Lessons on Causality

There is such a thing as meaningless concepts or concepts that do not point to some sort of thing (i.e. phenomenon.) “Perfect circle” might be a meaningful concept provided that you assign to it some kind of meaning (i.e. if you make it point to some sort of thing) but in the case of James, and also S57, it is a statement without any meaning. Basically, it’s just a sequence of words. That’s all it is. Words must refer to something concrete otherwise they are meaningless.

Another thing, which isn’t much relevant, is that people have evolved a common manner in which they determine which shapes are circles and which are not. Definitions are supposed to REFLECT this process and to reflect it with as much precision as it is necessary. The popular definition isn’t bad. It’s pretty good. But it becomes problematic when people take it literally.

They don’t start with what is real. There are circles EVERYWHERE around us. But because they take words literally, they won’t acknowledge this. They don’t understand that when you take the popular definition literally that you strip it of all meaning. There is no way in hell that you can identify a shape that has an infinite number of points on its boundary that are equidistant from the center of that shape.

No. The goal of the philosopher is to pursue wisdom. And when truth gets too far off track, the goal becomes to resist the insanity and reestablish enough truth for wisdom to be pursued again. This all started with Urwrong and Arc arguing over what a circle is, thus I mentioned “definition” to clarify and resolve the issue.

The entire issue is about language and identifying things in accord with whatever language there is.

Mag’s mistake is in presuming that whatever language he inattentively picked up is the language that dictates the identity of what he sees. He now preaches that physical reality determines language. That is in exact reverse. Language is formed by giving portions of reality identities - defined names. It is then from definitions, usually merely connoted from family and society, that anyone has the urge to call anything by any particular name.

A circle is not what the physical universe says that it is. It is often not what the child associated with the word. The universe doesn’t make that determination. People choose what is to be called a circle, whether it is an abstract category of shape or a physically real object.

But that is only half of his failing.

In addition to not understanding that definitions inherently precede perceptive identifications, he has latched onto the idea that abstract notions (categories) “have no meaning”, even while he is using such meanings and categories. Using his theory (void of categories), the first crude “circle” that one sees determines what a circle is. Anything you see afterward not exactly matching that first identification, would not be a circle because it doesn’t exactly match the identifier. There could only be one circle, the first he ever identified. Of course, he hasn’t thought that far, so he merely re-designates whatever he feels like, as a “circle” “because it is what he sees” regardless of what it might really be.

He is merely a corruptor of language with a primitive, grunt-like mind (no doubt a meat-eater). None of this has anything to do with actual philosophy because without a consistent language, with children choosing arbitrary definitions of their words, there can be no communication. And communication is required during philosophical pursuit in order to build secure, enduring thought and the pursuit of wisdom.

This more than proves that you do not listen to what your opponents are saying.

I never said or implied that the universe determines what a circle is. I don’t even know what that means. It is us, humans, who determine whether any given shape is a circle or not and we do so by some kind of procedure. My point is that this procedure (which I often identify with the word “intuition”) is not the same thing as its linguistic descriptions (dictionary definitions.) Your problem is that you take dictionary definitions too literally. When you take them too literally you fail to understand the procedure they are attempting to reflect.

Words do not precede the procedure by which we determine whether some given thing belongs to some given class.
That’s your mistake.

Here’s more proof that you do not listen to what your opponents are saying. I never said that categories are meaningless. I simply said that they CAN be meaningless.

Which ones am I using?

This merely shows how fucked up your brain is.

Whether something is a circle or not is determined by a procedure that takes into account a finite number of points on the boundary of the shape in order to measure their distance from the center of that shape. If every single point is at the same distance, then the procedure declares that the shape is a circle. Otherwise, it declares that it is not. The procedure DOES NOT work by comparing the shape to the first shape we identified as a circle. (By the way, how did we identify this “first circle” shape as a circle? We must have used some other procedure because before identifying this shape as a circle there was no shape that we previously identified as a circle. So what happened to this original procedure? Why did we stop using it?)

What you’re doing here is you are MAKING SHIT UP.

I am glad that I don’t think the way you do.

Noone is corruping language, moron. Noone is choosing arbitrary definitions, fuckface. The problem is that you are an IDIOT who obviously DOES NOT LIKE IT when someone calls him an idiot, whether they are justified in doing so or not, and who does not understand what words mean despite his pretense that he does.

I believe that you wouldn’t know what it meant. That is why I hadn’t said it to you. But what it means is what you have been claiming.

That’s not what it means. That’s what your fucked up brain thinks it means.

This thread is giving me a headache.

Mag I’m gonna cover your ass on this one before James exploits one of your unarmored areas. There are multiple procedures getting a circle, mostly it is a subconscious semi-process of just “seeing” a ring. I am not sure exactly how the neurons go about this, it is possible that they analyze it as a bunch of finite points, or they may use some other method.

James seemed to quote me in an attempt to argue at any and all cost, for example I made a weak post like this which could be misinterpreted.

What I was saying was not that a circle is dependent on words, but that words can fluctuate between people. If someone has a poor definition of what a circle is, then they will argue that you are wrong about what a circle is.

Thus I need to bring a 5th element to the process: communication. One person’s inner world may not match anothers, and thus we have the process of communication, a kind of bridge between inner worlds, only barred by solipsism.

For purposes of communication, a circle is whatever falls into the general range of what a circle is. James has a very, very specific definition in mind when he thinks of “circle” and this definition doesn’t match anyone else’s. But more importantly, his definition is objectively poor because it is inefficient: it is more optimized to have vague definitions of general items, and to have customizable adjectives one can ascribe to these items. James does it backwards: he assigns a very, very precise and inflexible attributes to a general item, completely stopping the possibility of custom adjective clarification. The way he does it, is simply very not good for language.

PS: A philosopher’s goal is to find truths, whether heshe is wise about it is their choice.
The goal of a leader, or politician, is to spread wisdoms. However, most politicians are very unwise.

For instance, my violence thread, I simply state truths of violence. A wise man may say my thread is rubbish, shouldn’t be taken seriously, because it could destroy the very fabric of civilization. Some wise men may hate my thread, even if it is true. Sometimes it is not always considered wise to speak the truth.

You missed the point.

The argument began between Urwrong and Arc. The issue was about a circle having an infinity of sides. The definition of a circle resolves the issue. But then Urwrong didn’t accept that and Mag proclaims that definitions are irrelevant and that it is only observations that count - what something is is entirely how it is perceived (an entirely non-sequitur and irrational response). Then the discussion became about how a circle is defined vs how a circle should be defined (a still different issue).

You are the one missing the point.

UrWrong was simply explaining that Pi cannot be a finite number because circles are infinilateral polygons i.e. they have an infinite number of straight sides.
(Exactly what Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz and others have claimed in the past. But let’s ignore that because you are right by default.)
Then Arc came along and missed the point. Note that she responded in a way that suggested that UrWrong is saying something wrong. Which he didn’t.
Then you came along and sided with Arc who missed the point.
From there on you just kept missing the point.
No doubt because you suffer from some sort of autism.
You take things out of context. That’s what you do. That’s your calling.

When we measure the length of a line, any line, we do so in terms of lines that are 1) smaller than the line we are measuring, 2) equal in length to each other and 3) straight. They can be at any angle but they must be straight.
There are many other possible ways to measure the length of a line but this is generally how we do it.
So if you want to measure the circumference of a circle there is no choice but to think of the circumference as a line composed of a number of sufficiently small straight lines i.e. as some kind of polygon.
The problem is as what kind of polygon? In other words, how many straight sides are there in a circle?
Because different number of straight sides means different length of the circumference.
The answer to the question is: the smallest number of straight sides that are necessary.
Basically, it depends on our needs.
Simple C = d x Pi formula cannot capture it.

Pi is simply a number that when multiplied by the diameter of the center returns the length of the circumference of that circle.
There is no such a number for many reasons one of which is that the number of straight sides the circle has is not specified.

Maybe you should stop pretending you know everything and start paying a little bit more attention to what other people are saying.
Unless you don’t want to cure your autism.

It is humans who determine whether any given shape is a circle or not and they do so by employing some sort of mechanism.
Human behavior is observable so this mechanism can be observed.
Dictionary definitions are simply a bunch of words that try to reflect this mechanism.
They are SECONDARY.
What is PRIMARY is HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

Magnus and James are the yin and yang of ILP because they both say the complete opposite to each other and so the truth is in there somwehere
Shame they cannot co operate instead of engaging in ego stroking and name calling but if one ignores this there is much one can learn from them

Did I ever say that there is only one procedure? Quote me saying it. The fact that you have to choose a finite number of points to test means that there is more than one procedure for determining whether something is a circle or not. There is a procedure that picks a hundred points, a procedure that picks a thousand points, a procedure that picks a million points and so on. It is not me who’s saying that there is only one procedure. If there is someone saying such a thing then it is James.

Yes. We want to understand how that process works. And we only want to do so up to a certain level of precision that is of interest to us.

That’s not important.

That’s a sufficiently precise description of how we differentiate between circles and other shapes. You can derive it on your own using nothing but introspection. But if you want you can also derive it by observing how other people behave.

That’s all he does. And he’s been doing it for years. It’s pathetic.

His definition is all-exclusive. In other words, there is no phenomenon that can be categorized as a circle. According to James, nothing is a circle. Instead, there are phenomena that are more or less close to what a circle really is. Even though nothing is a circle there are phenomena that are more or less close to circles. I think that’s a seriously backwards way of thinking. It’s like how people can’t accept that the concept of Absolute (or Universal) Truth is meaningless and instead cling onto it by making excuses such as “no theory can ever reach Absolute Truth, theories can only come more or less close to it”. The button on my monitor is a circle. The CD on my desk is a circle. It is not close to being a circle. It IS a fucking circle. That’s what a circle is. Sure, some circles are more perfect than others. What this means is that there is a RELATION between more and less perfect circles. In the same way there is a RELATION between taller and shorter people. When we say this or that guy is tall we do not do so in relation to some PERFECTLY or INFINITELY TALL guy. We describe things in terms of other things. Not in terms of meaningless concepts. When we measure the length of a line we do so in relation to some smaller line. We ask: how many of these smaller lines can be synthesized, i.e. put next to each other, in order to form the main line?

The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to some particular circle. This means that the word does not refer to a particular but to a category of particulars.

The button on my monitor is a particular circle. The CD on my desk is a particular circle. The bottom of my wine barrel is a particular circle. And so on. The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to any one of these particular circles. For example, it is not true that the button on my monitor is a circle while the CD on my desk and the bottom of my barrel are not circles. They are all circles. This means that the word “circle” refers to ANY of these particular circles. That’s what a category is. A category is something that refers to any particular within some range of particulars.

My point in this thread, or rather one of my points in this thread, is that categories, if they are proper categories, are NOT without a reference to particulars. Categories are merely without an exclusive reference to particulars. Categories, proper categories, refer to any particular within some range of particulars. For example, the word “car” refers to a category that includes both this and this. When I say “includes both” what I mean is that it refers to any of the two images. It does not exclusively refer to one of the two images and it does not exclusively refer to the combination of the two images.

The proposition that my theory is void of categories and that I think that categories are meaningless is simply not true. My theory is merely void of meaningless categories or pseudo-categories by which I mean categories that are all-exclusive i.e. categories that do not refer to any particular either because they explicitly reject all particulars or because they are “hesitant” to refer to any particular. Similarly, I don’t think that categories are meaningless, I merely think that there are categories that are meaningless e.g. the word “perfect circle” as used by James refers to a meaningless category. There are no particular “perfect circles”, not because the environment we live in is void of them, but quite simply because the category “perfect circle” does not refer to any particular thing. Compare that to the word “zombie”. The word “zombie” refers to a category that refers to any of all the possible particular zombies. Not a single one of these zombies is to be found anywhere in the environment we live in, not because the category “zombie” is meaningless, but because the environment we live in is void of what the category “zombie” refers to.

It is possible to conduct an experiment in order to determine what any particular category refers to. For example, you can conduct an experiment in order to determine what the category “circle” refers to. There are many ways to go about it but one way to do it is to choose a subject (e.g. yourself) and a number of images for your subject to separate into a group of those that are associated with the word “circle” and a group of those that are not. At the end of the experiment, you get a set of images that are associated with the word “circle”. By applying the logic of induction to this set, you can measure how much of a circle any given shape is.

The superiority of this approach lies in the fact that it lets you devise a theory on your own. You look at the facts and then make an inference based on them. In the context of this post, it means that you look at the particulars and then derive a category from them. The fact that you discover the category on your own, rather than pick it up from someone else by memorizing its rules, means that you understand it. You know what kind of experience it represents. On the other hand, if you start with dictionary definitions, which are nothing more than crude descriptions of other people’s categories, then it becomes easy to misunderstand the categories they represent. You might not understand what kind of experience the category represents. In fact, you might think that it represents no experience at all. As a consequence, you might become very defensive of the idea that categories do not have to represent experience.

It occured to me that Arc’s statement that circles have no straight sides is analogous to saying that houses have no occupants. The statement that circles have no sides is true in the sense that circles would be circles even if they had no straight sides in the same way that houses would be houses even if they had no occupants. But it is wrong to say that a shape that has straight sides is not a circle in the same way that it is wrong to say that a building that has occupants is not a house.

Time passes and you’re still wrong, James.

A 1000-sided polygon is a circle.

Arc is wrong as well.

Just goes to show you; even though time passes, you still aren’t any wiser.

I passed 1st grade geometry.

Even infants can pick apart shapes and slide them through inserts.

I’m just happy to have educated you on basic shapes. I mean, if you’re so wrong about something so simple, what else could be wrong about?

He’s not wrong. He’s just an annoying nitpicker. Instead of trying to understand the gist of the post he obsesses over irrelevant details. He’s a Grammar Nazi. He keeps repeating that “the devil is in the details” ignoring that the devil is also in the big picture.

But he is wrong when he says that randomness is ignorance. And so are you.

When the human mind, or any intelligent organism, encounters enormous complexity, as is the nature of existence, then the brain must limit its sense-data according to its methods of cognition, to reduce (infinite) data down to knowable forms. This is how all nervous systems work, the function of sensory organs and brains. Ignorance is the result of these cognitive limitations. It is a natural reaction, a reflex, a compulsion.

A human mind cannot “know everything”, and so must limit data input. The thing is, humans generally, are not aware of their own ignorance and perceptual blind spots. Similar to how everybody has blind-spots in their vision range, or how the human brain cognizes two visual images (one from each eye) into one model, of Consciousness.

People don’t examine themselves, their knowledge, their own consciousness. Thus self-consciousness is rare, in humanity, in life, and is symbolic of higher intelligences.

In fact, owing to Causality, humanity now has a long history of records and discoveries, culminating into a collective knowledge. Intelligent individuals of the past, scientists and revolutionaries, all contributed to that collective knowledge by adding relevant observations and lessons about causality. This causes that. And that causes something else. Because much of that knowledge is tried, tested, and true, humans today don’t need to relearn everything. Instead they trust the pile of knowledge, Dogma. They accept the general theses and theories. In turn, human knowledge has become specialized. So instead of discovering general causes of existence, contemporary intellectuals now focus on very small, minute causes, nano-technologies and micro-biology. Yet in the larger sense, there is aeronautics, astronomy, rocket science, and many new forms of physics.

I would label ‘Science’ as this collection of causality, of stored knowledge, all pooled together.

Science is the Study of Causality.

Humanity is unique with causality, symbolic of a highly evolved intellect, compared to all other (lesser) animals and organisms on earth. While it’s true that animals do have basic cognitive functions, with limited means of learning, and therefore understanding causes… their minds are rather unsophisticated. Furthermore, lesser animals do not have the benefit of language, literacy, and thus lack expanded memorization. Humans can catalogue information, data, and knowledge, collecting it over time. Hence this is the basis for human knowledge in general, a collection that expands centuries and millenniums. The ‘old’ wisdom is preserved, passed on to today’s Philosophers and Free Thinkers.

Compare an idea of Causality between a human to an animal. If an animal correctly intuited why and how an action occurs, predicting it, then they would memorize it to the best of their ability. Hunters and predatory animals predict the movements and directions of their prey, for example. Thus the higher intellect, the better the predictions. These cognitive abilities lead to survival and thriving. But the memories of an animal cannot be directly passed from parent to offspring, except genetically. Thus animals mostly rely on instincts, and what limited information can be passed genetically. Rather than textually, linguistically, a larger volume of (all human) knowledge can be immediately passed from human parent to child.

This gives humans exponential advantage over base animals. And higher intelligent humans, exponential advantage over lower intelligent humans.

All of this correlates directly to Causality by understanding of any and every (scientific) subject, or general topic. The causes of some function were discovered, tracked, and ‘known’ hundreds of years ago. Thus humans today don’t need to “keep reinventing the wheel” with every new generation.

Learning causal relationships can be labeled as a backward process whereby venues that share situations become causally related, and/or a downshift process whereby cause–effect relationships may be derived from observance and objectively tested for their veracity. There are three terms for causality: covariation, temporal precedence, and control for third variables. It’s not just making an extra key for your condo it’s something broad and next to your level. Multiple retroversion, like all statistical techniques based on linkage, has a severe restriction due to the fact that correlation doesn’t prove causation. And no amount of calculating of “control” variables can unpick the web of causality.