Causastion

You’re making the mistake of placing your own personal preferences (e.g. that causes are everywhere around you even when you don’t see them) above sensory information (e.g. that for some events we see no causes no matter how much we look for them.)
The exact same mistake that Christians and people like James (who think that you can “logically prove” that there is no such a thing as uncaused events even though it’s one of the most obvious things) make.
Basically, subjectivism.

Either you’re a rationalist (who believes that logic is something more than just a pattern of reasoning, something above sensory information) or you’re an empiricist (who believes that sensory information is fundamental.)
If you’re a rationalist, then you’re delusional.
That’s how it is.

There’s no such thing as something uncaused.

Just because you can’t find the cause of things or pattern of events, doesn’t mean there isn’t.

That is subjectivism.

My position is objectivism. Causation, explanations, reasoning, logic, are relative between people. Knowledge is limited. My position is that human intellect and consciousness is limited. You seem to claim otherwise.

Your presumption is that: “Beyond our/my limits, you cannot say nor predict anything meaningful.” I disagree. I’m saying that “uncaused things” or “chaos” is irrational. Just because you don’t know something, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. For you to presume as much, is solipsistic-subjectivism.

An uncaused event is simply an event for which we see no cause. That’s all it means.
A caused event is simply an event for which we see a cause. That’s all it means.
What appears to be an uncaused event today might turn out to be a caused event tomorrow when new evidence arrives.
And what appears to be a caused event tomorrow might turn out to be an uncaused event the day after the tomorrow when further evidence arrives.
And so on ad infinitum.
Do you get my point?
When you see no causes of an event, and when no amount of effort can help you to find them, then the only realistic thing to conclude is that the event is uncaused.
That’s how thinking works.
If there is no evidence for something then that something does not exist.
End of story.
There is no evidence that God exists, therefore, God does not exist.
There is no evidence that some event E has a cause, therefore, that event E does not have a cause.
You don’t go “look, our consciousness is limited, so just because we can’t see something does not mean that something does not exist”.
Because if you adopt that way of thinking then EVERYTHING becomes equally possible as everything else.
Who am I to say that God does not exist?
I have to open my mind and keep it in that state for an infinite period of time.
Otherwise, I risk being accused of subjectivism, solipsism, etc.

Objectivism means not believing in things unless there is evidence for them.
I see no evidence that God exists (and that every event is caused by some other event) so I don’t think that God exists (and that every event is caused by some other event.)
That’s a conclusion based on my viewpoint which is personal.
You are accusing me of being a subjectivist simply because of the fact that my viewpoint, which means nothing other than a set of observations that I possess regarding the world, is personal (i.e. limited) rather than universal (i.e. unlimited, absolute, complete, etc.)
As if there are viewpoints that are omniscient.
You are asking me to ABANDON my viewpoint and immerse myself in the realm of imagination all the while pretending that this is a more objective path.
Which it isn’t.
When you abandon your personal viewpoint the only thing that remains is IMAGINATION.

Methinks some definitions need to be agreed upon prior to any meaningful continuance.

:blush:

I can agree with this IF you are using the word caused to mean something which has ultimately been affected and determined as a result of something else ~ some other happening or behavior or lack of realization.
I said ultimately since something which was happening let’s say ten years ago can affect something ten years later and continue to affect it unless transcended or worked through.

Perhaps that is too simple.

Everything has a cause. If something appeared by magic, then magic is the cause. If it appeared from randomness, then happenstance was the cause. If by hallucination, then hallucination was the cause. There is nothing uncaused. Even the first cause had a cause and that cause had to be caused by something/one unrestrained by causality and somehow independent from duality or the first cause wouldn’t be the first cause but just another in the infinite progression of causes which is just as nonsensical as having an uncaused cause. Infinite progressions cannot exist in reality and are only fantasy. See here for more on that: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=192903&start=200#p2677831
and viewtopic.php?f=1&t=192903&start=200#p2677844

So if there are no uncaused causes and there are no infinite progressions of causes, then how did the first cause get here? That’s proof duality had a beginning because there is no other explanation. In the beginning, there was nothing unknown. Indeed, there was no unknown, no darkness, no space between points, no time, everything was here and now in an infinitesimally small, perhaps nonexistent point. Or is it equally valid to say an infinitely large and ubiquitous point? I see no distinction. Duality had a beginning because duality is not independent of its own definition and existence of duality itself necessitates non-existence of duality. Existence already includes nonexistence and the transition between the states requires a cause.

Yes.
And it is the real event, its the winter solstice, which we as conscious beings on Earth (not all humans are so conscious) naturally celebrate, as it marks a great change in the influences on our lives. Future events are, unlike Hume wanted so badly to say to Newton to still feel he had a right to dip a pen in ink, actually there. Otherwise they aren’t future events. Our expectation is a function of these events. Much about existence is not blindly being determined by the past but self-determination based on certainties in the future.

For example, if Christmas doesn’t come, that means we don’t exist, the Earth has ceased orbiting the Sun. So by definition, it will come. If we don’t exist, we can’t work with definitions.

And in a very predictable way - the one that puts us in the best light - in our own perspective no less. Its very selective.
But for me it is a it different, as you’ve seen - I like getting people to hate me, because I already feel that they are working with standards I loathe, and I want them to know it. This, for me, is the beginning of a time. And all beginnings are rough, start out with great contrasts and conflicts.

I remember my mind losing faith in the idea that the things it holds as real in itself have any substance besides that mind - that corroded the integrity of my ego quickly, and I came into world where I had to go by empirical evidence and smell and touch, and so I discovered magic, and from there on I got into Nietzsche. So Ive been able to take Nietzsche on that level you describe Nietzsche describing - which puts me in a privileged position among Nietzscheans - I always recognized the magician in him. the trickster, the devil that feeds off details you overlook. I always took him for a lure, an evil playmate, someone who knows play is all there is, where it concerns teaching - ‘fool me once…’

That is indeed the way I seem to go about - whats very remarkable is how far ore difficult and ineffective it is to hold three thoughts at once. Its not much more difficult, it just doesn’t produce the same dynamism. It doesn’t produce a new thought. But the reason is simple, we have two brain hemispheres, not three. A synthesis is built in the frontal lobes, a lot of lasting neural connections are made in that way.

What I used to do when I learned Kabbalah is hold the fully unfolded sun and moon nadis in my awareness and wait for my will to concentrate up to a point where I could have them controlled-spontaneously fuse and become the sushumna Nadi. Its really tough, you have to entirely frame the fusion before it happens, build a mental resistance on all sides, six sides in total. I have only bothered about five times with exercises like that, and they sufficed to sustain transformations for years afterwards.

Self-causation. “Magic”.

You a mystic Faust?

You might be surprised what reality offers of uncertain things, in sports has had many a uncertain matches when odds favor a team there is always a little chance that the under tipped team will win.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle offers no certainty.

Faust wrote,

Wouldn’t the fact that they are actually looking for that god cause them to believe in the first place and so they are already biased.
The only way that they will find their god is through faith and that will not prove anything either way.
They are no different than the stoics who are stoic because there is no real explanation for something except for what they decide to see and accept.

In fact, I am the furthest thing from a mystic. I am an atheist (not in the mystic sense) and a materialist. Thanks for asking.

Everyone is biased.

You’re on to something.

Rhetorical but, thanks for clearing that up.

Moral of the story: don’t stop talking, If you’re the OP and mention stopping talking and it’s relationship to mysticism, lest you be confused with a mystic.

And if you respond further you’ll get demoted an additional 50 points off the acumen ladder.

The word “magic” refers to extraordinary occurences (in relation to what was in the past, which is what is considered ordinary) for which there is no evidence. When evidence that proves such occurences is present, these extraordinary occurences are not treated as magic but as reality.

The word “extraordinary” is relative. It is relative to one’s circumstances. For example, to Buddha, death was extraordinary.

I am afraid you are stretching the concept of causality a bit too much and by doing so missing the point. I will give you an example of information within which no causality, and also no (complete) order, can be identified.

Suppose that we are dealing with a number of occurences of certain category of events. Suppose that this category contains only two types of events and that we can represent these using letters A and B. Suppose we decide to dig into our memory in order to find out how many of such events happened in the past. Suppose that our memory knows nothing about the order in which these events occured. Suppose that the only thing our memory knows is how many times each one of these events, A and B, occured in the past. Suppose that A and B occured 2 times each. We can represent this using a set {A, A, B, B}. What this means is that at 4 occurences of events of this type A occurs 2 times and B occurs also 2 times. Now, what we want to know, which is to say to predict, is how many A’s and how many B’s there are at different numbers of occurences of events of this type. Suppose we want to know how many A’s and how many B’s there are at 5 occurences of events of this type.

Our job is to choose one choice out of many choices. Many will also say to choose the best choice from a list of choices. The question is, what kind of criteria should we use? In reality, you can use any criteria. But there is only one criteria associated with intelligence.

Intelligence is about making evidence-based – you can also say informed or educated – decisions. What this means is that intelligence is about choosing what aligns with evidence (i.e. personal experience) the best.

If what we know – our evidence, observations, experience, etc – is represented using a data set then what we need to do is to find a data set that has the highest degree of similarity to it.

It’s pretty easy to see that every data set has only one other data set that has the highest degree of similarity to it and that this other data set is its clone. For example, {A, B} has only one closest relative and this relative is its clone {A, B}. It’s pretty easy to figure out the closest relative for any data set. There is no need for intelligence. This is why it is necessary to say that intelligence is about finding the closest relative of a given data set that is not its clone. In fact, sometimes we might go further than that and look for the closest data set within even narrower category of data sets.

With all of this out of our way, we can proceed to define intelligence in the following manner: intelligence is the search for the closest relative of some data set D within some category of data sets C.

In effect, the task of intelligence is to approximate.

In our above example, our personal experience is represented using a data set {A, A, B, B} which means “2 occurences of A and 2 occurences of B”. What we want to figure out is which one of the data sets within the category of data sets that contains every combination of A and B with length 5 is the closest relative to the data set that represents our personal experience.

The first thing we are going to do is to list all combinations of A and B of length 5. Then we’ll compare each to the data set that represents our personal experience and figure out, using either intuition or a set of rules, which one of them is the closest relative.

Here we go:
{A, A, A, A, A}
{A, A, A, A, B}
{A, A, A, B, B}
{A, A, B, B, B}
{A, B, B, B, B}
{B, B, B, B, B}

And we want to compare each one of these to this data set:
{A, A, B, B}

The question is how to compare them. The easiest way is to use intuition. We can easily determine the rank of these based on how similar they are to {A, A, B, B}. A bit more difficult task is to understand how intuition works. For the purpose of this post, I will say that our intuition works by counting how many elements the two compared sets have in common. This is how we quantify the degree of similarity between two sets. Roughly speaking. And that’s what we’re going to do.

{A, A, A, A, A} has 2 elements in common (A and A.)
{A, A, A, A, B} has 3 elements in common (A, A and B.)
{A, A, A, B, B} has 4 elements in common (A, A, B and B.)
{A, A, B, B, B} has 4 elements in common (A, A, B and B.)
{A, B, B, B, B} has 3 elements in common (A, B and B.)
{B, B, B, B, B} has 2 elements in common (B and B.)

We can see that there are TWO closest relatives to {A, A, B, B} and these are {A, A, B, B, A} and {A, A, B, B, B}. This means that at 5 occurences of events of type either-A-or-B there is either 3 A’s and 2 B’s or 2 A’s or 3 B’s.

The situation in which there is MORE THAN ONE closest relative is known as randomness (also equiprobability.)

The more heterogenous (i.e. mixed) the data set, the greater the number of its closest relatives. Figuratively speaking, such data sets are “friends of everyone”.

The greater the number of closest relatives, the higher the degree of randomness. Randomness can also be defined as a degree of arbitrariness.

If you apply the same logic to 6 occurences of either-A-or-B you will get a different outcome. At 6 occurences, there is exactly one closest relative. And that is {A, A, A, B, B, B}. This holds true for every even number of occurences of either-A-or-B.

At every number of occurences of either-A-and-B, the closest relative of {A, A, B, B} is:

1: {A} or {B}
2: {A, B}
4: {A, A, B, B}
5: {A, A, B, B, A} or {A, A, B, B, B}
6: {A, A, A, B, B, B}
7: {A, A, A, B, B, B, A}, {A, A, A, B, B, B, B}
8: {A, A, A, A, B, B, B, B}
etc.

From this we can see that there are no functions fA(n) and fB(n), where n is any natural number, that return a number of occurences of A and B respectively for n occurences of either-A-or-B.

However, if n is any even natural number then these functions exist and they are fA(n) = fB(n) = n / 2. If we change n to be any natural number that represents a number of pairs of elements within the set, then these functions can be rewritten as fA(n) = fB(n) = n and we can say there is a correlation between the number of pairs of elements within the set and the number of A’s and B’s.

So, there is a correlation, but where is causation?
And this correlation isn’t everywhere within the information.
And with certain data sets that are non-random, my intuition says, there is not even correlation but only relation.

You can’t say that the number of pairs of elements within the set CAUSES the number of A’s within the set. That’s very strange.

What people don’t understand is that relations (e.g. correlations, causal relations, etc) exist WITHIN information and not OUTSIDE of it.

Information isn’t caused by anything. It is in no relation with anything at all. It simply is. It occurs. It is given. For no reason at all. Rather, it is what is WITHIN information that is in relation with stuff that also must be WITHIN information. In other words, relations only exist between the constituents of information.

Relations can only exist between what is EXPERIENCED.
There can be no relation between something that is EXPERIENCED and something that is not.
That is MEANINGLESS.

When you say “everything has a cause” yet for certain events you see no causes then what part of your experience is the cause of that event? None, right? Because you see none. So you must say “it is something beyond” which is meaningless.

Mowk - it pains me greatly to think you were so confused. I will try to dumb my statements down a bit when i can.

True. But not everyone is aware of their biases, especially when it comes to particular ideas and beliefs.