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That is a serious mistake if a theorist is not in constant touch with experimentalists and vice versa. This is well known in scientific circles.
Physicists and their related disciplines tend to divide themselves into the broad categories of “theorists” and “experimentalists;” but those lines are not hard. Many of us have done both but consider ourselves “more comfortable with our talents” in one of those areas. So, for example, experimentalists like myself will have worked on theory if nobody else was working directly on something that needed to be explored and tested at the moment. But the minute that task is over, we would hand the problem over to a theorist for further work. Besides, experimentalists have to be intimately familiar with the theory as do theorists with the status of experiments.
I have known some theorists who were capable of doing experimental work but have very strong preferences for not doing it and doing theory instead.
All of the effective theorists in physics and cosmology are in direct contact with the experiments; and they often participate in working out the experimental protocols and data analysis. A theorist working in complete isolation from the ongoing experimental work will soon become out of touch with reality.
I always have to laugh at that assumption. Proper training in science these days includes a good dose of epistemology and ontology.
I worked on the electron g-factor experiment for a couple of years before Hans Dehmelt blew me out of the water with his “table top” measurement that leaped-frogged my potential experimental precision by two orders of magnitude and got him the Nobel Prize. The electron g-factor is a classic example of a measurement that was once thought to be impossible in principle. Cleverness won out.
We all have been immersed in the history of these kinds of issues; you simply cannot design experiments without that kind of background and knowledge of history. We cut our teeth on those lessons; its “baby stuff.”
Mike:
keiths:
Mike:
We’re not talking about whether theorists are in constant touch with experimentalists. We’re talking about your claim above that if one wants to be a scientist, one has to “lay out an experimental protocol with budget, timeline, and resources needed to do the experiment”.
That’s simply not true. Not all scientists are experimental scientists.
keiths:
Mike:
It isn’t an assumption. It’s advice.
All the more reason for you not to prematurely dismiss questions about transcendent causes as “unanswerable”.
Now I’m puzzled.
I am certainly familiar with the occasional complaints from the sidelines that scientists don’t know what they are doing – or that they are somehow “philosophically biased” – if they don’t include somebody’s deity or some other “transcendental cause” in physical theories and models; but I haven’t heard any concrete suggestions from those complainers as to how to actually go about it. I don’t think anyone else has heard anything either.
We still have dark matter and dark energy to understand; and there are tests of supersymmetry and other theories involving higher dimensions on the agenda at CERN. Data are still coming in from the newer satellites and there are more experiments in the works. Neutrino “imaging” experiments are being designed. There is lots of work lined up, and there are models with “holding places” for experimental results. And that is just the stuff related to fundamental physics and cosmology. There is even more work going on in other areas of physics as well.
What are you offering to contribute? Do you know of some way to do scientific research that millions of experienced scientists don’t know about? What is everybody else missing?
Dave,
If it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be a necessary cause!
To identify something as a necessary cause, you have to explain why it’s necessary — which explains its existence.
I addressed this earlier in a comment to Allan:
Mike,
I think you’re getting wound up for no reason.
You wrote:
I’ve neither stated nor implied that “scientists don’t know what they are doing”, nor have I accused them of being “philosophically biased.” I’ve simply disagreed with one claim made by Sean Carroll and a couple of claims made by you.
I disagree that you have to “lay out an experimental protocol with budget, timeline, and resources needed to do the experiment” in order to qualify as a scientist. Theorists are scientists too.
How does one answer a question one doesn’t understand? What would constitute an “answer” for you?
Are you suggesting that scientific answers to your questions be replaced by answers to questions that can’t even be formulated into experimental protocols for testing?
I’m not following you here.
I think you are mistaking “wound up” for enthusiasm for science. I haven’t lost it; and I try to keep up.
Then I don’t know what you think a “theortist” is.
Allan:
keiths:
Allan:
Well, if you define causality as requiring a non-equilibrium condition, then of course a static equilibrium won’t qualify. But why use such an unduly restrictive definition?
That’s why I keep repeating this question:
Or if someone asks me what causes the water in my cat’s bowl to hold its shape, am I wrong to say “gravity plus the rigidity of the bowl”? Sure it’s a static equilibrium, but why is that problematic?
What is wrong with Merriam-Webster’s definition of cause?
Gravity and the rigidity of the bowl produce the water’s shape. Remove either one, and the shape will not persist.
SophistiCat:
I haven’t claimed that it’s a “formal” argument, but he’s certainly making an argument. From his opening statement:
A complete cosmological model would tell us what will happen next (neglecting quantum indeterminism, of course). It would explain every event we observe. If we had no other questions then we could, as Carroll says, declare victory and go home.
But we do have other questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why these particular laws? Why is this particular model instantiated in reality when other logically consistent models are not?
It’s premature to declare victory if we can’t either answer these questions or explain why they are unanswerable.
I am neither attempting to give a full account of causation nor making a case for its universal applicability. I am simply arguing, contra Carroll, that it is legitimate to ask if the universe/multiverse has a cause.
Here’s an example of a far-out, seemingly unanswerable question about transcendent causes that may actually turn out to be testable.
Nick Bostrom has argued that our universe might be a simulation. If so, how could we ever detect this?
Martin Savage has suggested a potential approach:
These sorts of questions are legitimate, worth asking, and interesting as hell, even if they are long shots.
I dunno, Keith; whilst I agree that there is no need to restrict ourselves to considering only questions that we might currently answer, we are still limited by our past and future light cones. Outside those limits all is speculation.
Do you not think there is also an issue with the limit of human intellectual capacity and our ability to comprehend, notwithstanding our ability to share and store knowledge? Ants, side-walks, Empire State Building etc.
keiths,
You, likewise, are defining it in a way that includes equilibrium! Why give a word too much work to do? I’d apply two words, ’cause’ and ‘reason’. They are somewhat interchangeable, but as I’m arguing for cause/effect as a temporal phenomenon, I’m trying to avoid the equivocation. Cause does not just exist in time, but extends through time.
Nothing – it accords with our common-sense usage of the term. But as with such terms as ‘selection’, or ‘random’, common usage can hinder as well as help. Your computer/table has the same status as Kant’s lead ball on a pillow, and philosophical refutations have addressed that. But even if you don’t like my approach, to link cause and effect to entropy change, there remains the issue of simultaneity wrt 2 objects separated in space – particularly when you get a gravity differential in on the act. Are you sure that what you call cause and effect are ‘truly’ simultaneous – down to the same Planck instant?
We are trapped inside a bubble of time and space. Within it, entropy appears to have started off minimal, and we are in the middle of a cascade whereby it steadily increases. As energy equilibrates, we see cause-and-effect. When (if) the universe collapses into one enormous black hole, cause-and-effect will have ceased in my book. The universe will have become one massive computer-on-table.
Particles may say to each other “See! we are still causing things to occur simultaneously! We are all causing each other to compact the shit out of this mass!”. A pedant among them may say “Er … actually guys, I don’t think we can cause anything any more”.
None of this is to say that your question is illegitimate – I too would like to know the ”reason’ for the universe’s coming into being, and its low-entropy start. But I don’t think ‘simultaneous causation’ has any bearing. It is largely a semantic issue within a universe of spacetime and interaction, not an exportable concept.
And these questions are irrelevant to this debate, as I have tried to explain. Craig didn’t raise them. Personally, I don’t think these are questions that can be answered non-vacuously.
So, you are asking whether the universe has an X, but you cannot explain what X is. Do you not see a problem here?
That’s not an example of a transcendent cause. It is still well within the paradigm of empirical epistemology. The model may be exotic and not very predictive, but it is still a model.
Alan Fox:
Alan,
Keep in mind that our past light cone looks very un-conelike, because it is distorted by inflation and the continuing (and accelerating) expansion of space. It is less of a constraint than you might think.
Also, there is no reason to suppose that transcendent causes can’t produce detectable effects within our light cone. That is Martin Savage’s point.
Sure, there may turn out to be things that exceed our intellectual capacity, but that hasn’t stopped us from asking questions. Nor should it. We just need to keep our fallibility in mind.
The so-called “New Mysterians” think that subjective consciousness may be beyond the ability of humans to understand, but even they are not calling for us to stop investigating it.
Allan Miller:
Of course, because like the rest of the English-speaking world (apart from a grumpy contrarian or two in the UK 🙂 ), I use the word that way! To me (and to most English speakers) it is perfectly intelligible and sensible to say that the table causes the computer to remain where it is, and that gravity and the bowl cause the water to retain its shape.
Why sack a word from a job it is already doing well?
Yes!
Yes, if we apply your restrictive definition.
My computer and table aren’t separated in space (at least not at the point of contact). But you’re missing the larger point, which is that even if it happened to be true that simultaneous causes didn’t exist in our universe, it wouldn’t mean that the concept of simultaneous cause was itself incoherent. Newton thought that gravity’s effect on distant objects was instantaneous, but that didn’t lead to any logical inconsistencies.
Okay, then use the term ‘transcendental reason’ instead of ‘transcendent cause’. The meaning of the question remains the same: Are the universe’s existence and character explained by something ‘outside’?
I don’t either! My only point in discussing simultaneous causation was to show that time is not essential to causality. Both simultaneous causation and timeless causation are coherent.
It is timeless causation, not simultaneous causation, that is relevant to the existence of the universe as a whole. WLC’s error, as I noted earlier in the thread, was to invoke simultaneous causation in explaining the universe’s existence:
keiths:
SophistiCat:
They’re quite relevant. Both Carroll and Craig discussed the question of whether the universe has a transcendent cause, and whether a transcendent cause is needed to address the fine-tuning “problem”.
I think your judgment is premature, with Savage’s idea as a pertinent corrective.
keiths:
‘SophistiCat:
The fact that I am not presenting a full account of causation in this thread does not mean that I can’t refer to causation, any more than the fact that I am not presenting a full account of gravity prohibits me from mentioning gravity in my examples.
Sure it is. The programmer and computer are not part of the universe being simulated. They transcend it.
Who says that transcendent causes have to be empirically undetectable?
Who says that transcendent causes can’t be modeled?
In fact, this is an example of the use of the properties of particles and fields – i.e., things on which we can get an experimental handle – to probe properties of space or other dimensions. Some of the experiments at CERN are designed to probe models of higher dimensional spaces by measuring anomalies in the decay rates of particles. The models give some measure of what to expect, otherwise the models could not be tested.
One can certainly ask questions about anything one wishes; and those questions might have “answers” that are in some way “satisfying” to the individual who asks them.
I think the issue that is being confused here is the difference between a question that can be answered satisfactorily by science and a question that can be answered to the satisfaction of the individual asking. “Why there is something rather than nothing” does not appear to be a question that science can answer. The “answer” to that question always involves something else. This kind of question may be more properly understood as part of the properties of the brain.
In science, an answer to a question is not simply a statement that provides satisfaction in the form of some kind of emotional/psychological peace for a given individual. An answer has to be something that is objectively measurable so that everyone can agree that it is an answer. It may not be the right answer if there are competing models that predict very similar results beyond the limits of current technology. Experimentation has become a very sophisticated process that can often take many years to do.
I think that part of the reason for the confusion about “answers” to questions that have no scientific handles on them comes from the fact that there are a lot of sectarians who want their beliefs to have the imprimatur of science. Their deity has to be a logical necessity in order to give them the comfort and authority they want for their religious beliefs. The rather large and loud complaints about secularism and “materialism” coming from this segment of religion has propagated a lot of misconceptions and misinformation about science in the public mind; and that is in addition to the already dismal public understanding already there.
Craig is certainly an apologist who fits into this category, as are apologists such as Plantinga. Giving a deity properties and roles that purport to answer theological questions “scientifically” seems to me to be a game of words rather than anything scientific, let alone “satisfying.”
Another possible reason for the confusions about “inside” and “outside” the universe may come from the fact that theorists and cosmologists are constructing models that replicate what we see as entities embedded in those models; but they are doing it as “deities” “outside” the models. Why, then, could there not be a deity or deities with the same relationship to our universe? And the point is that the creatures embedded in the universe have no meaningful accesses to anything except that which is within their universe. What does “outside” even mean?
I personally don’t think the sophistry in wrangling about answers is necessarily bad. One has to think through these ideas in order to understand why science proceeds the way it does.
However, I suspect it becomes unhealthy if one is asking exactly the same question after passing up a lifetime of opportunities to see other approaches that provide answers that everyone can – in principle if not in practice – check out for themselves.
The answer to that question is discovered when one attempts to actually build a model that can be tested.
keiths:
Mike Elzinga:
Yes, like Savage’s.
And why is it that that model can be tested?
keiths,
Well, guilty as charged … 😉 … but there is a point to my pedantry. The majority of people aren’t physicists (and neither am I). But if we are talking of matters such as cosmology and physical cause, I think we should be using the physicists’ approach. Causation in physics is very much a matter of temporal succession.
The interrelation of things that ‘common sense’ deemed separate has been shown incomplete by careful analysis. Space and time, matter and energy … even thermodynamics and gravity.
I think the basic answer is that it I think it is being used to talk of two different things.
They are, even there. But they are separated even more from the force that binds them. The table forms an incompressible extension to Planet Earth. Its atoms in sum exert a gravitational pull. My computer on the other side of the world is pulling on yours. If you descend, even a little, you come to a place where time runs differently, ever-so-slightly, because gravitation and time are linked.
It wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t help the cause! 😉
That’s where we might have to agree to disagree. ‘Simultaneous’ and ‘timeless’ causation have the ring of ‘zero length’, to me (granted that I have opted for causation as definitionally tied to entropy change).
Mike,
Because it makes testable predictions.
SophistiCat seems to believe that transcendent causes are, by their nature, empirically untestable. That’s not true, and Savage’s model is a vivid counterexample.
You seem to be leaning in the same direction as SophistiCat.
If not, then what are you arguing against? I certainly haven’t suggested that we should accept transcendent causes absent good evidence. I am merely arguing, against Carroll, that the questions I raised above are legitimate and worthwhile, and that proposed answers may (as in the case of Savage’s model) turn out to be testable.
That is not an answer. What is a testable prediction?
Where are the “handles” in this model?
I ask this because it is analogous to many physical examples we in the physics community have studied (e.g., Ising models).
What does one use to detect differences in orientation in space? What is a “detector” and what relationships does the “detector” have to have with its surroundings? How are those relationships built into the model?
Allan,
In the end, it appears that our disagreement is definitional, not substantive.
You think that the definition of “cause” should be narrowed to exclude static equilibria, and I don’t.
However, we seem to agree that it is legitimate to ask whether there is a reason that the universe exists, and why it has the particular properties that it does.
Mike,
Are you arguing that Savage’s model is not a legitimate, testable model of a transcendent cause?
I’m asking you to think through the details of the model that would make it testable.
This is not sophistry; it is what theorists actually do.
Mike,
If you have an argument to make about the testability of transcendent causes, then go ahead and make it.
So I presume you don’t want to do the actual exercise of putting the experimental “handles” on a model.
You have a good toy model right in front of you to think about. I laid out the issues that have to be dealt with. Actually dealing with them would answer much of your skepticism.
I’m not trying to be coy. This is not a trivial exercise, by the way; but it is a good exercise that should be within the grasp of many.
Mike,
What, specifically, would such an exercise demonstrate with respect to the question at hand, which is the testability of transcendent causes?
Do you think that transcendent causes are necessarily untestable? If not, then who and what are you arguing against? Please be specific.
Seriously; try the exercise. 🙂
What’s the point? It’s not like I haven’t thought about testability before.
I’m not interested in jumping through hoops for you, but if you have an argument that is germane to the question at hand, I’ll be happy to respond.
keiths, I feel like I am trying to nail jelly to a wall. This is not to impeach your good will, but this discussion has a topic and I am trying to stick to it, whereas you seem to want to talk about everything and nothing in particular.
The topic is the first premise of the Kalam argument. It makes a very specific and a very strong assertion about causation. In order to evaluate this premise one absolutely has to have the concept of causation nailed down. There is no point in talking about every vague meaning of the word ’cause’, as it is used in everyday language, because that is not going to get you anywhere close to the first premise. There is also no point in equivocating causes and reasons, because, as I keep telling you, reasons figure in different arguments, not the one we are considering here and now.
This goes for “transcendent causes” as well. What is a transcendent cause? It is a metaphysical cause that transcends the physical universe. Whatever exactly that might mean, it is contrasted to Carroll’s self-contained models, which is his preferred approach of accounting for the world – which is to say, answering any meaningful question about the world that can have an answer, at least in principle. Your latest example is not an example of a transcendent cause in the above sense, because everything here is in keeping with building self-contained models. The idea is very speculative and, in my modest opinion, not very productive, because there are only so many predictions that it can generate (and predictions themselves look rather speculative), but it is still of a kind with other cosmological models.
SophistiCat,
That’s baffling, because my impression is that I’ve been sticking to the topic while you’ve been introducing irrelevancies. Let’s see if we can locate the source of the misunderstanding.
That may explain your confusion. The topic is not the first premise of the Kalam argument. The thread topic is the Carroll-Craig debate, and the subtopic I’ve been focusing on is not the Kalam, but rather Carroll’s statement about the “not-even-wrongness” of asking about transcendent causes.
The Carroll-Craig debate included the Kalam, of course, and we’ve touched on it briefly in this thread, but only to dismiss it. To the best of my knowledge, no one who has commented in this thread accepts either the Kalam or its first premise.
If you’re itching for that fight, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
What I have been defending is neither the Kalam, nor its first premise, but simply the legitimacy of asking questions about possible transcendent causes of the universe.
Agreed.
You are assuming that transcendent causes cannot be part of a model, but why?
Suppose we label the universe as U and its transcendent cause as T. What is incoherent about a model that encompasses both U and T? It is different from a model that merely encompasses U, as standard cosmological models do, but it is not incoherent.
Look at Savage’s model. The programmer and the computer are not part of our physical universe. They transcend it. They are transcendent causes, yet they are part of his model.
Also, I think you need to look carefully at what it means for a cosmological model to be self-contained. A self-contained cosmological model explains events that happen within the universe/multiverse, but it does not explain the existence or the characteristics of the universe/multiverse as a whole. This is true even of models in which everything traces back to a quantum vacuum fluctuation, because those models do not explain the existence or the characteristics of the quantum vacuum itself.
I’d like to answer Mike Elzinga’s question if he doens’t mind even though it is keith’s task to answer.
Once you can attach physical handles to a transcendent question and develop a model, it isn’t transcendent anymore. If T causes U then they are part of the same system.
I think transcendence is a measure of ignorance. It is perfectly fine to ask questions that at first blush are definitionally transcendent but those questions are effectively just philosophy until someone clever comes along and works out a testable model to answer them and a testable model by definition has physical handles. Then you don’t have philosophy anymore; you have speculative science on your hands.
The idea that we are living in a computed (simulated is a poor descriptive) universe was transcendent until we could figure out the physical implications. Now it is science and that makes the (possible)computer we live in and ourselves part of the same system. Would you try to claim that any program in your computer was somehow separate from your computer?
Aardvark,
That doesn’t answer Mike’s questions. He wants you to actually go through the motions using Savage’s model:
I’m not sure why Mike is assigning homework instead of making an argument, but I suspect it’s because he’s unable to point to a problem with what I’m saying.
Now back to your points:
T is transcendent with respect to U, because T is outside of U. Drawing a circle around both T and U doesn’t change that.
‘Simulation’ is the accepted term for such programs, even when the thing being modeled is counterfactual.
If we are living in a computer simulation, then the programmer and computer are not part of our simulated world. They transcend it.
Our world is not bound by the same laws as theirs (unless they happened to program it that way). Their world doesn’t have the same contents as ours. Their time doesn’t elapse at the same rate as ours.
We are all part of a larger, ultimate reality that Savage is attempting to model, but the programmer and computer are still transcendent with respect to our world.
I understand your problem far better than you do; I have been there, as have most of my colleagues.
Indeed, Aardvark sees it from the perspective of science.
We always have such problems to solve in basic research when we propose an experimental program to test a theory or model. What are the experimental handles on the phenomenon?
The illustration with the toy model of the cubic spatial lattice is a good example to think through. If one closes one’s eyes and imagines a completely featureless space, how does one determine one’s orientation in that space? What does “orientation” mean in that space? What do you need to detect it, and how does it work?
Once you understand that, you can move on to the question of how to determine if you live in a cubic lattice space. What do you need, and how does it work? What kind of a detector will tell you that you live inside a cubic lattice? On what principles does it work? How does it detect the cubic shape of the lattice, and how do you, as an occupant of that space, extract that information from the detector?
These are real issues. We have always had them in science. One can posit a “ghostly” neutrino to account for energy in a decay of a radioactive element;’ but how does one go about detecting a neutrino? How does one go about detecting a Higgs mechanism that gives masses to particles? What experiments can you propose? What is your detector? How does it work? What is the “signal?”
Dark matter; what is it and how do we detect it? We think one of the handles is gravity because that would explain galactic rotation profiles. But what would confirm it? What experiment do you do, what is your “detector,” and what do you expect to see with that detector? Write a research proposal with a budget, timeline, and needed resources. The same goes for dark energy.
When Carroll says that these questions about “transcendental causes” are meaningless, it is shorthand for the issues physicists and cosmologists face when trying to probe the universe in which we are embedded. We have to do it from our embedded position within the universe. And if Craig or anyone else proposes a “cause” coming in from “outside”, such a proposal is, at best, just speculation with no handles that will allow anyone to test it. One can make up any answer one chooses; and that is what is meant by “meaningless.”
To anyone who proposes such things, the obligation is on that person to provide the handles by which we can verify its existence. Sitting on the sidelines and not participating in what theorists are actually expected to do in science is just sophistry that leads to nothing; it’s meaningless. The most common failure among speculators and would-be theorists when it comes to understanding science is that they don’t have a clue about what it means to place handles on a proposed phenomenon to be tested by experiments.
That is why the toy model with the cubic spatial lattice is interesting. One must sit down and think it through in order to even begin to understanding the issues cosmologists and physicists face. You can’t place yourself “outside;” you have only what you can detect; and you have to elaborate the principles on which your “detectors” work. You can’t sit back and just make up “stuff on the outside” and say things like, “That would explain it.”
If you want to be a theorist in science, you have to go the distance and put handles on your proposals; otherwise nobody will be interested in your proposals. They will be meaningless.
Again, seriously; think through that cubic spatial lattice model. And if you want to propose “programmers on the outside” tell us how creatures embedded in the “simulation” would detect them. And if you can do that, tell us what it means to be “outside.”
Do this on your own time; this is not pressure to do it here. All physicists and cosmologists have to go through such exercises routinely; every time they write a research proposal to be submitted for peer-reviewed funding.
Mike,
As I expected, you’ve again failed to point to a problem with my argument.
Give it a try. Quote a statement of mine, and then explain specifically why my statement is wrong.
The closest you come to a counterargument in your comment above is this:
I’ve never said otherwise!
Of course we have to do it from within the universe. That’s where we live.
That’s exactly why I brought up Savage’s model. The proposed causes are transcendental; that is, the programmer and computer are not part of our universe. Yet Savage has identified a testable consequence that can potentially be observed within our universe, from our “embedded position”.
Transcendent causes can have testable consequences within our universe.
Then all you have to do is write a research proposal that will detect those “transcendent causes.”
If you can’t do that, what do you have other than speculation?
Mike,
If you haven’t noticed, I’m not proposing any particular transcendent cause. If there is one, I don’t expect it to bear any resemblance to what most people would call ‘God’. I have reasons for being an atheist.
For the umpteenth time, I am arguing against Carroll’s claim that it is “not even wrong” to ask whether the universe has a transcendent cause.
It is perfectly sensible and coherent to ask about transcendent causes, and Savage’s model is a nice example of how it can be done. Craig’s “model” is an example of how not to do it.
Can you spot a problem with my argument? If you can, then please quote the statement of mine that you disagree with and explain why it’s wrong.
I don’t think you can. If you could, you would have done it by now.
Then I don’t know what you mean by “transcendent” causes; especially transcendent causes that have “effects” in the universe. What kinds of effects are you thinking about? In physics, an effect is equivalent to the somewhat loose term experimental “handle.”
I have been in the physics community for well over 50 years, and I have never heard anyone speak of a “transcendent cause.” We are always scrambling to put those handles on proposed mechanisms or phenomena that “would explain” something we are observing.
The second you attach the word transcendent to a proposed “cause” or mechanism that has effects in the physical universe, then I don’t understand why you use the word “transcendent.” In science – physics in particular – one is proposing a mechanism or phenomenon that ultimately has to be measurable in some way; it’s not then labeled as “transcendent.” It may be a word being used by philosophers or theologians; but if they aren’t putting experimental handles on it, the science community doesn’t know what to do with it.
If philosophers and theologians are simply doing it to give some emotional or psychological relief or “satisfaction” in their explanations, those “explanations” may be useful in some psychological sense, but they don’t make the grade as science.
Would you, for example, have called atoms transcendent causes for what we observe? Was Democritus proposing “transcendent causes” or were the chemists and Boltzmann doing that? Mach was pretty harsh in his criticism of Boltzmann for trying to explain macroscopic properties of matter by using the statistical behaviors of huge collections of atoms.
Would you call dark matter or dark energy transcendent causes for what we observe in our universe? How about neutrinos when Pauli proposed them many years before experimentalists, using much more developed technology, detected them independently of their “explanatory effect” in beta decay?
We are not talking about the extremes of Logical Positivism here; we are trying to find independent verification of proposed mechanisms that explain effects we see. Proposing atoms, for example, “would explain” a lot; yet there is still the burden of independent verification of atoms by experimental means. And we got that many time over.
When you say “transcendent causes have effects” then I don’t know what you mean by “transcendent causes.” I don’t even see what it has to do with your “Matrix” example. If there are effects “inside” that model, then they must be measurable in some way. How are they measurable; and what do you use to measure them? If you lived in that “universe” what experiments would you propose? Or would you just stop at “That would explain it.”?
Mike,
That’s because you haven’t been paying attention. I’ve explained it several times in this thread, including in a direct reply to you:
Mike:
No. Things that are part of the universe do not transcend it.
No. Things that are part of the universe do not transcend it.
I provided a link to Savage’s description of his proposed test. Didn’t you read it?
Mike, show some discipline. Make an effort to understand what your opponent is actually arguing. Instead of doing that, you seem to be reacting emotionally and irrationally to the boo-word “transcendent”.
If there is something wrong with my argument, then show me. Quote a statement of mine that you disagree with, and then explain exactly why it is wrong.
If you can’t point to such a statement, then consider the likely possibility that your distrust of my argument is visceral, not rational.
If I’m reading Elzinga properly, his position can be boiled down to “Transcendent, schmanscendent—all I want to know is, is this ’cause’ of yours testable?” A cause is a cause is a cause, and “transcendent” just doesn’t enter into it! I suspect that Elzinga is dismissive of the notion of “transcendent” causes because bloody near 100% of the people who make noise about “transcendent” causes don’t ever bother with the hard work of figuring out how their favorite “transcendent”-cause-of-choice could be tested.
I further suspect that keiths is merely raising the somewhat pedantic/picayune point that in principle, “transcendent” causes are not absolutely, mandatorily required to be untestable. If that is, indeed, keiths’ point, Elzinga could be said to tarring all conceivable “transcendent”-cause proposals with a brush that only applies to… um… bloody near every “transcendent”-cause proposal which has actually… um… been proposed. As the joke goes, 99% of all lawyers give the profession a bad name.
I think cubist summarizes it best and most humorously.
cubist,
Actually, Mike doesn’t even understand what a transcendent cause is, though I’ve explained it several times in this thread, including directly to him. See above, where he asks if dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos are transcendent.
And if he is merely saying that causes need to be testable in order to be scientificallty validated, then why is he arguing with me? I say the same thing.
Tell that to Carroll! He claims that the idea of a transcendent cause is “not even wrong”. That’s what got us on this topic. Have you listened to the debate and read the thread?
Are you arguing that since most of those people are sloppy, we should dismiss all talk of transcendent causes, including Savage’s? Since infinitely many prime numbers are odd, should we dismiss the fact that two is even?
Not just in principle. I gave a concrete example of a testable hypothesis involving a transcendent cause.
Besides getting a dig in at those lawyers, you might also want to mock the “pedantic, picayune” mathematicians who insist that not all prime numbers are odd, despite the fact that “bloody near 100% of them” are.
Meanwhile, I invite either of you to point to an error in my argument. Quote the incorrect statement and explain why it’s wrong.
keiths,
If you watch the Science Channel, they talk over and over again about how some cosmologists believe the world, etc. is a gigantic computer simulation. This must mean the idea has definitely entered the mainstream among cosmologists. What does Mike have to say about that.
Also, the dig against the multiverse (from Guth, etc.) has always been its untestable, but it has also entered the mainstream.
JT,
I wouldn’t go that far!
The multiverse is an interesting case.
Some cosmologists think it may be directly testable.
Others don’t, and if they’re right, the question gets really interesting. Should we accept the existence of universes that we can never observe?
The answer is… it depends.
The key is to realize, as most ID proponents do not, that the multiverse idea is not a theory. It’s a prediction (of M theory, for example).
If you have a theory that makes an untestable prediction, then that prediction is of no use in helping to validate the theory. However, if a theory makes both testable and untestable predictions, and if the testable predictions are confirmed, then it may be a different story.
My feeling is that if abundant confirmation of the testable predictions of a theory puts it well ahead of its competitors, then we have reason to provisionally accept its untestable predictions also.
I think I have a pretty good idea of what you think a transcendent cause is. I was asking you to pick out some examples from a few that I listed, or to choose some of your own.
I am still trying to figure out how you explain that an “effect” measured by someone embedded in a universe can certify that the effect is due to a “transcendent” cause.
Even that presentation by Savage disclaims that notion in the last two or three slides. The presentation is, um, “colorful;” I’ll give it that. But I don’t see how one can conclude that our universe is a simulation by “transcendent causes.” If it were, the problem still remains as to how someone within that simulation would do an experiment that would answer that question unambiguously.
I am in agreement with Carroll on this.
I have a little familiarity with these lattice calculations, and there are a number such programs attempting to probe the underlying structure of space-time by modeling and then determining from the models what experimental handles might be available. There are proposals to look at the dispersions in the time of arrival of various “probes” such as neutrinos, gamma rays, and other photons in the spectrum of products arriving at Earth from supernovas. Dark matter distribution is being probed with gravitational lensing.
All these models are trying to simulate what we already see as well as determine what available probes we can use. I don’t see anything in those models that hints of “outside” programmers as “transcendental causes” of our universe. Don’t mistake the programmers of the model as being analogues of transcendent causes for the universe.
One should also note that the problems of dark matter and dark energy are also under investigation; and there is an entire set of experiments exploring not only the properties of the Higgs found at CERN, but supersymmetry and those higher dimensional models. It is a bit premature to think that this presentation by Savage is realistic given so many unanswered questions that are already on the table awaiting experimental confirmation.
There are other things going on here as well. Mathematical models are not just simulating universes and other phenomena, they are testing mathematical ideas. Mathematical tools are also under development. There are occasional mappings of areas of mathematics onto other areas in order to see if an intractable problem can be mapped onto an area in which the problem is either already solved or in order to find an easier way to solve the problem.
The little exercise I suggested is still a good starting point to try to understand what experimentalists are up against when probing the universe. If someone embedded in a universe detects an “effect” of some sort in that universe, how does one answer the question that the effect “came from outside”? If you can come up with such an experiment, you get a Nobel Prize.
By the way, one can also begin to see the problems with “multiverses.” It’s not that such models can’t test ideas; they can, but they also have to provide those experimental handles. There are some ideas that modelers are kicking around; but for now, treat them with a grain of salt. Such models are also driving the development of mathematical and computational tools that can be used elsewhere; in condensed matter theory and in the modeling of complex molecular structures, for example.
I don’t object to “wacky” ideas in theoretical physics or cosmology; it’s a creative and necessary process, and things will get sorted out in the long run. But please understand that wacky ideas aren’t always what they may appear to the layperson.
Not in all senses. That which is only causally necessary does not exist in all possible worlds.