Every single step will have inherent to it B happening because A, even if it's some A radiation and some B H20. — Marchesk

In a climate model it's going to be more like

- at step 4,983, approximately 500 million things happen
- at step 4.984, approximately 500 million different things happen, that are related to what happened in the previous step by a large, complicated system of simultaneous equations....

and so on.

It's hard to imagine something much closer to the Buddhist (and quantum mechanical) paradigm of 'everything depends on everything else' and further from the Aristotelean paradigm of 'this single localised phenomenon is caused by that single, localised phenomenon'.

If we want to say that the state of the entire system at time t was the cause of the state of the entire system at time t+1 then I'd be happy to agree, but I doubt Aristotle would like it.

I don't agree with either of those points, but the key seems to be that we have different notions of clarity. Some philosophers like Aristotle's writing about causes. I find them akin to his writing about physics. For me, Aristotle is brilliant on ethics and logic, and the rest is of purely historical interest, like phlogiston.

That's OK. We can differ on that.

In the physical context an efficient cause is something that acts on something else to produce a change in the latter. So, for example, the force of striking a nail with a hammer causes a nail to be driven into timber. and thus we understand the striking to be the cause. The striking of nails with hammers (or some other instrument) is also more or less universally correlated with nails entering timber, but it is not considered to be a mere correlation. The sound of striking is also more or less universally correlated with nails entering timber, but it is considered to be a mere correlation, and not a cause, of the nail entering the timber, because the sound exerts no force on the nail sufficient to drive it into the timber. — John

I'm afraid I can't see what this account gives us that we don't already have with a simple physical theory that describes a scenario in which a hammer strikes the head of a nail, with a certain configuration of hammer, nail and wood, and predicts that the nail will enter the wood. Who needs a cause when we have a mechanism?

A far as I can see, all this description does is introduce confusion into an otherwise clear situation. for instance:

• we have the phrase 'acts on' which appears to be either undefined or a loose synonym for 'causes' and hence ties up in circularity the attempt to impart meaning to 'cause'
• why is the striking the cause and not the motions of the carpenter's arms, or the carpenter's decision to hammer in the nail, or the softness of the wood, or the manufacture of the nail or any of a thousand other things?

Looking for causes is like looking for the 'source' of a river. Most rivers come from the flowing together of many, many tributaries, starting as little trickles, which join, then join some more and keep joining until we end up with something like the Nile delta. I remember, long before I became interested in philosophy, reading about the legendary search for the Source of the Nile, and thinking what a bizarre notion that was, since in all likelihood it will have many sources, not just one. As far as I can see, the search for a cause is just as empty. We can describe the mechanism of how all the tributaries flow into one another to end up at the Nile Delta. What is there of value that can be added to that?

That said, within both contexts, the physical and the mental, there are clearly, in different ways, logical distinctions between correlation and causation; which you seem to be ignoring, or wanting to dissolve. — John

Certainly not ignoring.

I went looking for them, quite determinedly, and was surprised that I could not find them. My presupposition was that they were there waiting to be found.

If you think you have found some distinctions that go beyond the above-mentioned one of whether or not we have identified a theory/mechanism, that's great news. Let's get them out on the dissecting table and inspect them.

does anyone think there's just nothing there to know? That correlation, and that at a pretty coarse level, is the best we'll ever be able to do? — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe somebody else thinks that, but not me. If we have identified a mechanism, we have a richer understanding and a more confident basis on which to make predictions.

That's a major achievement!

My point is that we don't need a notion of causality to obtain that understanding. Of course we can label the mechanism 'causality' if we want. But that does nothing other than add a superfluous label to a concept that was already perfectly clear.

The correlation vs causation dichotomy is one that has occupied my mind a fair bit over the last couple of years. I used to think there was a clear distinction between the two, but now I am not so sure.

It was epiphenomenalism that undid my confidence. The standard wisdom is that epiphenomenalism says consciousness is correlated with but not causative of brain activity - that a causal arrow points from activity in certain designated areas of the brain (the 'neural correlates of consciousness') to consciousness but there is no arrow in the reverse direction. But when I reflected as hard and long as I could on what that means, I was unable to find anything of substance.

If consciousness cannot occur without activity in the neural correlates and that activity cannot occur without consciousness arising, it seems to me that we cannot say either is the cause of the other. The two arise co-dependently, to use the Buddhist phrase.

As you say, we need to test theories about states through falsification. I think that process is best described in terms of the nature and persistency of the correlation, rather than getting ourselves muddled up in the philosophical vagueness of causality.

Say we have observed that phenomenon C, which we want to harness and make happen at will, usually follows phenomenon B. We have observed the two to be correlated. What we want to know is whether that correlation will continue if we induce B to happen. So we induce B under various circumstances and observe how often C follows.

The difference between our observations in the first and second phases of the project are that the observations in the first phase are of naturally-occurring, non-induced instances of B, whereas the observations in the second phase are of induced instances.

This is no philosophical nitpicking either. It is often the case in pharmaceutical research that a certain healing phenomenon is observed after ingestion of a certain plant. We isolate a chemical that is in the plant and test whether the healing still occurs if it is ingested. If that works then we test whether ingestion of a synthesised version of the chemical has the same effect. If it does we may then start producing pills with that ingredient, despite the fact that we have no idea why healing usually follows ingestion of the chemical. All we know of is a correlation. But what the laboratory research has done is confirm that the correlation remains at a useful level when ingestion of the chemical occurs in circumstances different from those in which we made the original observations.

Of course, we have greater confidence that the correlation will persist if we have a theory explaining why the healing follows the ingestion. We call that a 'mechanism'. A mechanism gives us an explanation of why the healing occurs and the ability to predict that it probably will occur. But lack of a mechanism doesn't stop us mass-marketing pills. We may lack an explanation, but we still have the prediction based on a persistent correlation, and that's what we care about.

Then we observe that nowhere in this decision process did we need to use a concept of 'cause'.

The 'correlation vs causation' distinction is able to be concretely expressed as simply whether the originally-observed correlation will continue to be observed in artificial circumstances of our making.

You could then just absorb the causal claim into the predictive claim, but they are fundamentally different aren't they? Or are they? — Srap Tasmaner

I'd say they are different in that the predictive claim is clear whereas the causal claim is capable of many different interpretations. Just think of how many arguments you've been in or witnessed about whether something was somebody's fault.

Say I run into an oncoming car that turns in front of me to cross my stream of traffic, leaving me no time to avoid collision. A huge argument may ensue as to whether that driver caused my injuries. But not many would contest that, once they have turned their steering wheel, a collision can be confidently predicted.

Or another of my favourites - from the good 'ol NRA:

'Guns don't kill people. People [firing guns] kill people'

[or is it the bullets that kill people? or the wounds?]

Agreed, there are different interpretations around for explanation. Consider 'Why is the sky blue?' An answer to that that may satisfy one person may not satisfy another.

My feeling is that 'explanation' is in the eye of the explainee. That is, it is an explanation if the explainee is satisfied with it. A definition of explanation that currently appeals to me is:

A deduction that starts from premises that the explainee understands and believes, proceeds by steps that they understand and in whose validity they believe, and reaches a conclusion that is the phenomenon for which an explanation was requested.

So, for example, will the writing of Pheumenon's post still appear if he doesn't touch the keyboard? Or does the appearance of those specific letters depend upon him pressing the keys? — TheWillowOfDarkness

'Will writing from person X appear on their screen if they don't touch the keyboard and [insert a number of constraints to rule out things like using voice-recognition software or getting somebody else to type it]?' Probably not. I thought I'd already given that answer but in case I'm misremembering, there it is.

My approach to all this is the same as that of most other people I've ever had occasion to discuss predictions and explanations with. There is nothing particularly sceptical about it, nor any particular doubt.

The only point of contention seems to be that, if we start with the perfectly concrete and definable concepts of prediction and explanation, the notion of 'causality' adds nothing to our understanding of the world and just confuses discussion of it. It also generates unnecessary arguments and lawsuits, amongst non-philosophers and philosophers alike.

Where do you intend to go with that line of inquiry?

I mean, if your position is that you have no idea whether or not my pressing these keys has something to do with letters appearing on the screen, then I can't help you. — Pneumenon

That is not my position, and I never said it was.

Again you are ascribing opinions to other people that they have not expressed.

Simple question: what do you think happens when Pneumenon doesn't press the keys? — TheWillowOfDarkness

I like that way of putting it. I think in that case, probably no letters will appear on the screen. That's a prediction, which is based on a theory. Things fall into place so much more naturally when we talk in terms of predictions and theories, which are nice and concrete.

I don't know about the 'depend' bit though. the notion of dependency seems very vague to me. Certainly I can imagine letters appearing on the screen without keys being pressed - eg if the dreaded Blue Screen of Death suddenly appeared.

.

You keep on telling me what I think and what I'd say. Yet every time you do that, you get it wrong. It might be time to stop making assumptions about what other people think.

I'm afraid I don't understand what your second paragraph is getting at.

I remain curious about what benefit you hope to gain from investigating an approach to causality. Last time you said something like 'I'm doing it because I want to'. I appreciate the wit of slipping the word 'because' into that answer but I'm still interested in an answer to the question I asked, which is 'what expected benefit?', not 'why?'

we both know this — Pneumenon

No, we don't.

What we may be able to agree on is that you thought to yourself that if you pushed the keys you would expect some letters to appear and, having thought that, you decided to push some keys, and then some letters appeared. If that's what you thought - whether explicitly or implicitly.

Injecting the word 'cause' into that quite clear scenario only confuses things.

I don't think it's a silly game. I just think it's a confusion over words.

If you want to make progress, one avenue to try is to think of a sentence containing the word 'cause' that somebody might use in everyday life. 'My pushing the keys causes letters to appear' is not such a sentence - or not in my experience anyway.

My provisional contention is that, in real life sentences containing the word 'cause', they are either meaningless - as in most cases where a litigator claims that somebody 'caused' somebody else to incur an injury, or the sentence can be understood by considering it as a whole, in its context, without requiring a notion of 'cause'.

Okay, so the following sentence is false: "The letter appears on this screen because I pushed a key."?

No. Failure to assent to sentence S is not equivalent to assenting to its negation.

Because there's more to causality than pushing keys.

That you feel that is what most interests me here. What sort of benefit do you hope to obtain from an investigation into an approach to causality - beyond the sheer joy of human interaction in conversations like this?

The later Wittgenstein wouldn't have seen any point in having this discussion. And yet, here we are. — Pneumenon

It was a bit loose of me to say there's no point in it. I think there's no philosophical point in it. The point for me of such discussions is that they are enjoyable. Sometimes I learn something along the way - usually unrelated to the ostensible topic. But the enjoyment is the main thing.

If you agree that touching the keys causes the letters to appear (and you do), then we have one case right here where we know what cause is. — Pneumenon

No, I'm afraid I don't agree about the keys.

But that's by the by. If it is clear to you what you mean by that statement about the keys, then why do you feel the need for an investigation into an approach to causality? Is it simply for the sake of enjoyment as well? If so, I think it's a great idea.

We all can use the word "cause." — Pneumenon

Yes we can all use the word. But one need only look at a litigation or an inquest to observe that we (all of us, not just philosophers) do not know what we mean by it.

My prescription is not to introduce a definition (although I do have 'one I made earlier' if anybody wants to see it (biscuit conditional alert)), but to avoid the use of the word 'cause' except where there is no possibility of disagreement over its use.

I'm fully in support of being Wittgensteinian in the approach to this. I don't think the later Witt would have seen any point in spending time trying to find a way to approach causality.

I think it was just Dawkins waxing lyrical in an attempt to defy claims from religious critics that his worldview is bleak and soulless. I agree with Dawkins that an atheistic worldview is no more likely to be bleak than a theistic one, but I do think he got a bit carried away with his own purple prose there - a metaphor that, as you say, went over the edge.

There is a smidgeon of interesting content in there, about the enormous numbers of different combinations of human DNA that are imaginable. I find that interesting, and had not thought of it like that before. But I don't think it means there are ghosts in the ante-room, and I suspect Dawkins doesn't either.

what is a way of approaching causality that enables us to understand diverse varieties of cause in a unifying way? — Pneumenon

This venture seems a bit circular to me. At least, it does if a 'way of approaching causality' includes a definition. If it does then one cannot understand the goal ('enabling us to understand diverse varieties of "cause" ') until one has decided on a definition of 'cause'. But then one cannot use the goal to decide what definition to choose.

It seems to me that discussions of causality usually are circular. Certainly I find Aristotle's notion of Efficient Cause circular.

What I wonder is what use the term 'cause' has. If we want to make something happen ('cause' it to happen) we can get by with the much simpler, non-circular notion of 'prediction'. Alternatively, if we want to understand 'why' something happened, we can address that by seeking an understanding of the prior environment. In neither case do we need a notion of 'cause'.

Even cones of causality, aka 'light cones', that are used in physics are able to be expressed - and IMHO are more clearly expressed - as cones of predictability. So what seems to be a case of the notion of 'cause' being inextricably embedded in core science is actually an illusion arising from etymological happenstance.

I don't disagree. I wasn't saying there's a moral obligation to comply with someone's wishes to use a particular set of sexed words in relation to them when those words do not correspond to their biology. I think that's more controversial and I can't say I understand the arguments for that position.

My position is that it is at least ethically recommended to use non-sexed words in relation to someone if they don't like references to them to unnecessarily mention their sex. In English this is easy to accomplish by just using pronouns like they, them and theirs. In some other languages it can be much more difficult because sex affects so many other parts of the language. [Another reason why English is a really great language, contrary to all the negative things some people say about it! But that's another topic]

In general my position is that discrimination - putting people into boxes - is unfortunate, so if someone requests to not be boxed, whether on sex, sexuality, ancestry, body shape or religious beliefs, I try to respect that. Indeed, as far as practical, I try to avoid boxing even without it being requested. But demanding to be put in a particular box goes in the opposite direction and makes me feel uneasy.

I can't see anything intrinsically wrong with society's tradition of identifying people by their sex. I think a moral dimension enters when somebody wishes to not be identified by their sex. In that case I think basic respect for the feelings of others requires that we not identify them by their sex except when necessary or when impractical to do otherwise.

While I have no objection to my sex being part of a phrase somebody uses to identify me, I can understand how some people might not like that, just as it seems impolite to refer to somebody by their tallness, skin colour, disability or body-mass index. It seems ethical to respect such preferences where possible.

As an aside, as I have been learning French and German in recent years, I have been struck by how much larger a role sexual identification plays in those languages than in English, and I'm not just referring to ascribing sexes to inanimate objects. In English the use of sex-differentiated terms like conductor/conductress were discarded quite a while ago, with some terms such as actress taking longer to disappear but becoming rare now. But in those Continental European languages, based on my limited reading (I'm very happy to be corrected) it seems to be still standard usage to use sex-differentiated terms for roles and professions, and failure to use the sex-differentiated term may even still be considered incorrect.

I was going to reply citing books like Speeches that changed the world, but then I heard about an upcoming book release 'PowerPoint Presentations that Changed the World', edited by Melvyn Bragg, so I think I'll have to withdraw my insinuation until I've read that with the openest mind I can muster.

I agree. Both good points.

Damn, from the title I thought this thread was going to be a deep dive into the subtleties, mind-blowing incomprehensibility, and yet fundamental feeling of rightness, of the Buddhist doctrine theory of Not-Self. Do I dare to discard the pronoun 'I'?

But it's not.

What a disappointment.

The way I make moral decisions is broadly in line with your principle. I want to point out though that it is by no means a clear decision-making tool.

There are two huge areas of fuzziness that I think cannot be resolved.

The first is whether the harm is the expected harm or the actual harm. All sorts of confusing situations arise in which one sets out to be kind but accidentally causes pain, and vice versa. One can try to dispel this by talking in terms of expectations, but further problems arise with that.

The second is what does it mean to 'cause' harm. It may be that my decision to buy magazine X rather than magazine Y is the last straw that breaks the back of struggling magazine Y, which then folds, its editor suicides and her family is plunged into misery. Causes are a very fuzzy concept to try to pin down to something as clinical as a razor.

To repeat, I agree with the OP as a broad moral principle, but I don't see it as a razor because it will still leave lots of dilemmas and contrary ouitcomes.

Based on Jorndoe's post, it appears one can get displaystyle by using the same delimiters .
and then using the standard latex delimiters for display style inside there, eg
$\begin{align}\sum_{i=1}^n r^2 = r\ \frac{1-r^{n}}{1-r}\end{align}$
which used the code

We can tell that it's display style because the subscripts and superscripts for the sum are directly above and below the $\Sigma$, instead of to the right of it.

One thing about MathJax though is that its functioning varies between browsers. My post above looked fine to me when I did it at home this morning on Firefox on Linux, but now, at work on IE in Windows, it interpreted some of the double-dollars as delimiters and made a whole bunch of ordinary text into unreadable pseudo-math. I have fixed that up now so it looks proper on IE-Windows, but I wonder what it will look like from my home computer.

Right-clicking on a piece of latex code brings up a MathJax context menu that includes useful items like
Show Math As > (choose between mathml and Latex commands); and
MathJax Help.

Right-Clicking on the first piece of code above (which is MathJax Latex) gives that, whereas doing it on the second, which is Unicode, does not.

There is a good $\LaTeX$ primer on physicsforums here.

MathJax is a Java implementation of LaTeX that interacts with the web browser.Stand-alone LaTeX uses $ and the double-dollar-sign as delimiters for in-line and separate line ('display style') formulas. MathJax implementations usually don't recognise those because that would prevent people from using the $ sign outside of equations.

physicsforums uses ## as delimiter for in-line but keeps the double dollar sign for display style since one doesn't normally type a double dollar sign in ordinary text.

As Srap discovered above, the in-line delimiters for this forum are [ math] and [ /math] but without the spaces inside the square brackets (which I inserted here to stop MathJax from interpreting them as delimiters - a classic 'use' vs 'reference' distinction that language philosophers will enjoy).

I don't know what the delimiters are for display math. I tried a few of the usual things like \[, $$ and [tex] but they didn't work. The forum maintainers would know.

While looking for a podcast of a radio show I overheard with an Indian giving his view on Hinduism, I came across the podcast of the discussion I mentioned above where the guests were a conservative Evangelical and a progressive Christian.

I think it will be an interesting listen. I haven't listened to all of it yet. It's here. The link is direct to the MP3, which is 49MB.

I am increasingly coming to like that show, which is called God Forbid, on ABC Radio National on Sunday nights. The host seems to try hard to get people from contrasting religious backgrounds and foster a constructive discussion between them. The show's web page is here.

Really? Might there not be another reason he begins with that? — The Great Whatever

Is there any point behind this rhetorical question?

You are conflating belief with content.

Even if one accepted that belief is not a significant part of liberal Christianity, that would not make it contentless. The emphasis on belief stems from the 'sola fides' doctrine of the Protestant reformers ('justification by faith alone'). It is not essential to Christianity, and it plays very little role in most other religions.

As the great liberal RC priest James Allison points out, it reveals a peculiarly Evangelical-Christian-centric view of the world to refer to religions as 'faiths', when it is only some parts of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam, that regard faith as essential.

If you want to know what the content of liberal Christianity is, you need to get out and talk to some liberal Christians about their religion, rather than just armchair-theorising.

Nevertheless, you could make a start by reading the following by Marcus Borg, a well-known liberal Christian, recently deceased. He starts, of course, by saying what he does not believe, because the first thing he has to do is distinguish his position from the Evangelicals. But then he presents three key positive aspects of his religious position.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marcusborg/2013/11/what-is-a-christian/

To be liberal is to be contentless — The Great Whatever

Nonsense.

You can spit out as many unsupported claims as you like. Other than informing us what your opinion is, they have no value.

liberal Christianity is basically atheism. — The Great Whatever

I don't agree with that unsupported claim either.

And so as you note, no one will stick around, because the religion no longer has any content. — The Great Whatever

I didn't note that at all. I presume your mistake comes from too hasty a reading, as I imagine you understand the difference between 'the membership falls' and ''no one will stick around'.

Nor do I agree with the unsupported claim that liberal religions have no content. I wonder if you have ever conversed with a liberal Christian about their beliefs and values, as none of what you say about them has any relation to reality.

Point 1 is a truism, but does not apply to liberal Christianity. There are plenty of flourishing liberal Christian congregations.

I don't agree with claim 2.

What is 'spiritual fulfilment'? This means different things to different people. For me it means a bunch of things, including something like feeling a connection with something much greater than oneself, and coming to terms with the existence of so much suffering in the world.

This may be true, but the assimilation of Christianity into modernity has to a large extent destroyed it — The Great Whatever

This is a topic that has taken my interest in the last week, after I heard a discussion between a liberal and an Evangelical Christian on ABC Radio National, in which the Evangelical said that Evangelicalism was better because when churches became liberal, they shrank.

I was convinced for about five minutes, because it's true that Evangelicism seems to be the only part of Christianity that is growing. But then I realised that that means Evangelicalism is better only if the sole measure of a religion's success is its size. Which implies that it is better to be a horrible Christian than not a Christian at all - a premise that only Evangelical Christians would accept.

When a church becomes liberal, it typically discards the threat of hellfire for nonbelievers and sometimes also the carrot of heaven as long as one believes (no matter how nasty one may be). As with any organisation propped up by threats and bribes, the membership falls as soon as the threats and bribes disappear.

But what's left is those that really want to be part of the organisation, rather than just being in it out of fear or greed.

To me that's a better outcome. Some people in the world have an emotional affinity with Christianity, and some do not. Since there are so many different available worldviews, in the absence of the threats and bribes that have been part of Christianity for most of its history, only a small proportion of all the world's people are going to want to be Christian. But that's good, because the people who are suited to being Christians will be Christians, and the others will be Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Stoics, Epicureans, or whatever suits them.

Liberalisation of a religion destroys it only if one measures the success of the religion by numbers of members. Most people would instead measure the success of a religion by whether it brings spiritual fulfilment and community to those that are unable to find it elsewhere, without causing undue misery. I would suggest that, on that measure, liberal churches, despite their smaller numbers, are far more successful than Evangelical ones.

I suspect the same would apply to Islam. The emergence of more credible, easily accessible, liberal, moderate sects of Islam may reduce the number of Muslims, but it would not destroy Islam, and it would improve its rating against the above-suggested KPI.

I'd say this goes country by country. For example, getting away from Saudi Arabia and Qatar's fossil fuel economies would be helpful in leveraging better human rights compliance from their theocratic, Muslim governments. — Heister Eggcart

I agree with that.

In the next bit you used the abbreviation SOE, which I can't quite place. What does it stand for in this context?

and which needs to be addressed. — Heister Eggcart

What is your proposal for addressing it?

What, exactly, are you defending? — Wayfarer

What, exactly, are you advocating?

How do you imagine it being useful to ask questions about it, and what questions would you like to ask?

The questions asked to date have been things like 'does Islamic culture say such and such', which is about as useful as 'Does American culture like Milli Vanilli?'

The Amnesty International page I cited above reproduces the quotation that Ahok was jailed for two years for: — Wayfarer

and the Amnesty page does not mention 'Islamic Culture'. Why not try to learn from the example of an organisation led by very wise and compassionate people?

it's simply a search on the phrase 'Islamic culture', which produces X million hits, all apparently in reference to something non-existent. — Wayfarer

Yes, it reports 77 million hits.

Then I Google 'Asian race' which is generally agreed by anthropologists and biologists to be a non-existent category, and get 186 million hits.

Conclusion: large numbers of Google hits do not validate concepts.

How about we discriminate based on people's actions and statements, rather than based on arbitrary, meaningless labels we want to slap on them, like Asian or Islamic.

For instance, we can agree that the people inciting the mobs that cowed the courts into convicting the governor were very dangerous, mean people and that we should do whatever we can to frustrate their nasty purpose.

All these pages are about nothing, then. — Wayfarer

Surely that's not the first time you've found dubious info on wiki, is it? Wiki is a marvellous institution that has enriched my life in many ways, but it also has lots of errors. Sign up for an account and you can start correcting them. I do that from time to time on maths and science articles, when I have the energy. It's both fun and rewarding.

the charge and the conviction were indeed a threat to democracy and pluralism in Indonesia, which I believe they are. — Wayfarer

Yes. This charge is a terrible thing and makes the future of Indonesia's democracy, such as it is, look shaky. As Benkei pointed out, the governor didn't even criticise the Quran. He (the governor) said that people - the Violent Fundies - were lying about what it said.