Thought Experiment: Inverse Causation

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Our typical view of causation is that there is a linear process of a causal chain from beginning to end. Big bang happens, causes a bunch of shit, eventually a man finds himself playing pool. He hits the cue ball with his pool stick. The cue ball hits the eight ball. The eight ball goes into the pocket. He wins. The causal chain is apperantly obvious.

But let us think lysdexically. Let us think that there is a “something”, maybe a “thing-in-itself” that has a magnetic pull that can and will force everything into it. Let us imagine that the pocket drew the eight ball into it, that the eight ball drew the cue ball into it, that the cue ball drew the pool stick into it, and that the game of pool drew the man into it. After all, it was his want and desire to play pool (at least in this scenerio, no one was forcing a gun to his head)

Does a man choose to fall in love in love with a woman? To lust for a woman? Does a sexual sadist choose to rape, torture, and kill his victim? Could it be that desire compelled him to do his act, and that this desire came not just from within, or, better yet, came from within but outwardly manifested as the object of his desire (the woman) and hence he was compelled by his desire in the form of the object of his desire to commit his deed, to “cause” her death. Could she have been the one who caused him to commit his deed?

Keep in mind that I have no agenda to defend (or not defend) sexual sadists who rape and murder women. I used that example (after the billiards example) to make this point hit closer to home (as in, human)

Is this a plausable perspective? Should scientists/philosophers/thinkers practice the art of doubting that one thing causes another thing to happen through FORCE rather than through ATTRACTION?

Thoughts?

2

My thoughts are the utility of your idea is questionable. Is there any evidence to support this? Is it logically necessary? Is there anything it can be used to predict?

Assuming that it in fact doesn’t predict anything, nobody should consider it at all, no

3

Well, what “evidence” is there to support the opposite? Hard science? psychologically speaking, I feel that there is quite a bit of validity to this perspective. Keep in mind that this is a thought experiment. I have a non-dualist view of the universe so I don’t think cause and effect goes one way or the other. But just using your own autonomy, can you not find it plausible that an object of desire is AT LEAST as responsible for the cause of what happens to that object as that which supposedly was the cause?

So I question your questioning of the utility of my idea, especially in the way it translates to human pyschology and the never ending inquiry of ethics.

4

What’s the utility of it? What does it predict?

and what does it have to do with ethics? WHAT?

5

I think it’s a bit easier to imagine a force that, from without the primordial “stuff” of the Big Bang, compelled that stuff to explode than it is to imagine that the 8 ball compelled the cue ball to hit it.

But I also think that cause, effect, and causation itself is relative to the observer. If we are moving past the pool player as he shoots and are not aware of our motion, we may see the entire episode differently. In fact, it’s plausible, given a certain scale relative to our senses, that we do not see either ball move in a straight line at all - given certain motion, we will see curved lines, just as we hear a change in pitch as we pass a car in opposite directions as its horn blows.

It’s a familiar example - when both we and the car are stationary, relative to each other, we hear a certain tone - a thumb, an electrical connection (and so on) causes an a440-pitched sound. But we don’t hear it that way when we’re in motion relative to the car. This can be explained mathematically, of course, but it’s the same math that describes the 440 pitch.

Momentum doesn’t “cause” the foreshortening of objects in one dimension, anymore that “being stationary relative to the car” causes the A440 pitch.

The causal mechanism that Hume was looking for doesn’t exist between the billiard balls - it defines the billiard balls.

Billiard balls move in “directions”, but causation doesn’t. I think your experiment actually points that out.

6

Lets say there’s a guy about to kick a ball in a soccer field. Could you measure where the highest concentration of Attraction particles in the field are to predict where the ball will land after he kicks it?

7

The utility of it is psychological (for me). I never said it predicts anything, nor do I care if it predicts anything. It, like all thought experiments, is there (at least for me) to practice putting oneself in a different state of consciousness that is different from our habitual patterns of thought and see if anything “new” in our understanding pops up out of these new lenses.

But I’ve already explained part of it in my last post. It’s translation into psychology and ethics (so long as we really attempt to put ourselves under the influence of this thought, like a good actor does playing a role) we can gain a new perspective that might reveal to us new phenomona that challenges our pre-conceived notions of Causation. I don’t know about you, but ruthlessly (and playfully) challenging and attacking ones own perspectives is part of the enjoyment and practice of living the philosophical life. Philosophizing with a hammer, so to speak.

Also, I have a question for you. Why does this thought experiment need to predict anything in order to have value or utility?

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Why does it need to predict anything to have utility? That’s kinda what being useful means…

Like if I have a theory that predicts that hitting a nail with a hammer while holding the nail perpendicular to a board will drive the nail into the board, I can use that theory to help me build things. It’s useful.

On the other hand, if I have a theory that the nail has some attraction to the board…well so what? Like, how am I going to use that fact? How is it useful? If it’s not useful, there’s no utility. That’s what the word utility means.

Not only does it not predict anything, there’s also no evidence for it, and it’s not logically necessary. It doesn’t have ANY of the three requirements for an idea even worth considering.

9

“The common goal of a thought experiment is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question.”

If it doesn’t predict anything, then there are no consequences. If it being true or false doesn’t affect reality one way or another, then there are no consequences. Thus, as a thought experiment whose goal is to explore the potential consequences of it being true…well, there are no consequences.

Unless you’re suggesting that we convict rape victims for attracting rapists.

10

Fair enough. That’s your perspective. That’s what these message boards are for. :sunglasses:

11

It’s true that science is useful mostly for what it can predict. But prediction has a property that is rather odd, but that we don’t think about. It separates causes from conditions. Control groups, or scientific controls generally, seek to define the conditions of experiments - those conditions are seen as neutral to the possible causative factors being studied. But are they? Aren’t they just as much a part of the cause? To affirm the boiling point of water, we must control for the barometric pressure. But isn’t barometric pressure part of the cause, then?

In other words, all causes can be seen as conditions and vice-versa. But all the conditions of the universe can be (theoretically) known and taken as one big condition. What happens to causation and even prediction then? If all conditions are known, then those conditions are both cause and effect.

Causation is not temporal, but events, by definition, are. But what is the difference between an object and an event? it’s the same as the difference between mass and energy - arbitrary.

12

Below is an alternative (but not necessarily opposite) approach to Faust’s on questioning causation metaphyiscally. Essentially I read the OP as one that attempts to change the underlying notion of causation.

In the final analysis the Scientific Method is only truly capable of establishing correlation between event A and event B such that whenever event A occurs event B follows or occurs simulaneously depending upon the relationship you study. It cannot demonstrate beyond a doubt that event A produces event B or brings event B about. From a practical standpoint the current view of causation as “A brings B about” has been more than sufficient to produce all the wonderful technology and improvements that make life happier. But of course, as philosophers, we can look deeper in the philosophy of science and say that correlation is about as far as we can go in what science can truly show, and even then you can’t even say 100% correlation for certain. Experiments statisitcally need to show a 95% Confidence Level in order for a correlation to be established.

As long as you’re not irrational and discard the correlative power of scientific inquiry and the demonstration of correlation in science, the metaphysical nature of causation is up for grabs. And none of this discussion would really get in the way of Humpty’s concerns. Science is still science and does the wonderful things that science does. It will create predictive models, experiment and perform careful repeated observation. As with anything else in the human experience that works normally - whether science, morality, the universe, etc., philosophers can always ask the deeper questions about what “really, truly” is going on, although of course you may also reasonably reject such questions as unknowable and proceed to Wittgensteinian silence on such matters. Philosophical models do not have the requirement of prediction nor must such models necessarily reject or even alter facts currently known by science. Rather, they attempt to understand what science is doing in a different way.

Having said all that, though, I don’t think we’re quite as ready for the paradigm shift on the content of your OP alone; of course, just because a metaphysical explanation of causation that differs from the traditional is plausible does not mean it is necessarily the correct one. The burden of proof is weighed heavily against anyone who wants to tackle the 3000 year old notion of causation, of which current humanity is employing version 2.0 (version 1.0 being Aristotlean causation). But it is important to note that our idea of causation has indeed changed or been tweaked in human history, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t justifiably change again - perhaps even in such a way that it improves upon the current Scientific Method.

It is interesting that the OP uses examples of the human act of “choice” in your OP. Because under the current version of causation we’re employing, free will or free choice is tough to come by. But alternative theories of causation are conceptually possible that could both leave current science untouched and allow for free will. Proving them, of course, is the real challenge.

13

One thing that comes to mind is Schrödinger’s cat. Determinations are made by the act of observation that preclude certain results and determine causal outcomes. Could we think of the “box” as determining the result?..perhaps better to think of the observer as predisposing physics towards his expectations – quite a murky business in any case.

14

That’s the pop-physics interpretation.

You know how sometimes in the news they make a big fuss about some guy who got accused of doing something horrible, but then when he’s found innocent none of the news organizations publicize that? Well that’s how pop science works too.

You see, the whole mystical affect of observation on reality – that was a premature hypothesis made many years ago, and when it came out it was AMAZING, something the masses would love to hear about! God how WEIRD reality is! But when better, yet more mundane, explanations came out, for example regarding the photon-slit experiment (the primary source for the mystical observation hypothesis from my understanding), they didn’t publicize that nearly as widely.

15

Not much of a post, but I came to say that I agree with Humpty on this one.

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For the Bolded parts.

  1. Yes and No. I don’t know if I was trying to “change” the underlying notion of causation, but more or less attempting to plant some seeds of doubt and shake up the habitual way of how we think of causation.

  2. Yes, I respect Hard Science AS Hard Science. It is wonderful for what it does. But, philosophers have the liberty to ask the deeper questions and challenge assumptions that Science takes for fact. If we couldn’t do that, we would cease to exist.

  3. I agree with everything you said in that paragraph. Maybe instead of “plausible” I should have used the word “possible”. I already stated that I don’t believe in this theory, and that I have my own views on the nature of causation, more of a Nietzschean view that “Causation should be used for description, but never for explanation”. The idea of Inverse Causation, maybe, can free us up to attempt describing causation in new and creative ways. Maybe nothing will come of it, and if that’s the case, so be it.

  4. I made sure to carefully use the word “choice” in quotation. I understand very well (through being a hardcore determinist for many years as a result of my inability to include free will under the scientic model that I held to be the utmost truth) that “free will” doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on under the current scientic matrix. And indeed, postulating an idea isn’t hard but proving it is. But when I made this thread (and I had been thinking about this idea of inverse causation for a while now) I decided “fuck it, we’ve been viewing the nature of causation almost the same way for about 3,000 years now. Why not practice an ole’ switcheroo and see what comes of it?”

Thank you for your reply.

17

Yes, perhaps a bit “poppy” in my brief post but the mystery remains. Speaking of the observable disorder in molecules Schrodinger writes, “But whether any particular molecule, supposing you could follow, its course, will be among those which have reacted or among those which are still untouched, he [the chemist] could not predict. That is a matter of pure chance. This is not a purely theoretical conjecture. It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.” “What Is Life”, pdf page 27, whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_fil … s-Life.pdf

It is a bit of a wishful leap to suggest that the phenomena that Schrodinger observed on the quantum scale has been “explained”. His supposition was that order arises out of chaos (peros from aperion) not unlike the thoughts of Plato, I might add.

I would submit that the slit experiment can actually strengthen my rather anemic response. When individual photons are emitted through two slits (or more) to the photographic film, the apparent simultaneity of the photon passing through both slits introduces an uncertainty that has yet to be explained. While Schrodinger referred to this “mystery” as entanglement, Heisenberg addressed the wave particle duality in his “uncertainty principle”. Subatomic particles incessantly pop in and out of existence in a way that disallows determinism and can only be explained statistically with essential and inherent uncertainty.

Forgive the indulgence but according to the Copenhagen Interpretation (not pop) if you never measure the x-spin (box, i.e., Schrodinger) of an electron, it will never jump to an eigenstate of x-spin and thus will have a 100% probability of y-spin (a contradictory state). The conclusion is that observable results depend on whether the electron is in an indeterminate state or determinate but unknown state. Indeterminate states are not just determinate states we have no knowledge of. Physical objects actually behave differently depending on whether their states are unknown or indeterminate.

One need look no further than quantum entanglement, the spooky action at a distance that Einstein despised and tried to refute with his EPR paradox only to end up showing the non-classical characteristics of the measurement process.

A Couple Quotes I Like:

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
Niels Bohr

I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Richard Feynman

I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.
Erwin Schrödinger