Ruth and causality (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 18, 2013, 16:26 (4113 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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? ...... Does the fact that we don't know all the causes mean they're not "really" there?-You are using a bad example. My medical detective work was in this reality. I preferred to know the cause or answer before I fired my magic bullet with a rifle not a shotgun. But sometimes the cause was not known, had to be there, but never found. As you know I believe everything has a cause.
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> 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.-My opinion is she used a bad example, and it is why I'm twisting her interpretaton somewhat to fit my won concepts.
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> DAVID: You are being too literal with her. .... 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.
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> dhw: 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...... and cue me in on your own opinion.-My WHY comes from the fact that we can observe and apply organization, math formulas to what we observe, but we still don't know why what we observe has to be the way we see it arranged. In basic particles we find three leptons (includes the electron), eight gluons, six quarks, one photon, one higgs, the W W Z group, three types of neutinos, making up three forces, matter and fields. And missing so far is gravity and its particle, the graviton. The WHY is just that. Why does it have to be just that arrangement and no other? There is a reasonable 'cause' for that arrangment. But my guess is we will never know it. And that 'reasonable cause' implies purpose in the sense that the arrangement created our reality, allowed us (life) to develop from it, created conciousness, which allows us to study it and wonder. This is a paraphrase of Paul Davies. You are agnostic because you cannot see the 'cause'. The hidden cause has to exist. Ruth's hidden causes in QM have to exist. Hidden doesn't mean non-existent.