So did you study the physics of spontaneous symmetry breaking? Did you get to the bottom of the buckling beam problem and other examples of bifurcation?

Cheeky bastard.

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

My OP was explicitly directed at the issue of spontaneous symmetry breaking where the situation is so unstable that any old accident is going to produce the same inevitable effect. So it would only apply to crime to the degree there was some similar causality in play.

However, because I am expressing a general constraints-based view of causality, you could say that responsibility is about limiting antisocial behaviour to some point where a community becomes indifferent to what you are doing.

If you wear your socks inside out, that doesn’t really matter, regardless of whether the act is accidental or deliberate. But if you bump into someone in the street and hurt them bad, then the difference would tend to matter.

My OP wasn’t ruling out the idea of deliberate action. It was focused on the causation of accidents in unstable situations.

How could identifying the causes miss the causal point? — Metaphysician Undercover

You missed the point. Read what I wrote and reply to what I wrote.

The framework is Aristotelian. Material/efficient causes are being opposed to formal/final causes. Don't pretend otherwise.

If the particular causes cannot be identified, it is a cop-out to claim it's a "general background condition" — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not that they can't be identified. It is that the identification would miss the causal point.

It is the inability to suppress fluctuations in general, rather than the occurrence of some fluctuation in particular, which is the contentful fact.

No, the straw man was saying that the tribe automatically is some collective hive-mind or some such. — schopenhauer1

OK. So that was the straw man you wanted to introduce here then.

Rather, I proposed alternative reasons for a more group-like mentality including social conditioning which has tried to tamp down individualistic tendencies or perhaps that they have not "discovered" the extent of individual freedoms of choice, the way some societies didn't "discover" the applications of science to technology. — schopenhauer1

I've said a million times that the standard sociological story is that a social system is an adaptive balance of global co-operation and local competition. It is this dynamic that explains the observed facts. So yes, we would expect an appropriate degree of "tamping down", or social constraint - coupled to an appropriate encouragement of individual freedoms.

As I've said before, I agree with your lament that modern life is difficult because it has become a social constraint that we must all strive to be highly individualistic. You have that seeming paradox of being now forced by social-conditioning to be creative and different. Your entire reason for existing is something that now has to be authored by you! Or at least, that was what you've been complaining about.

So I agree that that would be a problem. That kind of modern socially conditioned expectation doesn't make a lot of sense.

Well it does if you step back far enough to recognise the hand of the thermodynamic imperative - why we are hellbent on a technological lifestyle that could heat up a whole planet. The self-actualising individual is really mostly just about being the self-centred consumer, impervious to all environmental constraints. It is a system out of balance, as will be the lesson by 2050.

But meanwhile, as we idle away the wait in amusing philosophical debate, it seems worth pointing out the fact that meanings as they would exist for humans would be learnings captured by human culture. If you don't like the current general state of the conditioning coming from our social institutions, then the answer is to help change that conditioning - not just reject conditioning in some general pessimistic fashion.

Which comes first - even for us pragmatists. The big ideas or the nit-picking?

Yep, nominalism is one of those absurd metaphysical extravagances beloved of those who like to warn against absurd metaphysical extravagances.

So what the experiment does, is to place a limit such that it is not always possible to identify the causal sequence of some set of events — Banno

Rather it illustrates the contextuality of causation, the falseness of the presumptions of local realism.

Your conventional notion of causality was already dead and buried. This latest experiment dumps another truckload of dirt on the grave.

If that counts as philosophically uninteresting, so be it.

"A thing is identical with itself."-There is no finer example of a useless proposition, — StreetlightX

Why am I me? Why am I not the person next to me? — JohnLocke

The obvious answer is that “you” are a developing process, an enduring structure. Not a thing, but a historically conditioned continuity.

So is a process identical with itself? That requires a whole different metaphysical perspective. The parts can change. What matters is that some essential set of constraints are satisfied. The child becomes the adult and is both the same person and a different person.

The question of identity or individuation sounds silly. But it leads into exactly the kind of deep question metaphysics needs to have good answers for.

Can’t offer you any particular book. But I well remember reading a history of Greek philosophy and realising how the standard story was told dialectically. If Heraclitus said all was,flux, Parmenides said all was stasis. And yet that very telling brushed over the way the individual philosophers were themselves making dialectical cases. Heraclitus for instance was opposing flux and logos.

So it is very useful, when telling a history, to be able to pose one historical figure against their “other”. But most of those figures turn out to be arguing in dialectical fashion themselves.

This then goes to what I would see as philosophy’s deep problem. Dialectics points the way out of the simplicities of monisms. But on the whole, few continue the journey to arrive at an explicitly triadic or hierarchical method of reasoning.

A history of these systems thinkers - Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant to a degree, Peirce - might be a good book.

You queried the ball being at absolute rest. We can presume for the sake of the thought experiment it is in an inertial frame. So that would be a reason the ball shouldn’t move. That source of possible acceleration has been removed for sake of argument.

The issue here is spontaneous symmetry breaking. So you’ve got to start with some plausible state of symmetry.

So apparently you agree that this inflated notion of having to make fiat-like goals to rule your own life is merely a modern socially constructed “freedom”. Great. It wasn’t a straw man then, was it?

Yeah, it is not that I’m arguing that regular cause and effect explanations are wrong. They are useful descriptions of how things generally are in a world that has become cold and large, and so is acting like a collection of atomistic objects. But it is how we would think of causality as it applies to bifurcations or symmetry breakings. It is the causality that would apply to events such as the Big Bang.

So toppling pencils and rolling balls just serve as illustrations of the principles. And I’m arguing that while logic says there will always be some triggering cause, it also doesn’t make much sense to attribute anything much to that particular event - single it out as something uniquely significant and useful to know. The real cause of the change is the fact that triggering events couldn’t have been avoided. That generic fact of nature is what would be useful to know about and understand fully.

We can compare, side by side, two experiments where the infinitesimal limit is being approached, one using an hemispherical dome, say, and the other one using Norton's dome. — Pierre-Normand

If things can converge, then they can diverge. In one direction, the ultraviolet catastrophe. In the other, its matching infrared catastrophe.

So in terms of my metaphysical interests here, the dichotomous nature of any ideal limit is not a surprise. It would be a prediction. If you have fluctuations, as you do in quantum physics, then you are always going to be stuck between the two perils of everything adding up to infinity, or everything cancelling to zero.

Now those two perils are mathematically nicely-behaved but also observationally non-physical. The Universe actually exists in a way that suggests a finite cut-off before we can arrive at either two ideal limits to processes of convergence or divergence.

So that was something implicit in the OP. We need to explain finitude. There has to be an emergent scale of fluctuations that becomes too small to make a difference. Or indeed, to big to make a difference.

And here is where I would call on the holism and semiosis of hierarchy theory. In hierarchy theory, small scale fluctuations eventually become just a solid blur - from a middle ground perspective of them. And likewise, large scale fluctuations eventually become so large in spatiotemporal terms that they completely fill the available field of view. Change can no longer be seen as it is change that stretches wider than the visible world itself.

This is the usual contrast between blackholes and de Sitter spaces. Looking in one direction, fluctuations tend to a Planck scale quantum blur. Looking in the other, we encounter the large scale event horizon cut-off imposed by the speed of light.

So yes. There is always a dichotomy in play if there is any action at all. If there is a convergent limit, there is a divergent one to match it. And then tracking the physics of such limits with fluctuations also makes sense. But that then is nudging you towards this kind of hierarchical semiotics, this triadic story of being inside limits because of some kind of finitude-constructing mechanism, some kind of cut-off creating effect.

Again, the mathematical imagination is quick to believe that the infinite and the infinitesimal are in some sense achievable. But I'm thinking no. Finitude must arise somehow in the actually physical universe. And we don't have a lot of good tools for modelling that.

My OP illustrated one form of such a cut-off - the principle of indifference. If instead of having to count every tiniest, most infintesimal, fluctuation or contribution, we simply arrive at the generic point of not being able to suppress such contributions, then this is just such an internalist mechanism. The crucial property is not a sensitivity to the infinitesimal, but simply a loss of an ability to care about everything smaller in any particular sense. There is smaller shit happening just as there is also bigger shit happening in the other direction. It just isn't visible from our middle ground position due to a lack of the means to record that information. The holographic universe story in a nutshell.

But again, WHO is making the choices within that social setting. You keep moving the goal post from who makes the decision, to what the decisions are about. — schopenhauer1

Nope. I keep shifting the goal posts from atomism to holism. You keep trying to shift them back.

But you need to then provide your account for how we actually do make decisions of the kind that might concern us here. Where is your psychological model? I don't see it. You simply seem to exist that "we" exist in some fashion that needs no further discussion.

You miss my point. Chimps and dolphins are social creatures too. — schopenhauer1

Hardly on the scale of humans. We have language and so a symbolic level of cultural evolution. That makes a really big difference.

However, they don't necessarily have to purposely set goals for themselves. — schopenhauer1

LOL. How could they even do that without a language to construct such a framework on meaning?

But it is the RESPONSIBILITY of the individual to make decisions, to choose, to conjure goals to pursue. It is not given that what choice has to be made. — schopenhauer1

To say that is the RESPONSIBILITY, all shouty like, is already to take a very historically conditioned view of the human story. Check out your cultural anthropology and you will find that traditional tribal cultures don't tend to think they have some responsibility to make a personal choice about the life goals they will pursue.

Unfortunately, you discount the choice nature of individual humans within their social structure- even the choice to want to do nothing in particular. — schopenhauer1

But isn't my argument that on the whole, wanting to do nothing in particular is reasonably normal? It is the idea of wanting to be extraordinary which would be the source of much modern discontent.

I call it you continuing to frame the situation atomistically and thinking you've said something worthwhile.

Social construction is about the informational constraints that shape the individual psychology. So it is not about society making you decide anything, it is about society being the meaningful framework within which any personal autonomy is exercised.

My model accounts for the reasons or motivations that are so lacking in your model.

You are complaining the reasons don't exist in us, and they don't exist in the cosmos, so they don't exist anywhere. You've searched high and low, and you can find no point to any particular choice.

But I am saying this is a failure of naturalism on your part. The reality is that "we" are socially constructed. So meaning was never going to be intrinsic to "us" - beyond the kind of biological motivations that are natural to just being alive. A larger purpose in life is the social purposes to be found all around us. Society is the organismic level of organisation here. It is the locus of the kind of meanings that are necessary to social creatures living a social lifestyle.

Now you can of course have all sorts of thoughts and disputes about that. No one is going to pretend that society as it stands, or ever was, is a completely perfect or rational animal.

But as a departure point for moral philosophy, that is the reality from which to start a discussion. It is not unnatural to be behaving like socially constrained creatures if it is social constraint that is constructing us as the particular creatures we are in the first place.

We are already plunged into that historical flow of existence - the human story. You may wind up appalled or delighted. But it is philosophically unreasonable of you to distort the basic facts. And that is my objection.

So when we make decisions, we are making it on a species level? I don't compute. — schopenhauer1

Social communities are smaller than the biological species. And "we" are the product of multiple levels of community. So let's not be simplistic. You have a family heritage, a peer group, a neighbourhood, a national, religious or ethnic identity.

But the point remains. Language gains its meanings at a social level of development. And these meanings are what shape "us" in terms of some psychological set of habits of action. You can't analyse the individual abstracted from the social context as the social level is where the meanings are arising on the whole.

However, who actually MAKES the choice? It is not the species, but the individual... — schopenhauer1

Do individuals actually make all their own choices? You are presuming a level of independent mindedness that is much talked about - in a particular cultural tradition at least - yet rarely enough exhibited even within that culture.

Of course, people could call their physiological drives their own. Biology has its needs. And those are meaningful at that organismic level.

But mostly folk are not making real choices - not about reasons, anyway. They are seeking to apply existing social meanings to the lives they happen to be living. So they might have to plan or make choices about how to achieve some purpose. But the purposes are readily to hand as part of their cultural environment.

But how are the individuals not responsible for choices of motivation? — schopenhauer1

Nope. Why would you argue the unscientific and unnatural view that motivations should be a matter of individual choice. You are starting with a bogus model of psychology and so all your consequent philosophising is for naught.

it is still the individual who takes upon whatever role or goal to work towards. — schopenhauer1

We can always recognise the fact that we are only responding intelligently and creatively to the embedded demands of our cultural millieu. And that - theoretically at least - raises the possibility of dissent.

But you are ignoring the corollary. If we also recognise the fact that "we" are a social construction, then we can't claim there is some other "us" that exists free and independent of that cultural millieu.

Now we can imagine cutting ourselves off from our fellow humanity so entirely that we become your atomistic individual, alone in its cosmic sea of burden and futility. Indeed, there is whole genre of culture where you can learn to take precisely that attitude. You can find "yourself" among the like-minded by sharing the right texts and manuals.

But at the end of the day, you can't escape the reality that being socially constructed comes first. If you want to construct some absolute kind of psychological individualism, that is going to come after the fact. And considered sanely, what could be the point?

If there is a choice, it would be so binary as to be improper to conflate with human goals which are linguistically based and with a much higher degree of freedom of choice. — schopenhauer1

Maybe your mistake is to misunderstand the level at which language-based thinking, choosing and willing finds its natural meaning. You presume it is at the psychological level of the individual, and yet it actually happens at the organismic level of a culture and society.

So sure, a worker ant granted some kind of self-awareness might suddenly question what it is all for. But an ant colony has a clearly evolved reason for whatever the worker ant generally does, or is.

So your philosophical misstep is to fail to recognise the nature of meaning. The reasons for actions aren't ever to be found in the "self" when we are talking biology. That psychological self is always a biological or social construction. It arises embedded in a living context that determines its nature.

As has been said before, your angst about the meaninglessness of life arises only because you vault that embeddedness in a social context to consider the human condition in the context of a random and purposeless Cosmos. You jump scales of being.

But the irony is that that image of the human condition is itself a social construction - a product of a particular time in the development of the theories of physics, coupled to the romantic reaction that image of nature engendered.

So your pessimistic lament is anachronistic - out of date with our understandings of nature and humans as socially-constructed creatures. Time to change the tune?

For example if it is neurons creating mind what material properties predict this and causally necessitate it. — Andrew4Handel

The causality works the other way round. Life and mind rely on the functional trick of getting an informational grip on the material flows of the world. So the key material properties are those that permit information to have this power. The material world does nothing directly to necessitate the existence of neurons. What matters is that the material world could in fact itself be constrained by the free and independent informational activities of a system of switches.

Or if you like, the key material property is that material physics could be controlled that way. Genes and neurons and other kinds of biological information could bend its entropic flows to their own ends. Neurons evolved as that negentropic step was energetically favoured.

...and what prevents any matter and any arrangement of matter from causing a mind or experience to occur. — Andrew4Handel

Life and mind depend on that possibility of switching and controlling that emerges in very precise physical conditions. It has to cost next to no effort to choose the direction of the material flow being regulated. The actual material effort being expended must be as close to zero as possible.

So that means bodies and brains can only evolve when conditions are right. Recent biophysics shows that we are talking about the quasi-classical nanoscale of molecular action in liquid water. That happens to represent a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become matched in size.

At a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible or switchable.

There is no real cost to turning one form of action into another. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms.

See http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf and http://lifesratchet.com/

So life and mind colonise a seam of physical freedom that arises right at the point where quantum physics is itself "switching" with classical physics. It sort of become frictionless for information. It can get in there and regulate material flows for virtually no material cost. That then opens up the possibility of vast and unhindered evolutionary complexity. Nature has this new direction represented by living and mindful structure.

This kind of question makes me turn dualist because it seems like materialism about the mind leads to too much mind emerging indiscriminately and without clear location. — Andrew4Handel

Well science says there is a kind of dualism here in that you can make a distinction between dumb physics and smart life. But there is nothing indiscriminate about where or what happens. You need the very lucky thing of there being this nanoscale convergent zone where a variety of energy forms intersect closely enough to become switchable at "no real cost". And then from there, it becomes inevitable that a switching machinery is going to evolve to exploit that particular seam of material freedom to its own ends.

It is an inertial frame. And I’m not claiming that there is no accelerating force. I argue that the necessary force ought to be considered generic rather than particular. The environment did it. Accidents happen because they can’t be suppressed.

So, modally speaking, we have the number two and God being used interchangeably as abstractions of the mind. — Posty McPostface

The modal distinctions I made were narratively different. Two would be general rather than particular. God would be fictional rather than factual.

Are you saying that pragmatically, they serve no further utility to use than using a different language game? Again, if they are modally independent of synthetic a priori judgments, then they exist universally. — Posty McPostface

I wouldn't focus on these two particular examples - two and God. My argument is that "abstractions of the mind" are only "conceptions of a world". So before we get into anything else, the first step is to avoid getting sucked into a Platonistic framing of the options. I would begin in the pragmatism of "language games" - though "form of life" would be the better term, if we must invoke Wittgenstein.

Pragmatism isn't just a game, but life itself. We are constrained by nature to make it work in the long run. And "we" are ultimately the product of the game more than its author. So again, it is about shifting away from the opposing extremes and telling the story from the balanced middle.

With two-ness and the divine, we can see them as important to our conceptions of ourselves, as we exist in a world. If we express it that way, we can see that both sides of the equation matter.

If we are talking about dogs and cats, or turnips and potatoes, there is no big deal. It seems we are talking about physical stuff that is just "out there" right now in relation to us and what we might think about those things "in here". The separation - and the regulative interaction that epistemic separation enables - feels direct and immediate. No mystery.

But talk about numbers and creators touch upon the kind of generalities that must now somehow incorporate "us" - our own being or existence as both physical and mental entities. So that alone is shifting the modal register. Two speaks to the greater generality that is entification itself - separability or countability. While God speaks to the desire for a causal explanation - a general reason for the particular individuations we might observe.

So on the one hand, there is a definite shift to a metaphysical register of reference. Pragmatism is about a conception of the world with us in it. It seems to be about the everyday human scale view of turnips and dogs. And then we find ourselves talking about "things" - like two and God - that must be classed as transcending that human scale view. That appears to break the spell of ordinary language. We feel we must be talking about either abstractions that actually also exist, or abstractions that are merely pure imaginative inventions.

But that is why - pragmatically - we have science (and maths). The appropriate thing to do, we have found through our adventures in philosophy, is to step up another level in semiotic scale and start describing reality from an "objective" rather than a "subjective" point of view.

So we resolve the Platonic dilemma not by deciding in favour of universals, generalities or abstracta being either "creations of the mind" or "facts of the world", but by establishing a systematically larger point of view that can achieve the level of pragmatic understanding we seek. The "world with us in it" becomes the world as a well-informed scientist or natural philosopher sees it - if that happens to be what you agree is the proper step up in viewpoint.

As I say, learning to see the world that way involves habits that then produce that form of selfhood. It is a form of life. And many would immediately leap forward to say the naturalistic image of nature is something they must hate and resist ... as it threatens their own habitual identity. :)

However setting that aside, the resolution of the paradox - abstracta: mental or real? - lies in seeing that everyday language is a pragmatic form of life. And then having formed a habit of conception that successfully presents the world with us in it, we are going to encounter the world as it currently seems much larger than just us. That then presents the next challenge we might want to answer. And the only actual tool to hand is the sign relation or semiosis.

Well, we could always compare/contrast our respective conceptions of "sensation"... — creativesoul

I think you are just being asked to justify your sweeping statements on the issue.

You said sensations weren't meaningful. That would startle most psychologists. Why would the nervous system go to all the bother of conceiving of the world as a system of signs otherwise?

Then how else would you phrase the issue instead of resorting to terms like "abstractions of the mind"? — Posty McPostface

Conceptions. Habits of sign. "God" and "two" exist as words in a language. And as such, they mediate some pragmatic conceptual relation we might have with the real world.

Now of course you can go on from that to talk about whether they in fact relate us conceptually to the "real world" or just "metaphysically possible worlds", or whatever other kind of world you want to then name.

But that boils down to modality. Two-ness is being conceived of as completely generic - true of all possible worlds (where counting would work). And God is conceived of as completely fictional - not actually true of the actual world ... for the atheist at least.

So semiosis provides the larger encompassing framework already. It subsumes "material realities of the world" and "abstractions of the mind" into an over-arching semiotic relation. It cannot be a simple case of either/or - either God and two physically exists, or else mentally exists. It is already being said that for the words to exist, and be used within a language system, requires that both the mind and the world are "places" where they "exist". The existence is in fact the process which is a relation that works. Something about the world, and something about the mind, must be in fruitful co-ordination.

So God must be a useful fiction when the purpose was the regulation of traditional human societies. Two must be a useful generality once humans started to conceive of the world in terms of mathematical-strength signs.

Of course, there is aways something "out there" - that God-shaped hole to fill in a society seeking to be ruled by less earth-bound rules, that two-shaped identity to be discovered everywhere that counting appears to work.

But also there is always something "in here" - the participant in a language community capable of finding such a habit of interpretance a functional way to operate.

So your OP was setting things up for a false dilemma - something exists either in the world or in the mind. Pragmatism presumes that the existence of that something - the sign: some word that gets regularly used - must speak to a relationship that works. And for that to be the case, it exists as a unity bridging mind and world.

Of course - the next familiar Kantian difficulty - it is the "world" as it is for "us".

So it is the world as the phenomenal or an Umwelt, not the world as the noumenal. And it is us as an emergent modeller, not us as some Cartesian and unphysical res cogitans.

...are they real or just metaphysical? — Posty McPostface

...or demonstrably useful?

(Again, is there a good reason to debate realism vs idealism for the billionth time when you have pragmatism as the better choice?)

Sensation is not meaningful. — creativesoul

Whoops. Off the rails already.

Sure, language takes semiosis to another level. But sensation is also fundamentally semiotic.

What was your purpose then?

(Pretty clearly, it was to suggest there might be a "dilemma" worth discussing. So given the familiarity of this debate, were you planning to offer anything new?)

So the context has to be changed in order for the ball not to fall? eliminating each classical cause is the sisyphean task? — JupiterJess

I would instead say that to arrive at the classical situation, you would have to keep adding classical constraints. My argument is that indeterminism can never actually be eliminated. It can only be contextually regulated.

So we arrive at classicality as a terminus - the result of adding enough complex restrictions to produce an apparent causal simplicity. We have to remove the jitter, the friction, the heat - all that messy thermodynamic stuff - to arrive at one round object perched motionlessly on top of another round object with now no other object in sight to disturb that ridiculously unstable situation.

Maximum instability is presented as absolute stability. And then somehow this is the causal model of the world that most people want to defend.

The symmetry of the initial conditions is already broken in the sense that there is both a probabilistic process and the barrier preventing it breaking through until a threshold is accidentally breached. — apokrisis

I didn't quite complete this thought. As I am trying to make plain, my own interest here would be in the question of cosmic creation - the causality of the Big Bang as an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. So the difficulty becomes getting beyond a story - like tunnelling - which already presumes a causally broken situation. We have to get the bit just beyond where there are either the trapped propensity, or the barrier that is trapping it.

Tunnelling is good for explaining why there might be delays in events happening - like particle decays. And the decays - being statistically random - seem good evidence that we are glimpsing a quantumly indeterministic realm beyond. With quantum tunnelling, we can see flashes of the fundamental uncertainty breaking through.

However, the primal story would seem to have to go beyond a trapped propensity and the threshold holding it back for "a time".

Can you find a use for them? Is there a meaning beyond that use?

The answer is the usual pragmatic one. Show that there is any actual mystery here. If we form a concept, it had some application. It was a constraint on possibility which served a purpose.

(Even if that purpose might seem really generic, or really minor.)

As apokrisis has said, the ball effectively vibrates, as its internal molecules move about (Unless the experiment takes place at absolute zero), so it 'pushes' itself, if nothing else does so first. No need even for QM, just Brownian motion is enough to explain it. — Pattern-chaser

Reflecting on things further, we do seem to wind up with the issue that there always needs to be some kind of probabilistic tunnelling process for there to be an actual causal issue. The symmetry of the initial conditions is already broken in the sense that there is both a probabilistic process - some kind of quantum or even classical jitter - and the barrier preventing it breaking through until a threshold is accidentally breached.

So the ball bearing perched on the dome is going to be able to survive any nudge until there is one strong enough to overcome the frictional forces that would oppose the ball moving. Instead of the accelerative nudge tipping the ball bearing, that energy would instead start to heat up the environment via friction.

So again, if we really zero in on the full physics of the thought experiment, we find ourselves being pointed down the path to a fuller thermodynamical conception of this little causal universe. Not by accident, we look to be headed towards Feynman's Brownian ratchet and how that imposes an ultimate physical cut-off on determinism.

The general principle that follows is that we need to view first causes - the spontaneous breakings of symmetries - not as something hot happening to something cold (as in the bump that pushes the ball bearing), but instead as something cold happening to something hot - the fall, as in a generic fall in temperature that suddenly allows a ratchet and pawl to quit hopping about and start turning mechanically in a single deterministic direction.

That explains particle decay. In a hot environment, the particle isn't even stable. It is already melted. But if the environment is cooled, a particle can form. It will lock up a degree of internal instability that has some lingering propensity of overcoming the thermal decay barrier represented by a now cold world. By quantum uncertainty, that barrier will be spontaneously crossed because the particle fluctuated into a higher energy state that wasn't forbidden to it.

So if we want laws of nature that are generic enough to capture the causality of a Big Bang cosmos, this is the direction our causal thinking has to head in.

Classical causality is about something hot happening to something cold. But we need to flip that model on its head. The deeper causal story is about something cold happening to something hot. It is the context that tells the story, not the event. As the temperature drops generically, then localised heat can start to become the new big thing. But only after the temperature has dropped generically.

The OP presupposes an utterly impossible entity. It would have ended rather abruptly had it's author noticed this fatal flaw. — creativesoul

Yeah, it was my mistake to link to that paper for sure. I should have just left it at the gif I was taking.

But still, Norton's dome is also its own interesting debate. I'm just saying don't keep mixing the two things up.

Another way to avoid bifurcations, both future and past, might be to replace the 1st law by a new law saying that the relationship of any force to time must be analytic. — andrewk

There is no need to worry about trying to fix Newton's laws if you just accept them as effective descriptions. They are how reality would work in the limit. But reality can only approach such a limit.

It is defending Newtonianism as a literal truth that creates the problem.

And the metaphysical insight for philosophy of maths is that a third category beyond the discrete and the continuous needs to be recognised - that of the vague.

Limits in metaphysics can only be defined logically in dichotomous or complementary terms. The discrete and the continuous are ideals - opposing limitations on possibility defined by their formal reciprocality. That then leaves raw possibility - ie: vagueness or indeterminacy - sitting in the middle as the stuff that can approach one or other limit with arbitrary precision.

(Or, equivalently, in a time-reversed scenario, it would take an infinite amount of time for a ball sent sliding up to come to rest at the apex). — Pierre-Normand

The metaphysical reality of time reversal scenario's would also be in question here. If classical reality is actually the product of maximally constrained fluctuations - spontaneity is only ever suppressed - then time reversal can only be a locally effective story, not the generic metaphysical story.

Yes, I can drop your Ming vase on the floor and you will be able to gather up all its shards to glue it back together. Initial conditions can be recovered if no information is either created or lost in the time evolution of the event.

But thermodynamics would appear to say that is not the generic case, certainly at the Cosmic scale on which we are trying to write the laws of nature. So especially if we grant that the development of physical complexity erases past information - because hierarchical organisation acts downward to simplify the parts of which it is composed - then time irreversibility becomes the generic condition.

David Layzer makes this cosmological case - http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/

The larger point I am course working towards is that when it comes to the big question - why does anything exist? - we mostly start from completely the wrong metaphysical place. The ball perched for all time on top of a dome is just an example to how far our most familiar models of causality are from the physical reality.

Layzer's approach shows how classicality exists as literally borrowed time. The Big Bang cosmos had to go through its phase change - gravitating mass had to condense out of the relativistic thermal fireball - to create "Newtonian" degrees of freedom. You suddenly had particles that could have a location because they could move at less than light speed and so inhabit a realm where there was emergently a space-like causal separation between events.

So when speculating about the beginnings of everything, we have built up a stock of false Newtonian intuitions. Newtonianism only describes a Cosmos that has got cold and large enough to have undergone a complete phase transition - one that takes it from a quantum description to a classical one. And if we try to time reverse that, how to do we cross the divide given it involves a massive loss/creation of information at the transition point? (A loss and a creation, depending on whether you are tracking the negentropic order created, or the entropic disorder lost.)

The quantum fireball was of course its own further crossing of a transition with its own symmetry-breaking creation story. But we can't say more about that until the lingering Newtonian determinism is completely dispensed with.

It may be that the solution lies in what's being neglected by the problem itself — creativesoul

Two different questions are being confused here.

The OP was not intended to be about Norton's dome and its claims of Newtonian indeterminism due to a latent jounce concealed in the initial conditions. The OP was about how we would think about an initiating cause when it comes to spontaneous symmetry breaking. The usual natural inclination is to finger one individual perturbation - the straw that broke the camel's back. But the alternative view is to point to the general impossibility of reaching the Platonic perfection modelled by a Newtonian set-up.

In that other view, Newtonianism is only arrived at via the suppression of environmental perturbations. And so, even if perturbations can be more or less completely suppressed - thus allowing Newtonian determinism to be a useful general description of an actual material system - they can also never be absolutely suppressed. Hence - generically - the environment still fluctuates, meaning there will always be a straw to break the camel's back.

"Molecular decay" would be just one more example of this generic inability to suppress all background fluctuations. Just the same as thermal jitter in the ball and dome. And if we get down to the quantum level, there just is always a probability of the ball quantum tunnelling across the threshold, moving sufficiently off-centre due to uncertainty.

In the real world, there would also be some residual frictional forces holding the ball bearing in place. The surfaces in contact would have some microscopic degree of roughness. So in reality, the whole frictionless dome set-up is unphysical.

Did you have any thoughts about a clearer account of Norton’s set up?

Comments suggest to me that the cause of the sudden spontaneous motion is a concealed fourth derivative jounce. So it is like the ball is set down on the apex in the middle of just being about to snap. The maths allow this because the maths is blind to the concealed action. The maths only concerns itself with the first and second derivatives being zero to say the ball is at rest. It can’t pick up a singularity, as when the ball would be briefly motionless apex of its trajectory when tossed in the air.

That would seem a rather trivial get out though. And I don’t yet see why this particular curvature is so special. Any explanation for why this curve is somehow poised in a way that allows for the claimed indeterminism?

This is another good little commentary I was looking at - https://theconfused.me/blog/is-newtons-first-law-merely-a-special-case-of-the-second/

(There may be a emergent law specifying the half-life of a ball's staying poised before starting to fall). — Pierre-Normand

Yeah. I think this is the next interesting case to dig into.

Another slant on the OP would be the more standard example of a phase transition where a system is in a state of correlations of infinite length. It is right on the cusp of a global symmetry breaking and any perturbation at all will push it across the threshold. At that point you can throw away the need to identify the triggering disturbance. It was always going to happen somewhere.

All this is about how to view spontaneous symmetry breakings. The formalism usually reduce the description of the physical system to its perfectly poised symmetry, leaving the issue of a triggering cause - the source of the spontaneous change - outside the model. This leads to some rather arbitrary metaphysical conclusions by those only prepared to consider what the formalism is prepared to cover.

So that is the issue. How can we talk about the lighting of the blue touchpaper, the first cause, in a way that it is part of the model and not some ad hoc extra? If fluctuations are treated as generic, then that would answer the question. The causal problem is flipped as what would now become surprising is if some critical instability could be prevented from breaking.

In short, why does existence exist? It no longer requires a particular triggering cause that broke a prior quiescent nothingness. Now the generic issue is how could wild fluctuations ever get suppressed? The causal story becomes about the physical mechanism that could limit the possibility of fluctuations to the point where stable order finally starts to reign.

This would be missing the point of the thought experiment. We can take it for granted the ball bearing is actually at rest on the apex in perfectly balanced fashion and then just focus on the event that would be needed to topple it.

I agree that in practice this precision would be impossible, but that isn’t the point being made. The point is about how we like to assign causality to particular triggering events, but if a triggering event is almost sure to happen, then the particular loses its hallowed explanatory status. The cause can be treated as completely generic.

Making the generic cause to be about the impossibility of placing a ball with arbitrary accuracy on an apex is both another way of saying the same thing, but not quite as strong a version as focusing on the impossibility of eliminating triggering fluctuations.

I would say you are missing the point. I am discussing how we might view the metaphysics of accidents - spontaneous or random events.

On one view there are no accidents as every event will turn out to have some particular cause. Look close enough and you will find the nudge that actually did the trick of toppling the perfectly balanced ball bearing or pencil. So the accident becomes in fact micro determined. It only looks an accident while we are ignorant of the fine detail.

I want to contrast that usual view with its opposite. The story can be turned around by laying the stress on the other facts. In the end, it was the impossibility of eliminating all sources of environmental disturbance that was the cause of the toppling. Yes, there was some individual nudge that did it. But a nudge of some kind was also absolutely inevitable. We thus have no good reason to point a finger at some particular nudge as if it were significant in its own right. It was nothing special. If it had failed to act, the ball bearing would have still fallen just as surely because an unlimited number of other nudges were there to step in and do the same job.

So the odds of the accident happening would be 100% from that point of view. We could say that the ball bearing simply has the propensity to fall. It doesn’t need a particular push. It is generically set up to respond to a perturbation. Identifying some individual nudge as the actual culprit adds no real information to an account of the causality.

Clearly this line of reasoning then takes you into the interesting metaphysical questions about how the Big Bang could happen out of “quantum nothingness”, or what causes an unstable particle to decay.

The experiment can contrast the statistics of coherent and decoherent systems.