Causality

[Hey Bubu]

Just doing some reading and found this rather interesting. Especially the last part, which I have bolded


Causality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Causality, or causation, is the relationship between causes and effects. In common parlance, an event or state of affairs A is a cause of an event B if A is a reason that brings about the effect B. For instance, one might say "my pushing the accelerator caused the car to go faster". But this definition is somewhat circular; what does it then really mean to say that A is a reason that B occurs? An important question in philosophy and other fields is to clarify the relationship between causes and effects, as well as how (and even if!) causes can bring about effects.

David Hume held that causes and effects are not real (or at least not knowable), but imagined by our mind to make sense of the observation that A often occurs together with or slightly before B. All we can observe are correlations, not causations.

[xryptic]

Originally posted by TypeH

All we can observe are correlations, not causations.

That's just wordplay.
So I guess he'd agree that if I stabbed someone repeatedly in the chest and they died moments later, we wouldn't be viewing causation?

[Hey Bubu]

Originally posted by xryptic
That's just wordplay.
So I guess he'd agree that if I stabbed someone repeatedly in the chest and they died moments later, we wouldn't be viewing causation?

LMAO!!! that's a little extreme, but I guess there would be a correlation between the stabbing and the dying and the blood and the screaming and chopping and the running and the police and....


and then Zombies would come and chase us while we shop at Neiman Marcus

[hepkatmama]

i hope the zombie's eat your brains for shopping at Neiman's. & when they have eaten their fill, i hope they steal a nice "cruelty-free" leather prada handbag to save your leftover intelligence for their late nite snack.

snacky-snack



so i guess it goes without saying the david hume does not agree with Jung's theories about synchronicity.

[Hey Bubu]

Originally posted by hepkatmama
i hope the zombie's eat your brains for shopping at Neiman's. & when they have eaten their fill, i hope they steal a nice "cruelty-free" leather prada handbag to save your leftover intelligence for their late nite snack.

snacky-snack



so i guess it goes without saying the david hume does not agree with Jung's theories about synchronicity.

I wonder why they (Zombies) like Brains. I think it was explained in the last flick of Romero's Trilogy. Gotta watch them again. Oh and one can't avoid the whole political undercurrent of the movie.

Anyway!!!
I still find it rather fascinating (the thought of whether we truly have a choice or not)

Originally posted by TypeH
I wonder why they (Zombies) like Brains. I think it was explained in the last flick of Romero's Trilogy. Gotta watch them again. Oh and one can't avoid the whole political undercurrent of the movie.

Anyway!!!
I still find it rather fascinating (the thought of whether we truly have a choice or not)

There was a comment I heard once about reality and perception and free will.

Our senses work on delay (whatever the rate of synaptic relay is).

Our senses relate information. Our brain reads it and our mind interprets it - perception.

Because of the delay we perceive a world that just happened a split second ago.

Studies have shown than many of our day to day reactions to common occurances are programmed responses. We react faster than our senses can give us information to process and spit out a response. We just respond - boom - no thought.

Which brought it to the interesting comment... because most of our actions and reactions on a daily basis are purely automatic we do not exercise free will and further - reality is nothing more than an illusion our mind uses to keep us occupied and believe that free will exists. Anyway - that was a poor description and there was science to back it up - but the concept was interesting.

[[aNNa]]

Originally posted by TypeH
Just doing some reading and found this rather interesting. Especially the last part, which I have bolded


Causality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Causality, or causation, is the relationship between causes and effects. In common parlance, an event or state of affairs A is a cause of an event B if A is a reason that brings about the effect B. For instance, one might say "my pushing the accelerator caused the car to go faster". But this definition is somewhat circular; what does it then really mean to say that A is a reason that B occurs? An important question in philosophy and other fields is to clarify the relationship between causes and effects, as well as how (and even if!) causes can bring about effects.

David Hume has quite a strange theory of change. I studied
about one of this notions of change in a metaphysics class I
am taking right now. we didn't delve into it too much. rather it was simply meant to act as a foil for Aristotelian change and Descartes'/Galileo's notions of change.

according to Humean (black box,regularity theory) change,
one cannot know X without knowing the cause of Y. according
to this kind of regularity theory, A leads to E, for example, because A's past led to E's past.

if this doesn't make any sense, just stop reading now.

now, if faced with the question, "How did his window become broken?", the answer of the regularity theorist (Hume) is that maybe a baseball hit it, or a rock, or a shoe, or the sun's heat caused it to crack and break, or someone punched it out. Insert
anything for a cause here. essentially, A's past led to E's past.
(the baseball's past led to the broken window's past).

essentially, according to Humean change, things change in order
to point to past events or show regularity between even A and event E. hence, his theory is sometimes called the 'Regularity Theory'.

it's a BAD theory haha. this is because we have no way of pinpointing any concrete causes. unfortunately, Hume adheres
to the notion of ex nihilo causation. this means literally:
out of nothing. basically, ex nihilo causation holds that anything can come from or be the cause of anything.

absurd, but it helps to know that he believes in ex nihilo
causation so you can clearly understand why he hold the
aforementioned view, although he's wrong about his philosophy
of change.

Originally posted by TypeH
David Hume held that causes and effects are not real (or at least not knowable), but imagined by our mind to make sense of the observation that A often occurs together with or slightly before B. All we can observe are correlations, not causations.

i'm not sure how accurate an assessment that is of Hume's
philosophy, but given his belief in ex nihilo causation, the part
about us making up relations between event A and event E
to explain causation makes sense. especially if one believes
that anything can be the cause of anything.


hope that helps!
great topic. ^__^