it's more a way of offering an explanation than some underlying universal mechanism. — Banno

I understand this, but I think it’s not a useful way of looking at things.

Ok. Curious, since I would not have thought it so far from your "What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact". That the reed hitting the black on the billiard table, causing it to move, is a different sort of explanation to that you went to the fridge because you wanted a beer, and different again to vaccinations causing the number of measles cases to decline. Do we agree that, despite these all being labeled causal explanations, they are quite different? And perhaps that indeed, there need be nothing that they have in common - wasn't that much the argument in your OP?

That the reed hitting the black on the billiard table, causing it to move, is a different sort of explanation to that you went to the fridge because you wanted a beer, and different again to vaccinations causing the number of measles cases to decline. — Banno

I intentionally left out instances where a human motivation was involved because I wanted to avoid the complications associated with that. I think the difference between the billiard balls and the inoculations is the difference between a very simple instance where efficient cause probably does make sense and a more complicated one where it might not.

I hear you. You coulda been a contender. But yah couldna be bothered. :up:

I’m with you. The sheer amount of causal theories is mind-boggling.

But I’ve come to prefer a version of the so-called Transference theory of causation, where causation ought to be reduced to the transference of physical conserved quantities, like “momentum” or “energy”, from one object to another. Though I’m not sure I believe in “physical conserved quantities”, it is at least intuitive and empirical to say that one object hitting another caused the other to move.

it is at least intuitive and empirical to say that one object hitting another caused the other to move. — NOS4A2

But if every action is matched by an equal and opposite reaction, then who actually pushed whom Newton? What happens when you are an astronaut and throw your wrench? How can it be that you are now sailing backwards? Intuitively and empirically?

And yet maths tells us that even chaos is a structured pattern. — apokrisis

I’m not sure we can treat apparent structure as anything other than contingent, it may simply reflect the methods we use to measure and make sense of the world. Since I’m not a mathematical Platonist, I’m open to the idea that mathematics is created rather than discovered, and so the structures and patterns we observe may tell us more about how we construct our experience than about any inherent order in what we assume to be reality. But this is still an unsettled matter, and I’m about as close to being an expert as Donald Trump is to being a statesman.

But I mean, in our models of the world, we only have to be right for all practical purposes. We don't need to know everything to know enough. — apokrisis

Yep. And we don’t even need to know "true" things to make successful interventions in the world. for instance, the Aristotelian–Ptolemaic model imagined an Earth-centred universe with planets and stars fixed on rotating celestial spheres. Although utterly wrong today, it successfully predicted celestial motions, eclipses, and calendars for centuries. It also provided a successful aid to navigation by allowing predictions of star positions

But what happens when the greenie and the developer meet to discuss their mutual prejudices? Doesn't the frustration soon rise to the point where each must assert their dominance in terms of some moral absolutism?

Or don't you talk to developers much. What do you make of a spectacle like Trump telling the UN that climate change is the world's biggest hoax? — apokrisis

As it happens, I work in an organization that collaborates with government and corporations, and I’ve been involved in development in modest ways. I also know developers and how they operate. Often cunts by my standards.

As for your example, every position can be framed with a set of narratives designed to persuade others in one direction or another. Usually, money ends up being the deciding factor, but not always. Community organizing, lobbying, advocacy, and education can achieve remarkable results. Still, I’m always aware that my cause is just one of many competing values in a world where most things are ultimately for sale. And in the end, what we are really talking about is human behaviour, a product of culture and language and not some “true” order of nature. Or something like this.

Still, I’m always aware that my cause is just one of many competing values in a world where most things are ultimately for sale. And in the end, what we are really talking about is human behaviour a product of culture and language not some “true” order of nature. — Tom Storm

But right there you point to the core dynamic that organises society - a balance between competition and cooperation - and then shrug your shoulders and say there seems to be no natural order in the way humans collectively organise.

You can see it but you can’t see it.

But right there you point to the core dynamic that organises society - a balance between competition and cooperation - and then shrug your shoulders and say there seems to be no natural order in the way humans collectively organise. — apokrisis

I'm not saying this is the natural order. I'd say it applies to the West (and certainly in my patch) and it's the contingent product of capitalism and culture. My Aboriginal friends here tell me that this process isn’t a part of First Nations culture. I suspect that the Western hegemonic tradition may have inflicted this on most of the planet today, but I wouldn’t call this a natural order any more than I would say that about the dominance of neoliberalism.

What I do think most humans do is look for regularities and patterns. But to what extent these are features of reality or products of our cognition is, for me, still an open question.

But I’ve come to prefer a version of the so-called Transference theory of causation, where causation ought to be reduced to the transference of physical conserved quantities, like “momentum” or “energy”, from one object to another. Though I’m not sure I believe in “physical conserved quantities”, it is at least intuitive and empirical to say that one object hitting another caused the other to move. — NOS4A2

I’ve come to the same sort of conclusion you have— looking at cause, efficient cause, is a question of the transfer of energy. That doesn’t change the primary question in this thread, i.e. is the whole idea of causality useful in most situations? My answer is “no” or at least “maybe not”

OK, how would you describe "changes in energy", while avoiding the notion of Causation? — Gnomon
In the OP I've given specific examples of situations where changes take place but it is not useful to use the term "causality." Many people here have disagreed with my characterization. — T Clark

As with many, if not most, disagreements on this forum, the controversy hinges on the definition of key terms. For example, Aristotle's Four Causes include A> mechanistic sequences that show no local signs of intention (Material cause), and B> before/after relationships that are attributed, by scientists, to inputs of energy (Efficient cause), plus C> what exists/happens by definition (Formal cause) : it just is what it is. But perhaps the most contentious, although common, kind of Cause is D> the result of some agent's Intention/Reason (Final cause). Are you denying all of those kinds of Causation, or just one or two?

I can agree that Mechanical progressions may seem to be "uncaused", in that the next step merely follows the prior, with no apparent reason. Unless you zoom-out to look for the First or Final Cause of the system as a whole. In the case of a mechanical clock, the First Cause is the design of the spring & gear mechanism, and the Final is the desire or intention to keep track of the passage of Time.

However, as far as we know, almost all physical Changes result from Energy inputs or outputs. Some energetic transformations cannot be traced to any agent, other than Nature. So I suppose you could call that event/happening Change Without Cause*1. But scientists & philosophers tend to assume Universal Causation as an axiom, despite the rare exceptions.

The best known case of physical Change without any knowable prior Cause or Determination occurs on the quantum scale of reality*2. Which suggests that Reality may be fundamentally Random. And yet, few scientists or philosophers accept that Chance or Fate, makes rational understanding impossible. They just admit that some outlier Causes, on the periphery of perception, are not inferable due to the incompleteness or ambiguity of the evidence.

Since I can't refute the indeterminate events involving quantum "wave/particles", I must admit that our world seems to have an undercurrent of Randomness. But that is the exception, not the rule. Is your argument "against Cause" limited to events on the margins of human cognizance, or is it generalizable to "against God" (the First Cause)? :smile:


*1. A "change without cause" philosophy explores whether effects can exist without causes, a concept challenged by the principle of universal causation but also suggested by phenomena like radioactive decay and certain quantum events. While classical philosophy upholds strict causality, modern science and philosophy acknowledge the possibility of uncaused events, influencing views on free will and the nature of randomness. Philosophers like Zhuangzi have also described spontaneous, non-coercive change that aligns with this idea by respecting the inherent nature and context of things rather than imposing a cause
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=change+without+cause+philosophy


*2. "Acausal Quantum event " refers to quantum phenomena or theories where events lack a conventional, predictable cause, challenging the classical understanding of cause-and-effect. This doesn't mean there's no reason for an event, but rather that the cause isn't known or doesn't exist, as in the random timing of radioactive decay. More recently, "quantum acausal" also describes experiments that show events can occur in an indefinite causal order, where the sequence of cause and effect is uncertain, as if both "A causes B" and "B causes A" are happening simultaneously
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quantum+acausal

Thank you for the references. I will take a look to see if I can find something that suits me.

As with many, if not most, disagreements on this forum, the controversy hinges on the definition of key terms. — Gnomon

In the OP and subsequent posts, I think I’ve made it reasonably clear what I’m talking about when I say “causality.”

But scientists & philosophers tend to assume Universal Causation as an axiom, despite the rare exceptions. — Gnomon

This is not true. Many do not.

I'm not saying this is the natural order. I'd say it applies to the West (and certainly in my patch) and it's the contingent product of capitalism and culture. My Aboriginal friends here tell me that this process isn’t a part of First Nations culture. — Tom Storm

Competition-cooperation is the balancing act necessary to live as a society. Although humans are then also still shaped by the dominance-submission hierarchies that are the natural order in social creatures who lack the language to organise at a cultural level.

So it is the balance that is the necessary part of the equation. And the lifestyle that is contingent in the sense that different lifestyles tend towards different balances in what a culture demands.

A traditional foraging culture will be different from a settled farming community, which will be different from a nomad pastoralist lifestyle, which will be different from a modern neoliberal economy or authoritarian police state.

But each such lifestyle still has to find a collective balance of these forces - both the cultural habits of competition and cooperation, and the neurobiological habits of dominance and submission - that “works”. That promotes the long term stability of a collective social identity in a world that always changes, especially in terms of how that collective social identity is doing things to transform its landscape, attempt to transform “its” world.

That doesn’t change the primary question in this thread, i.e. is the whole idea of causality useful in most situations? My answer is “no” or at least “maybe not” — T Clark

Couldn’t resist. :razz: How can you, or anyone else, uphold responsibility sans “the whole idea of causality”?

I, and I can only affirm many another, find the notion of responsibility useful, as in, for one lighthearted example, I’m responsible for the contents of this post, not you or anyone else. And this because this post would not exist without my having caused it in some way or another (a partial cause, a sufficient cause, a necessary cause, etc., all these possibilities and more all being contingent on the occurrence of causation to begin with).

Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum! — apokrisis

Herewith the lurking dichotomous bum biting alternative:

You can see it but you can’t see it. — apokrisis

Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more — Skeeter Davis

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents.

Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?
What the magic that charms the glad babe in her arms,
Till it cooes with the voice of the dove?
'Tis a secret, and so let us whisper it low—
And the name of the secret is Love!
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love,
For I'm sure it is nothing but Love! — Lewis Carrol

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." — John Keats

In the OP and subsequent posts, I think I’ve made it reasonably clear what I’m talking about when I say “causality.” — T Clark

Yep. It finally seems clear. You feel the notion of causality is too simple to deal with the complexities of reality. Applying its simple rules quickly becomes defeated by the fact that reality is just too much to be boiled down into chains of cause and effect. Everything is too networked, too interdependent, too full of feedback and strange loops. Stuff emerges. Things are transformed. Growth and development leave linear tales of cause and effect fast behind.

Which is all true. But that is only to say that Nature is not a machine. A machine is designed to have a mechanical logic, a cause and effect linearity. It can be described in terms of a blueprint and a system of differential equations. But Nature is irreducibly complex. Or at least that is the conclusion of the systems science tradition that has sought a better model of natural causality - the causality of a cosmos - since philosophy first started cranking up.

Greek holism came before Greek atomism. Although not by that much as holism and reductionism are themselves a neat dichotomistic pairing of the metaphysical options. Aristotle entered the chat a few centuries after it got going and brought some coherent sense to both sides of this causal debate.

Anyway, the issue is clearly understood. Nature has its causal structure. That is bleeding obvious. And it is not a mechanical one. Or at least only in part. So a complex world gets to have a complex model of its causality. Aristotle sketched out the four “becauses” which would helpfully cover all the bases that needed to be covered.

All four causes would in some sense have “effects”. But already the effects could be broadly divided into constraining or limiting effects - effects like global laws - and constructing effects - effects like physical degrees of freedom. Effects like material and efficient causes that construct the linear tales of how one thing leads to another thing in little chains, that might then aspire to the complexity of networks with feedback loops.

And even networks of such networks that were arranged in levels of scale, or hierarchies of networks connected in feedback loops. And beyond that, even the hierarchical order that comes as networks of feedback show emergent behaviour and become organised by symmetry breaking and phase transitions. Networks that change state in the way gas condenses to liquid, and liquid crystallises into solid.

So we can say causes have effects. But then comes the complexity - the complexity that Nature demands from its would-be modellers.

The world divides neatly into its tale of global constraints in interaction with its local constructive freedoms. Its system of natural laws and the individuates action they regulate. And the maths and the logic have to follow that divide. As a field of research, this was making strong progress even 150 years ago. We had non-linear maths. We had statistical mechanics. But it was the invention of the computer that put a rocket under the maths of complexity and chaos theory.

Massively large calculations could hope to do a reasonable approximation of the intricate patterns of connection that make up any natural system. One could simulate the weather, the internals of a proton, the boom and bust of fishing stocks or stock markets. Networks of feedback arranged into hierarchies of such networks over logarithmic scale. Throw in phase transition behaviour too. It’s all become standard causal modelling.

Go to any lecture on theories of cosmic inflation and the modellers have to present their computer simulations of the physics that their particular model predicts. Go to any climate change conference and researchers will offer the latest update on how then Gulf Stream is faring and how close it seems to a radical phase change that will flip its course,

So metaphysics offers us a unified story of the natural logic of natural systems. And we also get a sub-model of atomistic reduction out of that exercise for free. We get the other thing of a mechanical notion of reality - nature imagined now as a reductionist machinery.

Then maths and science come along. It begins to model nature in reductionist and mechanical terms as that is the simplest place to start. You walk before you run. And also, society got immediate payback on building up a new mechanised form of itself. Reductionism was a partial model of causality that really worked down here on the face of a planet where we had already transformed its ecology by the technology of farming and were tantalised by the prospects of a collective social mechanisation.

Then this in itself became a networked feedback process. To control Nature better, we had to improve our causal models. We had to learn how to deal with complexity and chaos at the level of our maths and science. We had to be able to make useful predictions that could incorporate all the nonlinearity and uncertainty that Nature actually contains.

So these days, using computers to crunch numbers into hugely intricate patterns of hierarchical recursion, we can predict the weather, get the right numbers for the interior of a proton, manage fisheries, even start to model the kinds of things that humans would say to each other in natural language responses if they were trying to be both socially pleasant and objectively reasonable. The large language model that simulates our “collective intelligence”.

So does the fact that cause and effect models seem too limited to encompass the real world mean they are effectively useless as you wanted to argue?

Well the history of humanity seems to suggest no. The problem is more the lag between the partial reductionst models and the later arrival of the more holistic models. We are already running at one level of inquiry before having learnt to walk at the next.

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents. — unenlightened

So why just two parents? Why this complementary thing of a penis and a vagina, a sperm and an egg, the birth of a girl or a boy?

And if love makes the world go round, does hate bring it to a stop? Or doesn’t another song says love brought their world to a sudden stop.

All this talk of love from you. And yet I’m not feeling love from you. Curious. Poetry employed in an act of social aggression.

I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up:

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents. — unenlightened

Well, not all sex (child begetting sex included) is endowed with some degree of love. Sometimes, it can be pure hate and tyranny. But point taken.

Still, instantiations such as the latter cases of rape do attest to the fact that some adult humans become utterly immune to it. Love is to them a false promise, hence an utter falsity, hence a wrong reality to uphold, or, more simply, a wrong. Notwithstanding, duly agreed with the proposition: (universal) love is that which makes the world go round. And it can radiate from within individual humans as well, albeit always imperfectly. Or, in Peirce’s own terms, this would be agapism (his whole take on the evolution of natural laws and such makes no rational sense without the concept, but that’s Peirce for you).

All this talk of love spoken through gritted teeth. Something's up. :up:

All this talk of love spoken through gritted teeth. Something's up. :up: — apokrisis

How do you know that I even have any, physical, metaphorical, or what not? :razz:

And no, replied to @unenlightened about what i so far find to be facts. That's what up. :up:

In the OP and subsequent posts, I think I’ve made it reasonably clear what I’m talking about when I say “causality.” — T Clark

Unfortunately, what you are talking about may be clear in your own mind, but it's not clear to my simple mind. That's why I asked categorical questions in my previous post. Philosophical dialogues typically begin with controversial assertions, and followed with definitions & examples to support some generalization that is not generally accepted.

I'm trying to see if you are simply denying absolute Determinism, or denying God, or making the more radical assertion of a completely In-Determinate wandering-in-state-space universe. The link below*1 may offer a clue to your position, that I didn't find in the OP. :smile:


*1. Causality is an illogical (illusory) concept within a rigorously deterministic universe.
Sean Carroll:
"The idea that'cause and effect' isn’t fundamental to the workings of the universe hasn’t spread as widely as it should have, despite the efforts of smart people such as Bertrand Russell. In this first section of the book, I sketch how we moved from a picture of the universe animated by causes and reasons to one that obeys patterns, without the need for anything to cause it or sustain it."
https://www.reddit.com/r/freewill/comments/1huxxlr/causality_is_an_illogical_illusory_concept_within/
Note --- What's the difference between a universe that obeys Logical Laws, and one that "obeys Patterns"? Who or what determined the predictable patterns that Newton deduced, and mathematized, from his observations of the solar system? Another word for Pattern is "Design".

what i so far find to be facts — javra

Yep. The kind of facts one finds in Hallmark cards. And PF apparently.

Yep. The kind of facts one finds in Hallmark cards. And PF apparently. — apokrisis

You know, fallible me, but you seem to hold a grudge against what I said. As though you were insulted by it. Yet I still maintain that love/agapism is not a wrong. Your potential hurt feeling aside.

I think the difference between the billiard balls and the inoculations is the difference between a very simple instance where efficient cause probably does make sense and a more complicated one where it might not. — T Clark

The invitation in your OP was to consider how we use the word"cause", and you showed that causal chains and inferring probabilistic causes are quite different ways of speaking.

Indeed, and you apparently caused some pique in ...

I simply point out the lack of any argument in your post. Not even any poetry as some kind of evidence. Just some mutterings about sex as rape and praise for Peirce's worst idea.

you apparently caused some pique — Banno

And here is Banjo to join the mean girls with his usual constipated approach to insult. Ohh sir, sir! Well apparently. And to some degree. But surely, surely. Oooh sir!

Apparently so. Weird, ain't it.

I simply point out the lack of any argument in your post. Not even any poetry as some kind of evidence. Just some mutterings about sex as rape and praise for Peirce's worst idea. — apokrisis

No, you pointed out gritty teeth speech. Now changing tune to something alluding to rationality, I see. So you find that "love is not a wrong" to be in need of justification? Before I start, first reply contra what so that I might see what all the opposition is about. Is it that the good can only be obtained via a balance between the good and the bad (to not bring in evil)? You want to uphold with a straight face that this is not self-contradictory?

Weird, ain't it. — javra

A merely physical mythos cannot speak of such things.

A merely physical mythos cannot speak of such things. — Banno

My guess is that it would have something to do with entropy.