If that equation of immaterial Ideas with material Matter is true, then ghostly Ideas are just as "real" as physical objects. — Gnomon

There’s nothing ‘ghostly’ about mathematical logic applied to physical processes. That enables us to peer into the domain of pure possibility and actualise something we see in material form. That’s how inventions happen!

Kant is not remembered for his work on philosophy of science. I think the relevant comments are in the Critique of Pure Reason.

That is really not a fair criticism, but then maybe you’re trolling, which you seem to be doing in many of your comments. Comparative religion is a perfectly legitimate discipline, it interests people of various religious orientations or none whatever. It provides a way to make sense of the range of religious and spiritual literature in the world traditions without necessarily professing faith in any of them, although there’s also no reason not to do that.

Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter.
— Wayfarer

Can you expand this a bit? ‘Ideas’ ? — I like sushi

Major digression, but very well. It's the general consensus today that ideas are a product of the mind, and so of the brain. That the explanatory chain points back to evolution, 'what is useful to survival', therefore intelligence itself can be understood in terms of adaptation, 'the product of' evolutionary (and therefore biological) interactions. What counts for common sense nowadays.

Whereas what I'm contemplating harks back to the Platonic ideas. These are understood to be real. not simply the product of your or my mind. Consider the real numbers. Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he said "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." Here when he says 'thought content' I think he's referring to concepts such as real numbers, not just anything that happen to be passing through one's mind.

He says in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic that 'the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness: "[the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they authority for our thought if it would attain to truth."

So a generally platonistic view is that ideas are real in their own right - that for example the real numbers will be the same in all possible worlds. But the question invariably follows, in that case, where can they be situated? In some 'ghostly platonic realm'? I think that answer is due to the inherent naturalism of our culture, which can only conceive of what is real in terms of what is 'out there somewhere', what is existent in time and space. Whereas the ideas in that platonistic sense are what precede the formation of any specific particular thing, being the form of possibility for them to exist. They are part of the fabric the Universe, not something which features within it. That is the sense in which they're 'higher' (i.e. nearer to the unconditioned) than are 'the phenomenal' (existent things. One of the essays on my profile, Meaning and the Problem of Universals, addresses this. It's pretty dense read and I don't understand all of it but it makes some sense to me. Kelly Ross is the emeritus I mentioned previously that I've corresponded with about this subject.)

Kant didn't know relativity yet. ...He spoke of relative and movable space which exist relative to, say, a room. — Haglund

He said nothing of the kind. Have you got a reference? The canonical text is found here and in the next section. The key point that I take from it, is that Kant denies that either space or time are objectively real independently of our awareness of them: 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves, and would remain, even though all subjective conditions of the intuition were abstracted.'

I'm not sure what you are looking for. The nature of cause and effect? The physical meaning? The logic we use to determine cause and effect? — Haglund

The OP lays it out pretty clearly. Hume's analysis of causation and Kant's answer to Hume would comprise the basis for a semester. I did do the Hume semester as an undergraduate, but only ever discovered Kant years later. It’s a gap in my education.

You complaining that I gave you the tl;dr? — apokrisis

Pattee says there’s no need for an ‘ontological dualism’. And indeed there’s no need to introduce any kind of substance over and above what is already known to physics. But there is a need for concepts which could not be derived from physics by itself. Hence the appeal to organisms and to machines (artifacts). As Ernst Mayr put it, 'The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years.'

Determinism and non-determinism are descriptive of theories and beliefs concerning the consequences of hypothetical actions, but these concepts are not descriptive of phenomena. — sime

How about the genetic code? That determines outcomes, does it not?

What is historically amazing is that this common type of constraint was not formally recognized by physicists until the end of the last century (Hertz, 1894).

Do you think it would be recognised at all in the absence of machines? Does this principles manifest anywhere but in machines and organisms?

Pattee's clarity on these gritty matters always makes my soul sing. — apokrisis

You mean, it provokes the discharge of endorphins?

biology invented the molecular switch — apokrisis

Do you think it is sound to attribute agency to biology?

:chin:

You will probably like it because it indeed wants to regain a numinous notion of meaning, when Pattee has already rigorously done away with precisely that. — apokrisis

Why?

I remember now where I came across Hoffmeyer, there's a sidebar in the Information Philosopher's entry on Pattee which links to his page.

Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. — apokrisis

I can't see that in what I've been reading of him.

I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call thereal world.

What we call 'the real world'. Very Kantian. So I don't think his approach is as cut-and-dried as you're making it out to be - he still maintains a dualism.

I kind of agree on emotional grounds, but I'd like to come up with an argument that is harder for physicalism to simply shrug off. Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter.

(this is beside the point of this thread, but are you familiar with Jesper Hoffmeyer's book Signs of Meaning in the Universe? Would you consider it a suitable primer for biosemiosis?)

But it's also an empirical observation. The specifics of which ball, why it's moving (i.e. someone threw it) and so on are contingent, but the fact that it's moving, it's path and velocity, are determined by the laws of physics. Hence, logical necessity meeting physical causation.

we can imagine the universe with different laws. Logical possibility is about what we can imagine. — frank

But necessarily true propositions are those which are 'true in all possible worlds'. People nowadays conjecture that there are universes in which the laws of physics are different, but were not the fundamental constants just as they are, then such a Universe would not be able to exist. In other words, the contingent is dependent on necessary. What is missing in modern Western philosophy is precisely the notion of a domain of necessary being.

Balls that are moving go through windows.

That's not true in all possible worlds. — frank

There can't be a world in which things that don't move go anywhere, as 'going somewhere' is dependent on 'moving'.

But why not?

Look at this statement, P:

"The ball went through the window because Terry threw it."

P is necessarily true if it's true in all possible worlds. Why would it be? Why couldn't the ball have been shot out of a cannon? — frank

But it would be true in all possible worlds that the ball went through the window because it was moving. It would be a general statement, not about a specific situation.

Why does science need something else to prove? — frank

I'll step into that one. It has to do with the contingent, with dependent conditions. Everything in causal sequences is dependent on something else. Hence the intrinsic logic of the cosmological argument. Not saying I believe it, but it has logical force.

That reality is intelligible is the presupposition of all scientific endeavours: that the intelligibility science proposes is always subject to empirical verification means that science never actually explains existence itself but must submit itself to a reality check against the empirical data. This existential gap between scientific hypotheses and empirical verified judgment points to, in philosophical terms, the contingency of existence.

Understanding your question is tricky. Causation is explanation. It's the answer to "why?"

Necessity is modality. It's the answer to "could it have been otherwise?“

Where do you see the connection? — frank

I see the connection when you say, using logic, that 'a' must be the explanation for 'b'. I wrote to a retired professor whose website I often read, his answer was in part:

Logical necessity and physical causality: Logical necessity is a function only of truth. There is no intrinsic connection between antecedents and consequents in conditionals, or between premises and conclusions, apart from the truth-functional form. Thus, as the Stoics first understood, a conditional means that it is false only if the antecedent is true and the consequent false. In formal deduction, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. It doesn't matter what the meaning of the terms is. ...

With causality, there are extra concepts. The principle of causality is that the cause makes the effect happen. But that doesn't happen in a vacuum. Causes do not just randomly make things happen. A cause happens in terms of a law of nature. So things do not fall to the ground just because of causality. You need gravity. That takes some figuring out. They're still trying to figure it out. ...

So physical causation draws in multiple concepts and issues, way, way beyond what is involved in logical necessity. In terms of logical deduction or argument, what comes in are extra premises, even first principles, principia prima.

So I'm tempted to say that where you have a 'scientific law', then you have something in which logical necessity meets physical causation. It's a big claim, I don't know if it's true, or original, but that's what I'm trying to articulate.

then the logic dictates a causal connection. — Haglund

Ah, but does it. It's still an inference - that there must be a causal connection. The difficulty arises when you say what that causal relationship is. Essentially your positing the common-sense objection to Hume's argument. Have a glance at https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/

Kant wanders off into inexplicability. — frank

Kant himself acknowledges that his magnum opus is 'dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded', but despite all that it adds up to a profound insight. Have a geez at this primer.

If two natural events always turn up together they have a causal relation or a common cause. — Haglund

That is precisely the assumption that David Hume calls into question in his 'Treatise on the Human Understanding'. He argues that even though we observe causal relations, there is no epistemological basis for concluding they're connected over and above observation of repeated occurences. In other words, there's no logical reason why someone drinking from said well may not suffer any consequences even though previously others have. There's more to it than meets the eye.

“Pure” physics as a self-contained science is a misnomer, I think, at least without reference to a specific text. — Mww

Well, there is at least one:

But it happens fortunately, that though we cannot assume metaphysics to be an actual science, we can say with confidence that certain pure a priori synthetical cognitions, pure Mathematics and pure Physics are actual and given; for both contain propositions, which are thoroughly recognized as apodictically certain, partly by mere reason, partly by general consent arising from experience, and yet as independent of experience. We have therefore some at least uncontested synthetical knowledge a priori, and need not ask whether it be possible, for it is actual, but how it is possible, in order that we may deduce from the principle which makes the given cognitions possible the possibility of all the rest.. — Prolegomena, Section 4

Are you asking if logic is innate? — frank

The question is about the connection between logical necessity and physical causation. It's trickier than it looks!

As ↪Wayfarer might concur, the objects as such in a world we can either think or experience, but a world as such we can only think. — Mww

:up:

'World' - Origin

Old English w(e)oruld, from a Germanic compound meaning ‘age of man’; related to Dutch wereld and German Welt.

but everthing I've read about him raises red flags.
— Wayfarer

Just curious, what particularly did you read that is concerning? I haven’t read much else. — schopenhauer1

Mellaisoux is an advocate for what Kant would describe as transcendental realism - the conviction that the objective domain has an inherent or intrinsic reality.

What if the effect of cause is unpredictable? Can we still call it a cause? Or the effect the effect? I think for cause and effect to exist, there has to be a logical relation between them. — Haglund

Good observation, but the whole question of whether such relations can be described as 'logical' is what is at issue in this thread.

'Oedipus, schmedipus, what do I care, so long as he loves his mother!' - a line, I think from a musical, my mother used to repeat often. (Another was 'my son, the doctor, is drowning!!')

Anyway, where were we......

If you want to think sensibly about it, then try to deflate the hysterically overblown figures of speech. Hume never said any such thing, his prose was really rather quotidian.

There's a subtle but profound point at the basis of this. It is Hume's observation that certitude is only possible with respect to propositions that are true by definition. When I studied Hume at university the tired textbook example was always that a bachelor is an unmarried man, by definition. Therefore if you claimed that this particular bachelor was unmarried, you had zero chance of being mistaken. The tired textbook example of an inductive claim was that all swans are white, which is derived not from logic but from the observation of swans. And of course this was completely deflated when Western Australia, the famous abode of the Black Swan, was discovered. So if you want to engage in such excited hyperbole, first of all come to terms with the quotidian arguments around which these debates revolve. At the moment, you sound as if you've been inhaling nitrous oxide.

I had the idea that complex numbers were required for the rather inelegant mathematical technique of 'renormalisation' which is required lest the predictions of quantum physics yield unexpected infinities.

All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental) ~ Evan Thompson " — Joshs

Compare with this passage from a contemporary Zen teacher:

The biggest contradiction which Gautama Buddha must have faced in his thinking would have been between the subjective, idealistic thought of traditional Indian religion and the objective, materialist philosophies of the six great philosophers who were popular in India at that time.

I thought that Gautama Buddha’s solution to this contradiction was his discovery that we are in fact living in reality; not, as idealists tend to think, in the world of ideas, or as materialists tend to think, in a world of objective matter alone. Gautama Buddha established his own philosophy based on the fact that we live in the vivid world of momentary existence, in the real world itself. But to express this real world in words is impossible. So he used a method which brought together the two fundamental philosophical viewpoints into a synthesized whole. And the philosophical system he constructed in this way is the Buddhist philosophical system. But at the same time, he realized that philosophy is not reality; it is only discussion of the nature of reality. He needed some method with which people could see directly what the nature of reality is. This method is Zazen, a practice which was already traditional in India from ancient times. Gautama Buddha found that when we sit in this traditional posture in quietness, we can see directly what reality is. — Nishijima, Sōtō Zen roshi - Three Philosophies, One Reality

This 'seeing directly' is what is called in the Zen tradition 'satori', although there are constant admonitions from Zen teachers not to idealise what that might comprise.

I corresponded with an emeritus professor about this question. He noted that all the major breakthroughs in physics needed new mathematics; that Einstein had to seek instructions in tensor calculus in order to finalise the theory of relativity. And of course Liebniz and Newton both claimed credit for the invention of calculus, which was needed for the calculation of the rate of change of a quantity over time. But none of that undermines the basic observation that through mathematical physics, in particular, many discoveries have been made, that could not have been made by any other means, so far as we know. And I think the notion of synthetic a priori logic is central to that.

Your computer always seems to operate, though - as I said, with uncanny degrees of efficiency and precision. Had quantum physics not been discovered, then this could not have happened.

I do have a meta-philosophical aim in mind. It has to do with what Max Horkheimer called 'the eclipse of reason'. In classical cultures, it was assumed that the Universe was in some fundamental sense intelligible - that things happened for a reason, and that the aim of philosophy (including what we now call science) was in discerning it. As Horkheimer and his associates argued, this sense of the objective standing of reason was progressively weakened and ultimately undermined altogether in the modern period. So modern and post-modern philosophy is in some radical sense irrational, in that it proposes that reason only pertains to (for example) syllogistic arguments, or is internal to the minds of humans, and in any case is not discernable in the natural world. Hence Wittgenstein's fulminations that belief in causal connection is 'superstition'. Hence also the subjectivism and relativism which characterises much of modern discourse, arising from the typically modern conviction of a universe governed by chance (as articulated in such texts as Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity).

There's a lot of work involved in articulating that, and despite the claim that the argument is not progressing, many of the comments and objections are informative. It gives me a better idea of what I need to understand, and pieces of it are starting to emerge.

Following the rejection of causality Meillassoux says that it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent. — Quentin Meillassoux Wikipedia Article

:yikes: I have neither the time nor inclination to study this philosopher, but everthing I've read about him raises red flags. Of current French philosophes, I far prefer Michel Bitbol. He's expert in phenomenology, Kant, Schrodinger and Buddhist philosophy. I've only read a small number of his papers but they seem congenial to my outlook.

if localized interactions, "what" makes the perspective happen from these interactions? — schopenhauer1

Does the universe exist if we're not looking?

Now my point about modus ponens is in a sense a hint at a direction in which you might head. Modus ponens is a logical necessity, with a hint of causation about it. — Banno

I'll look into that.

It's the promise of an explanation for the supposed mystery of the effectiveness of mathematics, not the explanation as such. — Banno

Of course. I would not like to rush in where even Einstein feared to tread, but it is at least plausible.

:up:

You could say that it was Kant who pointed out that the empiricist's ideas of the 'blank slate' were fallacious.

Kant thought that Berkeley and Hume identified at least part of the mind’s a priori contribution to experience with the list of claims that they said were unsubstantiated on empirical grounds: “Every event must have a cause,” “There are mind-independent objects that persist over time,” and “Identical subjects persist over time.” The empiricist project must be incomplete since these claims are necessarily presupposed in our judgments, a point Berkeley and Hume failed to see. So, Kant argues that a philosophical investigation into the nature of the external world must be as much an inquiry into the features and activity of the mind that knows it. — Kant, Metaphysics, IEP

it remains that the answer to the OP is that physical causation is not logical necessity. — Banno

What about the claim that scientific law is where logical necessity and physical causation meet? That this is what accounts for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences?

I glanced at that, yet another dense academic paper. I might try and find time to look at it later. Suffice to say that at this point I'm happy to accept 'the standard story' of classical physics with LaPlace preaching strict determinism and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle holing it beneath the waterline. I am of the view that amongst the quantum pioneers, Heisenberg was philosophically acute; every essay I've read of his seems to hold up pretty well. And he's one of the two or three central advocates of the Copenhagen interpretation (in fact he devised that name.)

I'm not sure what logical causation is then — T Clark

The term is 'logical necessity' and the question is the relationship (if any) between logical necessity and physical causation. My (tentative) argument is that scientific laws are where these are united in some sense - that scientific laws are where material causation converges with logical necessity. But I know I'm skating on thin ice.

First, I would state Hume was unable to prove this separation [between deductive and inductive] — Philosophim

Your analysis is essentially the same as the 'common-sense' critics of Hume that Kant mentions - Joseph Priestly, Thomas Reid and others. Kant says that Hume freely acknowledges that of course causal relationships are assumed as a practical matter, in science and in everyday life; so that is not the point at issue. He's not denying that causality operates, but saying that its nature is not at all self-evident, even though we naturally assume it to be. 'The philosopher's task is to wonder at what men think ordinary.'

And the point at issue is in fact very subtle. It has to do with the distinction between a priori (what can be known without any reference to experience), a posteriori (what can only be known by observation) - and the mysterious 'synthetic a priori', a term which he introduced, and which is at the very centre of the Critique of Pure Reason. Hume says that only deductive truths can be known with apodictic certainty (i.e. can't be denied) and purely on the grounds of reason. Kant wants to show that the synthetic a priori is of another kind. But understanding that, requires grasping the central point of the CPR and Kant's 'Copernican Revolution in Philosophy'.

The empirical derivation, however, which both of these philosophers attributed to these conceptions, cannot possibly be reconciled with the fact that we do possess scientific a priori cognitions, namely, those of pure mathematics and general physics. — Mww

I'm interested in the fact that Kant acknowledges 'pure physics'. Pure maths, I can understand (not that I'm any good at maths) but physics always seems to me a combination of logical posits and empirical observations. I'm now reading the Prolegomena, which is a useful re-intro to the CPR, looking for some clarity around that. But from one of the SEP entries on Kant, I read:

Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,

* Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.

So I understand the idea of 'pure maths' but I'm finding the idea of 'pure physics' pretty hard to get my head around as it seems to me physics is always a combination of the analytic with the experiential.

THAT, is Hume’s problem: the conception of A cause, or THE cause, is impossible if the human intellect didn’t already possess the pure conception of “causality” as a natural precursor. We would never understand that a thing is possible, if we didn’t already possess “possibility”. And this thesis continues with ten more pure conceptions of the understanding, which are called the categories. — Mww

Well stated.

You will see that it does not contain any assertions of fact - only normative and evaluative statements. That is because metaphysics is not about the way the world is. It's about how we choose to live our lives and to think about the world. — Cuthbert

True, but Kant's aim is to try and present metaphysics as a science - a vain hope, according to most later philosophers. (I'm exploring his idea of normativity through this book.)

The role of the modern logician is thus akin to the role of a tennis umpire, who adjudicates and documents the conduct of interacting actors, whilst remaining agnostic with respect to the outcome of the game. — sime

Thereby shelving (or 'bracketing') the prospect for a science of metaphysics as such.

So let's grant what Kant argued, that causality is something through which we interpret the world. Fine. Makes good sense. Hume said something similar but called it an "animal instinct", this is the reason why we believe in causality. — Manuel

There's a world of difference between habituated responses, which any creatures exhibit, and reasoned inference, which are the sole prerogative of h. sapiens.

However, the subject of "cause and effect" is much wider than that: it includes non-physical things as well. — Alkis Piskas

Ah, but does it? That is one of the major questions at issue.

It is a thought worth pursuing. Actually even though it's very sketchy, it's suggestive of Kant's response to Hume's problem.

Apropos of which, there are a couple of passages in the Prolegomena which lay out the problem posed by Hume in pretty succinct terms.

Hume started from a single but important concept in Metaphysics, viz., that of Cause and Effect (including its derivatives force and action, etc.). He challenges reason, which pretends to have given birth to this idea from herself, to answer him by what right she thinks anything to be so constituted, that if that thing be posited, something else also must necessarily be posited; for this is the meaning of the concept of cause. He demonstrated irrefutably that it was perfectly impossible for reason to think a priori and by means of concepts a combination involving necessity. We cannot at all see why, in consequence of the existence of one thing, another must necessarily exist, or how the concept of such a combination can arise a priori. Hence he inferred, that reason was altogether deluded with reference to this concept, which she erroneously considered as one of her children, whereas in reality it was nothing but a bastard of imagination, impregnated by experience, which subsumed certain representations under the Law of Association, and mistook the subjective necessity of habit for an objective necessity arising from insight. Hence he inferred that reason had no power to think such combinations, even generally, because her concepts would then be purely fictitious, and all her pretended a priori cognitions nothing but common experiences marked with a false stamp. — Kant, Prolegomena

(I love the colorful turn of phrase.)

After mentioning the fact that Hume's 'common-sense' critics comprehensively failed to see Hume's point, he then says:

The question was not whether the concept of cause was right, useful, and even indispensable for our knowledge of nature, for this Hume had never doubted; but whether that concept could be thought by reason a priori, and consequently whether it possessed an inner truth, independent of all experience, implying a wider application than merely to the objects of experience. This was Hume's problem. It was a question concerning the origin, not concerning the indispensable need of the concept. — Kant, Prolegomena

That last qualification, part of which I have bolded, is of the utmost importance in understanding what is at issue. Remember, Hume's Treatise was on 'human understanding', and Kant's a 'Critique of Pure Reason'. They're considering the elements of knowledge. Hume is demonstrating that, even though the relation between cause and effect is everywhere assumed to be self-evident, in fact we have no logically necessary (or a priori) grounds to think that it is so. And note that Kant says that Hume is engaged in metaphysics, as he himself is: because metaphysics must rest on apprehension of 'inner truths' directly apprehended by reason.

Kant then goes on to answer this challenge from Hume. I'll come back to that, after I've got a bit more of a handle on it.

Mayhaps, the multiverse is important to the question — Agent Smith

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-multiverse-as-imagination-killer/497417/

But the necessity in question is not the same necessity as the necessity of logical inference. — Cuthbert

Because, I suppose the argument is, it cannot be determined a priori, in principle - that is, as a matter of definition.

The deeper question is - what, if anything, is causal 'necessity'? — Cuthbert

I think that is what interests me about the subject.

One of the responses posted on Stack Exchange was another quote from Wittgenstein, to wit:

Wittgenstein famously states that (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, proposition 5.1361) : "The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present." and "Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus."

That seems a far more radical statement of scepticism than what you have posed, does it not?

I'm going to press on with 'Kant's answer to Hume'. I've just found, for anyone interested, that the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics is very nicely formatted for Kindle on this page. (You can find an app on Amazon to upload it to your Kindle.)

What am I missing coming late to this discussion? — I like sushi

The distinction that Cuthbert makes above, between logical necessity and physical causation. But the implications are mainly philosophical, not practical - like, they're not going to be of interest to a bench scientist, I imagine.

But there is nothing logically contradictory in the kettle not heating up. — Banno

But if it were quite so simple as this, then why does it have so many entries in philosophical textbooks, and why did Kant say that it was Hume's attack on causality that woke him from his dogmatic slumbers?

SO it should not be a surprise that the logic and maths we choose is effective. — Banno

That's too easy. Through mathematics, a great many things have been discovered which could otherwise never have been known. It's not just a matter of making a nicely-fitted suit.

I believe Descartes was one of the first to employ it. — Agent Smith

Descartes was nevertheless solidly located in the Western philosophical tradition. It was Platonic epistemology which accorded a high status to dianoia and mathematical analysis.

I understand the distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning.
— Wayfarer

Doesn't that resolve the deep confusion you mentioned? — Cuthbert

It's one aspect of it, but I feel there's a lot more to be said.

I think the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics is the same problem restated more clearly. — unenlightened

So do I! I was going to include it as one of the refs in the OP. He says

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. — Eugene Wigner

Why isn't it understood? And what is it that isn't understood? Isn't it just the convergence between mathematical logic and physical necessity that he's talking about?

Interesting point - but then, we don't expect scientific laws to change over time, although there's some dispute over that (Peirce for instance calling them 'habits of nature' and questioning whether they are truly invariant.) Mathematical proofs and the like are also not contingent on circumstances or conditions, they are derived by pure intuition. Whereas empirical facts consist of a concatenation of circumstances and observation. But, that is why mathematical platonists insist that maths concerns a transcendent realm, which empiricists will always deny (see the indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics.)

Kant and Hume were talking about what we could know. — apokrisis

Rather, what are the foundations of knowledge. Kant credits Hume with establishing that causal relationships could not be simply assumed (or known a priori). He says most of Hume's critics failed to understand the cogency of Hume's argument (as I said, that criticism might also apply to my argument.) But nobody here yet (myself included) as really indicated the import of Kant's 'answer to Hume' (I'll try and find time to properly read that SEP article I referred to and then have a shot at it.)

Bringing Hume and Kant into this is just turning the ontological issue into an epistemic debate. — apokrisis

This is a philosophy forum, so it is apt. It's not a physics forum - and if I introduced this thread to Physicsforum it would be deleted because they don't generally much like philosophical threads.

But since Kant, we've had the quantum and relativity revolutions, — apokrisis

You may be interested in Kelly Ross' analysis Kantian Quantum Physics. Michel Bitbol has also undertaken similar analyses e.g. here.

The point is just to dump the hardest bit of the metaphysical puzzle in some dark corner that no one any longer wants to talk about. — apokrisis

:lol: Swept under the rug, you might say. That's what gives rise to the endless arguments about interpretations of physics.

We know the sun will rise tomorrow. But we can never deduce that it will do so from any description of the universe today. — Cuthbert

I understand the distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. Nevertheless scientific principles such as the second law of thermodynamics are presumed to entail necessary consequences, i.e. we will expect them never to be contradicted. If such is to occur, we would seek a further natural causal explanation as to why this could occur.

Just saying that the seemingly causal behavior of your machine is not necessarily the result of any fundamental causality, but rather a lot of effort to make it so. Per Wittgenstein quoted in your OP, it is useful for hypothesis. — noAxioms

The effort would be to no avail were there not causal connections there to be made.

If I push on the keyboard and a P shows up on the screen, I can see saying that my finger caused the P to show up. But isn't that what you are calling physical causation. — T Clark

Isn't it? Didn't I? It's your intentional action, plus a lot of work by the likes of NoAxioms that has been done in the background, to ensure that it works this way.

As I understand it Hume claims that on account of "constant conjunctions" of events we come to habitually assume that the preceding event causes the constantly observed attending subsequent event — Janus

The question was not whether the concept of cause was right, useful,
and even indispensable for our knowledge of nature, for this Hume had
never doubted; but whether that concept could be thought by reason a
priori, and consequently whether it possessed an inner truth,
independent of all experience, implying a wider application than
merely to the objects of experience. This was Hume's problem.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-0.txt

He goes on:

But to satisfy the conditions of the problem, the opponents of the
great thinker should have penetrated very deeply into the nature of
reason, so far as it is concerned with pure thinking,—a task which
did not suit them. They found a more convenient method of being
defiant without any insight, viz., the appeal to common sense.

That's what I think I can be accused of having done - I'm appealing to common sense realism. But at least I'm making progress to understanding what it is I don't understand.

There is no causation involved. — T Clark

But what about when it is applied to (for example) computing? Then there is plainly causation involved, as it produces a physical outcome. The fact that such-and-such is the case causes a particular result. I can't see how causation is not involved.

Thanks for your response, but I think it needs elaboration. Kant's 'answer to Hume' involves some pretty dense reasoning. I'm going to spend some time on the SEP entry on that topic before I come back to you.

Physical causation has a problem dealing with the contingency and spontaneity found in the world. — apokrisis

thanks for chipping in.

Yes - but physical causation doesn't have to be all powerful, does it? I'm the last person who would argue that it is - I accept the reality of karma, for instance, which overflows the horizons of physicalism - but within its range of applicability, physical causation and logical necessity seem to coincide, don't they?

Take a high-school physics example, the second law of motion - f=ma. Given that you know any two of those values, then the third can be deduced because f and m (for example) are such-and-such. So the cause of the acceleration is the result of the force multiplied by the mass. That, I suppose, is a deductive, as opposed to inductive, result. But it also suggests an invariable and causal relationship between cause and effect. And actually I think this is getting close to Kant's answer to Hume. There's a very knotty problem here which I'm getting close to, but haven't quite understood yet.

(Also found the reference to the Bertrand Russell essay on Cause which Anscombe refers to.)

I'd like to see what you make of my argument. — Manuel

Well, you'd better present one! :wink:

An elementary particle stays an elementary particle eternally. — Haglund

Not. You're talking about atoms, 'indivisible particles', but there are none. Nowadays a particle is an excitation of a field.

Whilst simultaneously appreciating the appalling nature of such thought systems, perhaps? — Tom Storm

Didn't think it worth pursuing, again.

I suppose I'll concede that.

Oh yes? Like who?