I think we agree here, although our terminologies have minor diifferences.

That being said - and this is coming from someone with an analytic background - I think it's a waste of time to try and "do causality" with FOPL. You can do specific instances of causality and understand certain laws using math (physics!), but FOPL will get you nowhere. People have tried that for a long time, and it runs into an intractable tangle as soon as things get complex (again, Mackie's work and those who responded to him). I think that, if we want a general understanding and perspective (not "theory") on causality, we need something vague enough to make various causal processes "show up for us" as causal, but specific enough to throw some light on them. That's a delicate dance.

Perhaps part of the problem is grammatical, insofar as it's too easy to speak of 'cause' as an independent entity, whereas the formula ought to be, in set theoretic terms: efficient causality={cause, condition}. — StreetlightX

In addition to grammar, one big problem is that everyday paradigmatic instances of causation that are readily visible to us fit the "billiard ball" image quite well: rock hits window, window breaks. How about evolutionary biology or something like that? A notion of causality derived from the former will break down when applied to the latter, as we've both observed in this thread.

Efficient causation, I think, is basically a heuristic. An object interacts with its environing system and change happens. We observe this interaction and parse out a relevant characteristic of the object/system interaction that we're interested in (usually something we want to control). This characteristic is then sedimented, in our minds at least, as the efficient cause.

This goes back to a debate you and I had on the old board about causation. I posited that any event is the result of a vast history of changes that eventually led to that event in a manner reminscent of light cones in physics. You stated that there was nothing in my account that qualified as "causation." I think I agree with you that there was no efficient causation in it, but I don't think that efficient causation is a paradigm of cause - at most, it's a special case that we happen to be familiar with because of the kinds of organisms we are. The problem with my old account was that I was taking a FOPL-esque approach, which, as I said above is not useful in this context.

Well, a language game is a body of practices where words are used in a particular way. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

A vantage point always requires separatation. Saying something about a particular word doesn't compare to saying something about Language. — Mongrel

I've never separated from myself, but I'm talking about myself in this sentence. And you're talking about language in this post, but I don't see anything separate or transcendent about it.

I think, then, that the question of understanding causality becomes one of characterizing time. — Moliere

This was one of the catalysts for the OP. I'm thinking of the tension between "eternal" laws (e.g. math, physics) and events embedded in time. Becoming, on this view, isn't a "falling away" from Being. It's rather the tension between the ontic and the ontological, to use Heidegger's terminology. Particular vs. universal, general vs. specific. I think of causality as one way that this tension unfolds, the constant working-through and tug back and forth between individual and context. Causality is not a creature of becoming opposed to being, but is the tension between them - or, to shy away from a strict definition, is one way in which that tension "shows up" for us.

Causal processes take time to happen, of course, so they're clearly related. Time is a constitutive world-feature, inasmuch as you can't have a world without it, or at least, not a world like this one. I think time is something that characterizes our lived experience as creatures subject to becoming, and here I'm talking about felt time, the feeling you have right now of time "passing."

on the one hand the philosopher wants the claims made to have results for the ordinary use of the expression, yet on the other wants to be careful to divorce it from its ordinary use — The Great Whatever

I think that this tendency also lies at the root of the tendency of certain philosophers to espouse elaborate metaphysical theses and then say, "Oh, what, I'm just using common sense!!" Ugh.

So talking about language games is a language game. It's a game in which we propose to have a transcendent viewpoint on language. — Mongrel

Strictly speaking, it doesn't have to be "transcendent." I don't have to "transcend" something to talk about it. If I give you the etymology of the word, "etymology," that doesn't mean I have to "transcend" etymology.

"Language game" is a term you use while engaging in (the social practice of) philosophy. The kinds of human interaction that constitute philosophy give meaning to the term, "language game."

I guess it's a little weird and meta from some angles. But I don't see any real problems from this angle. I think Wittgenstein has other problems, though.

To clarify a bit: there's a chicken-or-egg thing going on with particulars and their contexts. You don't solve the chicken-or-egg problem to figure out causality. Causality just is the chicken-or-egg problem.

I agree with most of this, but I am somewhat leery of over-emphasizing context. There is never not a context, I grant you. There's also never not individual entities. Chicken or egg.

More precisely, there is such a thing as independence, simply because not every change in context obliterates a given particular. But independence is not absolute, and neither is context. That's why I prefer to see causation as a process of the world working-through the tension between particulars and their contexts.

I think I'd rightly be condemned for punching someone who couldn't feel pain even though it wouldn't cause them pain. — Michael

What makes it wrong?

"It is not wrong to perform an act on a p-zombie that would harm a non-zombie by means of causing them to have painful qualia that equate to suffering." How's that?

If by "hurt" you mean "injure," then yes, it's possible. If by "hurt" you mean "cause pain to," then no, it's not possible, for that kind of pain at least.

I think that there's an important sense in which the cogito is not inferential. You read Descartes, you follow his arguments closely, and you're supposed to see the cogito in a flash, as it were. The idea is to lead you up to a point where you can't deny your own existence by making it visible to you in a particular way. You could certainly argue that Descartes is accomplishing this by means of inference, but the inference is incidental to some extent. He's trying to get you to acknowledge your own existence, bringing that out of the substratum by means of a self-referential thought-process. That you can self-reflect proves your existence, and (Descartes hopes) you can't deny that you're self-reflecting while in the act of doing it.

I don't see why it would be – moral intuitions about killing don't center on the suffering of the killed, for obvious reasons. Also, there would only be a sense in which a p-zombie doesn't suffer. — The Great Whatever

Okay, so how about hurting them? If that particular sense of "suffering" does not apply to p-zombies, than any moral judgments related to causing people to suffer in that sense would not apply to p-zombies. If a p-zombie cannot suffer in some specific sense, then any attempt to stop them from suffering in that sense is pointless, because it won't happen anyway.

On second thought, though, my reasoning here looks a little suspicious. You could argue that the ethical treatment of a human being is not significantly altered by the kinds of experiences that p-zombies lack. They lack qualia, but you say that they can suffer regardless. So pain qualia ("pain" understood in a general sense) aren't necessary for suffering, or at least, that's what I assume.

If that's what you mean - that someone can suffer without pain qualia - then I'd like to know what you mean by "suffering," because I would identify it with having certain experiences, and I assume that having an experience just is having a particular set of qualia.

I know you follow Schopenhauer on a lot of stuff, so let me try that: pain is when there's an impression in the body of a subject that the subject does not will, so, basically, a contradiction in the Will that the subject is (I think?), apprehended by the subject in the subject's representation of itself. Okay, it looks to me like the subject has to have qualia if it is an object for itself because then it's having an experience, and if we're qualia theorists, you can't experience stuff without qualia. Or am I just wrong to read this from the Schopenhauer angle, because the qualia terminology doesn't mesh with his philosophy? I only bring him up because I know you follow his line on a lot of things, thought it might work. Let me know where I went wrong.

If p-zombies do not experience and thus do not suffer, is it morally permissible to kill them?

If we could agree on the first rule, there would be no need for philosophy club...

I mean that the vast majority of governments in human history have not been democratic. If that observation makes us uncomfortable, perhaps we should ask why.

It is worthwhile to observe that the vast majority of national governments in human history have not been democratic.

If you mean "Can I have a pure unmediated experience of Being?" then the answer is either "no" or "Drop some acid/Meditate for ten years/go on a vision quest and see for yourself."

That being said, the question of whether there is a reality external to our conceptual schema is a horriffic tangle. "On Certainty" is the best attempt I've seen.

"We can't escape our conceptual schemas."

Looks vacuous to me. If you can recognize that a conceptual scheme is different from your own, then you are ipso facto not trapped in your own scheme. Think of Caesar assuming that the Germanic tribes to the north worshipped "Mars" because of his assumption that their gods were the same as his.

A lot of it arises for cultural reasons. I remember reading a book called "Witchcraft And Magic Among The Azande" explaining how witchcraft fulfills certain roles in a tribe. For example, a group is hunting an animal. The first guy to spear the animal kills it, and then the second guy who spears it after it's dead is said to have "also" killed it. This is a superstitious sort of thing to say, but it allows two people to have a co-equal part in downing an animal that the group will eat. So it can be a social thing.

Another example: Joseph Cambell was a mythologist who said something to the effect that shamans and wizards "fight the demons" so the rest of the tribe can fight the world. They're sort of a lightning rod for the psychological tension of the group.

The is-ought gap stipulates that there can be no valid inference from non-moral claims to moral ones. The "Everything I say is true" argument is only valid if "Everything I say" includes moral statements. If you never make a moral statement, then I cannot infer the truth of a moral claim from your argument.

But the important thing to note here is that I have successfully bridged the is-ought gap logically — darthbarracuda

I disagree. "Everything I say is true" only implies the truth of moral claims if the set of things you say includes moral premises.

I enjoyed Dennett's paper, "Two Black Boxes," but whenever I read his stuff on consciousness, I immediately sense that he's trying to hoodwink me.

What doesn't sit right is this: Dennett wants to say that common-sense things, like emotions and macroscopic objects and such, are illusions of the manifest image, but that we ought to regard them as real because they're useful. He's basically saying, "It's all just pretend, but it's fine that we pretend, as long as we keep in mind that we're pretending."

On the one hand, I see the merit of this. It certainly helps to keep in mind that the representation is not the thing that it represents, and the reification of representations is, indeed, a philosophical pitfall. The problem is that Dennett wants to claim that the only thing that isn't a representation is physicality. Of course, pretense itself is also a user illusion, but it's okay for us to pretend that there's such a thing as pretending. :s

I am quite comfortable with there being a physical description of all subjective phenomena. It bothers me not one whit that the thoughts I form while writing this all correspond to brain states, or even that they are brain states. I'll even grant you that the neural descriptions are far more useful, if you're doing neuroscience or something similar. The third-person perspective can be primary for methodological reasons, but why grant it ontological primacy? Dennett's answer, ultimately, is "because it's useful to do so." But things are the way they are, regardless of what is useful to us, and Dennett would, no doubt, agree with that. And if utility determines ontology, then why not assume the manifest image is real as well, since we need that too? You can even argue that the manifest image is more useful; we survived for millennia with it alone, and we still use it more often in our lives than the scientific image. More to the point, if Dennett is so adamant that things are the way they are regardless of what's useful for us, then why does he base his ontology on utility in the first place?

The manifest image is "the world according to us," yes - as is the scientific image.

In the leaks, it says the CIA had to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to get around some regulations -- which effectively compromised their organization's ability to act covertly, which ultimately led to these leaks.

So what we should be doing is adding a whole bunch of forced mental gymnastics clauses to make them just not do any of this. — discoii

Bingo. The value of adding regulations is not that the intelligence agencies will follow them (they won't), but that it gives us an excuse to bust them when they start getting too big for their britches. One of the few cases where bureaucratic bloat is useful.

I think Berkeley's philosophy suffers from a false loyalty to common sense. — The Great Whatever

Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. I think we agree on this.

The question is whether or not something can exist without being perceived.

I wasn't talking about knowledge, though.

Hmmm, you seem to be right. I think I misread Berkeley on this point. He does say,

Strictly speaking, Hylas, we don’t see the same object that we feel; and the object perceived through the microscope isn’t the same one that was perceived by the naked eye. But if every variation were thought sufficient to constitute a new kind or new individual, language would be made useless by the sheer number of names or by confusions amongst them.

And he says,

f the term ‘same’ be given its common meaning, it is certain (and not at all in conflict with the principles I maintain) that different persons may perceive the same thing; and that the same thing or idea can exist in different minds. The meanings of words are assigned by us; and since men customarily apply the word ‘same’ where no distinction or variety is perceived, and I don’t claim to alter their perceptions, it follows that as men have sometimes said ‘Several people saw the same thing’, they may continue to talk like that in similar situations, without deviating either from correctness of language or the truth of things.

So "same" just means that there's no perceptible difference between two ideas.

All the same, though, it still comes across as OLP-style nonsense. "All the vulgar really mean is -" (insert complex philosophical analysis here). He's double-crossing somewhere.

That is true if you are assuming only that all things are perceptible, not necessarily perceived. But Berkeley wants something stronger. He outright says, to be is to be perceived. That's why he has to invoke God, to perceive things and keep them in existence when no humans are looking.

I dunno about "external" because that's one of those words that philosophers twist and contort and force into doing all kinds of weird shit.

What I would like to say is that yes, we're reading the same story, but I don't think that's the kind of identity Berkeley has a problem with. The question that Hylas seems to be putting to Philonous is, "If we're both looking at a tree, how is it that, given your doctrine, we're looking at the same tree?"

Identical twins aren't qualitatively identical though. Nor are separate Pepsi bottles. They're distinguished in quality by their location, for one. — The Great Whatever

For what it's worth, I was riffing on Berkeley's definition of identity, where he specifies that identity is the absence of perceptible difference. I guess I perceive a difference in location between the Pepsi bottles, but I don't perceive any differences in intrinsic properties, although that's a tangle that I'm loathe to get into and that Berkeley would probably reject anyway.

If difference is always perceptible difference, though, and identity is always perceptible identity, then this would make Berkeley's assertion - that your idea of the Pepsi bottle is identical to mine - incoherent, because we only perceive our own ideas of the bottle, not one another's. Berkeley's invocation of God won't make any difference either, because only God has access to His perceptions/ideas, so Berkeley seems to be in a self-imposed epistemic bind there.

I suspect you'd reject this line of reasoning, given that you're not a fan of refuting idealistic doctrines by reducing them to solipsism or pointing at some kind of epistemic closure. But perhaps it works against Berkeley, if not other idealists, and I'm concerned with Berkeley in particular here.

I think that Hume represents what you might call the "terminus of sense" for empiricism, if you see empiricism and its attendant skepticism as a process of denying (or maybe bracketing) connections between things.

Incidentally, reading this just now has made Kant's attempt at responding to Hume at least somewhat more intelligible to me. Kant wants to say, "But the connections are in you anyway." The thing is, Kant can't maintain that, or at least, he doesn't seem to in the CPR, e.g. the part where he claims that temporal determinations would still present themselves without the temporal organizing faculty, just in a different way.

What about chemical feedstock? An awful lot of very important and convenient stuff is made out of oil. It isn't that there are NO substitutes ever, it's that there are often no easy substitutes. Oil is a great source of molecules which do all kind of fantastic stuff, like dental parts and glues, for instance, or pharmaceuticals. An awful lot of stuff has oil as a component — Bitter Crank

True, but replacements are on the way, and will look more and more attractive to investors as oil-based products become more expensive. Bioplastics are one example; one can use vegetative matter, among other things, to create plastic and other petroleum products.

Also, it's not a question of when we switch to alternate sources, but a question of how long the switch will take. We have already begun the process of transferring to other energy sources. It is at least possible that the cheapness of oil over the past year or two has been partially caused by the proliferation of alternative energy.

I have seen that philosophical problems need not be solved, but rather covered in damp washcloths and bakes at -pi degrees Fahrencelsigraheitade. This leads to the garden, my garden, the one that gives rise to sweet fruits and small aquatic creatures that feed upon thine queef bubbles. THIS IS THE GARDEN, ASSHOLE.

A valid inductive inference can use rules that would be fallacious in pure deductive logic. The trick is knowing what to use and when.

Sure thing. I don't think that that has any deep ontological implications, although it could be an interesting study in philosophy of mind.

The negation of a state of affairs is not a state of affairs. No causative absences.

Perhaps it's reading too much into the texts, but I'm amused that Hume mentions perception first, while Sellars mentions inference first -- as if, I'd want to say, in each case the first-mentioned term is the one held to be less mysterious by the contemporaries addressed by the author, those interlocutors invited to begin speaking together on this common ground. — Cabbage Farmer

Gold! It's true, Hume was using skepticism to push the British Empiricist project as far as it could go. Sellars seems to be dialing the clock back on that, in some sense. There does seem to be an implicit dialectic here.

Damn you, I was gonna make that joke!!

A Spinozist might reply with "Duck God, Rabbit Nature".

Okay, it's in multiple places. So far, so good. The same event doesn't occur in my brain and in your brain; they're two instances of an event type. Now, where's the type?

It's a regress issue.