Lessons on Causality

Did I ever say that there is only one procedure? Quote me saying it. The fact that you have to choose a finite number of points to test means that there is more than one procedure for determining whether something is a circle or not. There is a procedure that picks a hundred points, a procedure that picks a thousand points, a procedure that picks a million points and so on. It is not me who’s saying that there is only one procedure. If there is someone saying such a thing then it is James.

Yes. We want to understand how that process works. And we only want to do so up to a certain level of precision that is of interest to us.

That’s not important.

That’s a sufficiently precise description of how we differentiate between circles and other shapes. You can derive it on your own using nothing but introspection. But if you want you can also derive it by observing how other people behave.

That’s all he does. And he’s been doing it for years. It’s pathetic.

His definition is all-exclusive. In other words, there is no phenomenon that can be categorized as a circle. According to James, nothing is a circle. Instead, there are phenomena that are more or less close to what a circle really is. Even though nothing is a circle there are phenomena that are more or less close to circles. I think that’s a seriously backwards way of thinking. It’s like how people can’t accept that the concept of Absolute (or Universal) Truth is meaningless and instead cling onto it by making excuses such as “no theory can ever reach Absolute Truth, theories can only come more or less close to it”. The button on my monitor is a circle. The CD on my desk is a circle. It is not close to being a circle. It IS a fucking circle. That’s what a circle is. Sure, some circles are more perfect than others. What this means is that there is a RELATION between more and less perfect circles. In the same way there is a RELATION between taller and shorter people. When we say this or that guy is tall we do not do so in relation to some PERFECTLY or INFINITELY TALL guy. We describe things in terms of other things. Not in terms of meaningless concepts. When we measure the length of a line we do so in relation to some smaller line. We ask: how many of these smaller lines can be synthesized, i.e. put next to each other, in order to form the main line?

The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to some particular circle. This means that the word does not refer to a particular but to a category of particulars.

The button on my monitor is a particular circle. The CD on my desk is a particular circle. The bottom of my wine barrel is a particular circle. And so on. The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to any one of these particular circles. For example, it is not true that the button on my monitor is a circle while the CD on my desk and the bottom of my barrel are not circles. They are all circles. This means that the word “circle” refers to ANY of these particular circles. That’s what a category is. A category is something that refers to any particular within some range of particulars.

My point in this thread, or rather one of my points in this thread, is that categories, if they are proper categories, are NOT without a reference to particulars. Categories are merely without an exclusive reference to particulars. Categories, proper categories, refer to any particular within some range of particulars. For example, the word “car” refers to a category that includes both this and this. When I say “includes both” what I mean is that it refers to any of the two images. It does not exclusively refer to one of the two images and it does not exclusively refer to the combination of the two images.

The proposition that my theory is void of categories and that I think that categories are meaningless is simply not true. My theory is merely void of meaningless categories or pseudo-categories by which I mean categories that are all-exclusive i.e. categories that do not refer to any particular either because they explicitly reject all particulars or because they are “hesitant” to refer to any particular. Similarly, I don’t think that categories are meaningless, I merely think that there are categories that are meaningless e.g. the word “perfect circle” as used by James refers to a meaningless category. There are no particular “perfect circles”, not because the environment we live in is void of them, but quite simply because the category “perfect circle” does not refer to any particular thing. Compare that to the word “zombie”. The word “zombie” refers to a category that refers to any of all the possible particular zombies. Not a single one of these zombies is to be found anywhere in the environment we live in, not because the category “zombie” is meaningless, but because the environment we live in is void of what the category “zombie” refers to.

It is possible to conduct an experiment in order to determine what any particular category refers to. For example, you can conduct an experiment in order to determine what the category “circle” refers to. There are many ways to go about it but one way to do it is to choose a subject (e.g. yourself) and a number of images for your subject to separate into a group of those that are associated with the word “circle” and a group of those that are not. At the end of the experiment, you get a set of images that are associated with the word “circle”. By applying the logic of induction to this set, you can measure how much of a circle any given shape is.

The superiority of this approach lies in the fact that it lets you devise a theory on your own. You look at the facts and then make an inference based on them. In the context of this post, it means that you look at the particulars and then derive a category from them. The fact that you discover the category on your own, rather than pick it up from someone else by memorizing its rules, means that you understand it. You know what kind of experience it represents. On the other hand, if you start with dictionary definitions, which are nothing more than crude descriptions of other people’s categories, then it becomes easy to misunderstand the categories they represent. You might not understand what kind of experience the category represents. In fact, you might think that it represents no experience at all. As a consequence, you might become very defensive of the idea that categories do not have to represent experience.

It occured to me that Arc’s statement that circles have no straight sides is analogous to saying that houses have no occupants. The statement that circles have no sides is true in the sense that circles would be circles even if they had no straight sides in the same way that houses would be houses even if they had no occupants. But it is wrong to say that a shape that has straight sides is not a circle in the same way that it is wrong to say that a building that has occupants is not a house.

Time passes and you’re still wrong, James.

A 1000-sided polygon is a circle.

Arc is wrong as well.

Just goes to show you; even though time passes, you still aren’t any wiser.

I passed 1st grade geometry.

Even infants can pick apart shapes and slide them through inserts.

I’m just happy to have educated you on basic shapes. I mean, if you’re so wrong about something so simple, what else could be wrong about?

He’s not wrong. He’s just an annoying nitpicker. Instead of trying to understand the gist of the post he obsesses over irrelevant details. He’s a Grammar Nazi. He keeps repeating that “the devil is in the details” ignoring that the devil is also in the big picture.

But he is wrong when he says that randomness is ignorance. And so are you.

When the human mind, or any intelligent organism, encounters enormous complexity, as is the nature of existence, then the brain must limit its sense-data according to its methods of cognition, to reduce (infinite) data down to knowable forms. This is how all nervous systems work, the function of sensory organs and brains. Ignorance is the result of these cognitive limitations. It is a natural reaction, a reflex, a compulsion.

A human mind cannot “know everything”, and so must limit data input. The thing is, humans generally, are not aware of their own ignorance and perceptual blind spots. Similar to how everybody has blind-spots in their vision range, or how the human brain cognizes two visual images (one from each eye) into one model, of Consciousness.

People don’t examine themselves, their knowledge, their own consciousness. Thus self-consciousness is rare, in humanity, in life, and is symbolic of higher intelligences.

In fact, owing to Causality, humanity now has a long history of records and discoveries, culminating into a collective knowledge. Intelligent individuals of the past, scientists and revolutionaries, all contributed to that collective knowledge by adding relevant observations and lessons about causality. This causes that. And that causes something else. Because much of that knowledge is tried, tested, and true, humans today don’t need to relearn everything. Instead they trust the pile of knowledge, Dogma. They accept the general theses and theories. In turn, human knowledge has become specialized. So instead of discovering general causes of existence, contemporary intellectuals now focus on very small, minute causes, nano-technologies and micro-biology. Yet in the larger sense, there is aeronautics, astronomy, rocket science, and many new forms of physics.

I would label ‘Science’ as this collection of causality, of stored knowledge, all pooled together.

Science is the Study of Causality.

Humanity is unique with causality, symbolic of a highly evolved intellect, compared to all other (lesser) animals and organisms on earth. While it’s true that animals do have basic cognitive functions, with limited means of learning, and therefore understanding causes… their minds are rather unsophisticated. Furthermore, lesser animals do not have the benefit of language, literacy, and thus lack expanded memorization. Humans can catalogue information, data, and knowledge, collecting it over time. Hence this is the basis for human knowledge in general, a collection that expands centuries and millenniums. The ‘old’ wisdom is preserved, passed on to today’s Philosophers and Free Thinkers.

Compare an idea of Causality between a human to an animal. If an animal correctly intuited why and how an action occurs, predicting it, then they would memorize it to the best of their ability. Hunters and predatory animals predict the movements and directions of their prey, for example. Thus the higher intellect, the better the predictions. These cognitive abilities lead to survival and thriving. But the memories of an animal cannot be directly passed from parent to offspring, except genetically. Thus animals mostly rely on instincts, and what limited information can be passed genetically. Rather than textually, linguistically, a larger volume of (all human) knowledge can be immediately passed from human parent to child.

This gives humans exponential advantage over base animals. And higher intelligent humans, exponential advantage over lower intelligent humans.

All of this correlates directly to Causality by understanding of any and every (scientific) subject, or general topic. The causes of some function were discovered, tracked, and ‘known’ hundreds of years ago. Thus humans today don’t need to “keep reinventing the wheel” with every new generation.

Learning causal relationships can be labeled as a backward process whereby venues that share situations become causally related, and/or a downshift process whereby cause–effect relationships may be derived from observance and objectively tested for their veracity. There are three terms for causality: covariation, temporal precedence, and control for third variables. It’s not just making an extra key for your condo it’s something broad and next to your level. Multiple retroversion, like all statistical techniques based on linkage, has a severe restriction due to the fact that correlation doesn’t prove causation. And no amount of calculating of “control” variables can unpick the web of causality.

I just wanted to thank Urwrongx1000 for a great contribution of wisdom. I’ve been studying neuroscience along with philosophy of science & epistemology and have reached the same conclusions.

Our brain, which is trapped inside the darkness of our skull without any direct access to the world outside, can’t make hypothetical models of the past, present and future world outside to navigate from without relying on the concept of INUS conditions and causal structures causing new events through time. It does not matter if we do not consciously think about the world this way, our subconscious still makes use of causality.

Please check out this great interview with Neuroscientist Anil Seth: youtu.be/CJhSSPO8Ulk

Whenever we face a decision, our subconscious always tries to guess and model the outcome based on what is most probable based on the INUS-conditions and the probable causal structures that exist in the world. Successfull decision-making relies on making decisions that correctly guessing the most probable outcome based on the initial INUS-conditions and the probable causal structures that exist in the world.

When we learn something about the world it is actually a “guess” about how the world functions and what causal structures exist. Studying different kind of sciences really comes down to understanding databases about causal structures that have been gathered within different specialized fields(biology, physics, medicine) etc.

vetenskapsteori = Urwrongx1000

Urwrongx1000 = vetenskapsteori

10/10 thread, wood read again (…if I do say so myself)

But where did our Saint go? Props to Magnus for his opposition as well.

Legend.

The pineal gland’s primary function is ‘letting in light and darkness’, just like our eyes do… it’s a neuroendocrine organ containing light-sensitive cells that control the circadian rhythm.

‘Thought’ could simply be a sixth sense, and when combined with the other five senses, allows for consciousness/awareness and insights etc. to occur… thoughts are wave frequencies, after-all.

I think that frames-of-reference depend on how a person lives their life/operates, as each person’s will be unique to them… like a fingerprint.

Check out the difference in our usage of words and building sentences. We are not the same person.

//Big fan of Forensic linguistics

Pretty good.

Correct

Vetenskapsteori… Theory of Knowledge / Philosophy of Science: vetenskapsteori.se/ENGmon/emm1epist.htm