Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 07:20pm PT
|
you are the one using "cause," "causal," "causality"
you should be able to explain what you mean.
try to be brief.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 07:32pm PT
|
OK, I can wait for you to consult your physics brain-trust...
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 07:41pm PT
|
(I think Identity Theory could be tweaked somewhat to describe a correlation between subjective and physical.)
Probably, but the tweaking might need to include a re-naming. Mapping Theory?
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 07:43pm PT
|
Problem is, people believe linear causation IS an explanation, not just a description.
So that's the problem. I knew there was a problem. What is the solution? Is there one?
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 07:58pm PT
|
What is the solution? Is there one?
Yes soooo simple.
Even a child can do it and have done.
Stop being st00pid brainwashed gross materialists ......
|
|
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2018 - 08:07pm PT
|
JL: "and that would require a fundamental property like a scaler field"
You might be better off going directly to a Hilbert space.
This is exciting.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 12:12pm PT
|
Largo: . . . psychologists, who work directly with the subjective, are working with an empty gun, since the cause of any psychological malady is strictly physical, and that work on the subjective itself has no causal effect on the physical causal links involved.
Yeah, I have a problem with all of psychology these days. I don’t have much trust in any field of study that begins with: “. . . and there is always a problem.” Yeah, thanks, Freud.
Ed: you [Largo} are the one using "cause," "causal," "causality.
Just a minute, please. Are you saying that you do not believe there are causes (and results)? Is there anyone in this room who does not believe in causality (other than me, perhaps)?
eeyonkee: “supernatural”
You throw that word around as if you knew what it meant. Super-natural. Something that naturally appears that one would describe as “super?” Something not empirical? Something that is extraordinary, not normally occurring? Do you mean transcendent? Do you mean religious? Do you mean something that you (nor anyone else) can pin down or get their head around?
Jogill: Think I'll pop some popcorn and sit back and watch. This is exciting.
Step up to the plate. Take a swing at something. Come up with an insight or two now and then.
|
|
nafod
Boulder climber
State college
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 12:22pm PT
|
The implication, among others, is that psychologists, who work directly with the subjective, are working with an empty gun, since the cause of any psychological malady is strictly physical, and that work on the subjective itself has no causal effect on the physical causal links involved.
As a systems modeling guy...for example if you think of the brain like a huge electric circuit (super-simplified obviously) with billions and billions of circuit components (inductors, capacitors), then the number of states that the system can be in actually far exceeds the number of components. If you get rid of the resistors, then the system can be excited and resonate in a gazillion different ways, with a gazillion >> billions and billions.
Another analogy, a single guitar string has in theory an infinite number of stable resonant states it could be in, because it is a continuous system. Adjacent strings influence each other, etc. Knowledge of a guitar tells you minimal information about the music it can play.
If those resonances correspond to what people are thinking, then the same brain from a physical perspective can have many different possible thoughts.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 03:52pm PT
|
nafod, I'll bet if you were to count them all up, I've had more thoughts than you can shake a stick at:> Seriously though, to me, you have just described why our world is essentially unpredictable. Frankly, I would have to think that all of the possible permutations of an individual human's thoughts are likely, ultimately, unpredictable. But now, add all of the other human beings on the planet and all of their interactions to the mix.
Hari Seldon (and the psycho-historians, in general, for you Isaac Asimov fans) had an hypothesis...that you could aggregate and then base your predictions on the aggregate. Individuals are unpredictable; maybe not so much -- aggregations of individuals.
Aggregations include things like conservatives and liberals.
To MikeL -- about the word, "supernatural".
The theory of evolution is a good example for the word "natural" in supernatural. "Super" in supernatural is like "meta" in metaphysics. It means that it is "above" natural and "above" physics.
|
|
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 04:01pm PT
|
It means that it is "above" natural and "above" physics
That should please some on the thread.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 04:08pm PT
|
eeyonkee, see my "This is hilarious" thread for an example of agency (i.e., the can-do power of an agent in a multiplayer game) in two species besides human.
Agency, the power of an agent, despite the latter's automaticity (mechanistic nature) and despite 100 per cent obedience to causality, physics, chemistry, biology.
Agency, the power of an agent, despite the latter not having any contracausal (libertarian) freedom of the will (in the old, traditional historic sense).
A parrot and a dog, two agents, one avian and one canine, engaged/joined in a multiplayer game, sharing a moment in this scrimmage we call life. lol
...
Qt What are we, automata?!
Yes, and supremely exquisite automata!
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 04:45pm PT
|
You and I are on the same page, for sure, HFCS.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jul 11, 2018 - 04:48pm PT
|
Ed, as you know, I've never approached mind strictly in terms of physics or quantifiying, though I did spend nearly a decade wrangling various brain mapping approaches. And learned a lot in the process. But your scientism is showing when you purport that I must, or probably should, seek counsel from my physics buddies to answer your faux question about causation.
Remember, an honest question seeks information that the questioner doesn't currently know. That makes your "question" a set up, and underscores the fork-tongued angle people sometimes take when approaching subjects that either outstrip their experience or folk beliefs. And especially their "knowledge," whereby those not privy to their data is a yokel, a yahoo, or "just doesn't understand the math." That's what I called "fluffing your own gizmo."
I am not a Type A physicalist that stated, as you have many times, "What isn't physical?" Another way to phrase this is: What isn't temporal? Yet another is: What object or phenomenon doesn't arise from physical causation?
I still remember one of my philosophy of science profs, himself a cosmologist, hammering into our skulls that causality "is the relationship between causes and effects," a fundamental factor in the natural sciences especially physics.
Keeping the conversation on your home turf, this raises the question of how to reconcile the central role of causal concepts in the special sciences and in common sense with the putative absence of causation in fundamental physics.
It has to be the case that you are in a much better position to extrapolate on causation, as you know it, than I am, so as Mike said, step up to the plate, Ed, and let us have it. Otherwise Fruity will and you know where that goes.
I've already stated my beliefs in this regards. But I'd be interested in hearing how you define cause, causation, etc.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 04:54pm PT
|
You continue to be rude with the "Fruity", IMO Largo. It works to your advantage, of course, in diminishing your opponent. It's why I hate Trump most of all (actually tied with lying).
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 04:57pm PT
|
"how to reconcile the central role of causal concepts in the special sciences and in common sense with the putative absence of causation in fundamental physics."
I can give it to you concisely, most of all, plainly. PLAINLY. But are you prepared to hear it? to internalize it?
ANS Because the two categories of organization (that you're seeking to "reconcile") are different: different categories of function and different categories of thought. What's more, as you bump from one category to another in the organizational hierarchy you change your language (your way of talking).
How many times has this been laid out for you?
...
What's amazing is how people of all stripes get carried away with today's bloody edge physics (to an extent rightly so) but largely forget the role of (well-understood) core physics in our daily lives. You know the physics that IS expressed in our machines (cars, planes, trains; cams, ropes, biners), our buildings (skyscrapers, dams, bridges), our electronics (GPS, internet, nanosecond switching in computers and comm systems). I've said it now eight plus years here only to succeed like a lead balloon: All these items are not only based in physics but as systems - with input, function and output - they are all based in causality; and in every instance where they're operating as designed and built (and actually even when they're not, lol) they are ALSO -and this is so, so exciting - running true in regards to their underlying causality.
But one needs to be receptive to this. They need to be prepared for this. You don't seem to be. For whatever reason.
My beta if you would have it: Think and conceptualize in terms of everyday engineering physics for awhile. That's actually what it's called in some venues, where the focus is on basic everyday energy and forces (their origin, transfer, interaction, etc) in simple systems (pulleys, levers, spinning tops, lenses, telescopes, electromagnets, simple motors, buzzers). Remember one of climbing's mantras: Baby steps. Works in physics, too. Try leaving the esoteric complicated physics (string theory, dark matter, entanglement, "quantum soups", etc) to the Brian Greenes and Ed Hartounis and Lawrence Krausses. It might work better for you. Might.
...
Speaking of causality: What causes the wind? ANS Well, said Alice, the swaying trees of course.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 05:08pm PT
|
Okay, Largo, this is for you. I happen to believe that Michael Gazzaniga nailed it. For all of your ranting about how mind cannot possibly be explained in physical terms, it turns out, the physical manifestation of who we think we are is located in a particular location of the left hemisphere that has been called the "interpreter".
The other thing that is clear from Gazzaniga's research is that, if you knock out natural connections in the brain -- like the one connecting the left and right hemispheres, your understanding of the world as it unfolds is profoundly affected. I will say that I knew nothing about Gazzaniga before participating in this thread. His research has profoundly changed my thinking on the subject. I don't know that I have seen others' change their views in the same way. I would love to hear about it.
Sorry, got side-tracked. My question for Largo is, how can mind and brain not be intimately connected when, by knocking out the connection between left and right hemispheres, you get the different and predictable behaviors that we see?
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 06:54pm PT
|
I've posted this link before. You know, Largo, if you'd bother long enough to get this man's lesson and take it seriously, it would help.
https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
In this very first of FREE lectures from Stanford, he discusses this very topic: different categories (buckets he calls them) of things (organizations, thoughts, language, etc)...
...and how mixing them inappropriately (an act that human minds are inclined to do) can lead to confusion.
His "lesson" leads to the reconciliation you seek.
Sapolsky is a prof at Stanford, a favorite for his content, clarity and teaching style; and no schlupp.
Your welcome.
...
For a great discussion on so-called "downward causation" and emergence - favorites with the chopra gang re consciousness - there's a Waking Up episode with Geoffrey West, no schlupp either. Best of all, he and Sam discuss these cool topics so, so very plainly even a 6th grader could follow with interest.
https://samharris.org/podcasts/from-cells-to-cities/
My Conversation with the Great Geoffrey West
Dig the part where we have two stones residing on a slope at t=0, one cubical and one spherical... At t > 0... we end w different behaviors, different descriptions, different outcomes... and yet each overlying bucket/level remains obedient to any underlying bucket/level despite feedback from the former. How plain as day is that.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 07:04pm PT
|
You and I are on the same page, for sure, HFCS.
That's because you are both in a brainwashed delusion.
Both of you would actually have benefitted by being stuck in that cave in Thailand with the coach who taught the kids to meditate there.
You would have then actually have learned something beyond your brainwashed academics for once ...
(Do NOT Respond)
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Jul 11, 2018 - 07:35pm PT
|
(Do NOT Respond)
Why not?
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 12, 2018 - 12:11am PT
|
Largo retreats, he uses words for effect, but doesn't know what he means by them.
Once again, don Largo, please define your terms, what do you mean when you refer to "cause," "causal," "causality"?
If you insist that this is a fundamental principle underlying physics, you must be able to at least point to the "law" that "enshrines" it. Here I am talking about science, not scientism.
MikeL: Just a minute, please. Are you saying that you do not believe there are causes (and results)? Is there anyone in this room who does not believe in causality (other than me, perhaps)?
I generally don't "believe" in things... but I also suspect you are not using these words the same way I would, perhaps you could also provide what you mean by "causes" and by "causality" and how they are a part of science.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!