I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause.
~David Hume
I on the other hand will assert something so absurd.
This is motivated by a number of posts I have seen on the methods, limitations and philosophy of science. However, before responding to those individually I think its worth getting out my general view.
My sense is that reality is like a giant block. This block extends in a number of dimensions but four are most relevant for our purposes. The three easily observable spatial dimensions and the time dimension.
At different points within the block some properties of the block vary. These are the fundamental fields. They give the block a composition.
Now, so it happens the composition of the block is patterned. So, that a given value for properties at one point in the block mean that a range of values at nearby points is more likely than other values.
In our everyday experience this allows us to perceive objects. So if I look out and say “I have an arm” I am talking about a pattern in the block.
For example, I mean that if I can only perceive a portion of the block composing the “arm” that I none the less have some pretty strong guesses about what the nearby portion of the block islike. If I then perceive the nearby portions and they do not match my guess then this is surprising. Its surprising because of the patterns.
We can call a specific pattern a shape, so that I can say my arm has a shape. Alright.
That’s all very natural in the spatial dimensions but the same thing happens in the time dimension. Objects have a shape in time.
The difference is that I perceive space and time in different ways. This possibly extends from the fact that time has a useful meta-pattern but that fully clear.
In any case reality is completely described by the shape of all objects in space-time. This is because the shape of objects in space-time indicates the patterns in the block properties and the block and its properties are the whole of reality.
What I think of as science, though I have no interest in claiming the word science, so we can call it sclience if people object is building a map of space-time for the purpose of being able to look up the shape of various objects.
Now for relatively large nearby objects within a particular slice through time this is trivially easy. I open my eyes and boom! I perceive a map of objects. All sorts of fancy stuff goes on in my brain to make this happen but from my point of view its really, really easy.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for small objects, far away objects or objects at another slice in time. Which is of course a pain.
So I go about using whatever techniques at my disposal for expanding the map.
The attempt to do this in the time dimension has led people to posit the notion of causality: that if this thing happens then something else will happen. Really though this is just a discussion of the shape of things through time.
Its no different than saying, if I have a forearm then I have a wrist. Its not as if there is some meta-physical relationship between forearms and wrists. And, it wouldn’t really make sense to say having a forearm causes me to have a wrist. Its just that the shape of arms is such that forearms are usually in direct proximity to wrists.
This is the same with the shape of things through time. In time things usually have a certain shape. However, trying to apply some sort of meta-physical specialness to this doesn’t really add anything.
Similarly. its not clear what one really adds with the phrase “everything must have a cause.” There is some shape of things through time, sure. However, are you saying that there must be some identifiable pattern to that shape? I don’t see why that has to be true and its not even clear that it is in fact true.
There could be regions of space-time where all four dimensions are completely mixed-up with no pattern at all.
So, it seems to me that there is no point in getting all emotionally caught up in this notion of causes. We map space-time as best we can and that is that.
21 comments
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Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Andrew R. Hanson
You don’t perceive time. You infer it from the positional changes of objects in space. We call these “events”.
Science is about explanations and predictions. In order to explain something, you have to appeal to a cause. If you don’t appeal to a cause, you don’t have an explanation and therefore your statement isn’t scientific.
Hume’s point is that causality doesn’t come from rationality, i.e., deduction, it comes from induction. Lots of philosophers of science have tried to get around this basically by lowering the bar (not a criticism).
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
Becky Hargrove
The idea of causality creates value in your own mind, because it is one of the primary anchors of thought for whatever you undertake: be that a simple action, or one that takes the whole of your life effort. In other words, your notion of causality is important in terms of how you react and therefore plan, based on the circumstances you observe. And of course when you are fortunate, your definitions of causality (and your responses) will finally intersect with realities beyond your own.
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 4:36 pm
bulldog
Dr. Smith wasn’t interested in metaphysics, but then he got high…
He was going to talk about economics, but then he got high…
Now he’s inventing concepts like “slices of time,” and I know why…
Because he got high, because he got high, because he got high, lalalala.
See, causality is important.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw
(only kidding, I love this stuff, no offense intended)
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
anon
Karl, we can define causality in your geometric world as well, and it makes sense to do that.
Lets take one of the spacetime patterns you mentioned: such a pattern can be expressed as a time series of space only patterns. Lets consider the iterator function that generates the whole series: this iterator is closely related to causality: if it’s essentially random, then there’s weak causality. If it has real structure, then it’s strong causal relation.
What is cause and effect? The iterator identifies it: for every iterator (we could call them the physical laws of the universe), if it’s written as an operator, the operands are the cause, the result is the effect and the operator is the causal relationship between them.
How it all looks like in practice depends on how the universe is wired up.
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 5:07 pm
BSEconomist
You beat me to the point I wanted to make. Although I might express it differently. I would say that causality in Karl’s world, or philosophy or whatever, amounts to saying; if time is plotted diagrammatically from left to right that the left-most edge has a well-defined shape. That is not an entirely trivial statement–i.e. if anon’s iterator is not computable would that violate causality in that sense?–so saying that causality is superfluous is wrong. It is a non-trivial assumption about how we think the world operates.
Having said all that, this post does have me thinking about what a non-causal world might look like. Maybe.
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 8:34 am
Mr. Violet (@EuropeanViolet)
@BSEconomist
“Having said all that, this post does have me thinking about what a non-causal world might look like. Maybe.”
perhaps it’s like trying to think to a non-euclidean space, or to a many-valued logic… or maybe more like thinking to a human world without sex… I don’t know…
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
anon
Non-causal essentially means random – and there’s plenty of that in this universe. In fact there’s much more randomness than structure – and a growing amount of entropy, thanks to an expanding universe.
Regarding computability, I don’t think it’s an issue: it appears our universe is both finite and discrete. (Granted, it would take a computer much larger than this universe to compute it.)
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Lee Kelly
The philosopher in me winced while reading that. Sorry.
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Jeff
The overly-mathematical treatment of “causality” (I put it in scare-quotes, because clearly it is being thought of in scare-quotes) that you have here, and that had been adopted historically (in physics, for example) misses something that is ultimately fairly simple, and is certainly quite important. Although Hume was right, that we don’t actually perceive causality (we imagine it), if you read him closely, it is clear he does not say that it doesn’t exist. Causality allows us to make sense of the results of interventions on the block.
“IN SUMMARY, INTERVENTION AMOUNTS TO A SURGERY ON EQUATIONS, GUIDED BY A DIAGRAM, AND CAUSATION MEANS PREDICTING THE CONSEQUENCES OF SUCH A SURGERY.” -Pearl
http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/LECTURE/lecture_sec1.htm
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Wonks Anonymous
Have you read Julian Barbour’s “The End of Time”? He has a very similar idea.
Wednesday ~ January 11th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Jeffrey G. Johnson
I find it difficult to really understand what you are saying here. Is it something like that causes and effects over time form objects in four dimensions that are as naturally and unsurprisingly connected as a forearm to a wrist? For this reason cause and effect are only an illusion of how we divide or experience time? There is something in this discussion of shapes in space-time that makes me think of gravitation. Classically an invisible force attracts two masses at a distance. In general relativity, space is curved around an object, and so the gravitational attraction of a second object is really nothing other than that objects natural inertia carrying it on a minimal path through curved space. It seems like what you are getting at is somehow akin to that shift in viewpoint. What once seemed like an invisible action at a distance becomes a property of space itself.
But your discussion of shapes and objects seems to leave something out: processes, energy, movement, force. If we want to build something, or repair something, it is very useful to think in terms of causes and effects. When water boils, when vapor in the atmosphere condenses into rain, when something burns, there is a process that involves a coincidence of certain conditions or events that are both necessary and sufficient to an event which we say has been caused by its antecedents.
When a doctor wishes to diagnose a disease, it’s very important to be able to distinguish between causation and correlation. Certain bits of biological matter, e.g. bacteria, coming into contact with the body establishes the conditions for that bacteria to replicate, which is then responsible for the interruption of various processes in the body which are necessary to that state of being we call health. The doctor must understand the causal relationship between the presence of the bacteria and the symptoms it causes in order to diagnose the medicine needed to restore health. In what way is the idea of cause and effect superfluous in this scenario?
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 7:07 am
Matt (@MeCampbell30)
You completely missed the mark Karl. You’re conflating physics to closely with metaphysics.
There is a relatively simple explanation to describe how you are wrong. Causality rests on the existence of the concept of necessary connection. Hume’s idea was that nature is random and “causation” is a result of a human illusion – not part of the natural world.
Does 2+2 equal 4 because I have the experience of putting 2 things with 2 other things and getting a total of 4 things? Could I one day get 5 things (due to the randomness of nature)? Or is it because the world is structured in such a way that nothing else could be the case (i.e. we live in a causal world)?
What about imaginary numbers (the square root of a negative number)? Clearly, I have not seen them in the physical world but they are perfectly legitimate objects in the world of mathematics that obey certain rules (causal rules if you will). Causality does not need to be looked at strictly temporally. See Aristotle’s four causes.
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 8:20 am
Mr. Violet (@EuropeanViolet)
@Mr.Smith
I didn’t understand: are you mapping reality or your by-instrument-extended perception of it?
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 10:09 am
Jacob Hartog
This post well expresses my thought process while sitting in traffic, waiting to get through the Lincoln Tunnel: though there exists, I hope, at another point in space-time, another (happier!) me who has already traveled through the tunnel, it is difficult to say if my current self “caused” the later self to come into being; perhaps it is that later self that is causing my current self to sit patiently, waiting for the car in front of me to inch forward; or, indeed, perhaps the later self, bleeding and in pain, causes me now to do something stupid that causes an accident. Is the arrow really only pointing in one direction?
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Axel
It’s weird to invoke Hume as a ‘causality’ defender. Other posts mentioned it, but I remember the little I’ve read from exactly on the same Karl empirical position: causality is what our mind built from correlation/repeated observation. But if causality arise from correlation and is empirically linked to time. It’s far more than this for our representation of the world. causality is basically deduction.
So I’m not sure to understand what a world without causality means for you (especially as your posts are full of deductive reasoning). Does it mean you think causality is a pure artifact created by human minds ? And so what? human mind exists, it’s a pattern we can recognize on your posts !
Thursday ~ January 12th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Curt Doolittle
Sigh. That’s a long way of demonstrating you’re confused.
That’s a long way of justifying correlative reasoning over causal reasoning.
System 1 messing with you again?
Friday ~ January 13th, 2012 at 11:06 am
Mr. Violet (@EuropeanViolet)
Karl Popper, Postscript to the logic of scientific discovery, vol 1: Realism and the aim of science, Chapter 1 (Induction), section 2 (Solution of the problem of induction), subsection 6, footnote 11:
“Hume’s criticism of induction was unfortunately mixed up by Hume himself with his criticism of causality, of which it is, however, logically independent. With the most notable exception of Bertrand Russel [...] commentators as a rule have failed to disentangle these two points.”
Sunday ~ January 15th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
David Kagan
“Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for small objects, far away objects or objects at another slice in time. Which is of course a pain.”
It’s not just small objects! Unless you are implicitly buying into some kind of hard cut-off between the quantum and classical worlds, you would inexorably be led to the view that a no-collapse, quantum mechanical universe has a very complicated structure–certainly nothing as straightforward as a block.
You could try to finesse things by saying that the “shapes in time” are statistical regularities, but that moves away from a strictly geometric, block universe view.
Quantum mechanics is more than a pain–if we take it seriously, then it demands a dramatic rethinking of what we mean by the term “universe” and renders a block picture as a very poor sort of approximation.
Sunday ~ January 15th, 2012 at 6:42 pm
Interesting Things I’ve Been Reading: Causality Edition « Frontier Scientist
[...] http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/01/11/causality-is-superfluous/ [...]
Friday ~ February 10th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Notes on Causality and Superflousness « Modeled Behavior
[...] notes on the comments I made here, inspired by [...]
Saturday ~ October 13th, 2012 at 4:24 am
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