Ruth and causality (General)

by dhw, Sunday, August 18, 2013, 13:59 (4114 days ago) @ David Turell

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.-DAVID: I still think I understand Ruth. We all know cause and effect in our reality. We see events and we understand the physical laws 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. [...]
 
I'm fine with "QM is not really in our world", but not with CAUSATION "is not really in the world". Ruth links her scepticism to expectation and prediction, with the billiard balls as her empirical example. When you were a practising physician, if your patient did not respond to treatment as expected /predicted, did you assume there was no "real" cause, or did you look for a cause you might have missed? And if the treatment worked, did you say there can't have been a "real" causal sequence (a) between disorder and illness because you don't know WHY the disorder caused the illness, and (b) between illness, medication and cure because you don't know WHY the treatment worked? Does the fact that we don't know all the causes mean they're not "really" there?-dhw: 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.-DAVID: 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.-I agree with all of this, but I suspect your WHY relates to purpose, not to the reality of cause and effect. And you won't find any of it in Ruth's section on CAUSALITY which, along with Hume and Russell, she claims is not an ontological feature of the world. In my last post, I asked whether (and for what reasons) you believed this. So forget the billiards for now, and cue me in on your own opinion.-DAVID: Please ask Ruth to come back. I'd like to know what she thinks of my analysis of her approach.-So would I! But contributors to this forum are free to come and go as they wish. Ruth, if you read this, do please enlighten us!