Ruth and causality (General)

by dhw, Sunday, August 18, 2013, 22:52 (4113 days ago) @ David Turell

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?-DAVID: 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.-Hume never knew about quantum mechanics. He also meant this reality, and Ruth agrees with him that causality is NOT an ontological feature of the world! That's why she uses the billiard ball example. The key to our whole discussion is your next statement: "My opinion is she used a bad example, and it is why I'm twisting her interpretation somewhat to fit my own concepts." Precisely. You are substituting your own concepts in the hope that she has mis-stated hers! -DAVID: 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. [...] 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.-You cannot SEE the cause either, but you think you know what it is. I am agnostic because although I believe there is a cause, I have no idea what it is. I have no idea either what goes on in the quantum world, but yes indeed, hidden/unknown/unexpected/unpredictable causes are still causes (as in my version of the billiard ball example). That's why I've questioned Ruth's support for Hume and Russell, who claim to have eliminated causality as an ontological feature of the world. However, like yourself, I'm not a trained philosopher. I can only comment on the arguments in front of me, and while you prefer to twist them, I'll just plead for clarification of those points I find confusing. Ruth, won't you come riding to our rescue?