Ruth and causality (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 17, 2013, 00:38 (4115 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:Causality is the subject of another section of Ruth's Chapter 7, initially headed "Hume's elimination of causality", and once more I'm having trouble with the argument.-Ruth's chapter is beyond the average non-scientific reader, which is why she has to write the book for lay folks. I've had to struggle with it. 
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> RUTH: However, we never actually SEE the cause; .... The motion of the second ball is predicted by physical law; but again, physical law simply describes patterns of events; it does not say WHY they happen. For this reason, Hume concluded that causation is not really in the world, but it is something we INFER from what he termed the "constant conjunction of events"."-I think you miss her point. As a confirmed billiards player in college I think I can make her point for you. Let us start from the usual position of how and why. Gould wanted theology/philosophy and science to be separate majisteria. They are not and never can be. What we see when the billiards player steps to the table is what scinece studies, his actions perfectly visible to us. The force of his blow can be measured as can the angle used to strike the cue ball and the ball it hits. What cannot be measured are the judgements he makes in his frontal lobe from what he sees in his occipital lobe. He is using his consciousness to make decisions that will result in what we can measure scientifically. We can put an EEG skull cap on him and we will see spikes and waves in various parfts of his brain, the final ones over the motor strip as he strikes the cue ball, with an unseen decision of how hard a blow. We see all the results but no direct observation of the source. Yet we do know much of how the cause relates to the result. -That is Ruth's point. Those pesky quanta are over there on the other side, not really in our spacetime manifold. We never get a full view of them, but we can study them when they are activiated here and become cueballs we can watch.-
> dhw: To classify this as "simply an event" again requires a definition of "event", and even among philosophers there's no consensus on what it means. For most of us, it's an occurrence within space/time that involves change of some kind, and for most of us change entails a sequence of cause and effect.-I have redefined it for you. Quantum events are real when they occur in our spacetime, and they are real in their own realm. But we can never fully see the cause.
 
> dhw:Ruth follows this up with references to Russell and Salmon, and with somewhat recondite examples, but these lead to the same conclusion: "Hume and Russell (1913) were right: causality is NOT an ontological feature of the world. In TI terms, it is an inference we make based on situations involving very probable transactions [...] -I think this is understandable if my analogy is followed. We never fully understand the billiard player's brain work. (A bunch of ionized particles running around along nerve axons.)
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> dhw: Why "probable"? Again this relates to predictions, which can always be thwarted by unforeseen causes and their effects (the rod in the billiard ball). How does this invalidate past and present sequences of cause and effect? Is a predicted future the only "reality"? It seems to me that the apparent evidence against causality takes place in a quantum world nobody understands. -Of course there are quantum causes. All the equations that work in QM are just taking averages of what the particular quanta are doing at a given time. The equations amazingly work, even if infinities are wiped out! It doesn't mattter if they are entangled or not, if their angular momentum (spin) is this way or that way or all ways. The average of all the probabilities works. But each individual quantum particle (bad word, but it is all we have) is doing its own thing and we can't 'see' each individual at the source of 'cause'. That is why she used 'probable'. Heisenberg's wall of uncertainty. We can understand only so much, and probably never all of it.-
> dhw:Am I alone in my confusion? If so, perhaps Ruth or someone else will hit me with an intellectual cue ball and pot me into the pocket of enlightenment.-I think my prowess with the cue ball has now got you in the right pocket. Actually I grew to prefer billiards, but you wanted a pocket.