Hello and welcome to the final session. Thanks, Scott. Yeah. I'll pass the mic off to the course instructor now. Thank you, Theo. Okay, so very briefly, I'm going to talk today, the last session, a little bit on the notion notion of causality precisely because, and you know, point out to the fact that we were talking about just now, that there is, that simply without a certain kind or a certain notion of causality there is no such a thing as natural sciences. And the causality in natural sciences, I would say that is a unifying theme for everything
that we have been talking about since the beginning of our course so first I will talk about some of this stuff with regard to the notion of causality it cut some of them are rehashed some of them are kind of like enumeration of topics that are basically you can plug them into the concept of causality in natural sciences and then I will end notes and in our course with a note on the question of determinism. And certain kinds of paradoxes or what you might call to be puzzles that are usually attached to the concept of determinism among philosophers, particularly continental philosophers,
try to dispel the fog. After that, we can have a discussion. How does that sound? Good. So ... and I'm sorry I'm not asking you to have a question because I know that you have questions, so I'm going to first read it this time and then ask questions. So what you might call to be the purified concept of causation, as we have talked about particularly in our session, brief session, and the discussion around hempel and explanation,
you know, gnomic expectability, or gnomological expectancy. We can say that the purified concept of causation is defined in terms of predictability according to a law, or more adequately according to a set of laws. And we also pointed out the kind of dilemmas and problems we encounter when we try to define the concept of law. So the purification of the concept of causation essentially started by Galileo and completed by Hume.
It consisted in the elimination of, as we might put it today, metaphysical, that is to say in principle, unconfirmable connotations that had traditionally obscured, if not eclipsed, the only meaning of causation that is logically tenable and methodologically adequate and fruitful. So these disturbing or interfering connotations are as follows. There are three of them, which basically with the rise of natural sciences and the advent of Galilean mathematization of nature and natural physics, and also in philosophy by
Hume, there was a coordinated purge of these, what you might call to be unwanted connotations. One, the teleological conception, also known as final causes in the Aristotelian sense, We know that Aristotel influence, even though he began, he paved the road for natural sciences, his toxic influence is still present, not only in sciences, probably less in sciences, and much more in philosophy. You can see it all across particularly content of philosophy, and to some extent also in
analytic philosophy, the presence of the notion of a final cause, teleological conception. So the teleological conception eliminated from physics by Galileo, but is still surviving in various disguises in the thinking of some biologists, psychologists, and social scientists, historians, and not to mention philosophers. 2. The animistic conception, according to which there is an internal but unconfirmable compulsion conceived anthropologically in analogy to coercion as experienced on the
human level when forced against our own impulses, which supposedly accounts for the invariable connection of causes with their effects. One erroneous inference from this conception is a doctrine of fatalism, as you know it. So animistic and fatalism, by virtue of that driving force or compulsion, actually are two sides of the same coin. And actually, this is quite fruitful to look at the new rise of this kind of panpsychism, mind is everywhere, the animistic notions, and such political doctrines as, for example,
unconditional accelerationism or romantic fatalism, so on and so forth. These are absolutely logically connected. Three, the rationalistic… What was the name of that second one? Sorry, I just missed it. The animistic conception. Thank you. Animism, simply. The rationalistic conception which identifies or rather confuses the causal relation with the logical relation. Of course this is rationalism in the old sense of, for example, people like Descartes, so
on and so forth. So the rationalistic conception which identifies or confuses the causal relation with the logical relation of implication or entailment. This, as well as the preceding connotations, were repudiantated once and for all by Hume. The Kantian attempt at a resorciation of causal necessity in terms of an a priori cognizable presupposition for the possibility of knowledge in general boils down to an explication, an explication in the Carnapian sense, in an explication of what we customarily mean by
knowledge, i.e. the ascertainment of lawful relationships. And from this perspective, from a historical perspective, we can say that Kant actually did not effectively advance our conception of causality beyond that of Hume. And he was not able to carry out his intention of demonstrating the certainty of any causal law. He simply explicated the constitutive dynamics of how we arrive at the Humean causation,
rather than simply repudiating it. This is really important. Other attempts to assimilate causation to logical entailment, for example, Ewing, Mayerson, Cohen, Blanchard, may be said to have failed for diverse reasons such as mistaken conception of logical identity or necessity, mistaken conception of the meaning of the conservation laws, etc. So once we purge these what you might call to be pre-scientific connotations of causation,
a more detailed definition of causation may proceed and may emerge by attending to the types and forms of laws and the domains and levels of their application. forms, domains, and levels of application. So to this end, it will be helpful to distinguish classes of laws under the following rubrics. 1. Types. So types of causality. undeterministic, i.e. a strict and precise predictability, precise not in the sense that
it's fixed, I mean don't think like a Consenso philosopher, like you say to a French philosopher that it's fixed or precise, that as if there is no going to change if something anomaly might emerge, no, no, it's just simply a strict predictability from a statistical point of view, which doesn't mean that it is absolute, like a kind of Laplacian determinism. No, scientific determinism is a statistical notion, i.e. strict and precise predictability of individual events or of some of their aspects, to purely a statistical type, i.e. predictability
on the basis of stable frequency ratios or according to strict laws governing frequency distributions. So that was types, forms. One qualitative. For example, friction produces heat. and chlorine combine into hydrochloric acid. Thick layers of lead are not penetrated by x-ray, etc. Semi-quantitive, that is to say topological, for example, the higher the
temperature the greater the speed of chemical reactions the greater distance the smaller the force only the relations of equal and greater than are here defined in the semi-quantitive or topological forms of causality three Fully quantitative, that is to say, metrical forms of causality. Here we express functional relationships between, so for example, F equals G fraction M1 M2
over r2 r exponent 2. Here we express the functional relationships between magnitudes defined in terms of equality of intervals, zero points and units in addition to the topological ordering which is presupposed already. 3. So we have already have types, forms and now we have domains. 3 domains. temporal one temporal that is to say sequential this is the most common form of scientific law most regularities of our world pertain to temporal succession at least the semblance of sequentiality if not time asymmet temporal time asymmetry
Like, you know, the recording tape example that we had a few sessions ago. Two co-existential, namely simultaneous. For example, the regular co-presence of certain characteristics such as of electric and thermal conductivity, generally of various physical and chemical properties of substances, organisms, etc., or regular concomitances in changes of such properties, example of gravitational
and inertial mass. These are all classifications of what we mean by domains. And, you know, anchoring the scientific concept of causality in the topic of domains. Four levels or scales, which we have talked about at length. We can at least, at the very least, classify the idea of levels with regard to causality into two categories. One macro or molar level, usually are macroscopic, and hence they have phenomenological properties.
They are fully observer dependent from a phenomenological perspective. To micro or molecular level, think of Boltzmann example that I have made. So of course, when we are talking about scales and levels, there are various ways of to distinguish levels and scales. And in this case, the distinction between macro or molar and micro molecular is relative.
There may be as many levels as it is methodologically fruitful to distinguish. classical thermodynamics with its concepts of temperature pressure energy entropy etc is molar in contradistinction to a statistical namely molecular thermodynamics we talked about Boltzmann and Gibbs once the language of of the micro-science or the micro-model is introduced, the concept of the corresponding macro-laws become explicitly definable in terms of the micro-concepts.
Remember, we talked about, for example, irreversible processes. Gas escapes from a sealed, an opened bottle which previously was sealed. It's an irreversible process. And that can only be actually approached within the domain of macro scales or molar level, which is phenomenological. But once we refine the concept of irreversible process, then we have to explain it in virtue
of molecular laws of mechanics at the molecular level which are time symmetrical time asymmetry has no room at that level so hence we have to reinvent the concept of an irreversible phenomenon in terms of an ensemble of, an statistical ensemble of colliding particles or molecules. With understanding that the colliding molecules don't have such observable phenomena properties. They don't have irreversibility properties.
prima facie and that was basically how Boltzmann initially explained the second law of thermodynamic by virtue of a statistical and symbols to show that no matter how much we configure a gas given this amount of time the finite amount of time there is a tendency and a statistical tendency toward equilibrium, increase in entropy. Thus the ordinary concept of macro temperature of a gas may be defined in terms of the average
velocities of the molecules composing the gas. Analogously, the macro concept of the intensity of an electric current may be defined in terms of the number of electrons that pass through a wire per unit of time. Empirical laws in sociology are formulated in typical macro concepts. descending a scale toward increasing molecular or what you might call to be micro levels, kind of an explicatory vector, we may then distinguish the concepts of behavioristic
psychology, for example dealing with dispositions, motivations, learning processes, etc., of individuals to the north side physiological processes underlying the behavior, the said behavior. And ultimately at least two levels of physicochemical conceptualizations, i.e. again in terms of classical thermodynamics molecular and finally atomic quantum and subatomic theories. Another distinction, atomistic, additive, summative, mechanistic, and holistic, organic, emergent, telic, gestalt-like configuration, so on and so forth, while not necessarily
without merit, is fraught with dangers of metaphysical confusions, which as we talked about usually happens in terms of what mixing levels, flattening levels and their properties and the kind of epistemological requirements that they demand. Any questions before I move forward? I don't exactly understand how you have time asymmetry and an irreversible kind of process
or tendency. Well, you see, time asymmetry is essentially a phenomenological observation, a phenomenological observation. And time asymmetry is in fact responsible for the irreversibility. Many scientists however actually contend to this point and they don't, some agree, some don't. Well, literally, the whole point is that this brings back to the idea that how much we can separate sequentiality of events from the arrow of time, from the temporal time asymmetry.
You see? Now this has become a really, really interesting subject. And those of you who have read Granbaum, so we have a tape recorder or a computer which basically records a sequence of events on each frame or each unit of the tape recorder. So these are basically some sequences. Now, these sequences appear to us as narrating a thriller, a story, like almost a crime novel, or climax, that the gas in the first chamber, when you open the trapdoor to the second chamber,
chamber escapes to the second chamber but never comes back to the first chamber. Now, you see, this is the whole point. The sequentiality by itself does not mean that the gas cannot enter the first chamber. In fact, it does not give the phenomenological impression of this irreversible process of gas escape from the first chamber. The only reason that this happened is for two things. One, the phenomenological, namely time asymmetric,
impression of the aggregate of such sequences. two which is basically simply an addendum to what i just said is that a sequence a sequence of events has analytic they are analytical basically they are not synthetic when we deal with sequence from our phenomenological perspective we always misinterpret or reinterpret the analytic content of a given sequence as the synthetic content
of that sequence. Hence, just because a bunch of frames recorded by this tape recorder showing that the gas has such and such positions and such and such time stamp time and space stamped uh criteria basically characteristics this doesn't mean that there is an unfolding of a narrative that goes from the beginning toward the end that is a synthetic content and the synthetic content already presupposes time asymmetry, a phenomenological characteristic of the sequence.
The sequence by itself is just what you might call to be different occurrences that can actually be combined from a statistical perspective in all sorts of different ways, hence the symmetry of the mechanical laws at the statistical level. You can, another way to think about it is like the montage in cinema. So you have this kind of nonlinear dynamic or montage of a movie, flashbacks, flash forwards, everything goes toward the end, to the beginning, something might actually emerge right at the middle, but nevertheless.
There is also a montage which is kind of a narrative from beginning to the end. this edit, this montage, is really the difference between synthetic and analytic content of the sequence. From an analytic content perspective, sequentiality does not mean in the common sense idea of a sequence that it starts from point zero and flows to time n or space n. from the synthetic content which is essentially a phenomenological time asymmetric description or interpretation of the sequentiality it appears that the sequence actually takes place within one
direction and in fact every register or every picture recorded on this type I mean tape recorder is connected to the previous one there is a causal efficacy between record at time t1 space 0 to record at time t2 space 1 And you say this causal connection is synthetic?
At the level of that sequence, yes. Okay, okay. As a synthetic content, yes. So then we have two things. One would be like the synthetic component of the sort of like registration, which is undeniable but then the other component would be like what what synthetic content you're producing and then the question there becomes um and this is as you said it's a contentious topic among physicists but is that can you reformulate this macroscopic phenomenological synthetic principle of time asymmetry in terms of the laws of molecular physics, correct? Yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And also, again, just both in response to Christian and also Sio,
the thing is that the analytic content of a sequence by itself does not yield the flow of the sequence, which is the synthetic contents. In order for you to have the synthetic content, AKA the dynamic picture of the sequence, or a flow from this picture to this picture at the end, you need to have a component. And that component is essentially time asymmetry. And time asymmetry is only a macroscopic, a macro level characteristic or feature. It has no room, as Boltzmann identified, it has
no room at the level of molecular level or a statistical physics. Is it only time asymmetry? Because I feel like time asymmetry would be like a particular form of this rule and more generally it would be say something like the rule of the reproductive, of Kant's reproductive imagination. Yes, but even when you think about, even in the sense of Kant, when you think about that kind of reproductive imagination, the very reason just because there is a sequence, okay, let me, okay, so we have two lines, it's a table, okay?
It has two lines, two rows, one sequence one, one sequence two. Imagine that the sequence one represents certain memories of some event or event impressions in a Kantian sense. And then on the second row, we have the memory impressions and correspondingly the sequence attributed to that of another event. So two sequences, essentially these rows show two different sequences corresponding to their
own different events or memory impressions of such events. Now according to this thing that Christian said, and this is really a dilemma in Kant, let's just say that we only have the memory impression of the sequence. Simply we only have the sequence and not time asymmetry. We don't have any temporal consciousness of any sort. We only have the memory impression. And remember, the memory impression in Kant simply means the sequence in a Jungian sense, okay? So there we have a sequence one and sequence two.
But in so far, as the content of sequences are analytic rather than synthetic, precisely because just like you can think about them as a tape, as a kind of film in old cameras, So each of the sequences is just simply a square, a unit, time-stamped, and you roll the camera. These are just like these. So we have this and we have that. Sequence 1, sequence 2. At this level, all we have are the synthetic content of each individual sequence or record or negative photo. We don't have unfolding of events.
We don't have, in fact, like a kind of an impression of the kind of events that these individual records belonging to these two different sequences narrate. We don't have a story at this level. Hence, at the level of analyticity of sequences, and this is Max Agar's critique of Kant, which is absolutely phenomenal. We can in fact, he shows that we can in fact create arbitrary sequences out of simply these two sequences. But then which of them are correct? Because simply if you only have the analytic content of each record belonging to each sequence,
then you can put them together in many, many, many possible ways to create groups of events. But then which of them are actually illusory and which of them are veridical? Well we cannot say at this level. So the only way that you can do a semblance of arriving at synthetic contents so you can attribute sequence 1 to event 1 and sequence 2 to event 2 is by way of introducing a new factor, time asymmetry, which is absolutely absent in Kant of course. It is already taken for granted. Would it make sense to talk about different forms of time asymmetry, maybe existing at different levels?
Like for example- Yes, yes, there are actually, people have done, Jozefnick actually talks about this. Yes, well, I mean, we can also generalize the notion of time asymmetry to the most general thing, simply the idea of a flow, a flow. synthetic content. When we have a flow, it means that each record of the sequence is correlated to another sequence. But the sequence itself does not presume such a thing, such a flow, such a connection, such a correlation between each time and space stamped picture. So duration is agnostic to what registers it?
Kind of, yes. Go on, Teo, you were saying. I guess, okay, so time asymmetry is phenomenological. It just has to do with our position as an observer. And at the micro level, I think what we want to say is at the ontological level, it's analytic and it's irreversible. It's just laid out. reversible reversible reversible not irreversible reversible reversible yes okay well i'll i have a question about that in a little bit if it seems like the observational phenomenological asymmetric position
needs to have some the analytic needs to give an account of how the observation would take place as asymmetric. So we'd have to come up with a description of... Well, you see, this gets... You are opening a can of worms here. I just want to finish the thought. Okay, go on. Because, okay, part of what hinges upon doing science is the fact that we require time to get to know things to learn and Science doesn't need that science doesn't need that
Why science needs time in the phenomenological perspective science uses the notion of time, but it's not phenomenological time Okay, so it doesn't you you want to say it doesn't use phenomenological time? Absolutely not but that's what that the point but that's exactly the point that Boltzmann made and I just basically reiterated with regard to the notion of causality, is just even though we know that phenomenological concept of temporality or time has no place at the micro level of scientific inquiry, even scientists mistakenly, as Boltzmann noticed with his own solution
up to the second law of thermodynamics, bring an assumption that belongs only to the macro level to the micro level. That's all about it. And that's basically, that shows that even when we think our notion of causality is purged from all pre-critical, pre-scientific concepts or connotations, if we are not observant of the level criteria and their fidelity standards, then we might basically err and bring something that only belongs to the macro, and we know that it is not really scientific, it's phenomenological
per se, bring it and apply it to the micro level. Okay, I think I maybe my questions irrelevant then but it's just that the macroscopic asymmetric view. Macroscopic, macroscopic asymmetric view. Right, that the macroscopic asymmetric view has a way of understanding how it would make adjustments in its methodology. But the microscopic view, I don't understand how it can give a description of how a methodology would come to have grips upon reality to begin with. It seems like it would only be able to... Well, I don't think that this is essentially true.
Okay, you see, this is really part of the history of science that yes, for a certain amount of, you know, a certain history of science deals with macroscopic phenomena. But at some point, with Gibbs and Boltzmann, the course of science fundamentally changed. We no longer in fact deal with the macroscopic phenomenon or macroscopic characterization of phenomenon, but simply with microphysics, microphysics, statistical, quantum, so on and so forth. At these levels, all we have are metricizations, statistical ensembles, so on and so forth.
And that's basically what you might say is the gap, not a methodological gap perhaps, not a kind of a theoretical gap, the methodological gap between Newton, Schrodinger and Einstein. Okay, we should go on. Oh, I have one question. Sure. Okay. So one is a speculative question and one is just in terms of clarity. clarification. So from a speculative standpoint, what would it look like to have
a macrocosmic notion of physics or reality, whatnot, that does not have time asymmetry? Like what, like what kind, like, is that accessible to some kind of creature phenomenologically? And A, does not, and that's sort of like a speculative question. And the related question is, does that matter? or are we just sort of building on car naps, like different grammars for different categories of observation or aspects of reality of the world, whatnot?
Sure. Okay. I mean, the way that I think about it, and I need to think about this carefully, but for now I would say that we can actually reformulate your question in terms of the unity of science is the unity of science possible at the macro physics or is it only possible at micro physics people like Boltzmann Schrodinger, even Maxwell and of course Mac and you know many other people think
that is absolutely absurd. We can never have this kind of unitary view at the and microphysics, precisely because microphysics is essentially phenomenological. And phenomenological is essentially tethered or chained or yoked to different subjective transcendental structures. Kant's questions of aliens rears its head. It is not that aliens do exist, but we can postulate different kinds of constitutional systems since the time of Rosero.
And from those kinds of constitutional of phenomenological systems, we can in fact see different kinds of phenomena. And such phenomena by virtue that subjective phenomenological constitution is contingent and local, cannot all be put together. This is number one, which is basically more of a scientific thing. And hence the other side of this coin is that only at the level of microphysics we can have some sort of unity. Of course this brings a few other nasty problems into the equation. The problem of reductionism and fundamentalism.
In the sense that if we say that we cannot have this kind of unitary vision of the phenomenon at the microphysical level, and we can only have it at the microphysical level, then how far are we willing to go down in order to say that, for example, level zero, so-called level zero, is actually what you might call to be responsible for everything else. at the micro and the macro level. So this is also a dilemma. I actually, I am more willing to go between these two what you might call the problematic answers
in the sense that yes, I do believe that the phenomenological perspective cannot yield something like a unitary vision. science or anything else precisely because we can postulate we can simply postulate different constitutions of subjective phenomenological perception in fact advances in cognitive science and artificial intelligence already show us that we can do that and the results would be fundamentally different but But then I'm also not a fundamentalist or reductionist. But who am I? I don't know. This is, I think, an avenue for research.
And it's quite a fruitful one. And it is essentially, yes, as you said, it's a Carnap saw this, but Carnap also didn't have a fundamental solution to it. I think this is really a serious philosophical question that people just either try to sweep it under the rug or just forget about it as if it's going to miraculously go away no it doesn't i keep thinking about theo's question um and so So it seems like, you know, if we're talking about philosophy of science, no matter what
level of description we're talking about, the problem of our epistemic tools that we're employing is a relevant question. Which makes me ask, like, what does the history of science look like at the micrological level if it doesn't presuppose any sort of subject which is trying to gain traction on these types of problems? Well, it doesn't presuppose that it is purged of such assumptions at the microphysical level it just simply say that it is capable of by virtue of its canonical methodology to mitigate
the ingression of macro physical assumption to micro physical assumption this is basically essentially modern physics a statistical physics a statistical physics this is this is it i mean And you see it, components of statistical physics, the time of Boltzmann moving to Einstein, and today's quantum and subatomic field theory. This is it. This is how it looks like. But even then, insofar as it's simply the macro-physical assumptions are mitigated, rather than being purged in their entirety, philosophers of science and also scientists
are actually vigilant to detect possible macro-physical assumptions that have been illicitly smuggled into micro-physical presuppositions. Can we have a rest please? Yeah, let's take a five-minute break. Good. All right. Sounds good.
Not that it is compulsory, but unless I know that some of you do. I am. It's just slow going. I've been starting to write more in general. Good, excellent. Yeah, it's going to take time though, but I've committed to reading all of the Alfvau and about 70 pages in. How is it? I'm liking it quite a bit. Sometimes I think there's a little bit of naivety in some places, but sometimes I'm like, oh, this is really... This is... Remember that he wrote this like, what? It's like he was 30s, late 30s. I mean, he writes one of the greatest masterpieces
in all philosophy. One of the most difficult ones is, and what are we doing? Drooling day in, day out, while Carnac writes a vow in his late 30s? Yeah, see, I can only hope that I write something remotely interesting by highlight movies. Yes. Yes. Can you hear about anything related to the course or do you like to write something about articulation? Svilana, you are a little bit, your voice is kind of coming with noise. Does also people hear it like that?
Yeah, it's just kind of hard to hear you. Can you speak directly into the mic maybe? Okay, I'll try. I'm sorry. It's better? Yeah. Yes, much better. Yeah. So can we write about anything related to the course? or you were asked to write specifically about artificial intelligence? No, only anything that is related to the course, any of these topics that we have been talking about. No, AI is not part of this course, fortunately. So anything, any kind of, you know, I mean, any topic in philosophy of science would be, I think, quite a good, you know,
endeavor great do we have a deadline no there is no deadline i'm sure that there is a deadline but i'm not the man on deadlines if i don't fulfill them why should i ask other people who filled great I think I'll have to need some other resources to think about. Well, when I went to Minnesota for my vacation, you know, I mean, it's really interesting that, of course, the University of Minnesota is one of the oldest universities.
And so, you know, we went to these obscure towns at the middle of nowhere, and I went to these bookstores in these towns, which are absolutely, like, literally, I mean, if you think that Connecticut is bad, well, let me tell you this. I saw some really weird uncharted territories, and they have, like, these used bookstores, and I bought some books. Well, my greatest find was I came out of this coffee shop and, you know, I was just walking along the sidewalk and then I saw the next shop is this kind of like, you know, when a store goes bankrupt
or they want to close and they get rid of everything? It was a kind of completely a rinky-dinky store. and then we went into it and we saw some books and maps mysticism Buddha you know you know new age sex whatever and then we asked you know is there are there any philosophy books which is the worst kind of question you can ask in America and the old guy he was like really old And he said that yes, yes, yes, the art, you know, in the back. I thought, okay, usually when they call philosophy, it's just like Buddhist metaphysics and so on and so forth.
So I went there and holy fucking shit, I saw a whole section of philosophy of science, great, great manuscripts, some of them unpublished interdepartmental manuscripts. And so I took a few because I didn't know how much he's going to charge. Because if you show interest in these kinds of sounds, this is a thousand dollars. And he said that, oh, this is really a great book by Gustav Bergman. I thought that he's trying to charge me. He doesn't know who Gustav Bergman is. And he said that, well, maybe you should go look there and read some Carnap and I have some for you go some other good Vienna circle they have always you know they
are not published they are just basically in university manuscripts and then he told me that he was a student of Herbert Feigl so we spend an hour talking about Vienna circle and Feigl but yeah so you can come across a ship Fantastic finds. Where do you find this guy? Of all places. And then it made sense because majority of Vienna circle actually went to Minnesota. After the rise of Nazism, they went to the University of Minnesota and taught there.
And he had his own cot bed in the store by the way. Which actually makes the whole philosophy thing more credible. Philosophers, that's how your life ends man. If you go to the art philosophy. You have to live in your own store. Imagine how sad he probably was that he had to sell all these... he sold me he sold me all of the books i i almost bought i don't know how many books i bought he sold me every single one of them for one dollar oh wow majority of them were 300 dollar just nearly you some of them were not even available yeah i mean i bet i bet you know with his background
he was also probably a bit depressed about having to sell you know yeah the thing is that you know I definitely want to sell my youth books when I run out of retirement funds to some philosopher not some other person Anyway, causality. Yes, okay. So as I mentioned, most combinations of each case of these four criteria that I mentioned,
Most combinations of each case in one rubric with some one in other rubrics yield important further classes of laws actually exemplified in various fields of knowledge. The term cause and effect of ordinary language need not be rejected if proper causation is employed in their application. In most of the practically significant application we must remember that it is an entire set of conditions that represent the cause of an event. You remember I dismissed the idea of a singular cause and effect as purely pre-scientific psychological conception. Seneca told me to
kill myself. My break is of work and hence my car crashed into a tree. These are all You see, we are not, the whole idea of a singular cause and effect, one cause, one effect, one cause, many effects, it's just pre-scientific. In the domain of science, we only deal with a set of correlated causes. correlation it can either be derived from you know the the classes that I mentioned the domain the type forms and levels or in the correlation with the effect and the effect can also be interpreted precisely in terms of such
classes under which cause or the notion of causality was defined. Otherwise we should have to identify the cause with the eliciting event or the differential factor which given the total set of conditions is sufficient to produce the effect in question. Since all concept formation is abstractive we must also remember that what is designated as cause or effect in a complex situation is usually only some factor, aspect, magnitude, etc. that we select boldface from a more complex
and possibly inexhaustible welter of factual and counterfactual details. Essentially, what does this mean with regard to the notion or the concept of causation? the concept of causation in scientific canon requires a form of bracketing, a form of constraining and hence the idea of natural law or natural sciences is absolutely absurd
without the concept of bracketing or constraints upon the ramification of the causal factors. This is sort of in similar terms what you said a few weeks ago about the sort of modal propositions where it's not causality happened this way, but causality happens restricted within this scope of- Context, context sensitivity, yes, absolutely, yes. And thank you for suggesting it
because that's exactly why I wrote this, precisely because I'm just simply trying to bring back of the stuff that we have been talking about and kind of reread them. So A causes B, or what is tantamount, A is the cause of B, means that whenever and wherever A occurs, it is followed or attended by B. Since a precise repetition of A may not be feasible or in fact discoverable unless a stringent formulation would use something like a mathematical limit process. And what you might call to be a mathematical limit
process in this sense is what you might call to be a kind of what you might call to be a mathematical correspondence or equivalence of what we call in language context sensitivity. in our conversations. When I say flower in our conversation, imagine we have a dialogue, we talk about flower, but at some point the concept flower is no longer actually refers to actual flower. It might be actually a proper name of a girl. So, this is important.
A less stringent formulation would use something like a mathematical limit process. The more the actual condition A' approximates the conceived, namely ideal condition A, the more actual effect B' will approximate the ideal effect B. And this approximation can be couched in terms of a limit process, couched in particular, couched in a process for Weistras. In the case of unrepeatable unique events as described in its historical disciplines
as in the history of inorganic, organic, mental, social, cultural, and individual biographical occurrences, the assertion of causal relations as in statements regarding who or what influence events to what degree and in which direction, but it is not meaningless, just as in the considerations of contrary-to-fact conditionals, the so-called if-y questions. We must here fall back upon a system of laws only indirectly and incompletely confirmed
but nonetheless the basis of prediction, explanations, and answers to iffy questions. On the whole, the ordinary cause-effect terminology fits best the qualitative macro level. Thus, it is part and parcel of the language of common sense and of those levels of science which deal with gross behaviors and have not as yet introduced quantitative, namely metrical concepts. Once measurement is introduced, the gross cause-effect relation gives way to a mathematical formulation in terms of a functional relationship.
functional equations between one or many or more independent variables and one dependent variable or sets of such equations, differential and integral equations, whenever we relate rates of change or gradients with other variables or where certain integral aspects of functions are related to other variables. Now common observation, and especially the success of the physical sciences, at least until about 1900, have tended to establish the following connotations of causality in terms of one determinism, i.e., ideally, boldface, complete and precise predictability given the
momentary conditions, the pertinent laws and the required mathematical techniques. The best known formulation of this idea, and also one of the most cursed one, is contained in a famous passage of Laplace. The possibility of a world formula and consequently of a complete world calendar of events, past, present and future must however not be identified with the concept of determinism in the Laplacian sense. Precisely because for Laplace the concept of determinism is what you might call to be
a utopianistic vision of causality. a correlate of the Aristotelian final cause where we know that such and such phenomenon will absolutely under every fucking condition under every form of interference and disturbance will result in such an effect this is however not determinism is interpreted in the scientific canon today Determinism is simply the idea of a statistic causality from a statistical point of view. 2.
Homogeneity and isotropy of space and homogeneity of time. This principle clearly formulated by Maxwell. states the irrelevance of absolute space or time coordinates and in this sense the purely rational character of space and time as seen already by Leibniz and re-emphasized in Einstein's theory of relativity. The place and the time at which events occur do not by themselves have any modifying effect on these events. Mathematically, this may be expressed by saying that the space and time variables do not enter
explicitly into the functions representing natural loss. The same sort of irrelevance applies to direction in the space, as in the case of propagation of forces. causes same effects make sense only if there is such a neutral medium as a space and time like the Kantian idea of absolute space and time as simply rest containers containers relations without relato different so Same causes, same effects make sense only if there is such a neutral medium as space-time,
which thus is no more than a principium individualis. Differences in effects must always be accounted for in terms of differences in the conditions, not in terms of purely a spatio-temporal location. The empirical factual and hence ultimately non-necessary character of this principle of homogeneity becomes clear through a consideration of its denial. This would be equivalent to asserting the absolute character of a space and or time. Some of the basic physical constants would then be really variable in a space and or time and these variations would under our supposition not be accountable by functional
relations to any other physical variables except those of space and time. In such a queer world or esoteric world, determinism need not be invalid. The functions, monotonic, periodic or whatnot, might well be capable of successful extrapolation. 3. Contiguity or nearby action. This principle, which established itself firmly in the minds of the 19th century physicists, mainly owing to the field theories of Faraday and Maxwell, displays all previous notions of action at a distance. The propagation of electric or magnetic fields, even when the ether hypothesis had been relinquished,
was conceived as a process that spreads continuously from point to point in space. One must ask what precisely is exerted by this rather pictorial phrase? As far as empirically confirmable content is concerned, it seems to assert no more than that, a, there is an upper limit to the propagation speed of causal influences. This limit according to the theory of relativity is approximately 8600 miles per second, i.e. speed of light or of the electromagnetic waves generally in the vacuum.
The propagation is spatially contiguous in the sense that in all regions of space that lie between the source of energy and any recipient absorber, other recipients introduced there in between would also be affected. An analogous principle holds for time. And that modification of behavior, be it inorganic or organic, seem to be based on modification of a structure and function which extend continuously through time. C. The diminution of effects with increasing distance in Euclidean space generally according to an inverse square function. These three components of the meaning of continuity may serve to explicate the common sense phrase
The cause acts only where it is. This might be a spatial formulation of this cause. Kant actually has a temporal interpretation of this phrase, and that's called instantaneous causation. Just search it. Instantaneous causation. That no matter how much we extend the interval, we can in fact put a limit on it and actually see that the cause instantaneously leads to something far ahead of it.
So, the continuity of functions and usually also of their first and second derivations, which represents the metrical relations between measurable or hypothetically inferred magnitudes, this may be taken as an explication of Leibniz lex continui. Let me type it here. Natura non facid saltus. Obviously, even in the classical physics there was not and there could not have been any
conclusive evidence for this bold principle. Apparently, discontinuous change, like the increase in the pressure in the case of an explosion, can always be described as a rapid but continuous change. The idea of continuity, especially in 19th century field physics, simply comes down to this. if not all, of the basic laws of nature can be conveniently represented by means of mathematical functions that are strictly continuous. The utilization of the mathematical continuum, particularly of the real numbers, is no more
than an expedient device for elegant mathematical formulation and computation, a rather a small subset of the rational numbers within principle suffice for representing the actually measurable values of physical magnitudes and their functional relations. There is, however, an empirical core in the continuity principle. In many types of phenomenon described in classical mechanics and electromagnetics, there is no striking evidence for abrupt change of state. Nevertheless, the atomic structure of matter and certain singularities in the solution of the differential equations, even of field physics, involve discontinuities which are
not easily explained away. They are simply modeled by these such continuities. Number five, practical irreversibility, namely temporal asymmetry. We have talked about this, so I'm not going to go over it. So, these are the components of what you might call to be the scientific account of causality today. Now, let's talk about opening discussion because we have almost like 40 minutes. With regard to what I would say, I have actually heard this from many many brilliant and bright
philosophers of continental philosophy, and which I think is actually quite, I don't want to say ignorant, but I would say highly contentious claim that actually is rooted in precisely the problem of causation. So many of the, you have heard that content of philosophers believe in contingency and indeterminacy, and analytic philosophers or philosopher science believe in determinacy, and then variations, less what you might call to be awkward, philosophically awkward variations
of such phrase is that, well, causality determinism means fixed causal effect relationships. And the point of philosophy is to make things happen even if things are fixed. All sorts of this kind of absurd talks that are brought about against philosophy of science and causality and determinism. And of course let's not mention that many people actually think by determinism, Laplacian determinism, which is essentially, you know, it's like you are trying to say that, you know, a Newtonian system is based on Ptolemy equations of celestial bodies.
So with all that said, I want you to start to make a discussion that we can, precisely because this is I think an important discussion, in the sense that the question of determinism is essentially not only a, what you might call to be scientific topic, but also a genuine philosophical topic precisely because the idea of determinism comes hand in hand with
the idea of scientific causality. There are at least, I would say, four arguments by which confusion about the concept of determinism leads to what you might call to be pseudo-problems of modern continental philosophy. I'm sure you have heard of them, but let me just go over them very briefly and then we talk about them, how we can criticize such views from purely philosophy of science but also philosophical
argument. One, human behavior is not amenable to causal description and therefore not predictable, since each individual is unique and not exactly like anyone else. Argument one. Argument two, even if there is a causal order in the phenomena of human behavior, it is so complex as to elude discovery permanently. ineffability of human behavior. Three, in the physical sciences, a present fact is always determined by past facts, but in human behavior, present behavior is oriented toward future goals and thus determined, bold
face with a few emoticons around it, that's how the content of philosophers usually put it, thus determined by these future goals. 4. If human behavior were part of the causal order of events and thereby in principle predictable, it would be futile to attempt to make a choice between good and evil, to arrive at a philosophy of odds in the kind of rationalist philosophy, meaningless to hold men responsible for their deeds, unjust to inflict punishment, and naive to take seriously such remorse or guilt as is professed for past misdeeds.
In short, the argument is that to assume the principle of causality in human behavior is is incompatible with the knowing fact that people respond meaningfully to axiological oughts. I ought to do this. I should take such responsibility. I mean, a good example of this is Scott Baker and this whole idea of this kind of charade of neuroscientific, pseudo-neuroscientific attack on human responsibilities by virtue that we are simply the creature of basic mechanisms and hence on the servitude of their causal
influence. So criticize such views and let's open the discussion. What was the last one, Reza? Sorry. It's what you might call to be the incumbenzierability between causal determinism and moral and rational authority and responsibility. Why didn't you mention contingency? Well, you see, the whole point, so you get two things. These arguments actually give rise to two correlated views.
One, the determinism. You can get, for example, human is too complex to talk about, you know, all these kinds of ineffable ideas of the human. Pan-psychic, oh, well, we shouldn't scientifically talk about human because human has such emotions and you know it's like kind of these or the kind of like a Scott Baker the idea that you know if you are under causal mechanisms by our neuroscientific structure then literally it would be absurd talk about rational authority and responsibility so this is one it's basically what you might call to be argument from determinism they are happy with determinism but argument from
Non-determinism has also an opposite side which you might call to be exactly is correlated with the first. It's basically parasitizing on the same arguments. It's arguments from indeterminacy. Human is indeterminate, too complex. We have such thing as contingency, as absolute chaos. That scientific laws can at any time be basically trashed, so on and so forth. So indeterminacy, argument from indeterminacy, and capricious arguments from the points of this kind of determinacy are in fact two correlated sides.
We can in fact, my idea is that we can in fact preserve determinacy without either falling to these categories. In fact, determinacy does not forgo with the idea of rational or axiological responsibility and authority. It simply shows that in fact when we do judge, there is a component of causal reliability behind our beliefs. But also many other discussions, but I want you guys to unpack these and start the discussion.
So where does that, so you're saying that there's a realm of sort of reasons or space of reasons or what not that is maybe one of... Can live a happy life ever after with determinism. That's what I want to say. There is absolutely no divorce between determinism and rationalism. and determinism, the idea, the scientific idea of determinism, namely causality, and rationalism come hand in hand without it, literally we can neither talk about science nor about our values. Yeah.
So what, this, just, just clarify this for me. I might be off the mark, I'm sorry, but like... No, no, no, go on. So the ideas, the decisions about what is right or wrong or what kind of political system you're going to have, these aren't sort of determined on a molecular level or totally like meaningless or something. they would constitute one of the levels or scales or types within your model.
Yes. Is that right? But like what, though? Where does culture or where does normative rationality or something, where do they fit on your four... They don't. They are not essentially causal. they use causal factors, namely determinism, as point of constitution of making veridical claims. You see, as early as Kant, we already have this. If I can talk about a rose or a kitten that I'm going to hug and love and kiss,
it's because there is actually a causal factor here. I am dealing with such cause and effects, not only what counts as a kitten, that the concept of a kitten has subsumed, but also the relation between the kitten and me. These are all causal efficacy and hence under the criteria of determinism. The whole point is that if I did not have this causal determinism, if I did not have this kind of behavioral causal regularities with a kitty, In fact, I wouldn't have such beliefs. The reliability of my beliefs and what can I derive from my epistemological beliefs in order to arrive at what I ought to do with this kitten is actually undergirded by the causal efficacy.
So there's... The kind of regularities that hold for a kitten, but also me, and also kitty and me. Okay. The reason that I hate... You see, people have... Okay, let's not even talk about such things. Let's talk about an illusion. fundamentally what you might call the psychological states from a Freudian perspective. Imagine I have been traumatized in childhood, I have seen someone murdered and I've seen a pool of blood, okay? So then I have this irrational
fear of anything red red items the belief that I have to get rid of and escape from anything that is a red item colored red so you then take out all the red things in your house what was the causality that removed them from it the causality doesn't extend to that level It just simply means that my belief or my emotion with regard to the red item has actually a causal reliability. And that's why there are such a thing as psychotherapies that can show me that, well, these are irrational.
The presence of our blood, the hatred of red items. There is a causal reliability. determinism, that is the core of my belief. And without the core of this belief, I couldn't in fact have the belief in the first place about hatred or my emotion or belief about red items. You see, so what I'm trying to say is that the causal reliability, or what you might call determinism does not by any means reject or refute our values it simply is what you might call to be our beliefs are actually can be said to be approximately reliable precisely because
there are causal factors deterministic causal factors behind them but they they constitute something in themselves like a kind of um you know a culture is a kind of um externality like an artifice that we create and we then interact with so yes but how do we create it if not through causal factors because we see that such and such have such regularities that we believe, even implicitly, not explicitly. I don't mean that culture is essentially a product of an explicitation. I'm just asking, is there a kind of top-down, to what degree is there a kind of top-down, you know,
it seems to be sort of bottom-up, like the ideas are secondary. No, no, absolutely not. It is what you might call to be bottom-up come top-down. This is how it is. Arts in a Kantian sense can only have an epistemological status if they have a causal reliability, implicit causal reliability. However, implicit causal reliability cannot overrule the order of odds, they can show that there is a causal reliability to
believe in such things, but they cannot dictate what kind of odds can be driven or extracted from the order of the causal is. So it's what you might call to be an intransitive, an intransitive hierarchical intransitive, meaning in one way, traffic within the two, top down and bottom up. Bottom up causal factors give us implicit reliability for certain beliefs, and hence by virtue of this causal reliability, which is implicit, we arrive at certain kind of
epistemological beliefs about as we ought to do. Otherwise we couldn't even say what we ought to do. However, we can also come and see it from the top down view that oughts are capable of, precisely because they are of the rash purity, the rash on order, capable of sidestepping from certain kinds of, causal factors or determinations towards certain other kinds of causal factors and determinations, making things change.
So four points. One, human behavior is not amenable to causal description because it's too complex. Two, even if there is a causal order in the phenomenon of, sorry, one, human behavior is not amenable to causal description and therefore not predictable. Since each individual is unique, uniqueness of individual, first argument. Two, human is too complex, the complexity of the human. Three, present fact is always determined by past facts, but in human behavior, for example, motivations, emotions, beliefs, so on and so forth, the present is determined by the future rather than the idea of determinism in the causal vector, what you might say,
something past determines something that of the future. determinism is essentially incommensurable with rational and moral responsibility and authority. So, I want you to think about possible points of criticism against such ideas, with the understanding that these arguments from determinism, the negative understanding of determinism, lead to the argument from indeterminism, and hence the glorification of such notions as contingency, indeterminacy, absolute chaos, so on and so forth.
Can we say that there is no such a thing as a human behavior as such just like when we introduce this notion of human behavior just in the out of the blue in empty space like we can say all sorts of things and we can start to debate and and talk but in order to have a scientific kind of approach to human behavior we'll have to set up a certain space theoretical space in which we will have to discuss human behavior, different parameters, and then describe it as, I don't know, a set of relations or... But Esvidlana, when you talk to a deterministic person, and I'm not talking about the naive
old ones, but what you might call to be a deterministic person that comes from no scientific principles. Surely they agree that the very concept of human behavior is far from obvious. However, they will just simply make an example for you. They say that your decisions have already been made before even you realize it, even irrationally try to come up with a value what as what you ought to do it will just simply do this i have had actually many debates with with you know these kinds of determinants what you might call neurophysiological determinists that they are completely happy to just say oh okay
we are not going to general over generalize the idea of human behavior let's just talk about case by case. So there should be a kind of argument to diffuse their argument. And I think that is absolutely, this argument is already there. It's precisely because relying on a pretty scientific idea of determinism and causality. But I want you guys to think about it. I think one of the aspects that I find most complicated about this is actually the relationship and I'm open to correction obviously but the relationship between determinism
and methodology so would an analytic I'm probably giving a hugely naive version of this but wouldn't analytic observer lists cosmos like Laplace's demon or spinosis God which at some level I think is the metaphysics implicit in science yes would it allow for the methodological approach that science employs um no it won't there is no you see unfortunately I learned this lesson
the hard way and that's why to so many people I come my apologies to use this word as a prick because I absolutely do not believe that there is any way to come and zero the scientific philosophy or the scientific approach assimilated by philosophy with something that is metaphysically prejudiced or theological in nature, literally you cannot preach to them. It's just incommensurable. So what is, how can you do that? I literally don't know. I don't think that it's possible. by the virtue of the very principles that are at stake here,
all you can do is to actually show them that these two paths are fundamentally in command zero. Any person who tells you that they are in fact command zero is trying to cash in some sort of, you know, middle ground on behalf of one or the other. Can I answer some of the questions, have a stab at some of the problems? Go on, go on. Well, it might be that, I mean, with regard to the argument to sort of complexity or whatever, or, you know, couldn't you say that, you know, the subatomic particles are just as complicated,
you know, the atomic world is, there's nothing really specific or unique about humans or something. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, you nailed it. The whole point is, the idea is that science already knows about this complexity. As you say, subatomic movement is as complex as that of the human. And with regard to the neuro, I think you gave the answer to that before, with regard to the sort of neuro reductionist or whatever, which is that they're reducing it to one core fundamental world yeah yeah rather
than the the the sort of what did you what time did you use this sort of expanded multi-scaled yes multi-scaled structure yeah can I ask you something else that like you talked about the spec the the sort of future anterior and the speculative aspect that that could be some sort of like unique human causality or something. That's actually the ending of Ray Braziers. Doesn't Ray's book, his first book, have like a sort of speculative, I actually haven't got there, but he has a sort of speculative resolution to nihilism or something. Absolutely. I think you see many people balk at Ray, you know, that, oh, he's just a fucking rationalist shit.
Who is this old fart who has, you know, dismissed his own exciting nihilism? But the whole point that Ray always talked about is that nihilism is a precondition to reason. the understanding that the natural order of things don't tell us what we ought to do is a precondition to rationalism the idea that thought and the living are incommensurable And this is really, I think, a very, very fantastic point that many, many nihilists
don't realize this, that if you really do push, rather than simply becoming an aborted nihilist like Nietzsche, if you really push nihilism forward, you essentially arrive at rationalism for some reason, obvious reasons, of course. Do you think this plays in any way with the idea of cybernetics in terms of feedback looping as a condition, this sort of, as a formal necessity for revaluation of self-reflection and understanding of a system?
as a formal condition for re-evaluating the system as effectively kind of working. I'm being kind of vague right now, I apologize, but it seems that there is something very Wienerian-like in this idea that there should be this sort of a self-reflection on the conditions of a system in order for it to work properly almost. Yes, but yes, yes, I think cybernetic, what you might call to be, is paradigmatically is absolutely on the same line. However, when you look in the works of cybernetics, whether from the time of von Berg-Lanfey,
you know, to the modern cybernetics, you see that cybernetics as, in fact, a domain of science has its own biases and prejudices which somehow curtail the ambitions of its paradigmatic scope. So I don't think really cybernetic can inform that much about these issues. Yes, it can actually inform to some extent with regard to the paradigm, but not with regard to the details I mean Nick Land is a great example who takes cybernetics as something that
can inform us about the entire system of methods the armamentarium of methods cybernetics neither does understand the full details of a system what counts as a system nor what about it can seek precisely at least how it's classically formulated, we can seek methods or hypothetical methods that are beyond its scope. So yes, I agree with this, but to a certain extent only as only paradigmatically, but not we shouldn't take this very seriously I think. particularly if we are taking idea of cybernetics seriously and we should take it seriously
because it's useful, it's great and it's fundamentally going to change the world. But that doesn't mean that it can tell us everything. It's not a base principle or base principle. It is not what you might call to be a paradigm for the scientific method as such or the human behavior as such. So if we are accepting such constraints and caveats, then yes, I think a study of cybernetics system can actually contribute to the study of the human values with regard to such dilemmas and predicaments and so on and so forth. But until then, unfortunately, cybernetics to me seems to be another new age religion.
I have a question that emerged the other day, it's very relevant here, it's very brilliant geneticism. And essentially the conversation was kind of like, how do humans end up being able to have logical processes or whatever? I mean, I know that logical processes do not need the human or do not need, they're not dependent on any particular biological substrate.
What I wonder is, does it make sense to talk about material causal conditions which set the conditions of possibility for logical thought, even if the form of logical thought could utilize various substrates and then study how these causal conditions could be different in various substrates? This is intelligence and spirit too. I think it does. I think it absolutely does. Because you see, okay let's just not talk about this rational stuff.
Let's just talk about computation in the broadest possible sense. At least since the time of Turing, computation has always been introduced in conjunction with some sort of physical or structural constraints. Infinite time, I mean sorry, finite time, finite space, finite memory, so on and so forth. And hence your complexity class of computation will change according to whether you are at this level or that level of memory, space and time. So yes, if we interpret material conditions in that sense, I would say that yes, they absolutely are, you know, pivotal to understanding of our computational capacity and reimagining
such computational capacities. And I would say that this is precisely when a new rationalism will diverge from an old rationalism. The complexity of computation is correlated with material sufficiency or a structural sufficiency. You cannot talk about a proof of a mathematical theory if you don't have a finite time and if you have an infinite time.
You see, the finite time can be interpreted quite materialistically. No, yeah, I mean, just proving theorems of induction over infinite natural numbers. Yes, yes, absolutely. You know, finitistic resources in order to make such claims. Yes. Okay, okay, now that you didn't answer to any of my things that I invited you to… I tried to answer some of those. did you did you did okay other than i lost the list when i went to check the door okay okay other than you two no one answered so let me just go for the first three ones and then the moral
and rational responsibility i let it to you to to to think about it so these are my arguments which means that they are objectionable they can you know you can kick them out of the door whatever you want. Nevertheless, so argument from the uniqueness of human individuals, I mean this is the most basic one. This objection to the possibility of constructing a scientific psychology rests on several misunderstandings of the meaning of causality in science. To remove this misunderstanding, it must be pointed out that all particulars in the world are unique.
Whether they are physical objects like trees, physical events, electrons, light flashes, or human beings. The mere assertion that a thing is a particular means that it is in one way or another unique already as p suggested with regard to you know phenomenon studied by quantum physics or those of anthropology moral philosophy and science namely that of a human the mere assertion that a thing is a particular means that in one way or another unique different from all other objects of its own kind or of other kinds every insignificant tick
tick of my watch is a unique event, for no two ticks can be simultaneous with a given third event. Literally, no two watches are the same. No two watches are the same. With respect to uniqueness, each tick is on par with Lincoln delivery of the Gettysburg address. It is clear, however, that the uniqueness of physical events does not prevent them from being connected by causal laws, for present causal laws relate only some of the features
of a given set of events with some of the features of another set of events. For example, frictional processes are accompanied by development of heat insofar as they are frictional, whatever else they may be. A projectile fired under suitable conditions will describe a parabolic orbit regardless of the color of the projectile, its place of manufacture, who owns it, and so on and so forth. Since the cause-effect relation is a relation between kinds, really important, between kinds
of events, it is never necessary that all the features of a given cause be duplicated in order to produce the same kind of effect. It follows that when scientific psychologists assume the existence of causal laws for human behavior, this standpoint is not incompatible with the existence of great individual differences among men or humans, nor does it infringe on the uniqueness and dignity of each particular person. Every individual is unique by virtue of being a distinctive assemblage of characteristics,
precisely duplicated in any other individual. Nevertheless, it is quite conceivable that the following psychological law might, in fact, hold. If a male child having a specifiable characteristic is subjected to maternal hostility and has a strong paternal attachment at a certain stage of his development, he will develop paranoia during adult life. So the reason I'm using scientific psychology in regard to science is in line with Gurenbaum. It's so easy to repudiate this stupid argument through science, but I'm just using psychology,
which is something of a human science. And we'll develop paranoia during adult life. If this law holds, then children who are subjected to the stipulated conditions would in fact become paranoics, however much they may have differed in other respects in childhood and whatever their other differences may be once they are already insane. A variant of the argument against scientific psychology is that no psychologist can ever feel exactly like each of the diverse people whose feelings and behavior he's trying to understand. This form of the argument contains an additional misconception of the kind of understanding
or explanation that is sought by science, the impression that in order to explain aspects of human experience or behavior scientifically, the psychologist must himself directly have the experience in question in all its complexity. You see this stupid argument among many, I'm not, don't say that, resists discredit these respectable fields, but nevertheless we have to account for them. You see these arguments quite profuse among the colonial colonialist arguments, or even
feminism or any other, even alt-right among the males. How the fuck do you know how I feel? How can you actually talk if you are not me? Well, this is just a stupid, this argument. You do not need to be an electron in order to understand how an electron behaves. The impression that in order to explain aspects of human experience or behavior scientifically, the psychologist must himself directly have the experience in question in all its complexity. One who objects to scientific psychology on these grounds virtually equates scientific understanding with genuinely empathic understanding.
To understand the phenomenon scientifically, however, is in the first place to know the conditions necessary for its occurrence. A physician interested in understanding cancer, including the psychic consequences of having cancer, is not interested in becoming a cancer victim himself, but only in knowing the conditions necessarily associated with the occurrence and non-accurance of the cancer. A strictly empathic understanding may have great heuristic value and sometimes even political and aesthetic values as well.
However, from the standpoint of achieving scientific understanding and making the predictions which such mastery makes possible, the empathic method in psychology and in history is quite insufficient. Number one. Number two. The argument from the complexity of human behavior. This argument, it will be recalled, is to the effect that human behavior involves so complex a proliferation of factors that is futile to attempt to unravel them.
A glance at the history of science will deprive this point of view of such plausibility as it may possess. what a person advancing such an argument about psychology today would have said about the physics of motion before the time of Galileo. Probably he would have said that it is hopeless to attempt to reduce the vast diversity of terrestrial and celestial motions to a few simple laws of motion. Before the rise of scientific chemistry, this kind of person would have dismissed the possibility of reducing the seemingly unsurveyable variety of substances in nature to some limited elements on the Mandelio of table.
This argument rests its case on what is not known. And therefore, like all such arguments, it has no case. We can only talk from the perspective of that which is known. We cannot make case when things are unknown. And hence, the argument is moot and void. Now, the argument from determination of the present by the future in goal-seeking human behavior. A kind of causation not encountered... Sorry, my apologies. If a person is now taking action toward the realization of a future goal,
it is argued that the immediate action is the effect of a future cause, a kind of causation not encountered among physical phenomena. The answer to this contention is that not the future goal event, but rather the present expectation, gnomic expectability, as we talked about. But whether the present expectation of its realization causally controls forward-looking behavior of the human subject. Indeed, the goal sought may never be attained. Moreover, both the motives for achieving the given goal and the contemplation of action in its behalf function as antecedent conditions in the same way as the causal factors in
physical phenomena. Thus, in motivational situation, causal determination is quite unaffected by the ideational, boldface, reference of motives to the future. And I'm not going to talk about the moral law and the so-called income and zero, it's been rational odds and determinism. I leave it to you. Theo, you are twitching. What are you going to say right now?
I guess I'm less convinced by a lot of the… Or maybe it's just that I'm uninterested in a lot of the arguments from determinism that undermine rational agents. But I am curious about arguments from determinism that criticize method. I've just been saying this again and again. Yes, that is actually a quite serious thing. But then why don't you write a paper on this? I am trying to. I think it's just... I'm not sure how there could be a purely scientific way of looking at or evaluating the methodology that science uses.
You do not need to answer the problem. All you need, and I ask you to do, is to crystallize the problem. The essay can actually be about the problem without even answering it. I would say, as you know it very well, that the nature of this problem is itself quite obscure and not well elaborated. Yeah, I mean, my sense of it is that the scope of the problem, I think, is what a lot of, I mean, that's a lot of what the so-called post-moderns are trying to do, is to essentially level reason with causes.
Yes, I mean, it is not essentially post-modernism, I would say, but I would say that, in fact, post-modernism have taken it to a different level. But you see, in Marx already you get the same thing. Basically the rift between Marx and Hegel, with the understanding of Hegel is an arch, idealist and rationalist, and then Marx is exactly like this. That as if the mechanism responsible for the capitalist production have assimilated everything that we could ever say about the world, then how can we get out of this? In fact, using our own Marx, and that's Brandon's argument,
but a few others that I have seen, including the late Endnotes, Rob Lucas' essay, that you should, and this is just absolutely stupid. You cannot do this. The whole idea of historical material dialectic will go into trash if you try to actually say that the entire social relations on every possible level has been assimilated by the production of labor value which is time in the capitalist society i guess i have a question about this then from a scientific perspective is that it doesn't seem that science would ever be able to realize a full completion of science it's just yes yes but then then you should actually discuss that
Under what conditions this unfulfillment is different from the unfulfillment that is already implicit within theology, for example, or any of such esoteric cults? There is a fruitfulness to the uncompletion of science, and there is no fruitfulness to the uncompletion of theological project, namely negative theology. well then I would press back and not in defense of theology just because I reason urges me to the way by which we would say it's fruitful is according to our own methodological
on what grounds I'm simply trying to tease you here You mean on what grounds would I say that our values are based in reason? Like, so I guess what I'm trying to say is you want to say that, you know, science proves to be more fruitful than pre-scientific theology or myth. and the mythic thinker well we would never be able to talk to them that easily but they they would say it's fruitful to you or it's fruitful according to the way that you're thinking
about it yes yes and i i don't know that's when you have to bring the edge the idea of the vertical claim and the science is essentially basically encapsulate the idea of vertical claim as center point objectivity objectivity doesn't mean that there is such a thing with 100% certainty out there it is capable of making a vertical claim and hence we come back to the Popperian dilemma the science versus pseudoscience of course then position can change within the philosophy of science but also people outside of science even the
myth-making domain that you mentioned that what counts exactly to differentiate science from pseudoscience falsification from verification so on and so forth but I don't think that you should go to those then because that paper will never finish all I want you to write is exactly what you told me Reza can I take up the marks question am I in trouble well I think right right I raised the same question with Ray and he had an answer to it.
Not only did he have an answer to it, I had the feeling that almost that the work he was doing on Marx was somehow directed towards this. If you read the essay on endnotes or something, the endnotes people seem to have taken this paradigm that you can't represent what we're in because we're in capitalism. Not all of them. Actually, have you read the recent works of Rob Lucas and Zoe, his partner? Okay. They seem to diverge from that canonical end note of Kometian wills, of some sort. Okay. Okay. That's good. Maybe Ray's essay very well.
I don't know. But Ray was, I mean, when you look at the method, Ray focused heavily on the methodology that Marx develops in the Grundrisse, where he kind of elaborates it as a science, as he wants to practice a science. Yes, absolutely. It is a science. And it's the, I don't know if you would call it a science, if Popper would call it a science, for instance, actually I know for sure he wouldn't. But, you know, he wants, Marx wants to elaborate a kind of science or a methodology that escapes the, you know, I think that he doesn't say it explicitly, but it sort of escapes the determination that you're speaking of. And then Capital sort of enacts that. but it's still for me a problem because yeah he seems to be caught between wanting to say
capital the capital unfolds you know determinately or something but then if that's the case why are you even bothering describing what it is what difference would it make all questions that are relevant to sort of accelerationist debates or whatever But Ray obviously thinks that the thought of capital and the science of capitalism has some sort of relevance to revolutionary practices or something and to how you can intervene in it. you know so that i think yeah ray's got like a sort of i mean the most the most naive answer that i can give it to you uh is the very very simple fact that uh as we talked about and or or
i didn't really talk about it i just simply implied it the task up to you while to think about it is is that, as I said, there is no income and zero-ability between causal determinism and rationalism and axiological principles, odds in the general sense. Now first of all there are two things here that you need to take into account. When Marx talk about mechanisms, capitalist mechanisms or capitalist causes, he does not really, actually I think for the best, he does not confound them with natural causes.
causes are something more like impressions that become concrete, whereas natural causes are actually natural in the mechanistic sense. So this is one. Two is that yes, I would say that precisely along the idea that I said that you know determinism and rationalism can live happy life ever after is that there is no reason to think about even though that all social relations have been assimilated
by causal factors of the Marxian sense, namely social causal factors, there is no reason to not actually hypothesize that we can arrive at certain prescriptions or odds which might diverge or divest themselves from such causal connections. The only reason that you can say that they don't, you have to commit to two things. And you see, you always tackle your enemies based on their own assumptions. You don't put your assumptions right out there.
Because that was just a bad judo move. You always tackle their own moves. One, this already, if such real sub-tumption advocate come to you, say that, okay, if you understand that every social relations, including formal social relations, so basically there are two formal social relations, formal social relations and substantive social relations, language and reason actually mostly belong at the level of constitution to the formal and only at the level of content, according to Hegel, belong to the substantive social
relations. So it appears that Marx or Kammet, to be more precise, believed that both formal and substantive social relations are all assimilated by capitalist causal factors. But then you can actually make an isomorphic counter-argument by telling them, okay, make a lesson in history of science. Do you believe that if we have such natural causes from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, And we can never actually do anything other than what is already determined from a causal
factor. See what that person will tell you. Obviously they say no, because they're communists. Because they are communists. They are not going to say, because once, and actually this is the isomorphic between causal factors. believe in the subsumption of causal factors over rational predicates or rational judgments, then they should be also willing by virtue of their own implicit judgments, they should be actually endorsing a Darwinism, a thorough-going Darwinism of the kind that is what? Abundant in alt-right, social Darwinism. Jack London is a good example of this. Anything that we can ever do,
even communism, is simply a response to our causal factors. Then you can ask them this question in a Socratically, bring them to the contradiction. Then ask them that on what premise then you are endorsing communism and marx and not hitler or any other social darwinists of an extreme magnitude this is absolutely true this is absolutely true and that's why i don't feel comfortable with this kind of traditional marxism because i think that if you push the logic to the limit it just falls apart naturally
Assuming Marx actually held that sort of paradigm. I don't think that Marx did, but nevertheless Marxist commentators did. Yes, there are surely elements of this view that might actually correspond or somehow be correlated with social Darwinism in Marx, in the historical dialectical materialism. From the historical perspective, it is simply the result of Marx not taking Hegel seriously and moving from transcendental idealism to materialism, but without understanding the
prices that he has to pay at the end of the day once he endures a thoroughgoing, a thorough growing dialectical materialism yeah but i said all that in an essay and i got like just had i got hammered okay you sent it to me maybe it's actually because i actually did not like uh you know i have already told right so it's not a gossip i didn't like ray's last essay on marx i thought that it was fundamentally uh you know to be honest with you irrelevant so i would be actually happy to pick up this point of discussion because ultimately you know
we are have some sort of commonalities and the only way that we can move forward is by discussing the dissensus rather than the consensus you Can I ask a really random question rather? Do you do you think that the the natural laws are immutable as in You know, there's that you know the the that in terms of the Miesos idea of extra science fiction or something.
I've come across it in science fiction. Yes, of course. It's postulated that we might only live in existing sort of localized pockets or something. Yes. I just wondered about that. But I also wondered, in that essay I was always confused. And by the way, that extra science fiction essay is essentially a Boltzmannian view. It's a cosmological hypothesis. in the idea that there are these people A and people B made by some improbable entropic fluctuations. And by virtue of these entropic fluctuations, they have certain kinds of transcendental characteristics. And by virtue of these transcendental characteristics, they see laws differently.
But if they actually communicate, they notice that their notion of law is going to be thrashed. Yeah, but one thing that interested me in that was that it seemed to me as so was like misreading it as like contingent, like the laws can be altered, but the very story that he sort of looked at was one in which people use scientific knowledge to modulate natural laws and open up a space of exception in them as if Through knowing the laws you could Modify them or make exceptions to them or something. Does that make sense? Yes, whereas he hit his losses all like they could just change randomly
Arbitrarily like at the wind at the wind at the wind at the wind. Yes the story that he looked at they open up you know like a sort of zero gravity zone it's a it's an Asimov story his example or something yes yes no I I just wanted to say yeah do you think yeah do you have any comments or is that to be honest with you I I I don't want to be harsh precisely because I read this piece by Mea Su very long time ago before it was actually published and at that time I wasn't thinking about many of these problems that we are we have been talking lately but the only and so my answer is simply with the view that maybe my
knowledge of Meir Asuri is not correct but from what I remember he just cannot grasp that this is exactly the notion of natural law laid out in terms of a statistical nomological expectancy by modern sciences It tries to show it as if it's some sort of really a metaphysical catastrophe for science. No, it is not. It is not. It's actually, this is what science is. This is what science is.
This is what science conception of national law is. And do you have an opinion on the matter of the laws themselves or is that just too abstract? I think from a historical perspective, not from a philosophical perspective, when you look into the history of science, it appears to be that our concept of laws change in correlation with corresponding change in our concepts of probability.
From Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Einstein and so on and so forth. So I would say, and Carnap actually makes this in a very tongue in cheek manner in Foundations of Probability Theory, that refining the concept of a static, statistics can actually lead to a fundamental different view of a scientific law. And Boltzmann also had seen it. But to be honest with you, neither my knowledge on the statics is sufficient,
nor my knowledge of the history of contemporary sciences to actually gauge this claim. I'm simply making this as a reader, nothing more, nothing less. There is, let me tell you, I have this in my notes. My apologies. There is an essay by Rodolf Carnap which actually talks about this quite momentously
with regard to the concept of natural law and why is that our notion of law is somehow beholden to the notion of probability. And that's what you might think as modern science versus pre-scientific observations about the world actually can be laid out in terms of transition between two concepts of probability. But of course, in later works, Carnap himself believes that there are even, you know, we have a scientific notion of probability, this notion of probability can be explicated, namely we find and hence we can explicate our notion of law so the name of the essay is the logical fund
they uh sorry uh the two concepts of probability the two concepts of probability Have you read any Ian Hacking? Yes. Adam is actually quite a fan of him. What would you say the relationship is of judgments regarding, this is intelligence and spirit too, I guess, but the causal conditions for logical thought and
namely like the postulates we hold in relationship to causal relations in the world? One more time. What is the relationship of our judgments about the causal conditions for the possibility of logical thought and our postulates, you know, that is the sort of Carnapian hinge which allows us to make postulates that are testable in terms of what they are going to say about the This brings us back to what you might call to be the preneal question we have been talking
about since time two years ago since can't play to seminar to this seminar. First of all it is not that causal relations can actually instruct us what kind of logical constructs we can make in order to structure regularities and hence causal relations. Why? Because causal connections are simply about epistemic beliefs, not about logical connections. Logical connections belong to the realm of a priori in itself. It's only when they are
discussed in an epistemic paradigm or in the epistemic what you might call to be framework then this question becomes relevant until then it's not well what about just like the hard sort of material constraints of say like like computational capacity and the cost it takes to be able to make logical claims to begin with well actually you should read Orly Schenker and Maya Chimo Orly Schenker and...oh sorry... and Maya Chimo wrote to Maxwell Chimo.
This is one of the greatest books ever written. It's actually quite recent. The same thing applies to this, the same thing that I talked about with the epistemic aesthetics versus logical aesthetics applies to this. The computational cost only applies to the physical application of logical procedures. It does not determine in any causal way logical, connections or what you might call to be logical criteria. This is actually quite very important. This application of logical laws in Kant is called the epistemic criterion. It's very different
from the kind of logical relations that hold among certain kind of symbol designs. Those are not by any means, at least in the modern information science, in panam thesis, it's important, in modern information science, they are actually not determined by computational cost criteria. I would entertain that, surely, but... Yes, but that would be a speculation. It's a physical implementation of logical rules, computationally costs. Not the logical relations. They're entirely two different categories.
No, I'm saying even before we're talking about logical implementation and we're purely talking about, say, like the syntactic rules and whatnot, being able to formalize these, like the fact is, is like the thinking in terms of those pure a priori conditions doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's still happening based upon, you know, a materially bounded being. I would say that this is a very, very dangerous way. It might be fruitful, but nevertheless, it's pure speculation at this point. Essentially, logical structures are bound by transcendental structures,
not physical structures. This is already given by Kant and actually confirmed by modern thermodynamics and information science. However, we do not exactly know, and that's really the great avenue for research, we do not exactly know the boundary between transcendental aprioriate structures and physical structures. And hence, the computational cost can creep in, but also, in fact, contrary to what you said and what many computer scientists said, in fact, actually logical or mathematical
appropriate structures can bear on how we calculate computational cost on physical structure this is this is true this is true so you see you see you are now in it you just opened a cat of war i don't want to hear about this no i don't have enough philosophy problem already One more thing, please. So that last point was a really good point about the different transcendental structures change the way that we calculate computational costs. Yes, yes. Yes. But what I want to ask is, even if we can talk about transcendental forms that have been completely purged of any causal structure surely it won't be in
transcendental then they will be logical that's basically logic versus transcendent transcendental sure then then there would still be causal conditions which allow certain absolutely absolutely not other absolutely absolutely yes yes but then use what i wanted by the last comment is that this relation is not a one-way street is a two-way street it is yes agree and many people like naturalists like bad naturalists things that neuroscience actually define our logic. Computational costs define our mathematical
structuration. But what if I would have told you that mathematical structure in a very subrosa way actually determine how we calculate and identify computational costs? Or for example, logical structure of a theory actually determine how we identify such and such neurophysiological constraints. This is the whole course of the transcendence and the critique unfolds between the two rather than univalently moving in one direction. Yeah. The question of still how does the relationship of our posture. Why are you asking me? Do you really think that I'm a genius? I'm not a genius. No, no. Einstein. Resurrect him.
Even Einstein cannot answer. These are essentially philosophical questions. I'll write this one down and maybe I'll solve it, I don't know, 60 years. No, I believe that these questions are absolutely pragmatic questions of our own time. And whoever does not actually take these questions seriously is not doing the job of philosophy or science for that matter. Literally, these are the most important questions. But however, such questions cannot be answered by one or two or three or five or ten people. these take generations and paradigm shifts to actually even understand the meaning of the question as I said to Theo with regard to his essay we are far
from answering such questions all we can do at this point is actually understand the weight of the question itself yeah That's an interesting way to end the course. Okay, I'm not tired. You can go enjoy your vacation and the rest of your life, hopefully without me. Vacation? Yes, I expect that all of you guys go to vacation after this course. It requires a vacation. No. things have just gotten the most busy I've ever been in my life. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to be with you and talk.
We know that, you know, we didn't, as usual, didn't go over all the topics, but that's the whole point. As always, the point of these seminars is just to kind of trigger you to think more about but otherwise hidden or ignored questions. Nothing more, nothing less. Thanks, Rosa. The course was awesome. It was quite good, yeah. I had a very good time. Thanks, Rosa, yeah. I only hope you had as good of a time as we did. How many of you will end up in that next course on modeling? That is going to be a very, very technical course.
Unfortunately, I have already started to make diagrams because we cannot just talk. There are diagrams to be shown on the slides. I can't make it, unfortunately. I need a break from the late nights. No, you are excused. But you can surely watch videos. I will watch the videos, yes. I might even go back through some old Reza Neyaristani courses. or something. We get more money than yes. Okay. I have not been paid in two months. Welcome to the world of autodidacticism. Yeah, it's quite rough. No, no, we should have money in like
another month. That's exactly what I told myself last month. And it has been two months I haven't been paid. I'm going to pay next month surely in any case it was absolutely a pleasure to talk to you and thank you for all the conversation and your objections your questions etc alright I'm going to add the broadcast now thank you