Different creation/causation narratives
I consider a creation narrative to be the first cause we can understand and then understand no real distinction between the first cause and succeeding ones. If I'm not wrong about that then that includes creation narratives in any causation narratives.
There are only four or five creation narratives that I'm aware of and I wonder what their benefits and deficiencies cf. each other.
The first is creatio ex nihilo and I find issues with that when you apply it as a full causation narrative as we can trace objects back (say where an apple just came from) without any reference to nothing. I'm not sure what benefit it brings.
Creatio ex dei seems to be similar but conceptually has advantages without a postulation of nothingness.
Emergentism is a causation narrative that means the new object in succession has traits distinct from the prior object(s) which it emerges from. It is usually justified by statistical mechanics, among other probability-based fields. I've never seen an ontological example of emergentism just epistemological configurations.
A type of emergentism can be sublationism as proposed by Hegel but I think his creation narrative is faulty even with kenosis for christ later as the father is still prior who creates him. A better conception for Hegel's sublationism is christ starting then sublating himself to become man, sublating again to produce everlasting life (Hegel thinks this works) but in that last sublation, he should become God, the father. Heretical certainly and seems to make superfluous of the Absolute Spirit which assumedly must come later.
I find the issues of sublationism/emergentism too large to get past.
Emanationism is where objects have all their meaning and ontology from an object they are a "part of". For instance apples emanate from a tree where so long as a tree exists, apples will be made according to the tree and the tree according to the environment etc.
I feel like this is the best creation/causation narrative and explains everything. This seems to imply a hierarchical foundationalism and math would be ordered like pascal's triangle which seems to make the most sense for understanding math in equations, areas etc.
The last one I know is successionism which is similar to emergentism except no new variables or traits are created, there's just an advancement from the preceding object in the same way as preceding that. An example is cantor's different sets of numbers.
I feel like a huge weakness is its linearity which makes using these numbers outside succession very difficult. For instance 2*3 would require two lines of succession (one to 2 and the other 3) and then creating a new line (2*1, 2*2, 2*3) which is a lot of effort and seems functionally impossible without intuition leaps for larger numbers.
Are there benefits to these or other ones you may know?
There are only four or five creation narratives that I'm aware of and I wonder what their benefits and deficiencies cf. each other.
The first is creatio ex nihilo and I find issues with that when you apply it as a full causation narrative as we can trace objects back (say where an apple just came from) without any reference to nothing. I'm not sure what benefit it brings.
Creatio ex dei seems to be similar but conceptually has advantages without a postulation of nothingness.
Emergentism is a causation narrative that means the new object in succession has traits distinct from the prior object(s) which it emerges from. It is usually justified by statistical mechanics, among other probability-based fields. I've never seen an ontological example of emergentism just epistemological configurations.
A type of emergentism can be sublationism as proposed by Hegel but I think his creation narrative is faulty even with kenosis for christ later as the father is still prior who creates him. A better conception for Hegel's sublationism is christ starting then sublating himself to become man, sublating again to produce everlasting life (Hegel thinks this works) but in that last sublation, he should become God, the father. Heretical certainly and seems to make superfluous of the Absolute Spirit which assumedly must come later.
I find the issues of sublationism/emergentism too large to get past.
Emanationism is where objects have all their meaning and ontology from an object they are a "part of". For instance apples emanate from a tree where so long as a tree exists, apples will be made according to the tree and the tree according to the environment etc.
I feel like this is the best creation/causation narrative and explains everything. This seems to imply a hierarchical foundationalism and math would be ordered like pascal's triangle which seems to make the most sense for understanding math in equations, areas etc.
The last one I know is successionism which is similar to emergentism except no new variables or traits are created, there's just an advancement from the preceding object in the same way as preceding that. An example is cantor's different sets of numbers.
I feel like a huge weakness is its linearity which makes using these numbers outside succession very difficult. For instance 2*3 would require two lines of succession (one to 2 and the other 3) and then creating a new line (2*1, 2*2, 2*3) which is a lot of effort and seems functionally impossible without intuition leaps for larger numbers.
Are there benefits to these or other ones you may know?
Comments (26)
But that's really the problem for me. Except in the very simplest situations we can't trace events back very far. When we can, we find that there are multiple causes for almost everything. There's a word for it - overdetermination. I'm working, slowly, on a thread to discuss whether causation is a useful way of understanding how things work.
Quoting Shwah
Emergentism isn't really about causation, is it? It's not that chemistry causes biology, it's that what we call biological phenomena are consistent with chemical principles. Please explain what you mean by an epistemological configuration of emergentism.
Quoting Shwah
This doesn't really seem to have much to do with causation or creation either. It's about how what already exists, has already been caused, can be described.
Quoting Shwah
This seems like a traditional approach to causation. As I noted, for me it fails because the whole idea of causation is difficult to justify in most situations. This is not a radical idea. It's been on the table for more than a hundred years and is supported by established and respected philosophers and scientists.
So, how do we deal with the issue of the relationship between events and succeeding events? How do we use the past and present to predict the future? As I said, I'm working on that for myself right now.
Yeah that's fair. I think for me causation doesn't inherently need time in order to speak about cause. To me cause is solely the "why" something "is" so the basis is a type of predication of the is. This definition and generalization allows an inclusion of math/logical problems such as 1+1=2. If we include time then we can't include universals and then we have no means to speak about "what caused math" which is important for the "foundations of mathematics" etc.
In that, we would need to be able to speak about what causes time and how time is ordered (linearly, hierachically, cyclically). I've heard arguments which necessitate time for causation but then it becomes deficient to speak about time itself and makes any causation narrative a bit ad hoc to what the basis is (seasons, years for cycles or convergent evolution for hierarchy or linear time).
What are some good conceptions of causation in principles or full narratives that you prefer?
As far as the epistemological conception of emergentism, this video below called the game of life takes zero input from the person and plays itself (a zero-player game). It creates multiple shapes etc and people have tried to map what shapes are created (when birds appear and what happens after) and it seems impossible but the issue is they're establishing an epistemological fraking of the code ("birds") then trying to create patterns off that when the code doesn't compute by that so epistemologically emergentism seems to appear but ontologically this isn't the case.
https://youtu.be/C2vgICfQawE
It's called emergent computing.
I think you've broadened the definition of the words "causation" and "creation" to the point where they've lost their meaning. If you look at definitions of causation, they almost always focus on the temporal sequence of two events. To me, a temporal sequence and a logical sequence are completely different things. You are comparing one spherical, brightly colored fruit that is used to make juice that children like to drink with another, completely different, brightly colored fruit that is used to make juice that children like to drink.
Quoting Shwah
As I said, I don't think the idea of causation is a very useful one for any but the simplest situations. From my reading, It seems that the idea of cause really arose in relation to actions initiated by people and that the use of the term for events that don't involve people is a relatively more recent affair. Please don't ask me to defend that idea right now, but I think it's important.
Quoting Shwah
I find the Game of Life, cellular automata, fascinating.
Quoting Shwah
Sorry. I don't understand, especially the underlined part.
I would agree with the distinction between temporal sequentialism and logical sequentialism. I think I'm trying to capture sequentialism in general and have just been calling it causation. I'm not a big fan of temporal sequences and just redefine them in terms of their ontology (such as where a rock on mars may be from t1 to t2 is entirely dependent on the object rock and mars).
Epistemological is just a way we try to order things so an example may be that darkness is the opposite of light, so allowing polarities creates this concept that because light exists materially that darkness does. This would be a distinction between validity and soundness where darkness is ontologically just the absence of light (also valid but sound).
There's a particular order where the ontological nature of an object informs what epistemic standards can be used to understand it (such as what eyes or hands will "know" about a blade of grass under a running river). This order is asymmetric where the "belief, degree of knowledge, hunger-inducement the idea may make you etc" have no impact on the ontological position in question (say quantum mechanics or theism etc).
So for emergent computing they try to develop a valid structure for dealing with objects they propose exist (such as birds and them turning into flocks) and formally this fails because the game of life deals with completely different units (just dots in general I suppose).
Epistemology is the study of how we know things. I'm confused by the way you're using the word.
Quoting Shwah
Sorry, I'm lost.
Quoting Shwah
What flocking birds and the cells of cellular automata have in common is that changes in the behavior of cells or birds are based on simple rules about how they react to the behavior of adjacent cells or birds.
Sometimes the word used is epistemic such as epistemic priviliege (where one is privilieged with a unique epistemic set, or way to deal with reality, based on your upbringing (or based on ontological events that happened in your life vs epistemic ones which you may have participated in epistemically but not actually such as watching a horror movie or waving back at someone who was not waving at you)).
I'm still lost. I don't see what this has to do with causation or creation.
Creatio ex nihilo is an expression of a lower limit to awareness. Creatio ex dei simply consolidates awareness of this limit itself as ‘something’.
Quoting Shwah
The emergent traits of any new object are qualitatively determined. Emergentism is related to the qualitative variability in logical configurations of energy. The structure of a carbon atom, for instance, has a much higher degree of qualitative variability in its stable configuration than a hydrogen atom. So it stands to reason that reconfigurations of carbon-based molecular structures would have a high variability of emergent traits.
Quoting Shwah
Emanationism is related to the base notion of logic, which is the possibility of absolute interconnectedness. It pays no mind, however, to the role of information/entropy. A tree with insufficient energy or information from its environment will not make apples. It connects everything through metaphor, but certainly doesn’t explain everything.
I agree with @T Clark in that causation narratives - bound as they are by temporality - are insufficient explanations for reality. But I do get your understanding of epistemology as an understanding of ‘the way we order things’. This is conceptual structure - ‘how we know things’ is a reduction of this structure to predictive certainty.
Sure so the "logical configurations of energy" reminds me of statistical mechanics and the argument that temperature emerges from an individual state of atoms but to me that seems epistemological. I was wondering if you had a means to describe the examples you gave in an ontological manner.
The emanationism not accounting for entropy is interesting. I hadn't heard that and I'm not sure how to overcome that but I think it can be solved. I think emanationism, in a foundationalist structure, allows hierarchical time which can speak for convergent evolution more easily than linear time/evolution can.
I think a way to show entropy in emanationism is how objects interact after they've been created and creation is away from a foundation and we can seek the foundation more but it's always drifting away and in conjunction with many objects that are instantiated. Conceptually that may work but I don't have examples or strong arguments for it.
How familiar are you with Ontic Structural Realism?
Completely unfamiliar, if you need me to do some light reading I can.
From SEP on Structural Realism:
Quoting SEP
So it says objects have no intrinsic traits just relational ones? So a carbon atom isn't a carbon atom per se but the rearrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons? I have some reservations but if that's correct then I'm on board.
(Wiki)
Observe my avatar as an example.
Sure but causation usually necessitates strong emergence imo, wdyt?
(Wiki)
I don't personally see the nature of consciousness being emergent. If it's meant to be that the material brain makes consciousness emergent then I've seen studies which imply the opposite like the point of no return which shows a limit to material vetoing power. Some experiments from the wiki here.
I don't give it much thought. On the other hand weak emergence runs throughout my explorations in dynamical systems in the complex plane. Interesting link though. Thanks.
:up:
You mean real stuff that happened and imaginary? That's quite some way to put it...
What they look like? Can we consider them friends?
This is how early humans may have come to think of creation: an extrapolation of the ordinary notion of a maker that might've been the staple of conversations around fires to the universe itself.
Baked into the concept of a maker is a powerful, conscious, intelligent being and a beginning.
How can creating an eternal and infinite universe have a beginning,?
The high level structures, by definition, cant be reduced to the parts forming the structure. Particles can form a circle, a sphere, an ellipse, a leaf shape, a tree shape, a coffee cup, etc. Like thoughts can. Like the neocortex can influence the center brain and body. The shape of a form can't be deduced from the lower level parts. The structure of shapes is determined by causal forks, directing particles with no mutual interaction.
Through certain studies we can see that we are born with empathy and project certain feelings onto objects that appear to interact with each other. Projecting agency onto objects is where the ‘narrative’ sprouts from.
The ‘narrative’ of ‘narratives’ is our nature.