanence rather than transcendence in terms of any "first cause" or first symmetry breaking. And that would be right.
And between Plato and Aristotle, this would be more Aristotle (although the Timaeus tantalises us with its notion of chora, or the "receptacle" that the forms need to become actualised in material being).
So in this thread, I have argued for the immanent and hylomorphic view of causality. The systems science view. And that is a metaphysics that has even come into vogue because of gauge symmetry in recent philosophy as Ontic Structural Realism. It has also come into vogue in fundamental physics as more and more is understood about the maths of topological order and so how the gauge physics of quantum field theory can be properly generalised to cover, for instance, condensed matter and other emergent material phenomena.
Likewise, the idea of dimensionality as it might account for a hot Big Bang is leading to a dissipative structure approach as first pushed in cosmology by David Layzer. So a thermodynamics, but one more appropriate to a cosmos as a self-organising structure of dissipation. One that gets beyond the roadblock of the Second Law and its world built on systems already gone to the equilibrium of a Heat Death. Again a tale of immanence where even "entropy" emerges or evolves in topological fashion.
So it is all about symmetry and symmetry-breaking. But then also about that as itself an evolving hierarchy of topological order.
Our current universe is in its very complex and yet also very simple state. This seems an odd thing to say, but that itself stresses we are dealing with a logic of dichotomies. Things start to happen when two complementary things are happening at once. This is the thought that breaks the logjam of metaphysics. And has done so ever since Anaximander figured out the logic of the Apeiron split by the dichotomising action of apokrisis.
Anyway, our current universe has achieved a state that is matter dominated as the radiation background has already cooled itself to causal irrelevance. The CMB has been redshifted out of sight and may as well be a literal a-causal void of Newtonian fancy. And also, all the anti-matter that did exist has been almost completely annihilated fizzled to join that CMB because of a charge-parity violation buried in the fine print of gauge symmetry and the Standard Model hierarchy of particles it produced.
So as I said, SU(3) exists but is balled up into protons and neutrons and doesn't organise the universe at any more general level than being the strong nuclear force making atomic-level matter possible. SU(2) hangs around as the weak force which allows Standard Model particles to rotate their way down its thermal ladder and become the final most massless versions of their type. Pretty much everything has degenerated to up and down quarks, electrons and neutrinos, by now.
And U(1) runs the show in conjunction with the gravitational degrees of freedom embodied in this simple collection of Dirac particles. Charge is permanently broken as protons and electrons can't be rotated into each other anymore. As quark matter and lepton matter, the temperature of the Universe is too cold and they are now locked into that final lowest level slot on the Standard Model's gauge structure.
So charge is permanently broken, but then also permanently in a dynamical state of dichotomised balance. Protons and electrons have to be arranged into neutralising atomic forms just to settle things down enough for matter to be locally electrostatically bound and globally gravitationally organised as the stars and galaxies of the great Cosmic Web of dynamically swirling mass.
It is dances within dances. Symmetries broken at one level that need to be healed to create the symmetry to be broken the next. The story of topological order. First the universe breaks everything down so that all that seems to be left in the void is a residual dust of positive protons and negative electrons. But then that broken charge must restore its lost symmetry however it can. Hence the emergence of what we actually call matter. Atoms of hydrogen, helium and lithium.
And then because these atoms have mass as well, you get the clumping of clouds that reheats this dusty matter to the point it catches fired and becomes a star. A fusion furnace that is self-organisd for longevity as it exists as a yo-yo balance of gravity and its heat. Its own weight collapses it, but its own heat expands it. And so it can hang in space, radiating into the void, neatly balanced at its critical point.
A lucky fact as fusion starts making heavier elements. And then the exhaustion of the fuel and final collapse of the star is an explosion that loads up every possible slot of the periodic table with all the atoms its symmetries represent. The symmetries determined now by electron shells or orbitals.
And so it goes on. Dichotomies all the way up and so all the way back down. Simplicity creating complexity. Symmetries get broken and create some new brand of complexity. That in itself is the cause for some new re-simplification which fixes what just got broken. In a world broken by U(1) charge, structure must arise that can neutralise that destabilising fact. Order must be restored. Protons and electrons must get bound into neutrons.
If no charge symmetry had been broken, then the Cosmos could have rested its self-organising immanence right there. The only matter to talk of would be dark matter cold clouds of non-interacting particles just dancing the dance of a gravitating dust. And too cold to even make interesting emergent patterns doing that.
The Big Bang might be a fireball for quantum uncertainty reasons, as Planck hot as it was Planck small but most of that disorganised potential got spent quickly under the doubling~halving expansion and cooling of a Minkowski spacetime metric the Poincare group organisation of Special Relativity.
So the spacetime container that emerges from relativistic symmetry was disposing of the heat as fast as it could run. And running at the speed of light in being at first just a ball of radiation, a chaotic soup of relativistic excitations that was so fast it would have gone to zero about now. Or as the CMB, it has now fallen to 2.7 degrees K, and will halve that temperature once again in another 14 billion years.
(Or in fact 10 billion years, as dark energy has shown up to hurry things along. A further topological complication to add to the long list of things that are immanently emergent due to symmetry breakings we still need to figure out.)
One final point to toss in as I was trying to give a feeling for why gauge symmetry-breaking is the cause of the "complex simplicity" which is our current "atoms in a void" universe is that it should be noted how the symmetries are (dichotomously) divided between the real number symmetries of relativity and the complex number symmetries of quantum theory.
The U in the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) formula means a unitary matrix. A matrix description in which rotation and translation can be entangled. Or indeed, re-entangled. The view of reality as it was before rotation and translation got broken and so what it looks like again when that symmetry is restored.
Likewise the key symmetry at the heart of relativity is the Lorentz group SO(3,1). An orthogonal matrix group orthogonal meaning it is fully broken at a dimensional level and so described in disentangled real number values. No complex number mixing. Just the three orthogonal rotations of the 3D spin group SO(3). But with the addition of a time~energy conservation "direction" that is created by the speed of light as the universal limit on interactions with directions. This then makes it the 4D spacetime group of SO(3,1).
The Poincare group is then this 4D Lorentz group of relativistic "boosts" added to the standard 3+3D standard symmetries of 3D space to construct the 10D Poincare group not literally ten dimensional, but that is how many degrees of freedom you have to package together in a self-constraining fashion where you have 6 Euclidean or flat space degrees of freedom (three translations/three rotations) being traded off against the contractions and dilations demanded to make the resulting metric properly Minkowski and speed of light restricted.
Phew. So gauge symmetry comes in forms that are real number to speak to the globally-broken symmetry of spacetime as the dimensional container. And then also that are the complex number or unitary gauge symmetries to describe what remains as the open freedoms to be expressed at every point of this spacetime container. Just by constraining the metric to a collection of points itself sets up an "inner space" of intrinsic quantum spin that has now been set free to to add its topological order to the whole mix. You get all the possible kinds of local excitations or particles that become possible under the hierarchy of SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1).
At least once inflation is over and has dumped a load of reheated vector particles into the vacuum. Which also must have the different thing of a scalar Higgs field although that has to be SU(2) to later mix quantumly with the electroweak force and thus break it to become the weak force plus electromagnetism.
Then dark matter could be anything. Black holes, a condensed matter effect that results in "2D" anyon particles, all sorts of exotic stuff which would somehow have to also be explained in Platonic structural terms. There are always more symmetry groups to be pulled out of the maths bag.
And dark energy! If it exists as some kind of quantum uncertainty effect within dimensionality itself and isn't just an optical effect of viewing the universe from some locally underdense "gravitational well".
But immanence rules. And it rules as possibility can't help but stumble its way into orderly patterns. And it doesn't do this just once. Order always creates its own new possibilities which then have to stumble into new patterns.
Symmetry thinking is then just the way to discover this kind of immanent pattern making. The invariant structures that can't help but emerge when everything is trying to happen all together and all at once.
Shake up possibility and it settles down into whatever conformity that is its stable equilibrium state. A state where differences can no longer make a difference as the same old pattern just keeps re-emerging. The pattern that was immanent and then emerged dynamically to become something that looked permanent and even fore-destined.
But every such pattern then becomes its own state of free possibility. A higher level symmetry to be broken at a higher level shaken and shaken until it to settles into its own dynamical balance.
A Cosmos is more complex from the start as it has to be symmetry-breaking in two complementary directions at once. It is itself already a symmetry-breaking in progress. A Big Bang that is a mix of its relativistic metric doing the expanding and a hot quantum content doing the other thing of a cooling. A plasma fireball that is turning itself from a radiation soup into a matter dust via a series of topological phase transitions as the container expands and the contents spread out and dilute.
So good job we have both the real number matrices and the complex number matrices to keep track of both sides of this symmetry equation. Poincare invariance married to gauge invariance by little particle creating tricks such as that SU(2) is the double cover of SO(3). A Minkowski metric point can harbour the further inner complexity of a half-spin fermion that has to rotate 720 degrees to look like a 360 degree revolution. The mirror reflection trick that allows fermions to come as the creation~annihilation pairs of matter and antimatter.
The symmetry that gets broken to arrive at a world made of just matter and a void of long-spent radiation. The relic antimatter gone to join all dark matter and other stuff like neutrinos that has become causally irrelevant in this ruthless game of cosmic Darwinism. Or self-organising immanence.
And so it goes on. And on. Symmetry-breaking out to the furthest horizon. :wink:
I'm not a physicist, so this stuff is over my head. I had to Google "symmetry breaking"*1 to see if it can happen spontaneously without any causal inputs.
Does this contrarian-thesis mean that physical evolution occurs randomly and without causal inputs from the environment? In other words, without rhyme or reason. If so, how can scientists make any sense of the evolutionary process?*2
Is this symmetry-breaking argument intended to offer an explanation for non-classical acausal Quantum phenomena, and to deny the necessity of any cosmic First Cause of the Big Bang? How can Randomness explain anything other than Chaos . . . . or our ignorance of quantum scale reality?*3
It seems to me that human Reasoning & Logic are based on, or intuitively derived from, our experience with causation in the real world. Does this acausal thesis mean that millennia of philosophical reasoning has mis-interpreted fundamental Randomness*4 in terms of useful & meaningful Reasons, such as First Cause? :smile:
*1. Acausal Symmetry Breaking ? :
Arguments of the above kind that is, arguments leading to definite conclusions on the basis of an initial symmetry of the situation plus PSR have been used in science since antiquity (as Anaximanders argument testifies). The form they most frequently take is the following: a situation with a certain symmetry evolves in such a way that, in the absence of an asymmetric cause, the initial symmetry is preserved. In other words, a breaking of the initial symmetry cannot happen without a reason, or an asymmetry cannot originate spontaneously. Van Fraassen (1989) devotes a chapter to considering the way these kinds of symmetry arguments can be used in general problem-solving.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/
*2. "Evolution without causation" refers to the philosophical debate about whether evolutionary processes, particularly natural selection, should be understood as non-causal statistical phenomena rather than as processes driven by specific causal forces. While the majority of biologists and philosophers view evolution as a causal process involving factors like mutation, inheritance, and selection, a minority, often associated with the "statisticalist" school of thought, argue that natural selection is a non-causal epiphenomenon. This concept challenges the traditional understanding of evolution by suggesting it can occur due to statistical patterns and the differential survival of individuals, rather than by inherent causal forces shaping life forms.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=evolution+without+causation
*3. Ignorance of quantum scale reality refers to the deep conceptual and observational gap between the quantum realm and our classical, macroscopic experience, stemming from quantum mechanics' fundamental indeterminacy, observer-dependent phenomena, and non-intuitive properties like entanglement and non-locality. Physicists are actively working to resolve these mysteries and formulate a unified theory that bridges quantum theory and general relativity to better understand the true nature of reality.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ignorance+of+quantum+scale+reality
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle merely means that there's a "fundamental limit to how precisely certain pairs of physical properties, like an electron's position and momentum, can be known simultaneously". How can that sub-atomic sample of apparent randomness be scaled up to the evolution of a whole universe?
*4. Randomness is the apparent lack of pattern, cause, or predictability in an event, often associated with chance and probability, while reason implies a logical explanation or justification for an action or occurrence. Reason points to a specific cause, whereas randomness describes an event where the cause (if any) is not discernible, creating uncertainty in the outcome.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=randomness+vs+reason
This does not mean that symmetry breaks are acausal; symmetry breaks belong to an ontological continuum in which the slightest variation in the environment can lead to such a break. The cause is not external because it is not the first cause giving matter its form. The cause of the symmetry breaking may be due to a discrepancy between the symmetry of one system and the symmetry of another system with which it comes into contact. As I understand, everything occurs between different symmetry systems.
Again, I apologize for butting-in to your scholarly dialog with . The terminology alone is baffling to a late-blooming amateur philosopher with no formal training. But sometimes when I Google some esoteric language, I may actually learn something useful & meaningful. For example, "the dichotomising action of apokrisis" meant nothing to me, until Google revealed some associated concepts that I was already familiar with.
In the overview below*1, the evolution of the world is described in terms of two kinds of causes : Top Down = a creator/programmer, who serves as both First and Final Cause, bracketing the origin & development of what we call space-time Reality. Bottom-Up = the degrees of freedom that we call fundamental randomness/uncertainty on the quantum scale of reality. Working together, Cause (Law ; Regulation) & Chance (Stochastic Randomness ; Freedom) produce a Complex Adaptive System of "dynamic, non-linear systems of interacting agents that exhibit emergent, self-organizing behaviors and co-evolve over time". This kind of Emergent Evolution is compatible with my own notion of EnFormAction*2. :smile:
*1. Dichotomizing action of apokrisis :
[i]A systems view of causality: In a philosophical discussion on causality, the term apokrisis has been used to describe a foundational split. It is argued that a systems approach to causality dichotomizes the notion of cause into two complementary types:
Top-down constraints: The action of formal and final causes, representing global limitations.
Bottom-up degrees of freedom: The action of material and efficient causes, representing local spontaneity and construction.[/i]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=+dichotomising+action+of+apokrisis.
Note --- Formal causes are natural laws (Logic). First & Final causes are design intention. And Material & Efficient causes are the Energy/Matter cycle of thermodynamics. This is my interpretation, which may not be the original intent of the dichotomizing split. Working together, Constraints & Freedom are "complementary" and creative.
*2. EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. Its the creative force (aka : Divine Will) of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Causation.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Note --- "Ententional Causation" is the top-down lawful constraints, and "Random Interactions" are the bottom-up spontaneous degrees of freedom that allow for the emergent creativity of Evolution.
AI gives a nice summary .
You might note that your own AI prompt ends up referencing a lot of my own PF posts. :lol:
Another vid for your lecture tour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWWXcso-4E
Thanks for the summary. My philosophical vocabulary is narrow & limited, and obtained mostly since I retired. Before retirement I was more interested in physical sciences.
So I was not familiar with Anaximander's theory of Apeiron, but it seems to be generally compatible with my own amateur philosophical hypothesis of how the world works*1, based on Quantum physics and Causal Information.
My own term, Ideal Formal Potential (source of all real forms), may be equivalent to Aperion (unlimited possibility), or Spinoza's Substance (infinite unformed stuff). This boundless Potential is similar to Plato's unformed Chaos (infinite realm of unactualized Form). It's also imagined as the source of Causal Energy (EnFormAction) that exploded --- for unknown reasons --- into what we call the Big Bang.
Whether the Enformer is viewed as a god may be a question of personal taste, but it serves the same purpose of Creator of our Reality, without meddling with the automatic functions of natural Evolution. Because of the role of Information in the process of evolution, I like to think of the Enformer as a Programmer. And the execution of the program is what we call Causation.
My personal worldview is built upon what I call the BothAnd principle*1 of Complementarity or the Union of Opposites. Instead of an Either/Or reductive analysis, I prefer a Holistic synthesis. We seem to be coming from divergent directions, with different vocabularies, but eventually met somewhere in the middle of the Aperion. :smile:
*1. Both/And Principle :
[i]My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
# The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
# Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
# This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
There are many many versions of this in world culture as it is simply what is obvious once you think about how anything could come to have existence. Unless you go for some Big Daddy in the Sky divine creator figure, you are going to have to posit an ultimate stuff so vague it is just the potential for stuff, which then becomes something by dividing against itself in the complementary fashion that allows it to evolve into the many kinds of things we find.
One such philosopher whom you might like to add to your list is Schelling and his Ungrund.
A quick AI summary ..
What is Eternal is ever, and so there's no point at which any design could be put into it in the first place that never was; thus it must be Everything, either as potential or there all at once - and it still IS.
Tao: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5NFAInEizU
Quoting apokrisis
Solving the Eternal Equation
The great silence of the Unanswerable
Induces a clamor in us, relieved but by
Embracing the audacity of being:
To live, to love, to cherish each moment
This is the answer to Eternitys question.
However, to philosophically go further, I still need to know whether the mode of time is presentism or eternalism or growing block. Which is it?
If time is frozen or there is only the present moment, that rather makes existence seem rather directionless and meaningless.
Yet, we can't tell the difference among the three modes; how can we find out?
How was the music of the 'double-halving' vid?
To be honest, I hated it. Absolutely not my taste. But I am very picky about my music.
The rap works - and harder would be better - as the bombast of the music would match the bombast of what I wrote. It makes it impossible to take it too seriously.
But cheesy musical just sounds low budget. Fake sincerity that goes in one ear and out the other.
Its fun that you are having a go. But AI has to evolve a little more.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Philosophy of time is a mess. And thats because physics doesnt actually provide a general model.
So eternalism is what you get out of special relativity - where everything happens at the one massless speed of c and so time cant even elapse.
And presentism is what you would get out of general relativity where there is now mass and so the idea of a comoving reference frame. Particles can have a rest mass that locates them to a point in spacetime. They can stay in one place - relatively speaking - and so lag behind c as the general rate of causal interaction. To talk about the present has some meaning.
Then thermodynamics is starting to get somewhere as it has an arrow of time. There is an entropic gradient from past to future which breaks the symmetry of the relativistic descriptions.
The final model to be added into the mix has to be quantum physics. This is a work in progress but it looks to add the idea of contextually - the claim that the past does constrain the future in a decoherent fashion that fits with the thermodynamic arrow of time and thus supports the growing block universe approach.
But quantum theory brings a dose of retrocausality too, Time has to be emergent in a complex way where not every event is settled all at once. The current moment of the Universe is some present moment summary of all that has happened - all the quantum possibilities that have been decohered and made real. And then there are also all the events yet to be finalised as - in the timeless fashion of a photon under special relativity - the light from some star in the night sky will only hit your eyeball tonight when you stand outside and look up.
So - combining the stories told by our major models - we have this messy and emergent story. But it does support the growing block universe option once we account for the lags that make time the kind of thing we think it to be. Something that measures an elapsing duration.
These lags are the possibility of observers to be at rest in the Universe - to be comoving observers that have zero velocity in respect with each other and not zipping around at the speed of light.
And then the matching possibility to be still waiting for some c-rate interaction to happen - for that photon to finally cross a billion lightyears and its wavefunction to collapse as an act of thermal decoherence.
So time emerges as the waiting for something to happen becomes a concrete physical thing. The lags are what divide our world into that which has definitely happened and that which has yet to happen and still remains only probabilistic.
It takes time for two rest frame objects to move closer together or further apart. And it takes time just for them to interact just via lightspeed photons or gravity. Rest mass objects have a rich experience of time as they are both separated and connected by a duration - the gap they have between each other that would have to be crossed at some speed, and then the gap they have which is already being closed by c-rate thermal and gravitational interactions.
And all this doesnt work unless time is essentially timeless for the relativistic photon. And indeed, in some sense quantumly retrocausal. These would be the symmetries that the passing of time would be breaking so that particles with mass could be found at some particular location in time, as well as space.
(EDIT): That probably doesnt make a lot of sense to you. But you can see that time is treated somewhat differently by four useful models of the Cosmos. And that what we experience as time is the emergent combination of that in the current universe where - as its observers - we are rest mass objects in a comoving frame.
So we live in the world as it is with several levels of symmetry having been broken. We live in a world that as developed a topologically rich structure. Things have changed from time as it would be for a gas, then a liquid, and now as a solid - to use the phase transition metaphor.
And to recover the past of time itself, to recover its origin, we would expect to need a theory of quantum gravity as the description of the Universe with all its time symmetries still intact and waiting to be broken.
So the Planck scale had its Unit 1 symmetry as I previously said. Quantum gravity ruled. Then the rapid expanding and cooling of the baby Universe saw it crack and crack again. Time as we know it emerged with its growing block structure. A topologically richness that arose as the speed of change, the speed of causal connection, got dichotomised so that every event involving a mass term had some concrete speed that ranged between the relativistic limits of travelling at c and sitting at rest.
Precisely! That's why non-philosophers typically think in terms of real-world experiences --- Father in heaven --- instead of groundless abstractions : Ungund.
I scanned an article about Schelling's Ungrund, and found, among the paradoxes & enigmas, one statement that is akin to my own BothAnd Principle : idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is its body" . . . . "only both together can constitute a living whole.
https://epochemagazine.org/77/freedom-god-and-ground-an-introduction-to-schellings-1809-freedom-essay/
I don't follow most of his arcane reasoning, but the common notion of positive Potential makes more sense to me than the negation Ungrund. Potential even has a physical & scientific application, exemplified in storage batteries. "Vague" Potential per se is Ideal and does nothing, but when integrated into a real System (circuit), "both together" transform into Causation, and the voltage possibility of stored Energy is enabled to do actual Work.
I suspect that the OP argument "against cause" is talking about ideal & abstract Cause & Effect reasoning instead of the real & concrete natural cycles of Transformation in the real world. Hume argued that the notion of Causation was not real, but ideal : a "habit" of thinking based on experience with causal sequences, in which no physical connection between Cause and Effect can be seen, only inferred. Energy is not a real thing, but an ideal relationship : a ratio.
Philosophical Idealism is feckless & worthless by comparison to Scientific Realism. But working together, metaphysical Ideas & physical Actions allow human animals to dominate the natural world, by imagining invisible Potential, and then transforming mere possibilities into Actualities by means of Technology. :nerd:
AI Whitehead to the Rescue:
This goes straight to the heart of Alfred North Whiteheads process philosophy. While Whitehead never explicitly uses the term growing block universe, his metaphysics of actual occasions maps remarkably well onto that model though with some crucial differences that make his vision far more dynamic and organic.
Lets break it down carefully.
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1. The Creative Advance Time as Process
Whiteheads central idea is that reality is made of events, not substances what he calls actual occasions. Each occasion is a moment of experience that arises, becomes, and perishes. Once it has perished, it becomes a datum or objective fact for later occasions.
He calls this the creative advance into novelty an ongoing flow where each moment:
1. Prehends (takes in) the past,
2. Synthesizes its experience into a new unity, and
3. Perishes into the past, contributing itself to the growing universe.
So time is not a container in which things happen it is the happening of things.
Each new event is the presents contribution to the ever-growing totality of reality.
This is precisely a growing block mode of time:
The past remains real and permanent (every perished occasion endures as fact).
The present is the locus of creative becoming.
The future is not yet real only a field of potential (eternal objects) waiting to be actualized.
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2. The Block Grows, But Its Alive
In classical growing block theories, time is often imagined geometrically as a block that expands with each new layer of existence.
Whiteheads version is subtler: the universe is not a static structure that grows, but a living organism of becoming.
Every new actual occasion:
Re-enacts the past (by prehending it),
Creates novelty (a fresh synthesis of feeling, relation, and value),
And then objectifies becoming an immortal component of reality.
In this sense, the block grows organically each new moment is a creative transformation of all that has come before.
The past never vanishes, but it is no longer active it is what has become.
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3. Past, Present, and Future in Whiteheads Ontology
Thus, Whitehead integrates three layers of temporality:
1. The Objective Past what has become.
2. The Subjective Present what is becoming.
3. The Potential Future what may become.
This triadic structure fits perfectly into a growing block framework, with a metaphysical emphasis on the creative pulse of each new becoming.
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4. The Asymmetry of Time
Whitehead also provides a reason why time feels directed because:
Every event prehends the past, but not the future.
The causal arrows all point forward (from completed to emerging).
The novelty introduced in each occasion ensures that time has an arrow an irreversible creative growth.
This makes his version richer than purely physical eternalism or geometric growing block models: its not just that the universe adds new slices of spacetime, but that each new event changes the meaning of the whole. Reality evolves in significance as well as in extent.
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So while Whitehead shares the core structure of the growing block, he transforms it into a metaphysics of creativity what he calls the many becoming one, and being increased by one.
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5. A Poetic Summary
The world is a poem in progress:
each verse written, fixed in memory
the next still shimmering with potential.
The ink of time dries, line by line,
as eternity grows by living thought.
See my post above.
I prefer Bergson to Whitehead, although you are right about the triadic structure of relations and how all this fits the thermo-picture of the growing block universe.
Digging into my own database of notes about this issue, I find I long ago related Bergson notion of durations to the hierarchy theory view of Stanley Salthe which speaks of cogent moments. Something that is also illuminating in terms of the OP as it is about causality as the contextual integration the collapsed of the wavefunction as it must be when it is structured by the growing block universe as a spatiotemporal hierarchy. The lightcone structure that special relativity produces and "freezes" as its baseline representation of spacetime.
So what everyone has in common here is the triadicity of the systems approach. And that then gets expressed as a fractal or scalefree hierarchy of durations or cogent moments. The kind of block universe view that expands~cools from every point of its metric. Any disturbance at a point propagates at c to create an expanding space of its ripples.
A star has its probability of emitting a hot ray or a gravitational wobble. That potential spreads and cools until it becomes a concrete event at some other point. It could be not very far and so still very hot if the causal interaction is with a mote of dust in near orbit with the star. Or if could be a very dim and redshifted photon that has travelled an incredible distance to reach your eyeball looking up to the heavens at night.
So the speed of light sets a baseline spatiotemporal scale for the expanding and cooling. It creates regions in lightcone causal contact. And every such lightcone region or cogent moment grows like a swelling bubble until there is the event that decoheres it and locates it. The event that makes the bubble go pop and fix a place and a temperature where that ray met its concrete fate. The event that turned a future possibility into a definite past event. The present is then the surface of the bubble as the spacetime point where the event was actualised and thus all the other possible points on that spacetime surface where it counterfactually didn't.
We get the classical locality of a photon having been emitted and then being absorbed. But also the quantum nonlocality of the counterfactuality of a lightcone region where the photon could have been absorbed and yet equally certainly wasn't.
Anyway this is a post I once wrote on the similarity of Bergson and Salthe, and how the triadic logic can be set up as a nested hierarchy of process. The same basic "event creating" story of a causal connection, but set in a growing space of such "eventful moments".
So time from the point of view of its individuated happenings vs time from the point of view of all the expanding and cooling that was happening inbetween and so became the durational context to the event.
One could also throw Deleuze into this conversation. My point is that time has this nested hierarchical structure as all reality is indeed a process of durations growing the space of a potential that is then terminated at some point as a history-fixing event. There is the positive collapse of a possibility which was swelling at some general characteristic rate, but then gets punctured at some also characteristic rate, even if that rate is by contrast not a global constant but a local random accident. Like the half-life of a decay curve.
So again, this is the growing block universe view. But it is a step more complicated as it marries the general pace of an expanding~cooling cosmos the growing block bit to the quantumness of the events that fix the history as being probabilistic. There is randomness to the puncturing of all the bubbles that are getting blown.
Early in the Universe, everything is so hot and close that this randomness is maximally compressed. It seems pretty classical as any two particles are bound to interact almost immediately and without any real cooling. We have the plasma state of annihilating particles, as we get with the matter~antimatter brew of the quark~gluon plasma.
But as the Universe spreads right out and cools right down, it can start to take longer and longer for two particles to interact. The average time to the thermal decoherence of a particle can stretch out to billions of lightyears, as it does for distant star light seeking the absorbing terminus of our eyeball.
The indeterminacy stretches out for eons now. So when we are thinking of the passage of time, it is like the fast ticking clock of the plasma state has become the immensely slowed or time dilated clock of the current universe. We look around at the stars sprinkling the light sky and there are now both so few photons arriving, and they have been coming at us for so long.
The duration/cogent moment point of view turns time from something spatialised to something "processuralised". Not a simple geometric dimension but a topologically complex dimension growing effect.
My notes also remind me of a paper by Arran Gare on Whitehead and Pythagoras where he argues why Whitehead doesn't quite get it right...
Actually Gare is a good general cite if you are puzzled by where my own "worldview" comes from. He has a slew of papers covering the same pattern of intellectual connections.
and only then enters consciousness, the so-called 'now' being like a tape delay of half a second ago.
Good point.
Good post!
Whitehead's living, evolving, organic worldview resonates better with me, than the static "geometric" Block Time model*1. It better explains the incessant Change, and inexorable Causation that we humans experience and record in our Science & History. His Actual Occasions*2 are ticks on the cosmic clock, and serve as Atoms of Evolution.
As a Dynamic Block Model of physics, Whitehead's theory describes a scientific, non-religious concept similar to traditional metaphysical god-models, but also to modern models of physical Nature*3. It even includes Human Experience as a key feature of the living organism that is growing from a space-time quickening (Big Bang) into the on-going Reality that sentient creatures explore in their individual quests for survival. What the Cosmos was prior to the quickening is unknowable to humans (ontology). What we experience now is reality (axiology). What the cosmos will ultimately become, when it matures, remains to be seen by future sentience (epistemology).
We humans experience the growth of god in terms of the Time Triad of Past, Present, Future. The Past, as they say, is history (memory, fact), the Present is empirical reality, and the Future is open-ended Possibility. According to Whitehead's theory, human experience is god's experience. And the Life of the Cosmos is what we know as Causation. So, to argue Against Cause is to deny, not just a creator god, but to dismiss Life itself*4. :smile:
*1. Block Time Universe :
Philosophers such as John Lucas argue that "The Block universe gives a deeply inadequate view of time. It fails to account for the passage of time, the pre-eminence of the present, the directedness of time and the difference between the future and the past."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
*2. Actual Occasion :
In Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics, an actual occasion is the fundamental "drop of experience" that constitutes reality.
*3. The God Process :
No, A.N. Whitehead does not propose a traditional creator God, but rather a God who is a partner in the universe's creative process. In his philosophy of process metaphysics, God is not a coercive creator who makes things ex nihilo, but a "lure" that presents possibilities to guide the universe toward novelty and order. God is not omnipotent, but persuasive and receptive, experiencing the world's joys and sorrows alongside creation and co-creating the future with it.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a.n.+whitehead+creator+god
*4. The phrase "life is causation" can be interpreted in different ways, but it generally points to the idea that every event and state in life is a result of preceding causes and, in turn, a cause for future events. This can be understood as a complex system of interconnected cause-and-effect relationships, from the biological and physical laws that govern our bodies to the choices we make that lead to specific outcomes. While some argue that life is a complex system that goes beyond simple cause and effect, many also view causation as the fundamental structure that allows us to understand, predict, and navigate the world around us.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=life+is+causation
The demise of presentism:
There are big problems with Presentism as a sequence of nows with the past not kept and the future not yet existing, the first problem being its unrelenting besiegement by Einsteins relativity of simultaneity.
Second, the turning of a now into the next now sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous now wholly consumed in the making of the new now all over the universe at once in a dynamical updatingthe present now exhausting all reality. The incredibly short Planck time would be the processing time and that is not much at all.
Third, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of what is, and so Presentism has no true nonexistence of the future and the pastwhich means that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class; non-existent 'Nothing' is not an option.
Einsteins Special Relativity Universe is timeless because in his theory time is shown to be a variable, and thus time is not absolute, but relative, there being no universal now.
This Special Relativity Universe contains all its destined and particular events already laid out from its starting point and infinitely onward. This is Eternalism, in which past, present, and future coexist. Aka One, Block Universe, A Picture of Change. Parmenides philosophy accords.
In Einsteins General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, the laws that underlie them are time-symmetricthe physics described is the same, regardless of whether time increases or decreases. Aka time-reversible laws.
More so, the laws say nothing about the now point. In this static universe of space-time, any flow of time, or passage through it thus must be a mental construct or an illusion.
The Con to the Timeless: (from Gisin)
[i]In a predetermined world in which time only seems to unfold, exactly what will happen for all time actually had to be set from the start, with the initial state of every single particle encoded with infinitely many digits of precision. Otherwise there would be a time in the far future when the clockwork universe itself would break down.
But information is physical. Modern research shows that it requires energy and occupies space. Any volume of space is known to have a finite information capacity (with the densest possible information storage happening inside black holes). The universes initial conditions would require far too much information crammed into too little space. A real number with infinite digits cant be physically relevant. The block universe, which implicitly assumes the existence of infinite information, must fall apart.[/I]
Presentism vs Eternalism vs spaceless Quantum Field Monads fun vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQaWzDb23zs
Yep. So this is why I point to the way that the growing block universe has to have a present moment structure that is complex and not simple.
The baseline view might be special relativitys casual lightcone structure. But then general relativity breaks that with its comoving rest mass frame. Riemann spacetime replacing Minkowski spacetime. And quantum mechanics of the comoving rest mass frame then breaks that with its wavefunction spacetime holism - the way individual events are smeared out by an element of temporal entanglement or retrocausality.
So rest mass has its present moment in the strong sense of being located at spacetime points. Light and gravity move at c and so are stretched out over cogent lightcone moments as events. Then quantum moments are events that are reflect their present moment context in a nonlocal fashion. They feel the decohering weight of the accumulating bulk of the past as the constraint on their freedom to happen anywhen.
So the growing bulk universe would have this complex emergent structure and what we think of as time is generally the average state of the bulk - its current cross-section state of development in terms of being a doubling-halving and expanding-cooling Big Bang metric. A place with some temperature reading and redshift that locates it on the sliding scale that is the Planck scale being inverted. We are some spacetime extent and energy density content away from the ultimate smallness and hotness of the Big Bang and now also some matching distance away from the ultimate largeness and coldness of its Heat Death.
So there is a now - a current slice across the cosmic evolution - defined by the past that has on the whole happened and the future on the whole still to happen. The CMB is that ticking clock in being a generalised fireball of radiation with a temperature of 2.7 degrees K and a comoving particle horizon of 46.5 billion lightyears. That is the scale which defines the present.
But then there is still all the lagging matter - the cosmic web of stars, interstellar gas and other gravitating crud - that is hotter and less spread out than the CMB bulk. And all this lagging matter is still adding radiative and gravitational events to the Cosmos - quantum possibilities that are being created and needing to be dechohered as localised and individuated connecting strands of interaction. The photon some ancient star emitted and which tonight will find its absorber when it hits your eyeball.
So from that secondary point of view - the mass that lags the general dissipative rate of the cosmic fireball - the present is whenever some newly created quantum possibility finds that its time has finally expired. Its wavefunction has been collapsed and so its energy added to the now of the evolving block universe. Decoherence has put an open possibility safely into the thermal past even as it has also set up some new state of quantum possibility if the event remains warmer and denser that the backdrop baseline of the CMB.
Your eyeball will be warmed slightly by the ancient photon. The energy will be handed on in the form of some further quantum-structured temporal event. Much colder photons, but still warm enough to be seeking their future within a bath of 2.7 degree K radiation mostly now headed only to the end of time.
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Hmmm.
Ill stick to talking these issues through even if it is just a conversation I have with myself. :smile:
I'm still listening to your great posts; I'll have to come up with some award or reward.
Now*1 is not an objective physical thing, but as you noted, a metaphysical subjective label for the ephemeral Planck time between instances of Cause and Effect, which are also labels for instants of Change, or a snapshot of Becoming. If you subtract Before from After, the result is Change or Difference.
Perhaps that fleeting connect-the-dots experience of Change, of Difference, is what gives us the impression of a direction or arrow of Time. We still don't know what causes Causation, but we label it as "Energy", and vaguely define it as Ability or Power or Capacity or Work, and imagine it as-if an invisible Substance. We could just as well call it "Magic". Which may be why the OP is opposed to Causation.
Sorry. Just riffing on a theme. :wink:
*1. The philosophy concept of "now" is complex and has been explored in various ways, often touching on the nature of time, existence, and perception. Key philosophical discussions around "now" include the idea that it is a fleeting, ever-changing moment, and questions about whether it is an objective reality or a subjective experience.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=philosophy+%22now%22+concept