An Exploration Of Causality

[♦ ficino ♦]

 

These two fabrication processes are differentiated through a person applying a chainsaw to the log in different ways. If the person had used a set of instructions or blueprints to guide them, then some people would call the instructions or blueprints the formal cause of the chair or statue. I don't know though. I think of the fabrication process here as some sort of amalgamation of efficient and formal causes. An efficient cause gives rise to a material transformation, and formal cause dictates how the efficient causes are applied. If we expand upon the fabrication process we might write...

 

a person using a chainsaw over time to remove wood in a specified way ==> (log ==> chair)

 

I tend to think of the chainsaw's removal of wood as the locus of chair's efficient cause, and the specified way of removing wood as the locus of its formal cause. If that makes sense.

 

 

hello guys, may I throw in my two cents? For Aristotle, I think the formal cause will be the idea of a chair. The efficient cause will be the carpenter/chair maker, since from him proceeds the motion. The saw is an instrument but the motion doesn't proceed from it. That's the thinking on which Aristotle will say that the efficient cause of the child is the father (he didn't realize that the mother also contributes genetic material).

[Legion]

Ficino, I welcome your participation here. I certainly think that Aristotle's causes are open to different interpretations, and I am still learning. Consider this though...

 

We could conceivably remove a person from the fabrication process by building a machine which can fabricate a chair from a log. I would then have the tendency to say that the machine is the formal and efficient cause of the chair.

 

When I think of formal causes I think of things like... recipes, blueprints, and instructions. And I think of efficient causes as being responsible for a material transformation.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Hello Legion, I'm not up on modern processes enough to comment on your idea that it's helpful to speak of an amalgam of efficient and formal causes. As far as Aristotle goes, this is my understanding:

In book 2 of the Physics, what people call his "efficient cause" is the primary source of the change or rest. He give as examples the man who deliberated, or the father as the cause of the child. But it's not the man as man but, in the case of artifacts, it's the man as possessor of the relevant craft (techne). That's why Ari also says that the cause of the statue is the sculptor's art and explicitly calls it the source from where the motion comes (195a8). You can say that Polyclitus is the cause of a statue, or that a sculptor is the cause, because Polyclitus was a sculptor. I.e. Polyclitus is the cause of the statue qua sculptor, or even, it's the art of sculpture. Either way, Ari thinks of the efficient cause as the source of the change. He gives another rather strange example: the source of the motion in the army's going to battle was an enemy raid.

 

Ari is fine with hierarchies of causes, so somewhere in On the Generation of Animals (I can't find the passage right now) he's talking about semen as a cause, and he compares it to saying that a face on a carving is caused by the ax and the drill. In the passage, he is referring to the woodcarver making a carving. So as I remember, he doesn't want to say that the semen is the efficient cause of the child, but the father is, since he's the source of the motion. The semen is an instrumentality like the ax.

 

In your example of a machine that can fabricate a chair from a log, my take on Ari is that he'd say that the furniture maker is the efficient cause, or, put another way, the craft of furniture making (that's different from the form of the chair). The machine would be a particularly sophisticated instrument and thus, a secondary efficient cause, but he might insist that we apply the word "cause" to it homonymously, since the machine is not the primary source of the change - it's controlled by the furniture maker.

 

If you imagine programming the machine, you could say that it has the blueprint. The blueprint is a coded version of the idea of the chair or form of the chair. As a student of Plato, Ari always wants to say that artifacts are the products of craft, techne, which presupposes mind. I don't know what he'd say about artificial intelligence. Both of those guys take mind always as a function of soul.

 

If I can find the passage from Generation later on I'll add it.

 

Well, this is my understanding of this. Cheers, F

[Legion]

We may have some controversy here Ficino. And apparently this is not new, as even Aristotle and his contemporaries disagreed about the relative nature and importance of these four causes, even while accepting their relevance in the analysis of natural entailment. But allow me to state my reasoning once more as we consider fabricating a chair or a statue.

 

A person using a chainsaw over time in a specific way ==> (log ==> chair)

A person using a chainsaw over time in a specific way ==> (log ==> statue)

 

The only thing which differs between these two fabrication processes is the specific manner in which the chainsaw is applied. The differing shape or form of the resultant artifacts arises because of these differing ways of removing wood from the log. That's why I tend to think that the locus of formal cause here is the specific way in which the saw is applied.

 

I believe I need to think further on 'more natural' events, rather than artifacts. I might should consider rocks for instance, and ask "Why do rocks exist?"

 

As for organisms, I think this is complex. I feel fairly certain that Ari did not fully appreciate the phenotype/genotype distinction in biology which I believe is critical to any causal analysis of organisms.

 

Anyway, thank you Ficino. We may have some disagreements here, but let there be no acrimony. I'm glad you're participating. It urges me to a higher standard.

[bornagainathiest]

BAA, I am learning here too. I don't fully understand all this either. So, I appreciate the opportunity you provide for me to clarify my thoughts and hopefully spot errors in them.

 

I strongly suspect that entailment is a critical concept for us, so let us please back up and return to it. As I have come to interpret it, entailment is associated with the question "Why?" and the answers "because...."

 

If a chair exists, which we just finished fabricating from a log, then we may ask "Why does this chair exist?" When I look for answers then I see that the chair exists because of the log, and because of a particular process of fabrication. We could write this as...

 

c.fabrication ==> (log ==> chair)

 

In English, chair fabrication entails that a log entails a chair. If we had chosen to fabricate a statue then this would have required a different fabrication process, which we could write as...

 

s.fabrication ==> (log ==> statue)

 

These two fabrication processes are differentiated through a person applying a chainsaw to the log in different ways. If the person had used a set of instructions or blueprints to guide them, then some people would call the instructions or blueprints the formal cause of the chair or statue. I don't know though. I think of the fabrication process here as some sort of amalgamation of efficient and formal causes. An efficient cause gives rise to a material transformation, and formal cause dictates how the efficient causes are applied. If we expand upon the fabrication process we might write...

 

a person using a chainsaw over time to remove wood in a specified way ==> (log ==> chair)

 

I tend to think of the chainsaw's removal of wood as the locus of chair's efficient cause, and the specified way of removing wood as the locus of its formal cause. If that makes sense.

 

Final cause differs from the other three causal categories in the following way. When we ask "Why does the chair exist?" and we look for material, efficient, and formal causes of the chair, then we are looking at the chair as an effect asking "What entailed the chair?" However when we look for final causes, then we are looking at the chair as something which gives rise to effects and asking "What does the chair itself entail?" Well, we know that chairs provide something to sit on. So "something to sit on" is a final cause of the chair (i.e. chair ==> something to sit on).

 

I strongly urge you not to trust all of my thinking here, because I am still sorting through this myself. However I am fairly certain that entailment is a key concept for us. And I hope I've not made too many mistakes in thinking about it, and expressing my thoughts about it. If you see that what I've said here does not agree with your own reasoning, please let me know.

 

I am going to try and address your other questions later.

 

Thanks BAA.

 

Hello Legion!

 

Re: the above...

 

Thinking about entailment, how about this?

 

If we take your three sets of instructions/blueprints...

 

c.fabrication ==> (log ==> chair)

 

s.fabrication ==> (log ==> statue)

 

a person using a chainsaw over time to remove wood in a specified way ==> (log ==> chair)

 

...in isolation, they work well enough.

 

But is this 'isolation' false?

By that I mean, can we really consider the log or the person or the chainsaw in isolation from the context (the preceding entailments which caused them to 'be') in which they exist? If we can, fine.

If not, then I conclude that we'll find ourselves locked into a contextual chain of causal entailments, all the way back to the Big Bang. Something like this...

 

Log ==> tree ==> planet Earth ==> Solar System ==> Milky Way galaxy ==> Big Bang

Each entails the other. Inevitably.

 

Ditto the person and the chainsaw and anything else. Whatever we discuss - it was entailed by something or things, right? Only in supernatural terms is there Creatio Ex Nihilo. In Genesis, the universe and in the Gospels, loaves and fishes. Otherwise, all things are derived by previous entailments, right?

 

Is this a red herring or some kind of fault in my reasoning? I ask because you expressed doubts over your thinking and I agree - we should test as we go along.

 

Now, if I'm right, then your words...

 

"However when we look for final causes, then we are looking at the chair as something which gives rise to effects and asking "What does the chair itself entail?"

 

...tells us only half the story.

 

Everything material must give rise to effects that cause change because we do not live in a static, unchanging universe. That's because everything material affects it's surroundings in some way or other. Everything is inextricably linked to everything else by causal entailments. Everything gives rise to effects that affect other things.

 

So, our 'isolated' descriptions are, at best, like examining just one frame of a film strip and not the whole movie. To say that X is an adequate description of the entailments is somewhat false, because we are artifically stopping or freezing the ongoing action.

 

Am I chasing my own butt with this? (Confused. Head aching a bit.)

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

 

 

 

p.s.

Can't begin to look at Ficino's input just yet. (Waves to the Italian Renaissance guy!)

Soon maybe.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Hello Legion and BAA, this may be obvious, but I just want to point out that my question about Aristotle only concerned exegesis of his writings. You guys are doing actual philosophy. I’m not sure I have anything useful to contribute on that level! My concern was really history of philosophy, by which I’ve always been fascinated. So, Legion, I’m not contesting your ideas about entailment.

 

For what it’s worth, here’s the other Aristotle stuff I couldn’t remember earlier. It’s from On the Parts of Animals, not from the Generation of Animals. Aristotle says that a woodworker would not give a sufficient explanation for how a wooden hand was carved if he just referred to the action of the axe and drill, because in explaining why one part is flat and one part is curved on the wooden hand, he needs to say what kind of blow he struck where, and for what purpose. Ari uses this as an example of why certain scientific writers before his own day were wrong to content themselves with appealing only to factors like “elements” of air and earth in explaining why certain parts of the body take their shapes. The reference is De Partibus Animalium 641a9. A little later (652b14) he says that to say that the soul is fire because it heats and nourishes the body is like reducing the carpenter or the art of carpentry to the saw or the drill.

 

I think Ari’s interest in carpentry in these contexts is to point out that an adequate explanation needs to refer to the carpenter; his tools are ancillary to the explanation.

 

So, that bumps us to the mind of the carpenter, which your machine is replicating, Legion, no? From the point of view of figuring out Aristotle, I like the way you emphasize the close connection in the actual process between efficient and formal causes. After all, if the carpenter knows the art of carpentry, he has to know the form of the chair, so on Ari’s own terms the two “causes” will coincide in the same body of knowledge. I think they are notionally distinct but probably always found together in the mind of the worker. so if a machine duplicates the action of the worker, then we have to refer both to the procedure of making and to the form (modeled by the blueprint) in our explanation of what’s being made. I don’t think we are actually differing. As I see it, what is notionally distinct in this case is not distinct in a way that implies the existence of different producer entities. I think that's what you're saying, too.

 

 

Anyway, as you can see, I am addicted to texts (that’s part of what seduced me into the Bible, lol!).

[Legion]

My mind tried to go in several directions simultaneously here after your last post BAA. Let me try and express a few of them in some detail now and the rest later.

 

As we experience the objective world through our perceptions of it, there does seem to be something rather abstract, and contrived about systemhood. If we attempt to map all of our complex perceptions of nature into two categories, one representing a natural system and one representing the environment of the natural system, then this seems to open the door to a wide range of interpretation.

 

If we can with some measure of accuracy assert that indeed a chair can exist as an identifiable event or phenomena, and the same can be accurately asserted about a log or of the fabrication of the chair, then I think understanding consists, in part, of being able to explain how and why these events are related through entailment. Let me rewrite the expression.

 

fabrication ==> (log --> chair)

 

The '-->' symbol in the expression (log --> chair) represents material causation. The '==>' is what I think of as representing an amalgamation of efficient and formal causation. In other words, a log can in fact entail a chair given the appropriate conditions or event of fabrication, which entails the transformation of log into chair. Even though both these arrows represent an entailment or causation they are distinct types of causation.

 

If we ask "Why does the log exist?" within the context of fabrication then we can answer "because it gives rise to a chair" and this would be a final cause of the log in the context of fabrication. However we are free to open the context when we ask the question and we might see something like this...

 

logging ==> (tree --> log)

 

We could compose these two processes and write...

 

fabrication * logging ==> (tree --> chair)

 

... and in general, we can ask "Why does X exist?" where X is any event and thereby trace the entailments associated with it.

 

It might help if we look at something which arises without human agency. We could ask for instance... Why does sand exist? And we might find the answers... because a process of erosion transformed rock into sand.

 

erosion ==> (rock --> sand)

 

I had many other thoughts here. Some were about time. Some were about function and final causes, and still others were about Thich Nhat Hanh's words about interdependent co-arising. I hope to get to those later. And again I thank you for stretching my abilities here BAA. You bring some interesting considerations to bear. And trying to give voice to these thoughts forces me to clarify to the extent that I am able.

 

You too Ficino.

[bornagainathiest]

Hello Legion and BAA, this may be obvious, but I just want to point out that my question about Aristotle only concerned exegesis of his writings. You guys are doing actual philosophy. I’m not sure I have anything useful to contribute on that level! My concern was really history of philosophy, by which I’ve always been fascinated. So, Legion, I’m not contesting your ideas about entailment.

 

Ok Ficino,

 

Thanks for that.

 

BAA.

[bornagainathiest]

Hi Legion and thanks for batting this back so quickly.

 

My mind tried to go in several directions simultaneously here after your last post BAA. Let me try and express a few of them in some detail now and the rest later.

 

As we experience the objective world through our perceptions of it, there does seem to be something rather abstract, and contrived about systemhood. If we attempt to map all of our complex perceptions of nature into two categories, one representing a natural system and one representing the environment of the natural system, then this seems to open the door to a wide range of interpretation.

 

Hmmmm...

 

As I'm learning from the A-Man, our reality seems to consist of (at least) two elements - the objective world you mention and the mental models each of us construct to try and understand it. So, what I'm trying to do (in this message) is to tie together some different strands of thought and see if they really do link up.

 

If each of us has our own set of unique mental models of objective reality, I'd say that we have to sacrifice some of that uniqueness to be able to relate to each other. That might account for the abstract and contrived nature of the systems we use. Systems like language and symbols. The word, 'Tree' is not a tree, it's just the word that we've agreed to use to represent a small part of objective reality that we want to talk about. So, when we use a system of symbols (language) like this, it has the effects you mentioned, Legion. It's Contrived and Abstract.

 

I think the bottom line is that ANY system must be contrived and abstract. That could be the price we pay for communicating with each other. So, everything that's availible to me right now... the entire QWERTY keyboard, every icon, every punctuation mark, every numerical digit, the whole shebang... is necessarily contrived and abstract because I can only communicate with you in a systematized way.

 

(Ok, we've been here before. Remember my, "Mantergeistmann" gibberish..? But it's interesting that your observation seems to confirm this, Legion.)

 

If we can with some measure of accuracy assert that indeed a chair can exist as an identifiable event or phenomena, and the same can be accurately asserted about a log or of the fabrication of the chair, then I think understanding consists, in part, of being able to explain how and why these events are related through entailment. Let me rewrite the expression.

 

fabrication ==> (log --> chair)

 

Hits 'Pause' button!

 

Ah yes, but I think it's not just an assertion - it's also a joint (and systematized) agreement between us.

Consider what I said above. Aren't you and I accessing our separate and unique mental models of what each of us understands a chair or a log to be? Then, we're using two agreed systems of contrived and abstract communication (the English language and the entailment 'mapping' symbols of arrows, ==> and -->) to agree what these patterns of pixels on the screen mean to us. If our mental models of these objective phenomena didn't overlap there could be no meaningful communication between us. Ditto the languages we're using. There has to be overlap/agreement.

 

Look below!

You've even gone to the trouble of explaining your usage of the symbols in the next paragraph. You did this as a courtesy, so as to keep me in the loop of where your thoughts are going, yes? So, I think my point about agreement holds water. Yes, we do assert, but I reckon that it's a shared and agreed upon form of assertion. The catch, which you've already pointed out, is that these actions (assertion, agreement and usage of systematized languages) are contrived and abstract. They are at best, approximations of the objective reality we want to discuss. If that's so, then the conclusions we arrive at concerning causes, causality, entailments and such like must necessarily be rough approximations of what's really happening.

 

Please note that I don't believe this a bad thing. I just think it's a necessary thing and we should recognize it as such and live with it and work with it.

 

Presses 'Play' button to resume...

 

The '-->' symbol in the expression (log --> chair) represents material causation. The '==>' is what I think of as representing an amalgamation of efficient and formal causation. In other words, a log can in fact entail a chair given the appropriate conditions or event of fabrication, which entails the transformation of log into chair. Even though both these arrows represent an entailment or causation they are distinct types of causation.

 

If we ask "Why does the log exist?" within the context of fabrication then we can answer "because it gives rise to a chair" and this would be a final cause of the log in the context of fabrication. However we are free to open the context when we ask the question and we might see something like this...

 

logging ==> (tree --> log)

 

We could compose these two processes and write...

 

fabrication * logging ==> (tree --> chair)

 

... and in general, we can ask "Why does X exist?" where X is any event and thereby trace the entailments associated with it.

 

Ok. I can see what you mean here... and agree with it too.

 

It might help if we look at something which arises without human agency. We could ask for instance... Why does sand exist? And we might find the answers... because a process of erosion transformed rock into sand.

 

erosion ==> (rock --> sand)

 

W-e-l-l-l-l-l... ok then.

Right now though Legion, I'm not entirely sure if there's any benefit in us dividing things up into two categories - Human Agency and Non-Human Agency. Are they actually different? Can you help me out here a bit an clarify why you want to make this division?

 

Thanks.

 

I had many other thoughts here. Some were about time. Some were about function and final causes, and still others were about Thich Nhat Hanh's words about interdependent co-arising. I hope to get to those later. And again I thank you for stretching my abilities here BAA. You bring some interesting considerations to bear. And trying to give voice to these thoughts forces me to clarify to the extent that I am able.

 

You too Ficino.

 

This is fun, so thanks and please continue.

 

BAA.

[Legion]

BAA, Ficino, I feel that I am lagging behind you guys, trying to play catch up. I am still trying to address BAA's post #30, but I am hoping to get to the rest.

 

Everything is inextricably linked to everything else by causal entailments.

 

I believe so too. And I think this is very well spoken. You reminded me of something else here...

 

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there would be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist... So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

 

If we look into the paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there the forest cannot grow... And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in the sheet of paper... The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of "non-paper elements." ... As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh 1988

 

I think this is beautifully spoken. And I note here that Thich was asking "Why does this paper exist?" He then skips around showing some of the entailments associated with the piece of paper.

 

You also made me think of time. I don't pretend to understand time. In fact, I don't trust my conception of time. What I've been trying to do is think of the world without time and just focus on the entailments associated with things. I am hoping that by side-stepping time in this manner that I may develop a more robust concept of it.

 

The rest to follow later, hopefully...

[Legion]

Ficino, philosophical exegesis huh? Woah. I think that's nearly as cerebral as a human being can get.

 

My intent with all thinkers is to try and recognize where they get things right, and where they get things wrong. I believe Aristotle discovered something powerful with his four causes, but I also believe he was grossly mistaken about some things. For instance, I read sometime where he asserted that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. Now, he may have been joking, but there are other things about him which suggest a profound ignorance. Not his fault really. His life occured over 2000 years ago, before the explosive discovery of facts in the modern age. I think he had an excellent mind, but he had a relative dearth of facts at his disposal. Currently I think we have too many facts and not enough understanding. He probably could have helped us today.

 

The reason why I substituted machine fabrication of a chair for artisan fabrication is that I am trying to move out into domains which need not refer to the human mind for explanations. So I'm trying to get away from using artifacts (as Ari often did) to illustrate causal entailments and move out into a broader consideration of nature as we find it.

 

I am very pleased you're in this discussion Ficino. And I feel that I need to read what you've posted again to see what more I can glean from it, especially about efficient and formal causes. Thank you.

 

More later, hopefully....

[Legion]

BAA I hope I address some of your excellent points here.

 

Increasingly, I think of an understanding (a model) of nature as a relation between the objective world and our subjective minds. The behavior of a natural system is governed by causal entailments while the mind is capable of generating systems (languages) which are governed by inferential entailment. A model brings these two different domains of entailment into congruence through observation and prediction. When we can observe, infer, and accurately predict the behavior of a natural system then the modeling relation obtains, and our system of inference is then called a model of the natural system. We can then look at the model itself for explanations of natural behavior.

 

And yes, I agree with you. A model of nature is not nature itself. The map is not the terrain. However we often act as if our understanding is the reality.

 

The search for understanding is no idle thing though. It's deadly serious. We require accurate predictions so that we may act on them, and we need explanations with some measure of fidelity so that we may transmit our understanding to each other.

 

These are some of the thoughts I had here. I hope they are relevant to you. And I hope what I wrote to Ficino about artifacts addresses your question about human agency.

[♦ ficino ♦]

hello guys, I think this is a fascinating topic, and not just for exegesis of previous philsophers' stuff, though I am always down for that, but also for your thoughts. I agree with you about Aristotle, Legion. I keep being amazed at his insights and at some of his misconceptions. He pretty much started biological research, as far as I know. Plus there are always one's cultural blinders, active for us and for him.

 

BAA, what about this... You say the following: "As I'm learning from the A-Man, our reality seems to consist of (at least) two elements - the objective world you mention and the mental models each of us construct to try and understand it. So, what I'm trying to do (in this message) is to tie together some different strands of thought and see if they really do link up." What

about cutting loose the "objective world" from your and my "world"? Two approaches come to mind (sorry, I'm referring to past philosophers again, but then, that's probably to the good):

Schopenhauer seems to have a lot to offer to this discussion. He insisted that the "world" is the sum total of all the "representations" that go by on our mental screen. Kant had said that the categories of human understanding, the filters by which our minds filter and organize all experience, entail (heh heh) that we do not know "the thing in itself" but rather, the thing as our perceptual filters (categories of understanding like our notions of causality, time, etc.) present it to us. Still, Kant made statements about "the thing in itself" (das Ding an sich). Schopenhauer took the further step of pointing out that Kant isn't entitled to talk about the thing in itself. Schopenhauer said that the world for us is just our experiences. For all we know, the "absolute" of which the experiences are experiences is only one thing.

 

I remember walking through a forest after reading Schopenhauer. The light was shining through the trees. I had this sudden sense of some vast oneness behind all of my variegated sensory impressions.

 

I understand that Schopenhauer was into eastern mysticism. Maybe some of his takes dovetail with things that Antlerman would say. On the other hand, he is said to have been the first explicitly atheistic modern philosopher.

 

The second area where Schopenhauer interests me for this thread is that he sort of redid Aristotle's four causes, i.e. Ari's four explanatory principles, his answers to 4 questions we can ask about why some effect is so. I spent two weeks one summer struggling through Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation, in a later edition which S. revised, his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As I understand it, S. was talking about just what you guys are discussing in this topic, i.e. what is the ground on which we can say that we have reason to account for something.

 

S. talks about four kinds of objects of our experience (not the Absolute behind experience) and four kinds of reasoning toward conclusions about them:

 

objects: material things, abstract concepts, mathematical "entities," psychic forces

 

Kind of reasoning that corresponds to the objects: cause and effect, logic, math reasoning, reasoning about intentions

 

(I don't fully understand the diff. between his concepts/logic and his math/geometry breakdown.)

 

I can see, though, that we're working with different kinds of problems when we ask, what does this statement entail, vs. what does this physical object entail, vs. what does that person's pattern of behavior entail.

 

BAA, I think that everything is affected by everything else, and it's all part of a system that perhaps reduces to events on the quantum level. Yet, it sometimes sounds to me as though you are reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry within limited domains. Can we not have various kinds of inquiries, depending on the questions we are asking, so that many of them may work from principles that function as axioms within those domains but which depend on further principles "behind" them, which in turn are part of wider domains of inquiry? Legion's questions about different explanatory principles about wood and chairs seem legitimate to me within a domain, even though we all agree that at the atomic level there is more "empty space" within the wood than there is "solid" stuff. But maybe you don't deny the importance of limiting an inquiry to its proper domain.

 

Just added: so I agree that there's the "whatever is the absolute" out there and there are our models, which perhaps are really models of models, since our mind is already modeling by the very act of perceiving. Our "world" is a model. ???

[Legion]

Ficino, I think you bring some great considerations to bear here.

 

I've heard of Schopenhauer from others, and Kant too, and I like some of Hume's stuff and some from even the dreaded Descartes. I probably should look into Schopenhauer a bit more.

 

I have a soft spot for mysticism, as it runs through all transformative religions, East and West. Though my patience often runs short with perma-mystics who can't seem to stop talking about their mystical experiences. lol. Or with those who would build the artifice of religion upon the more primitive mystic tradition. Having said that, I've had what I'd call a few mystical experiences myself. Most lasting moments, but one lasted for nearly three days. I won't even try to describe them.

 

In some appropriate sense I'd call mysticism the art of the art, while I'd call considerations of explicit cognitive understanding (models) of nature the science of the science. And I think both grasp, in their own ways, some of the profound relations inherent in mundane occurances, and seek a better grasp of these relations, and cultivate this appreciation and awareness in others.

 

My urging to the mystics is to please honor a place for science, and my urging to scientists is to consider mysticism for it has inspired the highest arts.

 

Models of models, yes! I believe that our everyday cognition is not only hierarchical (e.g. reptile, lymbic, cerebral) but also fragmented (e.g. we each can disagree with ourselves). I believe we are deeply anticipatory, meaning that the function of cognition is to acquire and utilize understandings so that we may craft our own behavior according to these understandings.

 

Doubt and certainty seem to me, for instance, to be associated with models of models. And I could spend a great deal of time talking about the human emotional spectrum and anticipation.

 

Thank you Ficino and BAA. I find so few people who wish to explore these kinds of things.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Thank you Ficino and BAA. I find so few people who wish to explore these kinds of things.

 

Ditto! It's not clear to me now whether Schopenhauer would: A) include among the representations that make up "world" all the data we get from scientific instruments (all the way up to cyclotrons) and from theoretical, mathematical models, and B allow intersubjectivity, i.e. that people experience the same "world." I think the answer would be "yes" to both. To B, there's his famous story of his "very clever poodlel" who jumped around looking for who pulled the curtain, when S. pulled it from a distance via the cord. S. took his poodle's reaction as proof, against Hume, that even dogs experience their world through the organizing category of causality.

 

I wish I could contribute something about events on the atomic or subatomic level but cannot.

 

BAA, your emphasis on the importance of what happens on those levels, though, raises the question, who am I? Who is the "me" if "I" am at base a collection of atoms...? If we say that the conscious person is "just" a series of events of particles, it seems hard to account for why persons have rights, etc.etc. Can constructs have rights (well, maybe, if the US Supreme Court says corporations are persons). On the other hand, if we postulate something perduring that makes "me" "me" over and above the atoms, what is it? Do we have to accept an occult soul to account for persons?

 

There has to be a limited sphere of inquiry in which we ignore what's happening at the atomic or quantum level for life to make sense to me. But since I believe that at my death, all my atoms will be dispersed, I haven't reached the point of being able to give a full account of why my personhood now is not an illusion.

 

Is this the sort of thing that leads you, A-Man (If you're listening in) to equate the Self and the All?

[bornagainathiest]

_{It's ok guys!}

 

_{I AM going to get back to you both asap. Later on this week, probably.}

 

_{Till then, byeeeeeeeeee!}

 

 

_BAA.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Looking forward, BAA! As to what I said earlier about personhood, actually I think the person is the living human body, the thinking biped. I don't think we need the notion of an occult soul to account for our being persons. Once the mortal, singular human individual dies, s/he is no longer a person, and that's all I know. Now, as to why a collection of atoms or whatever counts as a person... it's the way the atoms in me are organized to make "me." Aristotle's formal cause again?