`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

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Chat with ChatGPT about Causation


This page comes about because I am Johnny No-Mates, so only can hold a sensible conversation of sorts with ChatGPT. That is not ideal, but does give me, and by extension you, the benefit of some sort of pushback from the perceived wisdom of currently accepted opinion.


I asked ChatGPT 'Why is causation a philosophical problem?'


Index


  1. We never directly observe causation

  2. Causation involves metaphysical commitments

  3. Causation hides counterfactuals

  4. Science replaced causes with equations

  5. Time complicates causation

  6. Quantum mechanics introduces indeterminacy

  7. Causation and explanation intertwine

  8. There are multiple competing theories of causation

  9. In short

  10. My version of Causation

We never directly observe causation


David Hume famously pointed out: all we ever see are sequences of events - A happens, then B happens.


But we don't see a necessary connection.


This raises the question:


Is causation something real in the world, or just a mental habit of expecting patterns?


My Response

Frankly, David, this is your problem, not the World's. Just because you, and all of us, lack the perception to sense the mechanism of change directly does not mean that there is no mechanism of change. In fact, because we interact with the World we live in, and because we can consciously model that world, down to some level of detail, we are able to infer lower level facts from higher level facts, as a project of reductionism.


We can therefore also infer other facts, well enough to follow the processes of emergence


Causation involves metaphysical commitments


To say 'A causes B' implies:


But what are these 'powers,' 'necessities,' or 'laws'?


Are they:


Different philosophical traditions answer differently.


My Response

Frankly, Mr Traditions, you would be foolish to think that B can exist in any shape or form without the prior existence of A.


Laws come about as a consequence of A changing to B, whatever A and B happen to be. For A to become B necessitates that A is itself in an untenable state, and so must change. That change is the demergence of the realities that form A, leaving only the previously emergent facts of A to constitute A's past, together with the rearranged realities that now emerge as B, and the natures of A and B determine the law that must also emerge. The law is a factual thing, not a real thing, and so should B join A as an object of past fact, along with the change from A to B, the law remains thereafter, as a fact, albeit obsolete in the present.


Humanity plays no role in formulating such laws, whatever philosophical traditions may say, except in as far as they are laws about humans and human activity and products. We could say Ohm's Law is [wo]manmade, because we are the only makers of electric circuits.


Causation hides counterfactuals


To say 'A causes B' also means:


If A had not happened, B would not have happened.


This involves imagining alternative possible worlds, which are not directly observable.


So causation depends on evaluating counterfactuals - something inherently conceptual.


My Response

Not at all, Mr Shankley!


When A causes B, B emerges from A, C does not enter into the calculation. Counterfactuals did not happen because they were not possible, or were not very likely. In any case, unlike what is claimed by Mr Wolfram, there is no calculating going on behind the scenes, the numbers are the brute facts of objects, and objects must act in accord with their facts.


You may imagine counterfactuals, but only because imagination does not have to be fleshed out with the detail of reality.


Science replaced causes with equations


Modern physics doesn't really talk in terms of causes; it talks in terms of:


Events no longer 'push' each other. Instead, they satisfy mathematical relationships.


So philosophers ask:


Is causation fundamental, or just a human way of interpreting the math?


My Response

Frankly, they have lost sight of reality by looking too closely at reality. An equation is akin to a law, and the law only emerges from the facts that pertain to the reality.


Time complicates causation


Causation seems to require:


But fundamental physics is time-symmetric, meaning its equations work the same forward and backward.


So where does causal direction come from?


Is it:


My Response

Speaking bluntly, as well as frankly, time-symmetry is utter bollox! There is no comprehension of the meaning of the word time in any of physics, nor much of philosophy. Time is simply not symmetrical. Time is not a reality, rather a set of facts that fall away from reality much like a waterfall.


Quantum mechanics introduces indeterminacy


At the quantum level:


So what does it even mean to cause something in a probabilistic universe?


My Response

Academia knows not what it talks of when attempting to explain quantum processes, because they take time as a given, not as an emergent phenomenon.


Probability is a numerical relationship, and although most changes are not strictly speaking random, in the sense of having total freedom to distribute evenly, being subject to constraints of various kinds. There is indeterminacy due to the inherent unpredictability of certain sets of circumstances that either are in exact equilibrium, or are in unresolvable conflict, or both at the same instant.


Having to change while having no preference introduces indeterminability, making the whole of Existence indeterminate. One single bump in the road my upset the applecart of determinacy.


Having to change while having unresolvable conflict introduces new emergent dimensions, i.e. strong emergence. Paradox causes emergence.


Causation and explanation intertwine


Sometimes we say 'A caused B' because:


This turns causation into something partially pragmatic - not purely metaphysical.


My Response

Frankly, the distinction between physical and metaphysical is a false one. Yes, there are non-physical things, and objects that originate in the physical but only exist as facts of the past, but physical is only a very small part of what exists, because we can multiply the physical by the number of instances of time that have taken place, to give a great many more facts about the past than can possibly exist as physical reality. This is once you accept that the past is not real, in the sense that the past cannot change. The past is factual, and facts may be at any scale, not just reduced to numbers.


There are multiple competing theories of causation


Philosophers disagree about what causation is:


The fact that smart people disagree so strongly signals a deep conceptual problem.


My Response

Frankly, perhaps they are smart, but not all that smart. Academics are always under pressure to come up with something, however nonsensical.


There is only one possibility for causation, and it is one and the same as the explanation of emergence. That is, the paradox of two immiscible facts forces the emergence of a new dimension between those two facts. This is the engine of everything.


In short


Causation is a philosophical problem because it sits right at the intersection of:


It's too fundamental to define easily, yet too complex to ignore.


My version of Causation


For me, causation is a word that is descriptive of a relationship between two states of affairs, and simply by definition those states are the before, and the after. If one is to believe in a time reversible block universe, then there is no preferred direction, except perhaps that defined by entropy, that is if you consider entropy to be any more than a measure of the direction we attribute to time.


For me, the fact of Reality is that there only exists Now, and whatever state of affairs exists can only exist Now, and so whatever exists Now must have been caused by whatever existed before Now, and whatever will come to exist, at some future Now, can only do so because of what exists Now. There are no free lunches. So if you want to deny the fact of Now being the only reality, you'd better have something more than the imagination of Professor Einstein, and that 'something more' does not exist.


If we limit our observation to a snooker table, we see the cue strike the cueball, and the cueball strike the colour, and the colour [hopefully] fall into the pocket. That order of events is causation, at one level, and to call that observation naïve fails to recognise its reality. To claim some godlike power of a higher perspective is to claim a power possessed by no sentient being, ever.


The description alone shows Hume to be wrong. We do observe causation all the time. We just happen to observe whole states, not the minutiae of each atom involved, nor the processes between each quark.


Metaphysical is a misleading concept. It implies something other than real, and so we need to rein in any enthusiasm for anything that we can't ultimately root in reality. Otherwise we may as well talk about reality being metafactual, which of course it is.


Our experience is always of some kind of empty whole thing, of which we truthfully know very little, but infer much. We tell ourselves stories about things we perceive, and those stories are acts of imagination. Science is just one way that we have of being more accurate in our story telling, and so better able to control our world.


Causation then is necessarily a story, but it can be accurate on many levels, there are immediate causes, and prior causes, chains of events, and the Machian causes of change on a universal scale. And when we say Trump was elected, the causes could potentially be very many, of which only one is that of having a majority of votes. No GOP = no Trump.


When time is seen as emergent, then causation is recast as the relationships of the realities of the present to the facts of the past. There is no possibility of knowing each and every detailed fact of the past, we can only infer or infer-no.



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