Platt says.
Thanks for a high quality historical perspective on the philosophy of cause and
effect. I conclude that philosophy is still involved with that issue with
Pirsig perhaps giving it the latest "twist" by introducing static patterns of
preference. That Hawkins doesn't see his thoughts in any way connected to
philosophy means to me that he doesn't recognize the underlying assumptions of
science much less those underlying his own ideas. (Or maybe he does but I
haven't read where he revealed or explained them, like why physical laws are
mathematical. )
Anyway, thanks for a "keeper" post for my science folder..
On 17 Sep 2010 at 10:01, david buchanan wrote:
Platt said:
... I buy the scientist's assumption that for every effect there is a cause
That at the beginning of the universe cause and effect suddenly becomes
inoperative to Hawkins and some other cosmologists seems to me to be a grand
cop out.
Steve replied:
I don't think that Hawkings is saying that cause and effect get suspended at
the beginning of the universe alone. The somethings coming from nothings happen
all the time on the quantum level according to my understanding of his
theoretical view. .. Believers often argue that the universe must have a
beginning because otherwise we would have an infinite regress of causes. ...
dmb says:
It's ironic that the issue of cause and effect should come up in a thread that
declares the death of philosophy. So much of philosophy centered on that issue.
Kant famously said that he was awakened from his "dogmatic slumbers" by Hume's
empiricism, specifically by Hume's attack on cause and effect. Basically, Hume
noticed that causal relations are never experienced as such. We don't see
causes so much as we add the notion to explain why one event follows another.
This was a big deal at the time because all events in the universe was
conceived as one long chain of causality going all the way back to the moment
of creation itself, going all the way back to the first cause. The first cause
is what starts the whole chain of causes and prevents an infinite regress. This
is "the prime mover". It's God. This idea goes all the way back to Aristotle,
but it had been integrated into Christianity during the age of scholasticism.
So when Hume attacked causality itself as non-empirical, there were profound
theological implications. No causality, no first cause.
Kant's response was to say that concepts like cause and effect (as well as time
and space) are innate categories of the mind. We need these mental categories
to shape raw sense data into something intelligible. In my undergrad days, the
prof explained this in terms of raw dough (sense data) being put through a
pasta machine (innate categories of the mind). The blob of dough is shaped when
it's run through the little machine. It's given a uniform thickness and sliced
into strands of uniform width. Afterwards, you might even trim the pasta so
it's of uniform length too but that's just a cooking tip, not an
epistemological analogy.
Kant thought he was saving empiricism from collapsing into solipsism, he was
saving God (not sure how THAT works), and since concepts like time, space, as
well as cause and effect were categories innate to the human mind, he was
presenting a particular kind of rationality as universal. There is a real world
with pre-existing things, with things-in-themselves and this is what causes the
sense data but we can never know the world of things-in-themselves except
through the mind's categories, he thought. His work is about the inherent
structure of reason, the thought paths we must walk, the modes of thought to
which we must conform.
Now I think we want to look at the MOQ's radical empiricism in this context.
It's part of the same story but, of course, it pushes these ideas in a very
different direction. Since radical empiricism rejects subject-object
metaphysics, what James and Pirsig are saying is really quite different. The
radical empiricist says that subjects and objects are not the starting points
of experience, they are concepts derived from experience. That one little line
changes everything. As Kant see it, objects are the cause of our experience,
they are things-in-themselves and so exist independently of our perceptions. As
Pirsig sees it, objects are concepts. They are what Kant would call a category
of the mind, except that in the MOQ our conceptual categories are not universal
or innate. They are provisional, they are cultural creations that have evolved
and will continue to evolve.
And then there is that bit in the MOQ where the laws of causality are replaced
by patterns of preference. Causal relations is a useful idea, but it's just
that: an idea. But we can just as well conceptualize the same experience and
the same laboratory data in terms of preferences.
It's interesting that Hawking is saying we don't need to invoke God in order to
explain physical reality and Dawkins is saying we don't need to invoke God in
order to explain biological reality and the Pope is in the UK issuing warnings
about "aggressive secularism" and "atheist extremism". (Echoes of "militant
secularism", eh Steve?) It looks like the war between science and religion is
still very much with us. I think the MOQ gives a better answer than either side
in that debate.
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