Hi Craig, Craig: > If it were correct that inorganic patterns could come historically before > intellectual ones only if there were first a cosmology that holds that > inorganic patterns come historically before intellectual ones, then you'd be > right. > But as that assumption is incorrect, the conclusion does not follow.
Steve: I don't follow your point above. Craig: > Yes, but experience is not just human experience. > There is the experience of interaction between/amongst inorganic & biological > patterns > not dependent on intellectual ones. Steve: Only human beings use the word "cause" to describe their experience. If you are invoking a hypothetical about animals predating humans, I would say that if they had the idea of causality they could have applied it to many of their experiences. But animals as far as I know don't have ideas (intellectual patterns). > [Steve] >> Causality is then only >> an epistemological concern for making predictions rather than a clue >> to what is REALLY going on in the universe (i.e., reading the mind of >> God and learning the rules with which he runs things.) > Craig: > This doesn't follow. > Why isn't causality just the "interaction between/amongst inorganic & > biological patterns > not dependent on intellectual ones." Steve: I don't know what you mean here. Let's consider what we are talking about with an example: Does drinking red wine cause a reduction in the risk of heart disease? Suppose we find that people who drink wine have a lower incidence of heart disease than those who do not drink wine. Is the relationship causal? Not necessarily. Causality is not merely one thing changing with another. As James put it, we are looking for a deeper sort of belonging where someone who does not already drink wine would have a lower risk of heart disease if they started drinking wine, and further, it is the wine rather than something else that is associated with drinking wine that is the key ingredient responsible for lowering the risk. It may be, for example, turn out that people who drink wine tend to get a headache and take aspirin for their headaches. It may be the aspirin that is responsible for the reduction in incidence of heart disease. The above is what I call "playing the causality game." We can of course do this game in a backward looking way to talk about causal relationships existing before their were humans (we can think that if pre-historic proto-humans had drunk wine they would have had less heart disease), but it is only humans with intellectual patterns who play this game. The causality game is _our_ tool for predicting and controlling, for doing things like lowering our risk of heart disease. This game did not exist before there were humans to play it any more than football existed before there were humans to play it. See also Newton's Laws of Gravitation in ZAMM. Causality is a "ghost" like gravity is. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
