Humean Causation as Habit & Evolution
Hume explained our tendency to say one thing caused another when we notice constant conjunction between the two events because of habit. Our past experiences tell us that objects heavier than air fall to the ground, so we expect this to be the case in the future.
What's interesting is that Hume felt the need to explain our concept of causation with a causal psychological explanation. Perhaps because past constant conjunction alone wasn't enough to get the concept into our heads.
Turning to Darwin next, we can further explain our habituation to causation with an adaptive explanation. Animals who came to expect constantly conjoined events to continue their conjoining were better at predicting when and where there would be food, mates or danger, and thus had more reproductive success, passing that psychological tendency on.
We can supplement Humean causation with a Darwinian one where constant conjunction produces reproductive success in organisms that expect the conjunction to continue in the future.
Of course if tomorrow is turkey day, then our habit won't help us any longer. It will become maladaptive when the sun doesn't rise, and heavy objects float way (or turn into flying pigs, which we could have ridden, instead of floating around dumbstruck).
What's interesting is that Hume felt the need to explain our concept of causation with a causal psychological explanation. Perhaps because past constant conjunction alone wasn't enough to get the concept into our heads.
Turning to Darwin next, we can further explain our habituation to causation with an adaptive explanation. Animals who came to expect constantly conjoined events to continue their conjoining were better at predicting when and where there would be food, mates or danger, and thus had more reproductive success, passing that psychological tendency on.
We can supplement Humean causation with a Darwinian one where constant conjunction produces reproductive success in organisms that expect the conjunction to continue in the future.
Of course if tomorrow is turkey day, then our habit won't help us any longer. It will become maladaptive when the sun doesn't rise, and heavy objects float way (or turn into flying pigs, which we could have ridden, instead of floating around dumbstruck).
Comments (77)
Why would our habit not help us anymore on such a day? The moment a heavy object turns into a flying pig we will note such a change, presume it will happen again next time we throw a heavy object into the air and ride the pig. If rather than a permanent change in reality we are now in a world where nothing remains the same, then the heavy object might just as easily fall to the ground again next time as do any other thing, in which case maintaining our belief that it will do so is at least as likely as any other belief to yield fruitful results.
So then we animals are inherently pragmatic.
The use of the word "explanation" sounds misleading, since Hume accepted the skeptical premise that the concept of causal necessity isn't reducible to "relations of ideas" (the analytic a priori) or to "matters of fact" (the synthetic a posteriori).
Hence the concept of causal necessity cannot be "explained" to the skeptic in terms of what is thinkable, and this must include the [I] idea [/I] of psychological association in terms of an analytic or synthetic explanatory hypothesis.
If Hume is to be consistent, his notion of "psychological habit" or "custom" can at most refer to the empirical observation that historical experience of repeated trials with identical outcomes is often observed to co-occur with present expectations for similar outcomes in the future - expectations which we might call "judgements of necessity".
But to avoid contradiction the empirical co-occurrence of identically repeated empirical trials with judgements of necessity cannot itself be considered to be a "causally necessary" relation, and therefore "judgements of necessity" cannot be synonymous to either "observed matters of habit" or to histories of identical trials.
To conclude, "psychological association" can only refer to the empirical background conditions in which judgements of causal-necessity are typically observed to follow, but cannot constitute a theory of causal judgements. Causal-necessity isn't so much of a thinkable idea but a feeling of compulsion that one sometimes feels subjected to.
Secondly, although Darwinian selection provides a naturalistic explanation of our inferential capacities, it cannot augment Hume's classical skeptical argument since naturalistic explanations beg the very notion of causal necessity that is in question. Indeed it isn't even the case after granting the notion of causal-necessity that evolution is guaranteed to improve any of our empirical inferences.
You can say that, but the big problem with it is that the concept of cause is entirely different from the concept of constant conjunction. They are not the same.
Kant explains: "The conception of a cause so plainly involves the conception of a necessity of connection with an effect, and of a strict universality of the law, that the very notion of a cause would entirely disappear, were we to derive it, like Hume, from a frequent association of what happens with what precedes"
Quoting Marchesk
This is obfuscation now. You're thinking you solved the problem the same way the man who thinks he solved the problem by saying opium causes sleep because it has sleep-inducing properties.
The question is why, in the first place, do those animals who expect constantly conjoined events to continue to be conjoined in the future are better at predicting when and where the food, mates or dangers would be? Oh, it might be because causality really is a thing out there in the world, hmmm, I see... :-d
Might just be.
I think philosophy has already settled this matter. The interesting question now is whether the causality is a priori (presupposed by our experience, and provided by our understanding) or a posteriori, derived from experience. Kant would claim that Hume definitely proved that it's not the latter, while he himself proved that it is the former. I think some Scholastics though would argue that Hume at least didn't understand causality as it had been traditionally understood, and as such was left with an impoverished notion of causality.
As a realist, I would say that if we observe constant conjunction, we're observing causality. But we often have to infer the nature of it, and it's always possible to infer incorrectly or incompletely. Something is causing everything to fall to the Earth at a rate of 9.81 m/s, otherwise why would a cannon ball fall at the same rate as a feather, once you factor out air resistance? That's totally unexpected.
Aristotle's 4 causes.
Basically, the 4 causes leave no gaps. Efficient cause and effect are understood to be temporarily simultaneous, so the Humean notion that we could imagine A happening first without being followed by B is false. Since A (the cause) is simultaneous with B (the effect), they cannot but be linked. Like drawing a line on the paper. The line that is drawn (the effect) is simultaneous with the movement of the pencil (the cause).
Constant conjunction (also known as correlation) isn't causality. They are two different concepts.
This doesn't seem right. Efficient cause is necessarily temporally prior to the effect. If they were simultaneous, then there would be no temporal progression between the thing which is said to be the cause, and the thing which is said to be the effect, and one cannot be claimed to be the cause of the other without a temporal progression.
For instance, the line on the paper is not simultaneous with the moving of the pencil, it follows from it, as the moving of the pencil is necessary for the existence of the line, but the existence of a line is not necessary for the moving of the pencil. The pencil might move without a line occurring.
Without movement, the pencil makes a point. After moving, and not until after moving because the pencil must get out of the way, is there a line. If the pencil continues to move, then any part of the line which already exists is simultaneous with the movement now, but any new part of the line only follows after that new movement. So it is clear that there is only a line after the pencil has moved. If the pencil moving, and the line occurring were simultaneous, then one could not be said to be the cause of the other. It would be just as likely that the line occurring would be the cause of the pencil moving as vise versa.
Right, although judging by how many people wrongly equivocate Hume's skeptical conclusion with "correlation doesn't equal causation", we should be careful to avoid the potential conflation of constant conjunction with the 'inferred' notion of [I]essential[/I] correlation.
Perhaps we should say:
1. The constant-conjunction of A and B refers to the sampled correlation of A and B over a finite history of observations, that happens to equal 1.
2. Hume's problem of induction also implies that a correlation parameter cannot be rationally deduced from a sampled correlation, regardless of the value of the sampled correlation.
For just as we cannot rationally infer causation, we cannot rationally infer correlation.
The problem is that we do both all the time. Our technology and science is based on being able to make predictions from what we consider to be correlation or causation.
It's not just that we observe past Bs following As, it's that we infer C will follow B given AB. If we know that all objects fall to the Earth at 9.81 m/s, then we can propel something into outer space with an acceleration greater than 9.81 m/s. Then given other Bs following As in chemistry, we can create the fuel to make this propulsion work. And so forth to the point that we can land spacecraft on other planets we've never been to.
That's why it's hard to take Humean skepticism seriously outside of a philosophy discussion.
Why is it a problem? Hume confesses that he does it himself, and by no means demands that one does not. He points out the limits of logical deduction. You can't get a will-be from a was, any more than you can get an ought from an is. The gaps are bridged by habit and sentiment. It's only a problem for the philosopher who has a false image of himself as purely rational.
I don't buy the argument that the gaps are bridged by habit and sentiment anymore than Kant did, even though unlike Kant, I think causality is real.
It's just obvious to me that we inhabit a causal universe, otherwise there would be no reason for it to have such a deep, uniform order to it over billions of years.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't think Hume's skepticism is taken that seriously even in philosophical discussions, to be honest. Or at least, it ought not to. I mean it's difficult to read and understand Platonic/Aristotelian philosophy especially in the later Scholastic synthesis OR to read and honestly study Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and still take Hume's skepticism seriously.
I can somewhat understand the appeal of Hume's skepticism today given the prevalence of postmodernism and different forms of positivism and scientism, but from the coherence of the arguments, I really think it is sorely lacking. I really can't take Hume very seriously anymore.
For me, the two competing worldviews that are worthy of attention are Kantianism as developed by Kant and Schopenhauer, and the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy as developed by the Scholastics. Everything else seems children's play, though other philosophers do sometimes make important, but lonely (as opposed to systematic) points (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc.).
The main difficulty, of course being that, because of the prevailing cultural climate, even most professional philosophers do not seriously study Scholasticism, preferring instead to read summaries and history of philosophy type of books. Nor do most philosophers, even amongst the professionals, seriously study Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - most read through it sometimes, or parts of it, as part of their university course, and then forget about it. Or they read through it through certain lens, either those of their professor, etc. They don't seriously think about the arguments made, and Kant is difficult to read because he makes like 10-15 subtle distinctions on every page between different concepts, so if you're not really really concentrating and re-reading segments multiple times, you don't really get it.
I mean I can see how, if you read the wiki summary, or the SEP page, or some history of philosophy book that you cannot see how, for example, Kant refuted Hume. But if you would spend the time properly doing it, I think the refutation is as definite as anything can ever get in philosophy.
Quoting sime
Is the only difference between constant-conjunction as described above and correlation the fact that correlation presumably involves the added necessity to continue into the future? I don't think that's the standard notion of correlation, but I may be wrong. So please clarify what is the difference between your notion of constant-conjunction and correlation.
Quoting unenlightened
This, of course, would ignore the fact that "oughts" can be factual too (per an Aristotelian worldview). Or, in the case of other so-called problems, it seems to me that Hume just shows a complete lack of awareness of synthetic a priori judgements that Kant discusses at length. So Hume shows a truncated understanding formed only of synthetic a posteriori judgements and analytical a priori ones (which are nothing but a systematisation of synthetic a posteriori ones).
I would say that's close, but if you want to be really accurate, you'd say that the universal constant of acceleration G is a property of all gravitational fields (why? - cause that's just the nature of gravitational fields, ie formal cause, due to the effects of mass (material cause) on spacetime curvature - if you ask another why now, it would be answered with the final cause, which directs the other causes towards their particular ranges of effects), and that objects on Earth experience a pull (effect) that is simultaneous with the efficient cause of being present within a gravitational field. Indeed, that's why it's called instantaneous acceleration :P
There doesn't need to be a temporal progression. The cause is logically, though not temporarily, prior to the effect. Why logically? Because the cause must contain the effect within it, and not the other way around.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, that doesn't tell me that it's not simultaneous, that just tells me that one is cause and the other is effect. You're talking of one being logically prior to the other one. The pencil can move without creating a line - if it doesn't move while in contact with, say, a page. A line cannot move a pencil, since it doesn't have that potency. Only a pencil has the potency of creating a line when moved on a paper. But the creation of the line and the movement of the pencil are simultaneous temporarily, though not logically, as explained above.
Yes, as far as I'm aware Hume never had wind of Kant at all. You can get a Kant from a Hume, but not vice versa. But as far as I can see "synthetic a priori judgements" are just a long-winded way of saying "sentiments".
Why do you say that?
And have you read Kant's first Critique?
Let's take a simple synthetic a priori judgement. Here it is. It's Euclid's first postulate.
"A straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point"
The definitions involved are:
1) A point is that which has no part.
2) A line is a breathless length.
3) The extremities of a line are points.
4) A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
The definition and the postulate are from Euclid's Elements Book I (I paraphrase the first postulate to clarify its meaning).
Now, is the judgement synthetic or analytic? Since it cannot be derived from the definitions alone, it must be synthetic, as it adds something that isn't contained in the definition (as opposed to analytic, which merely explains something already contained in the definitions). And is it a priori or a posteriori? It is a priori. Why? Because it is universal and absolutely necessary, you cannot conceive it being otherwise. That means you don't have to appeal to experience to know it, and hence it must be a priori.
Where am I wrong?
But since Hume was an empiricist, isn't he ceding ground to rationalism here by saying we have a sentiment toward causality? He's admitted there's something fundamental in our thought processes which we use to make sense of the world that doesn't come from sensory experience.
Indeed, and this is precisely Kant's point. Kant thinks that Hume is right about this:
"That which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. But that in which sensations are merely arranged, and by which they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be itself sensation. It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us a posteriori; the form must lie ready a priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation."
So indeed these forms, Kant would say, cannot come from sensory experience, they are the forms of sensory experience, and as such its conditions of possibility. But they are not, as Hume would say, merely psychological habit associations. Why?
Because "the conception of a cause so plainly involves the conception of a necessity of connection with an effect, and of a strict universality of the law, that the very notion of a cause would entirely disappear, were we to derive it, like Hume, from a frequent association of what happens with what precedes"
And also because without such forms existing a priori, sensory experience itself would be impossible. That follows from these forms being required for experience and these forms not originating from experience itself.
Right there. I can perfectly well conceive of separate domains of any number of dimensions, euclidian and non-euclidian, such that one cannot draw any line between a point in one and a point in another. For example, in spherical geometry, there is a point (the centre) to which no line can be drawn, because the geometry is of the surface of the sphere or hypersphere.
Hmmm...
In spherical geometry, assuming we're talking about an intrinsic as opposed to an extrinsic curvature of space, there would be no point at the centre of the sphere would there? I mean, if space itself is in the shape of a sphere, then there is no other space to contain that point in the centre of it, is there? Or am I wrong?
We can argue about it. In a sense you are right, because the centre would be postulated to exist in 'another (higher) dimension', outside the geometric space. But I think the point is already made, that what is conceivable or inconceivable varies according to how daring one's thinking is.
Quoting Agustino
I think we have already conceived it being otherwise.
Okay, but then we've just moved the problem one step further no? I mean from the POV of this higher dimensional space that contains the geometric space we're talking about, any point can be connected to any other point by a line no? The only way this wouldn't be possible is if we're dealing again with a non-Euclidean space stuck in a higher dimension space. But at some point, we would obviously have to stop with adding dimensions no? Otherwise, we'd have an infinite regress. So when we do that, it seems to me that the postulate still holds absolutely true, no?
So I think Kant's point still holds. I see that the judgement does have absolute necessity, though it may lack universality.
If you analyze "logical priority" you will see that the only valid way that something can be prior to another is that it is temporally prior. The claim that there is a logical priority which is not reducible to a temporal priority, would have to be justified either by examples and demonstrations, or else by some logical argument which demonstrated such. In the case of the former, all examples of priority will be demonstrated to be actually temporal priority or else the claim of "priority" will not be justified. In the case of the latter, if you have a logical argument which demonstrates that there is a type of priority which is not a temporal priority, then produce it.
Quoting Agustino
It can be demonstrated quite easily. Try it yourself. There is no line until after the pencil moves. Prior to movement the pencil is at a point and there is no line. After the pencil moves there is a line. The line does not appear until after the pencil moves.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, the creation of the line is simultaneous with the movement of the pencil, the two are the same thing. However, the creation of the line is necessarily temporally prior to the existence of the line. The existence, or "being" of a thing is completely distinct from the "becoming" of that thing. And, the becoming of the thing, by which process the thing comes to be, is temporally prior to the being of the thing.
Isn't that the common sense meaning of "cause," at least in a physical sense - a transfer of momentum and energy manifested as a change in velocity.
Some things can't come to exist without the priors. Babies exist because of mothers. Life exists because of chemistry. Chemistry exists because of physics. In fact, chemistry has a close mathematical relationship to physics. The physics of atoms dictate that molecules will form under the right conditions.
Are these "priors" not temporally prior? If the "prior" is necessary for the existence of the thing, then isn't the prior necessarily temporally prior to the existence of the thing
Right, but it's not the the temporal priority that is sufficient, it's the nature of the prior. If the universe was filled only with inert gasses, then their prior existence would not lead to any chemistry.
Yep, exactly. The cause is the movement of the pencil, and the effect is the creation of the line.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, but the creation of the line does not cause the (continued) existence of the line. There are other happenings which ensure that the line's existence continues, and these don't have to do with its creation. The line must be sustained into being, and that's different from being created.
So yes, the becoming of the thing is temporarily prior to its being. So what? :s
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Take it another way. The pencil is the cause of a point on the paper. The pencil touching the paper, and a point appearing on the paper are simultaneous, not temporarily separate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, there is a priority in terms of potency and act. The line (or point or whatever) is a potency of the pencil which actually exists. This logical asymmetry between the two is what guarantees the logical priority of one over the other. That is why the pencil can cause the line, but the line cannot cause the pencil.
That's an issue for Kant because his position ascribes the universal quality to it. Supposedly, it is the necessary connection lost between casual states in Hume's argument: the absence of a universality law which accounts for how they hold.
Without universality, "causality" disappears. No longer can we begin with a rule of form (e.g. the sun rises in the morning) which will pick out a necessary event in existence. We might have a sun that does not rise, no matter how often we've seen one rise. Causes an effect are still so, but they are only present in terms of what the states themselves do, rather than an extra layer of "causality" where logic determines a necessary relationship.
One is left with the Humean position Kant is attacking-- a world of interacting states which have no necessity by logical form. Only when existence is taken into account ( this sun, at this moment ) do the necessary logical expressions of state appear (e.g.the sun that rises necessarily rises. Outside of this, it is not defined whether a sun rises or not).
I don't think so. This is what Kant says:
"Now, in the first place, if we have a proposition which contains the idea of necessity in its very conception, it is a if, moreover, it is not derived from any other proposition, unless from one equally involving the idea of necessity, it is absolutely priori [...] Necessity and strict universality, therefore, are infallible tests for distinguishing pure from empirical knowledge [...] But as in the use of these criteria the empirical limitation is sometimes more easily detected than the contingency of the judgement, or the unlimited universality which we attach to a judgement is often a more convincing proof than its necessity, it may be advisable to use the criteria separately, each being by itself infallible."
Right... but that's the problem: the "causality" Kant is talking about is not an empirical state. We don't, as Hume was at pains to point out, observe "casualty" in the world. Our encounters are with the states.
Kant is after more than this, some logical connection, some pure and infallible knowledge which amounts to a necessitating of a causal relationship, such they our not just states doing their own random dance. The empirically defined account, the presence of states in relation, is exactly what Kant finds inadequate and is seeking to get beyond.
Does Kant ever say it is? No. He agrees with Hume that causality is added by the mind. And in some sense, Kant absolutely has to be right. Modern neuroscience does back up the idea that we do create a model of the world, which is what we actually perceive. For example, phenomena such as the phantom limb, etc. illustrate precisely this, that causality (at least to a certain extent) is added by the mind.
For sure: that's the issue. In both cases, "causality" is viewed as some sort of logical force, with Hume noting it's not apparent in empirical observations, so rejecting it as an account of the empirical.
The problem is precisely that Kant doesn't view "causality" as as an empirical matter. In doing so, he supposes cause and effect functions by the means of a logical universal (rather than states just doing whatever they do at "random" ). It means he takes that logical universal (the model of the world) is doing the work of being the states in question, that those states are so by this logical rule rather than just in terms of the states themselves.
Your account of Kant's epistemology/ontology is iffy. Kant doesn't take our models literally are the things with see. For Kant, our models are not constitutive of things we experience, of the things-in-themsleves. My model "the sun will rise tomorrow" is never the sun that rises. It's not that our experience of the sun constructs the sun, but instead that our experience of the sun is our construction (literally our existence, rather than anything we might be aware of).
In his account of phenomena, Kant's is pointing out our experience is us, such that any account of secret knowledge which is both phenomenal (for us) but beyond us is incoherent. He's pointing out our knowledge can only be our own, not claiming our minds create the things we encounter.
Unfortunately, this is not any sort of account of either causality or ontology. Kant's mistake (or maybe more so, the mistake of many readers of Kant) was to fail to properly recognise he was talking about us, about our knowledge, rather than the actions of things we perceive. Cause and effect does not need us to occur. Our minds, in the sense of being awareness of logic meaning, are not involved at all. It's other things which are doing it-- the sun, a ball thrown through a window, someone's body producing a state experience of a limb which isn't there, etc. The doing of cause and effect is another life entirely.
Thinking about causality in terms of the things, we find Hume's rejection of "causality" is coherent. If other things are cause and effect, then they don't need our models to be defined. They will be what they are, expressing their logical relations on account of there own being-- a sun which rises will be so no matter what humans might think or model, same for a sun which does not rise. Neither state of a sun is defined by our models. "Causality" isn't needed to form causal relationships. The action of one state bringing about another, appearing as a correlation, is always enough.
You were claiming that the two, the efficient cause, and the effect, are simultaneous. That seemed very odd to me, so I thought I'd bring this to your attention. Now you seem to agree with me, they are not simultaneous, one is temporally prior to the other.
Quoting Agustino
But now I see that you are still trying to argue otherwise. "The pencil touching the paper" is a description of an activity, and this activity is necessarily prior in time to what is referred to as "a point appearing on the paper". They are not simultaneous. Try it yourself. You will never get the point to appear simultaneously with the pencil touching the paper, because until the pencil moves out of the way you will not see a point on the paper.
No, I don't agree with you. I've just rephrased:
Quoting Agustino
The cause is the movement of the pencil, and the effect is the creation of the line, not its being. This is because its being depends on other - indeed temporarily posterior - causes relative to its creation. Of course, those causes, relative to its being, will also be simultaneous.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They are simultaneous. The fact that I don't see the point on the paper without moving the pencil out of the way does not indicate that there is no point that has appeared there, only that I do not see the point. Those are two different things. I don't need to see the point for it to be there.
Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I wouldn't agree with this. The "movement of the pencil", and the "creation of the line" are one and the same thing. They are two different ways of describing the very same event. One cannot be the cause, and the other the effect, if they are the very same thing.
Quoting Agustino
We are talking about efficient causes here. According to Newton's first law, if a thing has being, there are no other efficient causes required to maintain that being. This is called inertia. If your claim is that in order to maintain its being, there are other causes required, which are simultaneous to its being, then these are not efficient causes, because efficient causes would be described as forces acting to change the being of the object. Therefore you argue by equivocation, assuming that since there is a type of cause which is simultaneous to the being of a thing, then efficient cause is also simultaneous to the being of a thing.
However, it is clearly demonstrable that if an efficient cause is associated with the becoming of a thing, then it is temporally prior to that thing. And if the thing is the effect of the cause, then the cause is temporally prior to the effect.
Quoting Agustino
Do you know what the word "appear" means? To be visible. If you cannot see the point it does not appear. To claim that the point is there, before you can see it, is an unjustified assumption, just like your claim that the cause is simultaneous with the effect, is an unjustified assumption.
You still have done nothing to support this illogical claim that the efficient cause is simultaneous with the effect. You have demonstrated that this claim is derived from an equivocation between two ways of using "cause", and your demonstration, your attempt to justify the claim, is made by referring to something physically impossible (that the point appears before the pencil moves). So your claim remains illogical
That they are one event is clear by the simultaneity of cause and effect. However this isn't to say that what is the cause in this case is the same as the effect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They aren't the same thing. The proposition "movement on pencil on paper" isn't the same as the proposition "creation of a line".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, that's called pseudo-science. Newton's first law says nothing about the being of objects/things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:s
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, it could mean that. It could also mean to become present. If I say a ghost appeared in the house, I don't mean that I saw the ghost necessarily, I simply mean that it became present there or started to exist at that position in space.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes I have. I even explained to you the mechanism by which the cause is logically prior to the effect via the act/potency distinction.
Usually, the pencil has to move before the paper is marked. That's because the mark is made by the pencil leaving behind part of its graphite tip on the paper. For that to happen, a force is needed that breaks the bonds that bind the graphite that will make the mark to the rest of the tip. That force is created by moving the pencil sideways which, by the operation of friction, stretches the bonds to the point where some break.
A similar analysis applies when the motion of the pen is just up and down rather than sideways.
The only instance in which the pencil does not have to move before a mark arises is when particles of graphite freely fall off the tip without being subject to a force. This could happen with a very flaky pencil tip. But in that case the pencil does not even have to touch the paper for a mark to appear.
No, because it is not rational, but sentimental. 'Reason is and ought to be the servant of passion. '
That 'ought' is loose talk on Hume's part, which I interpret charitably to mean that one might have a passion to make reason the king and passion the servant. And if that passion is strong, it will prevail, but one can only regard reason as the king of passion by wilfully ignoring the passion that put the puppet reason on the throne.
I saw no such explanation. What you said is this:
Quoting Agustino
This provides no argument that the cause is simultaneous to the effect. What you seem to be saying is that the potential for the effect is simultaneous with the actual cause. But your conclusion is just a category error. It's like saying that the potential for sunrise tomorrow morning exists simultaneously with the actual setting of the sun tonight, therefore the sunrise is simultaneous with the sunset. Do you see the category error of mixing actual and potential in this way?
A passion isn't a concept. We have a concept of causality. Hume wasn't able to provide a good explanation for how we arrived at such a concept.
As has been noted earlier in this thread (in correction to something I posted), correlation isn't causation. So you can't derive the concept of causation from constant conjunction.
Nobody thinks a passion is a concept. We have a passion for pattern, a passion to predict, we are creatures of habit. Cause is a handy concept that appears to justify, and appears to rationalise, but does not - unless you want to disappear down Kant's rabbit hole. Hume says we are creatures of passion primarily not rationality; don't expect him to derive shit, he's busy pointing out how underivable it is.
That still fails to explain how we came up with the concept of causality. Saying that it's a habit of mind is not explaining how the concept could form.
And since Hume was an empiricist, he has nowhere else to go.
It’s been a while since my reading of Hume, and I’m not about to reread his works to present this. And yes, given my heavy alignment with Darwinian evolution, I may have misinterpreted his writing at the time due to this bias.
On a few rare occasions, Hume drops this bomb-word of “instinct”. Long-term memory sometimes being faulty, till I find out otherwise I’ll uphold what I remember: on even fewer instances he mentions this (you’ve got to place him in his proper time) rather heretical hypothesis that we humans share instincts with lesser animals. (I bet some will find it heretical even today on this forum.) And I recall his explanation for why we develop habits of (causal) association being just that: its instinct.
… OK, for what it’s worth just found this one summary online after a brief search:
From: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/understanding/section9.rhtml
The word "concept" is ambiguous, as are "relations among ideas" and "matters of fact".
Must the content of a concept be thinkable, or are concepts only demonstrable on a case by case basis?
Suppose for example that somebody claims to not understand infinity. So we provide him with a verbal definition, say
" [1,2,3,...] represents an infinite collection, where the dots allow us to write [1,2,3,4,...] and so on"
The learner then queries
"what do you mean by 'and so on' "?
At this point all we can do is demonstrate to him a finite number of applications of our rule of infinite expansion, and hope that he continues to use our rule in the same way. To verify this, we might test his understanding of the rule of infinity on a finite supply of test questions and then breathe a sigh of relief if he passes all the tests.
But where in any of this process did we teach to him and confirm his understanding of what we [I]want[/I] infinity to mean?
And the problem is the same when teaching what is meant by the word "necessary", for we can only teach a concept with a finite number of examples and by appealing to the words "and so on". Hence an exhaustive a priori definition of the word "necessary" cannot be given such that it's meaning is water-tight before all of its uses.
Therefore, and especially considering human fallibility, physical uncertainty and mechanical breakdown, the very notion of "necessary consequent" is not only non-demonstrable it is also under-determined thereby permitting exceptions.
Hence to say that "B necessarily follows A" is in some sense compatible with saying "B doesn't necessarily follow A".
What is the "concept of causality" exactly?
It seems to this sort of objection hasn't given it much thought.
If it is our concept, then it is our experience, to account for it is to describe an event of experience of the person in question, nothing more than our "habit of mind".
The "how" terminates there: it's the fact someone experiences a concept of causality which means it this there rather than not.
The laws of thermodynamics prohibit perpetual motion machines from being invented.
Nothing with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light.
It's impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle with 100% certainty.
You can't build a storage device consisting of a sphere of 6.7 cm or smaller containing more than 2.6 X 10^42 bits.
You can't build a computer that carries out more than 5 X 10^50 operations per second.
You can't transmit information faster than the speed of light.
You can't perform a measurement below the Plank scale.
You can't have a temperature below 0 degrees Kelvin.
All of the above and more is necessarily the case without exception.
Odd use of 'necessarily' there, to mean, 'as far as we know', or 'according to our best theory', or 'unless the rules change over the event horizon', or 'unless there are wormholes or some shit we haven't come across yet'.
[quote= Brian Cox]I think the power of science is that it's not perfect. It's the only discipline we have that acknowledges its own fallibility.[/quote]
It's not that we can't be wrong about what's actually necessary/causal, only that we can and do conceive of such things. Kant was right that causality is fundamental to our thinking.
To me, not only is there no contradiction, but they’re one and the same metaphysical stance; only that the latter Kantian stance gives a detailed metaphysical account whereas the former Humean stance only gives a generalized, superficial metaphysical account (I remind everyone that genetics and the like were not know in Hume’s time, hence “innate instincts”, while commonly used to describe animal behaviors, were not yet understood in the neo-Darwinian sense of modern cultures).
Otherwise asked: While the Kantian stance is justified in in-depth manners and the Humean account is only offered as the only consistent explanation which comes to mind, how is an a priori understanding of the cognitive faculties as regards causation not itself an innate instinct of the same cognitive faculties?
(To be clear, I personally uphold a Kantian metaphysics when it comes to causation but also find that Kantianism only builds upon Humean understanding in at least this one regard.)
What Hume was puzzled by was how we came to have a concept of causality since it's neither empirical nor a logical deduction. I've been arguing that habit in response to constant conjunction is not enough to arrive at the concept of causality.
That causation is not an object of immediate observation seems right. But Hume seems to be assuming the narrow view that belief only in phenomena that can be derived from the 'single point' of immediate conscious observation can be rationally justified.
This narrow prejudice ignores the fact that as embodied we feel the forces involves in causal efficacy; we feel ourselves being pulled, pushed, impacted and generally acted upon by natural forces in phenomena such as sunlight, wind and water, and also we experience pulling, pushing, impacting and generally acting upon other things. The bodily feeling of these forces is the source of the concept of force which distinguishes causation from mere impotent correlation.
Good point. Perception in philosophy is so often focused on vision that I wonder if it doesn't sometimes lead philosophers astray. If we're the billiard balls feeling the strike as we move in response, does Hume still make the claim that we don't perceive causation?
Kant is mistaken because in making the argument causality must be equivalent to our thinking, he forgets causality is not our thinking.
Our thinking only needs to reflect events of causality when we understand a causal relationship. In this respect, our insistence of what is causally necessary can be fucked by the world doing it's own thing.
There might, for example, be a perpetual motion machine. All it would take is a state with an endless supply of it own power, a state which didn't draw on other energies to move, unlike we have observed so far. We cannot say there is no possibility.
Our case against the perpetual motion machine only holds for instances of the world we have observed. Outside this context, we cannot say what the world is doing.We simply don't know.
If only we could ask the jolly old fella. Maybe a computer simulation...?
Okay, but as far as I see, this just moves the explanation back a few steps. It's not directly the pencil that causes the writing, but through the means of the graphite breaking. The graphite breaking (cause) and the marks appearing on the page (effect) are simultaneous.
Alternatively, you can replace the pencil with a marker. As soon as the marker touches the page, its liquid already colours it.
Or you can think of an example such as a potter shaping the clay with his hands. The cause and the effect are again seen very clearly to be simultaneous.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope, you didn't understand what I was saying.
Hmm I'm not sure about this. The things-in-themselves are precisely what is impossible for us to experience or know for that matter.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Agreed. But we only ever experience our experience, ie the model.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
He does claim that our minds create space, time, causality, etc. But of course our minds don't create sensation itself.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I think Kant's fundamental point was that we add cause and effect to the world. So whatsoever we perceive will be seen through the lens of cause and effect, much like if you were wearing red spectacles, you'd see everything in red.
What does it mean to experience our experience? Isn't that how we get in these philosophical muddles in the first place? Do I experience the tree, or do I experience the experience of the tree?
That Kantian point is that the world is our representation - we construct it. So basically our mind takes the sense impressions that are of an unknown origin - and then organises them through the forms of space, time, causality, etc. - into the representation that we're all so familiar with. Think about it like a computer's desktop - that's our representation, and all that we ever see. So we represent the world - we create a model of it - that helps us navigate it (ie survive). That model is of course not directed towards truth, and therefore very likely it's not what the world as thing-in-itself is really like.
Do you think that if we could see all the dings in siches, would they seem closer to what we think our senses tell us, or might they seem unrecognizable and alien? What I mean is, maybe we are victims of a monstrous hoax.
"Seeing" the dings in siches makes no sense, since all seeing takes place in space. There very likely isn't any space out there per a Kantian viewpoint.
The sense impressions that we receive are of an unknown origin. We never experience these sense impressions directly. We experience the phenomenon. What's the phenomenon? It is the sense impressions organised by our minds through the forms of space, time, causality, etc. So you never feel pain in-itself. You always feel pain out there in space, in the leg.
You never experience hunger in-itself. You experience it as related to your stomach, in your body.
Now your entire experience is like the computer's desktop. To delete something from the computer, you grab it on the desktop and drag it to the trash folder. Now, in reality, this isn't how things really get deleted. That's just the interface which helps you do it more easily instead of entering some code in the command prompt to do it for you (or instead of giving 0 and 1 instructions). So likewise, eating food is merely the interface that shows you how to get rid of hunger - it's not what really happens to get rid of hunger. Eating food (cause) and ending hunger (effect) is merely the desktop interface of life that allows you to deal with survival most efficiently. So you project your hunger out there in space, you attach a cause to it (food, which you also project out there), and then proceed to eradicate your hunger by means of eating the food. But whatsoever really happens behind this interface is a mystery.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Because we do not control the sense impressions that we receive + space, time, causality, etc. are a priori forms of the mind, and cannot be really out there. Kant follows Hume here who shows that causality cannot be a sense impression. But yet, we nevertheless necessarily perceive things in terms of cause and effect, Kant notices. So how does that happen? That can only happen if those are a priori forms of our minds always imposed on top of sense impressions to organise them (since we've eliminated the possibility of them being sense impressions themselves).
So the sense impressions are not of us, and the forms which are of us aren't real, they merely organise our impressions.
Now the first point that we have sense impressions that we do not control is obvious.
The second point, Kant argues at length for in the CPR. If you just read the introduction and the transcendental aesthetic (around 10-20 pages maybe, it's short) you will see the arguments made with regards to space and time being a priori, transcendentally ideal. If you agree with those arguments, then there must be a thing-in-itself, since sense impressions, whatever they are, are always organised by these a priori forms of cognition (space, time, etc.) which don't really exist out there. So whatever you perceive is only the desktop interface. Now if you see the desktop interface, and you see that it is a desktop interface (since the forms in which experience is given are a priori), then you know that there must be a computer behind.
So really, to summarise, it all revolves around if space/time/causality, etc. are sense impressions, and if they are not, then where are they coming from? If they aren't sense impressions, where else could they be coming from?
I think there is a problem with this account of causality: the role of the states themselves is eliminated. We walk away saying causally is only in our minds, rather than recognising it inheres within the things we encounter.
Kant talks about it in terms of our “minds” because it reflects a logical significance of the world we know. Causality is not some individual thing in front of we observe. Like other a priori significances Kant points out, such as space and time, causality is an extra logical significance not granted in the mere presence of an object. Insofar as this goes Kant is right, but I think it’s a huge mistake to assign this conceptual meaning merely to our mind.We should not be making the mistake of equivocating the a priori truths we know with our minds which are the knowing. Logical expression is not dependent on us to be true.
If we didn’t notice the ball caused the widow to break, action of the ball and widow would still be a causal states. The ball and widow are doing the causality. To say our minds "add in" causality is obviously wrong, unless we were to equivocate our awareness of causality with the casual actions of state we are talking about.
In this way, we might say that Kant denies causality is real, claiming it is merely something humans like to add in with their minds, rather than recognising it as a feature of things (i.e. not just our experiences and models-- the instances when we notice "causality"-- but a meaning inherent in the things moving about in causality) we've encountered.
If causality is to have teeth, it cannot be merely our minds. Things, which are not the human experience of causality, are interacting and moving, forming the states of the world in relation to each other, defining when one thing bringing about another (as opposed to something else), etc.
Otherwise we just have a pretence "causality" which has nothing to do without things interact.
You should be careful here when talking about "things" we encounter. Kant fully buys into Hume's model that there are no "things" we encounter as such (I'm stating a lie here technically, but I will correct it soon - take it as truth for now). We only encounter bundles of sense impressions. An apple isn't a "thing", it is the sense impression of red + sense impression of soft + sense impression of sweet/sour + etc. etc. So this bundle of senses right? That's what Hume says. So there is no "thing" there according to Hume, just this constant conjunction of sense impressions.
Now Kant comes along, and says, wait a second, there actually is a "thing" there that we experience! But Hume is right, the thingness cannot come from the sense impressions themselves - there is no "thingness" given by the senses. So where does the thingness - the substance - come from? It comes from the understanding - that is Kant's answer.
So you are right, causality (and space, time, etc.) does inhere in the things we experience, but not as sense impression, as matter or as content of what we experience - but rather as their form, which is given by the mind. We don't experience things directly - naively - but through these forms. So there are no objects or things outside of the phenomenon. And the phenomenon is sense impressions organised by the understanding.
In my opinion, the Kantian position, much like the Aristotelian position is one of the strongest there is in philosophy.
The trouble is Hume has an implicit and unstated a priori notion of things: that's how he indexes bundles in the first place. Hume didn't begin with undifferentiated impressions. He indexes them in distinguished objects. Otherwise, Hume would have no distinct bundles or impressions at all. He would just have a mess impressions which weren't distinguishable from each other at all (i.e. to say "the bundle of" would be impossible).
In this way, Kant is starting with a misreading of Hume (though admittedly assisted by Hume's discourse) which spoils the party. He mistakes that bundles of impressions (as argued by Hume) could somehow be given without a priori understanding of the presence of a thing. In effect, Kant already pointing out something Hume (somewhat unwittingly) knows and is used in putting forward a bundle theory of states/objects and things-- i.e. there is this bundle, and there is that bundle, etc.
On the surface this might not see like a big issue, what's wrong with talking about the logical notion of a "thing?" Surely, this could be a worth topic given the way Humean discourse would seem to discard it against reason? The problem is Humean discourse doesn't really discard it. In thinking it does, Kant sets up this schism between sense impressions and a priori definition of things, as if they had nothing in common. The impressions of "bundles" come to be seen merely as human experience, rather than meanings of things we encounter.
We can see this all come to a head in analysis of the logic of sense impressions themselves. Is not anything we encounter in sense impressions equally a logical meaning? How will I recognise the phenomena of a tree if I lack the a priori concept of tree? If I do not have an a priori indexing of sense impressions, how will I even pick them out as of particular things? Our sense impressions are no less given by understanding than space, time or causality. No-one's senses (as distinct from understanding the meaning of what you sense) can give them an understanding of sense impression.
In the same way that observation doesn't get us causality, it doesn't get us anything in sense impressions either. Any instance of awareness or understanding involves an a priori meanings of whatever is involved, whether it is a sense impression or causality.
I'm not quite sure I follow. An impression is like redness. A thing (or substance) is like whatever has redness as a property. So redness by itself is an impression and an impression is not a bundle. A bundle is multiple impressions which occur in constant conjunction with each other - that's how we get our notion of a "thing" or "substance" according to Hume in his Treatise from what I remember.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The impressions are differentiated from each other (redness is not blueness), but they aren't things. Do you mean to say that being a thing - having substance - is merely being differentiated?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Well, I'm not sure how to understand this statement. Kant and Hume would ask you if space is a color, if space is hard, if space has a taste, a smell, etc. So if you answered no to all those, they'd say that space cannot then be an impression. An impression is like a property. It's like red, or hard or sour, etc.