It seems to me we still cannot, will not and need not make sense of the notion of causation (virtually no progress has been made since Hume's time).
To which I can only say this post, this book and this Youtube video.
If the universe were a purely random foam, as this seems to imply, wouldn't we expect only the smallest possible zone of order? The fraction of observers not completely surrounded by the physical equivalent of TV snow is minuscule, and yet I, personally, see an entire roomful of coherent objects.
Even if you weight the prior probability of any given fundamental order of nature by its complexity, there are a lot of theories which have higher posterior ranking than pure noise for explaining my instantaneous experience.
What are the useful consequences of this theory?
It does not seem to me to “solve” the given “hard problems”; rather it declares them unsolvable, along with most everything else which we think we've solved.
This system does not pay rent, first of all. In fact, if anything, it's several years behind in its mortgage payments. If the universe is completely non-deterministic with infinite random events happening, shouldn't the odds of my living in the specific sub-universe that appears fully deterministic be almost indistinguishable from zero? This can't even cheat with the anthropic principle, since there should be a greater proportion (to the extent that proportions are intelligible in this context) of universes where the laws of causality do not appear to hold...
Does inflationary cosmology give me a reason to think that the earth will not turn into a pink elephant the next second?
For those who are arguing that a theory of non-causation needn't be considered because it is not predictive, I do not think this is the correct refutation. As spuckblase pointed out in a comment, using the predictive ability to judge the merit of a theory presupposes a causal reality. Fortunately, causal reality is hardly ever challenged.
So what really challenges Hume theory?
In the context of belief in external reality (in the context of considering the intersection of a Hume theory and empiricism), the correct refutation of Hume theory is that while it m...
Firstly, this kind of multiverse is esentially the same as a parallel worlds one; the only difference is which dimension you take the multiplicity to occur in. I prefer parallel worlds as it implies a logical branching structure, a cladistic tree which provides an overlying system to the otherwise arbitrary worlds.
Second, without some kind of anthropic principle or similar filtering mechanism, then islands of order only appear at the very tip of a mountain, surrounded by masses of increasing disorder. Any order that has been apparent so far has no reason n...
For those who are arguing that a theory of non-causation needn't be considered because it is not predictive, I do not think this is the correct refutation. As spuckbase pointed out in a comment, using the predictive ability to judge the merit of a theory presupposes a causal reality. Fortunately, we forget this because causal reality is hardly ever challenged.
So what really challenges Hume theory?
In the context of belief in external reality (in the context of considering the intersection of a Hume theory and empiricism), the correct refutation of Hume the...
So now I scanned over the "Dust theory FAQ" to which Z_M_Davis linked (thanks again!)
To
Q5: How seriously do you take the Dust Theory yourself?
Egan replies:
...A5: Not very seriously, although I have yet to hear a convincing refutation of it on purely logical grounds. For example, some people have suggested that a sequence of states could only experience consciousness if there was a genuine causal relationship between them. The whole point of the Dust Theory, though, is that there is nothing more to causality than the correlations between state
Any statement which leads to the conclusion that all statements are false, or that all statements are unknowable, is itself false. Treating this as a basic premise cuts off a lot of bad lines of thought, including this one, early.
Falsificationism is dead
Well I'm merely an amateur when it comes to philosophy of science, but I seem to encounter more Popperians of one sort or another than not.
Without some sort of causality, there's no way to make predictions. As was recently pointed out, causality does not imply correlation; the theory that RichardKennaway's device operates causally predicts almost perfectly its behavior. Do you have a better method?
Bayes' law time!
Suppose the event T is the fact that the universe has no causality, and the event O is that the universe is as orderly as we have observed it to be. Then P(T|O) = P(T)*P(O|T)/P(O). (In general, these probabilities explicitly do not take into account what we actually know about T and O.) I'll let you pick P(T) and P(O). You can even pick P(T) = 0.99 and P(O) = 0.01. P(O|T), however, is so small that P(T|O), which may be orders of magnitude larger, is still negligibly small.
Okay, now we're talking.
That isn't parsimony, that's ontological promiscuity of the worst sort.
alicorn&robinZ: i talked about ontological parsimony. you're talking about something else. epistemological parsimony, perhaps? same for mystery. that you can prolong it doesn't mean there's less of it.
cyan: yes, this might be a problem. you sure natural desity is the right measure?
z_m_davies: looks very interesting. thanks!
jack: yes, I saw that problem too. That's why I said the theory might be self-defeating. My idea was that even if inflation as a the...
Guys,
my goodness, do you have some fields medals to show for your confidence? and would you also downvote hume into the ground? You discussed the riddle of induction, no?
as for the few substantial points:
alicorn:
the model is ontologically more parsimonous because it posits all standard entities minus causal relations.
I'd think we find ourselves in a seemingly ordered universe (or a patch) thereof because the cardinality of ordered regions is the same as that of the chaotic ones in this sort of infinite universe.
and i really don't see why random events ar...
Everybody,
I'll admit defeat if you give me a good explanation of causation. Until then, the argument, more or less, stands, and is just this:
There is no good explanation of causation. We should consider to get rid of it, since we can explain all phenomena otherwise (random events in an infinte universe as spoken of by inflationary cosmology)
the new theory is less mysterious and more parsimonous. It might help explain other puzzles that are tied to causation like mental causation and time travel paradoxes.
the fact that it predicts nothing can be seen as a ...
Okay... I wasn't going to downvote the post because this is the sort of thing I thought was marvelously clever when I was thirteen (so there's hope) and you'd already been downvoted below posting threshold (so it'd be just punitive), but really?
You have provided a way the universe could be (the word my undergrad prof used for a universe with no causation was "Humeiform", as opposed to "uniform"): there could be a lot of sub-universes arranged spatially in a single possible world, in which infinitely many universes instantiate every possible sequence of events.
You don't have any way to explain why we should find ourselves in a sub-universe that seems to fall into miraculously well-regulated patterns, when the overwhelming likelihood if you pick a sub-universe at random is that wacky, irregular stuff will happen all the time. The anthropic principle won't help you, because there's no reason in this system for the observers to mostly find themselves in sub-universes with apparent regularity.
Less mysterious? "There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random" doesn't eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two - it...
David Hume called causation the “cement of the universe”, and he was convinced that psychologically and in our practices, we can’t do without it.
Yet he was famously sceptical of any attempt to analyze causation in terms of necessary connections. For him, causation can only be defined in terms of a constant conjunction in space and time, and that is, I would add, no causation at all, but correlation. For every two events that seem causally connected can also, and without loss of the phenomenon, be described as just the first event, followed by the second. It’s really “just one damn thing after another”. It seems to me we still cannot, will not and need not make sense of the notion of causation (virtually no progress has been made since Hume's time).
There seems no need for another sort connection besides the spatio-temporal one, nor do we perceive any. In philosophy, a Hume world is a possible world defined in this way. All the phenomena are the same, but no necessary connections hold between the supposed relata. Maybe one should best imagine such a world as a game of life-world, but without a fundamental level governed by laws and forces; or as a movie, made of frames that are not intrinsically connected to each other. So, however strong the psychological forces that drive humans to accept further mysterious connections: Shouldn't we just stop worrying and accept living in a Hume world? Or are there actual arguments in favour of "real" causation?
Yes. There's the problem of order. What accounts for all the order in the world?It is remarkably ordered. If no special connections hold between events, why isn’t the world pure chaos? Or at least much more disordered? When two billard balls collide, never does one turn into an pink elephant.To explain this, men came up with laws of nature (self-sustained or enforced by a higher being).
So, there's the paradox: On the one hand, we have to postulate special connections to account for an orderly world like ours; on the other, we cannot give a proper account of these connections.
Inflationary cosmology to the rescue.
I won't go into the details (but see the nontechnical explanation and some further philosophical implications here).
Suffice it to say that
1) inflationary cosmology is mainstream physics, and
2) it postulates a spatially infinite universe in which every event with nonzero probability is realized infinitely many times.
How does this help to solve our paradox? The solution seems straightforward:
In an infinite universe of the right kind, order can locally emerge out of random events. Our universe is of the right kind.
So, we can account for the order in our observed (local) part of the universe.
Random events just happen, one after another, there is no need for mysterious causal connections. We throw them out but keep the order.
Problem solved.
Q: But if this is true, it’s the end of the world. Thinking, action, science, biases and many, many more concepts are causal ones. How can we do without them?
A: life is hard, get over it.
Q: But the theory is untestable?!
A: Falsificationism is dead; we have other evidences in favour (see below).
Q: But isn’t the theory self-defeating?
A: It is certainly odd to have a theory informed by experiences and high-level physics that tells us that, strictly speaking, there are no experiences or sciences. But it doesn’t seem incoherent to me climb the ladder and then throw it away.
And, looking at the bright side:
In addition to being non-mysterious and conceptually sparse, this might allow to solve some additional (would-be?) hard problems:
qualia, clustering of tropes, time travel-paradoxes, indeterministic processes: All easy or trivial when a thouroughly indeterministic universe is considered.
So. What do you think – if you can?