Ruth and causality (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 17, 2013, 16:34 (4114 days ago) @ dhw


> 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.
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> dhw: Maybe American billiards is different from British. Our table has pockets into which you can pot the red or other white ball (regarded as bad form and also bad tactics, as it remains in the pocket), or go in-off either ball. -In America we have pocket billiards, or pocket pool as one form of play. Six pockets, a cue ball and 10 other balls set in a triangle, all these balls numbered. The cue ball strikes the group which obviously spread out despite Ruth and the various games are played pocketing one ball after another. In 'eight ball' that ball is pocketed last. In straight pool one simply pockets the balls in any order. In billiards there are three balls and no pockets. One either strikes one ball directly into the other two or makes more of a score
using banks.-> In Chapter 7 Ruth claims, along with Hume, that causality "is not really in the world". She gives as an example a billiard ball striking a second ball, thus causing (or not causing?) the second ball to move.
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> RUTH: However, we never actually SEE the cause; all we see is the pattern of events, which is repeated every time we perform these actions [...] the cue ball striking the second ball is not OBSERVABLY a 'cause'. It is simply an event. ........ 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 still think I understand Ruth. We all know cause and effect in our reality. We see events and we understand the physical lays governing them. We know the HOW, but Ruth is asking for the WHY. Why's are looking for underlying reasons that we can never fully know. I know you undertand this, but I think you are missing Ruth's point that in looking at QM we only have a partial understanding and her PTI approach is an attempt to increase our view of WHY. QM is not really in our world to paraphrase her. This is why she is a philosopher of QM. It requires that sort of approach, not just studying entanglement at greater and greater distances, which teaches us nothing. We have already concluded the entire universe is entangled.-> 
> dhw:Thank you for this magnificent effort to explain Ruth's arguments and to read her mind. However, as you will see, I have restored those parts of the quote that you missed out. Ruth never once mentions the player's mental processes. She is talking solely about the motion of the second ball being (or not being) caused by the impact of the cue ball.-You are being too literal with her. I used the mental processes example to bring in the concept of consciousness. Some folks think that our consciousness affects the QM study results, go so far as to say the universe is a result of our consciousness. Patently absurd, as our consciousness is a late comer, unless one wants to use that twisted argument for a universal consciousness. Our conscious choices affect results because quanta can be so many things at once. Once again: we can make mathematical descriptions (laws) from all the physical observations we make, but to quote Paul Davies we don't really know the WHY things are the way they are. We just accept things as they are, but why are they that way? In that sense we only have a partial view of our reality, and our view of QM is even worse.-Please ask Ruth to come back. I'd like to know what she thinks of my analysis of her approach.