What does “cause” mean?
I’ve been thinking about causality a lot recently and the subject seems to have come up on a lot of threads. I thought it might make sense to figure out just what it means to call something the cause of something else. For the purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on physical causes of physical effects. I recognize that leaves out a lot of legitimate examples, but I want to keep it simple for now.
Aristotle writes about four types of cause - material, formal, efficient, and final. I’m pretty sure what I’m talking about is efficient cause. I’d rather not spend time walking through Aristotle’s classifications in this thread.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about philosophical causality:
Quoting Wikipedia
Wikipedia also has something interesting to say about causality in physics. They claim that cause “...must be… ultimately reducible to fundamental interactions,” by which they mean the electromagnetic, gravitational, strong, and weak forces. That strikes me as true but not obvious.
I want to take a fairly detailed look at a very simple, actually cliched, example of physical causation - a moving billiard ball hitting a motionless one. For the purposes of this discussion, we won’t worry about what put the first ball in motion to begin with. More from Wikipedia:
Quoting Wikipedia
From another source on the web:
Quoting Real World Physics Problems
So, when the two balls hit each other, by which we mean the electrons in the atoms near the surface of the balls repel each other, the collision is elastic. That means the force of the collision causes both balls to deform like springs. When they move back into their original positions, a force is exerted and energy is transferred from one ball to the other and the second ball starts to move.
The process I just described seems to me to be the essence of what we mean when we say that one physical event causes another one. As the text from Wikipedia noted, most events have more than one cause and may have many. I focused in as close as we can get to the point when energy was transferred from one object to the other in order to avoid an infinite regress of causes - the cue hits the ball, the muscles of the players arm and hand contract, the ligaments and tendons transfer motion from the muscles to bones….
Again - For this thread I’d like to focus just on the meaning of the words “cause” or “causalty,” not on any other philosophical issues. Also, as I noted, I’d like the focus to be on physical causes.
Aristotle writes about four types of cause - material, formal, efficient, and final. I’m pretty sure what I’m talking about is efficient cause. I’d rather not spend time walking through Aristotle’s classifications in this thread.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about philosophical causality:
Quoting Wikipedia
Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (a cause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an effect) where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space.
Wikipedia also has something interesting to say about causality in physics. They claim that cause “...must be… ultimately reducible to fundamental interactions,” by which they mean the electromagnetic, gravitational, strong, and weak forces. That strikes me as true but not obvious.
I want to take a fairly detailed look at a very simple, actually cliched, example of physical causation - a moving billiard ball hitting a motionless one. For the purposes of this discussion, we won’t worry about what put the first ball in motion to begin with. More from Wikipedia:
Quoting Wikipedia
Everyday objects do not actually touch each other; rather, contact forces are the result of the interactions of the electrons at or near the surfaces of the objects. The atoms in the two surfaces cannot penetrate one another without a large investment of energy because there is no low energy state for which the electron wavefunctions from the two surfaces overlap; thus no microscopic force is needed to prevent this penetration. On the more macroscopic level, such surfaces can be treated as a single object, and two bodies do not penetrate each other due to the stability of matter,
From another source on the web:
Quoting Real World Physics Problems
[i]The physics behind billiards (or the physics behind pool), in large part, involves collisions between billiard balls. When two billiard balls collide the collision is nearly elastic. An elastic collision is one in which the kinetic energy of the system is conserved before and after impact. Therefore, for simplicity one can assume that for collisions involving billiard balls, the collision is perfectly elastic.
For collisions between balls, momentum is always conserved (just like in any other collision). For a simplified case assuming no friction …we can combine this fact with the elastic-collision assumption to find the trajectory of two colliding billiard balls after impact.[/i]
So, when the two balls hit each other, by which we mean the electrons in the atoms near the surface of the balls repel each other, the collision is elastic. That means the force of the collision causes both balls to deform like springs. When they move back into their original positions, a force is exerted and energy is transferred from one ball to the other and the second ball starts to move.
The process I just described seems to me to be the essence of what we mean when we say that one physical event causes another one. As the text from Wikipedia noted, most events have more than one cause and may have many. I focused in as close as we can get to the point when energy was transferred from one object to the other in order to avoid an infinite regress of causes - the cue hits the ball, the muscles of the players arm and hand contract, the ligaments and tendons transfer motion from the muscles to bones….
Again - For this thread I’d like to focus just on the meaning of the words “cause” or “causalty,” not on any other philosophical issues. Also, as I noted, I’d like the focus to be on physical causes.
Comments (191)
So the coupling of real particles to the virtual gauge particle fields causes other particles to change 4-momentum. Two real particles are needed at least. One particle coupling to the virtual field has a potential to cause.
This seems more of a focus on the physics question of what causation is as opposed to the philosophical issues related to causation. The philosophical debate related to causation is: https://iep.utm.edu/causation/
For example, take Hume's comment "We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable." This denies direct knowledge of causation and claims it's based upon an assumption that A causes B as opposed to A always seems correlated to B. Statistically speaking, the best you can say is that A is 100% correlated to B after n number of trials, but you can't ever say that A causes B.
So, you've spoken of causation, but you can't see the property of causation, as in your example, the bounce off one ball to the other. You can see the movement, but not the actual causation.
I think contemporary physics assumes energy and matter are what fundamentally cause things. In biology they assume some conception of life.
I think currently in physics they haven't put up a narrative as to what's a necessary component of cause and what's sufficient (such as quantum spin etc). It seems they're still trying to find more particles and trying to order them. I know string theory fell out of favor but quantum field theory has an argument for accounting for cause in quantum mechanics and general relativity (which both supplanted classical mechanics in manners of their own). In classical mechanics I believe kinetic energy was what caused things.
So what is it causality? It's a good question and Hume would say that whatever it is, we can only see "constant conjunction", event B following from event A. There is surely more to causality than this, Hume unambiguously states, but that's not what we discover when we look at things happening in the world.
I'd add that whatever it is, is crucially determined by the creatures we are. We frame events so as to say that one follows the other, it's an open question if this is what nature does.
Sometimes it may. But we can't get out of our bodies to verify it.
EDIT: After reading the OP's request, I think the meaning of the word is more or less straightforward, we want to know what matter affects this other matter is such a way as to be able to state that one phenomena is intimately connected in the rising of another phenomena, which would not occur absent the preceding event.
I do, eventually, want to have a discussion about philosophical issues related to causation. I've already tried to have some of those discussions in various threads, but it's been a muddle. My plan is to make sure I am clear on what I mean by "causality" before I dig deeper.
Quoting Hanover
I think it goes further than that. Once you get past over-simplified situations like the billiard balls, it get's much more complicated. Most events have more than one and perhaps many causes. Events we call causes may not lead to events we call results 100% of the time. Being bitten by an infected deer tick causes Lyme disease, but not everyone who is bitten by an infected deer tick gets Lyme disease.
That's why I wanted to start out with something very simple.
I wanted to quote this portion here as I think there is something unclear which needs to be sorted out. And aspect of causality may be time, but is not a necessary aspect of causality as it is often used.
For example, lets take a snap of a ball falling towards the Earth. We could say, "What causes the ball to be in that exact spot at that moment?" If we examined all of the forces on the ball, we could conclude that is the cause for the ball being there at that exact moment.
Causality first requires a state of identity. When I talk about the cue ball, am I necessarily talking about it down to the quark level? Likely not. Am I using the Earth's rotation or considering the slight speed up and slowdown as Earth orbits the sun through space? Likely not.
So an identity is set, as well as its scale. We might consider the cue ball, but ignore the subatomic level. Time is one of those identities that we can consider, but we set a scale for this as well.
Do we want to consider seconds? Nano-seconds? Months, years? The scale and identities we pick for our consideration all need to be considered.
As identities as well as scale can be varied, so can the term "causality". I just wanted to note that its very important to understand that time does not necessarily have to be an identity, or an identity at zero scale when considering causality in the snapshot of "Why is something in its current state?"
It is certainly true that I could have gone even deeper into the interactions of the billiard balls than I did. I could, theoretically, done an analysis using quantum mechanics. But where I drew the line makes sense to me.
Yeah I'm not sure what causes or how to account for kinetic energy to be honest. I gave a quick once-through about what the traits in quantum mechanics were. If I remember correctly, the difference between bosons and fermions was a De Morgan's law in dirac notation (which would intuit a logical reduction of physics) but irdr, it was over a year or two ago.
Causes always lead to events if we accept that every event has a cause, which is a basic metaphysical assumption. What you have identified isn't a metaphysical problem, but an epistemological one, meaning every cause doesn't have a predictable event, and by "predictable," I mean knowable. That we don't know whether you will contract Lyme's disease by the bite of an infected deer tick doesn't mean that there will not be an event that is caused by the bite of the infected deer tick, it just means you don't know what it will be.
As you increase the number of variables that can affect outcome, predictability decreases and is arguably eliminated, which is the foundation of chaos theory, but chaos theory doesn't suggest some events don't have causes.
I've been thinking about the right way to respond to your post. Your points are good ones and are at the heart of the questions I want to get to eventually, which I think are metaphysical questions. I was going to try to avoid metaphysical issues in this discussion. Maybe that was an unrealistic hope.
I find this an unsatisfactory response to your post. I'll think some more and come back later.
I think you're exactly right, and that's why I wanted to look at the billiard ball example at a molecular level. I wanted to bring those framing, scaling issues out into the open so I could take a look at them. I think they are really important. The fact that we have to choose the scale and frame we are going to look at things at is also important.
I'd suggest that the apparent way to cash out the notion that A caused B, where A and B are considered to be two distinct events, is something like that in each and every case in which A occurs, B follows. Implicit in this are modal considerations, the is, necessarily, A causes B if and only if every event A is followed by event B. We thus arrive at counterfactual theories of causation, which, despite having all the apparatus of possible world semantics at hand, fail to produce a coherent account.
A second try might be to soften "A causes B" from B always following A to B mostly following A; to treat causation as probable rather than certain. Hence the present preoccupation with causal models, which I am forced to admit show great promise in both their usefulness in practical application and to some extent their correspondence to our mundane notions of cause.
The alternative, for which I have great sympathy, is that the notion of cause cannot be cashed out in any great depth, to follow Hume in concluding that cause is more habit than physics.
A few things to note. Firstly, by taking the example of billiard balls, and especially the description of electron repulsion, as epitomising cause, we run the risk of falling into the common philosophical trap of reaching a wrong conclusion by limiting the examples we are considering.
And secondly, it is well worth noting that scientists, especially physicists, rarely if ever make use of the word "cause". It's philosophers who describe the work of scientists as finding causes. Scientists think of themselves as discovering how things are rather than what causes what. Try looking up "cause" in the index of a text in any science. If it were central to the scientific enterprise. one would expect more than one or two entries.
Is cause something more like a necessary relationship?
Oh, yes. A hangover of Aristotelian physics, used with ulterior motives.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's an important question. I agree that this is how it is often treated, as can be seen from some of the replies above, and the many other threads on the topic. The glory of 's OP is that it dares ask the question "what is causation", and the answer is that it is not the necessary relationship so many suppose. Hence, David Lewis' brilliant analysis of the counterfactual (read [i]necessary[/I]) nature of causation apparently ultimately fails.
(I find myself arguing with corrective text on this new laptop.)
I'm not sure what science's lack of use of cause has to do with the situation. Evolution is still a theory as it has no causation narrative that is sufficient to explain what's happening.
In any case, what issue would you find with causation?
As I understand it evolution was never about cause, it's about natural selection. Abiogenesis is about cause (or the lack thereof).
Sure natural selection's a cause. The question is "what cause dictates biological object x to become biological object y". People can erroneously assume it's due to "randomness" but that's explanatory for nobody.
Some people assume it's ad hoc or the explanation is due to "what survives".
Those are bad understandings of evolution and on the face of it seems like what's not happening. That being said, what *is* happening and with that how does that bring us to convergent evolution, divergent etc? We have nothing which's meaning formalizes this observation. Environment doesn't do enough and neither do predators. These variables influence it certainly but they're not sufficient explanations.
Edit: many different species live in a similar environment or have the same predators and can be vastly different. Genes looks like a good place to look but we currently have issues in science with "noise" (e.g. replicability issue) and now we're going to get more noise if web 3.0 gets big but it doesn't look popular because it's goofy. Probably a corporate-sponsored phase in technology to get more of our data.
How would you describe evolution then without cause?
You are hoping to project an intuitive notion of efficient cause onto the physical account - one where, as you say, you can ignore the rest of Aristotle's holistic account. Yet the physics will always let you down.
Even Newton's laws of motion say an elastic collision is the result of the ability of an inertial body to resist its acceleration as much as some impressed force might embody the capacity to accelerate it.
Every action is matched by the reciprocality of an equal and opposite reaction. So the causality is divided equally between the mover and the moved, it would seem.
And for free floating objects in space, this Galilean relativity becomes rather in your face. Who moves when the spaceman throws his space-wrench? Does the wrench move away from the throwing spaceman, or does the spaceman get propelled away by trying to budge his wrench?
Which inertial reference do you prefer? And how is that choice justified in fundamental law?
Efficient cause then really starts to get lost in the thickets when you shift up to actual relativity and its issues with simultaneity, or quantum mechanics and it nonlocalism and virtual particles.
Efficient cause can't explain anything all on its lonely ownsome. A holism which can provide the context is always going to be the other half of the story that completes the causal picture.
I was under the assumption the big bang was but I read it was developed by a priest and roundly rejected because it seemed too theistic lol.
I personally don't mind abiogenesis.
Yes, indeed. Science, and most other forms of explanation, simply do not make use of cause in the way some folk dogmatically suppose.
Which is as well, since it is so difficult to set out what cause is.
I've thought about this some more and I don't think I have much more to add. Your point about causes having effects that aren't, and perhaps can't, be known is interesting. It's something I've thought about before without coming to a final conclusion. I'm not sure that is at the heart of what I'm calling the metaphysical issues with the idea of causality.
Yep. The holism of the context.
Quoting Banno
Yep. The next step in understanding the causality of the context as the holism of global constraints.
So efficient/material cause are taken to speak to localised acts of construction. And the reciprocal to that - in the good old Aristotelean analysis everyone wants to ignore - is globalised states of constraint.
Constraints place limits on what is possible. But then what isn't prevented from being the case, is free to be the case. Indeed must be the case. Anything that isn't expressly forbidden is going to inevitably happen ... sooner or later, in unpredictable fashion.
Quoting Banno
Yes and no. Even physics sees its laws as habits or emergent regularities. And being global constraints, they reciprocally define their own degrees of freedom. Global invariance is what grounds the kind of local variation that can freely exist - as by definition it isn't constrained.
And of course Peirce spelt that out explicitly as a metaphysics, a theory of probability, and a logic.
So yes, causality reduces to merely some notion of a habit. But no, this in fact cashes out our notions of causality in their greatest depth.
The good old Aristotelean analysis is yet again affirmed.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps you just don't recognise the rapid evolution of its definition in terms of measurables.
Once it was Newtonian forces that were shoving stuff about. Then it was Leibnizian vis viva or energy - where inertia resistance and forceful acceleration were unified as a measurable. Lagrangian mechanics was born. Eventually thermodynamics forced itself into the conversation and the cause of action become the production of entropy - a framing even more transparently Aristotelean.
So not sure where you get the idea that science doesn't talk about causality. That is what laws and differential equations are about - the global symmetries that define the holistic context and the local symmetry breakings that are the local causal actions you want to be able quantify.
Force, energy, entropy. These are concepts that make reality measurable with the context of their relevant levels of theory. And science has kept moving up the scales of abstraction to recover the general causal scheme of Aristotelean system science.
I think you're right. My hope to keep things focused on simple physical causes as a way to getting an understand what causality is probably isn't going to work out.
Quoting Banno
I read through several paragraphs describing counterfactuals and causality. I think I understood what it was saying, but it seems much to complicated. That's why I wanted to start out with such a simple example. I guess my take, perhaps my prejudice, is that, if it's all that difficult, why not just get rid of the idea of causality completely and look at it some other way.
Quoting Banno
I read through the section on probabilistic models of cause. Again, I think I understood it, but I think it's too complicated. Maybe this is my problem - at bottom, I've always seen causality as a complement to determinism. The ways of seeing things that you've described are much less rigid, I guess deterministic, than that, which is a good thing, but it seems like it loses whatever philosophical explanatory power it originally had. What value is there in loosey-goosey causality.
I neglected to respond to some of what you wrote.
As I noted, this view of cause is one I also find convincing. At this point my goal is finding a more formal and convincing argument than "seems to me."
Quoting Banno
Sure. I wanted to start with a very simple, familiar example of cause and then break it out in as much detail as I could think of. I found it helpful. It raised interesting questions with me. I guess I figure, if I can't figure this one out, I won't be able to get anywhere with more complex examples.
Quoting Banno
In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "On the Notion of Cause" in which he makes a similar point.
Quoting Banno
I think the idea of cause has a very strong, intuitive power. People in general think that the fact that events are caused is self-evident. I feel the attraction of that attitude.
But how could you define your deterministic efficient cause except counter-factually in relation to that which it is not.
This is Metaphysics 101. Precision is the double negative. A is defined by being not not-A.
So to have efficient cause, you must counterfactually define it in terms of its Hegelian "other".
The irony of the Aristotelean systems view is that this defines efficient cause to sit at the pole that is locally contingent rather than globally necessary. It is the free variable that you want to plug into your equation expressing a constraining symmetry.
The determinism in any causal situation owes everything to the downward acting constraints. And that rather precisely defines the accidents, the randomness, the freedoms, the causal particularity, as the upward acts of individual and constructive action.
The force applied could have been anything. And yet the number measured was x. So that is what I plugged into the differential equation that could compute the outcome to any number of decimal places.
Well, I'll try out a little literary foreshadowing... It isn't my plan to do it in this thread, but I want to be able to convincingly argue that the idea of causation is a metaphysical principle that is not of great value in any but the simplest situations. Many, most of the responses so far have seemed to be in that vein, and it surprises me. I thought that the idea of cause was fairly universal.
Quoting apokrisis
All of the issues you raise in your post are what I'm trying to get clear in my own mind.
Ah, good call - . Here it is. I find the essay is also in "A free man's worship", which was my bible while in my late teens, so doubtless I've stolen the observation from Russell.
That's what I was trying to do in my billiard ball example.
Quoting apokrisis
I'll need to think about this.
I mean good luck trying. That would be a counterfactual approach. Deny the obvious, and when that fails, you have no choice but to accept the obvious. :up:
The Aristotelean scheme is meant to show that even the simplest simplicity must have the irreducibly triadic complexity of hylomorphism. And therefore all later notions of causality - like the reduction of all causes to just efficient/material cause - could at best be regarded as modelling conveniences.
Simpler models of causality do work if you can take the stability and indifference of a holistic context for granted.
So that is why atomism was the stimulus that got science started. Newton could start things off with an a-causal void. And that little ruse allowed him to treat all the busy contents as a collection of atoms.
This was a stroke of genius in that other famous minds like Descartes couldn't let go of the idea that space had to be full of something causal at every point.
Einstein did the same stunt at a more abstract level in getting rid of Maxwell's ether.
So to imagine that the context is a "nothingness of perfect stability" is the way to model reality as just some local play of material/efficient causal atoms. But physics has only had to keep returning to the void to re-fill it with the missing holism.
Quantum field theory filled the vacuum with a sea of virtual particles. Even general relativity made spacetime floppy unless filled with some energy density at every point.
So you have this dialogue by which physics keeps moving itself forward. First make things too simple by getting rid of Aristotle's formal/final causes. That moves you a step forward. Then take another step by re-filling the void just created, except now define it at as an "emptiness" at an even more abstract level.
Quoting T Clark
Pfftt. Who has studied metaphysics, physics or philosophy of science?
Causality must be the hardest subject there is. And that is because it is the most abstract and fundamental level of metaphysical analysis.
I agree and it seems clear to me that we are generally socialized to view the world as a vast realm of cause and effect. It's part of our 'commons sense' heritage.
Sure, there is clearly a habit of explanation in terms of setting out sequences of events, the earlier in the sequence being named the "cause". At issue is whether the notion of cause can stand interrogation. The utility of that habit might suit a pragmatists, but does it suit a philosopher?
We may want to claim something like that if A causes B, then in any case in which A occurs, B must follow; but a moment's consideration will show that not to be the case. It seems from SEP that the present thinking leans to probabilistic accounts rather than modal accounts; that A caused B means B will follow A on most occasions. But I share your concern that such an account seems unduly complex.
We might avoid sophisticated accounts with profound "philosophical explanatory power" if what actually occurs is no more that just "loosey-goosey causality."
So we have the traditional dichotomy. On the one hand we have the empiricist Hume puzzling over how it can be that we call one event the cause of another, when all we have are our observations of those events; and here sits the problem of explaining induction; how we move from a limited number of specific cases to a general law. On the other hand we have Kant supposing that we must already, a priori, have a notion of cause available to us in order that we bet able to attribute cause and effect.
Perhaps the error here is to suppose that there might be a way to firm up our talk of causes to anything more than a colloquial way of speaking, of a habit.
We know force = mass * acc and it's valid necessarily and therefore never changes. Whether it's sufficient enough for everything that goes on is tangential because we can derive force from mass (through the mass formula, which imports volume from math) and acc. If a proper reduction is done then we get more than probabilities and in any case probabilities are a pretty low bar in any science. It's literally when the particles are too convoluted or it's just efficient but statistical mechanics similarly doesn't imply emergentism except in an epistemological sense and it doesn't preclude regular causation.
Now think about this fast forward.
Salmon wrote a book on causation. Causal forks, statistical laws, etc. I got so bored reading that. I can remember still its creative uniform brown cover. Correlations, causal connections, statistics, etc. Is the excessive use of toiletpaper in philocity caused by the the consumption of rotten stuff accidentally sold in the supermarket in the etymology part of town?
In other words, cause is ideal. Which is nonsense since all dogs shake out in the same way.
That's a useful and nicely written summary. It fascinates me that such an apparently simple concept could be a kind of trick of usage.
This is dependent on the scope of your measured causality. If you say, "That cue ball is now traveling at X velocity because it was hit Y seconds ago," then of course we cannot state, "The ball cannot ever travel at X velocity if it is never hit by a cue ball Y seconds ago." But we can reword it to state, "If the ball has a counter balance of forces to ensure force Z is in A direction, it will have a velocity of X every time." Take away all forces on the ball, and it will not travel at X velocity, because it cannot by definition.
Quoting Banno
I believe the strength of Hume's argument is misinterpreted here. Hume cannot argue against taking all of the data in an experiment and determining why an outcome occurred.
What Hume argued against was the notion that everything would act that way again in the future. And to this, he is correct. The future is always an induction. The laws of physics may not remain the same 5 seconds from now. It is a matter of habit and faith that we believe the causality of today will be the causality of tomorrow.
Quoting Banno
Banno, is this really a good argument? I've taken advanced physics courses in college, the word causality was used all the time. Typically this is noted by the entity with the initial acting force on the object. Just follow a basic Newton's law.
Law 1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.
So what causes a body to cease remaining at rest? A force acting upon it. Words describe concepts, and concept of causality is very much alive in science. Now causality can be considered a large word, more generic such as "good" or "tree". Science might try to use words that are more specific parts within the concept of causality, but that is not a negation of the word, or its usefulness in day to day communication.
Don't you mean a force not working on it. Absence of force is the cause of remaining at rest. The absence of force is the absence of cause, though absence of cause as a force can cause as a non-force.
Quoting apokrisis
At first, I was thinking you were agreeing with me that causality is not normally a useful metaphysical idea. Now I'm not sure.
Your comments have been interesting and helpful, especially the ideas about how we keep conceptually emptying and then refilling the void.
That's what this thread is about for me.
Quoting Banno
I don't see the idea of cause as having much pragmatic use except in the simplest situations or in ethical theories about human responsibility.
Quoting Banno
Not only is it unduly complex, but it loses it's explanatory power if when you make the relationships too convoluted.
Quoting Banno
I hadn't thought of the two, causality and induction, as being connected. I've never really understood the whole "problem of induction." Induction seems defensible and useful to me. Actually, it's indispensable.
Quoting Banno
I have no trouble with that approach, but it takes cause out of the realm of philosophy and science.
I think maybe its use in physics and philosophy is metaphorical. I have read the idea arose in the context of human responsibility for human actions and spread by analogy. That makes sense to me.
I think the reason it is "valid necessarily" is because it is a definition. Force is defined as the product of mass and acceleration.
Quoting Shwah
I think they call the results of statistical mechanics "weak emergentism." I think you're right, though. Emergentism, weak or strong, doesn't address causation one way or the other.
Aren't all concepts tricks of usage? Not trying to be funny.
Yeah I agree. Validity is just falling from axioms to a derivation but it's all we can meaningfully check anyways.
Wiki gives a very classic definition of causality, and I'm willing to concede that the whole cause-effect relationship is a classical one that doesn't necessarily carry down to more fundamental levels.
Different quantum interpretations have different definitions of causality. The ones that hold to the principle of locality would probably put cause before effect like wiki does, but counterfactual interpretations (Bohmian in particular) does not, with delayed-choice experiment blatantly putting effect arbitrarily amounts of time before cause,. They've demonstrated it with millions of years between cause (a choice made on Earth) and effect (which direction a photon is emitted at the distant emission event).
So sure, you kept it simple and classical at first with the billiard ball example, but when one gets down to the fundamentals, the definitions become interpretation dependent, which is the point I want to convey.
That's how I approached it. I think you're right, cause is classical mechanics if it has any meaning at all. I've purposely stayed away from quantum mechanics in this discussion because I think it muddies the metaphysical water.
Quoting T Clark
How can the interrogation take place while avoiding the more fundamental level? There seems to be a disconnect between what you say the thread is about and where you're steering it.
I had pointed out that cause is something subject to interpretation and one is not likely to come to a conclusion without making some assumptions, the soundness of which cannot be demonstrated.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "more fundamental level." For me, whether or not we use the concept "causality" is a metaphysical question that doesn't really come up except in classical mechanics. I think it's a very simple and straight-forward idea. The only question to me is whether or not it is useful.
Let me be clear then. I couldn’t disagree more. Being able to give reasons for why things are and why things change is the entirety of metaphysics in my opinion.
But you say you understand causality to only mean efficient cause. And that to apply only in classical physics.
That is bonkers as far as I am concerned.
And yet induction is logical invalid, since no series of instances is sufficient to imply the general case. It is evident that the problem of induction is at least coextensive with that of causation. The naive response is that our induced scientific laws set out cause and effect - as other posters have posited. But we might agree that account is far from unproblematic.
Banno, in Newton's law, what causes an object at rest to move?
Well, thank you for the example, and the opportunity it offers. You see, Newton's laws do not make mention of cause. That's the point made by Russell, and subsequently by myself. Phrasing them in terms of cause is removing them from their usual playing field and putting them into the language of our everyday interactions.
I see efficient cause as being both a necessary and sufficient (given the presence of the other necessary conditions) condition for any event. The three other kinds being necessary conditions.
I notice you didn't answer the question. If I asked a scientist that question, would they be unable to answer? They would answer it without hesitation.
I'm going to post this part again, as you didn't address it.
Quoting Philosophim
Words represent concepts Banno. There are also synonyms. I don't care if you tallied a word count of all scientific articles and speeches around the world and found the percentage use of "cause" was lower than the rest of the population. They do use the word cause, and if they don't that specific word in a sentence, they use often use synonyms or more specific subsets of the concept of causality.
There are some ways to debate causality, but "Scientists don't use the word" is just silly. When you have to go to absurd lengths to avoid answering a simple and obvious question, its time to question whether your argument is absurd as well.
Well, yes, I did. But it was not an answer to your liking.
The scientist can use causal language just as you and I can. But does not use it in setting out Newton's laws.
Have a look a the SEP article Causation in Physics. At the least it might help you to see that the notion of cause in physics is not as simple as you suggest. What I have argued here is pretty much the "vagueness" challenge mentioned in that article. If causation palya a central part in physics, you should have little trouble setting out what causation is.
Have to it, then.
This makes sense to me based on things you've written about biosemiotics and DNA as a kind of formal cause. I see you as walking a path between nuts and bolds reductionism and Thomas Merton and his hippie noosphere cohort. I find it really interesting.
My problem is that my understanding of formal cause includes a need for intention. Formal cause doesn't make any sense unless the form is intended to achieve the final cause - purpose. Purpose requires intention. That gets too close to the noosphere for my taste.
I'm trying to decide if the difference between your understanding and mine is just one of language. You certainly have put a lot more thought into it than I have.
I've never understood that. It seems like a throwback to Descartes and universal doubt. Induction works...imperfectly. There isn't any other option. We do the best we can. We're still here. Bridges generally don't fall down. Aircraft don't generally fall from the sky. Ergo induction works.
It all depends on where you place the frame and what you set as the scale. The object you're describing is travelling with the Earth's rotation at about 1,000 miles an hour. It's also travelling around along with the Earth as it revolves around the sun and as the sun travels around the galactic center. I guess it's also moving along with the expansion of the universe. It's status as at rest in relation to the Earth's surface is the result of the forces of gravity and friction. If you start it moving, you'll also have to deal with air drag and impacts with whatever it bumps into.
If you look more closely, unless you apply a body force such as gravity to the object, the force you apply will be distributed from the point of application to the rest of the object by elastic deformations which are the result of intermolecular forces. The frame you've chosen is based on your particular point of view which results from the fact that you are a human and live at human scale.
Causality, Hume clearly demonstrated, has no deductive necessity to it. There really is no deducitve argument that shows that, for example, when a ball hits another, the other ball should move with a specific velocity (speed + direction).
This observation, in tandem with the problem of induction, prove the case for empiricism against rationalism, the latter being the position that all knowledge can be acquired deductively, a priori.
It's odd then, oui, that causality is a topic in metaphysics, metaphysics also being deduction unless the aim is to refute empiricism in this particular case by demonstrating causality can be given a deductive foundation.
Indeed, let's first tackle the small fries before we go for the big guy! If I can't get through the door, I sure as hell won't fit through the window. I used to follow this strategy on my exams: first the easy, then the hard! :grin:
Yes. Final cause and formal cause combine like that in the pansemiotic view. But at the level of physics, this is no more than saying the second law of thermodynamics imposes a thermal direction on nature. The finality is the need to maximise entropy production and reach equilibrium.
So that is both sort of “mindful”. But also the least mindful notion of teleology we can imagine.
Then humans can sit at the other end of the scale in terms of being full of all sorts of cunning schemes and bright ideas.
So you can either see causality as being about two different realms - res cogitans and res extensa - each with their own non-overlapping logic. Or you can seek for a unified theory of causality, as Aristotle and a Peirce did.
Yep. There is the set-up. Then there is the pulling of the trigger. That way of thinking also leads to the dichotomy of proximate and distal causes.
Everyone is feeling the same elephant.
In physics-speak, I would also talk about constraints and degrees of freedom.
I can understand that approach, although it's a stretch for me to think about it that way. I keep wanting to keep it simple. Simpler.
Quoting apokrisis
This is more like how I see it, without much interest in the cogitans, at least in this thread.
Logical, no conjunction of observations leads to the truth of a general rule; no finite sequence f(a) & f(b) & f(c) implies U(x)f(x)... That's clear enough isn't it?
But why when that approach can only make causality incomprehensible?
What is efficient cause all its own with no context?
And how could you explain why the radioactive atom decayed at some particular moment? If a triggering event is ruled out by physical theory, what then?
If you are serious about causality in a physical context, you are going to need to arm yourself with more resources.
Hi, may I ask you something?
Since we're in Aristotelian cause territory, which one of the follwing
1. Material cause
2. Formal cause
3. Efficient cause
4. Final cause
entails a conscious being? In my humble opinion, it should be 4. Final cause which I interpret as teleological in essence and if there's a purpose, it kinda makes someone, as opposed to something, an inevitability (design argument).
Thinking itself is an IF-THEN-ELSE statement, ie. (IF) I think, therefore I am (ELSE I am not).
It also seems that causation is an integral part of any realist world-view in that your experience is a product of the interaction of your body and the world (ELSE solipsism is the case).
Reading a sentence is another causal process as it takes time to read a sentence. It has a beginning and an ending and the beginning causes the context to emerge for the rest of the sentence and the rest of the paragraph.
Symbols symbolizing would be another causal process.
Of course that's the answer. We've known this for a long time. We can see that in Newton's own laws. When you "act upon" something, you are placing the frame of reference on "something that is being acted upon" and "something that is doing the acting". The result of the acted upon's response to the "actor" is the response, while the "actor" is the cause.
Needing to apply scale does not make anything special or questionable. Its completely normal. Take a look at your keyboard right now. What is it composed of? Of course, I'm not asking you to give me the atomic composition right? We scale it to what's reasonable. If I wanted to dig down at a deep enough scale, the keyboard would disappear entirely. Does that mean there's no keyboard or identity? Of course not, that's absurd.
Take the words that you're using and realize you scale those as well. You scale them to your audience. You have implicit emotions and intentions behind them that your audience may never glean. And yet I can say, "I understand what you're saying T Clark". Even though if I go to a small enough scale, like reading what is exactly going on in your mind right now, I would not.
Scaling down something to the point of uselessness and incomprehensibility is not clever, though it appears a trapping for many. Anyone can do it by simply crossing their eyeballs. "Look, my view of the world is completely distorted now! Maybe I don't really see anything at all?!" My answer is to that person is, "Uncross your eyes you silly goose." Words are signs we use to convey conceptual intention, and the challenge is not to make them pointless, but to make them useful as we need to convey those underlying concepts.
If I would guess at the real underlying criticism of the word "causality", its that it has sub-concepts that are not easily conveyed through the context of a conversation. I'm not saying Aristotle's break down is correct, but you could construct a sentence with "causality" which could mean any one of the sub-types. Again, this does not mean "causality" does not exist or is useful. What is really being asked is. "Which sub-type are you intending through your context?" When conversation requires the accuracy of those sub-types be conveyed cleanly without possible ambiguity, then we should use a sub-type of causality.
Quoting Banno
It was not that it was to my liking, it is that I interpreted your intentions incorrectly. Your link to the article made your intention more clear. Above should include my response to that.
Logic schmogic. Induction works. Pragmatic logic:
That's a good point. I think that's the right place to start because that's where everyone else starts. That's what people mean when they "cause" in a physics context. I know that needs to be broadened in order to get anywhere, but I think I need to figure out what the standard meaning of the word is.
That being said, I've been really happy with the way this thread has developed. As usual, it's helped me get my hands around the subject, which is a good start.
Quoting apokrisis
Isn't that an argument for my position rather than yours?
Quoting apokrisis
Working on it.
Agreed.
Quoting Philosophim
We scale it to what is relevant to us as humans. I'm not disagreeing with you.
Quoting Philosophim
Reading Aristotle, it struck me that, generally, when he is talking about cause, he is talking about it in a human context. The formal cause is the planning, design, that goes into an event, human activities. The final cause is the human purpose to which it will be put. The efficient cause is the guy who does the work or the skill and understanding that allows him to do so. It is my understanding that Aristotle also acknowledges that some non-human entities may cause things, e.g. fire (heat) causes things to rise.
R.G. Collingwood wrote that cause is a process that started out referring to human action and only later took on meaning as a non-human physical process. He saw the term cause as it is used by philosophers to describe physical action as a metaphorical usage from that original meaning.
I don't doubt it. Word use continually evolves over the centuries. I find that philosophy is often about amending and inventing words to fit logical concepts. Science tries to take those words and use them effectively. Good philosophy eventually becomes science.
The notion that something can act upon another is a genie out of the bottle now. Of course, this is not to be confused with intention, or the personification of objects. But I think its a fairly straight forward notion in science that we look for a cause to explain why a state exists as it does. Its our job as philosophers to find the nugets of the concept that are valuable, and refine out the rest.
I think it is common, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is straight forward. And I don't think it is.
What, that some events seem to need a push - an impressed force - like the billiard ball, while other things, like the decay, the quantum fluctuation, have only a global probability, the certainty of a statistical half-life, that bounds them?
Some situations conform to one end of the spectrum - where cause and effect seems to rule in strict counterfactual fashion. But others are somehow locally unprompted and yet exactly constrained by some probability curve or wavefunction.
Doesn’t this show that causality must be a bigger picture?
Shome mishtake shurely?
[quote=Isaac Newton]“Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward.”
“You sometimes speak of gravity as essential & inherent to matter: pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know, & therefore would take more time to consider of it.”
[/quote]
So Newton was both pleased to be able to give a precise reason in terms of one body striking another body, and also honest about another law that appeared to speak uncomfortably to action at a distance.
Seems that Newton was pretty engaged in the issue of causation, and its larger complexities.
The Humean issue is only about the certainty that can be ascribed to some causal belief, not that causation is somehow "metaphysical". The pragmatist then tidies that up nicely by replying that causal beliefs can be judged by their inductive evidence.
If Newton's laws predict the future with reasonable accuracy using a reasonable argument, then what is there not to believe?
:up:
But if you frame your notion of final cause so that it only applies to humans, or even organisms, then you rob it of that kind of causal status as it is not a necessary part of nature as a whole. It becomes just a local accident of evolutionary history.
So if you want to argue for intelligent design - big daddy in the sky - you still have to try all the usual rhetorical tricks to make it seem you are making a solid causation-based argument.
Note that the whole "everything needs a cause" creating God is yet further evidence that a narrow "cause and effect", or efficient cause, model of causality is too limited. A larger model of causality is required.
I would argue that's just an unexamined look at the nature of causality to its ends. I think its pretty obvious to anyone who's been in philosophy for even a short time that the next question becomes, "Well what caused God then?" Yes, theists often invent special circumstances for God, but its all made up, and they can never quite explain those special instances can only apply to God, and not well, anything else.
Regardless, reasoning about causality as a serious argument should not involve God. If a person avoids causality because they think a conclusion leads to God, that's not square thinking. Same as if a person holds onto a view of causality because they think a conclusion leads to God. An argument should never be agreed or disagreed with based on where it might lead, it should be considered on its logical merits of its immediate claims and deduced conclusions.
Or any child.
Quoting Philosophim
That wasn't anything that I was advocating. I was saying it is yet further evidence that the metaphysics of causality are far more complex and interesting.
What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes.
It is even baked into the grammar of language. Every sentence is formally composed of a verb connecting a subject to an object - a tale of who did what to whom.
So no wonder folk are confounded by the idea that causality might demand a much larger "four causes" model, or that it might have a triadic "irreducible complexity".
In everyday life, they have probably never come across a challenge to the way they have been taught to think about the way everything works at its most general possible level.
I meant that radioactive decay seems like an instance when the idea of cause doesn't fit.
Quoting apokrisis
Or, alternatively, that there is a bigger picture, but it doesn't make sense to call it "causality" anymore. I have no doubt that the universe is an historic entity. Events in the past are connected to those happening now.
For me, that's a big part of the issue with cause. To say that something is caused when we can't be certain of, or even close to knowing, what causes what, which is generally the case, is meaningless. What we call "causality" is an un-disentanglable tangle.
Quoting apokrisis
I'll say it again - I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but to call it "causality" no longer makes sense.
Additionally, "If it works, it is true" is false.
Yes. Always.
So if that ain't explicit enough, is this a "first rule of fight club..." kind of deal? :razz:
What Newton did was make it clear that a mechanical description of nature could be produced by dividing it into what needed an external cause - an impressed force, or vis impressa - to produce a change, and what instead could be considered the uncaused, even it did seem to be changing.
So space and time were broken out as a backdrop - an a-causal void. And material things were given the new local property of vis insita - inertia, or a matching resistance to having their state changed.
It was all about constructing a story of causality that made use of the maths of symmetry.
A flat and infinite Euclidean backdrop of space and time put them outside the causal story as being simply the Atomists' void. This fixed stage underwrote the Galilean symmetries that made local change now "a point of view".
And then the atoms were given this primal property of inertial mass. The materiality was also abstracted away in fashion that put it outside the system of explanation being developed by making it one of the axioms.
So masses no longer needed a causal reason not to move (as energy-conserving inertial translations and rotations). They only needed a causal reason - a vis impressa - to decelerate or accelerate.
Thus what Newton achieved was a very careful dissection of causality that reduced it to the parts that were definitely causal, and the parts that definitely weren't - so far as the new mechanical model of causality was concerned.
The success of this mechanical conception of causality is the stuff of legend. As is the fact that physics has been having to backfill it with Aristotelean metaphysics ever since - the holism of general relativity and quantum field theory, maybe even one day a final theory of quantum gravity.
So yeah, nah. The Principia is all about a model of causality that strips the reasons for the states of the world down to a bare-bones, mathematical account. It explicitly makes effective cause the measurable "difference that makes a difference" against a backcloth world that is a host of differences not making a difference. Or a set of mathematical symmetries.
AP went off on its own weird slant on this issue, like it did with a lot of stuff. But don't fall for the slogans.
What? After Newton narrowed the definition, it becomes forbidden to continue to follow physics and tack back towards Aristotle's larger definition?
Quoting T Clark
Yet you seem to believe in pragmatism and its inductive confirmation. And you seem to believe that relativity and quantum theory say something pragmatically valid about reality.
Surely the truth here is just that disentangling the strands of metaphysics' central endeavour is ... a lot of hard intellectual graft?
Quoting T Clark
It still makes the same counterfactual sense it always made. If you take away the causes, does the same thing still happen?
If it does, then yes, maybe causality is just some dastardly illusion with no rhyme or reason, or some hidden divine puppeteer driving the show.
Or alternatively, you can stick with philosophical naturalism and instead conclude you haven't quite understood the complex nature of causality. More work needed.
I still have lots of thinking to do on the subject. This has been a really useful thread for me in that regard.
So first comes the reductionist conviction - the standard model idea of efficient cause, or chains of cause and effect.
Then comes the holist backlash - the rejection of the mechanical model and the discovery of other "logics" like Aristotle's four causes.
Finally, after thesis and antithesis, comes the resolution. Colliding billiard balls sit at one extreme pole of our conception of causality, the random decay of a particle sits at the other.
Get up close and the two billiard balls in fact never touch. The space between gets filled by virtual photon exchanges - or some kind of story that is all about quantum holism.
And stand back to watch a particle decay carefully, you will discover that it then never does. Your continuous observation keeps resetting its decay clock - the quantum Zeno effect - and prevents it behaving in its usual "a-causal" fashion.
So there are opposing limits that bound causality. And limits are precisely the bounds that can never be reached, only approached with arbitrary precision.
It all makes sense in the end. Or at least we can see how this is the project on which scientific theories of everything are now deeply engaged.
... despite the foolish AP tropes of old Oxbridge fuddie-duddies.
I have no trouble holding two apparently contradictory ideas in my head at the same. I remember in high school physics when we talked about particle-wave duality. It struck me suddenly that the universe doesn't work the way our minds say it should. Why? Because it's the universe. That's not why I want to reject causality. In an earlier post you wrote:
Quoting apokrisis
That's what I'm responding to. I'm chewing on your broader definition of causality before I try to swallow it.
Quoting apokrisis
I looked this up and didn't understand. Can't you observe a particle decay without affecting it just by detecting the decay product?
Quoting apokrisis
Je parle un peu Francais.
Ich spreche Deutsch Ein bisschen.
Me talk English good.
I get what you mean. It's better to leave Aristotle's 4 causes unmolested. I simply wanted to know which of these 4 causes (one/a combination) is being referred to in the Cosmological Argument (first cause) for God's existence.
A quantum jump between two states is meant to have nothing connecting them in the spacetime between those jumps. No story of efficient causes laying the unbroken causal trail.
Thus the quantum Zeno effect follows as nature only lets you see the before and after, not the during. If you continually watch the particle, this prevents its "causeless" leap from ever happening. If instead you tell the particle to let me know when its all over, then it is free to jump ... whenever ... because the freedom to be random.
But as I say, that is as much a description of the holistic extreme as it would be to invoke some locally concealed cause like "hidden variables".
And you can make weak measurements to get mixed states. You can sort of slow down the quantum jump to a jerky succesion of film frames.
So between the two limits, you also get the quasi-classical - or quasi-quantum - realm as the intermediate state ... which is hardly talked about.
Thanks.
Good question. First cause seems to conflate both efficient and final cause. Ask a theist for more clarity I guess. :wink:
:ok: That's a good answer! :up: Perhaps design (formal cause) + creator (efficient cause) + telos (final cause).
Let's say we just get rid of idea of causality. Doesn't your way of seeing things just revert to the hierarchical system we talked about last week - laws from below, constraints from above? What advantage do you get when you add cause to the mix?
So it is a full four causes model as described by the maths of hierarchy theory.
You can’t claim that a hierarchy - or a “basic triadic structure”, as Stan Salthe defined it - represents the universal self-organising causality of nature, and yet also we can then just get shot of the idea of causality.
The deep structure of causality has been the only thing under discussion. :grin:
But what then is the epistemic upshot? If we can't have absolute belief that reality is causal, then we can still - inductively - constrain our scope for reasonable doubt.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, let's get on with treating it as a duck until something fails.
It is a matter of historical record that both special relativity and quantum mechanics eventually gave us good reason to want to update the Newtonian model of causality.
And the step to unite the quantum and relativistic views - quantum gravity - has led to a lot of folk, like the loop theory guys, treating causality as a fundamental ingredient when it comes to weaving a spacetime metric.
It all starts with an action that has a direction - the 1D quantum fluctuation that is a first cause, but without yet the world where it could also be producing some effect.
The Planck scale defines a causal grain - the point where the vagueness of uncertainty starts to become the counterfactual definiteness of a spacetime metric populated by thermal events.
So it is silly to say that science doesn't believe in causality. The whole set-up of science is pragmatic rather than logicist.
Truths aren't deducted. Models are deducted. And then their predictions are subject to inductive confirmation. The results are accepted as believable to the degree they aren't doubtable.
And then all along, right from Aristotle, the search has been for causal explanations. A scientific theory is a formal model of some causal system.
Finally, as I say, causality has continued to be a lively central topic. Why is special relativity so strange and quantum theory so weird if they didn't point to a drastic need to place Newtonian mechanics in its larger relativistic, quantum, and eventually quantum gravitational, causal context?
T Clark, from reading your replies in this thread, I suppose I still don't understand why in particular you seem to have an issue with causality. There is a motivation here. And that's not wrong. There is something about causality that leaves such a distaste in your mouth that you are more than willing to throw it all away.
That's an incredibly important thing to examine. We are not rational beings by nature, we are rationalizing beings by nature. When we figure out why we're rationalizing, why we're looking for a particular answer we desire, only then can we be rational.
I say this, because I have no particular love or hate for causality. Its just a word to me. I try listening to people's rejection of it, but I personally don't see a lot of logic here. Perhaps if we figure out why its so distasteful, then we can examine the issue in the way you seem to be looking for.
The view Russell is I think rightly critiquing is that of causation as "event A is caused by event B, which in turn is cause by event C, and so on" - cause as a regularity. His criticism is mirrored in The Tratutus:
It seems from this SEP article that there has been some interesting developments to the contrary over the last twenty years of so - to my surprise. I might revisit these when time allows.
One way to think about it as that cause does not have much of a place in the sciences, say physics, but rather sits in metaphysics. Here's a quote from the Russell article:
Think of it as that cause does not play a part in physics, which involves more detailed analysis of functions rather than mere sequences of events; but that it is held by many to maintain a place in metaphysics, where it simplifies the philosopher's task by removing the need to follow the maths. You might notice even in this thread that folk's view on causation tends to follow their metaphysical prejudices rather than the physics. Physics, and the other sciences, just get on with it without having first to settle the many problems of causation.
I am not philosopher but I have generally held that what we call science hangs on tentative models of reality that don't make proclamations of absolute truth. Ultimately we tend to take 'cause' as a presupposition.
Quoting Banno
Very useful and nicely worded.
:up:
To the first sentence, yes, scientific facts are held only tentatively. It would be an error - the error of scientism - to extend this view outside of science.
To the second sentence, the philosophical issue is whether we might rightly call causation a presupposition, as Kant supposed, or a rational conclusion, perhaps via induction, as pragmatism claims, or perhaps as some variation of the notion of a hinge proposition; or alternately as a notion that might be discarded, it being irrelevant except to metaphysicians.
Good point. I wasn't thinking Kant or transcendentals. I meant we hold the concept as an assumption and get on with things. We presuppose it works (pragmatically).
Pragmatism just means burying the mouldering corpse of logical atomism and moving right along in a commonsense fashion.
Quoting Banno
Yep. If you use logical atomism as your attack on logical holism, you wind up with nothing. Hence AP's rapid implosion.
Causality can't make sense unless the model includes both the holism and the atoms, or the global constraints and the local degrees of freedom.
Newtonian reversibility leads to the First Law of Thermodynamics - the conservation of energy. The collision on the billiard table seem to have no causal direction as you can run the film in reverse and it all looks perfectly good from the point of view of the Laws of Motion.
This is life from the point of view of the atomistic interactions where every action is symmetrically a reaction.
But then it only takes the smallest degree of finality - a statistical arrow of time that connects an energy source to an entropy sink - and you have the holism of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Suddenly all that blind and aimless reversibility discovers it shares an inevitable common future - the slippery slope that ends in an equilibrium.
Quoting Banno
I notice that to be a view which shows little familiarity with how physics, and the other sciences, in fact have been getting on with things ever since Newton made it a properly mathematical question - one based on the inductive evidence of quantified measurement rather than just a lot of anti-metaphysical verbiage.
I don't know if you've noticed, but I spend a lot of time thinking about metaphysics. My cliched catchphrase - Metaphysical claims, what Collingwood calls "absolute presuppositions," are not true or false. They have no truth value. They are more or less useful. What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is when people fail to recognize their presuppositions are not somehow immutable aspects of reality.
Causality is metaphysics. The question I have is whether or not it is useful metaphysics. My intuition says "no," but I don't yet have good arguments to show that to my satisfaction. That's what this thread is about.
Another thing that raises my hackles is when people say that a certain position is obvious or self-evident. That's rarely, maybe never, true, but it shuts down argument. I was recently in a discussion like that about cause in another thread.
We would treat it as a counterfactual hypothesis. We are saying there are two choices here, either things have a cause or they don't. The job then is to define what the observable difference might be.
So is the decay of the atom caused or uncaused? Is it determined or is it random? Is it local or contextual? Does it in the larger analysis satisfy the principle of sufficient reason or fail it?
It is true that it does tend to get elevated to the exalted level of a key scientific principle - sufficient reason, or the principle of universal causation. It is just too hard to honestly doubt given the success of modelling the world in causal terms.
Yet still, that is what Aristotle's four cause analysis and other efforts to break down the general motherhood statement - every effect has a cause - is about.
Science has to refine its questions of nature as it works its way through mysteries like the apparent violations of causal order in special relativity, or the nonlocalism and indeterminacy of quantum interactions.
Taking causality seriously as a work in progress is how we can say, well classical Newtonianism remains a workable model within a small range of physical velocities and temperatures, but then that particular notion of causality must somehow be enlarged to keep adding these apparent counterfactuals into the scheme.
We might all grant the success of the modelling, without the addition of "...in causal terms".
How do we rule out astrology, homeopathy, miracles, fate, and anything else that might rely on the appeal to lucky coincidence in our cynical old eyes then?
Patterns must have generators. Or else the world just doesn't make sense and we should all give up and go home.
How is causality different from determinism? They seem like the same thing to me, just looked out from a different direction. Can you have one without the other?
Causation as a criteria for demarcating science from non-science. That's something I hadn't come across before. Would you mind explaining how it works, or providing a reference I can follow up?
Quoting apokrisis
How do you know this? How could you know this?
No real idea. But given that cause can't be established for certain what legs does 'determinism' have?
Ok, I think I see. One thing that might help is that words are entirely made up. They are just models we use within our personal context, and group context. Think of the word "tree". When you say tree, you think of something different than what I say tree. I might classify a bush as a tree, and a botanist may not. Who's right? Depends on what context is important to us. If I go into botany, then I better use words better than tree. If I'm with a group of friends, who cares?
If you're interested I've thought about these things for years. I have a paper I divided into several small sections here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9015/a-methodology-of-knowledge/p1 The discussion is poor at first, but once Bob Ross jumps in, it gets going well.
But back to your point. No word is an immutable aspect of reality, including whatever you replace causality with. But there is something you're trying to find that bothers you about it. Could it be:
Quoting T Clark
Its not. And that can put a damper on it if you don't like the idea of determinism. Unfortunately, not using the word causality won't eliminate that either. For a non-deterministic universe to happen, there must be something that happens without prior cause. I don't necessarily mean a God. I mean a particle would need to pop into the universe without any prior causality and then influence the matter in our universe.
You may like another post of mine here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12098/a-first-cause-is-logically-necessary In the end I conclude that the end result of causality, is that there must exist something that is uncaused. There are a lot of people in there who are think its a God argument and make up straw mans, but ignore them. So logically, I suppose I conclude there that determinism is false. If you don't want to give my former post a read, give that latter one a read at least.
If they're the same thing, then it's the same question.
I was talking about demarcating sense from nonsense. Surely you have heard of that?
So now you tell me how you rule out astrology, homeopathy and crackpottery in general. Then maybe I’ll tell you about how this played out in psi research as an interesting case study.
A clue. What defines a theory that is not even wrong apart from a failure to generate a testable counterfactual. Some causal hypothesis where the result is different depending whether the modelled cause is present or absent.
A constraint doesn’t determine an outcome, it just limits the probabilities. It places concrete bounds on the degrees of freedom or sources of indeterminism.
Of course, in the extreme, constraints become mechanical - that is, they can leave so little wiggle-room that the outcome is as good as determined.
That's not true. They aren't just made up, they're made up and then agreed to. Imperfectly. That's what this thread is about for me. Getting to an agreement on what cause is or, if that fails, laying out the terms of the argument.
Quoting Philosophim
There's a whole discipline in metaphysics about that. If you throw out the words, you throw out ontology. I'm just trying to get rid of causality. You're trying to get rid of reality.
Quoting Philosophim
You ignored my previous response in which I discussed this.
Quoting Philosophim
If I remember correctly, I participated in both those threads.
This just reinforces my understanding that you and I mean different things when we say "causality." That's not a bad thing and I've found your positions interesting. If I understand you correctly, you think I've focused in on a small part of what's included and not taken a holistic view. That's because my whole beef is with the way causality is usually understood, not the broader context you are describing.
And they are still entirely made up between different people. And many times, several people will not agree to them. Just look around here! Words are tools is all I'm noting. There is no "one" definition that is used the same everywhere. Different contexts, groups, and settings will have their own definitions and implicit meanings to words they use. The tool of words is to convey concepts and meanings that fit what the group desires.
Some words are more logical, detailed, and effective at communication than others within different contexts. If you find the word too broad, which is a fair assessment, then I would work on defining sub-groups of causality that are more detailed and to your satisfaction. Then, when people bring up causality, bring up the subgroups and try to get them to narrow their word down to your more detailed analysis.
Quoting T Clark
I rather like reality. Reality persists despite whatever definition and words we invent. My point is that words are attempts to represent reality, and their representation is not an immutable aspect of reality.
The point that I wanted you to think about is that the problem that you have with causality, is a macro representative of every single word you ever think about. The problem is a pattern, not isolated to causality only. Also what I am describing is ontology, not trashing it.
Quoting T Clark
I did not mean to ignore, I simply misunderstood. I assumed you were unsure of the reason why you seemed against causality specifically. It was an attempt to determine what that was.
Quoting T Clark
I hope I was helpful, or at least gave you a different view point to mull over.
I've said that all along. You take it to mean just efficient cause. I take it to include all four Aristotlean causes.
Likewise, you take it to mean chains of events in an a-causal or unentangled spacetime backdrop. I see a need to make the container part of the holistic causal story along with its contents.
You identify causality with determinism. I set things up so that the determined and the random, the necessary and the contingent, are reciprocally defined as the global constraints vs the local degrees of freedom.
So at each turn, you want to reduce causality to some kind of ultimate simple - a monism. And I say no. Causality is irreducibly triadic in its structure. It is hierarchical in its holism. You have to have the three things of thesis, antithesis and their synthesis, to get a complete picture of a systematic relation.
Quoting T Clark
But just because efficient causality is a quarter of the whole, that doesn't make it wrong. It just makes it incomplete. And it also makes life simpler to the degree you can get away using that as your sole modelling tool.
So yes, it is too simple. But also, simple can be good when your purposes are matchingly limited - as when you merely want to build machines, and not organisms.
1. Method of Agreement:
A B C occur together with w x y
A E F occur together with w t u
Ergo,
A is a necessary cause of w
2. Method of Difference
A B C occur together with w x y
B C occur together with x y
Ergo,
A is a sufficient cause of w
3. Joint Method
A B C occur with w x y
A E F occurs with w t u
B C occurs with x y
Ergo,
A is a necessary and sufficient cause of w
4. Method of Residue
A B C occur together with w x y
B is the cause of x
C is the cause of y
Ergo,
A is the cause of w
5. Method of Concomitant Variation
A B C occur with w x y
Increasing/decreasing A causes increase/decrease (positive scalar correlation) or decrease/increase (negative scalar correlation) in w
Ergo,
A is the cause of w
A causes B IFF
1. A is correlated with B
2. B does not temporally precede A (rule out reverse causation)
3. There is no C that causes both A and B (rule out third-party causation)
4. The correlation is not coincidental (persists in spacetime, jibes with background knowledge, mechanism of causation is known, etc.)
Guilty as charged.
Quoting apokrisis
My problem; and I guess it's more a matter of taste, aesthetics, than substance; is that those broader issues are not what I would call causes. No need to go into this any further. I think I've understood what you've been saying and I don't disagree.
Words are the tools we have to work with. It's our job as proto-philosophers to do our jobs with the tools at hand.
Quoting Philosophim
That's what this thread has been about.
Quoting Philosophim
Well.... that's for another thread.
Quoting R.G. Collingwood
When I first read this, I found it unsatisfying and confusing. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to think that the distinction between the first two senses he writes about and the third is worth considering. In the first two, the agent of causality is a human actor. In the third, it is another event. According to Collingwood, the first two senses are the original meaning of “cause,” while the third is a cause metaphorically by comparison to the first two. After thinking about it, that makes some sense to me. Perhaps the question I'm asking is whether that metaphorical understanding makes sense.
This is discussed in detail in my Complete Theory of Everything at https://EdgarLOwen.info.
What about the coupling constants? How, at the fundamental level, is your information processed and what's the info about?
Determinism is perhaps the most useless philosophy. Does not mean it is wrong, but useless.
And with my science hat on, it is untestable.
Determinism can have a strong impact on reality though. Determinism can lead to distancing. "Everything is determined. So let it all be". Or, "it's all determined, so it's my destiny to fight the power".
Yes, though if one really subscribes to determinism it is even more fundamental that that.
Take your example of someone thinking: "Everything is determined. So let it all be." But if determinism really is true, then they were always going to think that no matter what. And the next thing they are going to think? They were always going to think that as well. If determinism is true, then it has an absolute impact on reality.
In fact if determinism is true, those who think determinism is not true, were deterministically always going to think that as well. It is untestable, unknowable and frankly useless.
Now if determinism is not true, yet someone thinks determinism is true, then that line of thinking will have a strong affect on reality. Whether they think "Everything is determined. So let it all be" or, "it's all determined, so it's my destiny to fight the power" will affect their actions in reality.
Universe is a computational system. Everything contains the complete data of what it is. Elementary particles contain the complete data of what they are. Now maybe at the most fundamental level everything actually IS this complete data of what it is. That would enable the universe to compute everything that happens on the basis of that fundamental data. By analogy a virtual reality game consists entirely of computer data, but appears as an actual world in the mind of the player. Human minds then simulate the data world as the 'physical' world just as they do with virtual reality games.
Determinism is of course incompatible with quantum theory where quantum events occur randomly. In my view that in itself is enough to consign determinism to the scrap heap of pre-quantum history. No one should consider it seriously any more.
Local determinism is incompatible with quantum theory. Global determinism can be consistent with quantum theory - if the experimenter is also being determined. There is no test you can perform to disprove determinism, as the result of the test and your interpretation of that could always have been determined, whatever it is.
But I agree no one should consider it because it is useless. It is a good way to waste time without any progress.
Don't agree because quantum randomness is intrinsic to decoherence. It doesn't depend on an observer or experimenter.
If the experimenter and experiment are both determined in such a way as they are correlated, current quantum mechanics is consistent with determinism.
But there is an even simpler thought experiment. Imagine a very long piece of code sitting outside the universe, with every outcome of every quantum recoherence. The list is random, but determined.
In such a universe, what experiment can I do to show this determinism? There is none. Of course this question even doesn't make sense, as I have no real choice in performing the experiment, whether I do so and when is all down to what is already determined on that list.
Consider a volume of free particles that interact. Their particle properties such as energy, momentum, spin orientation, etc. are INdeterminate with respect to each other to a certain degree determined by their wave functions. Now, for particles to interact they must decohere, their particle properties must become exact with respect to each other. That is because their particle properties must be conserved in any interaction. Eg. energy exiting an interaction must equal the energy entering the interaction. In decoherence exact particle properties such as energy are randomly chosen (within wave function limits). Decoherence occurs in all particle interactions. It happens irrespective of whether a human is arranging the particle interaction or not. It's because of this innate INdeterminism of quantum processes that determinism cannot be true.
This is innate local indeterminism. Not global indeterminism (or universal indeterminism may be a better term).
Read about superdeterminism, here is a quote from John Bell, he of the famous Bell inequality and Bell test:
You can have a universal script that determines the behaviour of the entire universe, including all quantum decoherence, and we would not be able to tell as we too are inside this determined path of events.
On top of my previous two posts, I should add that a lot of quantum mechanics is consistent with even local hidden variables. That was only discredited by the Bell's theorem experiments.
Global determinism remains a possibility, as far an quantum mechanics is concerned.
There is no 'faster than light' signal between particles. In the spin orientation example the spin orientations of both particles are determined when the particles are created. Must be for the spin orientation of the two particles to be conserved. However that exact mutual spin orientation is indeterminant with respect to a measuring device until one particle reveals it by decohering with the device. At that point the exact mutual spin orientation becomes known and confirmed by a measurement on the 2nd particle.
It's us who contain the data and compute. There is no structure in reality that computes the data of the electron behind the scenes. You project an idea on the electron.
Ah yes. I see what you mean. So only in the case nothing is determined determinism can have impact?
I agree there is no FTL signal. I don't agree that the spin orientations are determined because the spins must be conserved. The spins of two electrons are entangled when interacting. Because the electrons can't be in the same state, the spin states are opposite. And they stay opposite during their separation. Without each of them having a fixed direction yet. Their direction is fixed upon measurement. The spin entanglement transcends space which makes it look that there is a FTL signal traveling. Which there isn't.
The spin orientation of both particles are not locally determined when the particles are created. That is the whole point of the Bell tests. The particle does not locally "know" what its spin is at creation. We have good experimental data to support this.
What superdeterminism says is that the particles could be globally determined, including the experimenter in the determinism (i.e the experimenter has no free will and was always going to do what he did).
Experiments don't rule out non-local hidden variables. There are even experiments thinkable to decide if there are these things.
Would the input and output of a computer be considered a physical cause and effect? If so, then is the processing of information a causal event? What about you typing your posts (the effect) as being caused by your beliefs and your intent to communicate them? It seems to me that forcing the term "physical" into the discussion of causal events is what creates many of the problems that you are trying to solve.
Yes, which is what superdeterminism is. It could be a global hidden variable that includes the experimenter.
In which case the standard scientific method runs into problems, if the experimenter is behaving deterministically according to a global hidden variable (a script of the universe, for example).
Can you think of a possible experiment that rules out all global hidden variables? I don't think one exists - I'm sure that whatever experiment you think up, I can show how a global hidden variable could be consistent with the results, whatever the results.
Superdeterminism seems to include the choices made. Non-local hidden variables don't involve choices made. It are the objective variables and are the underlying mechanism leading to the observed chance behavior, like there are determining processes in the throwing of a dice.
I don't think there is a non-local, non-experimenter hidden variable theory that is consistent with the results of the Bell tests.
Those experiments ruled out hidden variables that do not include the experimenter. Whether that objective variable is in the particle or elsewhere doesn't matter. In order to find a loophole in the experiment, the hidden variable must include the experimenter.
Alternatively it could be that our understanding of locality is incomplete, or our understanding of the limitation of speed of light is incomplete, or our understanding of correlation is incomplete.
But it can't be a determined global hidden variable that does not include the experimenter.
Why? Non-local hidden variables exist without any observer
Read about the Bell tests. They are a somewhat complicated but brilliant set of experiments done in reply to the hypothesis of hidden variables.
You can calculate the probability that a pair of entangled spin polarised particles will pass through two separate polarisation filters if there is the behaviour of the particle is governed by an objective hidden variable. This is Bell's inequality.
The experimental results show that Bell's inequality does not hold. And the experiments have been replicated, in many different ways, with the same outcome.
As a result, the only way to maintain determinism is to include the experimenter in the determinism - the choice of filter the experimenter made was also determined. That is consistent with he results.
Or our understanding of locality is incomplete, or our understanding of the limitation of speed of light is incomplete, or our understanding of correlation is incomplete.
Yes. The Bell tests. Bell invented them as he was an advocate of hidden variables (he couldn't imagine an observer, an experimenter with knowledge of QM) to cause collapse of the wavefunction in the past. The test doesn't rule out non-local HV, only local ones. And the non-local ones are needed to explain entanglement and global collapse of the wavefunction.
Another intractable problem with determinism is it implies a block time/block universe theory in which everything is predetermined in advance of it happening. How, pray tell, is a causally determined universe created prior to the actual causality that creates it? See the problem?
Anyway, in my view, the notion of causality is an outmoded physicalist way of modeling the universe that simply refers to repeatable sequences of events that are actually computed instead of caused in any physical mechanistic sense. At this point I'll probably turn my attention to another thread. Thanks guys for the interesting discussion!
As I noted, I just wanted to keep things simple. I think there are issues with non-physical causes that would muddy the waters of a discussion.
Why it implies a block universe? That's what we project on it. Rigid iron world lines with motors in them pulling all particles along in the predetermined, preconstructed rails in a static universe. This image though denies the particles their own determination. I don't feel I'm pulled along worldlines.
Then the question pops up: what computes? In a sense I think you're right. I think the gods calculated how the particles should behave in order for life to emerge.
My model of how this happens is discussed in detail in my Complete Theory of Everything at https://EdgarLOwen.info
This is not a thread about the mathematical nature of the universe. It's about cause. I haven't seen anything you've posted here that relates to that.
I think he did. It are computations behind the scene causing things.
Like I said in my post, the test rules out non local hidden variables, except if the experimenter is included in the determinism (superdeterminism) or our understanding of locality is incomplete, or our understanding of the limitation of speed of light is incomplete, or our understanding of correlation is incomplete.
If you want non local determinism, that does not include the experimenter, then you will have to explain faster that the speed of light communication, or a new understanding of correlation, or a different understanding of locality - in particular one where the laws of physics are not local.
What is needed to explain entanglement is at least one of:
- Superdeterminism
- New understanding of locality
- Speed of light is not the upper bound of information transfer
- New understanding of correlation.
- Something completely new we are yet to think of
We don't know which of the above is true.
Can you give a theory of non-local hidden variables that does not require one of the above points?
The test just doesn't rule out non-local variables. It doesn't matter if you include the observer or not. If there was an entangled pair of electrons 13 billion years ago, then non-local hidden variables took care of the spins being non-causally related. If one of them interacted by spin, the other would automatically fall into one state.
As i said in my post in the rest of the sentence you posted:
Or our understanding of locality is incomplete, or our understanding of the limitation of speed of light is incomplete, or our understanding of correlation is incomplete.
You can use non locality to explain entanglement, if you change the understanding of locality in physics. - if you hypothesis that locality is not valid. That is not really a non-local hidden variable.
In your example, where is the non-local hidden variable? How does this variable communicate information with the particles?
Well, it could be that hidden variables constitute space. This would establish the connection between gravity and QM. So the space between and around two electrons connects them globally. Non causaly, without time involved.
That would violate special relativity.
Time is not involved. There is no causal interaction between the electron spins. Space connects them globally without information going instantaneously or traveling in space.
That's not a hidden variable theory though. You are in effect hypothesizing wormholes between entangled electron pairs.
I don't mean wormholes. Space itself is the connection.
- It (space) is transferring information between entangled particles at faster than the speed of light
- Space is connecting the particles in such a way as there is no distance between them (wormholes)
If the hidden variables have a non-local nature than the can collapse two entangled states, spatially separated, simultaneously, like a causal fork. No information runs between the two events. Only a direct causation of the non-local hidden variables, which could be the space in which they move. No wormholes involved.
That violates special relativity.
Which is why most non-local interpretations of quantum mechanics don't posit non-local hidden variable, but rather that out classical understanding of locality is wrong.
That's not what I'm postulating. I postulate no transfer of information between two localities. I postulate one simultaneous (in the rest frame) transfer at two locations towards the spins. Not between the locations.
That won't explain the Bell's test results. In your above example, Bell's inequality should hold.
"A non-local hidden variable theory would just say that there are hidden variables but they are non-local. Such a theory wouldn't get around Bell's inequality - it would claim that the inequality is correct and says that the laws of physics are non-local."
As per your quote (I don't know where you got that from), the laws of physics also have to be non-local. You can't simply have non-local hidden variables, you then have to also postulate the very concept of locality does not hold (not just for hidden variables).
That would very much be under "or our understanding of locality is incomplete" that I wrote earlier.
A non-local hidden variable pushing information one way to the two particles simultaneously would not violate Bell's inequality. But our experimental results do violate Bell's inequality
Particles are local, and the variables behind their motion, the wavefunction guiding them, non-local.
But that is what I'm saying, there is no such thing as a "physical" cause. Your title doesnt make that distinction either. Do you want to know the meaning of "cause", which does exist or the meaming of something that does not exis? It seems to me that if you want to know the meaning of something then you need to include all instances of that something, and not cherry-pick your examples or else you would be muddying the waters instead acquiring a clearer picture of what it is youre talking about any explanation you come up with would never hope to explain what cause really means.
This non-local waveform you postulate needs to be able to transfer information from one local particle to another, if it is to explain Bell's test results.
Or transfer information from the state of the equipment to the other particle
Which is why most theories focusing on non-locality are around our current understanding of locality being wrong.
Simply pushing information from a non-local variable to the two particles doesn't work.