Sorry I should have been clearer! I was assuming realism. In that case isn’t it true that Bell’s theory implies non-locality? (And also the fact that the measurement of spin in one place cause the spin in another?)

I think that’s one where intuitions differ. I might not say the Big Bang caused the universe, but it surely seems correct to say the Big Bang caused the universe to expand.

I’d love to hear what others think!

What if something novel happens though. What if man made climate change causes human civilization to end? Surely plausible that this could happen. But nothing like that has happened before. Wouldn’t we still use ‘cause’?

Interesting, so some sort of regularity theory (like Hume?) is what I think you're describing?

From memory there are reasons why a naive version of regularity theory is out of favour. One might be that things can sometimes cause other things when they are genuine 'one offs'. One might think the Big Bang caused the universe to expand or something like that. Can your idea cover that type of causation too?

Much is made of the experiment’s into Bell’s inequalities and their implication for Einstein.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/

Einstein, to speak very roughly, appeared to plump for realism - that things really did have defined properties even when they weren’t being observed or interacting with other systems.

With loopholes of the Bell equalities being closed in recent years we often paint Einstein as being wrong-headed about realism.

I suspect, however, that there are too many assumptions being smuggled in about causation when it is not clear people have thought deeply about the subject.

The implication for so-called ‘entangled’ particles seems to be that the detection of a particle here can cause the spin of a particle on the other side of the galaxy. This is NOT to say the detection of a particle here can cause you to KNOW the spin of a particle on the other side of the galaxy, which would have been a more easily explainable fact.

If all we mean by ‘causation’ is simply that the words ‘detection of a particle’ don’t give you information about the spin of a particular particle, and that the words ‘the spin of a particle’ don’t give you information about the detection of a particle, then the result IS that the detection of a particle would cause the spin of a particle.

Now that’s a particular hobby horse of mine, you may disagree that’s what causation is. Yet it is not settled in science on what causation is, so who is to to say that’s NOT what causation is?

Do your preferred understandings of causation explain the Bell experiments? Or do they simply tell us the universe is non deterministic after all?

Thanks! No hard feelings, I realise I’m in the minority with this opinion haha :)

Maybe you’re unaware of how aggressive this post looks in a cold reading. I was up front about my bias toward Harris and gave an opinion on who it appeared to me came out looking better. No need to get exasperated!
From your point of view: a man being wrong on the internet - well there’s plenty of those out there :)

Interesting to revist these ideas four years later. I think I had some things correct and others wrong. Yet the thrust - that some words are referring to a relationship between words and things rather than just things and things - is important.

These days I feel these 'intra utterance' words track Aristotle's four causes very nicely.

So with the material cause that Aristotle talks about, the orthodoxy is that Aristotle is talking about the material that makes something up - the usual idea of thing-in-the-world statue and thing-in-the-world bronze.

I think, however, that this an example of intra-utterance relations. Aristotle is REALLY talking about the relationship between the word we use for the material (the words ‘the bronze’) and a particular statue, not the statue and the bronze itself.

When Aristotle gives the example of bronze and a statue as a cause and effect it is tempting to think of the obvious relationship between them. I can understand why people look at the relationship between the bronze and the statue and say ‘Hey, the relationship must be that the statue is made out of the bronze’.

My claim is that the relationship is actually between the words ‘the bronze’ and the statue, and ‘the statue’ and the bronze. This looks a little more complicated than ‘what the statue is made out of’, but I think this word/thing relationship will allow us to have a more parsimonious explanation for why Aristotle draws up these four types of causation in the first place.

So what IS the relationship between ‘the bronze’ and the statue, and ‘the statue’ and the bronze?

A meaningful use of the words ‘the bronze’ are - in an important sense - sufficient to give information about a particular bronze statue. By this I mean that the words ‘the bronze’, no matter when they are meaningfully used, will necessarily refer to the stuff that a particular bronze statue is made of. I suppose you could say bronze is fungible in that regard, meaning that bronze is functionally identical wherever it is: ‘bronze’ will always refer to any bit of bronze you need because bronze (as bronze) is interchangeable.

So this, what I call the ‘sufficient’ relationship between the words ‘the bronze’ and a particular bronze statue, is what I claim is one part of the ‘material cause’ relationship. (Because necessity and sufficiency are two sides of the same coin you could equally say that ‘bronze’ necessarily describes the particular statue - if it describes the bit of bronze here it necessarily describes the bit of bronze anywhere).

The second part is that the words ‘the statue’ is NOT sufficient to give information about the particular bronze, seeing as ‘the statue’ doesn’t necessarily refer to bronze things, it could just as easily describe something made of marble.

So we can see there’s an interesting relationship here.

Naively we think the relationship of a material cause should be between the particular statue and the particular material that makes it up, but I’m saying the relationship Aristotle is interested in is the sufficient relationship between the WORDS ‘the bronze’ and the particular statue, and the insufficient relation between the WORDS ‘the statue’ and the particular bronze that makes it up.

The benefit of this idea, is that the rest of the causes just follow the same pattern with different permutations of sufficiency. The four causes: sufficient / not sufficient, sufficient / sufficient, not sufficient / not sufficient, not sufficient / sufficient.

For the formal cause we say the ratio of 2:1 causes the octave: Here words ‘the ratio of 2:1’ necessarily gives information about a particular octave, while ‘an octave’ necessarily gives information about the ratio of 2:1.

For the efficient cause we say the father causes the child. Here ‘the father’ is not necessarily giving you information about a particular child (because unlike bronze, fathers are not interchangeable thus it could be someone else’s father), and ‘a child’ is not necessarily giving you information about a father seeing as not all children have fathers.

For the final cause we say health causes walking: here ‘health’ is not necessarily giving you information about particular walking (health unlike bronze is not interchangeable, it could be talking about someone else’s health), but ‘walking’ necessarily gives you information about health, namely that you (will) have it.

I find language is often underestimated! Maths is good in its domain for sure, but I think true understanding only comes from the clarity of a well constructed sentence.

It is important, therefore , to analyse words like ‘to be’, ‘to cause’ and ‘to mean’ to see what they’re really getting up to!

I love thinking about emergence.

It often seems that emergence is about things at different levels of description.

A flock of birds emerges from individual birds, or a chair emerges from a bunch of particles seemingly because they are the same things but being described at a different level.

I think that’s our clue. Emergence is about language, at least in part.

- A flock of birds is an emergent property of individual birds.

Here the words ‘a flock of birds’ is not sufficient to give information about (particular) birds seeing as it could be giving information about a different flock of birds. However ‘a collection of birds’ is sufficient to give information about a flock of birds, seeing as this phrase always gives information that is true of a flock of birds.

That combination of non-sufficiency and sufficiency - I think - is enough to tell us when something is a) one of Aristotle’s four causes, namely the final cause, and b) emergence.

Note that if we use this same permutation of non-sufficiency to talk about consciousness it also explains so called ‘strong emergence’.

- ‘Consciousness’ is not sufficient to give information about a (particular) thing seeing as consciousness might not always involve a particular thing, but ‘a thing’ is sufficient to give information about consciousness, (perhaps in a surprising way: the way that all language gives information about consciousness.)

However with both examples we still see that permutation of sufficiency we typically see with emergence, letting us know we’re dealing with emergence (and Aristotle’s final cause.)

As a result both examples are about emergent properties:

- A flock of birds is an emergent property of a collection of birds and
- Consciousness is an emergent property of a thing (in fact any thing you could name)

As a result it seems panpsychism is true in a non-mysterious way.

I am not really talking about Harris' breadth of knowledge when I praise him. One can be an extremely good philosopher with a narrow field of expertise!

I see comments like this on the reg, yet it looked like Chomsky was the dill from my vantage point! I seem to be in the minority about this so perhaps a bias toward Harris on my behalf.

Can you expand on this a little? Is this a claim that reality is language? Who's claim is this? How does this relate to causation? etc.

I don’t think Harris would argue about the importance of narratives or stories. His bit about the recipe (from memory) was simply to illustrate that it is very easy to read significance into text even when it is not intended, or borderline absent.

Harris will readily admit that there is some good to be found in religion, but that religion is rarely necessary to find that goodness, such that we needn’t put up with the obvious harms that religion also brings.

The way I’ve always felt about the distinction (and it sure feels real when you’re an analytic philosopher, perhaps less so for people the analytics call ‘continental’ or who use the dreaded ‘straddling the two traditions’) is that analytic philosophy attempts to get at law-like relations that are ALWAYS true. Continental philosophy is much more comfortable with things being often true or generally true (or true for some people) or fact there no such THING as ‘always true’.

I admit though that such a law-like distinction is itself an attempt at analytic philosophy and might rankle some!

Funnily enough I agree that Harris is the smartest philosopher alive. I urge people to try and read ‘The Moral Landscape’ and not be impressed.

I also agree that ‘public intellectual’ describes him pretty well, but that shouldn’t mean that we dismiss him. I find so much of analytic philosophy barking up the wrong tree so Harris I find refreshing just on pure hit rate of what he gets correct.

In a similar vein I like Sean Carrol a lot. A physicist by training he doesn’t (in my opinion) have the same hit rate of correctness as Harris in philosophy but often has interesting things to say. I like his Ask Me Anything podcasts which you can find on YouTube.

But generally, Harris is a one off - there’s not many that really approach him for mine.

Thanks for clarifying. Yeah I couldn’t immediately see Anscombe in dialogue with my ideas, although I appreciate the relationship to necessity and determinism.

When I am talking about ‘sufficiency’ of course I am talking about whether certain words are enough/sufficient to give information about a particular effect. I’m not sure if everyone participating in the thread quite appreciates what I mean by this although perhaps they do and just disagree!

Sure if you like, I’m happy to explain though if you or anybody else also finds what I’m trying to say confusing.

From my understanding about uncertainty of quantum states it is more correct to say that detecting a particle causes its location rather than detecting a particle causes you to KNOW it’s location, the later which seems trivially true.

Still with an updated understanding of what ‘cause’ means I don’t think this should be as science-deranging as it seems.

Thanks for that article, it was an interesting read. I’d read Anscombe on intentions a while back but this was new to me.

Although I agree that causation is both in the world and and in the word I suspect we might be talking about different things! See the above comment I made to @T Clark

@

I don’t think think I did a good job of explaining.

I’m not saying causation is not ‘real’ precisely. I’m certainly not making the trivially true claim that causation has no spatiotemporal location like mass and force.

I’m saying, I suppose, that most words refer to things in the world, not necessarily in the sense of in the world as having spatiotemporal location, but broadly, including relationships and even abstract ideas. Democracy is in the world in that sense, even if you can’t touch it.

The claim is that ‘cause’ refers to a relationship between the WORD for the cause and the effect rather than between the cause and effect itself.

So you can have a relationship between the bronze and the statue themselves, which I imagine most people think Aristotle is talking about with ‘cause’. That relationship is about what the statue is made of for instance.

But there’s an interesting relationship between the WORD ‘the bronze’ and a (particular) statue. That’s what I think Aristotle is interested in.

I had a think and it is perhaps even simpler:

Material cause:
So we say the bronze causes the statue = the meaningful use of the words ‘the bronze’ IS sufficient to give information about the particular statue (e.g. information about what it is made of) however the words ‘the statue’ is NOT sufficient to give information about bronze.

Formal cause:
So we say ratio of 2:1 causes the octave = the meaningful use of the words ‘a ratio of 2:1’ IS sufficient to give you information about a particular octave (in particular about the relationship between its sound waves) but here the meaningful use of ‘the octave’ IS sufficient to give you the information about the ratio 2:1 (i.e. that something has it).

Efficient cause:
Aristotle’s example is situated in the present such as when the father causes the child = the meaningful use of the words ‘the father’ is NOT sufficient to give you information about the (particular) child because 'the father' is more general than that, and the meaningful use of the words ‘the child’ is NOT sufficient to tell you about the father i.e. the child might not have a father.

When we use ‘caused’ in English we are using efficient causes but not talking about what IS, we are talking about whether the causes DID exist. And when we use ‘cause(s)’ we are talking about whether the causes DID, and CONTINUE, to exist.

So a spark caused a fire = ‘the spark’ is NOT sufficient to give information about the particular fire, and ‘a fire’ is NOT sufficient to tell you about a spark (in general) i.e. the fire might not have had a spark.

The word ‘cigarettes’ is NOT sufficient to give information about (particular) cancer and ‘cancer’ is NOT sufficient to tell you about cigarettes (in general) i.e. the person with cancer might not have had cigarettes.

The words ‘detection of a particle’ is NOT sufficient to tell you about a particular location and ‘location of a particle’ is NOT sufficient that the detection of a particle = detection of a particle cause(s) a particle to be at a particular place.

The only difference with Aristotle’s and our causes are that ours seem to be in the past tense.

Final cause:
So in this example Aristotle tells us health causes walking = the word ‘health’ is NOT sufficient to give you information about particular walking ‘walking’ IS sufficient to tell you about health.

I would translate to:

‘90’ is sufficient to tell us about the temperature, but the temperature is not sufficient (but can potentially) give us 90 (temperature)

‘rising’ is sufficient to tell us about the temperature, but the temperature is not sufficient (but can potentially) give us rising (temperature)

So that’s not the same as the 3+1 is 4 which is the word ‘4’ is sufficient to tell us about 3+1 and 3+1 ARE sufficient to give you 4.

They’re both two of the four permutations but they’re quite different.

Well that’s right, although I was talking about one of Aristotle’s four causes which don’t map neatly onto ‘cause’ in English.
There appear to be four permutations that words can map onto things in a sufficient/not sufficient way and I think that’s all the four causes are.

Two are ‘to be’ in English,
One is ‘to mean’ in English.
One is ‘to cause’ in English.

It’s a bit of a pet theory, there’s more in that other thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13583/is-causation-linguistic-rather-than-in-the-world

Agreed @Agent Smith!

I see no difference with small scale and the macro world in that regard.

Just to add my two cents, I think most native English speakers would agree that 3+1 is 4 but that 4 is not 3 + 1.

It is interesting to consider why. It appears that one of the senses of ‘to be’ tells us the WORD ‘4’ is sufficient to tell us about 3+1 and 3 plus 1 things are sufficient to give you 4 things. Perhaps that’s all one of the uses of ‘to be’ is.

Aristotle would equate this to the formal cause (I’ve written about this elsewhere). I suspect the four causes of Aristotle are a relationship between the WORD for something and then the thing in the world, rather than just between two things. In this case ‘4’ is the cause and 3+1 is the effect.

No, I don’t think quantum physics says that nothing is real. I think it has more to say about causation.

Most people don’t question what they mean by ‘causation’ too much, and think that the observation of something (e.g. a particle) causing that thing’s location is odd. But if you have a nuanced view of causation it doesn’t necessarily mean that a particle doesn’t have a location before it is observed.

Now a counterfactual way of thinking about causation is A way of thinking about causation (e.g. that if the cause didn’t happen then neither would the effect) but perhaps this suggests we update our ideas about causation rather than reality.

I think this is a really good point. But can you see the claim I'm attempting to make? Perhaps I mean to say something else? That 'to be','to mean', and 'to cause' are EXCLUSIVELY 'intra-utterance relations' or some such?

Maybe a side issue, but you don't think 'screwdriver' means something like 'a tool created to turn screws'?
I know there is a drink called a 'Screwdriver', so the word can mean something else, but is it odd for a word to have two meanings? Surely that sort of thing happens all the time without being a problem for my theory?

How about

P1. All and only (phenomenologicall experiences) are (from your perspective)

C. All (from your perspective) are (phenomenological experiences)

Does that suffer the same problems? It means everything is a phenomenonological experience, be it thought or sensation etc. I still think that is a form of Idealism.

But you said it yourself, "Given P1., there is no possibility of a B which is not an A", therefore a completely valid conclusion from a premise P1. That is a logical argument in anyone's language.

Oh right, I think I'm with you. Yeah I think I am claiming that everything from a perspective is mental. That's what you would have to deny if you were going to argue against the conclusion. But I think it pretty obviously true that everything from a perspective is mental.

Not rude at all :)

I'm still not getting your point though. You think that I'm claiming that perspectival = mental?

Why do 'think' and 'perspective' drop out though?

I don't mean to be rude but I'm not sure you understand how logic works. Maybe have a bit of a look over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?

So "think" and "perspective" drop out, and you're left with the premise, "Everything that is mental is mental." From this, you derive that everything is mental simpliciter. — Pneumenon

Not quite sure what you mean here. Is that a question?

Hence why it is a logical argument.

Yeah that's my claim, only thoughts exist.

Pretty sure

P1. All and only As are Bs

is different to

C. All Bs are As

Isn't it a syllogism? It is worked out logically i.e. not by observation. How exactly do you think logical arguments are meant to work if not like that?

Right. So you agree that the argument is valid, now you're just questioning P1., specifically whether there can be things from your perspective that are not mental? Actually, if I phrase it as 'mental' does that hold seeing it covers sensations?
Now I'm not entirely sure a room itself can be from your perspective, I would suggest only the thought of the room can. Do inanimate objects have perspectives as such?

Um... of course I need P1, that's my argument. Otherwise I'd just be asserting C.
Now I agree P2 is a tautology, that's why I didn't have it originally. Others in this thread thought I needed it.