You're getting at a human-centric bias? If so, sounds plausible, but can you develop a more specific example? — Baden
Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but, as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable: to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.
- I.Berlin, p.
To say that causation (C) is direct or indirect or anything else is to tell a story. The story is never true, but it can be useful.
That is, C is a useful descriptive fiction that in the story itself is taken to be true. The mistake is to unreflectingly suppose that what is true in and for the story is true outside of and beyond that context.
You're missing my point. One way for you to see it is to try to explain exactly how asbestos causes illness. And you will see that asbestos never did and never will cause any illness.Asbestos only causes disease within the context of a fiction? — Count Timothy von Icarus
And you will see that asbestos never did and never will cause any illness...
The idea is that "cause" is an informal, convenient shorthand for complicated events that with respect to the events themselves is almost or entirely irrelevant, a fiction
Or another way: what exactly is a cause? I don't think there is any such thing as a cause - except, again of course, as convenient descriptive fiction
Cause," then, properly regarded, is like "truth." We can certainly talk about them, and usefully, but it's a big mistake to think they exist in themselves.
And of course having such a flaw deep in the foundations of any belief system can have explosively destructive consequences.
Does it? Truth is a noun, by assumption a person, place, or thing. The only "thing" it can be is an abstract noun. That is, truth as a genus, its species being true statements, the only thing them having in common being truth. So, no. Truth (itself) not an existing thing.Truth exists though no? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Bingo! And if informally you want to say "cause," not a problem (for me). But if formally you want to assert that the cause exists, then it's a fair question to ask what, where, when, why, and how it exists. And that a difficult - and I think ultimately impossible - set of questions to answer.Here is my position: it is useful to believe.... — Count Timothy von Icarus
Bingo!
and I think ultimately impossible - set of questions to answer.
When the sun rises it heats the ground. The causal linkage here seems pretty direct. When the Mets give up a hit it certainly seems like this is caused by the Dodger's players' bats hitting the ball. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think “distal” is a better term than “ultimate” because ultimate causes are never really ultimate, and are always also proximal to some effect in a chain. — Baden
Why are some stories useful and other ones not useful? — Count Timothy von Icarus
So the categorical statement that "asbestos causes disease" is categorically false. And this, really, isn't about asbestos or any thing else. It is about the usage and understanding of language and the traps and rabbit holes that people can fall into or walk into eyes wide shut.
Unfortunately, Anaxagoras’ mistake is still alive and well in his reductive physicalist descendants. Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape is a prime example here. Throughout the book, Harris points out that feelings of suffering or challenges to human flourishing can be correlated with changes in the brain. For instance, children in foster care show elevated stress hormone levels when compared to children from unseparated families. From this he draws the conclusion that “neuroscience” and “knowledge of the brain,” is the key to understanding morality, since morality relates to human well-being, and our experience of well-being relates to neuronal activity.
Harris would do well to reflect on Aristotle’s dictum that the “specific and concrete will be 'better known to us,' whereas what is more general will be that which is 'better known in itself.'"6 To be sure, Harris is correct that there are things we can learn about human flourishing and the human good from studying the brain (pace the common post-modern claim that the Good is simply arbitrary social convention). And it is certainly in some ways easier to study concrete phenomena, such as hormone levels, rather than general principles. However, Harris’ reductive account of morality is akin to claiming that we are best able to understand flight (the principles of lift, etc.), by looking at the individual cells making up the wings of all the animals that fly (i.e. a focus on the "many," to the exclusion of any unifying "one.")
Yet this is demonstrably not the best way to understand flight or lift. We did not learn to build machines that would let us fly through an intensive study of the chemistry at work in insect or bird wings. Rather we mastered the more general generating principles at work across all instances of heavier than air flight in nature. The fact that “the cells in insects' wings are necessary for flight” need not compel us to conclude that flight is best understood through a study of these cells, just as the fact that we need our brains to “know the Good” need not suggest that the Good is itself something that can be best known through studying neurons.
Utility in the eye of the beholder.why exactly are some stories more useful than others? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Apparently - please correct if I'm mistaken - you say that the airlines crashing into the WTC towers is what caused them to collapse. And no one as a practical matter would disagree. Unless he or she was a person actually interested in what made them fall. Because it is blindingly obvious that the airlines crashing into the WTC did not cause them to fall: they stood after the crashes for quite a while. And that's why yours a convenient descriptive fiction true in the context of the "story" being told. But beyond that, not true.I would not say that airliners crashing into the Twin Towers is what caused them to fall had I not seen airliners crash into the Twin Towers — Count Timothy von Icarus
Responsibility and cause are different words....Nonetheless, smoking is responsible.... — Count Timothy von Icarus
So the categorical statement that "asbestos causes disease" is categorically false. And this, really, isn't about asbestos or any thing else. It is about the usage and understanding of language and the traps and rabbit holes that people can fall into or walk into eyes wide shut.
This is just sophistry and bad faith lol — Count Timothy von Icarus
Utility in the eye of the beholder.
In most cases, sense experience is prior to the stories we tell (e.g. I would not say that airliners crashing into the Twin Towers is what caused them to fall had I not seen airliners crash into the Twin Towers). But if causes only exist in stories, then are our sense experiences uncaused, occuring as they do for "no reason at all?" Certainly they cannot have "causes" that are prior to our storytelling on this view. Nor could anything in nature have been caused prior to the emergence of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus
but that it doesn't map neatly onto the sensible world
Causal analysis maps neatly enough for us to cure many diseases, fly around the world, travel to space, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus
When people say "smoking causes lung disease," they do not mean "anyone who smokes will necessarily develop lung disease." — Count Timothy von Icarus
And there is also, I think, an urge to begin the casual story with a human. The trigger does not pull itself, the gun does not aim itself. And one cannot follow the causal story into the physiology and neurology of the individual without generalising them out of existence. The story becomes personal and no longer objective. — unenlightened
The argument then is that causation, despite it pervading our thought and practice, is not an objective feature of the world at large, in which humans are but a speck. This is not quite right, though, because we as intelligent agents could not have succeeded in this world without having an essentially accurate understanding of it. What we can say then is that causality, like regression towards the mean, is at least a good heuristic. But there is no metaphysically fundamental "law of cause and effect."
Which symmetries? Physics is time asymmetric at both the macro and micro scale, although there are time symmetric processes and "laws." Time is obviously asymmetrical in a big way at the global scale, and depending on how one views quantum foundations it is asymmetric in another way: collapse/decoherence occurs in only one direction. The latter can be interpreted in many ways though. — Count Timothy von Icarus
All deterministic processes are time-symmetric — SophistiCat
Not all. The evolution of entropy in a closed system is deterministic (entropy always increases), but it is not time-symmetric because entropy decreases in reverse time. — jgill
There are mathematical dynamical systems that function in simple ways that are not reversible. f(z)=z^2. — jgill
I put "physical laws" in scare quotes because many physical laws are simply close approximations of behavior. For instance, Newtons Laws are "good enough," but won't work even on the macro scale with multi-body problems. Nancy Cartwright's work on this would be the big example I can think of. Laws are symmetric because that's how the math used to describe them works, but nature doesn't necessarily correspond to such laws. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I say physics isn't time symmetric because there are several observed time asymmetries in physics, at both the smallest and the largest scales. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Arguing for time symmetry against all empirical evidence (no one has ever observed time running in anything but one direction, nor has anyone ever observed the defining elements of quantum mechanics, decoherence and collapse, running backwards, making for a very distinct observable asymmetry) seems to largely rely on the fact that the very mathematics used for descriptions assumes a sort of eternalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
As to the problem of disentangling causes, I think this is a problem that only results if one takes a very narrow view of causality as a sort of granular efficient causation. But what we are most interested in causes are general/generating principles, not the infinite (or practically infinite) number of efficient causes at work in any event. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You seem to want to dilute the concept so as to include just about any kind of mechanistic analysis, which is tantamount to eliminating causation — SophistiCat
Why should this be the case? I drop an object from a certain height and predict when it will hit the ground. How does this eliminate causality? There are a host of factors involved in this physical feat, and one can argue one's way through that jungle, rather than citing a principle cause, gravity. — jgill
(I wrote a math note a year or so ago that partitioned a causal chain temporally so that each link was formed by a collection of contributory causal effects added together to produce one complex number associated with that link. Just a mathematical diversion, but a vacation from the plethora of philosophical commentaries about the subject.) — jgill
But here I would question whether the notion of cause adds anything that is not already given in the mechanistic description. — SophistiCat
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