vaportrail said:
Noteworthy said:
In order to get a grip of 'why' things change, the human brain utilised its social meta-layer to tag every change to a cause, or an 'instigator'. this resultantly was the begginings of spirituality, for this metalayer of generating instigators developed in line with human awareness shift on consciousness and identity.
This makes sense.
When the first humans asked why it rained,
the answer was a god, something that made it happen,
an instigator.
Noteworthy said:
As well as this, our human brains as a whole will not give up on this notion of cause and of things causing other things to happen.. to science all it seem to be is an orderly flow of energy throughout the universe, and the evidence that we get from the changes that occur according to the energy transfer.. but the majority of science does not provide a great survival advantage when in human-controlled environments, and you need to quickly assess which humans are most associated with different aspects of change (or controlled consistency)
I agree, but what do you mean about survival advantage and assessing humans?
Survival is the farthest thing from my head when I'm at the mall,
and why do I need to categorize humans by their capacity for change?
Quote:
There is nothing quite as boring as semantic games. - OrgoneConclusion
What about reading a response from somebody who is uninterested in the topic but had the option to not comment at all? 
"Cause" is the name we give to the phenomenon being discussed in this topic,
why do you find it so unworthy of exploration?
Noteworthy said:
a puppet with a hammer would appear to be controlling the hammer, causing it to hit the other puppet. but when you learn that the puppet is an extension of the puppeteer then you learn that it is the puppeteer that is causing the hammer to hit the other puppet. then you might find out that the puppeteer is not fully conscious and has an amazing ability to learn sequences of puppet moves and actually just repeats whatever is shown to them at the start of the evening. It turns out that the root cause of the hammer hitting is the puppet-master who layed out the show at the start of the evening to the puppeteer. Well at any rate eventually you might find out that the puppet master only ever reads his stories from other people.
I would have traced a sequence going back to the big bang, energy conversion and such eventually leading to the hammer clobbering that other puppet. But I think what you're saying here is basically, if the puppeteer caused it, was that because something caused him to? Which follows into an argument on free will. If we are all the results of some initial cause, or exist as a process of "an orderly flow of energy throughout the universe," then what responsibility does he take for his action? Is he just the result of a sequence of cause and effect, instigated by something that happened a long time ago?
Perhaps the mind wants to find a cause for everything because that is how we learn to manipulate the world.
Why did this good thing happen? How do I repeat it? Why did this bad thing happen? How do I make it stop?
Why is this casserole so delicious? ("lots of yummy cheese.") How do I repeat it? ("more yummy cheese!")
Why is my bread money gone? ("you are irresponsible.") How do I make it stop? ("stop being irresponsible.")
But how do I stop being irresponsible? I'm a good person, so it can't be my fault.
Bill Nye, "Science is cool! Science has the answers! Lets. Learn. About. ENERGY TRANSFER!"
I see now! The universal flow of energy has resulted in something that is causing my problem.
But what is that something? What can I do about it? Somebody must know the answer.
Excuse me sir, why is my bread money gone? ("evil jews!") Oh! How do I make them stop? ("kill them!")
My conclusion is that the mind hunts instigators because understanding them allows manipulation of their effect. However, instigation is not an external characteristic you should give to a cloud for causing rain, it's an internal characteristic (you are the instigator) that allows humans to influence their own behaviour, perhaps inversely to influence each other's behavior. Sorry Bill, the big bang is not an answer to any question that I have.
often it is easy to think of early beings as asking questions and having these questions being answered in a certain way. but you dont always ask questions to find out information.
People might not have stopped and asked why everything happened at first. They probably just would have gone ahead and dealt with the sky and the ocean etc as an instigating force and as soon as they had words to deal with it, concepts applying to human or animal instigators quickly were applied to (actually) inanimate instigators. simply because of the way language works
if they did ask the question though at that point, then indeed the question would be 'why rain?' and then answer is 'because of the rain-instigator'
now as for assessing other people, well, the survival advantage is what makes humans the way they are now (like all species) so if humans have an inert way of perceiving the world (note that this is different to having innate knowledge or information, but still acts as an innate factor predisposing you to certain knowledge) then at some point it must have played some survival advantage (OR potentially the survival advantage was for some other factors that coincidentally harmonised to produce the traits we are talking about).
as for thinking about survival at the mall, well you dont need to be consciously thinking about survival for your mind to be processing the world in a way that indeed increases your likelihood of surviving (or at least, did to your parents in the environment they lived in)
and as for perceiving people's capacity for change, well... this is one of the most central perceptions of human mind. Someone's capacity for change is their power. their expressed and socially perceived capacity for instigating change is their 'status'. Someone with higher status is assumed to be able to enact their will and instigate some change in the universe moreso than someone with lower status. this is what we call 'power' in a social context (as opposed to a physics context).
percieving status is something that all mammals do.
its not even a uniquely human thing at all.
something more uniquely human that raises status (though maybe with the right inspection it would be seen that many other animals do this too) is simply be creative. humans can be so creative and generate things that are enjoyable to other people (eg humour, beautiful art, appropriate solutions to apparent problems, etc) which acts as a very influential instigation (instigation over other people.. the most status-earning instigation).
ok so the argument of freewill is always important to consider whenever suggesting theory relating to cause. I have a lot to write about this, too much to organise in this context, but the way i see it, in short, is that we cannot compress people into single events (and relate them back to a prior 'root cause'). We actually DO do this all the time, but never to the extent where the whole person has been compressed. That is, whenever people become predictable or purely reactive (as opposed to responsive) then they loose their 'humanness' in humans' eyes. they are not considered to be causing change in the universe, ie, their free will.
If you knew every single thing about the whole universe ever, then there would be no causes.. there would also be no people.
people represent unpercievable variables. if you know all the variables then there are none unaccessible by your perception..
no one can ever reduce a person into events and so they will always be an irreducible instigator, a constant 'cause' of change in the universe. a being of power, and thus, a being with responsibility.
we have free will because although we are the result of prior 'causes', there is no way of thinking of a person in any other way than an unpredictable variable. even though we can conceptually state that 'a person's choices' are 'caused by' 'external forces', this does not mean that this is true for the world that we experience every day of our lives. Because as far as we are concerned, we must treat people as if they are the most associated aspect of the universe with the choices that they perform.
ie. who is responsible for the choices that Fred makes?
well although you could trace back all of freds decisions to things he was shown, things his parents did in front of him, things people said to him and how he felt, the way that people treated him in response to his actions, etc, etc, we can never actually associate any of those things with his choices, because individually they all associate with the choice only along with the billions of other tiny little random factors in the person's life.
thus .. the buck stops at the person themselves, which as a whole encompasses all of the tiny factors. the unknowable plethora of factors inside each person and across their whole lives are just the things that each person must call themselves.
(mind the prescription)
finally, although people can influence their own behavior, their choice to do so is still influenced by external factors. If 'the big bang' (id prefer to avoid that particular scientific theory and opt instead for 'initial factor' or 'Om') 'caused' all of a person's actions, it would never really help to know this.. because.. it would simultaneously be the 'cause' to everyone elses actions.. and basically everything else in the universe.. so it would be a useless concept .. probably not answer any of your questions, for asking 'why this' is very much asking 'why this instead of [some assumed default of the world]', and since the initial factor would be associated equally to all of the 'assumed defaults' then there would be no way of using it to distinguish 'this' from [assumed default].
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