Does every thing have an effect on something else?
Does every thing/object/entity have an effect on something else?
Another way to ask this question is:
Is every thing/object/entity perceived? and when I say perceived, I mean sensed by any thing/object/entity that is not it, not necessarily a living thing.
I would like to know your answer to that question, and please try to justify such answer as concisely as possible. I might not reply back. I do not expect to start a discussion about the question or your point of view or my point of view. I just want to know what your answer to the question is if you'd like to share it with me and the rest of the forum. Thank you.
Another way to ask this question is:
Is every thing/object/entity perceived? and when I say perceived, I mean sensed by any thing/object/entity that is not it, not necessarily a living thing.
I would like to know your answer to that question, and please try to justify such answer as concisely as possible. I might not reply back. I do not expect to start a discussion about the question or your point of view or my point of view. I just want to know what your answer to the question is if you'd like to share it with me and the rest of the forum. Thank you.
Comments (58)
A speck of dust falling on an aging floor in a remote cabin abandoned 50 years prior ontop of literally trillions upon trillions might. It might not.
These are not the same question.
I guess I should have asked: Is every thing/object/entity perceived by at least something else that is not it?
I am assuming for this question that everything that affects something is perceived by such something.
What about this version? Does everything that exists interact with something different to itself?
You seem to be wanting to replace effect with perception. Something like: are all causes perceived?
Is that helpful?
but now I'm realizing I am confused about what I really wanna ask; it's hard to put into words.
Maybe: is it necessary for something to exist to be a cause, that is, to have an effect on something else that is not itself?
All goes back to my believe that for existence to occur at least two objects must interact since a single entity cannot act on itself and therefore cannot exist. As in a single thing (a unity, not a composite) cannot exist. OR only composites can exist.
Welcome to philosophical analysis - working out what it is you want to ask. As opposed to the sort of philosophy that just makes stuff up.
What you are saying puts me in mind of Quinn'e "to exist is to be the subject of a predicate" - to exist is to be the thing that does such-and-such.
If that were so, your question might better be: Does every thing have a relation to something else?
does every thing that exists interact?
makes sense? as in, to interact is a condition of (for) existence.
Is to have a relation to something the same as to interact with something, though?
But analytical, an interaction would seem to requires two individuals, while being the subject of a predicate requires only one.
Can you (or anyone else that reads this) think of something that exists and does not interact?
Unexpressed thoughts. Or do they? Do they?
Take for instance a block of masonry weighing 100 Newtons. If I apply a force of 100 Newtons or less, the block would remain unaffected - it wouldn't budge. In other words, there's a cause (the force of 100 Newtons applied to the block) but no effect. Only when I exert a force greater than 100 Newtons will there be an effect on the block - it'll move.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't know if I understand what you are trying to say, but I'd say that the mind/self itself is the result of the interaction of the external environment with our bodies. We are the effect of such interaction. The self is also a cause for many things. So, I'd say we are not dead ends. Again, I am not sure if I understood you correctly.
As for the analogy of the block, if there was no friction (or no other force opposing the applied force), would this still occur? Because I think the block does not move not because there is no effect, but because the cause is not enough to overcome friction or any other opposing force and make the block move. Right? So, I think that in this case the lack movement is not a lack of effect, but a lack of visible effect. At the microscopic level you must be breaking billions of bonds. My speciality is not physics, btw.
Yes, exactly. There are some causes that don't produce an effect.
Quoting Daniel
A diamond is actually soft until it's touched - then it becomes hard. There can be no such thing as an invisible (unperceivable) effect for effect is defined as a perceivable (visible) change.
And here is my elucidation:
George Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived", and as I've already detailed in my previous essay against nihilism, I don't agree with that entirely, in part because I take perception to be a narrower concept than experience in a broader sense, and because I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable. And I find this adage to combine in very interesting ways with two other famous philosophical adages: Socrates said that "to do is to be", meaning that anything that does something necessarily exists; and more poignantly, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "to be is to do", meaning that what something is is defined by what that something does. Being, existence, can be reduced to the potential for or habit of some set of behaviors: things are, or at least are defined by, what they do, or at least what they tend to do. (Coupled with the association of mass to substance and energy to causation above, this notion that to be is to do seems to me a vague predecessor to the notion of mass-energy equivalence). To combine this with my adaptation of Berkeley's adage, we get concepts like "to do is to be experienced", "to be experienced is to do", "to be done unto is to experience", and "to experience is to be done unto".
This paints experience and behavior as two sides of the same coin, opposite perspectives on the same one thing: an interaction. Our experience of a thing is that thing's behavior upon us. An object is red inasmuch as it appears red, and it appears red inasmuch as it emits light toward us in certain frequencies and not others: the emission of the right frequencies of light, a behavior in a very broad sense, constitutes the property of redness. Every other property of an object is likewise defined by what it does, perhaps in response to something that we must do first: an object's color may be relative to what frequencies of light we shine on it (e.g. something that is red under white light may be black under blue light), the shape of the object as felt by touch is defined by where it pushes back on our nerves when we press them into it, and many other more subtle properties of things discovered by experiments are defined by what that thing does when we do something to it.
We can thus define all objects by their function from their experiences to their behaviors: what they do in response to what it done to them. The specifics of that function, a mathematical concept mapping inputs to outputs, defines the abstract object that is held to be responsible for the concrete experiences we have. Every object's behavior upon other objects constitutes an aspect of those other objects' experience, and every object's experience is composed of the behaviors of the rest of the world upon it. All of reality can then be seen as a web of these interactions, the interactions themselves being the most concrete constituents of that reality, with the vertices of that web constituting the more abstract objects, in the usual sense, of that reality. We each find ourselves to be one complex object in that web, and the things we have the most direct, unmediated awareness of are those interactions between our own constituent parts, and between ourselves and the nearest other vertices in that web, those interactions constituting our experience of the world, and also our behavior upon the world. By identifying the patterns in those experiences, we can begin to build an idea of what the rest of the world beyond that is like, inferring the existence and function of other nodes beyond the ones we are directly connected to by their influence in the patterns of behavior of (and thus our experience of) those nearest nodes.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I also do not think that the existence of an object depends on it being experienced. An object must exist before it is experienced. I completely agree with you in this matter, and I believe this to be a fact.
On the other hand, the idea that the potential-to-be-experienced determines the existence of an object with the potential to be experienced assumes the existence of the potential before the existence of the object, and how can a potential be a quality of something that does not yet exist? How does the potential exist prior to the object? Maybe I am wrong in assuming temporality in this case, but no matter how hard I try, I am not able to imagine a potential as being a quality of something that does not exist.
Quoting Pfhorrest
To be experienceable, an object would require the future existence or the present (concurrent) existence of that which will experience the object. This idea assumes an interaction as you mentioned. I agree in that this interaction is a requirement for the existence of the thing in question.
You say that it is its potential to be experienced and not the interaction per se which constitutes the existence of an object, correct me if I am wrong.
According to your view, a single object in the universe, a unity, a particular, may exist even if other things do not exist because it has the potential to be experienced in the future. But the potential must exist before the object (again, I might be wrong in assuming temporality).
I'd say the existence of the interaction constitutes the existence of the interacting objects. From this would follow that a single object, a unity, a particular, cannot exist.
Again, in my view, it is not interacting what determines the existence of things but the interaction itself; in this case the interaction does not exist prior to the objects since it would be impossible, but the objects' existence depends on them interacting, which again assumes the necessity of multiple things existing.
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Introduction:
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Pan-Psychism written out instead of a youtube video (see below):
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe."[2] It holds that mentality is present in all natural bodies that have unified and persisting organization, which most proponents define in a way that excludes objects such as rocks, trees, and human artifacts.[3]
Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales,[4] Plato,[4] Spinoza,[4] Leibniz,[4] William James,[4] Alfred North Whitehead,[1] and Galen Strawson.[1] During the nineteenth century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the twentieth century with the rise of logical positivism.[4][5] The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.
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Pan-psychism further explained:
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Panpsychism holds that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe".[2] Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality each of us can know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies.[8] This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Contemporary academic proponents hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distancing these qualities from complex human mental attributes;[9] they ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe it to most aggregates, such as rocks or buildings.[1][10] On the other hand, some historical theorists ascribed attributes such as life or spirits to all entities.[9]
The philosopher David Chalmers, who has explored panpsychism as a viable theory, distinguishes between microphenomenal experiences (the experiences of microphysical entities) and macrophenomenal experiences (the experiences of larger entities, such as humans).[11]
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Ancient times and then skip to much later
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Panpsychist views are a staple theme in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy.[5] According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE) the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods."[12] Thales believed that this was demonstrated by magnets. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine.[5] Other Greek thinkers who have been associated with panpsychism include Anaxagoras (who saw the underlying principle or arche as nous or mind), Anaximenes (who saw the arche as pneuma or spirit) and Heraclitus (who said "The thinking faculty is common to all").[9]
Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).[9] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:
This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.[13]
Stoicism developed a cosmology which held that the natural world was infused with a divine fiery essence called pneuma, which was directed by a universal intelligence called logos. The relationship of the individual logos of beings with the universal logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The metaphysics of Stoicism was based on Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of the anima mundi.
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(skip a bunch of steps to modern times)
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The panpsychist doctrine has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism" and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism."[22] Its prominent proponents in the United States include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin,[1] and David Skrbina.[5][16] In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson,[23] Gregg Rosenberg,[1] Timothy Sprigge,[1] and Philip Goff.[6][24] The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness."[25][26] The Canadian philosopher William Seager has also defended panpsychism.[27]
In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A New theory of the relationship of mind and matter," a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics.[28] The philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has described Bohm's view as a version of panprotopsychism.[29] The American philosopher Quentin Smith is also a follower[clarification needed] of Bohm's ideas.[citation needed]
Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.[30] Science editor Annaka Harris explores panpsychism as a viable theory in her book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing the view.[31][32]
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems.[33] However, it does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others.[33] Koch has referred to IIT as a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.[34]
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You might say this contradicts scientific determinism, however i believe evolution is the hypothetical god's(i say Jesus Christ) solution to solve his own depression. Evolution is controlled by scientific determinism. I can't list Bible verses, but this comes from the oldest or supposedly the oldest book in the Bible and i'm not in this case implying the book of Genesis. I don't believe we will become gods someday but i do believe in an afterlife.
This alone may not suffice for to infer causation there seems to be other essential requirements. For instance, if we're investigating the cause of a fire that started at 5:00 AM, many events will have occured in the light cone of spot where the fire began. Suppose we look at 1 second prior to the fire, the light cone will be a "sphere"(?)186,000 miles in radius. It's possible that within a sphere of that size, two lovers could be kissing, a vehicular collision could occur, and so on. However, knowing the mechanism of fire - heat + oxygen + fuel - that the kiss between the lovers or the traffic collision could be a cause of the fire is ruled out.
Then there's the issue of degrees or levels if you will. Take the example of a block of stone that weighs 10 Newtons. If we exert a force less than 10 Newtons, the block won't budge. Only when a 10 Newton or greater force is applied to the block, the block can be lifted. In such a situation, are we to conclude that the forces 1 or 4 or 5.6 Newtons (less than 10 Newtons) are causes with no effects? :chin:
Quoting TheMadFool
If there was no friction, an infinitesimal force would be able to move a huge object. Again, that the block does not move does not reflect absence of effect. At the microscopic level, a bunch of non-covalent bonds are being broken. The forces that are unable to move the object have not broken a statistically significant amount of bonds to overcome friction and make the object move. They have an effect, nonetheless.
Quoting TheMadFool
For this part, I do not quite understand what you are trying to say. Could you elaborate/explain in other words?
Have you considered the Participatory Anthropic Principle? Or in layman's terms, the law of attraction.
All that is similar to the Observer Effect in physics (QM). We are all interconnected Beings.
“Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): the observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on the values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.” (The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, p. 16)
Taken from: http://www.physics.sfsu.edu/~lwilliam/sota/anth/anthropic_principle_index.html#:~:text=The%20Participatory%20Anthropic%20Principle%20states,and%20probabilities%20from%20superposition%20into
I agree to some extend with this statement; to be more precise, I agree in that existence is conditioned. However, I do not agree that existence depends on life. We are objects just like any other object in the universe. Nothing special if you really think about it (not saying life is insignificant, nothing is). What I am saying is that existence depends on the interaction of at least two things. It could be an electron and a proton, a block and a force, an idea and a conscious mind, or any other system with multiple objects*. This is not the same as saying that the universe exists because life exists or because conscious observers exist. It would be more like saying that the universe exists because there exist at least two interacting things.
The other subcategories of the Anthropic principle seem to rely more in the existence of conscious beings. Again, I completely disagree with that.
*I say multiple objects because I am assuming that no unity/particular can act on itself (the forces would cancel to 0-@TheMadFool, maybe a case in which there is cause but not effect?) and that to interact is a requirement of existence.
Daniel!
Can you elaborate on that one a bit? Are you saying that an experiential world has no relevance or meaning there?
In other words, the distinction PAP makes is that it requires a subject/object relationship. An interconnectedness that without, would preclude the phenomenon of life itself/conscious existence. In a cosmological sense, it could be argued that it (the subject/object relationship) requires logical necessity to work.
Please feel free to poke holes... .
This is incorrect. Rockets need fuel (non-zero force) to propel (move) themselves in space (zero-friction environment).
Quoting Daniel
Light cone
Causality
Quoting 3017amen
An experiential world, in the sense of human/intelligent/conscious experience, has relevance and meaning, of course. Our experiences determine our actions which in turn affect our surroundings. We are part of existence/reality; we affect it and it affects us.
However, to experience, an object does not need to be conscious. I prefer the word interaction because it describes experience in more generally applicable terms. Every human experience comes from an interaction. Every object interacts. That's what I mean by every object experiences. I do not mean that all objects are conscious, but that all objects interact. Interaction does not require consciousness (as in Human consciousness). Consciousness, on the other hand requires interaction (assumption). Human experience is just a process analogous to the processes of planetary revolution, or protein folding, for example; analogous in that they are processes (that follow the same natural laws).
The Participatory Anthropic Principle seems to rely heavily in the idea that an "intelligent, information-gathering life form" is required to justify existence. I do not agree with this. I believe that the mere interaction (no matter the kind of) "justifies" the existence of the interacting objects. It is not, however, that the interaction exists before the objects exist since I think that is impossible. How could there exist a capacity of performing an action x without that which performs the action?
It is like if there was a fundamental triad that makes up existence. A triad formed by the interacting objects and the interaction.
If there is a single thing in the universe, we say (or at least I used to) there is existence, in contrast to nothing. I say a single thing in the universe cannot exist since existence requires plurality. Again, it is not the interaction that determines the existence of the interacting objects; instead, I'd say it is the inability of a single object to exist by itself*. Now, why not nothing?
Now, if life did not existed, reality would not be the same. However, I think this does not mean that life is a requirement for existence. If this was the case, any other concurrent process would be entitled to belong to the same category of conditional-for-existence. Maybe they all are. Or maybe something they have in common.
*Again, I am making the assumption that interaction is required for existence and that an object cannot act on itself.
To my knowledge force, F = mass * acceleration. Do you suppose you, with your finger, could generate enough force to move a cruise liner weighing 100,000 tons?
I don't think a finger can generate the force necessary to move a cruiseliner. If you disagree, show me how.
:up:
Quoting Daniel
Yes.
Yeah....me too. Seems I would move backward and the ship would pretty much stay put. Even with Newton’s law, there’s zero force on the ship if all the force is accelerating the lesser mass.
:groan: This is high school physics!
And experience. Ever tried to push a car on an icy street? Even if the car had a SaranWrap hood and you disfigured it with the pressure of your hands, the car ain’t goin’ nowhere but you’ll end up in a face-plant.
Not much point in claiming you accelerated the hood when the objects of discourse....the variables in Newton’s law....are you and the car.
That aside, consciousness is perhaps an example of something that doesn't affect something else, depending on the answer to the mind-body problem. Perhaps consciousness is an emergent property of brain activity but not itself causally efficacious (which presumably must be the case else it would appear that brain activity happens without any physical cause - creation of energy?). Hence we can't know if another is conscious; only infer that they are on the presumption that the kinds of brain activity that are responsible for my consciousness must also be responsible for consciousness in other people.
It seems a face-plant for me doesn't require either a car or an icy street. I'm a natural at falling and falling hard. :grin:
Quoting Michael
When you say "can't be known to existence", do you mean it exists, but it cannot be experienced? or do you mean it cannot be at all-it does not exist, in all the sense of the word? Could you elaborate more on that?
Because the universe is in some sense compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it. (Otherwise, how would you explain Emergence?) The universe's fine tuning seems to be the result of selection bias (specifically survivorship bias) in that, only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting on the matter.
But as far as why there is something and not nothing (if that's what you mean) it's almost like asking what happened before the Big Bang (causation)?
If it does exist we can't know that it exists.
Imagine a spectrum of examples to illustrate. You push a person the same mass as you: you both accelerate away equally. You push someone slightly more massive than you: you accelerate more and he accelerates less, but you both still accelerate some. You push something much more massive than you: you accelerate a lot more and it accelerates only a little, but still you both accelerate some.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
I am assuming that every object that exists is associated to some kind of intrinsic field (i.e., a gravitational field, an electric field, etc). The object and the field are the same thing (assumption); as in, the field cannot exist without the object, and the object cannot exist without the field-or could it? Theoretically, these fields reach to infinity. So, an object, theoretically, interacts with any other object there is. My question is, could there exist an object with an intrinsic field if there were no other objects (not necessarily human beings) which interact with such field.
a field is defined as a region in which each point is affected by a force
Imagine there is a universe in which only one thing exists*. This solitary object produces a field (which would be its potential to interact, or its potential to be experienceable as @Pfhorrest mentioned). The question is, would this field exist when there is no other object to experience it. Would then this solitary object have no field? Could this be a real scenario? or can it just exist in the mind?
(I'd say it can't, not even in the mind-where the object of thought is that, an object of thought).
So, I say that a condition for existence is that there must be an object with a field, and the object that experiences the field**. The field cannot exist without the object that produces it, and the object that produces the field seems to be unable to exist without the field (HUGE assumption). In addition, the field seems to be unable to exist without the thing(s) that perceive it. This is the reason I say, it is not the interaction that defines existence, nor the objects alone. To exist, there must be an interaction and two or more interacting objects. These are conditions of existence.
The interaction is required for existence but not sufficient.
The objects are required for existence but not sufficient.
So, for example, if the self exists, it must interact with something else. If consciousness exists, it must interact with something else. If there was a singularity from which everything came from, it must have interacted with something else. Anything that exists must be interacting with something else. Again, HUGE assumptions.
*I am assuming that no matter the universe, existence is the same everywhere; it must be. To exist is to exist whatever the kind of existence.
** I am assuming that this is the case because I have not found something that exists and does not interact (I know this is not a reason to believe what I believe, but I do not really know any other way to approach this question)
Yep. That’s what the law says. Right there, “M.P.N.P”, 1687, Book1, pg 20, “Axioms or Laws of Motion”, depending on which edition/translation is referenced, of course.
The facts don’t lie, and in the case of me/cruise ship/deep space....they don’t matter. And in the case of me/car/icy street, I lose, car wins.
Ask a high school Physics teacher to confirm what i'm saying. However if there is no coefficient of static friction and no kinetic friction you could accerate a tank as long as you are applying you finger to it in space. It would push back and you would go in the other direction. If you were in space (as well as on the earth) every particle in the universe would be pulling on you and also you would start accelerating towards the closest moon or star more than likely. Gravitational pull is effected by the density of mass and something like inverse square of the distance.