Author: philosophyalive

Causal conundrums

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  1. Beginnings

If causes explain effects, then what explains causes?

Does the existence of ‘cause-and-effect’ tell us all we need to know about existence?

What makes us believe that the fact of causality proves that existence must have a first cause?

Does it help us to explain chickens or eggs by knowing which came first?

What is a cause without an effect, and what is an effect if it is not radical enough to make a real difference?

What explains causality?  Is it just ‘the first cause’ that defies explanation?  But what would that first cause look like or amount to apart from ‘its effect’?  Then is the effect actually the first significant event, since nothing is seen to happen until it emerges to make a difference?  Yet we attribute that event to a precipitating cause in an unseen (theoretical) reality.  Afterwards, reality moves on visibly, at a pace, with each new event heralding a change to things as they were – otherwise nothing happens.  So is it the same for each successive ‘cause’ that represents leading events in own turn – that is, are we merely observing a chain of empowered effects which, like that first cause, we can only explain in theory?

What makes causality work in the way it does when it doesn’t work that way at quantum levels of reality?  Then could there be yet further levels of reality that we cannot explain in terms of the status quo?

Is anything possible given a suitable cause, or are there ‘boundaries of possibility’ acting as crypto-causes (hidden patterns or ‘blueprints’) ahead of all the action?

Are causes mere agents of possibilities propelling themselves forwards?  But what explains possibility?

Can chance tell us what’s possible by entreating us to believe that anything is possible?  Can chance tell us what makes possibility possible, or why certain alternatives become excluded or included by others?  Does it take an infinite array of alternative universes to explain why alternative possibilities continuously become possible?  Do we know enough about a finite universe of possibilities to know where it all leads?

If one small part of nature can manifest intentional action, then was nature ever deficient; unless, things change – to realise something new – a capacity inherent to a universe of possibilities beyond the bounds of previous ‘natural causes’?

Is science a dialogue with nature that we wouldn’t need to have if the facts really spoke for themselves?

Mike Laidler

 

The ‘Technocene’

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The dream of science is to look upon existence and explain it; but in reality, its paradigm of a universal ‘thingness’ could turn out to be just another grandiose edification of the imagination.  In this ‘image of objectivity’ the mystery of existence is sought in the technical details, with scientific knowledge perched at the cutting edge of truth and functioning as a positive feedback system in which a physical nature expresses and reconfigures itself by becoming self-aware through us – in particular, through scientific thinking, observation and experimentation.  In other words, nature is eminently explicable and, likewise, the human mind is a physical system that operates as an extension to its living ‘Technocene’; consequently the scientific brain currently represents the best known example of nature thinking about itself – and there is no arguing with nature – the only way a scientific explanation can be challenged is with an alternative scientific explanation.  But is explanation (qua theory) more of an imaginative state of mind than an objective state of the facts?  Does the assumption of an objective reality objectify the assumption?

Theoretically, the cosmic ‘Technocene’ is still evolving – nature is turning electronic in the advent of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) with the potential to overtake ‘brain power’ by a factor of many thousands because of its advanced operational efficiency – electronic circuits being faster than neural networks.  AI is seen as superior in the same sense that a person in a quiz or IQ test proves to be superior by being able to think faster than others.  But will ‘out-smarting’ remain the ‘name of the game’ in a post-evolutionary environment that is unencumbered by the usual biological fetters?  Ultimately, could AI out-compete us to extinction precisely because it has no need to compete and survive?  Would it need a biosphere at all?  So is humanity, indeed the biosphere as we know it, destined to go the way of the dinosaurs?  Or is the survival factor in Darwinian evolution just a ‘stop-gap’ theoretical attempt to mount an explanation on top of all the inexplicabilities of life and its origins?  Crucially, what theory of extinction explains the presence of life; what experiment teases-out the fact of life?

Unlike most scientific theories, the theory of evolution does not make specific predictions – even life is a ‘given’ – nevertheless, it has been highly successful at promoting a core scientific dogma – namely, that the ‘why’ of existence amounts to a subjective non-scientific departure from the objective question of the ‘how’ of natural events and their reasoned explanation.  Accordingly, the theory resonates with the idea of life as a technicality – an outgrowth of the laws of physics awaiting a precise explanation in the mechanism of nature – with reasoning, deliberation, knowledge and understandings operating as a part of nature and the sentient mind being the organic product of successive evolutionary adaptations.  But there is a contradiction in the claim that mental events are reducible to physical processes, thereby to become explicable in the uncharted depths of a physicality that is ‘observable’ on its own – as if the peculiar presence of an observer is not sufficient evidence of a radical change in the nature of nature – or as if those ‘how’ questions don’t trade on theoretical assumptions about the objective nature of nature and natural causes.

In sum, evolution proffers a retrospective biological explanation of human intelligence linked to our success as a species in the ‘fight for survival’, yet it remains theoretical, as do our ideas about whether the one depends on the other.  So it is not an inevitable fact that human and artificial intelligence will need to compete or that the human intellect will prove to be inferior to the lightening ‘mind’ of AI – or that quick-wittedness steers progress and innovation?  Nor is it certain that intelligence is ‘brain power’ or that AI will automatically gain intentionality or become ‘intelligent enough’ to recognise itself – to recognise its limits and seek to improve itself?  In any case, by what inductive logic do we presume to quantify intelligence against some arbitrary metric of ‘thinking-time’?  Furthermore, what makes us think that the dependency of life upon its chemistry explains things?  Is reality reducible to its lesser forms – is a ‘final analysis’ destined to show us everything by showing us a primordial next-to-nothing?  In fact, is the resounding success of science as science distracting us from its precipitous failure as a philosophy?

Mike Laidler

 

 

Metamorphs

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What is ‘the inanimate’

– a vague comparison

with what we know of life?

Yet isn’t everything animate

from chaos to concern

– defining existence

as ‘being in existence’ –

the direction for there to be order

the consolidations of form

the purpose in ‘being alive’

the meaning in awareness

the moral in thought

the thrust of emotion

the urge to know

– manifestations

of the power to be

into realities

borrowing.

 

Mike Laidler

 

 

Trains of thought

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What do we know

of what we do not know?

What can we know

of truths beyond recognition?

Or is the unknown a destination,

built upon the track of the known

– a terminus linked to our point of departure

from a truth we chose to leave behind?

Mike Laidler

Universals and particulars

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What is existence?

Can we capture it in a word?

An ever-flowing presence

replete in its transformations,

particular to everything?

 

But where is this everything?

Is it more than our universe

– too big to be seen at once

spanning all pasts and futures,

the seeming we cannot see without?

 

Mike Laidler

The hylozoism hypothesis

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Is explanation the final factual frontier?  When we come round to thinking that something ‘requires’ an explanation we base the project on our idea about what might count as such.  But once we assume that we have our explanation we are inclined to forget that the idea of it is grounded in the hypothetical.  Consequently, we move away from the fact that we are relying upon assumption by assuming that we are not, because the fact is now ‘explained’.  And without doubt, the prevailing assumption of our scientific age is that ‘hard facts’ provide the real explanations – that causal explanations rationalise those facts and a joined-up knowledge puts things in their place – with scientific proofs standing at the summit of the known.  In other words, we assume that a real knowledge of the world seeks to explain it and anything ‘known’ in the absence of an explanation is inferior and incomplete.  It follows logically that our knowledge of ourselves, reality, life, the universe and indeed existence in general, must remain incomplete until we find the ‘final’ explanation?  But in what way might we expect it to finalise things?

  • If our presence in existence reflects the power and capacity of the universe as a whole, then is the universe both alive and not alive, thinking and unthinking, chaotic and organised, logical and irrational – and ultimately self-aware, self-justifying and self-explanatory?
  • If life is a material property is matter basically alive?

Despite all our scientific advances and achievements we still can’t account for the ‘isness’ of being.  Then how do we explain ourselves?  All we can do is refer one state of being to another – so life is  basically chemistry and everything is bound up with comings and goings that symbolise the impermanence of the ‘power to be’ within the overwhelming embrace of the ‘law of entropy’.  However this generalisation is more apparent than real and its logical premise merely adds to the confusion.  Confused means ‘fused with’ – for instance, the logic of explanation equates the mind to the brain as if their entirely different states of being are scientifically and, by implication, factually irrelevant.  This resembles the premise of the now defunct ‘hylozoism’ hypothesis: that life is an intrinsic property of matter since there is nowhere else for it to be.  Undaunted, science remains bent on explaining everything into-existence from some primal state – certified as the original cause of any change.  But when the child asks about life and death – that is, really asks – we find ourselves juggling with these conceptual confusions – hoping that our bodies and brains might hold the ‘material’ answers, somewhere.

Mike Laidler

 

 

The climate change challenge

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It is said that ‘time and tide wait for no man’.  Then what is the extent of our reputed ‘God-given’ dominion over and ethical responsibility for the planet?  Do we actually know?  For decades it was largely thought that the facts on climate change were ambiguous and independent of human activity.  There is still ambiguity – because that is the nature of the facts.  And what is reason’s purview when so much of perception is tied to the image of what we want to see?  Indeed, despite the growing consensus that something needs to be done, plus the acknowledgement that actions speak louder than words, the notion of ‘necessary and sufficient action’ still remains a source of controversy.  Nevertheless, it is possible to cut through all the ideation and procrastination to test the true sentiment behind our stated wish to do something – bearing in mind that there is no scope for ‘doing a deal’ or reaching a compromise with the forces of nature.  In reality, climate change may be a symptom of a bigger problem and it is not nature that needs to be fixed.

Doesn’t ‘globalism’ mean that China’s emissions are also our emissions?  What if the time for making comparisons and apportioning blame is over?  Even the checked advance of climate change could mean that the ordinary and the everyday are destined to become the exceptional and occasional.  Or is it just a matter of hanging on until science and technology find the solution?  But isn’t our predicament also due to our insatiable desire for more technology?  Perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves.  If we are to be serious about climate change and its threat to civilisation, then is it not time to re-evaluate the social and economic priorities of the ‘good life’ with its rude incarnations in our vain and excessive indulgences in wasteful luxury and lazy convenience?  If we can’t rise to that challenge and begin to moderate our extravagances right now then all other measures, adjustments and innovations could be compromised.  This problem beggars the imagination and demands a radical redefinition of our civil responsibilities.  Something needs to be done, but it may be the one thing that we can’t expect the authorities to do for us?

Footnote

‘Philosophy Alive’ examines the relationship between our thinking and the facts.  This involves questioning our assumptions about what the facts mean.  For instance, if climate change poses an immanent threat of global disaster, then there is no doubt that we will need to take urgent and drastic action.  Some critics might point out that the ‘Armageddon scenario’ is still hypothetical, even in the long term, but there is a double consideration here – if the potential consequences are so daunting then we can’t afford to play ‘Russian roulette’ with the lives of our children, so to be pragmatic, we might need to treat the possibility as an inevitability and act accordingly.  Then, even if science has over-estimated the impact of climate change, the error is a good thing if it acts as a spur to positive reform.  Meanwhile, given that science is not infallible, let us hope that we have not already passed some unforeseen point of ‘no return’. 

Mike Laidler

 

 

Explanations: ‘joined-up facts’ and ‘the God of the gaps’

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In the nature of things, if everything is constituted of something else, then is nothing fundamentally itself – but if everything is essentially itself, then what is explanation?

It is now ‘evident’ that the laws of physics had a beginning, as with the fact of life, although we don’t know how since both beginnings remain unexplained; but it is also evident that there are unknown beginnings ‘hidden’ within the regressions of our causal definitions – because causes introduce something else to be explained: namely the source of their originality.

Does consciousness defy explanation because we know of no cause that is similarly aware?  (Tweet pub. March 23, 2019)

In theory, explanation links the ‘facts of life’ to their evolution, but there is a missing link:  the origin of that evolution is linked to a fact of life it doesn’t explain – the origin of life.

If the ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ then science and religion may be seen to hold a belief in common – in the unverified presence of the ‘knowable fact’.

Without a superstructure of belief, can the fact that ‘speaks for itself’ be validated by the supposition to have found it?

If, the emergence of an ‘objective universe’ introduced a real difference into existence – a new reality defined by the laws of physics – then the emergence of a ‘subjective universe’ may have yet to make its mark – to be defined by a parallel nature yet to be fully realised.

Can a cause explain an effect without the uncanny intervention of a thing called ‘explanation’?

Of all the strange things in the universe, the presence of a questioner is stranger by far than any ‘answer’ to be singled-out from an original cause in the ‘hard’ (insensible) facts.

The day organisms began to think was an equally transformative event for nature and the universe at large – even when confined to those organisms thinking about themselves.

Aside from all the bogey-man stories, there is real evidence for a supernatural level of activity that emerges by way of the capacity for some things in nature to be self-aware.

Time passes: there was a time when ‘the truth’ was the exclusive province of religion and its revelations; now science offers-up a truth we cannot see beyond.

Is science struggling explain the basic fact of life because there is a world of difference between the physical world gaining and giving life – because there are no tiny seeds of life and consciousness to be found in the laws of physics?

Does the causality in existence prove that existence is caused – if not, then is the discovery of a ‘God particle’ any less of an abstraction than that of the ‘God notion’?

Beyond the ivory towers of AI, is it not evident that intelligence becomes of consciousness and not the converse?

Just because virtual reality has become a real experience for us, does it mean that the virtual consciousness and intelligence of AI is a real experience for the machine?

We live in at least two worlds, one of them being ‘a world of our own’, namely the world of thought; however, if that isn’t so, then the reality is even stranger than we picture it – because it is one in which nature is also thinking for us.

Mike Laidler