Vitalism is a belief that starts from the premise that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.

The elan vatal talked about by vitalists is not generally considered the same as soul as understood by Christians and some other religions, although there are some who make that connection.

What do you think Darwin would have to say about people living in the 21st century and still believing in a "soul"? Is it possible that Aristotle was right, and that Darwin was wrong? — chiknsld

Darwin was pretty clear that he didn't know how life began. Natural selection only applies to already living organisms.

Although differences between believers in a soul and those who believe life is a physical process exist, seems to me that setting that up as a conflict between Darwin and Aristotle is misleading. There are plenty of people who believe in both Darwinian evolution and the existence of the soul.

And so, asking the predicate of existence, and the answer being "something was always here" is in a sense merely a begging of the question, and at the very least an infinite regression. — chiknsld

If, in fact, it is true that the universe is eternal, then it is neither begging the question nor an infinite regress. It doesn't make sense to ask a question then exclude a possible answer.

I would love to hear everyone's feedback on this observation. Does this make sense? — Bret Bernhoft

For me, the major themes I've always gotten from cyberpunk are nihilism and despair. For that reason, I tend to avoid them. The only books in that genre I've enjoyed in the last few years are those by Paolo Bacigalupi, especially "The Windup Girl."

something was always here — chiknsld

That's where I put my vote, based on not much of anything. It's not begging the question at all, it's saying the question is meaningless.

Just look around here! Words are tools is all I'm noting. There is no "one" definition that is used the same everywhere. — Philosophim

Words are the tools we have to work with. It's our job as proto-philosophers to do our jobs with the tools at hand.

If you find the word too broad, which is a fair assessment, then I would work on defining sub-groups of causality that are more detailed and to your satisfaction. — Philosophim

That's what this thread has been about.

Reality persists despite whatever definition and words we invent. — Philosophim

Well.... that's for another thread.

So at each turn, you want to reduce causality to some kind of ultimate simple - a monism. — apokrisis

Guilty as charged.

But just because efficient causality is a quarter of the whole, that doesn't make it wrong. It just makes it incomplete. And it also makes life simpler to the degree you can get away using that as your sole modelling tool. — apokrisis

My problem; and I guess it's more a matter of taste, aesthetics, than substance; is that those broader issues are not what I would call causes. No need to go into this any further. I think I've understood what you've been saying and I don't disagree.

A constraint doesn’t determine an outcome, it just limits the probabilities. It places concrete bounds on the degrees of freedom or sources of indeterminism.

Of course, in the extreme, constraints become mechanical - that is, they can leave so little wiggle-room that the outcome is as good as determined. — apokrisis

This just reinforces my understanding that you and I mean different things when we say "causality." That's not a bad thing and I've found your positions interesting. If I understand you correctly, you think I've focused in on a small part of what's included and not taken a holistic view. That's because my whole beef is with the way causality is usually understood, not the broader context you are describing.

One thing that might help is that words are entirely made up. — Philosophim

That's not true. They aren't just made up, they're made up and then agreed to. Imperfectly. That's what this thread is about for me. Getting to an agreement on what cause is or, if that fails, laying out the terms of the argument.

No word is an immutable aspect of reality, — Philosophim

There's a whole discipline in metaphysics about that. If you throw out the words, you throw out ontology. I'm just trying to get rid of causality. You're trying to get rid of reality.

But there is something you're trying to find that bothers you about it. — Philosophim

You ignored my previous response in which I discussed this.

If you don't want to give my former post a read, give that latter one a read at least. — Philosophim

If I remember correctly, I participated in both those threads.

How can we address that until after we find the answer to the titular question? — Banno

If they're the same thing, then it's the same question.

I think I mentioned this before, but I don't remember anyone responding.

How is causality different from determinism? They seem like the same thing to me, just looked out from a different direction. Can you have one without the other?

T Clark, from reading your replies in this thread, I suppose I still don't understand why in particular you seem to have an issue with causality. — Philosophim

I don't know if you've noticed, but I spend a lot of time thinking about metaphysics. My cliched catchphrase - Metaphysical claims, what Collingwood calls "absolute presuppositions," are not true or false. They have no truth value. They are more or less useful. What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is when people fail to recognize their presuppositions are not somehow immutable aspects of reality.

Causality is metaphysics. The question I have is whether or not it is useful metaphysics. My intuition says "no," but I don't yet have good arguments to show that to my satisfaction. That's what this thread is about.

Another thing that raises my hackles is when people say that a certain position is obvious or self-evident. That's rarely, maybe never, true, but it shuts down argument. I was recently in a discussion like that about cause in another thread.

Maxim: All essential workers (healthcare, cleaners, garbage collectors) will be given a minimum wage to protect them from exploitation.

Using the universal law, what are your thoughts to debunk this argument? — ohmyvanz

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

— Immanuel Kant,

So, what is the universal law you want to apply? Some choices:

• All workers should be given a minimum wage.
• All workers should be protected from exploitation.
• Everyone should be protected from exploitation.
• Everyone should be given a minimum income.
• Wage structure should be used to ensure society is provided with adequate essential services.
• Financial reward should be used to encourage desired behavior.
• Workers should be paid on the basis of the importance of the work they do.

@apokrisis

Let's say we just get rid of idea of causality. Doesn't your way of seeing things just revert to the hierarchical system we talked about last week - laws from below, constraints from above? What advantage do you get when you add cause to the mix?

Thanks.

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. You need to become fluent in both reductionism and holism to see how they are in fact the two poles of the one larger epistemic dichotomy.

So first comes the reductionist conviction - the standard model idea of efficient cause, or chains of cause and effect.

Then comes the holist backlash - the rejection of the mechanical model and the discovery of other "logics" like Aristotle's four causes.

Finally, after thesis and antithesis, comes the resolution. Colliding billiard balls sit at one extreme pole of our conception of causality, the random decay of a particle sits at the other. — apokrisis

I have no trouble holding two apparently contradictory ideas in my head at the same. I remember in high school physics when we talked about particle-wave duality. It struck me suddenly that the universe doesn't work the way our minds say it should. Why? Because it's the universe. That's not why I want to reject causality. In an earlier post you wrote:

What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes. — apokrisis

That's what I'm responding to. I'm chewing on your broader definition of causality before I try to swallow it.

And stand back to watch a particle decay carefully, you will discover that it then never does. — apokrisis

I looked this up and didn't understand. Can't you observe a particle decay without affecting it just by detecting the decay product?

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. — apokrisis

Je parle un peu Francais.
Ich spreche Deutsch Ein bisschen.
Me talk English good.

Or alternatively, you can stick with philosophical naturalism and instead conclude you haven't quite understood the complex nature of causality. More work needed. — apokrisis

I still have lots of thinking to do on the subject. This has been a really useful thread for me in that regard.

Seems you would jump straight to the pragmatic vindication — Banno

Yes. Always.

The Humean issue is only about the certainty that can be ascribed to some causal belief, — apokrisis

For me, that's a big part of the issue with cause. To say that something is caused when we can't be certain of, or even close to knowing, what causes what, which is generally the case, is meaningless. What we call "causality" is an un-disentanglable tangle.

What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes. — apokrisis

I'll say it again - I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but to call it "causality" no longer makes sense.

What, that some events seem to need a push - an impressed force - like the billiard ball, while other things, like the decay, the quantum fluctuation, have only a global probability, the certainty of a statistical half-life, that bounds them? — apokrisis

I meant that radioactive decay seems like an instance when the idea of cause doesn't fit.

Some situations conform to one end of the spectrum - where cause and effect seems to rule in strict counterfactual fashion. But others are somehow locally unprompted and yet exactly constrained by some probability curve or wavefunction.

Doesn’t this show that causality must be a bigger picture? — apokrisis

Or, alternatively, that there is a bigger picture, but it doesn't make sense to call it "causality" anymore. I have no doubt that the universe is an historic entity. Events in the past are connected to those happening now.

I think its a fairly straight forward notion in science that we look for a cause to explain why a state exists as it does. — Philosophim

I think it is common, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is straight forward. And I don't think it is.

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I avoid dead metaphors like the plague and never use them in any way, shape or form. — Cuthbert

Amusing.

Needing to apply scale does not make anything special or questionable. Its completely normal. — Philosophim

Agreed.

We scale it to what's reasonable. — Philosophim

We scale it to what is relevant to us as humans. I'm not disagreeing with you.

If I would guess at the real underlying criticism of the word "causality", its that it has sub-concepts that are not easily conveyed through the context of a conversation. I'm not saying Aristotle's break down is correct, but you could construct a sentence with "causality" which could mean any one of the sub-types. Again, this does not mean "causality" does not exist or is useful. What is really being asked is. "Which sub-type are you intending through your context?" When conversation requires the accuracy of those sub-types be conveyed cleanly without possible ambiguity, then we should use a sub-type of causality. — Philosophim

Reading Aristotle, it struck me that, generally, when he is talking about cause, he is talking about it in a human context. The formal cause is the planning, design, that goes into an event, human activities. The final cause is the human purpose to which it will be put. The efficient cause is the guy who does the work or the skill and understanding that allows him to do so. It is my understanding that Aristotle also acknowledges that some non-human entities may cause things, e.g. fire (heat) causes things to rise.

R.G. Collingwood wrote that cause is a process that started out referring to human action and only later took on meaning as a non-human physical process. He saw the term cause as it is used by philosophers to describe physical action as a metaphorical usage from that original meaning.

But why when that approach can only make causality incomprehensible? — apokrisis

That's a good point. I think that's the right place to start because that's where everyone else starts. That's what people mean when they "cause" in a physics context. I know that needs to be broadened in order to get anywhere, but I think I need to figure out what the standard meaning of the word is.

That being said, I've been really happy with the way this thread has developed. As usual, it's helped me get my hands around the subject, which is a good start.

And how could you explain why the radioactive atom decayed at some particular moment? If a triggering event is ruled out by physical theory, what then? — apokrisis

Isn't that an argument for my position rather than yours?

If you are serious about causality in a physical context, you are going to need to arm yourself with more resources. — apokrisis

Working on it.

Logical, no conjunction of observations leads to the truth of a general rule; no finite sequence f(a) & f(b) & f(c) implies U(x)f(x)... That's clear enough isn't it? — Banno

Logic schmogic. Induction works. Pragmatic logic:

• If it works it's true
• Induction works
• Induction is true

Yes. Final cause and formal cause combine like that in the pansemiotic view. But at the level of physics, this is no more than saying the second law of thermodynamics imposes a thermal direction on nature. The finality is the need to maximise entropy production and reach equilibrium.

So that is both sort of “mindful”. But also the least mindful notion of teleology we can imagine. — apokrisis

I can understand that approach, although it's a stretch for me to think about it that way. I keep wanting to keep it simple. Simpler.

So you can either see causality as being about two different realms - res cogitans and res extensa - each with their own non-overlapping logic. — apokrisis

This is more like how I see it, without much interest in the cogitans, at least in this thread.

in Newton's law, what causes an object at rest to move? — Philosophim

It all depends on where you place the frame and what you set as the scale. The object you're describing is travelling with the Earth's rotation at about 1,000 miles an hour. It's also travelling around along with the Earth as it revolves around the sun and as the sun travels around the galactic center. I guess it's also moving along with the expansion of the universe. It's status as at rest in relation to the Earth's surface is the result of the forces of gravity and friction. If you start it moving, you'll also have to deal with air drag and impacts with whatever it bumps into.

If you look more closely, unless you apply a body force such as gravity to the object, the force you apply will be distributed from the point of application to the rest of the object by elastic deformations which are the result of intermolecular forces. The frame you've chosen is based on your particular point of view which results from the fact that you are a human and live at human scale.

And yet induction is logical invalid, — Banno

I've never understood that. It seems like a throwback to Descartes and universal doubt. Induction works...imperfectly. There isn't any other option. We do the best we can. We're still here. Bridges generally don't fall down. Aircraft don't generally fall from the sky. Ergo induction works.

But you say you understand causality to only mean efficient cause. And that to apply only in classical physics.

That is bonkers as far as I am concerned. — apokrisis

This makes sense to me based on things you've written about biosemiotics and DNA as a kind of formal cause. I see you as walking a path between nuts and bolds reductionism and Thomas Merton and his hippie noosphere cohort. I find it really interesting.

My problem is that my understanding of formal cause includes a need for intention. Formal cause doesn't make any sense unless the form is intended to achieve the final cause - purpose. Purpose requires intention. That gets too close to the noosphere for my taste.

I'm trying to decide if the difference between your understanding and mine is just one of language. You certainly have put a lot more thought into it than I have.

How can the interrogation take place while avoiding the more fundamental level? — noAxioms

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "more fundamental level." For me, whether or not we use the concept "causality" is a metaphysical question that doesn't really come up except in classical mechanics. I think it's a very simple and straight-forward idea. The only question to me is whether or not it is useful.

Wiki gives a very classic definition of causality, and I'm willing to concede that the whole cause-effect relationship is a classical one that doesn't necessarily carry down to more fundamental levels. — noAxioms

That's how I approached it. I think you're right, cause is classical mechanics if it has any meaning at all. I've purposely stayed away from quantum mechanics in this discussion because I think it muddies the metaphysical water.

I read somewhere that there are languages which use the same word for "weakness" and "strength." Can't remember the source or which languages. It makes sense to me that our weaknesses are also our strengths.

an apparently simple concept could be a kind of trick of usage. — Tom Storm

Aren't all concepts tricks of usage? Not trying to be funny.

We know force = mass * acc and it's valid necessarily and therefore never changes. — Shwah

I think the reason it is "valid necessarily" is because it is a definition. Force is defined as the product of mass and acceleration.

statistical mechanics similarly doesn't imply emergentism except in an epistemological sense and it doesn't preclude regular causation. — Shwah

I think they call the results of statistical mechanics "weak emergentism." I think you're right, though. Emergentism, weak or strong, doesn't address causation one way or the other.

I agree and it seems clear to me that we are generally socialized to view the world as a vast realm of cause and effect. It's part of our 'commons sense' heritage. — Tom Storm

I think maybe its use in physics and philosophy is metaphorical. I have read the idea arose in the context of human responsibility for human actions and spread by analogy. That makes sense to me.

At issue is whether the notion of cause can stand interrogation. — Banno

That's what this thread is about for me.

The utility of that habit might suit a pragmatists, but does it suit a philosopher? — Banno

I don't see the idea of cause as having much pragmatic use except in the simplest situations or in ethical theories about human responsibility.

We may want to claim something like that if A causes B, then in any case in which A occurs, B must follow; but a moment's consideration will show that not to be the case. It seems from SEP that the present thinking leans to probabilistic accounts rather than modal accounts; that A caused B means B will follow A on most occasions. But I share your concern that such an account seems unduly complex. — Banno

Not only is it unduly complex, but it loses it's explanatory power if when you make the relationships too convoluted.

here sits the problem of explaining induction; how we move from a limited number of specific cases to a general law. — Banno

I hadn't thought of the two, causality and induction, as being connected. I've never really understood the whole "problem of induction." Induction seems defensible and useful to me. Actually, it's indispensable.

Perhaps the error here is to suppose that there might be a way to firm up our talk of causes to anything more than a colloquial way of speaking, of a habit. — Banno

I have no trouble with that approach, but it takes cause out of the realm of philosophy and science.

I mean good luck trying. That would be a counterfactual approach. Deny the obvious, and when that fails, you have no choice but to accept the obvious. — apokrisis

Pfftt. Who has studied metaphysics, physics or philosophy of science?

Causality must be the hardest subject there is. And that is because it is the most abstract and fundamental level of metaphysical analysis. — apokrisis

At first, I was thinking you were agreeing with me that causality is not normally a useful metaphysical idea. Now I'm not sure.

Your comments have been interesting and helpful, especially the ideas about how we keep conceptually emptying and then refilling the void.

But how could you define your deterministic efficient cause except counter-factually in relation to that which it is not. — apokrisis

That's what I was trying to do in my billiard ball example.

The determinism in any causal situation owes everything to the downward acting constraints. And that rather precisely defines the accidents, the randomness, the freedoms, the causal particularity, as the upward acts of individual and constructive action. — apokrisis

I'll need to think about this.

You are hoping to project an intuitive notion of efficient cause onto the physical account - one where, as you say, you can ignore the rest of Aristotle's holistic account. Yet the physics will always let you down. — apokrisis

Well, I'll try out a little literary foreshadowing... It isn't my plan to do it in this thread, but I want to be able to convincingly argue that the idea of causation is a metaphysical principle that is not of great value in any but the simplest situations. Many, most of the responses so far have seemed to be in that vein, and it surprises me. I thought that the idea of cause was fairly universal.

Efficient cause can't explain anything all on its lonely ownsome. A holism which can provide the context is always going to be the other half of the story that completes the causal picture. — apokrisis

All of the issues you raise in your post are what I'm trying to get clear in my own mind.

I've generally found that 'cause' is one of those words so beloved of apologists and their cosmological arguments. I rarely see it elsewhere, except when people are talking about wars... — Tom Storm

Oh, yes. A hangover of Aristotelian physics, used with ulterior motives. — Banno

I think the idea of cause has a very strong, intuitive power. People in general think that the fact that events are caused is self-evident. I feel the attraction of that attitude.