My argument against David Hume's take on causality

[onesteptwostep]

Hume argued that causes and effects could simply be a habitual reoccurence that we observe. Hume uses an explanation of using the sunrise and sunfall as an explanation of the things that happen around us. We know from the telescopes now about the orbits of the planets and the effect mass has on gravitation pull. But Hume argued that these events may just happen because simply observe them happening everyday. If you saw the sunrise and sunfall on day one, observe the same thing on day two, then on day three, and on and on, you might establish yourself the notion that, indeed, the sun rises and and the sun falls everyday, as a rule.

My argument is this, but with an illustration of a hoarder. If someone depressed was sustaining a mess within the room something which he or she did not really come to care, that person might fail to register that the place is a mess. This person might think, yeah it's messy, but this thought would not be a catalyst for 'oh this is such a mess, I need to clean this place up'.

I think in a sense the person who is depressed and is hoarding might be employing the logic of person watching the sun rise and fall. You see oneself as a phenomenon rather than an agent of oneself, someone fully in control in life and one's senses to execute the tasks which life thrusts at us.

So what I'm trying to get at here is that noncausality is like in the philosophical sense a hoarder in the mind.

This kind of inductive reasoning,

1) the sun rises and falls on the 1st day
2) the sun rises and falls on the 2nd day
3) the sun rises and falls on the 3rd day

Therefore the sun must rise and fall on every day, is a passable but poor reasoning of the phenomena of reality and does not come to grasp with the notion that the sun may move because of certain universal laws. Sometimes we may see the sun disappear. But if our understanding of the laws deepen, we come to realize that it was an eclipse, not the glitching of the sun.

I'm going to end with a C.S. Lewis quote I found which was insightful to me: 'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.' Lewis, Mere Christianity

 

[Black Rose]

So long as the constants of reality remain constant. sure causality holds.

But what reality do we exist in?

Each world may only be consistent with the rules it was given.

Sure a base reality exists with base rules but we may not live in base reality.

I could walk through my door and find things have changed. That the rules no longer apply as I've known them. It is possible.

The question is: what is this reality for?

 

[onesteptwostep]

That's mumbo jumbo armchair thinking AK.

 

[Black Rose]

That's mumbo jumbo armchair thinking AK.

Yes but do you realize how powerful computers are today and will be in 2-3 decades?

I had a thought in 2011:

When I am out of this place, this place I am vacuuming, what will my future self think of me?

I had the same thought in 2007 walking in the mall. What will it be like when I have money to come here when I want to, or really what if I come here as part of a memory program?

I could reexperience all memories without the emotional pain attached to them, and look at them all in a detached fashion. Because when I have nothing to do anymore, when I no longer require of myself, to force myself to exist in hard times, I can exist peacefully.

I keep records of my stuff, and I keep records of my memories to some extent. When things get better and when I can afford the technologies I have plans to map all the things I have done in a virtual library. I like libraries and places I've been to. but I cannot leave my house right now. It would be nice to go places without the need for money.

 

[onesteptwostep]

That's mumbo jumbo armchair thinking AK.

Yes but do you realize how powerful computers are today and will be in 2-3 decades?

I had a thought in 2011:

When I am out of this place, this place I am vacuuming, what will my future self think of me?

I had the same thought in 2007 walking in the mall. What will it be like when I have money to come here when I want to, or really what if I come here as part of a memory program?

I could reexperience all memories without the emotional pain attached to them, and look at them all in a detached fashion. Because when I have nothing to do anymore, when I no longer require of myself, to force myself to exist in hard times, I can exist peacefully.

I keep records of my stuff, and I keep records of my memories to some extent. When things get better and when I can afford the technologies I have plans to map all the things I have done in a virtual library. I like libraries and places I've been to. but I cannot leave my house right now. It would be nice to go places without the need for money.

Haha, yeah that's interesting. It would be nice to revisit your past but in a way that's removed from that time's temporal moment.

Kinda of like the pensive in Harry Potter.

Yes, and true, movement requires money. I felt this a lot when I was in Japan. In Japan, the cost for the train transport is quite a expensive than in Korea. In a way I thought my freedom of movement was impaired by monetary necessity. In Korea you can go almost anywhere in Seoul with an equivalent of 2 dollars. In Tokyo, 2 dollars would only take you perhaps 5 stations. After that, the price goes up.

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:

extremely unlikely

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

Sure a base reality exists with base rules but we may not live in base reality.

right, QUANTA is ultimately (emotionally) meaningless

QUALIA is the source and destination of all meaningfulness

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

nice

 

[ZenRaiden]

I think our minds want causality, but complex world allows for limited access to causal things.
Our biases also establish causality.
If I like chocolate, causality means I pick chocolate.
If I speak about lever as causal relation of distance and pivotal point and a weight I speak of observable empirical causal relation.
My take on things is that we always start from causal premise.
Ergo the sun has risen enough many times to warrant a prediction.
Contradiction should tell me its more complicated.
I don't actually know when people learned as creatures of curiosity that the sun is not a mere disc, but a fire ball of heat.
We have plenty evidence to know that even before Hume people have established that object in the sky are not what they appear.
We know the Greeks established circumference of Earth.

We kind of know where Sun is, how big it is, why it comes up and down, why its warmer when it comes up, we know everything about photosynthesis and life, and we know at least on some level how Sun came to be and how it functions.
We even have speculations about the way it functions ergo it being a fire ball full of nuclear explosions pulled together into a super dense ball liquid and gas which is also considered plasma.

The trouble with morality is that it encompasses more than mere rational.
There is nothing rational about the way we feel or the way we want things to be.
That is given by our human nature.
Rational and logic defines causality, relationship between things.
But our rationality and logic are defined by how our brain works even emotionally.
Logic and rational have sever limitations.
Even things like logic where we apply it perfectly we still have to contend with the fact it has its limitation.

Prime example is the Sun analogy.
Our ancestors where not stupid.
They just did not know.
Their ignorance of facts about the Sun lead them to believe the Sun was a God, or a disc or a god with chariots etc.
None of that was on purpose, rather they simply did not have perfect model of reality.
We model reality as humans, logic and rational are often times secondary, despite the fact logic and rational are important in ascertaining reality.

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

I am not sure what your argument exactly even is.

Hume's point was that there is no apparent necessary connection between cause and effect. As an example, just looking at the cause a priori you can't figure out what the effect is, no matter how intelligent you are (without prior knowledge of dynamics). He was taking a stand against more rationalistic metaphysics and the principle of sufficient reason.

Moreover, Hume makes a psychological point that we tend to learn to attribute causal forms of rule to phenomena out of certain psychological tendencies of mind (capabilities for relating phenomena in different ways) and based on habits and custom. Another point of Hume, is the lack of perfect rational justification for this inductive reasoning.

His exact metaphysical stance on causation is more debated. But one perfectly good understanding is that he was agnostic or open to causation being real in the broad sense of their being real influences of one event to another.

But Hume was not against doing science, and modeling rules to systematize experience, and predict phenomena.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Maybe the right question is how do we know that we know?
Or what is actually knowing?

 

[BurnedOut]

Therefore the sun must rise and fall on every day, is a passable but poor reasoning of the phenomena of reality and does not come to grasp with the notion that the sun may move because of certain universal laws. Sometimes we may see the sun disappear. But if our understanding of the laws deepen, we come to realize that it was an eclipse, not the glitching of the sun.

Causality as per observation only is nothing but us getting a glimpse of the 'slice' of the entire series of occurences which is inherently incorrect. But that is the best we have to do because it's still valid causality. One can endlessly argue from the loci of higher abstract reasoning to confirm the law in question. How is causality itself is wrong here? It's the inference that messes things up. Only an reoccuring observation can be called a law when the pattern repeats reliably for several other events such as cicardian rhythm associated with the sun or the photosynthesis process of plants. That's only a better version of 'sun rises in the east' but not the ultimate one.

I'm going to end with a C.S. Lewis quote I found which was insightful to me: 'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.' Lewis, Mere Christianity

Unlikely so. Search for the truth is endless and often dissatisfying and if you apply the Hume's reasoning, you can only be closer to the truth but not at it. So an ignorant person is only a dumber version of you. I am not sure why the dumb one would feel any bad because all you have done is abstract causality further and he hasn't but none of you are closer to the truth and your abstract reasoning is more or less invalid when it does not have mechanical attributes like that of hard sciences. Most of the causalities that vex mankind are that of psychological nature. If truth mattered so much, philosophy would not have been so far away from being a discourse of action

 

[ZenRaiden]

The bottom line is if you have right axioms, you are likely to reason well from it.
If you have wrong types of axioms your reasoning will never be correct.
How does one however arrive at axioms.
Because a lot of axioms, such as in hoarding are indeed psychological not philosophical.

 

[kora]

The problem of induction is not exactly about causality itself, it's more about our logic. It's an epistemological problem. When we reason about the world we use deductive arguments, inductive arguments and abductive arguments.

With deductive arguments the truth of the conclusion necessarily follows from the the truth of the premises. Mathematics are purely deductive for example. This is deductive :

All cats are gold
Marcel is a cat
Therefore Marcel is gold

Deduction is certain, but it does not add much knowledge to the world.

Inductive reasoning on the other hand does add a lot of knowledge to the world and proceeds from empirical observations about it. From observed individual instances you derive a generalized rule. "The sun rises each day" is an example of a generalized rule we have derived from individual observations of the sun rising day after day. But the truth of the rule is not guaranteed by the individual observations. If you have only ever seen white swans, you could derive the general rule that "all swans are white", until a black swan turns up and invalidates your conclusion. While the conclusion may be probable, it is not grounded as logically necessary like in deductive reasoning, and this means that our main tool for apprehension of the world is simply grounded in our repeated observation of the juxtaposition of Cause A and Effect B.

Hume does not reject inductive reasoning as a tool, he simply wished to underline that the method only ever gives probable conclusions and not necessary ones, and that the truth of the conclusion from induction is much less certain.

I haven't understood the hoarder analogy at all ! Could you explain what you mean by this: "I think in a sense the person who is depressed and is hoarding might be employing the logic of person watching the sun rise and fall. You see oneself as a phenomenon rather than an agent of oneself, someone fully in control in life and one's senses to execute the tasks which life thrusts at us."

I haven't understood how the logic is similar between the depressed person and the person seeing the sun, how does the notion of agency come into it, and how it is a counter-argument to the problem of induction?

 

[Black Rose]

how does the notion of agency come into it

"You see oneself as a phenomenon rather than an agent of oneself"

I think onestep is saying you become a solipsist. But this is the exact same thing as religion in my opinion because you can say schizos believe in god so anyone who is believing in god thinks god can change causality. When god creates causality then the schizo thinks god can suspend causality. It is my whole argument that god has a purpose for suffering onestep rejects. I told him several times that god is not evil and he rejects this. But I cannot think evil exists unless god has some kind of handicap preventing god from preventing suffering. So hell is not real and no other notion that god does things to make us suffer for no reason is real either. I believe that all things are only qualia nothing else just qualia and rules it obeys. I said this before and he interprets this as solipsist. but then I have said unless we can separate mind and matter then they are not possible to interact with each out. only mind exists and if only mind exists then that is solipsist to him because matter is needed for cause and effect but if only mind exists then you cannot have matter at all. god in my opinion as I believe is and because onestep would not listen several years ago what is the connection between things onestep calls the ground of being but really it is all being not matter at all. I drew this but he said something was wrong with it without explaining why.

but the real issue is how casualty is possible, which is that interactions by what god allows is the case that transportation happens, nothing moves without god so if god is not evil he can move things to stop babies from having cancer so the handicap must be in place if god is not evil. god cannot violate certain rules/algorithms except by a limited means. god can only transport particles within a limited range when the conditions are set. but all particles are qualia regardless not matter.

My conclusion is:

God transports qualias at certain ranges under certain conditions and that is why suffering can happen. Matter does not exist and schizos think either they are god or god can do anything and this can only mean if true god enjoys suffering. I don't believe god enjoys suffering so I don't believe in a non-handicapped god. God being handicapped in what he can transport is the only solution to the problem of evil.

another thing to say is that if everything is just qualia, every particle is just a piece of qualia, then when god teleports them and all things are made of it then God is pretending to be the universe the same way you pretend to see things yet are not those things. and God is aware of all things because god is moving all things (all qualias) God is hidden because we do not see god in all things for that reason, God only moves what he can in the way he can not the way he cannot. my being an agent can move but it is not solipsist. my view is that God moves and we move and we move together so as to interact. I can push on god as god can push on me. but this teleporting is only possible if my qualia happens to want to go in a direction and that requires me to learn what is good and bad. there is no reason to exist as a creature unless we seek to learn good and bad. we would be statues.

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

Hume does not reject inductive reasoning as a tool, he simply wished to underline that the method only ever gives probable conclusions and not necessary ones, and that the truth of the conclusion from induction is much less certain.

agreed

 

[onesteptwostep]

I am not sure what your argument exactly even is.

Hume's point was that there is no apparent necessary connection between cause and effect. As an example, just looking at the cause a priori you can't figure out what the effect is, no matter how intelligent you are (without prior knowledge of dynamics). He was taking a stand against more rationalistic metaphysics and the principle of sufficient reason.

Moreover, Hume makes a psychological point that we tend to learn to attribute causal forms of rule to phenomena out of certain psychological tendencies of mind (capabilities for relating phenomena in different ways) and based on habits and custom. Another point of Hume, is the lack of perfect rational justification for this inductive reasoning.

His exact metaphysical stance on causation is more debated. But one perfectly good understanding is that he was agnostic or open to causation being real in the broad sense of their being real influences of one event to another.

But Hume was not against doing science, and modeling rules to systematize experience, and predict phenomena.

I'm not really making an argument, I'm just saying that the mindset of a hoarder has some similarities with someone who employs inductive reasoning. Both are psychological points which are taken from a relaxed position. If we only employed inductive reasoning, or the view point of a hoarder, we might not have developed to this stage in human civilization. There's nothing grandstanding, I'm just making a filmsy parallel. Overcoming inductive reasoning or overcoming the mentality of the hoarder takes effort. I think that's the point I'm trying to get across.

 

[Black Rose]

 

[LOGICZOMBIE]

Hume does not reject inductive reasoning as a tool, he simply wished to underline that the method only ever gives probable conclusions and not necessary ones, and that the truth of the conclusion from induction is much less certain.

for example,


link skips to 8 minute mark

the story of the shooter and the farmer