The section on 'Complex Systems' doesn't actually mention causation. — bert1

I think you’re right, I should have been clearer about what was caused and what wasn’t. On the other hand, that’s sort of the point. Here is the salt marsh sitting out there by the ocean just existing and changing based on the behavior of a very complex biological and physical system. What’s actually causing what out there? Can you point to something causing something else?

But isn't my argument here that holism means all four of Aristotle's four causes. And reductionism just means material and efficient cause. Or even in very reduced renderings, just efficient cause. Closed patterns of logical entailment. The stuff of logical atomism. — apokrisis

From what I've read in your posts, Aristotle's four causes are a major organizing principle of your metaphysics. I must admit I don't get it. I think I understand the four types of cause, but I don't see them as a particularly useful or interesting. I think there are other, better ways of seeing things. I've tried to lay that out in this thread.

So that is why I don't understand why you would seem to say you would rather let go completely of causality – and in return for what exactly – while I instead make causality my preoccupation. — apokrisis

My claim is that in many cases, focusing on cause makes it harder to account for context. Even worse, it makes it much harder to even be aware of it. When you then start pushing buttons and pulling levers, you get results that don't achieve the goals you intend. Most things are not caused in any simple easy to trace way. The salt marsh I described is out there in the world doing the kinds of things salt marshes do. What's causing that? It's dozens of different factors interacting with each in a complex pattern. What does the idea of cause provide in that kind of situation.

Causality is the primary metaphysical fact. It is the basis of any explanation or narrative we might have. — apokrisis

You are preoccupied with causality, I am preoccupied with metaphysics. I have a lecture I give ad nauseum about my understanding. Here's what I wrote in the OP:

"causality" is a metaphysical concept, by which I mean it represents a point of view, a perspective, not a fact. As R.G. Collingwood might say, the Principle of Sufficient Reason - everything must have a reason or a cause - is an absolute presupposition, not a proposition. Absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, they have what Collingwood calls "logical efficacy" - they are useful. — T Clark

Collingwood wrote "Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking."

I wonder how much of our disagreement comes from a difference of understanding of what metaphysics is and how it applies. As Collingwood indicates, a metaphysics applies to a particular kind of thinking at a particular time, it’s not universal. I don’t reject the idea of causality completely, I just believe it’s not always the right way of looking at things.

So – with my ecology hat on – the causal explanation for climate change is as plain as the nose on your face. Nothing would even have gone wrong if the damn planet had the atmospheric physics which would have released the heat all this industrial burning was producing rather than trapping it with the greenhouse gases the burning also created. — apokrisis

And I guess I look at it from the other side. We have climate change because people made decisions based on simplistic causes, ignoring the full context of the actions they implemented.

Those are what I facetiously call "Faith communities" because their worldviews are based on non-empirical Axioms. As Hume noted, specific Evidence & formal Logic may support the general (universal) conclusions, but do not prove them. The degree of Faith may be measured in terms of Bayesian Belief*2. — Gnomon

What you call “faith communities” I call “metaphysical positions.” They are unavoidable and, as I’ve noted many times, cannot be proven or falsified.

But seriously, I think you're using the term "beautiful" here in a pretty broad way, so maybe a legal argument could be beautiful, but not like a sunset. This issue isn't a small one because the definition of "beauty" is obviously central to aesthetics and this whole conversation.

So, define "beauty" so that the term makes sense in claiming a legal brief is beautiful in some way as is a sunset beautiful so that the term can be applied to both. — Hanover

It’s a feeling I get when I read poetry or fiction. My primary aesthetic medium is the written word. I like music and visual arts, but my relationship to them is not as close. The feeling I’m talking about is the same one I get when I read anything well written—poetry, fiction, technical documents, legal documents, construction documents, philosophy, history, letters, emails, posts here on the forum. It’s the same feeling. Competence is beautiful.

What saith Collingswood on it? — Hanover

I’m not sure what Collingwood would say about beauty and I’m too lazy to go check. What he says about art is that it is a way for the artist to express their experience and share it with an audience.

Now think about it the other way : I take a walk in the woods. Does that affect, say, the orbit of Jupiter? Let's think about one of the countless human actions. Since there are so many, shouldn't they alter the orbit of Jupiter? — JuanZu

The situation you describe is no different in principle from the one I described about the LIGO system. You can claim that everything in the universe affects everything else, but at some point you have to limit the scope of the cause and effect in order to be able to say anything intelligible.

For convenience, perhaps, we impose boundaries on causes for effects; however, causes go all the way back… — PoeticUniverse

The point of my OP is that thinking about things that way is not necessarily useful and can be misleading.

I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all.
— T Clark

That is an idea completely baffling to me. How can you even think if not causally? What would that even look like? — apokrisis

This surprises me. I think of you as intellectually committed to a holistic approach. As I see it, reductionism and causality go hand-in-hand.

Well there is nothing wrong with efficient cause in itself. It is part of the Aristotelean package. And clearly it is the notion of cause that we humans have in front of mind. We are always looking for the switches to switch and the levers to pull. Where we fit into nature, into the flow of the world, is where we can insert a choice - a difference that makes a difference. — apokrisis

As a civil engineer, I’m one of those guys always looking for switches and levers. Over my career I’ve seen how disruptive that kind of approach can be—applying rational methods that ignore environmental and social context.

Context would be the facts about what constrains the possibilities as the other kind of facts. — apokrisis

Again, looking at my engineering experience, ignoring context is what leads to unintended consequences. It makes it impossible to pull those levers, push those buttons, and get the kind of results you expect and desire.

Then life and mind come along and note that this is the causality of physics. You are allowed to exist under the scope of becoming an informationally-complex dissipative structure. If you can add efficient cause – some system of levers and switches that unblock pent-up entropy flows – then physics will pay for you for that small service. Become the blades of vegetation intercepting the sun, become the little critters with legs, mouths and arses. Get focused on imposing a causal mechanics on the world and you can have a job for life, even if you accelerate the entropification of nature just a tiny bit. — apokrisis

I don’t get this. It seems wildly simplistic and optimistic. This is the kind of thinking that leads to climate change. Not only do you focus in unrealistically closely on the causes, but also focus in unrealistically closely on the results.

There are efficient causes and then there are overall conditions. Perhaps the overall conditions for the evolution of humans would not have obtained if the asteroid had not hit. — Janus

What are the efficient causes of evolution?

Some seem to consider overall conditions to be equivalent to final causation not efficient causation. — Janus

I don’t get that. It’s certainly different than my understanding of final cause.

No. I mean, is the discontinuity in the chain of causality something that we simply draw subjectively so that we do not have to go to infinity, or is it something objective in the world, that there is actually a type of discontinuity in the causality of the world that explains why we explain some things better with a specific causality and not with just any causality? — JuanZu

Do distant galaxies influence everyday activities here on earth? Sure, recent studies of gravity waves show they can have an influence from billions of light years away, but very, very minimally. Very very, very minimally. So minimally that it makes no sense to consider it in any evaluation of causality here. The LIGO detectors can reportedly measure disturbances of less than the diameter of an atom. Please don’t ask me how.

The question is: when we separate the events in question from their surrounding environment, is it simply an epistemic construct or is there really an objective kind of disconnect? — JuanZu

I call causality a metaphysical principle. Is that what you mean by "epistemic construct?"

So causality is the narrative we tell, the map of how to get to where we want. But then philosophy came along and started injecting a little more metaphysical rigour into this exercise. What was causality as a narrative at the level of the Cosmos itself? — apokrisis

Again--but sometimes the concept of causality is just not a useful one.

Is everything causally connected to everything else? If I throw a ball from the fifth floor, I know that the cause of the ball falling is because I threw it. And I don't have to look for the cause in, say, the movements of the stars. So it seems that not everything is causally connected to everything else. There are limits to causal influence. — JuanZu

how far should we extend our view in casual relationships? If it is true that the movement of the stars does not explain why the ball fell to the ground from the fifth floor, it follows that there is a kind of causal disconnection. In that sense, one might say: there is continuity and there is causal discontinuity. — JuanZu

I think you're talking about the same thing I was when I discussed the idea of cause only being useful when we can separate the events in question from their surrounding environment. If I wanted, I could find a causal connection between the stars and the ball, but it is not relevant to the question at hand.

For philosophers "causality" is a metaphysical notion, whereas for physicists it's a practical principle, to aid in understanding how & why things happen. — Gnomon

Causality is practical, useful, to scientists sometimes. Sometimes not. Physicists more often than biologists.

Ironically, that swampy quicksand logic allows people of Faith to claim that their metaphysical "reasons" & divine revelations are just as valid as a scientist's physical-empirical Facts & Faxioms. — Gnomon

I don't see how the kinds of issues I'm talking about have anything to do with religion.

So, where does that leave us public reasoners on a non-empirical (metaphysical) philosophical forum? Are the conjunctions in our reasoning so weak that none of our arguments will hang-together under the universal solvent of skepticism? Are our fundamental (self-evident) axioms only valid within a single isolated-but-united Faith community (-isms)? — Gnomon

I'm confused. Denying that of the idea of cause is always a useful one has nothing to do with skepticism.

Causality as efficient cause is not wrong. It just is always shaped by some prevailing context. — apokrisis

It seems to me that the cause people are talking about when they talk about everything having a cause is efficient cause. Do you disagree? Maybe I should have called this thread "Against Efficient Cause."

When you say "context" I think you are saying something similar to what I meant when I wrote "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..."

Constraint removes possible futures, but normally still leaves many possibilities open. Accidents can happen. Asteroids could be on paths that just miss the Earth as there was no constraint on that fact. — apokrisis

Sure, when we're talking about asteroids or artillery rounds, but what about when we're talking about complex systems like the salt marsh I discussed.

So causal accounts are flexible like this. We learn to make good choices about how much events are to be explained by contextual circumstances and how much by accidents or free choices. — apokrisis

I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all.

I just wrote what I consider a most beautiful work of art. It argued that the condominium covenants did not bind the association to protect against water heater leaks from individual units, but that obligation rested entirely with the individual unit owners. It was a work so maginficent, it made the Sistine Chapel look like a steaming pile of cat shit. — Hanover

But seriously, don’t you ever read a legal argument or decision that you think is beautiful, wonderful? I do.

I find beauty in the diversity of personalities, including those so boring they find beauty in blueprints. — Hanover

For what it’s worth, I’ve also found beauty in well thought out and well written legal decisions.

https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

That is, there can be more beauty in an analytical essay than a limerick. — Hanover

I have made the argument that there is beauty in a set of construction specifications.

Language itself or how language is used? — Tom Storm

I must admit it was just a passing fancy and I haven’t put much thought in it. I guess that means I don’t know.

Do you have a favourite aesthetic experience out of poetry, painting, architecture or nature? — Tom Storm

Hard to pick just one. For poetry I’ll say “The Black Cottage” by Robert Frost. For architecture — Machu Picchu.

You're right. This is probably the sorriest thread I ever started here. — RogueAI

Congratulations.

Scientists are now seriously asking if humans were seeded by aliens — RogueAI

The article doesn’t say anything about humans being seeded by aliens. It says that some of the components for life might have been transported to earth on meteorites or comets.

For discussion: How do you think the media should cover these events? — BitconnectCarlos

This is simple. Murders are generally discussed as local news, which is appropriate. When you expand the discussion beyond that, you’ve already made a judgment that brings debates about social issues into the discussion, often inappropriately or unnecessarily - as you note, to make political points.

The whole process is flawed and biased.

I don't understand why you removed substance from my definition, but something that objectively exists is a substance, as opposed to something that subjectively exists, such as an experience. — MoK

The definition of “substance” I was using refers to a physical material. The word has several other meanings, but they don’t seem applicable to this case.

the brain cannot produce the mind and be affected by the mind at the same time. — MoK

Yes, it can.

Biology, chemistry, etc., are reducible to physics. That means that we are dealing with weak emergence in these cases. — MoK

This is not correct.

To me, abstraction and imagination are examples of thinking. Remembering, free association, etc. are not. — MoK

As I’ve noted several times in this thread, you are using non-standard definitions for words. Your and my arguments are incommensurable, by which I mean, our underlying arguments are not resolvable.

Let’s leave it at that.

↪T Clark That's an interesting Pinker quote, although I myself frequently think in English sentences - not that I regard that as typical or as something everyone would do. Others have said here there are people who can read and speak perfectly well without ever being aware of a stream of thought in their minds. I think my 'bottom line' with respect to AI (with which I now interact every day) is that LLMs are not subjects of experience or thought. And if ask any of them - Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT - they will affirm this. They are uncannily like real humans, right down to humour and double entrendes, but they're reflecting back at us the distillation of billions of hours of human thought and speech. — Wayfarer

After this whole discussion started, I went doing a little research on Google and in the SEP. What I found is consistent with what you’re writing. There seem to have been two approaches to this question - one that uses a language-based approach and another that uses the kind of processes that are described in an LLM. I guess it is controversial which one is the proper one to use in this kind of a situation.

self awareness and introspection is at the core of all understanding of personal need. — Jack Cummins

There’s a great deal of skepticism, even hostility, here on the forum to the idea that introspection, self-awareness, and intuition are fundamental to philosophy.

My point is that your quote is of a position that is generally challenged and not widely held. — Hanover

I’m aware that it’s controversial, but that wasn’t my main point. I was just trying to show that it is unreasonable to assume that language is necessarily required for thought.

They stress that language is not primarily a system of communication, but a system of thought. Communication is a secondary use of an internal capacity for structuring and manipulating concepts. Animal communication systems (e.g., vervet alarm calls) are qualitatively different, not primitive stages of language. — Wayfarer

This is what Stephen Pinker had to say in “The Language Instinct.” I’m not sure if this contradicts what you’ve written or not.

Any particular thought in our head embraces a vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a single head, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because the internal representations are the imagination. We end up with the following picture. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.

I was going to bring up A Man Without Words. Someone here brought him to my attention several months ago. Ildefonso was born totally deaf. Nobody ever tried to communicate with him until he was 27. He literally had no language. — Patterner

This is what Stephen Pinker had to say in “The Language Instinct.”

In her recent book A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for “cat.” A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the sign for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities.

An explanation is needed that can account for the phenomena we call mental or conscious. — JuanZu

The fact I might not be able to account for the phenomena right now doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation.

What is the neurological configuration from which we can deduce the glass of water as a conscious experience? — JuanZu

That is the essence of emergence. An emergent phenomena can be shown to be completely consistent with the principles of a lower level of organization. For example, all living phenomena must be consistent with the principles of physics and chemistry. That doesn’t mean that the emergent phenomenon can be predicted, constructed, or deduced from the principles of the lower level of organization. Again - the principles of biology cannot generally be deduced from the principles of chemistry or physics. In the same manner, mental phenomena cannot be predicted based on neurological or biological principles.

we could be beings without consciousness and without experience, and yet the neurological explanation would still persist and remain valid — JuanZu

That seems obviously false to me. Can you provide some evidence?

the mind is … something that objectively exists and has a set of abilities and properties, — MoK

I’m OK with that as edited.

it cannot be an emergent thing. — MoK

Of course it can. Life emerges out of chemistry. Chemistry emerges out of physics. Mind emerges out of neurology. Looks like you’re understanding of emergence is different from mine.

That is a very broad definition, which I don't agree with. — MoK

But that’s what it means. As I’ve said before, if you want to make up definitions for words, it’s not really philosophy. You’re just playing a little game with yourself.

But isn't your intuition that your mind is also a thing that you can ascribe qualities to? — RogueAI

No. I'm trying to think of it that way now, but not having any luck. — Patterner

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that something that seems completely obvious to one person is not even imaginable for another.

My view of art is that it is a form of language, and the expression through painting is just another way of speaking, writing, or grunting. — Hanover

I’m not being particularly facetious when I say maybe it is language that is a form of art.

It is interesting that you and I perceived the same -- The girl felt self-conscious about something. I guess the expression of her eyes and the innocent position of her hands caught our attention. — javi2541997

Collingwood says the purpose of art is to express the artist’s experience. Our goal in looking at art is to try to share that same experience with them.

I have big issues in thinking about the nature of inner and outer reality..The inner perspective is a way of focusing on the outer, but it is not absolute, because it may hold limitations of others's perspectives. It may end up with a form of philosophy shoegazing. Being able to look within and outwards simultaneously, in thinking of needs, self and others may be an intricate process in thinking about the experience of needs. — Jack Cummins

This will probably just confuse things, but I have come to think that all philosophy is inward looking, introspection. Everything we do here is looking at ourselves, self awareness. When we think we are looking out into the world, we are really only looking at ourselves, looking out at the world.

This probably is not the right place to take this any further. I don’t want to distract from your thread.

Girl with Peaches by Valentin Serov. — javi2541997

I was thinking about it some more. Maybe the girl was playing by herself, engrossed, and then someone, maybe one of her parents, came in and she became self-conscious.

Thanks for keeping this thread alive.

I can see that the dichotomy between inwards and outwards exist to some extent. However, the panorama of this may be a little more complex, — Jack Cummins

Sure, I was generalizing to get my point across. But I still think that generalization tells something significant about the differences between the two styles of philosophy.

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea*. The conscious mind** can experience and create an idea. An AI is a mindless thing, so it does not have access to ideas. — MoK

There are plenty of other mental events that come to mind that might be considered emergent. As we’ve discussed previously, as I see it, the mind itself is emergent from the neurological and physiological processes of the nervous system and body.

Beyond that, this is a circular argument - your evidence that AI can’t think is that it is mindless, which means “having or showing no ability to think, feel, or respond.”

… thinking is defined as a process in which we work on known ideas with the aim of creating a new idea — MoK

No. Thinking is:

cognitive behavior in which ideas, images, mental representations, or other hypothetical elements of thought are experienced or manipulated. In this sense, thinking includes imagining, remembering, problem solving, daydreaming, free association, concept formation, and many other processes.

You’re using non-standard definitions again.

. It probably represents a far 'softer' form of thinking than in Western philosophy. — Jack Cummins

The way I think about it is that eastern philosophy looks inward and western philosophy looks outward.

Here are some thoughts from the Tao Te Ching - Stefan Stenudd’s translation.

Verse 44

Your name or your body,
What is dearer?
Your body or your wealth,
What is worthier?
Gain or loss,
What is worse?

Greed is costly.
Assembled fortunes are lost.
Those who are content suffer no disgrace.
Those who know when to halt are unharmed.
They last long.

Verse 46
When the Way governs the world,
The proud stallions drag dung carriages.
When the Way is lost to the world,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater crime than desire.
There is no greater disaster than discontent.
There is no greater misfortune than greed.

Therefore:
To have enough of enough is always enough.

My take on this - Desire for accomplishment, acclaim, status, wealth distracts us, makes it harder to be aware of, our Te, our intrinsic virtuosities, the voice inside us.

Chuang Tzu wrote - “ What I call sharp hearing is not hearkening to others, but rather hearkening to oneself, nothing more.”