Causality as Given in Observation

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

Causality as Given in Observation

04/24/2011

I was having a discussion about causality recently with some long-term Objectivists, and I wasn’t able to get across the idea that causality is given in observation (perception and introspection for consciousness). Causality is a concept designating that an entity will act a certain way under certain circumstances, but this is directly observed. We observe a dog barking, wood burning, a ball rolling, a child speaking, a cat running, and a tree waving in the breeze, changing one’s mind about an idea, imagining a better place, thinking, directing one’s consciousness, etc.. All of these particular actions of particular entities is directly observed, so the information for the concept of “causality” is given in observation. What needs to be done after making these observations is to abstract out the entity from the background by focusing on it, and then doing an abstraction from that abstraction to have concepts of action. The widest concept for specific things observed is “identity and “entity” and the widest abstraction we have for particular actions of particular entities is “causality.” The connection between an entity and its action is that the concept of the action is an abstraction from an abstraction – it is not just an association of entity to action, but rather the entity is abstracted and conceptualized and then its action is abstracted and conceptualized. So, the information is given in observation, but the abstracting and conceptualizing must be done volitionally based on that information given in observation. This is what I mean when I say that causality is given in observation. Like the axioms, the raw data is given in observation, and then the abstracting must be done volitionally. As I have mentioned before, identity and entity designates “it is”, while causality abstracted from identity designates “it acts”. These abstractions are done from observations of particular entities acting in particular manners, which are directly observed.

Some people seem to think that one has to get to the particular aspect of the entity that leads to the conclusion that it acts that way under those circumstance due to that particular factual nature of the entity. An example would be that water boils at that temperature due to the hydrogen bonds breaking which transforms water (a liquid) into water vapor (a gas). But while this is true, it is an advanced scientific – special science’s – understanding of why water boils, and comes only after one understands that water boils due to the fact that it is water. One has to grasp that an entity acts the way it does due to that fact that it is what it is, before one can abstract further and get to the more specific cause of that particular action, and the philosophical knowledge that an entity acts due to what it is precedes the scientific knowledge. What I’m claiming is that one observes that it is water directly and observes that it boils directly, and that the boiling (action) is abstracted from the water (entity), leading to cause and effect – water is the cause (a fact about water) leads it to act that way (boiling) under those conditions (sufficient heat).

Also see my FaceBook Note, Causality as a Corollary to Identity

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=135728633151785

[TheEgoist]

Water boils because it is water? But water's identity is the atomic base that constitutes it. Consider you find a liquid that is upon casual observation qualitatively identical to water. However, this stuff boils at a different temperature than that of real water, which is identical to H2O, not to its whole. If it weren't for those hydrogen bonds, the water wouldn't boil as it does.

Why not take the atoms as that which has this primitive notion of identity you are asserting? Why must it be the macroscopic level?

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

The axioms and their corollaries are given in perception and observation, because perception and observation are our awareness of existence. So the macroscopic level is where we must begin to understand existence and those entities we are directly aware of. And one knows that the boiling has to do with the nature of the water because it is the water that is boiling; the pot doesn't boil, the spoon to stir it doesn't boil, and the food one is cooking doesn't boil -- only the water boils. So, even before we had the atomic theory of matter, it could be known that there was something about the water that led it to boil at high temperatures over a fire. And what I am asserting via that observation is that this could be known through direct observation and a little abstracting, not via scientific chemistry and physics inquiry. In other words, philosophic knowledge is based upon man's unaided observations -- no scientific instruments or a laboratory setting, just normal everyday observations. Aristolte knew that water boiled because it was water thousands of years before the atomic theory of matter was conceived. I'm trying to get Objectivists to become more observationally oriented. What does one observe and what abstractions can one form from those observations? This is the level of philosophy -- what is given in perception and observation. It is not that the atomic theory is wrong, but rather that one can conclude through direct observation that because one observes that the water is boiling, then there must be something about the water -- the factual nature of water -- that leads it to boiling in a pot when it is placed over a fire. And that the cause of the water boiling is this fact about the nature of water -- that it is what it is, and acts accordingly.

[TheEgoist]

But again, you are saying that we have to identify the primitive identity of water with what is observable macroscopically, but the thing is that on the macroscopic level, how are we tell the difference between water and water*? If we are taking this on the perceptual level, we cannot distinguish between water and something that is perceptually identical to it.

[Jake]

But again, you are saying that we have to identify the primitive identity of water with what is observable macroscopically, but the thing is that on the macroscopic level, how are we tell the difference between water and water*? If we are taking this on the perceptual level, we cannot distinguish between water and something that is perceptually identical to it.

Anything perceptually identical to water is identical to water and is therefore: water. When you say "perceptually identical" without qualification, you must mean "perceptually identical in all cases." To say water is perceptually indistinguishable from water* but that the two are different in reality is to say thay perception is not representative of reality.

Let's say water* can only be differentiated from water by use of a mass spectrometer. The readout of the spectrometer is in your perception. I don't think Thomas was proposing that only perceptions based solely on a relationship between the entity in question and the observer matter. I'm not sure such perceptions exist for humans anyway. Anytime you see something that is not a light source (say, a table), your perception involves light from a source, which is not the object, reflected and absorbed by the object, then refracted and scattered by the air between you and the object..

Is the issue that you would say water boils at 100 °C/1 atm because it is H₂O, but to say the reverse would be false (it is not the case that water is H₂O because it boils at 100 °C/1 atm), so therefore the microscopic identity causes the macroscopic identity or is metaphysically primary? Even if the microscopic is metaphysically primary, I concur with Thomas that the macroscopic is epistemologically primary. Physical theories which don't predict anything perceivable are not even wrong.

I've been thinking on and off about this problem for a while: Is it in the nature of the universe that the microscopic causes the macroscopic? I can think of no philosophical reason this must be, so if true, it must be in the physical nature of the universe.

[JayR]

I've been thinking on and off about this problem for a while: Is it in the nature of the universe that the microscopic causes the macroscopic? I can think of no philosophical reason this must be, so if true, it must be in the physical nature of the universe.

What about macroscopic events causing microscopic changes in the physiology of human being though? I suppose it could be said that those macroscopic events were actually caused at a microscopic level, it just depends on how you look at it. I agree that we percieve on the macroscopic level, consciousness would be a mess otherwise. But talk of the microscopic causing the macroscopic as a law of nature sounds like dualism with regard to consciousness. Unless Im missing your point.

This is something I think about often as well.

[Jake]

What about macroscopic events causing microscopic changes in the physiology of human being though? I suppose it could be said that those macroscopic events were actually caused at a microscopic level, it just depends on how you look at it. I agree that we percieve on the macroscopic level, consciousness would be a mess otherwise. But talk of the microscopic causing the macroscopic as a law of nature sounds like dualism with regard to consciousness. Unless Im missing your point.

I should have been more specific. I am talking only about macroscopic properties of an entity being dependent on the microscopic properties of said entity (or its constituents). I was not covering events or interactions between entities.

Atomic and/or cellular processes can still be causes of consciousness even though the atoms/cells are not conscious. Emergence does not contradict Identity. 1 liter of water can slosh in a bucket, but 1 H₂O molecule can't.

[TheEgoist]

I've been thinking on and off about this problem for a while: Is it in the nature of the universe that the microscopic causes the macroscopic? I can think of no philosophical reason this must be, so if true, it must be in the physical nature of the universe.

The microscopic does cause the macroscopic. It is not the observable level of an entity that causes the identity but the atomic level. Take color as a prime example. Color appears the way it does to us not because the micro-physical base supervenes on the color but because the color supervenes on the micro-physical base. For atomic structure determines the nature of the middle sized world. Colors appear the way they do because of it, this table my computer is placed on is solid because of it.

It appeared to me Thomas was saying supervenience worked backwards from the middle-sized to the atomic and sub-atomic. I would agree that, epistemologically, the macroscopic is primary, but ontologically it's the microscopic. If that's all the argument is entailing, I guess I agree.

However, something else confuses me. You don't think H2O is identical with water but that it is just identical to itself, unless we're talking past each other. You said anything that seems upon observation to be water is water. Do you take it as conceptually impossible that some other liquid could act just as water does, even boiling at the correct temperatures at the correct altitudes, but has a different atomic structure? Let us say we have a distinct pool of this stuff. All water* is located in one area. We find out after thousands of years of treating it the same that it is different atomically. Is it still water?

Edited April 25, 2011 by TheEgoist

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

I think some of the responses are misunderstanding my position. That water boils at 100 degrees C due to the hydrogen bond that gets broken as energy is added into the system and water becomes water vapor is a true statement. I wasn't claiming that it was a false statement, and I wasn't saying that this truth is not the reason why water boils. But this is a further explanation that water boils because it is water, which information we get on the perceptual level. That is, we can directly observe that it is water and that it boils when placed in a pot over a fire. The point is that because the water boils while the pot and the spoon and the meat in the pot does not boil, then there must be something about the water that leads it to boil instead of just getting hot. This is causality understood on the perceptual level -- by direct observation. As to whether it is water or water*, if it has all of the characteristics of water, then it is water. It wouldn't be like water if it was water* because it would be different enough that one could differentiate it at the perceptual level. That is, if it was sufficiently different from water, then it wouldn't boil over a fire, it would do something else. Perception and more generally observation, gives us existence the way it really is -- and our observations are the root of our knowledge of existence. It is not as if one has to have the knowledge of the microscopic level to have any knowledge of existence, and that without this microscopic knowledge we know nothing about existence. That is the premise I am challenging -- that existence, the nature of existence, is given in observation, including knowledge about causality.

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

Also, it must be added, that without this perceptual level of knowledge -- that water boils while the pot and the meat does not boil -- is a necessary knowledge to investigate further to find out more deeply why the water is boiling and the pot and the meat is not boiling. Without these facts understood as causation, we wouldn't have a clue as to where to start in finding those hydrogen bonds. All knowledge begins on the observational level, and we can go from there to the deeper causes,only because we have that observational level of causation.

[New Buddha]

Regarding what I think is the original topic of discussion, I've had the question in my mind that if I'm on an asteroid, and another asteroid collides with mine, did "my" asteroid cause the collision or did the other one? Perception would tell me that the other one ran in to mine, but knowledge would tell me that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It would be perception, not physics, that would state that one was the "cause" of the action observed. Is this what you are getting at Thomas?

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

The level I am getting at for your example would be the observation that asteroids are capable of colliding, that it is within their nature to be flying around in space acting under gravity. It's not an issue of which asteroid hit which asteroid, but rather the fact about asteroids is that they are not under any kind of intelligent guidance and just move about due to gravity and prior collisions. You might say that the asteroid has a crashing into things nature, in this case. The idea of asteroids acting like billiard balls under collisions is the "efficient cause" conception of causation, and Objectivism has a better approach. Things do not act the way they do because they are acted upon, rather they act the way they do due to the fact that they are what they are. I'm saying you can tell what something is and what it does -- on some level -- by observing it.

[New Buddha]

As I have mentioned before, identity and entity designates “it is”, while causality abstracted from identity designates “it acts”.

At the atomic level there does not appear to be much difference between one element and another. Each element is composed of electrons, protons and neutrons. Their only "difference" is the number of their constituent units (their weight). What makes sodium different from all the other elements is not so much it's weight, but rather it's "behaviour" -- that is how it interacts with other elements. It's "action" appears to be it's identity. Could this not also be said to be true at the macroscopic level? That a thing's behavior is it's identity?

[Steve D'Ippolito]

A nit, but the difference between one element and another is the electric charge of the nucleus (by way of the number of protons in the nucleus). That does correlate with weight but not exactly; it is possible for two different elements to be of the same weight, this is done by having the number of neutrons differ in the opposite direction. For example carbon-14 has the same mass as nitrogen-14; it's just that the carbon has 6 protons, 8 neutrons, while the nitrogen has seven of each.

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

I would say no, that a thing's behavior is not its identity, though it can be used that way to differentiate one thing from another -- for example cats meow, but dogs bark. However, the identity is what something IS while it's causative identity is WHAT IT DOES. For dogs and cats, they are perceptually different, even before they make a noise or run. But for things like the sub-atomic particles, these are usually differentiated in how they act -- like how they behave in a given electric field, for example. However, their masses are different, and as far as we know now, this is not due to an identifiable action. And sub-atomic particles are generally not "at rest" in a given frame of reference (except for its own). Epistemologically, everything we know about something gets put into the concept of that something, so typical and identifiable actions are included in the concept. Still, there is a difference between what something is and what it does, which is more easily discernible on the perceptual level. That is, a tree is a tree even if it is not swaying in the breeze at a given moment of observation.

[New Buddha]

Thanks Steve, my background is architecture, not physics, so I was out on a limb in my description of atomic weights. I hope I didn't mangle the issue too much.

Thomas,

I've been toying with the idea that Identity can best be described not with the axiom A is A, but rather with A is not B (or C or D....). Knowing what something is NOT is a valid statement of it's identity. Perception seems to tell us that one thing is not another thing. This is true of two very different things (a car and a horse) and it's true of two similar things (this car and not that car).

With the axiom A is not B, it's not necessary to exhaustively identify or define what something is to know something about it. At the perceptual level something is ostensibly not another thing. We may not know “what it is” but we do know what it is not. (This is not That). I hope this does not seem too far off topic. It also ties in to another post you had about whether or not a causal sequence can be seen as “one thing”.

[Dante]

I've been toying with the idea that Identity can best be described not with the axiom A is A, but rather with A is not B (or C or D....). Knowing what something is NOT is a valid statement of it's identity. Perception seems to tell us that one thing is not another thing. This is true of two very different things (a car and a horse) and it's true of two similar things (this car and not that car).

Your ideas have some similarity to Objectivist ideas about perception and concept formation, but you're leaving significant parts out. In short, differentiating objects from one another is not enough. Perception gives us discriminated entities, and we need to use both differentiation (between different objects) and integration (between similar objects) in order to form concepts from our perceptions. It is important not to focus exclusively on just differentiating objects from one another, because that is only half of the picture. Things come to us already discriminated as distinct objects in perception, and we use both their similarities and their differences in grouping them into concepts.

Edited April 29, 2011 by Dante

[New Buddha]

Your ideas have some similarity to Objectivist ideas about perception and concept formation

I do understand Objectivism well enough to know where I'm veering outside of it. Also, I'm not trying to abuse the rules of the forum by presenting these ideas.

The issue I always struggle with is identity – example: what is “sodium”? I seem to keep coming back to: “sodium is not helium, is not boron, is not uranium.... is not a car, is not a cat, is not running, is not jumping....”. I believe that Rand states somewhere that essence is that characteristic which most differentiates one thing from all others. I take from what I believe to be a logical extension of that statement that “a thing is what every other thing is not”. I don't know if this is a restatement of the contextual nature of knowledge, or something else.

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

While differentiation is an important first step in conceptualizing something, it wouldn't do you much good to stop there and not perform an integration and identification. If I wrote a sentence saying that, "The not-cat, not-pig, not-tree, not-horse, not-apple was on the porch," you wouldn't have much of a clue as to what *was* on the porch. Identification and integration are crucial in forming a precise concept of what something *IS* not what it is not, because not-being-something can mean anything, and that doesn't get you anywhere without the integration.

[Dante]

I do understand Objectivism well enough to know where I'm veering outside of it. Also, I'm not trying to abuse the rules of the forum by presenting these ideas.

Well, just a note on that, that rule is meant to prevent people coming to this site simply to proselytize those kinds of viewpoints. You don't have anything to worry about from stating (or defending) some view that contradicts Objectivism. I was just relating your ideas to Objectivism, should you be interested in looking into that further, and I hope this site helps you in further understanding Objectivism

Edited April 29, 2011 by Dante

[New Buddha]

If I wrote a sentence saying that, "The not-cat, not-pig, not-tree, not-horse, not-apple was on the porch," you wouldn't have much of a clue as to what *was* on the porch.

Here is what I'm trying to get at: Suppose I walk into a science lab and I see two objects sitting on a table. I may not know what those two objects "are", but I know with unqualified certainty what they are not i.e. they are not the table, the chairs, the window, the ceiling, and one is not the other. I can assign a word to them such as "object A" and "object B" but "A" and "B" are not their identity. It's not until I pick them up and begin to push buttons, hold them up to light or sound, shake them, etc. that I begin to get some understanding of their identity – and their identity is directly tied to their behavior and interaction with other things. In fact their identity might be said their behavior, and nothing "more". I qualified this last sentence because I'm still working on these ideas.

I'm still trying to keep to this tied to your original post....

[Grames]

Identity consists of intrinsic and relational properties. As an example: mass is an intrinsic property, weight is a relational property. Intrinsic properties are inferred to explain relational properties, while the relational properties are what is observed directly.

An entity which existed but did not have any relational properties with respect to anything in the universe would be unknowable by its nature.

One could argue in epistemology it is actually causality which is primary, not identity. I don't think there is much payoff to insisting that either being or acting must be "first" somehow, or most important.

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

Yes, it is true that one has to differentiate according to how something reacts or acts according to the circumstance, I'm not denying that. So yes, if you go into a laboratory and started to look around you would not be familiar with a few things and you could beginning by differentiating, and then investigate further to make the integration.No denying that at all. But one must do the investigation part to form the integration to identify what something is. So, you are on the right track, but that track is best identified as coming to realize that A is A, and not A is Not-B. The A is Not-B is the first step, in a way, but that is not the universal principle. The universal principle is that A is A, a thing is itself.

As to whether one starts with being or action, I think it must be kept in mind that concepts of action are abstracted from concepts of entities -- that one cannot have a disembodied action -- it must be something acting. So, in reality, the thing and the action are simultaneous, but epistemologically, the concept of the thing is prior to the concept of its action.

[Grames]

As to whether one starts with being or action, I think it must be kept in mind that concepts of action are abstracted from concepts of entities -- that one cannot have a disembodied action -- it must be something acting. So, in reality, the thing and the action are simultaneous, but epistemologically, the concept of the thing is prior to the concept of its action.

You can't have a knowable thing that does not act. Epistemologically there are no static entities without the actions by means of which we know them.

Identity and Causality are of equal status and simultaneous in both metaphysics and epistemology.

A thing cannot both act and not act at the same time and in the same respect.

Edited April 29, 2011 by Grames

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

I think you are confusing an implicit concept with an explicit concept. True, if one observes several dogs playing in the back yard, one's concept of dog (which is new to you) will include their actions of running and playing. However, one cannot form the concepts of "running"and "playing" until after one has formed the concept of "dog." This is because the playing and the running must be abstracted from the observations of the dogs, it is something the dogs are doing, and even thouigh one sees the dogs and that they are playing and running, the abstraction from the abstraction must be done to resolve out the implict concepts of "running"and "playing."

But I do agree with you that it is by interactions that we come to understand something and that if it is not interacting with us on some level we are not aware of it.