I have been enjoying a lengthy debate with Stephenb on causality (Lizzie also contributing brilliantly). It has made me think about causality a bit more deeply. Here are a few loosely connected ideas for comment:
- We should be wary of making causality into an unnecessary philosophical mystery. To say A causes B is just another way of saying that if A had not happened then B would not have happened. The way we investigate if A causes B experimentally is exactly this – we remove A and see if B still happens, we bring back A and see if B returns.The detail will vary immensely form one situation to another – A and B might be billiard balls moving, A might be a magnetic field coming on and B iron filings aligning, A might be the French revolution and B the rise of Napoleon – but whatever the detail that is the story. If I observe a white ball run into a red ball and the red ball moves then I can see that if the white ball had not run into the red ball would have not have moved. There isn’t another metaphysical attribute of the event to be deduced – the causal relationship. This is an example of “language bewitching our intelligence” into thinking we need to find something which a word refers to.
- The law of causality is a methodological tool not a law of logic. The assumption that every event has a cause is methodologically extremely useful. It drives us to investigate the circumstances under which things happen. But it is logically possible that we may find events that sometimes happen and sometimes do not and there are no circumstances that dictate when they happen. This is what appears to have happened in quantum mechanics.
- The assumption that every contingent thing that comes into existence was brought into existence by something seems to be plucked out of the air. Among other things “coming into being”, as Lizzie has pointed out, for most things is just a rearrangement of elementary particles and as such is just another event which may or may not have a cause. We are perhaps confused by dwelling on objects with very clear boundaries in time and space such as living creatures or manufactured objects such as balloons. It becomes clearer that there is nothing special from a causality point of view about coming into existence when we think about fuzzier objects such as mountains and rivers.
It’s not as simple as that. When we say that a gust of wind caused the door to open, or that smoking causes cancer, we can’t use your counterfactual definition of causation.
To this day, there is no commonly agreed upon philosophical account of causation. I prefer to regard causation as (a) “folk science”, as John Norton puts it, and possibly also (b) a principle of locality, i.e. the idea that influence propagates at a finite speed (otherwise we couldn’t tell which causes which).
We don’t need to throw causality out of the window because of quantum mechanics. There are accounts of probabilistic causation. Besides, quantum mechanics is not the first theory with stochastic laws.
I’m a bit confused.
If A causes B and A does not happen, then something else might cause B.
It seems to me that A causes B means If A then B. I don’t see any implication for not A.
I don’t really see how you could establish a necessary precursor to B, other than by the arbitrary definition of terms. You could say if B has been murdered then there must have been a murderer, but that’s just the consequence of the way the words are defined.
Of course that is true that B might still happen even with ~A. It needs a proviso on the lines of “everything else being unchanged”. So if there are a set of circumstances A1, A2 through to An under which B happens and when A1 is negated but the others remain the same then B does not happen – then it is reasonable to say A1 is a cause of B. I wouldn’t say even then that it is absolutely rigorous – “causes” is not a rigorous word – but I think that captures the essence of what is meant by “causes”. My major point is that we don’t need a metaphysical something else to describe the relationship between A1 and B to describe causality.
I’m still confused. There might be any number of paths to B. I can’t think of anything in the real world that would preclude multiple paths to any condition.
You could construct abstract logical scenarios, but I don’t see any relevance in real life.
Perhaps a specific example.
Well, speaking as one who wastes far too much time on supposedly causal analytic models, I’d say that it is extraordinarily difficult to establish causal chains for a lot of stuff, once you take into account that several factors can be sufficient, but not necessary, and some factors can be necessary but not sufficient, and some factors can be necessary in the absence of other factors, and so on.
And that’s before you even start on feedback.
We can say, in general, what causes hurricanes, but trying to track down the relevant butterfly, and the conditions that led to that butterfly being critical is not even possible in principle, I don’t think.
This discussion brings to mind Sherlock Holmes’s famous aphorism about eliminating the impossible and what’s left must be the truth.
I can’t think of a sillier thought that has been taken seriously by so many people. It does seem to describe Dembski’s approach, though. Not that that is inconsistent with it being silly.
Science seems to be the business of finding regular relationships. If A and B, then C might represent a regular relationship, but C does not imply A and B (although it might contribute to the inference).
I’m waiting for an example where A and B can be reliably and exclusively inferred from C.
Theists tend to use what Mike calls “billiard ball causation”, probably because some of their bogus apologetics arguments depend on that. But that was wrong even under Newtonian science, where we had to integrate over infinitely many contributing causes.
All I can say is try being on a jury and having to decide whether to lock someone up for the rest of their life based on reconstructed history. It’s an eye-opener.
And people that posts here still beleives that science makes concordant models.
Indeed. Causation: A Users Guide is on my to read list to try to understand the issues better. Sample chapters here.
I’ll go ahead and put another plug for John Norton’s article “Causation as Folk Science”, which takes its cue from Russell’s dismissive attitude towards causation in science, but ends up with a somewhat more optimistic message. I can take credit for having thought along the same lines prior to reading the article, but Norton will have put it better than I could. There are some points there that I am not so sure about, but I endorse the main idea.
A considerable part of the article makes a case for a failure of causal determinism in Newtonian mechanics, using as an example the so-called “Norton dome.” This is a subject of other papers by the same author, and you can safely skip this part: it is not essential for the main points argued in the article.
Lizzie,
Which is absolutely right. But surely what you are struggling with is finding which combinations are actually necessary? i.e you are not looking for some additional relationship which is “causality”?
Yes, finding necessary factors (in causing psychiatric disorders, in this case) would be good. Even more useful would be finding which are the critical factors – the factors that can tip things one way or the other.
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/04/causal-models-by-steve-sloman-index.html
Worth a read.
StephenB is very, very confused about the difference between logical axioms and empirical truths:
He is also very, very confused about what it means to deny the so-called “Law of Causality”:
It’s ironic that in trying to defend logic, he mangles it so badly.
And this:
keiths,
I don’t get it. Why do they assume that “coming into existence with no cause” is exactly equivalent to “bringing itself into existence”?
Why is the third option not valid (in their opinion)? I don’t think any of them can explain why it isn’t valid, they can only repeat that of course it isn’t, you dishonest atheists always trying to get away with not obeying god’s law and not worshipping god as the proper cause of everything.
Yeah, I get that in our normal material world, “things” don’t cause themselves, they have “causes” external to themselves. We understand Newton’s First Law from babyhood: if some thing moves, it’s because some other thing came along and gave it a shove.
What I don’t get is why they think Newton’s Law is all there is. It’s not proscriptive, it’s descriptive. If there’s anything or anywhere it doesn’t apply, there’s no Lawgiver to come along and arrest the miscreant subatomic particle for moving without being caused to.
hotshoe,
In Stephen’s case, I think it is because he simply can’t come to grips with the idea that “no cause” actually means “no cause” — zero, zilch, nada. Causeless.
He thinks there has to be some cause (’cause the Law of Causality is self-evident, remember?), and if there isn’t an external cause, why, there must be an internal one — the thing itself.
So even when he tries to conceive of something without a cause, he fails and reverts to the “LoC”. He is truly trapped in his own thinking.
hotshoe,
There would be if StephenB were in charge, by God! And KF would be right there with Mr Leathers to apply six of the best to the particle’s ‘seat of learning’.
It has always seemed peculiar to me that these “arguments” about “first causes” don’t apply to a specific sectarian deity. This deity is exempt from having been caused.
And it adds a double whammy to the problem of causation for the person proposing the deity as an uncaused first cause.
How is a deity, without itself being caused, able to cause anything else? The deity is presumed to be, well, a deity that is so complex as to be able to cause complexity such as the universe; but by what mechanism(s)? The deity is apparently presumed to be “outside” the universe and not material as we understand “material.” So how does this uncaused First Cause produce material causes?
This issue also overlooks the nature of time and its relationship to everything else that exists in the universe. Time is not independent of the existence of things in the universe. If there were no things, there would be nothing to “mark off time.” Time is a relationship between states of a reference system of material, designated as a “clock,” and another system designated as, say, the particle or systems of particles.
The passage of these sequences of events has to be recorded in some medium capable of “storing” as well as “remembering” the ordering of events, otherwise “time” is still meaningless. “Knowledge” of these sequences travels via photons to the system recording the comparisons; and that process in itself makes time a “rubber thing” that depends on how the recording system is moving relative to the other systems as well as by how much other matter is in the vicinity.
Much of the confusion about causality and “first causes” lies in old Newtonian ideas of time as an independent entity that exists and is the same for everything everywhere in the universe.
Just to be clear, inertia doesn’t mean that all bodies are at rest unless a force is exerted upon them. It is just that on Earth, the forces exerted on moving bodies tend to stop them moving very quickly. Absent a force, a body moving at a constant velocity will continue to move at a constant velocity. So there is no support there for the notion that moving things must be caused to be moved.
I see causality as temporal proximity with some kind of modeled justification for why those things are next to one another in time.
You need to elaborate. The elder twin doesn’t cause the younger. The item with serial number LGX45009 doesn’t cause LGX45010.
Atheist philosopher Quentin Smith analyzed the idea of god as a cause of the universe coming into existence ex nihilo back in 1996 and found it is was in conflict with all extant philosophical definitions of causality.
Hi Mark,
Amazing but true.
Causality is another area of interest we seem to have in common.
Want to set up a regular discussion?
Mike Elzinga:
You poor philosophically impoverished man. I pity you.
Hi Mark,
Causality is another area of interest we seem to have in common. Want to set up a regular discussion?
No time?