More on causality
July 22nd 2008 11:18
Well, i didn't have much time to read philosophy these last months, so i had no new subject to talk about in the blog... since i don't like posting bullshit just to fill up some pages, there were no new posts these last months. Well, after some days off at work, i have time to think about some new ideas.
These post comes from the 4th "cartesian meditation" from the book from Husserl, "Meditations cartesiennes".
Somewhere on it Husserls comes to a delicate subject, causality. The average person will ask what's the problem about it, lets present the thing in 3 lines.
There are 2 main ways of seeing how causality affect us. The "determinists", who think the world can be defined by "cause-and-effect" rules, think that we can, by the mean of cience, describe and predict the world, and all it's "states". The main problem in that approach is that,
if we take causality to it's extreme, all our life would be already defined before we were even born, so we have no real "freedom" to define our lives. Thus, the other main way of seeing the world thinks that the world is a chaos, and we have freedom to define our will (this can be considered the Nietzschean way, even though it is way older than him..).
To avoid discusing if the world can be completely defined by rules, Husserl avoids the term, prefering the use of what he calls motivation. Thus, he leaves the question partially unanswered, and goes to his considerations about how phenomenology can analyse the world.
Well, following the ideas we presented in older posts, we can give a better answer to the question, although you might disagree in the end of it..
This blog considers the world as an ensemble of "infinite dimensional" facts. By "infinite dimensional" i mean that, for each fact that happens, the quantity of information that defines it is infinte. In our "math" version, this would mean an infinite dimensional vector, but let's leave maths for another post.
In the same way the world is "inifinite dimensional", we can see that causality, if it exists, has to be infinite dimensional. I mean, the causes that it rained all day are an infinite ensemble of things, from the factories in US and China to the sequence of climate changes from 2000 years ago till today.
This leads to the conclusion that the question about "causality" has no sense. Why?Because, if it exists, the real causality is infinite dimensional, thus impossible to be completely modeled. And if it does not, we wouldn't be able to have complete models anyway.
Please don't think that i undervalue the models we have today. History show us that in every domain our models evolve everyday, and without evolution we would still be living in caves. But we will never be able to say that a model is completely representative of the truth. There will allways be a black shawn to proove that our model is no good.
So the conclusion about causality is that "if i exists, it won't change a thing" (to use Sartre's phrase about God..)
cheers.
These post comes from the 4th "cartesian meditation" from the book from Husserl, "Meditations cartesiennes".
Somewhere on it Husserls comes to a delicate subject, causality. The average person will ask what's the problem about it, lets present the thing in 3 lines.
There are 2 main ways of seeing how causality affect us. The "determinists", who think the world can be defined by "cause-and-effect" rules, think that we can, by the mean of cience, describe and predict the world, and all it's "states". The main problem in that approach is that,
To avoid discusing if the world can be completely defined by rules, Husserl avoids the term, prefering the use of what he calls motivation. Thus, he leaves the question partially unanswered, and goes to his considerations about how phenomenology can analyse the world.
Well, following the ideas we presented in older posts, we can give a better answer to the question, although you might disagree in the end of it..
This blog considers the world as an ensemble of "infinite dimensional" facts. By "infinite dimensional" i mean that, for each fact that happens, the quantity of information that defines it is infinte. In our "math" version, this would mean an infinite dimensional vector, but let's leave maths for another post.
In the same way the world is "inifinite dimensional", we can see that causality, if it exists, has to be infinite dimensional. I mean, the causes that it rained all day are an infinite ensemble of things, from the factories in US and China to the sequence of climate changes from 2000 years ago till today.
This leads to the conclusion that the question about "causality" has no sense. Why?Because, if it exists, the real causality is infinite dimensional, thus impossible to be completely modeled. And if it does not, we wouldn't be able to have complete models anyway.
Please don't think that i undervalue the models we have today. History show us that in every domain our models evolve everyday, and without evolution we would still be living in caves. But we will never be able to say that a model is completely representative of the truth. There will allways be a black shawn to proove that our model is no good.
So the conclusion about causality is that "if i exists, it won't change a thing" (to use Sartre's phrase about God..)
cheers.
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