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 reaction for example.

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 various organisms. Whereas traditionally final cause was thought of in 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 existing 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 and reduces causes to classical mechanism, it's possible to justify 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).

The SEP article on metaphysics of causation offers an analysis in terms of type and token that looks promising. And reduction to "probabilities, regularities, counterfactuals, processes, dispositions, mechanisms, agency, or what-have-you".

But here we are yet again stuck with Aristotle.

The SEP article on metaphysics of causation offers an analysis in terms of type and token that looks promising. And reduction to "probabilities, regularities, counterfactuals, processes, dispositions, mechanisms, agency, or what-have-you". — Banno

Those sound interesting (without having read) -- would you say that these analyses are Against Cause, in terms of the OP?

But here we are yet again stuck with Aristotle. — Banno

There's a sense in which I think it's understandable to reach for Ari on causation. The sense in which it makes sense is that we generally do believe in causation if we haven't read much philosophy in a fairly unquestioned way. And even if we have, at least in my journey of thinking, I held onto cognitive dissonance on this question until still now, but less so than before.

Aristotle provides a plausible account of our phenomenology, from the scientific attitude. The four causes, at least as we interpret them today, work well enough to be persuasive, at least with respect to philosophical reflection: The question is asked and answered suitably well enough.

I don't like the universal move, though. I think we can shoehorn causes into the four-causes, but it looks a lot like the various organizational-speak around business and government, except that it at least fits into a larger coherent philosophy that isn't capitalism.

And I think it's important for us to be critical of the philosophers we love, especially. Else we'll probably get it wrong.

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

I've been going back and forth trying to figure out how to respond to this for awhile. I haven't given up. I'll be back later.

:up:

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. — Patterner

I do understand the point you were trying to make. As I said previously, there are everyday, common sense situations where the chain of causality is simple--as you called them "brute force causes." I would have no problem with saying I hit the ball in the pocket. I caused the ball to go in the pocket. At human scale that kind of judgment is necessarily so I can be held accountable for my actions. The point I was trying to make is that particular choice is arbitrary. It's a matter of convention. As I noted in the OP, there are lots of other places along the chain of causality I could have identified as the cause. Which raises the question--why did you pick those particular places to make the breaks?

...there are four different (kinds of) causes :
* The material cause or that which is given in reply to the question “What is it made out of?” What is singled out in the answer need not be material objects such as bricks, stones, or planks. By Aristotle’s lights, A and B are the material cause of the syllable BA.
* The formal cause or that which is given in reply to the question “"What is it?”. What is singled out in the answer is the essence or the what-it-is-to-be something.
* The efficient cause or that which is given in reply to the question: “Where does change (or motion) come from?”. What is singled out in the answer is the whence of change (or motion).
* The final cause is that which is given in reply to the question: “What is its good?”. What is singled out in the answer is that for the sake of which something is done or takes place. — SEP

These are the classical Aristotelian varieties of cause. They are supposed by Aristotelians to be quite general. But they are not unproblematic. At their core, although they provide various examples of causes, what is not presented is an account of what it is to cause, or to be caused.

That's an issue addressed in more recent metaphysics of causation, and to which a not insubstantial reply is that there is not some one thing, or even group of things, that are common to all causes.

The notion of a family resemblance might be appropriate here, as in so many other cases of mooted definition.

At their core, although they provide various examples of causes, what is not presented is an account of what it is to cause, or to be caused.

That's an issue addressed in more recent metaphysics of causation, and to which a not insubstantial reply is that there is not some one thing, or even group of things, that are common to all causes.

The notion of a family resemblance might be appropriate here, as in so many other cases of mooted definition. — Banno

I'd go along with the notion of a family resemblance as long as we don't stop there -- and I must admit I feel like I'm chasing a rabbit down a hole where simply saying "Causation is a metaphysical fiction that's attractive" stops me from jumping down the hole.

as long as we don't stop there — Moliere

Never. It's a method, not an answer.

Three areas of interest, at least to me, are probabilities, and counterfactuals, and the relation between causation and action - not as competing alternatives but as complementary approaches addressing differing aspects of the wider topic of causation.

But of course what is being done here is not the search for an overarching theory so much as a group of interrelated explanations. Familiar stuff.

@apokrisis @Count Timothy von Icarus @Patterner @Janus @JuanZu @bert1

I often complain that people don't put enough effort into providing definitions of the words they're using in arguments. Now I'm wondering if I've fallen into that same trap. I'm not sure I mean the same thing when I say "causality" as the rest of you do. I thought it was something simple and clear, but maybe I was wrong. As I wrote back in the OP, I'm looking at causality as it is expressed in the principle of sufficient reason--everything must have a reason or a cause. I have always understood that to mean efficient cause and perhaps, as apokrisis noted, material cause. Patterner called it brute force cause. Thinking of it mechanistically, I'm talking about causality that includes the transfer of energy from one system, the cause, to another, the effect.

That's the argument I have been trying to make--the idea of cause, efficient cause, is not useful in many cases and can be misleading. Perhaps you all and I have been arguing from different starting points. Certainly that's true of me and apokrisis, but as I was working to respond to all the responses, it started to seem like it may be true of others also.

Thinking of it mechanistically, I'm talking about causality that includes the transfer of energy from one system, the cause, to another, the effect. — T Clark

Mechanical forces are quite a particular subset of physics. They depend on the simplistic ontology of atoms in a void. Particles that have mass, shape and motion. They can stick together or recoil at the instant they happen to come into physical contact. They can compound or scatter as a second order topological fact.

So yes. This is a very restricted, if very useful, model of causality. It is exactly what you want if you are in the business of turning nature into a system of machinery. Even society can be imagined in terms of atoms in a void. The neoliberal market model of how life should work.

Machines are a system of switches, levers, ratchets, cranks, cogs, pulleys, pistons, etc. Hard constraints on volatile explosions. Everything becomes predictable as accidents are ruled out. They are made impossible and so can no longer be a cause you need to worry about. You just fill a tank, let the explosive potential go bang at precisely timed moments. Then all the mechanical parts twist and turn in a concert of strict "cause and effect", while the spent products of the explosion get shoved out the exhaust or radiated away by another level of machinery that is a heat exchange mechanism.

Mechanical causality is also what is natural when turning logical relations into computer circuits. You design a machinery of switches and transducers, plug in the electric flow and cool the resulting entropy production. Data become the virtual atoms banging about in their virtual void, clumping or scattering according to how the algorithms are driving their patterns.

So the natural world has a rich causality. The engineered world has its impoverished version. But simplicity is the easiest thing to get built. We learn to come at life's problems as if being asked: now how would a mechanism best handled this little chore.

I was just saying that the links in the chain of events you listed represent two very different types of cause. I wasn't intending that to be an argument or contradiction to what you're saying.

Here’s a counter to apokrisis‘s treatment of causality from an enactivist perspective. I’m curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood.

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. In the enactive framework, context isn’t an add-on or backdrop but constitutive of meaning and action. The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. These causal relations are open-ended, historical, and enacted, not closed or total. Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. It’s not that the atom has freedom and the void constrains it; rather, the atom–void system is a co-defined relation, a process without independent parts.

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. — T Clark

OK, how would you describe "changes in energy", while avoiding the notion of Causation? Einstein noted that Energy can be mathematically transformed into Mass/Matter (E=MC^2). But what is the Cause of that form-change? Is it just random fluctuations of Quantum Fields? Hence acausal? Or is it scientists just playing around : smashing atoms with a Cyclotron, to see what pops out?

If "all there is is energy", then what causes the hypothetical universal Quantum Field to fluctuate, to change, to evolve? Why not just be? If "energy is all there is", does that mean the god-like power to cause positive (non-random) change (evolution) is eternal, existing prior to the Big Bang? Could that eternal field of Energy be forever creating new worlds, as in the Multiverse hypothesis?

Scientists don't seem to know the details of how the Energy transformations*1 occur. But energy transformations are essential to the concept of Causation*2 in physical change. In this thread though, I'm talking about Causation as a philosophical concept. If you want to explore that, we can get into it. But I warn you, it involves Metaphysics. If you don't like the AI summaries below, just click on the link and you can go to the human-authored sources of information. :smile:


*1. Energy Transformation :
Through all of these transformation chains, the potential energy stored at the time of the Big Bang is later released by intermediate events, sometimes being stored in several different ways for long periods between releases, as more active energy. All of these events involve the conversion of one kind of energy into others, including heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_transformation
Note --- Potential Energy has no physical properties, because it's an ideal concept, not a real thing.

*2. Energy causation :
describes how one event causes another by the transfer or transformation of energy, where the initial energy is the source of the effect.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=energy+causation
Note --- If you trace the transformations of energy back far enough, you will bump into the "Initial Energy" that Aristotle called "First Cause".

*3. The Metaphysics of Causation :
Metaphysical causality concerns the fundamental nature of the causal relationship itself, investigating what causes and effects are, what the causal relation is, and how it works, rather than simply identifying cause-and-effect pairs. It explores different ways of understanding this link, such as through regularities between events, counterfactual dependence (if not for the cause, the effect wouldn't occur), causal powers, mechanisms, or interventions. Philosophers also distinguish between metaphysical causation, where the connection doesn't rely on natural laws, and nomological causation, where it does.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=the+metaphysics+of+causation
Note --- Causation is a relationship, not an object. Nomological Causation is a philosophical notion, not a physical thing. Nomological : "principles, such as laws of nature, that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are simply taken as true." ___Oxford Dictionary

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. — T Clark

Yes. intermediate causes*4 are arbitrary & subjective. That's why Aristotle coined the term First Cause, which is a logical necessity, like the final number on the number line, not a physical object. The Big Bang is one kind of First Cause, but it didn't put to rest philosophical conjectures about prior causes. Divine Creation is another kind of Cause. So, Causation is a useful concept for Science and Philosophy, but as you noted, it is unavoidable, metaphysical, and non-empirical. So, we can debate til the cows come home. :joke:


*4. What is the Ultimate Cause? :
The idea that "energy is causal" can be understood in two primary ways: as a philosophical concept suggesting causation is the flow or transfer of energy, and in a more practical sense where energy consumption has a measurable causal impact on economic growth and other systems, though the direction and nature of this causality can be complex and context-dependent.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=energy+is+causal
Note --- Exchanges of Energy are merely intermediate causes. So, in order to understand Causation philosophically, you need to go back to the origin of the causal chain of events*5. Unfortunately, the Big Bang begs the question of where the Causal Force & Natural Laws --- that explain the subsequent evolution of the world, from simplicity to complexity --- originated.

*5. An ultimate cause is a deep, underlying reason or a historical, evolutionary factor that explains why something exists or occurs, answering the "why" question in terms of its adaptive significance and long-term origins.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ultimate+cause+definition

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. — Joshs

But that is the metaphysical architecture that sets up the dynamic interplay over time. It is boiling causality down into the logical account rather than describing it in terms of the blooming, buzzing confusion one might appear to experience.

The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system. — Joshs

Again you are saying the same thing. Just in a more touchy feely way.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. — Joshs

But not everything is living and embodied in Nature. You need a model of causality that is large enough to even hopefully account for the reason why a Cosmos would exist. And one that goes beyond flowery words to have mathematical and quantifiable consequences.

Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. — Joshs

But the argument is that freedoms and constraints co-emerge. In logic, that is what being a dichotomy means. That which is formed by being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

But not everything is living and embodied in Nature. You need a model of causality that is large enough to even hopefully account for the reason why a Cosmos would exist. And one that goes beyond flowery words to have mathematical and quantifiable consequences.

Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy.
— Joshs

But the argument is that freedoms and constraints co-emerge. In logic, that is what being a dichotomy means. That which is formed by being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. — apokrisis

Interesting. This isn’t my area, so all I can do is ask naive questions. Are you saying Josh’s view is mistaken, or just a partial account? I’m also curious, in light of the first quote above, are you any kind of theist or idealist, or is your position purely rooted in a scientific model of reality? Do you see causality as foundational for how we understand the universe? I can never tell with questions like this; is it something baked into reality, or, like Kant’s time and space, is it something built into human cognition?

Something that interests me greatly is the singularity of the effect that cannot be reduced. Its irreducible novelty with respect to regularity (same causes, same effects) which similarity is its condition. The central question, for me, is how singularity occurs, rather than a theory of the regularities of nature (causality as regularity), which for me remains an abstraction from the real production of becoming as singularity. Classical theorie of causality cannot account for the singular (that which is neither particular nor universal but a difference and novelty).

Are you saying Josh’s view is mistaken, or just a partial account? — Tom Storm

The mistake would be to not expect some well justified dichotomy to emerge where one can point to a disagreement. So if I am successfully taking things to one extreme – a formal metaphysics – then there is no good reason why that would not have as its "other" the exact opposite approach, which is both equally extreme and equally valid. That way, between them, they would be both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. They would together arrive at the limits of what could be usefully said.

So his reply is not necessarily mistaken or partial. It just could be. And the only way to find out is reply in kind and see where the dialogue goes. At the very least I should emerge with my own view on what is rightfully the other to my formal metaphysical account of causality. Which may be very much like the direction he proposes, or different in interesting and important ways.

I’m also curious, in light of the first quote above, are you any kind of theist or idealist, or is your position purely rooted in a scientific model of reality? — Tom Storm

My view of Nature is in the systems science tradition. So not theist (although it is only over the past century that the scientific and mathematical part of the deal has started to carry its weight). And only idealist in the epistemic sense, and in the deflationary ontic sense.

So I believe in the reality of structures, for example. Nature just can't help forming itself into rational patterns. It is almost as if material being as a form and end in mind. But that is now the poetic and metaphorical way of putting it. I can be comfortable with that because there are some very exact mathematical models and scientific theories which give the detailed account of why this would feel to be the case just from everyday experience of the world.

Why is a tree or mountain range beautiful? Because that is Nature expressing its scale symmetry – its most basic fractal pattern. And what then is a fractal? Well maths shows us how they are generated from recursive algorithms. They are log/log or powerlaw distributions. They are just what you have to get when you pair global constraints with local freedoms in the most cosmically general fashion.

So that would be an example of tying the two sides of this discussion together. On the one thing, I have my lived experience. Surround me with trees and mountains rather than garden sculptures and blocky buildings. Now I am seeing true natural beauty and not that other thing of a cheaply made realm of mechanical artifice.

But then ask me about why trees and mountains are beautiful and I could bore you to tears with the maths of fractals and how that reveals the true metaphysical bones of reality. One can also then like the Platonic perfection of perfect circles and triangles, straight lines and perpendicular angles. But now that is about the other side to this maths of reality.

One needs a symmetry that can be broken to get anything going at all. And fractal symmetry is about symmetry breaking achieved over all its possible scales. Symmetry breaking taken to the other thing of its limit where it must halt as itself an emergent scale symmetry. The "other" to how it began.

So science is in touch with its idealist side. But this cashes out in a belief in the inescapable truths of rational order. Nature can't escape falling into its particular patterns. Nature has to have its deep causal structure. And learning that doesn't have to make one love trees and mountains any less. Instead, it should expand one's appreciation of being alive in a Universe such as we find it.

Who needs creating gods when ontological structure just has no option but to fall into place exactly as it does – accidents and all? And why else would our soul feel so attuned to natural beauty if we couldn't somehow see the rightness of what is before our eyes. The poetic way of saying all this that @Joshs might prefer to a disquisition on formal logic and maths.

Do you see causality as foundational for how we understand the universe? I can never tell with questions like this; is it something baked into reality, or, like Kant’s time and space, is it something built into human cognition? — Tom Storm

Causality is foundational.

Of course, we are only making models of it. But the models are of something real if we believe in the pragmatic method of reasoning. If our models make mathematical predictions that our methods of observation and measurement then support with evidence.

The question then becomes what is this most general model of reality. Is it exactly the same size as the Cosmos it describes? Or does it need to be larger as we need to be able to imagine a cause so general that it could produce any kind of "Universe". Or can it only instead always be smaller – simply because the true causes are somehow transcendent and ineffable. We are fools as humans to think we can encompass existence with our little bag of mathematical tricks.

I of course want a model of causality that accounts for both cosmology and mind. A pansemiotic model to give it a brand name.

So a model that predicts all that we can observe and doesn't overstep the mark by predicting stuff that just starts to sound idiotic.

Such as you get with multiverse talk for example. The idea of a reality so unconstrained by unity that it fractures into an infinity of universes of any type, and so where there is now not just this one semiotically-structured conscious "you" here in this one pansemiotically structured world, but an infinity of these "yous" living every version of your life. And indeed, an infinity of these "yous" also repeating exactly the same life in every detail. As given this kind of causality that lacks the extra property of finitude, infinity without limits is what you get. What you logically believe to be the true truth. The most truthy truth of them all.

So causality is foundational. It is always just our idea of reality. And yet also, one has a reality to check things with. Once you understand this is the game, the rest is just working out the details to the point you find a good reason to care.

Do humans need to do this for everyday living? Almost universally they prove that they can get by without any measurable degree of logical or mathematical or experimental rigour.

They can just see trees and mountains and imagine instead how much better things would look with as a flattened plaza with some public artwork and this year's version of fashionably blocky buildings. Even beauty can have its necessary other. Be determined by the eye of a beholder. Be considered as a celebration of all things civilised and well-machined.

Reality is dichotomies all the way down. Not turtles.