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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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cause and effect * 2
    #23367982 - 06/21/16 07:18 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

"Cause" and "effect" are convenient fictions, they have no ultimate meaning -- only the proximate conventionality of association -- and yet they are the basis of millions of personal philosophies of nature. To posit them affords no true understanding whatsoever; they are conceptual tags based on the need for a human mind to find some type of relative invariance by which to gain hold of some fact mentally. These ideas are exclusively that: ideas. They do not connect to points which are meaningful for the cosmos -- merely for man. Nature is one undivided, flowing movement; any grasping at static points from which to conceptualize is nothing aside from a human abstraction.


What are your thoughts on the subject of causality?


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Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici


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OfflineBrendanFlock
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #23368008 - 06/21/16 07:25 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Cause...well ultimately..you are here right now..as an observer and actor..so all forces are within your grasp..

BUT!!

They will be in your grasp as a specific set of thing, thingness, or things themselves..which are defined..likely are following some sort of continuum?


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Offlinedeff
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #23368009 - 06/21/16 07:26 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

you summed it up quite well! :smile:


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InvisibleJokeshopbeard
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #23368016 - 06/21/16 07:28 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

DividedQuantum said:
Nature is one undivided, flowing movement



Unfortunatley I don't have anything to add - I don't think I'm really grasping your argument (please forgive my frontal lobe in this case), but I wanted to highlight what I quoted - I really like that.


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Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not.
--Jac O'keeffe


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InvisibleLunarEclipse
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Re: cause and effect [Re: Jokeshopbeard]
    #23368191 - 06/21/16 08:22 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

Jokeshopbeard said:
Quote:

DividedQuantum said:
Nature is one undivided, flowing movement



Unfortunatley I don't have anything to add - I don't think I'm really grasping your argument (please forgive my frontal lobe in this case), but I wanted to highlight what I quoted - I really like that.




It sounds nice, but the fact is that nature is divided for a reason.  Flowing?  Sounds nice too.  But the fact remains that nature isn't undivided at all, it's divided into species and genuses and families and orders and classes and phylums and kingdoms.  It was only because I remember King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti.


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Anxiety is what you make it.


Edited by LunarEclipse (06/21/16 08:23 PM)


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InvisibleJokeshopbeard
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Re: cause and effect [Re: LunarEclipse]
    #23368323 - 06/21/16 08:55 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

LunarEclipse said:
It sounds nice, but the fact is that nature is divided for a reason.  Flowing?  Sounds nice too.



I think it all depends on your sense of perspective. Mine is quite clearly different from your own.


--------------------
Let it be seen that you are nothing. And in knowing that you are nothing... there is nothing to lose, there is nothing to gain. What can happen to you? Something can happen to the body, but it will either heal or it won't. What's the big deal? Let life knock you to bits. Let life take you apart. Let life destroy you. It will only destroy what you are not.
--Jac O'keeffe


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InvisibleKurt
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Re: cause and effect [Re: LunarEclipse]
    #23368758 - 06/21/16 11:50 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

A shot in the dark.

Nature is was not first a field where things and dimensions are gathered together.
It is a path.
Lao tzu wrote on diversity and contradiction in a "way" of things, for instance.
Tao called tao is not tao.
But it is not just in seeing a way in general.
It is more like: if you follow your path, whatever forks, there are, (which there are) as you look back it is all one way in a way.

I am sure this will be considered appropriately nonsense, pretty much.

If I were to say there were a principle in the prim and proper western tradition, it would be in a "way" too. And it is not so different.

As important as modern philosophy conditioned by empiricism is to us today, (and as important as it is to critically examine its philosophical nature, and not just "science" as some absolute) there is a lot to see in pre-empirical concepts of nature as well. These roots do greatly inform even the tabula rasa of a modern culture's view of the world.

I like Thomas Aquinus's words, as an entry to this way;
definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam

"Definition is achieved through the proximate genus and specific difference". Even in things in themselves (substance, being, or nature, etc) there is always a principle of differentiation, if you examine closely. We essentially employ a principle of contradiction or difference, and distinction to apprehend anything - even nature itself.

Aristotle said, (for whom Aquinus was commenting) nature, or physis, is what is caused in itself. What did he mean? He meant in one sense that nature, physis, was seen in terms of causes. But in what principle did this principle emerge?

I would generally comment that it was first seen in one sense, that is clear, as a priority preserved the organic, in face of the synthetic. Aristotle did not make a bridge of meaning (A=B) to say that something physical was nature. He did not lay out a domain where all spatio temporal dimensions, and entities were all ideally gathered together, and held in that place as opposed to the place of nothing, or nonexistent things to be falsified, according to statements we make of the world.

Nature already was physis - which is not even just to say, it was this by any definition. Philosophy arises from that, but in another way there was what was before that. Philosophical meaning is still too much to bridge. Nature meant physis and vice versa. Nature had the meaning, which many today look to attribute to it. Not a priori, or by definition, but as it came off the greek tongue, physis meant nature. What would it mean to surmise the physical as something natural, or the natural as physical? We take for granted that we know. We take for granted that we think we know.

Ostensibly the first historically mentioned use of the word physis in particular, was in Homer's Odyssey, and in a way it was granted. It was just one line of many many lines of course, but what we see, is that it was shown to humanity, and that it's example was something organic, and living. "The way a thing was".

Quote:

"Hermes Argeiphontes gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me the way it was (φύσις, physis). At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. 'Moly' the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal men to dig; but with the gods all things are possible."




Heraclitus, a presocratic naturalist, speaks well to this. He suggests the primordiality of flux and becoming, as nature. He is noted to have said, one cannot step into the same river twice. But in that principle, he was also on record to have said, "one may step into the same river". I forget the exact phrasing, but :lol: And Heraclitus said nature was like fire, becoming and ceasing, and constant battle of opposites and burning through itself.

But to the "more principled" point, (or at least what I was getting at) Aristotle, who brought a principle meaning to physis, as "what is caused in itself" relied on a principle of distinction (as Aquinas said) to establish what he meant. How could nature, what is caused in itself, physis, have a principle of distinction for Aristotle?

He said that the trees the rocks the streams and the stars overhead, and the organic natural world, had its own cause, whereas, through human craft, a chair or table is shaped by human hands, and this is extraneous. The chair was not caused in itself in this sense, clearly.

This is where people usually blank I find. People cannot bring themselves to think of nature as anything but what is, or an idea of the world, and "its cause" that is always implicitly gathered together under a singular conception. It is deeply engrained, in all sorts of ideologies, and not just one or the other. People are frankly offended to think that there is such distinction. In fact there is an appreciable unify and holism in Aristotle, and this is prevalently the chief principle of an "inclusive" view. (We are hugely Aristotelian, it is just a matter of seeing)

There are no necessary meta-physics to distinguish physics either. There really can't be metaphysics in the first place. (They come later by association) Aristotle's principle of distinction of nature, from nature, is conceived of in nature, as a whole, and unity, as much as in a way to find its principle of reason. There is what distinguishes nature in what is not nature, and what distinguishes nature qua nature (essentially) and there is the principle of such distinctions itself.

This may seem mundane, for something so crucial (and usually after people are offended by philosophy they get bored) but there is an essential principle in this, if you look. The crafted chair or table (τέχνη; techne "craft"), is in a sense other than something essentially of nature, or physis. We can see that. But we can also see that it stands on its four legs, in nature, or in its own principles of physics. Very easily considered. This is sort of like nature vs. nurture (which we usually take as the most derivative discussion of politics, rather than basic)

But we essentially traverse this. Along along this path with techne, we we need our essential analysis (ἀνάλυσις, analuein, "unloosening") to see this. Breaking down the chair into parts, into what it is made up of, brings us to an impartial material nature, at a certain point. A material nature, if you look to it (particularly as a reduction) is something that stands as it does in itself, just as the raw stuff. It has not been crafted or formed in this capacity (whether we see things being made up this way or literaly take them apart and build them up). Because of this, in the lucid principle, that has already shown itself once, it too, is what it is, as caused in itself.

It is wood, (and actually, interesting note, the latin mater, literally means wood) standing in its parts to incidentally form whatever it is, all in itself, in this capacity. Anything can be analyzed this way. Matter can, indeed be seen as essential nature in this sense. So we come to this principle of nature, which significantly includes the way things are broken down and technically made up, through tapping into a broad association with the materiality of things, (an analysis) as nature. Material is physical of course. It is, along with nature as the trees and the rocks and the streams. The material substance is something which is found in itself too, and that is the principle that is what is important to us.

What is usually overlooked is that the manifold nature in Aristotle. It does not need to mean anything metaphysical. Generally if we take something from the greeks, I think Martin Heidegger is right when he says that we look to nature as a kind of "un-concealing" of meaning in its essence. This primordial provision of truth, ἀλήθεια, aletheia, meant both a disclosure and truth, something like remembering or returning things to their place.

Aristotle's materialism was lucid in this sense. It did not set material substance out as special, or fundamental insofar as it was reduced or built up. This just happened by association, incidentally "on the way" to a certain way of being of western humanity. So though the example we traverse here, the chair, and the wood it is made of, and the tree, are all of nature or physis, in case we somehow "forget" the eay things are, or in case we wish to travel forward through this, and find the principles of things on this way too.

It is important that we remain with this, as much as we traverse, the Greeks apparently thought. So Aristotle basically made that distinction of nature, meaningully. And there is not just what we may remember, or return to its place, but what we traverse on the way itself. We look to nature or physis, being itself. We can break it open and show its principles and processes, or in the passive principle that always comes as well, let it be what it is, which is actually, (if we forgot) the same thing. It is all the same way. Indeed we should not get lost in our technical apprehensions, (as plato said: "you can't carve reality quite by its joints), and think we know more or something more special than what is in front of us.

Sometimes we fly a rocket to a moon and discover more principles of astrophysics in jet propulsion, in flying through the atmosphere and through space, all in order to gather a moon rock. That is a path that we can seem to relate to The principles we discover this way are involved, and yet of nature as herself.

We indeed circumspect a nature, or cause in itself, in our own "philosophical" ways, derivatively, although it is mostly pragmatic and just what we do today (so long as it is effective) For instance, through an ideal "removed observation", and letting the thing be as best as possible, without doctoring experiments, we use an empirical approach. We look to a thing itself this way. It has its own way of showing, and yet, even as Hume the quintessential empiricist himself insists, absolutes are never found...as we all already know...


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InvisibleCosmicJokeM
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #23369229 - 06/22/16 07:27 AM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

DividedQuantum said:
"Cause" and "effect" are convenient fictions, they have no ultimate meaning -- only the proximate conventionality of association -- and yet they are the basis of millions of personal philosophies of nature. To posit them affords no true understanding whatsoever; they are conceptual tags based on the need for a human mind to find some type of relative invariance by which to gain hold of some fact mentally. These ideas are exclusively that: ideas. They do not connect to points which are meaningful for the cosmos -- merely for man. Nature is one undivided, flowing movement; any grasping at static points from which to conceptualize is nothing aside from a human abstraction.


What are your thoughts on the subject of causality?





I mean there are some sort of newtonian physics type examples like if you jump off a tall building without a parachute you're going to get hurt, but those are extreme cases and most of the time we should be thinking in terms of probabilities.  Like for example it's highly improbable that the police are going to arrest the majority of pot smokers in any given city in state where it's illegal in a single day, so you're probably pretty safe to smoke some.


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Everything is better than it was the last time.  I'm good.

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.

I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too.  If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: cause and effect [Re: CosmicJoke]
    #23369438 - 06/22/16 09:33 AM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

CosmicJoke said:
I mean there are some sort of newtonian physics type examples like if you jump off a tall building without a parachute you're going to get hurt, but those are extreme cases and most of the time we should be thinking in terms of probabilities.  Like for example it's highly improbable that the police are going to arrest the majority of pot smokers in any given city in state where it's illegal in a single day, so you're probably pretty safe to smoke some.




You're right that at a macroscopic level objects behave in a classical way, but remember that, even for macroscopic objects, at a fundamental level the quantum rules still apply.  We are simply not aware of them because at our everyday level the wave nature is not observable as it is at the atomic level.  Even though we are not aware of the quantum waves of a macroscopic object, they are actually still there.  And yes, as far as we can tell right now, Nature is governed by probabilities at a fundamental level.  Whether or not this is a roll of the dice, or some deeper factors come into play, we do not at present know.


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Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici


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InvisibleCosmicJokeM
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum] * 1
    #23370302 - 06/22/16 03:29 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Right, I'm just thinking in terms of a psychological paradigm shift that could occur through understanding of quantum physics, how it would change people's beliefs about what is "common sense" if there were less convictions and more pause and consideration towards probabilities.


--------------------
Everything is better than it was the last time.  I'm good.

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.

I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too.  If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.


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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: cause and effect [Re: CosmicJoke]
    #23370535 - 06/22/16 05:00 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

I completely agree.  The culture at large has still not caught up to the major developments of the twentieth century pertaining to our understanding of Nature.  We're still living in a certainty-oriented, either-or Cartesian world.  It's high time we revised our perspective.


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Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici


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Invisiblesudly
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Re: cause and effect [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #23370682 - 06/22/16 05:49 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

On the subject of causality I think that cause and effect are useful idioms to help define physical tendencies.


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I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.



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InvisibleDividedQuantumM
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Re: cause and effect [Re: sudly]
    #23370715 - 06/22/16 05:59 PM (7 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

sudly said:
On the subject of causality I think that cause and effect are useful idioms to help define physical tendencies.




Yes, I agree.  But I am arguing that causal factors are subjective, not objective.  Surely they are useful and necessary for humans operating in the world, no doubt.


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