I echo:

↪T Clark Yes! — Banno

No need for four becauses, unless that helps us to sort our thoughts at the moment: We can surely come up with more than four becauses. We see these sorts of categories all the time in Business -- why 5 Whys? Why the 6M's in a Fishbone diagram?

Insofar that it makes sense in the moment go ahead and use any cause you want -- it may be more multiplicitous than the four causes, though.

When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraints—events that prevent future events—have a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causes—events that result in future events. The asteroid didn’t cause humans to evolve, it prevented dinosaurs and other organisms from continuing to evolve. Hitler didn’t cause me to be born, he prevented other potential futures from taking place. — T Clark

I don't think the asteroid and Hitler were constraints. The asteroid prevented the continued evolution of dinosaurs by wiping them out. Or, iirc, it wiped out land animals above a certain size. Hitler prevented a lot of potential futures by murdering millions who would have had children. If a constraint is "a limitation or restriction", then I don't think it applies to these two cases?

But isn't my argument here that holism means all four of Aristotle's four causes. And reductionism just means material and efficient cause. Or even in very reduced renderings, just efficient cause. Closed patterns of logical entailment. The stuff of logical atomism. — apokrisis

From what I've read in your posts, Aristotle's four causes are a major organizing principle of your metaphysics. I must admit I don't get it. I think I understand the four types of cause, but I don't see them as a particularly useful or interesting. I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread.

So that is why I don't understand why you would seem to say you would rather let go completely of causality – and in return for what exactly – while I instead make causality my preoccupation. — apokrisis

My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. Even worse, it makes it much harder to even be aware of it. When you then start pushing buttons and pulling levers, you get results that don't achieve the goals you intend. Most things are not caused in any simple easy to trace way. The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation.

Causality is the primary metaphysical fact. It is the basis of any explanation or narrative we might have. — apokrisis

You are preoccupied with causality, I am preoccupied with metaphysics. I have a lecture I give ad nauseum about my understanding. Here's what I wrote in the OP:

"causality" is a metaphysical concept, by which I mean it represents a point of view, a perspective, not a fact. As R.G. Collingwood might say, the Principle of Sufficient Reason - everything must have a reason or a cause - is an absolute presupposition, not a proposition. Absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, they have what Collingwood calls "logical efficacy" - they are useful. — T Clark

Collingwood wrote "Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking."

I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. As Collingwood indicates, a metaphysics applies to a particular kind of thinking at a particular time, it’s not universal. I don’t reject the idea of causality completely, I just believe it’s not always the right way of looking at things.

So – with my ecology hat on – the causal explanation for climate change is as plain as the nose on your face. Nothing would even have gone wrong if the damn planet had the atmospheric physics which would have released the heat all this industrial burning was producing rather than trapping it with the greenhouse gases the burning also created. — apokrisis

And I guess I look at it from the other side. We have climate change because people made decisions based on simplistic causes, ignoring the full context of the actions they implemented.

The section on 'Complex Systems' doesn't actually mention causation. — bert1

I think you’re right, I should have been clearer about what was caused and what wasn’t. On the other hand, that’s sort of the point. Here is the salt marsh sitting out there by the ocean just existing and changing based on the behavior of a very complex biological and physical system. What’s actually causing what out there? Can you point to something causing something else?

The 8 ball went into the pocket because the cue ball hit it. It couldn't have done anything else.
The cue ball hit the 8 ball because the cue hit it. It couldn't have done anything else.
The cue hit the cue ball because your muscles and bones moved in specific ways. It couldn't have done anything else. — Patterner

Sure. I have no problem with that as long as you recognize that that particular way of breaking things up is not the only way of looking at it. It’s a matter of convention. You decided which particular aspects to focus on based on your own judgment, and not on any kind of universal principle. That focus was a matter of human value, not scientific principle.

Here's where the break comes. Your muscles and bones moved in those specific ways because you chose to move them in those specific ways, because you intended the cue to hit the cue ball, because you intended the cue ball to hit the 8 ball, because you intended the 8 ball to go into the pocket. (i'm assuming you intended to hit the 8 ball into the pocket.) But that didn't have to happen. — Patterner

Are you saying that the appropriate place to make a break is based on human intention? So that causality only is significant when there’s people around. I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, so I think I must be misunderstanding.

the primary Cause for physical science is Energy. — Gnomon

That doesn’t make sense to me. All there is is energy. Matter is energy. It’s changes in energy that need a causal description.

Mutations perhaps? — Janus

But there have been tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of mutations that led to the multiplicity of life here on earth. Just saying “mutations” doesn’t really have much meaning.

The final cause was traditionally considered to be the telos or purpose of a thing. That would involve how it fits into the overall web. We can think of the global conditions, which include both constraints and opportunities, as providing for the possibility or impossibility of the existence of particulate things and kinds of things. Think of environmental niches, for example. — Janus

I don’t see it. How does the the full context of existence here on earth constitute its purpose?

I don't think the asteroid and Hitler were constraints. The asteroid prevented the continued evolution of dinosaurs by wiping them out. Or, iirc, it wiped out land animals above a certain size. — Patterner

I guess that’s my understanding of what a constraint is— something that prevents something else from happening. It reduces the number of possible futures.

I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread. — T Clark

But all you keep doing is collapsing causality to the notion of efficient cause and then talking about the other thing of "context".

There are always other models of causality. You have something like you are describing in proximal and distal causes in medicine. Or proximal and ultimate causes as defined by Ernst Mayr. In quantum physics, contextuality is invoked as the better way to explain non-locality.

My approach is based on Aristoteleanism as that aims to make a proper logical dichotomy of causation. It divides it into the two complementary halves of some set of top-down constraints and some set of resulting bottom-up degrees of freedom.

Each half accounts for the other half. And so you have a model of causality that sums to 1. Nothing is missing. But also you have the thing you are really wanting – two directions in which causation as a whole is interacting. A holistic relationship between downward or globalised constraint and upward or localised construction.

Perhaps Aristotle's four causes are too complicated. But I already said that. You only really need formal and material cause. But then it is also useful to make the further division that is causes in general and causes in particular.

My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. — T Clark

And this is so until you learn to expect causality to be dichotomised in the systematic fashion I just described.

If you start out not just expecting causality to break down into a tale of actions in a context, but for this to be a mathematical-strength reciprocal relation, then focusing clearly on the local degrees of freedom will automatically sharpen whatever you might mean by the global context – the global constraints that form these exact freedoms you complain about as being vision-obscuring.

For example, to have atoms, you must have the reciprocal thing of a void. The two go together in a necessary way. For a mass to have a shape and a motion as the kind of things it does, it has to have the matching thing of a context for this to be so. A large and empty space in which the mass can have a shaped boundary where it suddenly stops, and a sufficient vastness so it can rattle around until it collides with some other atom that has a shape and a motion.

So even for our most cartoon picture of nature, causality is based on a reciprocal pairing of local freedoms and global constraints. If we form a mental image of what the degrees of freedom look like – a wee atom – then this brings with it an equally definite image of the kind of context in which such dof would exist. In this case the kind of absolute Euclidean emptiness that is a context rendered as a-causal and ignorable as possible. And yet as a spatial expanse, it does contain this atomistic content. It does play some residual causal role.

The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation. — T Clark

Again, complexity can be modelled. And that is done by hierarchy theory.

Once you get used to understanding causality as the division into constraints and degrees of freedom, you can then start stacking things up into hierarchies. A network of networks ordered by their scale.

You have the salt marsh ecology – itself a hierarchy of organisms – interacting with its environment, the sea and the weather, over minutes, days, months, seasons, centuries and millenia. The tide goes in and out twice a day. The global climate changes rather more dramatically every 100,000 years.

So start with the general principle of how causality works – some functional balance between a stabilising set of constraints and the degrees of freedom keeping the show dynamic – and then start adding all the possible spatiotemporal scales that this balancing act must play out over.

In hierarchy theory, you call it a set of cogent moments or cogent scale. It defines how much context you need to take in to account for the degrees of freedom you are interested in. Its all explained in papers like this.

I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. — T Clark

Yep. I don't see metaphysics as just people making shit up in random ways that take their fancy. It is about extracting the deep principles. The presuppositions that can be deemed absolute as their emergence as the eventual horizon on inquiry is inevitable.

Metaphysics was solved almost immediately in Greek philosophy. The unity of opposites. Hylomorphism.

But then the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution fired up. The Church had taken over metaphysics for its own social purposes. The Industrial Revolution happened and the world fell in love with a causality based on switches and levers. Metaphysics got broken into engineering and spiritualism.

Sure. I have no problem with that as long as you recognize that that particular way of breaking things up is not the only way of looking at it. It’s a matter of convention. You decided which particular aspects to focus on based on your own judgment, and not on any kind of universal principle. That focus was a matter of human value, not scientific principle. — T Clark

That's how you broke it down in your OP. I was just replying to the parameters you gave.

Here's where the break comes. Your muscles and bones moved in those specific ways because you chose to move them in those specific ways, because you intended the cue to hit the cue ball, because you intended the cue ball to hit the 8 ball, because you intended the 8 ball to go into the pocket. (i'm assuming you intended to hit the 8 ball into the pocket.) But that didn't have to happen.
— Patterner

Are you saying that the appropriate place to make a break is based on human intention? So that causality only is significant when there’s people around. I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, so I think I must be misunderstanding. — T Clark

Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :grin: No, I didn't mean that. I was trying to distinguish between different types of causes. Cue hitting cue ball, cue ball hitting 8 ball, and 8 ball falling in the pocket are all one type. I don't know what anybody else might call them, but I would probably just call them brute force causes? Thing 1 bangs into Thing 2, and Thing 2 moves.

That's very different from you intentionally moving the cue in a certain way in order to make something specific happen.

I guess that’s my understanding of what a constraint is— something that prevents something else from happening. It reduces the number of possible futures. — T Clark

Sure. But doesn't every action, even inaction, constrain things one way or another? Aaron Judge hitting the ball is a constraint, because he prevented the ball from hitting the catcher's mitt. That wasn't his goal. his goal was to hit the ball. It just so happens that hitting the ball prevents that. Is there a line between something being a constraint and the idea that any course taken means every other course is not taken?

But there have been tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of mutations that led to the multiplicity of life here on earth. Just saying “mutations” doesn’t really have much meaning. — T Clark

I was just saying that mutations might be counted as proximate or efficient causes of evolution, if evolution is change in organisms and mutations cause change in organisms. Efficient or proximate causes are thought to involve energy flows and exchanges—chemical reactions for examples.

I don’t see it. How does the the full context of existence here on earth constitute its purpose? — T Clark

I don't think existence has an overarching purpose, but there are many purposes motivating some organisms. Whereas traditionally final cause was thought of i terms of purpose or telos, I am thinking of it in terms of function or place in the overall system. I'm thinking along the lines that every part has a place, a function, in relation to the whole, as well as being constrained by the whole, by the overall existential conditions.

Wouldn't the counter to Collingwood's statement be an example that is uncaused or self-causing?

The statement is not afterall that: "all causes are discrete," or: "all causes are easily known." The idea that the temporal ordering of mechanistic causes stretches back to the "beginning" and that it isn't discrete is arguably a point in favor of something like PSR, rather than an argument against it. Or, at least I'll lay out why we might think that.

If one defaults on PSR, one gets something like the old-school mechanistic view where every last line of Hamlet is as it is ultimately because the arbitrary laws and initial conditions of the universe "just happened, for no reason at all." Everything reduces to a brute fact. And even on a view of an eternal universe, the answer to the question: "why are things one way and not any other," will be "it just is."

This sort of issue comes up in cosmology all the time. The "brute fact" explanation is only ever held to when no other good explanation exists. So, for instance, you get claims like: "the incredibly low entropy of the early universe needs no explanation because we have a sample size of one and so we cannot say that it was "unlikely." It just happened and that's all there is to it." There are similar answers to the Fine Tuning Problem. But if people accepted such answers we'd never have developed the theory of the Big Bang or Cosmic Inflation, because odd properties of the universe that don't seem to suggest an arbitrary process would have simply been written off as: "it just is." Plus, if we had a theory that explained the universe's low entropy that was a compelling as Cosmic Inflation no one would resort to: "it just is."

Now, might causes as mere mechanism be ultimately such a thin notion that it boils down to nothing more than correlation? I think that's a pretty good point; causation becomes arbitrary in the early modern mechanistic paradigm (that was, in fact, the generally the point they were striving towards, because any thick/secondary causality would be an affront to the divine will, which orders all things). If "cause" just refers to some sort of regularity in observations, it is itself arbitrary as an explanation. More recent work on causation often goes the pancomputationalism route though, and this reintroduces a sort of formal causality (granted, often in very reductionist terms).

I think that might suggest a problem with a particular view of causality as opposed to causality per se though. As a rule of thumb, I would say that if we find ourselves needing to eliminate, radically deflate, or pragmatism/voluntarize core concepts like truth, part/whole relations, goodness, beings (plural), knowledge, etc., that should give us pause. Hume's critique of causality, for instance, flows from certain epistemic assumptions. But if we're left with an seemingly arbitrary notion of causality, that might be more an indictment of the starting assumptions, since presumably epistemology is all about causes, reasons, that in virtue of which, etc.

Let me give a more down to earth example than cosmology. Suppose you find a corpse in the woods. Now maybe the hiker died of a heart attack, or maybe he was eaten by a bear, or got lost and froze to death, or maybe he was murdered by a skin walker. Lots of possibilities. But absolutely no detective is going to get by with: "it just happened." That doesn't mean there will be a clear cause of death, nor that looking for the cause of death will turn up anything "useful." It might not be useful in any particular case to try to figure out how a badly decomposed corpse ended up as it is. It is, however, a useful principle that people don't die for no reason at all. They might have relatively spontaneous, "natural deaths," but they don't just cease living. And so too for crop circles, odd rock formations, recessions, etc. That doesn't mean the causes will be simple or accessible. The simplicity of causes is an artifact of mathematical modeling. The philosophy of causation generally always had them as very complex, with every action always involving interaction, both patient and receipient, and the dictum that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver."

Personally, I like Proclus and the Book of Causes here, not so much as a perfect explanation, but as a radically different view to see how much of "causality" is paired away in linear mechanism (I wouldn't even call this "efficient cause" because efficient causes only make sense in the context of the other causes, and the primary view would be of vertical, hierarchical contemporaneous efficient causes, not accidental temporal orderings, e.g., for a chandelier to hang from a ceiling, the ceiling must be present at every interval).