Any thoughts on this tangled mess? — I like sushi

This is my best attempt at a substantive response.

If all causation is indirect then surely to refer to anything as 'causal' is nothing more than saying something 'is'. — I like sushi

This seems partly correct. If a consequence - or the likelihood of a consequence - is related to an intermediary factor manipulated via another variable, that doesn't necessarily include knowledge of how the intermediary factor results in the consequences. But I think that sometimes one could have some knowledge of how the indirect relationship works while maintaining the necessary boundaries i.e. the intermediary factor still exists distinctly and independently of the consequences of the indirect relationship; I don't think the relationship would just collapse into directness due to some knowledge of its workings.

it is impossible to confirm direct causation ergo why do we assume direct causation at all other than as means of anchor the constant change we experience as beings. — I like sushi

I do think indirect causation plays a factor in the change humans experience. For instance: an athlete might lift weights and get stronger, and getting stronger might make them better at their sport. However, direct causation is probably what most people look for when trying to anchor their beliefs and experiences - and rightly so. It is more in agreement with the sense of change you mention. None of that says much of anything about whether or not direct causation can be proven, however.

Even the use of logical tools fall apart when this is taken into consideration other than. Implications and Conditionals are meaningless under the regime of indirect causation. — I like sushi

So, if we act like everything is indirect, we have the conclusion that often times we cannot express useful logical statements regarding why when x affects y it increases or decreases the chances of z. I think this is true given that assumption, but like I said earlier, these processes don't need to be totally opaque; furthermore, you have no evidence that relationships that appear to be irreducibly direct are not in fact direct. It seems to me that if some relationship can be directly, logically expressed such that it agrees with reality, there is no reason to try to insert some sort of intermediary factor.

If we cannot prove direct causation outside of the confines of abstract bounds, then how can we ... how can I say 'then'? How can a 'question' form about something yet to happen? — I like sushi

Once again, that indirect causation exists does not mean we cannot say definitively that a relationship is direct. There are mathematical models that model reality sufficiently accurately that they can be said to demonstrate the directness of the causes, or forces, that they purport to model; we know, for instance, the commonly used equation that governs projectile motion is accurate given some assumptions - such as gravity having a fixed value near the surface of the earth - and that these assumptions don't amount to some sort of intermediary factors, but rather behave more like settings. So, we can model the world in a very real, physical way that can give rise to questions like: if I throw this apple at a certain speed, and at a certain angle, where will it land? You could even determine such a thing relatively easily given the right tools.

Indirect causation means that it 'could be because' but the 'because' is known as a direct causal term not an indirect causal term. — I like sushi

You are just making things complicated here. Indirect relationships can exist as an expression of direct relationships or vice versa, and you still haven't shown that using words like 'because' is somehow an expression of a disjunction between abstraction and reality.

Are all our propositions based purely on an idea that Pure Abstraction overrules experiential evidence? — I like sushi

No, clearly not. I think people have plenty of experiences that appear to be genuinely based on direct causation.

To say that causation (C) is direct or indirect or anything else is to tell a story. The story is never true, but it can be useful. That is, C is a useful descriptive fiction that in the story itself is taken to be true. The mistake is to unreflectingly suppose that what is true in and for the story is true outside of and beyond that context. And there are lots of levels in most stories so that even within one story there may be different "kinds," for lack of a better word, of C.

An example, used before and not original: a fellow wants to get a tree-stump out of his yard. He goes to the store and buys some dynamite, which long ago you could do. He sets the dynamite and the fuse, lights the fuse, retires to a safe distance, the dynamite blows the stump out of the ground, job done. What caused the stump to be out of the ground? And not too much thought yields the insight that the cause depends on both the story and the level of the story being told or emphasized.

Is there ever C that is story-independent? My guess is you have to go deep into the sub-atomic level, near Planck times and distances and analyze and define, but even then I think you end up with a story, and ultimately, mystery, C being simply change in some way special or distinctive to the observer/story-teller. As first or before-after or sequence are stories for and by the story-teller.

I know this is weird and seemingly obvious. That is what gripped me about it.

I am intrigued by the use and application of these terms both within logic and colloquially. It seems to me that an Event is needed for any such appreciation of reality to exist. The disjoint between reality (experiential world) and the abstract makes me uneasy.

Anyway, off to work. Will see if I can pick at this a little more during the day ...

I can make some limited sense of necessary and sufficient causes, but direct and indirect? What do they mean, what is the distinction being made?

Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation

I struggle with the idea that causation is always indirect. As I type this, my keystrokes cause the appropriate symbols to appear on the screen. I understand this is mediated by thousands of sub-processes on my computer and the servers but nonetheless if I were to press Z and see X, I would have to think there was some cause for that. (Although even as I write that, I recall an old friend who had a near-fatal neural aneurism, the first symptom of which is that he couldn't type, and thought he had a faulty keyboard.....so I guess I've just shot myself in the foot....)

If all causation is indirect — I like sushi

Says who? Why? What is direct causation?

I couldn't make any sense of your OP - it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion. Was this split from some other topic?

Bingo! Thanks for that.

I am just playing around with the concept of time here and how our terminology influences our perception of time. Especially in terms of how we approach formal logic and its relations to colloquial language use.

I guess I am saying all Causation is Proximal and never Ultimate (as referenced by Baden : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation

@SophistiCat
"...it reads as if it was ripped out of some ongoing discussion"
Agreed

@I like sushi
"I am just playing.......colloquial language use" Well explained and justified.
Shame it can't be used as a defense in law. Be a different world.
Just citing a random imagining, not citing an "implication" (with all the causation that word connotes)

↪Baden Bingo! Thanks for that. — I like sushi

Well that seems the other way round from the op, and totally in line with the notion that action at a distance would be "spooky".

But in practice, we do a lot of hand-waving, because to spell out the full mechanism each time would be both tedious and unjustifiable. 'The billiard ball went in the pocket because the player had practiced, and judged his shot well.' One leaves out the psychology, the neuroscience, the physiology, the Newtonian physics, the properties of felt and slate and effects of air resistance, and... But we understand that a ball entering a pocket is also caused by Some billionaire offering prize money for a tournament in his backyard. What's the difficulty?

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe — Carl Sagan

Because an apple is made of star dust. Yet most recipes leave out that bit, and assume that you already have a universe at hand, and access to apples therein. One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting- the full history of every atom of pie, tin, and oven from the big bang would take too long, and your pie would get cold.

Still not 100% clear on what you're getting at.

Maybe we can take a simple scenario like the one below, and analyze things from there.

*

Two dominos, A and B and an agent, X.

X pushes Domino A, causing Domino A to fall against Domino B, causing Domino B to fall.

Domino B falling:

Proximal cause = Domino A falling against it
Distal (ultimate) cause = X pushing Domino A.

*

I think “distal” is a better term than “ultimate” because ultimate causes are never really ultimate, and are always also proximal to some effect in a chain.

Anyhow, causal network and contextual orientation ought to be part of the meta-context here in terms of placing the question in a comprehensible form.

Consider the causal network as the network of enabling conditions and triggering causes that could possibly be considered relevant in the outcome, such that proximal cause can be defined with some flexibility. This causal network causes a kind of fuzziness around the identification of the proximal cause.

Note this network as a whole can be considered the necessary and sufficient conditions of the effect under analysis. Also, the proximal cause is usually a triggering cause (and necessary e.g. my push) rather than an enabling condition (maybe only contingent, depending on the circumstances, e.g. the weight of the domino).

Re contextual orientation, are we approaching this from the context of a human observer with human desires, needs, goals, and recognizably human actions? Are we focusing on the mechanics of the situation? The physics? E.g. perhaps down to the micro context of electrons? The neurobiology? Our analysis can be psychological, chemical, physical or some combination thereof depending.

All relevant considerations.

Basicaly agree; I don't yet know what the issue is, but with some refinement we may get there.

One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting — unenlightened

Yes, that's the key to understanding causality.

One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting
— unenlightened

Yes, that's the key to understanding causality. — SophistiCat

As witness:

Maybe we can take a simple scenario like the one below, and analyze things from there.

*

Two dominos, A and B and an agent, X.

X pushes Domino A, causing Domino A to fall against Domino B, causing Domino B to fall.

Domino B falling:

Proximal cause = Domino A falling against it
Distal (ultimate) cause = X pushing Domino A. — Baden

Wot? Falling not caused by Gravity? :gasp:

Triggering cause (push of other domino or finger) vs. enabling condition (gravity), bruv.

Anyhow, I said "fuzzy" below so I'm insured against all objections.

Pretty much there. Being born can be viewed as the reason you kill someone, rather than some fact that they ran in front of your car whilst you were driving at 90mph. There is infinite regression in reality but not in abstraction.

We can fall into infinite regression. The situation you outlined with dominoes is an abstract reality. If we are parsing up time as beginning from the initiation of the first domino to fall then that is the Distal cause.

In reality this parsing up of time is completely arbitrary. Of course I fully understand the bonus for scientific experimentation.

I was just wondering why because we experience the world the way we do we assume the world is the way we experience it. The appearance of events running as one that follows another does not rigidly define them as causally connected other than by our experiential perceptions - which are artifacts of culminated culture.

We speak the words we speak because we inherited them not because we created them. In around 200,000 years what is pretty much an evolutionary homeostatic position we have moved strides ahead in terms of our dealings with the environment.

What if our species had no formal language? What if it took over 100,000 years to create a minimal form of language? Dr. John Vervaeke refers to our progression as being driven by psychotechnologies (language, writing, reason, etc.,.). Something along the lines of humanity hitting something equivalent to a Cognitive Singularity that propelled us from partly dumb animals to non-dumb animals. Then, as time moved on we dragged and cultivated ideas through generations to the point where they culminated in the explosion of civilization.

Over all this time the next most significant leap was agriculture, which would require a verbal scheme to plan ahead and think about the future, only really tangible as a collective group with the creation of temporal concepts (more diverse prepositions of time and tense). Then, eventually, the written word and literacy also played a major role.

The very concept of Causation is a tool of understanding the world from our perspectives NOT a given. The power of memory allowed for a 're-cognition' of events and a recognition which led to appreciation of some cyclical procedure (from our perspectives). The refinement of this occurs because we then quantified and atomized the world.

Our stories about the world we live in dominate daily life. Causation does not. The idea of causation is a tool that imagines the world as orderly and was more fully taken to be 'real' due to the 'tool' of quantifying/atomization.

The way I see it, there are three main divisions when it comes to conscious appreciation of the cosmos: Material (physical), Formal (Reason) and Social (Intersubjective).

Causation plays between the Material and Formal, but overreaches into the Social.

OK, but you've gone from what seemed like a specific issue in the OP, to some very general comments that only seem incidentally related to it. Are we done now or?

If you want to argue that there is Ultimate Causation go ahead. The neglect of the pilot has as much bearing as the inaccuracy of the autopilot. Not having the ship manned was negligence. So it was it lack of a manned deck that caused the incident or the inaccuracy of the autopilot? They cannot BOTH be ultimate causes - there is no such thing in reality only in abstract space.

There seems to be a given belief that temporal proximity has more weight to the contributing factors of some given outcome?

if you want to argue that there is Ultimate Causation go ahead. — I like sushi

"Ultimate" has a different meaning when applied to causation. It doesn't imply "final". Ultimate causes are nested. It's explained in the wiki article. That's why I said "distal" cause is a better term to use.

So it was it lack of a manned deck that caused the incident or the inaccuracy of the autopilot? — I like sushi

Just depends on your story as un said.

There seems to be a given belief that temporal proximity has more weight to the contributing factors of some given outcome? — I like sushi

Maybe. Do you have an example? An opinion one way or the other?

They cannot BOTH be ultimate causes - — I like sushi

Yes, they can. You've just misunderstood "ultimate" as applied to causation.

"In most situations, an ultimate cause may itself be a proximate cause in comparison to a further ultimate cause. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation

It appears so. :) It does state they are often regarded as 'real' cause though. Which is primarily what I am questioning here. I am wondering about temporal bias, and it kind of relates to @schopenhauer1 post regarding the responsibility of a Culture.

An example would be the disjoint between a planned action and once taken in the spur of the moment, against items such as physical mechanics. The 'agency' of the human seems to run into conflict with the, how should I put it, 'laws of nature'.

The weight of importance is attributed to us because the immediacy of an action seems to trump the knowledge of the action.

If all causation is indirect then surely to refer to anything as 'causal' is nothing more than saying something 'is'. — I like sushi

That simply means nothing intelligent operates from being "told" to perform as such. Such environments can be created, they parallel natural scientific evidences, ie. if you don't eat, you will soon starve, naturally. But it infers a greater truth that yes, the world around us seems to be lacking intelligence, or free will, and as such follows physical, biological truths. If the weather is unpredictably cold, the people may have to ration to avoid starving. If it is pleasant, perhaps we may have plenty to sell and increase available resources and infrastructure to sustain ourselves. Simple, yet plenty complicated, surely.

That is to say, yes eventually, seeing as intelligence evolved out of non-intelligence, if that's the low temperature brew of soup you sip, something random has a profound affect, or at least the potential to have such, on anything you will ever do or experience. What of it? This is nearly codified philosophy, if such a thing were logically permissible, which it is not. The question I always is, and? Where to go from there?

An example would be the disjoint between a planned action and once taken in the spur of the moment, against items such as physical mechanics. The 'agency' of the human seems to run into conflict with the, how should I put it, 'laws of nature'.

The weight of importance is attributed to us because the immediacy of an action seems to trump the knowledge of the action. — I like sushi

You're getting at a human-centric bias? If so, sounds plausible, but can you develop a more specific example?

Why would it affect reasoning? Of course causal reasoning has uncheckable assumptions like no outside cause intervenes, the system will evolve such and such. But the certainty of assumptions is not required to get logic going. Also causal reasoning is most of times in itself probabilistic.
There’s an issue of necessity at play akin to Hume’s critique of causation. Hume first of all from the lack of necessity implies the lack of causality which is ridiculous. Of course causality was never assumed to be unfailing because for example free will is causally efficacious, the world (at least for monotheists) in itself is contingent etc. So Hume’s critique only shoots at some misguided notion of laws of nature having the necessity of logical ones. Certain very general aspects of causality were assumed necessary. For example an effect rarely if never is necessarily is implied by the existence of the cause. But existence of an effect with certain features like complexity, change etc. does imply the existence of SOME cause although its nature is unspecified.

There is something interesting here though.

Triggering cause (push of other domino or finger) vs. enabling condition — Baden

Triggering cause, trigger, enabling condition bullet in chamber? "Guns don't kill people, rappers do."

We set up the dominoes so that we can see how a small cause can have a large effect; the trigger is another example. We love to exploit 'the butterfly effect' - the will to power perhaps?

And there is also, I think, an urge to begin the casual story with a human. The trigger does not pull itself, the gun does not aim itself. And one cannot follow the causal story into the physiology and neurology of the individual without generalising them out of existence. The story becomes personal and no longer objective.
And at this point we have arrived at the starting point of this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15499/when-can-something-legitimately-be-blamed-on-culture/p1

The story changes from causes to reasons and motives. The faulty trigger mechanism fails to fire, the bullet but the faulty person fails to reason or act appropriately; the storyteller has entered the story and transformed it.

That OP looks messy and unfocused to me. And this conversation seems now to be about everything and anything.

the storyteller has entered the story and transformed it. — unenlightened

Apparently so.

That OP looks messy and unfocused to me. And this conversation seems now to be about everything and anything. — Baden

Yes, but that is, for me, the value of philosophy; that it can somewhat clean up conceptual messes. There's something messy about how we think and talk about causation, because our talk and thought is inside the causal chain not beyond it. Even just to understand that much is useful. We cannot untie that knot, but we can acknowledge it, and apply a palliative dose of humility and some 'whereof one cannot speak ...'.

I will think on that. I am inclined to avoid doing so at the moment in fear of straying too far afield.

It might help to think of time 'running backwards' and then looking at how you view this or that as 'causal'?

It might help to think of time 'running backwards' and then looking at how you view this or that as 'causal'? — I like sushi

What happens then is you strip away / distort the contextual network; enabling conditions like gravity, thermodynamics etc become meaningless and you are left with a bare sequence of events, sound and fury, signifying nothing.