The Humean issue is only about the certainty that can be ascribed to some causal belief, — apokrisis

For me, that's a big part of the issue with cause. To say that something is caused when we can't be certain of, or even close to knowing, what causes what, which is generally the case, is meaningless. What we call "causality" is an un-disentanglable tangle.

What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes. — apokrisis

I'll say it again - I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but to call it "causality" no longer makes sense.

Seems you would jump straight to the pragmatic vindication, which is inadequate.

Additionally, "If it works, it is true" is false.

Seems you would jump straight to the pragmatic vindication — Banno

Yes. Always.

Newton was the guy who invented the modern model of causality that in general opinion replaced the old Aristotelean one.

So if that ain't explicit enough, is this a "first rule of fight club..." kind of deal? :razz:

What Newton did was make it clear that a mechanical description of nature could be produced by dividing it into what needed an external cause - an impressed force, or vis impressa - to produce a change, and what instead could be considered the uncaused, even it did seem to be changing.

So space and time were broken out as a backdrop - an a-causal void. And material things were given the new local property of vis insita - inertia, or a matching resistance to having their state changed.

It was all about constructing a story of causality that made use of the maths of symmetry.

A flat and infinite Euclidean backdrop of space and time put them outside the causal story as being simply the Atomists' void. This fixed stage underwrote the Galilean symmetries that made local change now "a point of view".

And then the atoms were given this primal property of inertial mass. The materiality was also abstracted away in fashion that put it outside the system of explanation being developed by making it one of the axioms.

So masses no longer needed a causal reason not to move (as energy-conserving inertial translations and rotations). They only needed a causal reason - a vis impressa - to decelerate or accelerate.

Thus what Newton achieved was a very careful dissection of causality that reduced it to the parts that were definitely causal, and the parts that definitely weren't - so far as the new mechanical model of causality was concerned.

The success of this mechanical conception of causality is the stuff of legend. As is the fact that physics has been having to backfill it with Aristotelean metaphysics ever since - the holism of general relativity and quantum field theory, maybe even one day a final theory of quantum gravity.

So yeah, nah. The Principia is all about a model of causality that strips the reasons for the states of the world down to a bare-bones, mathematical account. It explicitly makes effective cause the measurable "difference that makes a difference" against a backcloth world that is a host of differences not making a difference. Or a set of mathematical symmetries.

AP went off on its own weird slant on this issue, like it did with a lot of stuff. But don't fall for the slogans.

Or, alternatively, that there is a bigger picture, but it doesn't make sense to call it "causality" anymore. — T Clark

What? After Newton narrowed the definition, it becomes forbidden to continue to follow physics and tack back towards Aristotle's larger definition?

To say that something is caused when we can't be certain of, or even close to knowing, what causes what, which is generally the case, is meaningless. What we call "causality" is an un-disentanglable tangle. — T Clark

Yet you seem to believe in pragmatism and its inductive confirmation. And you seem to believe that relativity and quantum theory say something pragmatically valid about reality.

Surely the truth here is just that disentangling the strands of metaphysics' central endeavour is ... a lot of hard intellectual graft?

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but to call it "causality" no longer makes sense. — T Clark

It still makes the same counterfactual sense it always made. If you take away the causes, does the same thing still happen?

If it does, then yes, maybe causality is just some dastardly illusion with no rhyme or reason, or some hidden divine puppeteer driving the show.

Or alternatively, you can stick with philosophical naturalism and instead conclude you haven't quite understood the complex nature of causality. More work needed.

Or alternatively, you can stick with philosophical naturalism and instead conclude you haven't quite understood the complex nature of causality. More work needed. — apokrisis

I still have lots of thinking to do on the subject. This has been a really useful thread for me in that regard.

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. You need to become fluent in both reductionism and holism to see how they are in fact the two poles of the one larger epistemic dichotomy.

So first comes the reductionist conviction - the standard model idea of efficient cause, or chains of cause and effect.

Then comes the holist backlash - the rejection of the mechanical model and the discovery of other "logics" like Aristotle's four causes.

Finally, after thesis and antithesis, comes the resolution. Colliding billiard balls sit at one extreme pole of our conception of causality, the random decay of a particle sits at the other.

Get up close and the two billiard balls in fact never touch. The space between gets filled by virtual photon exchanges - or some kind of story that is all about quantum holism.

And stand back to watch a particle decay carefully, you will discover that it then never does. Your continuous observation keeps resetting its decay clock - the quantum Zeno effect - and prevents it behaving in its usual "a-causal" fashion.

So there are opposing limits that bound causality. And limits are precisely the bounds that can never be reached, only approached with arbitrary precision.

It all makes sense in the end. Or at least we can see how this is the project on which scientific theories of everything are now deeply engaged.

... despite the foolish AP tropes of old Oxbridge fuddie-duddies.

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. You need to become fluent in both reductionism and holism to see how they are in fact the two poles of the one larger epistemic dichotomy.

So first comes the reductionist conviction - the standard model idea of efficient cause, or chains of cause and effect.

Then comes the holist backlash - the rejection of the mechanical model and the discovery of other "logics" like Aristotle's four causes.

Finally, after thesis and antithesis, comes the resolution. Colliding billiard balls sit at one extreme pole of our conception of causality, the random decay of a particle sits at the other. — apokrisis

I have no trouble holding two apparently contradictory ideas in my head at the same. I remember in high school physics when we talked about particle-wave duality. It struck me suddenly that the universe doesn't work the way our minds say it should. Why? Because it's the universe. That's not why I want to reject causality. In an earlier post you wrote:

What this thread demonstrates is just what a baked in conception of causality folk have. They believe that the laws of mechanics, logic and computation all point to the same small narrow device of the "cause and effect" connection of temporal chains of efficient causes. — apokrisis

That's what I'm responding to. I'm chewing on your broader definition of causality before I try to swallow it.

And stand back to watch a particle decay carefully, you will discover that it then never does. — apokrisis

I looked this up and didn't understand. Can't you observe a particle decay without affecting it just by detecting the decay product?

It's rather like learning to be bilingual. — apokrisis

Je parle un peu Francais.
Ich spreche Deutsch Ein bisschen.
Me talk English good.

But if you frame your notion of final cause so that it only applies to humans, or even organisms, then you rob it of that kind of causal status as it is not a necessary part of nature as a whole. It becomes just a local accident of evolutionary history.

So if you want to argue for intelligent design - big daddy in the sky - you still have to try all the usual rhetorical tricks to make it seem you are making a solid causation-based argument.

Note that the whole "everything needs a cause" creating God is yet further evidence that a narrow "cause and effect", or efficient cause, model of causality is too limited. A larger model of causality is required — apokrisis

I get what you mean. It's better to leave Aristotle's 4 causes unmolested. I simply wanted to know which of these 4 causes (one/a combination) is being referred to in the Cosmological Argument (first cause) for God's existence.

Can't you observe a particle decay without affecting it just by detecting the decay product? — T Clark

A quantum jump between two states is meant to have nothing connecting them in the spacetime between those jumps. No story of efficient causes laying the unbroken causal trail.

Thus the quantum Zeno effect follows as nature only lets you see the before and after, not the during. If you continually watch the particle, this prevents its "causeless" leap from ever happening. If instead you tell the particle to let me know when its all over, then it is free to jump ... whenever ... because the freedom to be random.

But as I say, that is as much a description of the holistic extreme as it would be to invoke some locally concealed cause like "hidden variables".

And you can make weak measurements to get mixed states. You can sort of slow down the quantum jump to a jerky succesion of film frames.

So between the two limits, you also get the quasi-classical - or quasi-quantum - realm as the intermediate state ... which is hardly talked about.

Thanks.

I simply wanted to know which of these 4 causes (one/a combination) is being referred to in the Cosmological Argument (first cause) for God's existence. — Agent Smith

Good question. First cause seems to conflate both efficient and final cause. Ask a theist for more clarity I guess. :wink:

Good question. First cause seems to conflate both efficient and final cause. Ask a theist for more clarity I guess — apokrisis

:ok: That's a good answer! :up: Perhaps design (formal cause) + creator (efficient cause) + telos (final cause).

@apokrisis

Let's say we just get rid of idea of causality. Doesn't your way of seeing things just revert to the hierarchical system we talked about last week - laws from below, constraints from above? What advantage do you get when you add cause to the mix?

It’s downward acting constraints and upwards constructing degrees of freedom. So it is a model of Aristotelean causality where the constraints are the global context that shapes the action, and the degrees of freedom are the local efficient/material causes that give the constraints some action to shape.

So it is a full four causes model as described by the maths of hierarchy theory.

You can’t claim that a hierarchy - or a “basic triadic structure”, as Stan Salthe defined it - represents the universal self-organising causality of nature, and yet also we can then just get shot of the idea of causality.

The deep structure of causality has been the only thing under discussion. :grin:

Sorry quick recap. When we are talking through Hume's problems of induction are we saying in summary (I'm looking for the right wording here) that the notion of causality is a custom acquired by experience and the principles of inference (from cause to effect) can't be demonstrated using logic?

Sounds good to me.

But what then is the epistemic upshot? If we can't have absolute belief that reality is causal, then we can still - inductively - constrain our scope for reasonable doubt.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, let's get on with treating it as a duck until something fails.

It is a matter of historical record that both special relativity and quantum mechanics eventually gave us good reason to want to update the Newtonian model of causality.

And the step to unite the quantum and relativistic views - quantum gravity - has led to a lot of folk, like the loop theory guys, treating causality as a fundamental ingredient when it comes to weaving a spacetime metric.

It all starts with an action that has a direction - the 1D quantum fluctuation that is a first cause, but without yet the world where it could also be producing some effect.

The Planck scale defines a causal grain - the point where the vagueness of uncertainty starts to become the counterfactual definiteness of a spacetime metric populated by thermal events.

So it is silly to say that science doesn't believe in causality. The whole set-up of science is pragmatic rather than logicist.

Truths aren't deducted. Models are deducted. And then their predictions are subject to inductive confirmation. The results are accepted as believable to the degree they aren't doubtable.

And then all along, right from Aristotle, the search has been for causal explanations. A scientific theory is a formal model of some causal system.

Finally, as I say, causality has continued to be a lively central topic. Why is special relativity so strange and quantum theory so weird if they didn't point to a drastic need to place Newtonian mechanics in its larger relativistic, quantum, and eventually quantum gravitational, causal context?

Let's say we just get rid of idea of causality. Doesn't your way of seeing things just revert to the hierarchical system we talked about last week - laws from below, constraints from above? What advantage do you get when you add cause to the mix? — T Clark

T Clark, from reading your replies in this thread, I suppose I still don't understand why in particular you seem to have an issue with causality. There is a motivation here. And that's not wrong. There is something about causality that leaves such a distaste in your mouth that you are more than willing to throw it all away.

That's an incredibly important thing to examine. We are not rational beings by nature, we are rationalizing beings by nature. When we figure out why we're rationalizing, why we're looking for a particular answer we desire, only then can we be rational.

I say this, because I have no particular love or hate for causality. Its just a word to me. I try listening to people's rejection of it, but I personally don't see a lot of logic here. Perhaps if we figure out why its so distasteful, then we can examine the issue in the way you seem to be looking for.

That's pretty much what Hume said. Since then much ink has been spilled in trying to show otherwise, then in claiming that it don't matter anyway. The pragmatic approach is that induction works, so don't ask, which seems to be what @T Clark would have us do. I'd opt for the view that, that the world suffers a degree of uniformity such that we can do physics and the other sciences is not that odd go even that both we and our languages arose within that very world. The difference between these two views is minimal, though, since both finish with "that's just the way things are".

The view Russell is I think rightly critiquing is that of causation as "event A is caused by event B, which in turn is cause by event C, and so on" - cause as a regularity. His criticism is mirrored in The Tratutus:

5.133 All inference takes place a priori.
5.134 From an elementary proposition no other can be inferred.
5.135 In no way can an inference be made from the existence of one state of affairs to the existence of another entirely different from it.
5.136 There is no causal nexus which justifies such an inference.
5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present.
Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

It seems from this SEP article that there has been some interesting developments to the contrary over the last twenty years of so - to my surprise. I might revisit these when time allows.

One way to think about it as that cause does not have much of a place in the sciences, say physics, but rather sits in metaphysics. Here's a quote from the Russell article:

...laws of probable sequence, though useful in daily life and in the infancy of a science tend to be displaced by quite different laws as soon as a science is successful.The law of gravitation will illustrate what occurs in any advanced science.In the motions of mutually gravitating bodies, there is nothing that can be called a cause, and nothing that can be called an effect; there is merely a formula. Certain differential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system, and which, given the configuration and velocities at one instant, or the configurations at two instants, render the configuration at any other earlier or later instant theoretically calculable.That is to say, the configuration at any instant is a function of that instant and the configurations at two given instants.This statement holds throughout physics, and not only in the special case of gravitation.But there is nothing that could be properly called " cause" and nothing that could be properly called "effect" in such a system.

Think of it as that cause does not play a part in physics, which involves more detailed analysis of functions rather than mere sequences of events; but that it is held by many to maintain a place in metaphysics, where it simplifies the philosopher's task by removing the need to follow the maths. You might notice even in this thread that folk's view on causation tends to follow their metaphysical prejudices rather than the physics. Physics, and the other sciences, just get on with it without having first to settle the many problems of causation.

Yes, I think you are right. It would be absurd to disregard 'causality' even if it hangs on custom or habit.

I am not philosopher but I have generally held that what we call science hangs on tentative models of reality that don't make proclamations of absolute truth. Ultimately we tend to take 'cause' as a presupposition.

Think of it as that cause does not play a part in physics, which inilvoevs more detailed analysis of functions rather than mere sequences of events; but that it is held by many to maintain a place in metaphysics, where it simplifies the philosopher's task by removing the need to follow the maths. You might notice even in this thread that folk's view on causation tends to follow their metaphysical prejudices rather than the physics. Physics, and the other sciences, just get on with it without having first to settle the many problems of causation. — Banno

Very useful and nicely worded.

It would be absurd to disregard 'causality' even if it hangs on custom or habit. — Tom Storm

:up:

I am not philosopher but I have generally held that what we call science hangs on tentative models of reality that don't make proclamations of absolute truth. Ultimately we tend to take 'cause' as a presupposition. — Tom Storm

To the first sentence, yes, scientific facts are held only tentatively. It would be an error - the error of scientism - to extend this view outside of science.

To the second sentence, the philosophical issue is whether we might rightly call causation a presupposition, as Kant supposed, or a rational conclusion, perhaps via induction, as pragmatism claims, or perhaps as some variation of the notion of a hinge proposition; or alternately as a notion that might be discarded, it being irrelevant except to metaphysicians.

presupposition, as Kant supposed, — Banno

Good point. I wasn't thinking Kant or transcendentals. I meant we hold the concept as an assumption and get on with things. We presuppose it works (pragmatically).

Yes; if it is anything it is a part of the background against which we perform. But the background, in this case, is not a part of the performance, which might continue without it.

The pragmatic approach is that induction works, so don't ask, — Banno

Pragmatism just means burying the mouldering corpse of logical atomism and moving right along in a commonsense fashion.

The view Russell is I think rightly critiquing is that of causation as "event A is caused by event B, which in turn is cause by event C, and so on" - cause as a regularity. — Banno

Yep. If you use logical atomism as your attack on logical holism, you wind up with nothing. Hence AP's rapid implosion.

Causality can't make sense unless the model includes both the holism and the atoms, or the global constraints and the local degrees of freedom.

Newtonian reversibility leads to the First Law of Thermodynamics - the conservation of energy. The collision on the billiard table seem to have no causal direction as you can run the film in reverse and it all looks perfectly good from the point of view of the Laws of Motion.

This is life from the point of view of the atomistic interactions where every action is symmetrically a reaction.

But then it only takes the smallest degree of finality - a statistical arrow of time that connects an energy source to an entropy sink - and you have the holism of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Suddenly all that blind and aimless reversibility discovers it shares an inevitable common future - the slippery slope that ends in an equilibrium.

You might notice even in this thread that folk's view on causation tends to follow their metaphysical prejudices rather than the physics. Physics, and the other sciences, just get on with it without having first to settle the many problems of causation. — Banno

I notice that to be a view which shows little familiarity with how physics, and the other sciences, in fact have been getting on with things ever since Newton made it a properly mathematical question - one based on the inductive evidence of quantified measurement rather than just a lot of anti-metaphysical verbiage.

T Clark, from reading your replies in this thread, I suppose I still don't understand why in particular you seem to have an issue with causality. — Philosophim

I don't know if you've noticed, but I spend a lot of time thinking about metaphysics. My cliched catchphrase - Metaphysical claims, what Collingwood calls "absolute presuppositions," are not true or false. They have no truth value. They are more or less useful. What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is when people fail to recognize their presuppositions are not somehow immutable aspects of reality.

Causality is metaphysics. The question I have is whether or not it is useful metaphysics. My intuition says "no," but I don't yet have good arguments to show that to my satisfaction. That's what this thread is about.

Another thing that raises my hackles is when people say that a certain position is obvious or self-evident. That's rarely, maybe never, true, but it shuts down argument. I was recently in a discussion like that about cause in another thread.

I meant we hold the concept as an assumption and get on with things. We presuppose it works (pragmatically). — Tom Storm

We would treat it as a counterfactual hypothesis. We are saying there are two choices here, either things have a cause or they don't. The job then is to define what the observable difference might be.

So is the decay of the atom caused or uncaused? Is it determined or is it random? Is it local or contextual? Does it in the larger analysis satisfy the principle of sufficient reason or fail it?

It is true that it does tend to get elevated to the exalted level of a key scientific principle - sufficient reason, or the principle of universal causation. It is just too hard to honestly doubt given the success of modelling the world in causal terms.

Yet still, that is what Aristotle's four cause analysis and other efforts to break down the general motherhood statement - every effect has a cause - is about.

Science has to refine its questions of nature as it works its way through mysteries like the apparent violations of causal order in special relativity, or the nonlocalism and indeterminacy of quantum interactions.

Taking causality seriously as a work in progress is how we can say, well classical Newtonianism remains a workable model within a small range of physical velocities and temperatures, but then that particular notion of causality must somehow be enlarged to keep adding these apparent counterfactuals into the scheme.

has some history on the topic of causation.

It is true that (causation) does tend to get elevated to the exalted level of a key scientific principle - sufficient reason, or the principle of universal causation. It is just too hard to honestly doubt given the success of modelling the world in causal terms. — apokrisis

We might all grant the success of the modelling, without the addition of "...in causal terms".

We might all grant the success of the modelling, without the addition of "...in causal terms". — Banno

How do we rule out astrology, homeopathy, miracles, fate, and anything else that might rely on the appeal to lucky coincidence in our cynical old eyes then?

Patterns must have generators. Or else the world just doesn't make sense and we should all give up and go home.