Uncaused cause

What is impossible about an uncaused cause? Theists seem to think that one is possible - even necessary. Why not countless uncaused causes, then?

Take any series of causes - A1, A2, A3, A4, A5. All but the first and last (at least) are both causes and effects - it is a chain of causes.

Let’s say we determine that A5 is caused by A4, and that A4 is caused by A3. And that we do not know the cause of A3 - limit the series in this way - take out A1 and A2 for the moment. The series A3, A4, A5 is still coherent. We see such series all the time, if we see causation at all, for we don’t know the first cause ever (unless it is the First Cause). That is, we can only see finite series of cause and effect.

What if the condition A3 wasn’t caused at all? What if it was generated randomly - yet once extant, caused A4? That would be no different than it being caused by an unkown A2, a far as our understanding as far as our knowledge of A4. What if the anterior limit to every chain of cause and effect was impossible to understand within the paradigm of causation? What if causation was local and temporary, but that our scope of knowledge was too small to know this?

What if we, in many cases, did obtain enough range, enough scope, a great enough scale to understand this, but refused to? Because we have not admitted the proper paradigm? What if science and mathematics was so limited that we cannot use them to describe the world without universal, permanent even infinite causation? Nor with it? What if the world around us was partly caused and partly random?

In other words, what if things were exactly as they seem?

I would say an uncaused cause is absurd; i would argue instead that there are inherently unknowable, spontaneous causes at play in every effect, originating beyond our capacity to perceive – to man things appear random, but ultimately everything, every cause is grounded in some form of intelligence, everything for a reason and purpose and beautiful necessity.

Feel free to brand me metaphysical, though I’ll mention that I too hold something of a perspectivist outlook; indeed, while I haven’t yet turned my back on epistemology and metaphysics, I also manage at the same time to wear my intellectual conscience like a crown of thorns – I find it stimulates the Eye :slight_smile:

Yup. I would call that metaphysics, all right.

A very interseting post Faust! I am really tired from working all day but I will try and make a couple of comments anyway.

A beginning with no possible cause or no beginning with infinite causation? Both choices appear to be illogical in my opinion but they are the only choices we have right? So I have already chosen the first. Why? Because of the scale involved in the no beginning infinite causation option, or the fact that I could spend the rest of my entire life trying to come up with a number for this particular quantity of existence and even this number could not even begin to represent this quantity in any real way.

I have also come to the conclusion that a beginning with no possible cause must still have a reason or why everything began in the first place at least…in…retrospect…but this reason or why could not again be a cause of any kind existing before this in any way. ??? I believe this is true but please do not ask me to explain this because I cannot explain what I do not understand myself! ](*,)

I am not claiming either. Not if you’re talking on a cosmic scale, anyway. We can begin with billiard balls, which seems a better place to begin than “At the Beginning”. At least we can witness a billiard game.

I don’t know how it all began. I am claiming that there is nothing impossible about many chains of causation, instead on just one Big One.

I call this an anthropomorphisation of the Universe - a human prejudice.

I think we should go with what we know, and not with what we don’t know.

We want to get to the root of things, but some things have many roots. Like that wisteria in my yard that I could never seem to kill.

Faust, why is it that I always find that my brain works like yours?

It’s just logical and proper in sense, what you just wrote.

There is nothing that has been able to state that a cause is needed for the first cause being studied in the observation.
Instead, we seem to be working backwards from A5 towards A1, but you are right; we quite possibly may never find an A1 as there may not be one.

We assume that one exists for any given event, but it is inductive logic that tells us that A1 exists only.

Smart thought, fun.

Sorry to hear that.

Thanks, though.

I think it’s speculative induction.

Then, when I put a “straight” stick into a pool of rippling water, witnessed the stick as bending by the waves, then it would actually be physically bent by light itself.

Everything we know about human language would then need to change.

Ur - I didn’t mean that we cannot be fooled.

It’s that quest for certainty that forces us to overextend and overexplain.

Science isn’t an explanation, it’s a description. As long as we keep that in mind, we’ll probably be okay.

The way language is now doesn’t provide metaphysical certitude.

Nothing does.

Science tells us that our observation of the bending is an error as to what “actually occurs”. But, our eyes tell us something different.

What if our eyes are correct and science is far-removed, trying to back-track its way into accounting for what we already see?

Have you considered that possibility?

Actually, you just gave me an epiphany just now Faust:

Men are sight-based, visual creatures (to see, to know). Women are touch-based, visceral creatures (to feel, to intuit). This also explains why men covet what they see and we see women as affectionate creatures; they are inclined to know something by touching or hearing it.

So, regarding the stick. If we base our observation on sight, then the stick actually does bend by the water ripples. If we base our observations on feeling (the stick feels unchanged by the submerged hand), then the stick actually does not bend by the water ripples. The problem is that these two observations do not reconcile via known-science. You cannot qualify which one is “more true” than the other.

The empirical sciences, as we know them, are coming to a decisive end.

P.S. Our written symbols are text-based, visually-speaking. We do not hear nor feel one another, which is also why women are at a natural/instinctual disadvantage when it comes to this domain of information & intelligence.

indeed, and I’m not sure it’s altogether obvious whose view is more presumptive and naive :-k

but i do admire your see-no, hear-no, do-no metaphysical pragmatism – it is honest in a sense

but I bet Socrates would admire my honesty – that I am aware of the fact that I perceive and experience both myself and the world through a perceptual pinhole, and thus know that I know nothing :stuck_out_tongue:

really though: if consciousness does, in a strictly scientific sense, play a causal role in the collapse of a wave function, then consciousness itself would appear to be an uncaused cause would it not?

final curious bit: do you find metaphysical ideas to be largely absent from Nietzsche’s writings?

Also, I say that the human mind cannot trick us and we cannot be fooled by it, here.

Our minds were not made to deceive us, which, coincidentally, is why God is not a deceiver (Descartes’ dilemma). If our minds were made to trick us, then they would get us killed from an evolutionary stand-point. That’s not, nor has it ever been, the case. – because we-as-human-animals are designed (instinctively) to survive at all costs. If our brains were (evolved to be) dysfunctional, then we simply would die out due to stupidity and ignorance. Nature and history tells us otherwise. Stupidity and ignorance are after-effects of laziness and hedonism: atrophy. Nature built the brain to be used-and-abused, not to rot away unthinking. She built our minds to see, to hear, to feel, and to know. We were given the right tools. It’s what we make of them.

So, consider this. The brain is not being fooled by the ripple-bent stick-in-the-water. What is being mistaken is the descriptive language of Science and expectation. If you trust the judgment of Man and his Reason, then it is not the feeling/emotion of the actual stick that is bent. The stick is bending according to our temporal consciousness of light itself.

I read this thing once that was really complicated, and talked about just this. You’re distinguishing between science, and the eyeball. Why? Basically, the paper was arguing that we can know that the eye is telling us what’s really out there and long story short, this thing called a fourier transform happens and like magic, what’s on the lens of your eye is mathematically identical to what’s been reflected off the surfaces in front of you. Or something like that…

That would not surprise me.

The human eye, like the human mind, simply does not lie.

In music this is referred to as transposing; to shift the same value of one set of notes by degree into another scale of notes using the same degree.
By holding the same value as another value a different perspective is accomplished, though the recognized pattern is held.

I consider “cause-effect” perspective to be just like any other temporary and arbitrary perspectives we can adopt.
I mean, it has the limit resulting from the required elements to hold it.

For example, when we talk about the world without “time” nor “space”. “cause-effect” perspective is irrelevant and there is no room for it.

So, if someone see the world as something that encompasses the “zone”, “state”, and/or “situation” outside of the perimeter/limit of “cause-effect” perspective, it’s normal for the person to find no cause in some part of the world.

But most religious people insisting in “no-cause” type thing isn’t very aware nor logical, and thus they don’t know what they are talking about.
And when they know a bit, they can be lying to themselves to maintain their “belief”.

I think the model is a bit over simplified.
If we adopt this type of simple “cause-effect” perspective, then we can think of more situation out of the limit.

Why not (A1, A2, … An) causing (B1,B2, … Bn), for example?
Although pretty small and we can practically ignore, very very small event/object in far far away may have some effect on any occurrence of event/object.

However, when we focus on B1, we can pick up A2, A8, Ax as the main causes based on certain criteria.

So, it’s like everything causing everything, but we focus on some of more relevant or useful cause depending on our aim in taking such perspective.

Also, do you have the starting node and end node in your model?
If you do, then the perspective allows the event/object without cause and/or effect.
It’s more or less normal in computer programming/language to have these two nodes when we make chained structure.

Any perspective, including the perspective of causation is local and temporary, I’d say.

We are free to adopt any perspective.
We are free to discard it, anytime, too, unless we become fanatic.
And we can live without lots of perspective.
Animals seem to live without lots of fixed perspective, for example.

Religious people (and many others) are often tied by rigidly fixed illogical and outdated set of perspectives. It’s like living is a mixture of narrow dark tunnel world.
Moreover, they tend to think that their rigid perspectives are absolute truth and must be applicable to everyone.
This causes the conflict of different perspectives, in addition to their inner conflicts.
And they usually don’t know that perspectives have limits.

I don’t get it. What does it mean “things being exactly as they seem”?

Things seem to be the effect of causes though.

That’s quite an interesting distinction between explanation and description. What are the things we can be certain of in order to explain them and what are those things which we are uncertain of which we can only describe? And how many times do we confuse the two in assuming we are explaining something when really all we are doing is describing it, description being limited to the tools of observation i.e. prejudices and dispositions etc.

amor fati - consciousness seems to be caused by brain function.

There is a sense that we should just stop asking the question “but what causes brain function?” - if not that question, then the next, or the next.

Because we will surely work back to “accident” or “god”.

Both may be naive, but each has distinct ramifications that do matter - I’m not sure that naivete is a problem - at some point we are going to ask naive questions. Do we want to get stuck with just any answer?

While there are a couple of grey areas, I see no metaphysics in Nietzsche.

nah - my example is waaaaay oversimplified. But I had to start somewhere. Many causes for many effects, or for one - of course. But this model still doesn’t account for everything. And if everything causes everything, our usual notion of causation is still fucked. But not in practical terms - correct - but in epistemic terms. Which is why science doesn’t require epistemology, and why epistemology must be considered metaphysics.

I think we substantially agree.

That things are exactly as they seem is one of those quasi-Nietzschean phrases I like to toss around from time to time. I mean that we need to start with the phenomena around us and not with some notion of a priori knowledge, for instance.