The phrase is ambiguous. Causation may be a process that exists everywhere without anyone knowing anything. We may understand miracles, or the concept of miracles, but that doesn’t mean that miracles ever occur.
Causation is a byproduct of the way humans define events. Nothing happens outside of time because “occurrence”, as we use the word, requires the concept of time. Causation is the most apt description of certain aspects of our experience, due to the scale on which we live. Events themselves would be different if we lived faster or slower or bigger or smaller.
Hume was only arguing against God. It’s stupid to argue for or against causation. It’s not a theory that needs proving or disproving. It’s not a law of nature. It’s just a description. A human narrative. Philosophers don’t know this.
Let me give you a couple of example to show you contrary: (1) A seed which turns into a tree, (2) Me picking up a cup of tea, (3) Elementary particles interacting with each other. In first case knowledge is encrypted in DNA of seed. In second case, I first should know what I want to proceed afterward. In third case, elementary particles simply follow laws of nature.
You make a chain of intelligent comments, which I grant, and conclude in a line of horrible dreck. The volcanic energy around the word “God” is the villain culpable in many cases of fine chains of reason snapping.
We have common sense certainty, enough for daily activity. I’m sure you will grant as much. On the other hand, we have appeals to rationality or some manner of absolute certainty. So, you seem to appeal to the everyday sense in which the question “why” is the source of the notion of causality, rather than a theory, a logic, or a developed metaphysics. The problem arises if common sense judges itself. So, for instance, we come to see that common sense misleads us in the issue about what motion is. Common sense requires some sort of “formula” to set itself at rest so far as it becomes anxious, as it were, to explain why the earth stands still and moves when seen from a distance. The issue raised by Hume is in principle the same. One has to ask if the sense of certainty we have in daily life is changing, and if so whether these issues enter into it. The issue of “God” means here the same as that common sense allows clarity in normal understanding to be a sufficient measure as though the world were made for us, to rightly fit our intelligence. Simple understanding understands that the earth is standing still, we understand that with great clarity and rely on it in every ordinary sense, and yet it is false. It’s true that formulas for explaining away the defects in common understanding are readily available to us, but they come out of a kind theoretical explanation, as of Heisenberg who goes into this issue.
The continuing insane and crude harassment by vicious supervisory censors on this board compels me to add that conditions are becoming amazingly bad for free discussion.
By us I mean agent who are in charge of controlling a human body. And yes, we as agents are eternal. We however need to show that something which cannot be created cannot be destructed. It then follows that we are eternal. I will open a new thread on the second topic shortly.
No. Knowledge is not encrypted in DNA. That’s maybe a nice caption on some nice notepaper. Information is encrypted, if you will, in DNA. That does mean that the organism that the DNA is in has the information. Information is an event.
As soon as i figure out what it means, I’m stealing that line.
You’re correct in that causation is always and only about God. Regular people live life the way Nietzsche described it. Unfortunately, once people realize this, they usually try to live in a way that’s impossible for them. Everything lies along a spectrum. Some things are more caused than others. There should be nothing strange about this notion. Only when you overthink it does it become strange at all.
Cause means a number things, including final cause and first mover. Final cause means that human life has a better and worse way to play out, just as a seed might produce brilliant pink magnolia blossoms, or be blown away into the sea. Causation in the sense Hume discredited is the conditioned response sort of causality. He said we might just be used to a “this, then that” situation. “No glue” is the catchphrase, between the first this, then that. For Aristotle that was a relatively unimportant issue, a sub answer to one of the main answer to the question “why?”, instrumental cause, a things pushes another thing, directed by an agent with knowledge. So, the issue is an accurate description of experience, and how experience differs from simple sensing. Such a distinction has never been adequately made.
How do you understand Nietzsche’s “description”?
Don’t humans vigorously challenge each other with words instinctualy and ordinarily? We call this life in a city. Ergo, the necessity to think has a basis in human life at the lowest level. Humans aren’t turnips or dirt clods, for those things such problems don’t arise. Thinking through such things has led to technology, and technology has become a requirement for life in the contest for mere survival against the other human groups. Modern physics, mathematical physics, has its basis in the move from causal thinking to thinking in terms of mathematical function (which allows for suspending the question in favor of the “working hypothesis” and the mere “it works” or it don’t. Ergo, the flight from science into mere technology.)
Is the question, rather, if it can be proved, to students of reason, that they can be made? If they existed, they might be so powerful that they would despise the need to prove their free agency. Or, is that our own situation?
I think Aristotle was a bit ify here too, on the issue of the psuke or form of the human being (or, its highest part) and its destructibility. The medieval thinkers tried to uncrumple this difficult mountain gorge for many centuries.
Well. I can buy that that is information that is encrypted in DNA. This information however is structured otherwise a thing like tree can never give rise from a seed. Can we agree up to here. That is basically premises (1) and (2). What is the your next challenge?
Structure does not imply intelligence. Humans like the Intelligent Design argument because we design things. And we have intelligence. God supposedly looks like a human, and even was one, once.
Because we designed him.
Any caused thing is structured? So the “unstructured” things are not caused? What does “structured” even mean if everything is structured? Who is “one?” Free from what, exactly, by the way. What is it we’re supposed to be so free from?
All this epistemology is essentially religious. There’s very little thinking to do in Christianity, anymore. That ship has sailed.
That’s what I was thinking he or she was doing. Something like
since we must control the product through how we design it, it will be only following our designs and hence cannot be free.
Of course we might create learning systems and I am pretty sure most AI work now is in doing that. Though one could argue that still there will be embedded meta heuristics and still the things will not be free.
Then one might ask: do you consider us free?
If not, well, no real surprise that we can’t make free agents, except perhaps by accident (were it possible).
But then if the answer is ‘yes, we are free agents’, Then how did evolution manage to create us. Or even a deity.
All of which circling around free will and determinsm.
I think a definition of ‘free’ is in order from the OP.
We’re free from some things and not from others. Some individuals are more free or less free, from more or fewer constraints. Once you try to make all-encompassing, absolute statements, you’re no longer describing life as we live it - you’re talking about shadows on the wall of a cave. You’re talking metaphysics. People have been trying, forever, to justify religion on rationalist grounds. Trying to sneak it in.
Be a man, I say, and admit what you’re doing from the start. Although, for all i know, the OP is just trying to allay our fears that the robots we create will eat us, some day. I await clarification on that point.