And here is Banjo to join the mean girls with his usual constipated approach to insult. — apokrisis

That's excellent! You should change your name to Banjo!

Is it that the good can only be obtained via a balance between the good and the bad (to not bring in evil)? — javra

I thought you were talking about love. Why the sudden change of topic?

Does good and bad seem to make more sense if we are speaking generally about Nature as a whole? Does speaking of Nature as "universal love" make one loses grip on that straight face? Do we want to want to put our most extreme claims of transcendental being back in its bottle a while? Safer to move what's most fragile out of the way.

And to repeat what I have now had to say way to often, any dichotomy that I supported would be that thing which is a pair of complementary limits, not a pair of antagonistic ones. It is worth balancing two varieties of what is "good". And your metaphysical task is to be able to make that make sense.

One doesn't want to be evenly balance between good and evil, or even love and hate for that matter.

If we are talking the natural structure of pragmatic social order, this is why competition and cooperation work so well together. Each supplies something good and healthy that the other lacks. That is why they combine make the world feel complete. Give it a rounded shape if you like.

But keep spluttering away in suppressed fury. Love! LOVE!!! I tell you.

Or what you can only assert ever more vigourously in lieu of any credible argument.

Can you, like, give a rational answer to a simple, straightforward (and might I add not rude) question?:

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. — javra

Now, just so it said, I won't apologize for implying that love is good. But since you here also quite emotively express things such as this with a good deal of resentment:

But keep spluttering away in suppressed fury. Love! LOVE!!! I tell you. — apokrisis

What on earth do you interpret by the term love/agape?

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

Yep. It's entropy all the way down.


Old. I am surprised that Apo was reduced to name calling so quickly.

Now, just so it said, I won't apologize for implying that love is good. — javra

And I am saying that if this is going to be a useful distinction – one that has dichotomistic rigour – you need to be able to tell me "as opposed to what?". How can I know what you think love is if you won't tell me what it isn't.

Is not-love = hate? Well hate seems make the world spin pretty fast too. If I am to agree with "love is not a wrong", you do seem to understand that a rational argument requires this dialectical framing. But you should also see that you are again jumping your categories.

If what is not a wrong is a right, then what is the actual wrong that makes love a right? If your answer is hate, then why would it even exist in a world where love is supposedly universal and all there is? I mean the math just doesn't add, does it?

Whereas my kind of dichotomies – which are complementary and not antagonistic – say fine. If love is the unity, what are the opposites it usefully combines.

And in social science, that would be competition and cooperation. Two forms of the good that go together splendidly. The basis of rational and civilised human social and economic order.

Or if an ethologist was invited to join the discussion, we might add in dominance and submission – the way social animals achieve fruitful order in their pride, troop, herd and flock structures.

How can you, or anyone else, uphold responsibility sans “the whole idea of causality”? — javra

I posted this earlier in this thread.

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. — T Clark

That’s why I don’t claim the idea of causality is useless in all situations.

Is not-love = hate? — apokrisis

To you apathy, for one example, mild liking as another, are equivalent to hate?

(Who the heck am I debating here???)

And in social science, that would be competition and cooperation. Two forms of the good that go together splendidly. The basis of rational and civilised human social and economic order. — apokrisis

Back to the issue of the good, then. As in, what is it that make either competition or cooperation good Though it was quite apparent that your problem was with love. It is to the latter that your replied to me, after all.

So, as to the good:

As you ought to rationally know, fallible me is not now, has never been, and will never be an embodiment of perfect love nor of absolute good. Neither, I could argue, can be any other spatiotemproally occurring being. But I think this is beginning to touch on the nerve that might have been struck in you to elicit all those emotively hurt feelings, or so it seems: "The Good", which, as is no news-flash, some affirm to be perfected love (one that transcends the interpersonal but is nevertheless immanent in all interpersonal instantiations of love), cannot of itself occur spatiotemporally. It is not something that has a dichotomy, but simply that toward which, at least some, aspire to get closer to. Which, I take to you, gets into that whole transcendent, platonic mush that you abhor?

Still, this is all now awfully off this thread's subject.

That’s why I don’t claim the idea of causality is useless in all situations. — T Clark

Right. So we can't survive, live, in a society without posing the question, at least implicitly, "who's responsible for what". But then, I find the same can be said of "what's responsible for what": what is responsible for my sink being clogged; what's responsible for my window not opening; and so forth. However they may be thought to do it, non-human animals too operate by discernment of the same, both in terms of who and what as being responsible for what. We humans just term this issue one of causation.

↪Patterner Old. I am surprised that Apo was reduced to name calling so quickly. — Banno

Oh! I didn't realize. I just thought it was a typo.

To you apathy, for one example, mild liking as another, are equivalent to hate? — javra

Now you are just making babbling noises.

Though it was quite apparent that your problem was with love. It is to the latter that your replied to me, — javra

But never a topic I raised. And now you don’t want to have to provide an answer. Curious.

But I think this is beginning to touch on the nerve that might have been struck in you to elicit all those emotively hurt feelings, or so it seems — javra

Wishful thinking. I don’t see atheism as a term of abuse. Rather the opposite. But for you, metaphysics seems to be the sound of one hand clapping. Broken at base.

Insults devoid of rationality. Why is this not a surprise? (before you start on mathematical theses of entropy, its a rhetorical question).

And I am saying that if this is going to be a useful distinction – one that has dichotomistic rigour – you need to be able to tell me "as opposed to what?". How can I know what you think love is if you won't tell me what it isn't. — apokrisis

I'm not enamored with you shifting the responsibility on me - especially since you then were actively antagonistic toward something which you, by the aforementioned comment, have no comprehension of.

But before i take off, here's a working definition of what in English is termed "love": Love (in all its forms and variants) is equivalent, in the broadest sense of the phrase, to "unity of being" - irrespective of whether that which is, being, consists of psyches or physicality.- this, either in perfected form, this being "The Good", or as movements (including purely psychological ones) toward an ever closer manifestation of unity of being.

As to the "poetic evidence" you so humbly asked for, there's a song called "The Gravity of Love" whose lyrics might suffice.

But, your returning unsurprising insults aside, here the thing: I dare you, triple dare you, to define "love" in a way that conflicts to the just offered definition.

Ciao.

Triple dare? But you haven’t moved on from tautology. Love is love. Good is good. Unity of being is … well, unity I guess. And the being thereof.

A pretty thin metaphysics.

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: — apokrisis

Well thank you for the reluctant charity. I certainly don't claim to be the incarnation of love, and my use of quotation rather than simple declaration might even suggest that to the charitable. But your suggestion

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. — javra

There is no place in the attraction between electron and proton for consent or dissent. The love of the rapist is the love of power which is the love of the feeble. Since 'love' is somewhat a trigger word, it seems, I will back-track to 'like'. One cannot object to 'like' with any vehemence surely?

'Kangaroos like to hop'. @apokrisis likes to disdain. Systems like to dissipate.

Any minute now I'm going to invent the law of attraction, so I'll stop while I still can.

This is a great summary of the "blooming, buzzing confusion." Better than the one I've presented in the OP and my subsequent posts in this thread.

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. — apokrisis

Yes.

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. — apokrisis

Maybe this is where our differences start. From what I've observed, most people don't recognize the irreducibly complex reality you describe. For them, causality means simple systems--billiard balls. That's the curse of reductionism. That's what I'm talking about. Your complex and nuanced understanding of causality is not how most people understand it. We civil engineers don't work with machinery, we go out into nature and treat it as machinery. We're not the only ones.

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. — apokrisis

I was going to mention numerical monitoring in my OP, but I didn't think I could do it justice. I'm not a modeler, but I have worked with them. We used groundwater and river flow models often in my work. I was going to use modeling as an example of the kinds of efforts required to overcome a knee-jerk dependence on causal processes. In a model you break up reality into little cells and apply simple causal processes within and between those cells. That just brings us back to my original question. When you're dealing with such a complex system, why do you need the idea of causality? Of course reality can be described using the language of cause, but why do it?

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. — apokrisis

This makes sense to me.

Unfortunately, what you are talking about may be clear in your own mind, but it's not clear to my simple mind. — Gnomon

Did you read all my posts? I'm guessing you didn't.

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. — Banno

That's what I was trying to do. I don't think I've been very successful.

But then, I find the same can be said of "what's responsible for what": what is responsible for my sink being clogged; what's responsible for my window not opening; and so forth. — javra

Again, I didn't say the idea of causality is never useful, only that it's usefulness is limited. I tried to give examples of what I was talking about in the OP.

However they may be thought to do it, non-human animals too operate by discernment of the same, both in terms of who and what as being responsible for what. We humans just term this issue one of causation. — javra

Causality is a human concept. Animals, at least the great majority of them, don't recognize causes. They just act in accordance with their nature given the conditions they encounter.

I think you were distracted away from a quite valid point.

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.
— Banno

That's what I was trying to do. I don't think I've been very successful. — T Clark

I don’t have much to add here, but I’ve enjoyed your OP and think you raise some significantly interesting ideas as Banno has summarised. The notion of cause has interested me for some time. My initial interest was in how the idea of cause applies to historical events (which is terribly fraught, slightly different and more nebulous to the matters you have raised). We know there is an impulse in human beings to make meaning and wrest order out of chaos, and central to this is being able to identify first principles.

We know there is an impulse in human beings to make meaning and wrest order out of chaos — Tom Storm

Why is that?

My initial interest was in how the idea of cause applies to historical events (which is terribly fraught, slightly different and more nebulous to the matters you have raised). — Tom Storm

Yes, the whole distinction between events that are intentional versus those that are not seems to complicate all of the discussions I’ve looked at. As I noted earlier, that’s why I avoided the whole subject of human causation. That doesn’t mean none of the issues discussed in this thread is relevant.

Why is that? — Patterner

You agree with this? I imagine it’s for facilitating survival and attempting to manage our environment. Making the wrong choice can harm or kill us. But it’s obviously more nuanced than my couple of sentences.

From what I've observed, most people don't recognize the irreducibly complex reality you describe. — T Clark

Yes. This is a point very specific to Peircean semiotics and hierarchy theory. But a relational view of reality is already more irreducibly complex than an atomistic one.

One thing can stand alone, however you have to have two things to relate. And then three things to have a hierarchical relation. The story that is a dichotomisation towards limits plus the spectrum of all the mixed states to be found inbetween.

If you have black and white as two complementary extremes, you must also have all the shades of grey which a black and white mixes. And that makes for a triadic story of complexity. This is a simplistic example. But you can see how it makes threeness the irreducible basis of a world with complex relations. You’ve got to break possibility apart in a way it then can relate over all its scales of being.

Apply that logic then to all the dichotomies that Greek metaphysics left as it legacy. Chance-necessity, part-whole, discrete-continuous, integrate-differentiate, matter-form, one-many, and the rest. The Universe formed as a unity of opposites. The irreducible thing of two opposites and their relational unity.

Your complex and nuanced understanding of causality is not how most people understand it. We civil engineers don't work with machinery, we go out into nature and treat it as machinery. — T Clark

Well the crowd I mixed with were mainly ecologists and biologists.

When you're dealing with such a complex system, why do you need the idea of causality? Of course reality can be described using the language of cause, but why do it? — T Clark

How could you - as an ecologist - even argue with someone who only thinks as a mechanist. If it is their actual causal model of reality where the issue lies, you have to be able to argue at the level of a different brand of causality.

A scientist is giving causal explanations just as the basis of what they do. What is an explanation if not an account of a structure of reasons?

I think you were distracted away from a quite valid point. — Banno

:lol: :lol: :lol:

As a panpsychist I've been been considering whether the distinction between intentional cause and non intentional is sustainable. I think it may be, but the non intentional would be derived from the intentional. The only causes we actually know about are intentional. Other causes are often attributed to laws, which are descriptive and don't need the notion of cause to work, perhaps. Not sure.