I plan to make this my last ILP thread:
This thread will be about Causality, why and how it operates as a cognitive process.
Evolved organisms, gaining consciousness, senses, and intellect, begin to navigate existence with self-serving interests, to survive. Within the cognitive processes and functions, is one function in particular with the purpose to learn and ‘Understand’ about everything. This is when and where the ideal of Causality originates. Causality is Teleological meaning, that it necessarily and logically precludes the notion of “beginnings” and “ends”. A cause begins here, and ends there. Thus “to know” something, is to understand the causes that initiated, forced, and concluded any event.
Causation requires imagination. You need to imagine ‘how’ causes and events take place. You need to presuppose beginnings to casual-chains, the sequences of causes and affects that flow outward from the presupposed ‘source’ or ‘origin’ of those subsequent causes. In other words, a person decides to do this, or chooses to do that, and from the actions of one person, a tidal wave of events can flow outward and affect everybody else.
Recently, the US democracy chose to elect President Trump, or before him, President Obama. And so, from these choices and decisions, subsequent events transpired, and such defines the course of humanity and history.
Philosophical minds are rather obsessed and focused on ‘Causality’ because it is one of, if not the most, important topics and matters of contention. Causality is a core tenet, or the core, of all Sciences. Thus to know the cause of something, an event, leads to the ability to manipulate such events. If you know how to change isotopes, chemicals, and other processes, then you can use such knowledge to great profit or advantage. Thus it is within the interest of every organism, every mammal, every human, to have firm understanding and knowledge of Causation, to know the general causes of things.
People think they do, but, are often flawed. Because the human mind is flawed, and intellect limited. What people know of existence and reality, the causes, are often mistaken. You thought that A caused B. But actually it was X that caused B. And because you have been wrong about your presuppositions for so long, it out to be an embarrassment and shameful. People disdain each other’s general ignorance and flawed premises. Yet everybody has them, somewhere. Philosophy is a craft that highly values true premises, and so, seeks to lay the strongest and firmest premises for subsequent logic and rationalization, for reasoning. When common people are so commonly wrong about everything, and misattribute causation, then they cannot be trusted.
Because common people cannot be trusted with advanced, complicated, or sophisticated Causation, then intellectual authorities become necessary such that people place their trust in them, when it comes to matters of great importance. So too is it with Causation, or general human history. If somebody cannot correctly and accurately attribute the causes of nature, or politics, then they’re eventually going to be wrong, and make mistakes, of great importance, that can even cost people, or entire societies, their lives.
So how does anybody go about “understanding” Causation? What does it mean that A causes B or X causes Y? Are causes even real? Or what are they, except reality? To know the “true” causes of things, is that not reality? Philosophers have taken these questions, and the topic of Causality, very serious for centuries. It is a keystone of philosophy. Because, again, if you can correctly and accurately attribute the causes of things, and return the path back to the original or ultimate “source of things”, then you can most fully understand any natural process, or even any artificial (human) process, such as politics. If you understand pathology, psychology, and sociology, then you can begin to understand the causes between people. People have needs, which drive them and their motivations, which cause behaviors.
This ought to be a good enough stepping-stone for conversation and further thought.