Simon Blackburn - What is Causation?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 11 бер 2020
- Free access to Closer to Truth's library of 5,000 videos: bit.ly/376lkKN
In a 'billiard-ball world' of Newtonian science, causation was obvious-things had to touch each other in space and a cause always had to precede an effect. But quantum mechanics destroys such notions. What then is causation? Moreover, must causes always be physical? Is 'mental causation' a coherent concept? What about 'top-down causation'?
Watch more interviews on causation: bit.ly/2x7R6uE
Simon Blackburn is a British academic philosopher known for his work in quasi-realism and his efforts to popularize philosophy. He obtained his doctorate in 1970 from Churchill College, Cambridge.
Register for free at CTT.com for subscriber-only exclusives: bit.ly/2GXmFsP
Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
I like this guy. His responses were clarifying without advocating a particular view.
Causation is indeed THE fundamental problem in science along with the illusion of time. Thanks for this interesting video!
The illusion of time is certainly fascinating, but it is not a fundamental problem in science. The illusion of a god for instance is as interesting, but not "a problem in science."
Certainly science is never harmed when anything is better understood, but time as a tool in math for instance works so well the idea that it is a problem is silly. The Illusion of time is problem in philosophy or cognition, not science. Even still it is fairly well understood.
The time illusion is an emotional response ie a fit of the creature via biological evolution to the physical fact we know as entropy. A deer moves out of the way of a falling rock (entropy) because it has evolved by surviving danger related to events "about to happen" ie within a time. It prepares for winter via a sense of "time" manifest as oncoming events because it has evolved to do so, it's genetic forebearers who did not having died out. Entropy is the fundamental issue in science not time.
In my case a close study of Sean Carroll's video series on time was useful as were a number of books whose titles I could look for in my library.
@@rubiks6 - I challenged him on that too. But I don't see how you asking for more out of a source that is clearly limited is going to extend a conversation usefully.
@@rubiks6 - We both agree he has it wrong, then notice the use of all caps for emphasis, and a pandering thank you to the authors of the vid, neither are a sign of having insight, they are rather conversational babble.
When a comment has it wrong and is adamant, do not expect good things to come given open questions. This comment format needs to be held tight to be useful, which I like it for practicing writing and thinking.
@@rubiks6 if "how" and "why" are important questions for science why do scientist always talk about how the universe was created and dodge the question why was it created ?
@Mohamed Taqi - I limited my analogy to where it is useful, I did not imply what you suggest but you are free to ramble.
This man is very articulate. Clear, precise, and insightful.
That's because he has a British accent. British accents make someone appear to have a higher IQ... except Cockney 😂
Yes he is. Blackburn is one of my favourite living philosophers. A great teacher.
I love that way of describing the issue: Causation doesn't hit the eye in the same way colours do.
Qualia ... the subjective experience.
@@jairofonseca1597 Subjectivity is the illusion. Objectivity is the truth.
@@verfassungspatriot illusion also is truth.
The classical view of causation (not the "spooky action at distance") requires two spatially separate objects to influence each other:
they have to INTERACT at a given moment in time. BUT there are really no static objects, that's just a simplified mental representation.
No matter what side of reality are we looking at: on the quantum level the simplest "objects" such as electrons or photons (to name both fermionic and bosonic "particles") can only be described via the help of wave-functions when they aren't involved in a classical event... Even a single subatomic particle seems to be a dynamic system. On the other side, a macroscopic object (say a piece of salt crystal, NaCl) made of a bunch of atoms is also a very dynamic system under everyday circumstances....
It's interaction with distilled water will result in its dissolution. Can we say the water caused the result?
It depends on what we mean by causation.
If the dynamic pattern of the process (in this case the dissolution) can be "satisfactorily" simulated using (measurable/quantifiable) properties of the interactants, the encounter of which lead to certain (mathematically calculable) results, which can only be explained via exact rules of mutual influences: should we call the rules as the causes? Those rules only apply at certain properties... Are the properties more fundamental than the rules? Is it even sensible to talk about any properties if there are no rules relating them?
Can there be rules (natural laws) which doesn't involve in their description a causal relation of some properties?
(In reference to the philosopher's choice of words calling gravity a causal law).
Brilliant explanation!
That moment where something you deduced on your own turns out to be a very simple and raw form of a clearly defined philisophical concept from hundreds of years ago.
At least it was Hume...
QM doesn't destroy our notion of cause and effect. It challenges our understanding of space and time. The mathematics of QM show that our understanding of reality, which is based on our evolutionary necessities of survival is not complete. In fact it appears to be beyond our ability to conceive. We lack the kind of mental landscape needed to encompass it.
Fortunately for us, we do have these mathematical systems which so far seem to work, so all hope isn't lost.
He mentions the block universe is the way to understand backwards causation, but the block universe is actually fully based on Einsteins forward directed time dilations and the speed of light. I feel it is directing us to imagine a presentist block universe instead, with a small 'thickness' in which backward causation moves from the surface of the universe (future/present) to the bottom of the block (the quantum past - but not the past like the world we live in, it is limited in its temporal reach then)
Cause and effect is omnipresent in our everyday lives, as well as in quantum mechanics.
And if in modern philosophy this concept (cause and effect) causes controversy,
then this is due to a misunderstanding of the essence of quantum mechanics.
----
''If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it''
/ John Wheeler /
''Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense'' /Roger Penrose/
"Nobody understands quantum mechanics and that's a problem". /Sean Carroll/
good interview...Wonder if you could get David Ray Griffin on your channel. He's got some interesting ideas on causation.
These are such lovely conversations. As Hume himself said, upon leaving the comfort of his study to take a stroll outside -- he suddenly finds himself to think like everyone else! Crossing streets is a dangerous endeavour when skepticism about causality is part of one's daily Modus Operandi. We are _necessitated_ to adopt *causality* as a (subjective) transcendental category with which we describe phenomena that occur in our experiential models of the world. The attempt to explain causation _in_ _terms_ of those phenomena appears to be mistaken.
If you accept that causation is really just an observation of regularities in nature, then it opens the door to much stranger regularities. This is why natural magic is still a thing. The act you perform doesn't seem to have a causal connection to the effect, and yet you can observe that the two things happen together with remarkable regularity.
@@caricue thanks for the explanation.
Causation isn't our mind reading its own habits or customs in the world, it is a reality of the way we create explanations. We create them assuming the correctness of the logic of causation. So the necessity for causation doesn't rise in ourselves, but in our knowledge.
I think I agree - realized it while reading Popper. Explanations are by definition causal - it consists of 1. what we want to have explained, and 2. the reason why what we want to have explained happens. If that is true, then an explanation is finding a cause for an "effect" we are observing.
@@chrertoffis thst logic is a mere mode of explanation. An explanation isn't that necessarily, that's a special case.
Hume's concept of an event seems to be separable from causation, however I do not think we have a concept the of an event without antecedent causes. (I take this to be a component of Kant's response)
Nevertheless this does not deny Hume's point that the causal consequences are not known to us outside experience and that even with some experience though we might expect that a collision between two physical objects will have causal consequences, without more specific experience we would not know whether the interaction would lead to an elastic rebound, deformation, disintegration (or a combination of these).
causation is the bumping of events as time affects experience
We don't want to be born and die, but it has to happen (causation)
I love Hume. Yes, he said "you've got to suck it up" on many things, including the is/ought distinction. What has followed since he made these brilliant observations is people have mostly ignored them without ever refuting them. They go to Ipse Dixit: I say causation is universal law, therefore it is. I say morals are objective, therefore they are. In other words, they go into delusion, ideology, and dogmatism and hope that this will replace truth, science, and reason.
Actually Al-Ghazali mentioned this problem of Causality in his book "Incoherence of Philosophers" way before David Hume.
#Eurocentric
I just LOVE the way Professor Blackburn speaks English. And at the same time sort of wringing his hands. Fascinating. Of course his logic and his knowledge are also impressive. hahahaahahaha
Why do we expect causation? Would we need to expect to expect to expect?
What are the implications of necessity in the human mind? Does necessity mean there is subjectivity, consciousness, and perhaps ontology; since physical reality is contingent with patterns in nature as effects?
A very interesting interview.. I couldn't grasp the importance of distinguishing a difference between EXPECTING something to happen, and knowing it will, but there was much here to consider. Dr. Blackburn mentioned the block universe theory.. THIS would be a place where causation becomes less meaningful. (Meaningless?)
"Knowing" is a shortcut in biological creatures for waiting each time to see if an event will be consistent with past events. A deer runs away from a man holding a cup of grain because it "knows" that the man who wants to feed it is a danger. Of course the man is not a danger and what the deer knows is wrong. But the deer is more tightly bound to what it holds as "knowing" than remaining open and testing the issue, because it's genetic fore-bearers who violated that behavior tended to not survive as well to have offspring and the curiosity gene was not spread as well as the run away gene.
A block universe does indeed set causation aside. You might say it is as a universe would be, without life to observe it. It therefore is any given exact state of the universe at any instant, in an infinite sequence. This is a case of a way of considering a thing, much like if you considered a person you know as having just died, for that moment they are impressively static in comparison to the potential they held for change just a second before. Block universe is a paradigm for helping to shake psychology out of the mind for a second, like listening to an orchestra in microsecond intervals or a moving image as individual frames.
@@johnsmith1474 Yea.. But why did Hume attach so much significance to the DIFFERENCE between expecting an event or knowing that it will happen ? I feel like it's going over my head..
@@billnorris1264 - The importance is that the total construct of the world and society around Hume was founded on the presumption that it was known what caused everything; God. When Hume steps out and declares "you do not rationally know anything before it happens," he destroys the whole edifice of Western Christian reality as expressed by "The Great Chain of Being" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being
So you really can't get bigger than that. This is why Hume and his associates around the late 18th Century are labeled historically as having created, "The Age of Enlightenment." (This has an analogy in, "The Renaissance").
I don't want to dump too much at you in one serving. But know this: 1. your curiosity and sense of being ill-at-ease is absolutely correct. 2. you cannot do better for your own mind than to study in this historical area and all of it's thinkers until it sinks in. 3. I rely on a full boat of study from very ancient history to modern physics to get a handle on how I want my mind to operate, but the period of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers that includes Hume is as important and rewarding as any in history and we should be very proud of him. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume
@@johnsmith1474 Ill look into it friend..Thanks.
@@billnorris1264 - Willing learners deserve willing teachers. I see your vid collection is A+ stuff across the board, sign of a well oiled and able mind on the move to endless understanding. So I am honored to perhaps encourage or be of the least support!
I recommend the opening chapters of Roger Penrose's "Cycles of Time" (2011) for it's investigation of entropy in real terms with many interesting graphic examples. The total book is on a new cosmology (which I buy into but is not the point here), but to present his thesis Penrose first analyses some peculiar implications of the 2cd Law (entropy). I find a solid grasp of the counter-intuitive implications in entropy useful for breaking out of some mental structures, and eventually any mental structure.
Hm-but how would a view without causation explain away causation at a macroscopic scale: for example, if I do a hundred pushups every day for the next 3 months, I'm bound to get a better physique on my upper body. Now, would the block universe picture state that me being buffed up in the future CAUSED me to work out in the past? Even then, I'm not able to picture the causal link being broken!
Is there causation when a force acts on an object?
Could quantum fields / wave functions explain causation? If there is backward causation in quantum fields, then maybe probabilities of wave function are caused by measurement?
The question is not 'whether quantum fields / wave functions explain causation'. The question is 'how to understand quantum fields / wave functions in the light of causality'. Causality is the criterion of validity and reality. Quantum fields / wave functions are just tentative candidates to be judged before the court of causality.
Basically what the chap is saying here is that, 'What has to happen will happen else we wouldn't be here'. Time is mathematical only.
I’m surprised Simon Blackburn didn’t differentiate between correlation and causation. I think an important difference, and the reason a cause “must” result in an effect is “mechanism”. Isn’t that what Science is about in terms of explanation?
That's the mechanistic approach to science. It's the mainstream accepted conception of science right now. But it doesn't have to be the truth, as it were. Also he talks about causation in a much more general way, not a particular realisation of it.
Aishwariya Sweety Thank you - you’ve got me intrigued! You say mechanism is the current way of Science but is not necessarily the truth... Why wouldn’t it be the truth ie. making a mere correlation into a cause, (assuming the proposed mechanism is correct)? It may not be the only way to differentiate between correlation and causation, but it’s an important distinction to make. Causes are not just regularities of one thing following another. Often they are statistical eg. smoking and lung cancer. The mechanism then is important, ie. to show how carcinogens in cigarette smoke cause cancer. Otherwise, you just have correlation - even in non-science situations.
So, for instance, in contrast with smoking... research in the 1950s in the UK showed that people who wore flat caps 🧢 lived shorter lives than people who wore top hats 🎩. Are flat caps the cause of an early death? Do top hats cause less injury or illness?
No... it’s just that working class people tended to wear a flat cap, while many upper class people wore a top hats. Working class people had more dangerous jobs, were poorer, had less good healthcare etc. and thus lived shorter lives. My point is, it’s only by knowing the explanation ie. mechanism that you can tell correlation from causation - not just in science, but in everyday life.
@uremove You can identify confounding variables like class differences by stratifying the data. Change a few variables and see how the outcome changes, that will give evidence for or against causation. That's without knowing the mechanism.
This being such a radically challenging argument against the god as the ultimate cause of things, I wonder what debates may have been held about it?
These guys are intelligent.
The are only fools with questions that arise in their minds from our CREATOR.
Does need to experience causation indicate subjective and conscious nature of causation?
No, in solipsism causation would be completely subjective yet also arbitrary. In fact there would be no way of knowing that it was not utterly arbitrary.
Is that Jeff Goldblum cos playing as Steve Jobs ?
How can I go further with this?
That stuff about causation not being an actual thing, but just an observation that this one thing always happens after another is a strange road to follow. If one uses natural magic, you can see that your seemingly unrelated actions can lead to a desired effect, but you can find no causal relationship, it is just a regularity of nature. The backwards causation is even weirder. I was born with a misaligned leg, but before I was old enough for a leg brace, I was run over by a car in a most improbable way by my own mother, and when the cast came off, my leg was straight and all I was left with was a scar, almost like a makers mark so that I would know. The question is, did the fact that I was going to have a crazy "accident" while still a baby, cause my leg to develop wrong? I don't think so, but it was the only example I could think of backward causation.
There is no causation at the deepest level of reality cause the projector or the computer that make our reality render the eality in zero time between even and the next event
That makes sense
Our ancestors understood causality, since bacteria, all the way through being fish and animals. If they didn't, we would not be here, like all the lives that aren't here. Only recent humans have beome confused with beliefs.
Causation seems one of the hard problems in nature. Nobody knows for certain how to explain it's connection with the physical world.
Only because the truth of mathematics has been airbrushed from human history. Causation is a mathematical phenomenon just like everything in a mathematical universe.
You've got to be kidding.
"...that DOES worry us". Hmmm. Nothing should.
I think Hume and the Buddha (or Nagarjuna) would have a great time talking about causality! 😅
Perhaps causation is the new agency. Merely another bias we impose on two events that appear related in some sense we only imagine we comprehend.
Hornsby already explained what it is.. given below.
i dont think you can explain causation, until you explain what time is. there can be no causation without time.
Everything causes everything else instantaneously - there you go: timeless causation. (Dot)
What’s magic? Every process with its source outside the universe and our physical reality. Perhaps gravity is magic!
The brain is a well-honed tool for identifying useful patterns like causality. If causality wasn't useful, we wouldn't be talking about it.
It's not just useful, it's I indispensable; in philosophy and in daily life. You couldn't even brush your teeth if you didn't know that squeezing the tube would CAUSE toothpaste to come out.
And you can test it as rigorously as you like. (Even the idea of a test assumes causality.)
QM is not a valid exception, since we don't understand what causes what. Two hundred years ago you might have said that sunlight was an exception in the same sense as QM, since no one knew what caused it. But now that we do know about fusion, the causality is apparent and obvious. QM doesn't defy causality, it defies our understanding of QM - big difference.
Bo Zo shut up
Not sure of your point here, you seem to be dancing around terms and missing the point of the lecture. To say the human mind recognize patterns is a woefully partial explanation, because where it wishes it invents a pattern in place of one it lacks. The accurately invented patterns are used as knowledge, but so are completely inaccurate ones proving that the mind is not identifying something but creating something. A complete delusion is as powerful as the most accurately known fact (god belief). As Simon Blackburn is trying to tell you, you do NOT know that the paste will come out of the tube, there is no "knowing" in advance.
@@johnsmith1474 No, you absolutely know the toothpaste will come out. I personally guarantee it. Go try.
We "create" accurate understandings of patterns because of Darwin. We also create inaccurate ones because of Darwin - pretty good has usually been good enough.
Go find an example of non-causality.
@@bozo5632 - You are muted. I'm cutting out the junk.
@@johnsmith1474 Cause and effect.
I really hate the Humean notion of causation.
It lifted Hume to the pinnacle of philosophy. All the more important considering the time in which he developed the ideas. But yes it is not warm & fuzzy. I suggest you embrace it, it's the truth.
John Smith pretty sure Aristotle got it right.
@@patrickwithee7625 - The planets & Sun orbit the Earth in perfect circles because the circle is a perfect form?
Meh. These aren't the big questions. They don't bring us closer to anything, let alone The Truth with capital T's.
Why does a dog chase his tail?
Why does BZ post clatter? For the same reason an unwilling teen learner spends most of class combing his hair and winking at girls.
'cause and effect do not exist'...the , so called , cause/effect are in, and of, the process...OMski
Dr. David R. Hawkins ... 'there is no cause ... '...
So to summarise: shit happens.
Karma
Ha !! No one can brush "God" aside, at some point the best answer is: I dont know, that is what God means.
Thanks Aquinas.
Yes, let the least creative thinker in the class impose his doctrine, demonstrating zero personal intellectual courage! Next, find yourself a Lord and a King to live under! Chav's philosophy!
This is called: "the God of the gaps".
@@eyebee-sea4444 - It's the poorly educated person, steeped in dogma, of the Internet.
The inquire, the quest are good, courage does not mean arrogance, it ok to say I dont know when it is true, we may add, we are working hard to find out though.
The Gap sometimes is bigger than what we know, dark matter and energy, consciousness, creation of life and the universe, etc, again parsimony is advised.
Science can be and sometimes is dogmatic, so it does not add to this discussion.
@@jairofonseca1597 - Intellectual parsimony rejects the supernatural completely without reservation. I an up to dealing with your double talk, but please respect ethical humanity & keep you ideological rot away from children and the credulous.
ooh..someone who has thought about things for once...
444
did i miss something here.. when did events/time start moving backwards? If there is one thing I want to see before I die, it's a baby going back into it's mother's womb.... i don't mean a marsupial. im talking mammals
im not so sure we are speaking the same language. and, god knows im not a scientist, but it seems to me that marsupials would come before mammals. That's neither here or there. your "vast dust in a wide open universe coalesced to become a planetary system"... for me isn't backward because that same universe is still explaining... backward to me would me that all of this somehow would become a minute particular that became the big bang. that is if we are still talking big bang here.
@@ronjohnson4566 - Fair enough, I deleted it. Thanks for challenging it, I didn't like it myself after I wrote it, it being more of a mental workout for me than a solid reply to you. (I have a couple physics discussion here at once.) Thank you for that!
Perhaps this is better for you: There is nothing in any law of physics that makes impossible time reversed events. That is, the laws of physics are completely time-reversible. That is, IF an egg reassembles after it falls and smashes, no law of physics is broken. Hold this thought ....
The overwhelming belief that it CANNOT do that is just a strong impression that arises from the vast unlikelihood that it ever does do that. Because it can.
You will agree that an event being completely unlikely is not the same category of thing as it being disallowed. And, here to the point: allowed/disallowed under the laws of physics is the gold standard for causality. Not likelihood.
@@johnsmith1474 Ive read this stuff before. So, I won't hold my breath waiting. But, if I do "see" something anything like this I will post it and show it to someone in Sweden or is it Finland and get my money! Nobel who!
@@ronjohnson4566 - You are ineducable, lol.
‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio’
Our CREATOR created an AI and Voice system that processes INVISIBLE thoughts into visible images and separated that AI and Voice systems into what is known as individual MEN. Each MIND of MAN is like a computer processor of information that experiences visible worlds to explore.
What's the nature of the creator? AI as well?
boo
NOOOO . This is my field, *closes my door* stay in your own community. The intermediators are our domain. Sincerely, the type you don't test for. Paradigmatic Causality Mechanics . Any answers for consciousness yet? *smug face* , not really, we aren't smug, ready when scientists are :) . Cognitive computers? hows that for a breadcrumb :)
additionally quit the agency argument. No they didn't invent animism to understand. Ironically i am assumed to be religious when i say this, no no, far worse, i write about evolution, to the letter, as opposed to whatever fits the intelligence myths. Primitive humans understood causality, you don't because of how the language is constructed as typological . Animism origin stories are delusional, because you need to push the intelligence argument.
Honey for sociopaths ,)
The Theory of Everything: Consciousness emerges from biology. Biology emerges from chemistry. Chemistry emerges from matter. Matter emerges from space-time. Space-time emerges from energy. The question for physicists should be "what is energy" ?
Amazingly arrogant WE humans can write the laws of the cosmos - really? - give me a break.
You misunderstood.
@@qwadratix help me understand, I see "law" as a human concept, an idea, a dogma. I just don't think we should go around trying to enforce our "laws" when we have no idea what we are regulating or defining.
If our "laws" are so powerful why does the "cosmological constant" turn out not to be not so constant, or Einstein's "only absolute in the universe" the speed of light, yet in experiments, the speed of light changes - better call the cops and not a physicist.
@@babyl-on9761 They agree with you. The concept of a 'law' is a purely human one. In that sense, we impose the laws on the universe, which doesn't concern itself with them at all.
The problem arises because of the use of the word 'law'. It's a historical one. Before the 20th Century the prevailing view of the world was as one created by a god. The laws were thought to be the laws given by god and we mortals were simply finding out what they were. Later, god got taken out of it and we talk about the 'laws of nature' if we must.
But the philosophical view is that the very concept is man-made. We invented a god in the first place to have these laws and when that proved untenable we transmuted it to some nebulous 'nature'. But in reality, these laws are something we put in place for our own purpose and understanding.
Now the view is beginning to shift to something else, but no-one seems to be sure what that is. We're beginning to suspect that the 'laws' of our universe probably don't apply to other universes (this is the multiverse 'thing') and no-one has been able to determine what exactly might be the fundamental set of 'laws' that ALWAYS pertain - or if in fact there is one.
Well the fact that you are writing that comment on electronic device that uses those laws of the universe kind of makes me think that we're on to something. So can we write down the laws of the universe? Well we're riding down some of them and they work. Will we ever understand everything? Don't know. That remains to be seen. But we can try! I chose physics for my education because I like learning those laws governing the universe.
@@dankuchar6821 The hubris of the Western civilization knows no bounds.