baba@spar.UUCP (Not Michael Ellis) (08/18/85)
I don't understand all this talk about determinism and acausality. I mean, what distinguishes a "causal" and an "acausal" event? Is there a "causiton" that mediates the force of causality? Or is it all just a silly trick of our particular brains, like, well, "free" will? Baba
tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (08/21/85)
In article <471@spar.UUCP> baba@spar.UUCP (Not Michael Ellis) writes: >I don't understand all this talk about determinism and acausality. >I mean, what distinguishes a "causal" and an "acausal" event? Is >there a "causiton" that mediates the force of causality? Or is >it all just a silly trick of our particular brains, like, well, >"free" will? > Baba Without having so far taken part in this debate (likely because I tend to think in terms of "function" rather than cause, for reasons I may explain here someday, but not now), I'd offer this distinction between determinism and acausality which answers Baba's question: "Causality", as Hume would put it, is a connection OUR BRAINS make between two events occuring right next to each other as far as we can "see" or "determine"; we make this connection under the requirement that everytime we see one event (called the cause), we then see the second event (called the effect) immediately following. Note I use the word "everytime". "Right next to each other" involves concepts of time which are relevant to the observing brain, which may or may not take these measures to correspond with scientific time, as measured by clocks of some granularity. Has something to do with connectedness of events in time, i.e. the inability to see a space of time between two events in which neither event is occuring. Also something to do with disjoint- ness of events in time, perhaps (otherwise the sense in which one event "follows" another could be construed as unclear). Chains of causality are { cause, effect = cause2, effect2 = cause3, effect3 = cause4, ... } connections. See Beauchamp & Rosenberg's *Hume and the Problem of Causation* for more. (Cambridge U Press, 1981 I think, and a magnificent book) An "acausal" event could be an event to which our brain cannot find another event such that that event could be called a "cause" of the acausal event, i.e. an event which is not a member of any causal connection in the second "effect" position. Determinism is the belief that all events can be placed in causal connections by some brain at some time. Hard to prove. If "acausality" is the belief that some events are acausal, then "acausality" would just be the negation of determinism. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw