I would suggest that what we call an accident is the opposite of what we call a necessity. So the more fundamental dichotomy is chance and necessity. Or what in the systems view is the top down constraints and the bottom up degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

In that simplistic dichotomy, where is the "logical efficacy" of the OP? Is it in the "top-down constraints" or the "bottom-up degrees of freedom". Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? :smile:

My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwood’s logical efficacy. — T Clark

Peircean triads. Is it the degrees of freedom below, the constraints above, and the resulting phenomena?
— T Clark

That’s it. Between the downward constraints and the bottom up construction, the reality that emerges inbetween as the dynamical balance. — apokrisis

How does this relate to the sign, the object, and the interpretant.

In that simplistic dichotomy, where is the "logical efficacy" of the OP? Is it in the "top-down constraints" or the "bottom-up degrees of freedom". Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? :smile: — Gnomon

This is not what Collingwood meant by logical efficacy.

I don't see how it's possible to deny that there is order in the universe, regardless of humans perceiving it. — Patterner

Ever since I read this, I’ve been thinking about it. I started out writing a response where I said I denied there is order in the universe, but I am not ready with an argument right now. I’m going to think about it some more.

:up:

How does this relate to the sign, the object, and the interpretant. — T Clark

As ontology to epistemology. A two for one deal. You have the sign relation as an account of how an organism models its world. And then you have this psychologised logic to account for how the world itself could self-organise as a pansemiotic rational process.

So behind it all is a universal triadic logic. But then that is applied to two quite different kinds of self-organising worlds. A cosmos and a mind. A Universe that is its own self-interpretive process, and an organism as what can live in that world by an actual system of sign.

If you want the more ontological story of systems causality, you have to look to Peirce’s writings on the dichotomy of tychism and synechism for instance.

The same triadic relation was worked out at all its levels from phenomenology to logic. But the lines between things could be blurry because of that.

Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? — Gnomon

Not sure what your question is. But if we are talking about the epistemic issue of the pragmatic usefulness of our causal models of the world, then understanding the Cosmos to be run by the dichotomy of chance and necessity is how we can then insert our own semiotic intentionality into the scheme of things.

We can’t change the laws of physics or the structure of maths. But we can have the aim of constraining chance by constructing constraints on natural processes and so harnessing their flows to our ends.

It is this cosmology that inspires us to straitjacket nature in a mechanised order. Fence the sheep, channel the water, explode gasoline in a system of pistons and cranks.

So the OP was about the limits of the efficacy of the mechanistic mindset. The complaint was that because it seemed a severely limited view of Nature in practice, one might as well give up on the very idea of believing in “causality”.

My argument was that the world does have its own actual causal order. And understanding that would inform us as to how to get the most out of a mechanical mindset while also getting the benefits of a more organic view of Nature as it is in itself. One that includes even life and mind as part of this cosmic order as the source of a semiotic level of constraints over the shape of the world.

Bodies and brains exist by imposing a mechanical logic on the processes of the world. A system of switches and levers which starts down at the molecular nanoscale of enzymes and all the other molecular machinery that regulates the chemistry and structure on which intelligent life is based.

So biology inserts intentionality into the world ruled by chance and necessity at the level of chemical reactions. Information regulates entropy. Flows get directed. Reactions are turned on and turned off by a genetically encoded machinery.

The mechanical mindset is pretty effective as it is how life and mind can arise in the first place. And the irony is that it is the Cosmos that has the purer organic logic. It is a system of self-organising flows that exists by evolving at the level of its own laws and the material freedoms that arise due to these laws becoming firmly fixed in place.

So nothing about metaphysics is quite as it first seems. Life and mind are the further thing of a mechanistic causality that arises within the organicism of a Cosmos that truely has to evolve its own self-making balance.

Consciousness is just what it is like to be in this kind of mechanised modelling relation with a world - a model of the world as it would seem to be from the point of view of us as a knot of intentionality within it, looking to further constrain its flows by applying our mechanising mindset wherever we find it possible.

The fact that humans engage in intentional behavior implies only that some causation is the product of intent. Not that all causation is. — Relativist

True. Billiard balls are causal, but not self-causal. So what is the initial cause of their motion? Does the cue ball initiate the aim & activity on the table? Or does the chain of causation link back to an intentional*1 Prime Cause, with the mental goal of moving all balls into pockets?

Statistically, Correlation does not prove Causation, but logically it does point in that direction. If some causation results from intention, could we not reasonably infer that all intermediate Causes can be traced back to an original intentional Act? That seems to be the reasoning underlying primitive Animism, and the God postulates of almost all world religions & philosophies. Is there any scientific or philosophical method to disprove Divine Causality or Aristotle's Logical First Cause? "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (Carl Sagan).

From a more physical perspective, the original Big Bang theory avoided dealing with a source or explanation for the Energy (efficient cause) and Natural Laws (formal cause) necessary to make sense of the unprecedented emergence of a chain of transformations (material causes) from mathematical Singularity, to hypothetical plasma soup, to experiential Life & Mind. Does the sudden appearance of Cosmos from Chaos, as inferred from astronomical evidence, cause you ask "Why?" as well as "How?". Is it possible that the implicit First Cause*2 was Intentional/Purposeful instead of Accidental/Aimless? If not, why not? As a non-religious philosopher, I have to ask myself that contrapositive question. :chin:

*1. To Intend : to extend the mind toward a goal, purpose, design, aim or object

*2. First Cause :
Aristotle's argument for a First Cause, often called the Unmoved Mover, does not rely on it being an intentional entity with a will or mind, but rather as a necessary, external, and unchanging origin of all motion in the universe. The First Cause initiates motion without itself being moved, stopping an infinite chain of causes by providing a beginning point for the universe's existence and change. This uncaused cause functions as a final cause, drawing all things toward it in a state of pure actuality, thereby explaining the purpose and motion within the cosmos.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=aristotle%27s+first+cause+intentional
Note A --- In the real world, we have no experience with uncaused Causes. According to the law of Thermodynamics, they all link back to some a priori input of energy. So, an Unmoved Mover cannot be Real, but Ideal : i.e. imaginary. A philosophical hypothesis, not a scientific fact.
Note B --- "Pure Actuality" might explain physical Motion, but can it provide Purpose, Aim, Time's Arrow?

In that simplistic dichotomy, where is the "logical efficacy" of the OP? Is it in the "top-down constraints" or the "bottom-up degrees of freedom". Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? :smile: — Gnomon
This is not what Collingwood meant by logical efficacy. — T Clark

Collingwood's abstruse concept is over my untrained head. I simply construe the term to mean that the conclusions follow logically from the premises. But the path of reasoning can be traced from Top-Down or from Bottom-Up, and can be evaluated as Statistical (permanent pattern) or Intentional (aimed at future state). :smile:

Collingwood's abstruse concept is over my untrained head — Gnomon

Here’s an idea— if you don’t understand a word don’t use it.

I simply construe the term to mean that the conclusions follow logically from the premises. — Gnomon

This is not correct.

Consciousness is just what it is like to be in this kind of mechanised modelling relation with a world — apokrisis

Ooooooh no it isn't

So the OP was about the limits of the efficacy of the mechanistic mindset. The complaint was that because it seemed a severely limited view of Nature in practice, one might as well give up on the very idea of believing in “causality”. — apokrisis

I probably missed the point of the OP. But the subsequent clarifications only muddied the water for me.

Quantum Uncertainty does place limits on some traditional universal assumptions underlying the "mechanistic mindset". But those squishy lower-level limits don't seem to have much efficacy on the macro scale. So, we continue to depend on the "pragmatic usefulness" of our causal models for designing machines.

As long as we keep those acausal animals penned-up on the quantum scale, we seem to be safe from the anarchy of Chaos. They do cast some philosophical doubt on a few over-generalizations of the past. But for all practical purposes, continuous Causality still seems to be a valid assumption. So I don't see any need to abandon Causality altogether, and to accept Absurdity in its place . As a matter of fact, I have been arguing in favor of Aristotle's First Cause theory on this forum. :smile:

PS___ I just saw the first episode of Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective TV series. And it seems to interpret "Holism" as Pandemonium, where randomness rules.

Quantum Uncertainty does place limits on some traditional universal assumptions underlying the "mechanistic mindset". But those squishy lower-level limits don't seem to have much efficacy on the macro scale. So, we continue to depend on the "pragmatic usefulness" of our causal models for designing machines. — Gnomon

But biology in fact depends on the mechanical harnessing of quantum causes. An enzyme is a clamp to lock organic molecules into positions where quantum tunnelling can then overcome energy barriers and bind them chemically.

So the nanoscale is the semi-classical realm of physics. And life exists by sitting just on the classical side of that and tapping into quantum uncertainty to beat the classical odds that constrain chemical equilibria.

Life and mind don't emerge from quantum foundations. But they do dip back into the quantum realm so as to build their own little classical paradise in the midst of the thermal battering that is trying to build any organic structure at the nanoscale of flying H2O molecules that is a room temperature droplet of water.

So biology is mastery over both quantum and classical forms of uncertainty. It is a molecular machinery that lives right on the edge of chaos where the physics is at its most volatile. But that radical instability is then turned into the energy that a genome can harness with a set of cunning plans.

As long as we keep those acausal animals penned-up on the quantum scale, we seem to be safe from the anarchy of Chaos. — Gnomon

A book well worth reading is Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos.

Classical chaos and quantum uncertainty are what life and mind harness so as to exist. Information can extract work from entropy gradients. And the wilder the ride, the greater the return when you eventually learn how to tame it.

There is a reason life and mind have continued to evolve in the direction of looking for the most dangerous and volatile ways to eke out a living. Modern human society rather proves the point.

Living on the edge is fine. So long as you are sufficiently in charge of the causal structure extracting the energy to do work. So long as the damn thing doesn't suddenly blow up in your face.

So the OP was about the limits of the efficacy of the mechanistic mindset. The complaint was that because it seemed a severely limited view of Nature in practice, one might as well give up on the very idea of believing in “causality” — apokrisis

Ahem…

A book well worth reading is Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos. — apokrisis

I really liked that book. It changed the way I look at living organisms and the world in general. Oddly enough, it’s one of the books that led me to seeing the world as I described it in the OP.

Ahem… — T Clark

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments, e.g. electrons in a physics experiment. It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. It is a much less useful explanation for most phenomena. My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwood’s logical efficacy. — T Clark

Which bit are you disagreeing about? Reduction to efficient cause is a mindset based on certain metaphysical presuppositions. You say the logical efficacy of that epistemic approach is limited. And then you conclude this seems to be the end of the matter as what more could be done?

My suggestion was to get back to the metaphysics as it was first envisaged in Greek discourse. The larger model that Aristotle in particular provided. The theory of causality as it has since been worked out in the mathematical structures described by the systems science tradition.

And didn't Collingwood offer his own update on Hegelian dialectics – one that boils down to the unity of opposites – as well as being an epistemic idealist?

So he seemed to be going in the right direction on the epistemic issues. He just didn't then apply the same holism to physical causality as he did to the structure of thought and human history. He didn't spot how the logic was fundamentally the same – rooted in symmetries and their breaking.

We can't – in Kantian fashion – know the truth of our metaphysical presuppositions directly. They are after all logical arguments if they have any rigour worth the name. But we sure as heck can test our metaphysical models in terms of how they fare. And mechanical causality both has to presuppose so much and soon runs out of road once it passes mere complication and tries to move on to tackling self-referential complexity.

Complexity is different as it speaks to emergence, self-organisation and topological order. A theory of the Universe has to be able to model the emergence of space, time and energy as its three major ingredients. And why shouldn't physics and cosmology have that ambition?

Reduction to efficient cause is a mindset based on certain metaphysical presuppositions. — apokrisis

No. My mindset is based on my understanding of how the word causality is generally understood by people who don’t recognize the limitations of the concept associated with complex systems.

My suggestion was to get back to the metaphysics as it was first envisaged in Greek discourse. — apokrisis

No. Again, what the Greeks said isn’t what people today say. That’s what I was talking about.

And didn't Collingwood offer his own update on Hegelian dialectics – one that boils down to the unity of opposites – as well as being an epistemic idealist? — apokrisis

I’m not familiar with that. I only turned to Collingwood when he confirms my prejudices.

We can't – in Kantian fashion – know the truth of our metaphysical presuppositions directly. They are after all logical arguments if they have any rigour wort — apokrisis

Here’s one of those Collingwoodian prejudices—absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false.

Complexity is different as it speaks to emergence, self-organisation and topological order. A theory of the Universe has to be able to model the emergence of space, time and energy as its three major ingredients. And why shouldn't physics and cosmology have that ambition? — apokrisis

I agree with all this, although, as I’ve said many times in this thread, I don’t think it makes sense to call this causality.

No. My mindset is based on my understanding of how the word causality is generally understood by people who don’t recognize the limitations of the concept associated with complex systems. — T Clark

But in the OP you also said…

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. — T Clark

…so naturally I thought that was the direction you might explore. The systems perspective. Causality as so much more than cause and effect. The story of just efficient cause.

I’m not familiar with that. I only turned to Collingwood when he confirms my prejudices. — T Clark

:grin:

I agree with all this, although, as I’ve said many times in this thread, I don’t think it makes sense to call this causality. — T Clark

That seems odd on what is supposed to be a philosophy board. Again, you introduced constraints as a better approach in the OP. Was the thread meant to tread no further in that direction? :chin:

…so naturally I thought that was the direction you might explore. The systems perspective. Causality as so much more than cause and effect. The story of just efficient cause. — apokrisis

I thought that’s what we were doing. This has been a very satisfying thread for me. It’s given me a chance to flesh out some of my thoughts. You’ve thought about this a lot more than I have, but I think we’re talking about the same thing. I think the primary difference between what you’re saying and what I’m saying is about language— the words we use to describe things. I think the word “causality” is misused and misleading. I think it would be better to dispense with it except in a certain limited number of cases.

That seems odd on what is supposed to be a philosophy board. Again, you introduced constraints as a better approach in the OP. Was the thread meant to tread no further in that direction? — apokrisis

Again, I think this is language. Yes I do want to talk about constraints. I don’t think it was me who limited discussions of causality to just efficient cost. That, as I
understand it, is the common way it’s thought of. That’s what I’m resistant to.

@apokrisis

I think the primary difference between what you’re saying and what I’m saying is about language— the words we use to describe things. — T Clark

This has always struck me as a bit unfair. I know how seriously they take coffee in Australia.

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments, e.g. electrons in a physics experiment. It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. It is a much less useful explanation for most phenomena. My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwood’s logical efficacy. — T Clark

So often, causality is an important concept in interpersonal relationships where people try to exert control over one another. Often, it's in the form of assigning blame; attributing a single cause is necessary in oder to effectively blame someone for something happening. This happens on a large scale, such as when people blame Hitler and Hitler alone for everything the Nazis did; and of course in daily interactions ("It's your fault we missed the deadline!") Another frequent application of single-cause thinking is when one person tries to get another person to do something and assumes that one single command or push should be enough (and that if it isn't it means that the other person is "obstinate", "rebellious", or "stupid").

People generally love to attempt to simplify interpersonal interactions like that; as if people were mere things, objects, that can (and should) be shoved around.

So often, causality is an important concept in interpersonal relationships where people try to exert control over one another. Often, it's in the form of assigning blame; attributing a single cause is necessary in oder to effectively blame someone for something happening. — baker

Rather than blame, I would more likely say responsibility or accountability. As you note that’s in relation to causality as it applies to human action. I intended to avoid all the complications associated with that by limiting the discussion to non-intentional causality.

People generally love to attempt to simplify interpersonal interactions like that; as if people were mere things, objects, that can (and should) be shoved around. — baker

But the larger reason for this is that a rationally structured world is based on the logic of counterfactuality. An intelligent system is based on being a pattern of switching. Action must be focused in a way that it is either aiming in the one direction or its exact other. Either definitely doing something, or definitely not. And from that digital counterfactuality can arise the complexity of a whole that knows what it is doing, where it is going, behaving holistically as more than the sum of its parts.

So organismic order is a hierarchy of dichotomous switches all the way down, from top to bottom. The enforced simplicity of either doing the one thing or the other.

The body is either in a generally anabolic state or catabolic state. Either accumulating energy stores under the general coordination of the hormone insulin, or spending that energy under the coordination of the hormone glucagon. The pancreas is the organ flipping that general switch.

Likewise the body's general emotional state – its visceral state – is either tilted towards the sympathetic or parasympathetic pole. Towards fight or flight, or towards rest and digest.

Just as you don't want to be trying to both store and spend energy at the same time, you don't want to be both gearing for action and gearing for relaxation at the same time. Evolution just naturally makes sense of things by finding the organising dichotomies that give you two exactly contrasting system goals, so that you can then divide your life either going in the one direction or its other. A clear cut choice can get made. And when the context changes, you can rebalance the system by going back the opposite way again.

Cognition is the same story. We get aroused or we get relaxed. We get keyed up and attentive, or we mooch along on automatic pilot. We become either alert and wary or we get very concentrated and task focused. We are designed by natural logic to be able to go in two opposite or complementary directions in any facet of life where being in a generally coordinated state of being matters.

Systems never do just the one thing. They are always critically poised between doing quite opposite things. It is only by clearly being able to go in a direction that it is also possible to clearly be doing the inverse of that – and so reverse things back in a way that overall winds up being a state of suitable balance.

That is the basic circuit logic of an organic system. Of course complication can be layered on complication. If you have a fight-flight switching centre, you can add a freeze command on top. You have then a choice of running at a threat, running away from a threat, or freezing in immobility in the hope that the threat simply fails to notice you. Rather than reacting instantly and reflexively, you can also reflexively force yourself to take the other path of not reacting until the nature of the threat becomes more clear.

Anyway, this is the general principle that organises life and mind as intelligent structure. As systems with a clarity of action and so a maximal capacity for learning and adapting to the challenges of existing. If you are doing one thing, then you can't be doing the other. So you are definitely maxxing out what you are doing in terms of what you are not doing. You can be doing what the occasion definitely demands that you should rather than piddling about doing neither the one thing nor the other.

This same dichotomising logic applies at the level of the human social organism. Society has to be structured by a strong counterfactuality. Everything has to be reduced to the clarity of behavioural switches that then give that society is complex emergent order. Every part of the social system is functionally focused on the choice that is doing what is right in one context, as doing the other is what is right in another context.

Social order before language – the natural social order of chickens, wolves, chimps, cows – is based on dominance~submission behaviours. A pecking order. Social animals evolve a clarity about whether the lead or follow. And this can be fairly rigid, or as flexible and in the moment, as the overall circumstances demand. A larger brain can cope with more complexity layered on its simpler responses.

Humans then have language as a new medium to regulate and coordinate social behaviour. We become tremendously complex and plastic in the way that we are organised. But still, broadly the metaphysical logic of the dichotomy shows through. Behaviour is intelligent to the degree it is sharply switchable between two precisely contrasting or counterfactual states.

So a social scientist notes that the broadest dichotomy determining human behaviour is competition~cooperation. We have to switch our mindset between these two poles of social direction in ways that are – in that moment at least – pretty clear to all concerned. There are social contexts in which both poles of behaviour are recognised as "being the right thing for this occasion".

This need for switchability has only become more pronounced as human society has become more socially complex and collectively intelligent.

In a foraging tribe, individuals are mostly going along with the tribe. Acting at the level of families doing family things just like they have been doing for generations. But when we build up to a modern technological and civilised lifestyle, we really need individuals who operate with personal decisiveness in that new environment. They must demonstrate to us that they are causal agents with complete independence – their own freewill and conscience – so that we know they are either in the mind to either do that thing we want, or they are not.

This is all rather frustrating to have to deal with. But that is the structural logic of an intelligent system. Out of clarity of doing that thing, and not the opposite thing, you can build up a system that is able to – at the level of a unified balancing act – doing the general something which is what the social order itself desires as an appropriate response to the demands of the world as it seems at that general collective moment.

For choice to scale, you have to construct choice at the level of a system's smallest parts. It is the logic of dichotomies all the way down the hierarchy. So at the bottom of any hierarchical or systems order, you discover that all its parts are indeed shaped as switches. A counterfactual choice to be made.

Another frequent application of single-cause thinking is when one person tries to get another person to do something and assumes that one single command or push should be enough (and that if it isn't it means that the other person is "obstinate", "rebellious", or "stupid"). — baker

So yes. We are always having to look for that switch to flip in the direction we want. If I feel you are not cooperating, I have to assume you are competing. And I have to use words that are socially effective in getting you to switch your mindset in the diametrically opposed direction.

Of course, when one person accuses another person of being obstinate, rebellious or stupid, it often doesn't go so well. It rather confirms them in their current setting.

To the degree we can instead simply assert social hierarchy dominance over them, then perhaps they might meekly submit. That prelinguistic social circuitry still exists underneath all the more civilising linguistic layers.

But it is hard as just a single individual to speak as the voice of the social collective view – the one that can rightfully demand cooperation rather than competition. To throw the switch the way you want it, you have to construct things so that the other person feels they are being called out by a whole jury of their peers. And that requires more linguistic artistry. You have to say, look I understand, but everyone is going to see and hear about the way you are behaving. I'm trying to protect you against that generalised opprobrium. Mate, you're going to get cancelled by everyone that matters.

My point is that intrapersonal relations do have a general structural logic. And while it may seem that we are always just looking for the little buttons to push, the levers to pull, to be effective in achieving what we want, we have to step back and see the situation as the social system that it is.

The causality is complex even if it is all built on the relative simplicity of the dichotomous logic of the counterfactual switch. We want others to have a simple on/off button. But the switch we really have to flip is that hugely complex one of society's global balancing act that is the general choice between competing and cooperating – something we need to flip the switch on even at the level of warring and trading nations.

Although we can revert to dominance and submission games. That does also work even if it subverts the more civilised approach we have tried to construct through language and rationality.

Rather than blame, I would more likely say responsibility or accountability. As you note that’s in relation to causality as it applies to human action. I intended to avoid all the complications associated with that by limiting the discussion to non-intentional causality. — T Clark

Hah. But my argument would be that the mechanical notion of causality only arises within the context of intentional being. As Hoffmann shows, life begins at the point that a mechanical logic starts to get imposed on warm and wet entropic world.

So this is the irony. We are driven to thinking of Nature in terms of buttons and levers, or switches and ratchets, because that is how intentionality can become a thing.

Nature is its own thing – still a system, but a physical one ruled by centralising tendencies rather than deliberate intentions. And life and mind then introduce mechanical form – a structure of counterfactual switching – so as to build up its own semiotic brand of complexification.

Life and mind are what set up Nature as a new cause and effect tale. Flipping an informational switch can be the actual efficient cause of a resulting physical effect. Reach for the light button and that is the definite reason something happened.

Nature sort of vaguely has a causal structure in this fashion. A single falling grain of sand can be blamed for the avalanche that followed on the critically poised sloping side of a sand hill.

But add models to nature and a rigid counterfactual logic can be imposed on the pattern of material events. We go from the analog to the digital. Causality itself changes state from the materially real to the mathematically ideal.

There is a continuity in terms of the systems view of causality, but also that great stonking discontinuity in the topological organisation of that causality. And it is the notion of mechanical causality – the logic of the counterfactual switching mechanism – that both bridges and divides these two worlds. It is the switch that implements what Howard Pattee dubbed the epistemic cut on which life and mind depend. The epistemic cut that separates the informational model from the entropic world.

Pattee is the constraints guy, by the way. He made the distinction between holonomic and non-holonomic constraints. Or the constraints that entropic nature just has, and the constraints that informational models can construct and add to regulate that world in a mechanical fashion.

If you want to expand your causal vocabulary, Pattee has done a lot in that area.

Collingwood's abstruse concept is over my untrained head — Gnomon
Here’s an idea— if you don’t understand a word don’t use it.

I simply construe the term to mean that the conclusions follow logically from the premises. — Gnomon
This is not correct. — T Clark

If I don't understand a word, I Google it.
*1 is ambiguous & abstruse. *2 is the definition I mentioned.

If "logical efficacy" does not refer to "conclusions that follow from premises" based on "measured effects", then what does it mean? I had to Google "absolute presuppositions" to see that it's an arcane term for Faith. Which is obviously meaningful to believers, but logical? :smile:

*1. R.G. Collingwood's concept of "logical efficacy" refers to the power of certain fundamental beliefs, which he called "absolute presuppositions," to give rise to questions and structure an entire field of inquiry. In his work An Essay on Metaphysics, he argued that these presuppositions are neither true nor false and cannot be verified empirically. However, they are still meaningful because of their logical power to frame our thinking.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Collingwood%E2%80%99s+logical+efficacy

*2. "Logical efficacy" describes a situation in clinical trials and other contexts where an intervention's measured effect (efficacy) is consistent with and logically follows from the effects observed in its constituent subgroups. It's crucial for accurately interpreting trial results, especially in the presence of patient subgroups with differential responses, and ensures that the overall treatment effect falls within the range of the subgroup effects. For example, if a drug is efficacious in a marker-positive subgroup but not in a marker-negative subgroup, the drug's overall efficacy must be somewhere between those two values.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=logical+efficacy
Note --- The premises for logical thinking are supposed to be based on "measured effects", not on Faith without evidence.

Sorry it took so long for me to respond.

But my argument would be that the mechanical notion of causality only arises within the context of intentional being. — apokrisis

This makes sense, although I hadn’t put it in these terms to myself before. Maybe it’s really another way of saying what I was trying to say in the OP

This makes sense, although I hadn’t put it in these terms to myself before. — T Clark

Remember that life is a ratchet. And what better embodies an intent than a ratchet?

From OP :

If I hit a cue ball and it bounces off the bumper and into the eight ball which goes in the corner pocket, what caused the eight ball to move into the pocket? Me? The cue? The cue ball? The pool table? My muscles and bones? The electrons in the outer valence orbital of the atoms at the surface of the ball that exert repulsive force as they approach each other? My mother who gave birth to me? My friends who convinced me to go to the bar? The car that I rode in to get to the bar? The star that created all the elements that make up the pool balls? — T Clark

But my argument would be that the mechanical notion of causality only arises within the context of intentional being. — apokrisis

This quote is much more to the point than the rambling OP of opposition to some vague notion of imparted motion and being.

Causation is a concept about a process, not a physical or static thing. Which is why Aristotle postulated a logically necessary First Cause, presumably intentional, to serve as a metaphorical answer to open-ended causation riddles.

But even a theoretical notion of an intentional Designer, who set in motion all the subsequent steps in the 14B year old chain of intermediate causes, sets some people's teeth on edge. As a sop to the sensitive, I sometimes use the notion of a hypothetical impersonal anonymous Programmer, who caused the program of Evolution to begin computing the natural world that we experience moment-to-moment, but remember as a continuous meaningful memory.

If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. So, inquiring philosophers resort to metaphors. :smile:


Evolutionary programming is an evolutionary algorithm, . . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_programming

Thinking of evolution as a program can be a useful way to grasp the concept of an iterative process of adaptation and optimization. However, it's critical to remember that this is a metaphor.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=9c8fe5677d44d698&sxsrf=AE3TifNNUNrHzkPptcp0w_zJxdxq9Aeypg:1759526155597&q=Does+evolution+work+like+a+program+pdf&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyz-jb-YiQAxUsRzABHessKnsQ1QJ6BAg9EAE&biw=1173&bih=791&dpr=1.09

If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. — Gnomon

My argument is instead the one to be found in Anaximander, Peirce and quantum field theory. The Cosmos exists as the constraint on possibility. It emerges not from fundamental intentionality nor from fundamental mechanistic cause but from the fundamental vagueness of unorganised free potential. An essential state of everythingness that then must start to self-cancel until it becomes reduced to some coherently organised somethingness. A realm of inevitable structure.

Something can’t come from nothing. But also everything not only can be reduced to something, it indeed must do so.

If everything is busy happening, then the opposite of that is trying to happen too. And so the great self-cancellation starts. Everything starts heading towards zero. Nothingness is the ultimate destiny.

But that takes time. And while it is happening, complexities can arise for a time along the way. In short we have the Big Bang universe that is falling into its own heat sink. An explosion of hot possibilities being annihilated, expanded and diluted until all that is left is as close to a true void as is possible.

So reality is emergent. But its trajectory is not from nothing to something but instead from everything to nothing via the passing existence of somethingness.

We might be at the height of what we can mean by intentionality as we are also at the height of what we might mean by classicality and its mechanistic order. But that doesn’t make that state fundamental from the cosmic point of view even if it does seem fundamental to the emergent existence of us - as a passing pattern of nature with a particularly intricate topological order.

rambling OP of opposition to some vague notion — Gnomon

HA!!

My argument is instead the one to be found in Anaximander, Peirce and quantum field theory. The Cosmos exists as the constraint on possibility. It emerges not from fundamental intentionality nor from fundamental mechanistic cause but from the fundamental vagueness of unorganised free potential. An essential state of everythingness that then must start to self-cancel until it becomes reduced to some coherently organised somethingness. A realm of inevitable structure. — apokrisis

Ouch! That kind of complexified conjecturing makes my amateur philosopher head hurt. It's so far over my little pointy pate, that I probably shouldn't even comment. Do all those polysyllabic words add-up to agreement or disagreement with my quoted summation (#) of the Argument Against Causation?
# If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. — Gnomon :worry:

Note --- I interpret First Cause to be logically & necessarily eternal & intentional Essence instead of temporal & accidental Substance. Otherwise, the chain of Chance would have no beginning or end . . . . just one "damn thing" after another forever : aimless, randomized, disorganized, self-canceling, structureless, nothingness.
Sans intention, does Everythingness, Organized Somethingness, & Inevitable Structure, explain the Ontological question : "why something instead of nothing?"
Sans Intention, how could Chance cause anything other than Entropy? :chin:


In Spinoza's philosophy, "nature eternal" refers to his concept of God as Deus sive Natura (God or Nature), an absolutely infinite and eternal substance that encompasses all reality, having no beginning or end and existing by the necessity of its own nature.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=spinoza+nature+eternal
Note --- Spinoza was not aware that cosmic expansion implied a beginning of space-time. So, he assumed that Nature was an eternal cycle instead of a linear expansion. Today, we must take the evidence of an ontological origin into account. And one resolution would be to ascribe an endless cycle of reincarnation of the Deus Natura, as postulated in the Multiverse theory. A sequentially-instantiated-necessity. Ooops! More polysyllabic terminology. :yikes: