I've said this before on another one of his videos, but regardless of the wide varieties of disagreement on his videos, can we all agree that Kuhn is one hell of a host? The guy is so well read.
If he can stop using theistic opinions just to grab a wider audience he would be taken more seriously! He wants a big tent n sacrifices epistemology n truth
@@mikebell4649 Why would he and should he be so prejudicial in his investigation? Especially since a great number of modern philosophers are theists. I think getting a wide variety of opinions and considering them is a sign of intellectual maturity. And this is especially true given that Kuhn has stated on multiple occasions that the existence of God and the possibility of an afterlife is one of the subjects that troubles him most of all the deep questions.
I love the fact that "Closer to Truth" is provided freely on TH-cam (and without ADs).. the series brings up great questions that trigger more and more questions!!.. Curiosity is the base of learning, and to have this for free open doors for people to learn and ask more all around the world. The main problem is how to bring this kind of stuff to more people, a youtuber talking about whatever gets more views than these type of series.
New to this series and digging it. IMHO it's draw is it's genuine curiosity, and the excitement encircling it. That's really tough to fake. The host, ofc is a perfect conductor for all this.
If reality tv were replaced by Closer To Truth I don't think the world's politics would look anything like the circus we see today. This sort of programming is such an understated benefit to the species. Very work Dr Kuhn 👍
Firstly - taken together, Mr Kuhn, these many chapters of Closer to the Truth constitute one of the most profound philosophical explorations of our time (i actually can't think of a comparable work in print of this scope.) In pushing into some of the deepest questions of existence - you tease out and weave together connections across disciplines, across world views, across perspectives - and all the time simply exposing the competing threads to allow us to see how they lie. You respect those you interview, and you respect your listeners. You meet with great minds and ask many of the questions I want to ask, and so many more I wouldn't have thought to ask. (Secondly - am I the only one who is, of course, at once impressed by these great minds - but then equally surprised at how many demonstrate an underlying almost emotive commitment to their own presuppositions about reality by sometimes presenting as sureties the More Speculative Ideas (eg, multiverse, backwards causation) alongside those Things More Verified as if they are the same?
It's in large part to Roberts interviewing skills. He asked such profound questions and has stood toe to toe with...... Everyone. Super inquisitive conversation from Robert. The guy just never disappoints.
All of my life I have been concerned with the meaning of things, identifying them, how things work and why, and entity relationships, etc. This made me feel like I wasn't as smart as other people because I never see others bothered by not knowing enough. I eventually learned that most people do not like to think and would rather fake it till they make it. I guess I wasn't really behind, I was just more curious and honest about my level of understanding in the interest of welcoming more understanding.
Me too I'm interested in many things. I can't do them all. Not time enough dont live long enough. I've always knew for some time now about the law of cause and effect. Einstein used it. To discover ever thing he ever knew without it nothing can be known about any thing. I'm a very curious person. I suppose. ,,,
The things is all of these smart people arent sure of their "intelligence". I assume like most smart people they doubt they are. The difference is that they are people that have done thing i.e they jumped
Kuhn makes you think, whatever that is. Curiosity is for people who like to think, dogma is for lazy,disinterested people who enjoy being satisfied with group values.
@@terrywbreedlove Those popular scientists doesn't really answer question, only referee to what they already explained. There are other channels when young researchers and scientists explore their thought models, they do care what community want to know and do repply to every single comment. Greene is a good professor, but he wont waste time with amateurs and risk loosing credibility due to some stupid question he can't really explain.
I love this series but the more episodes I watch the more I realize that we actually know very little. There are very few absolute truths if any, and I wouldn't be surprised if in 300+ years people look back at our time and are amazed at what we believed and thought was true.
Interesting and I mostly agree. I know most people think we will become increasingly advanced in the future but I often wonder could we regress. Could we lose even our current technology and have to start over. I am not sure I could start a fire without a match and that scares the hell out of me!!!
In 2001, I had a very real motor cycle accident. It resulted in some permanent damage to my right leg. Since then I am reminded every minute of my life that causation is very real indeed and not just a mental construct.
Sorry for that... Technically it was some specific chain of events (only part of what can be called "the accident") that lead to the damage. I hope that something could be learned from those events that helps others and also that you can still lead a life worthy to live. I have a HUGE RESPECT for each kind of activity that involves things faster than a fast ride on bicycle. We've been playing once with a cheap, very HARD frisbee, which was capable of flying rather long distances if thrown with enough POWER. It was me who threw it mostly along the lowest path possible, as that was the most efficient. For reasons, we stood on a hillside, and changed positions, so it wasn't trivial to find the best path. Once I threw it in such direction that a boy standing closer to me, than the intended "target", could intervene. So he attempted to catch the damn thing but it was SPINNING VERY VIGOROUSLY and since it was somewhat sharp at its circumference, he instantly pulled away his hand. That sturdy, energetic frisbee hit him right in the head and resulted in such a wound as if hit by a stone. So the cheerful game had an awfully BLOODY END. Of course this can't be compared to most of the traffic accidents. What I'd like to HIGHLIGHT is: I knew that frisbee the most, as it was mine and played with it a lot. I think most of the players realised it's unusually dangerous properties (I even urged them to be careful) but they had LIMITED EXPERIENCE with it. I threw it sometimes the MOST HARD because I was able to aim it precisely and knew that after the given distance it will loose enough energy to be safely catched. However after a while we all got "enchanted" and many of us tried the limits (that's what puberty is about, eh?!). When more participants of any potentially harmful activity start to loose carefulness also alertness (due to tiredness) then the circumstances can change more quickly than awaited: accident is bound to happen. If I'm not mistaken: majority of motorcycle riders don't get involved in serious accidents (?) What are the major causes that lead to more drastic outcomes? On aikido lessons we spent a lot of time, a huge effort went into learning HOW TO FALL. Are there similar trainings for motorbike raiders? Is that even possible to prepare (a bit) in advance? If that opens up too painful memories, please ignore my comment
It's a shame the program didn't interview statisticians who have puzzled over the concept of causation, determinism, and probability for more than 100 years.
Right! Especially, the Granddaddy of them all -- Judea Pearl. His books, "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference" (for the expert) and "The Book of Why" (for the layman) are the last word on this subject for now.
Enlightening. Thank you. the examples about the dollar etc work well. Backward causation seems absurd. Changing the notion of space seems less problematic as explained in another video of the series.
@Islayman what makes any of us able to decide on whatever if future already exists? Sorry, one has to peek into what kinds of experiments are done in QM (eg. a bunch of quantum particles showing non-intuitive probability distributions, or the wave like behaviour of matter particles strongly limited by the mass of the system, it's not that long that systems able to re-cohere are studied ...): QM with all the fields and special dynamics is nowhere near to full understanding of even the simplest systems... Once you start to develop a solid grasp on basic concepts, suddenly you realize how far stretched are many of even the basic interpretations of the measurement problem, not speaking about the extrapolations they make. What the heck is a conscious system in a block universe anyway?
This is why I am subscribed to this channel. For topics like this. Swinburne rarely looks you in the eye. I'm the exact same. It's not that common. It's often a trait of shyness it seems. Kuhn has very straight shoulders. Swinburne's right shoulder slants at quite a noticeable angle.
I like the concept of causation, a certain strength of causation that led to the emergence of the world instead of its destruction. This is what we call believers, the uncaused cause or the Lord.
Backward causation also resolves freewill V Determinism. Both concepts apply but one is in backward time and the other in forward time. So there is duality on this level.
?? determinism doesn't "become" free will by inverting the arrow of causation and time, it's still determinism. you just perceive it psychologically as free will if you want.
A basebal breaks a window, it makes a loud noise, people come out to see what happened, somebody gets in trouble, somebody feels guilty, the glass must be ckeaned up, the window must be repaired, the repair costs money, somebody has to pay, somebody learns a lesson, on and on and on!
It's not clear that Hume is a skeptic about the metaphysics of causation, but he is a skeptic about our knowledge of causation, because he thinks that we cannot properly ground our claim that there is a necessary connection between causes and their effects in sense experience.
Excellent move to come back to the theist/atheist divide to understand the divide between seeing causality as a fundamental or seeing it as derivative from human experience. Think of Aristotle's four kinds of cause - formal, efficient, material, and final -... These are four different ways of framing the world to focus on what is really significant or basic in it. What things are made of, what their "essence" is, what brought them into existence, or what purpose was behind it happening. You could say that these describe the four basic ways that we (Aristotle, not me) look at everything. As far as causal processes go, why single out any particular series of events rather than another, and why stop with a cause and effect when the whole structure of causation stretches out to infinity in every direction? Any parsing of reality to understand or explain it must be from a human perception, until such time as we encounter intelligent aliens. I side with Blackburn and the Humeans.
Causation is a concept based on time, which is still the least talked about or well defined concept in physics. No one has seen or proposed a subatomic carrier particle for time or an intrinsic field theory. Ask a physicist what time is and they will give you a series of indirect answers. "Timespace" is usually the accepted concept., which analyzes the geometry of it, but nothing else. What is time specifically? If it's the thing we are all confused about and hung up on, maybe as a construct of reality that doesn't exist, maybe this explains causality. If everything happens at once in reality, there is no need for time, and no need for causes.
Causality is a fundamental nature of mental logic. Without it, mountain goats will jump off cliffs without hesitation. In other words, the phenomenon of life shall be characterized as causal purpose, not only purpose. Nature laws shall have their own full-scale causalities, not necessarily be fully compatible with human mental causality though. Therefore, using terms such as pattern to deny the causality of the physical world is self-deceiving.
Causation can be formally described by mathematics, it is a model that is able to predict the effect of interventions or a prediction model that correctly adjusts for confounders. No philosophical speculation is needed or theist vs atheist concepts.
Great video for a great topic. Thanks Mr. Kuhn for being such a great host! I'd be extremely interested about the same topic seen from a physics point of view.
Just beautiful, Robert! My thoughts: If experience is wired to the phenomenon of causation and (Aristotlean) logic - our most reliable tool for studying experience - fundamentally embeds cause through the construct of propositional statements, aren’t we trapped in desconstructing the nature of cause?
I really liked this video myself. My conclusion is that the concept of causation is being used backwards in many cases. It is very helpful and enlightening to look for causes to explain observations or experiences, but you get in trouble when you take these imagined "causes" and try to use them to judge nature. What you observe or experience is assumed to exist, but your explanation is just an opinion that is subject to being revised or rejected based on new data.
The subject of causation provides the very crux of discovering "bedrock reality". I would love to be able to discuss this with Kuhn. Unfortunately, such a discussion to be of value would almost certainly take more of his time than he would be willing to spare. There exists a fundamental causal mechanism that starts with "something" that has no physical characteristics; and with "nothing" that is absent even the fabric of space itself. It took many decades of pursuing this causal mechanism to arrive at a definitive relationship of such precision to know the path was more than simply a curious exercise in logic. Thank you for a superb video!
Thanks. Maybe one need a unifying quantum gravity theory to better depict reality and understand causation, whether it is a fundamental element of reality or a one among other mental constructs.
Causation is basically making something happen. Which requires some kind of a mechanism that connects the cause and effect this way. Sometimes this causal mechanism is very simple and straightforward. But more often, effects have multiple causes and very complicated mechanisms that connect each cause to the effect. You can find all kinds of patterns in event sequences using statistical correlations. But most of such correlations don't have a causal relationship, even though one follows the other in time. Because quite often, there is some third hidden cause that first causes the first event and then the second. That's why people say correlation isn't causation. So, just finding a sequence pattern doesn't necessarily mean that there is a causal relationship between the first event and the second. To establish a causal relationship, you need to describe a mechanism of how one event causes the other. And you need to show beyond reasonable doubt this mechanism exists and it works the way you say it works. "How?" is the question any claim of a causal relationship must answer. Because if you don't describe and explain the mechanism of how it happens, then there is no way to tell if your pattern is just a correlation, or if it has a causal relationship. It's the mechanism that establishes the causal relationship. So, it's no so much a question of whether causation exists. It's a question of whether a mechanism exists that enables one event to cause another. And this question you can answer only through scientific investigations for each seeming cause and effect.
When you describe the mechanism of how one event makes another event happen and show beyond reasonable doubt that this mechanism exists and it works like this in every experiment, then this is experimental evidence and not an assumption. An assumption is when you make an untestable and an unfalsifiable statement and assume that it's true. But this clearly isn't the case when describe a mechanism of how one event makes another event happen, and show with various experiments that this mechanism actually exists and it works the way you say it works. Because if this mechanism doesn't exist or doesn't work the way you say it works, then the experiments will show it. And other people can test it too independently of you. Perhaps the problem here isn't the answer. The problem is the question. It's a badly worded question that uses an abstract word which doesn't describe what exactly it is that you are looking for. Albert Einstein once said, “ If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/determining-the-proper-question I think you can remove the word 'causation' and just talk about one event making another event happen through some kind of a mechanism that can be tested and shown to work in various experiments. And then you don't have any philosophical dilemma to worry about. It's just a mundane scientific question about whether one event plays a role in making another event happen or not.
Causation is an effective language that turns a description of the universe of the form "t -> X" into the form "e -> (X -> X)". The former is great when you try to answer how a system evolves in general, the latter is great when you try to answer how events or actions affect the evolution. The former is like having a computer program that is completely evaluated at compile time and presented to the user as some kind of movie, the latter provides an interface to the user so the user can interact with the program (which necessarily means that some parts are evaluated at runtime). The former tries to be objective and assumes a passive observer, the latter is somewhat subjective and permits an active experimentator. The former allows for continuous time, the latter inherently has time quantized into events.
if you eliminate the causation from the universe, then the human brain isn't eligible to understand the universe simply because it thinks in causation terms
If there's no time then everything that has, is, or ever will happen, exists at once. Causation then could just be a matter of perspective, dependant on which sequence is viewed in a particular order. Humans view things 'forward', but there could be infinite degrees and possible pathways to sequence every event that already exists.
Nando N I agree. Also is a perspective of being outside time that you could (theoretically) view all of space-time, past and present at once. And as you say, it’s all about perspective.
@@alwaysgreatusa223 Semantics. Sure, you could say that 'at once' means at a single 'time', but the word 'time' here is just used to reference and juxtapose the common use and understanding of time to be flowing. Where time is static, and not flowing, relative to the common grasp of it, it would be reasonable to say that there would be no time there, which could also be referred to as static time.
@@Ndo01The idea that things happen in no time having passed is absurd. It's not just words, it's concepts that are the issue here. To speak of time as being static is to destroy the concept of time by making it unintelligible.
Introducing backward causation doesn’t undermine *causation;* it undermines the uni-directionality of time. But the very idea of backward causation presupposes causation. It’s in the name lol. Causation is a subcategory of explanation, a category we can’t get rid of per certain formulation of PSR, which Ed Feser defends brilliantly in his 2017 “Five Proofs” book (in the chapter on the Rationalist Proof).
Ps. I know that Feser denies backward causation, but he’s just wrong about that. It’s not merely theoretical, as there’s experimental evidence for it! But his case for PSR remains solid.
Causation is also probability! Let me explain. When you throw a stone at the window, the window always breaks is wrong! most probably it will break, out of many other things that can happen. It can be shown better the striking of a billiard ball, we provide a smooth top for the ball to roll, the table is well prepaired, the ball is perfectly round, ... etc. etc. So as humans we have prepaired the situation by minimising the probabilty of other things happening. But not all, a pilot training an air plan might crash on the building! We always tend to forget that the place of the experiment is carefully prepared by the experimenter to minimize the probability!
Amere Mortal you can not study it. by definition, the tool you would use to study is science which is based on the cause and effect. So, it would not be an objective quest for truth. does it make sense ?
a new thought ; you do know the max speed = the transfer(or transmission) rate of causality so all that goes slower then the speed of light is under the same hood, bound to causality.. then there is a gap, the size of a (maybe that famous) planck length, that any 'causal tick'(lack of better word) has to jump before it gives you that transmission . it has to buildup tension to jump that gap, thats why black holes are weird, gaps are gone, no jumps whatsoever all is one big soup of causal incoherence
Philosophers talking about physics always reminds me of Richard Feynman making fun of philosophers. They really don’t understand physics. 5:01 Here, he said gravity causes attraction but that’s not true at all. The attraction IS what we call gravity. Cause and effect are always separated by a time interval. A very short time after someone pulls a trigger, a bullet gets shot out of a gun. That’s cause and effect. This is not the case for gravity. Things are not getting attracted after the gravitational pull. Gravitational pull is just another way to say that things attract each other. What Newton found out was how mass and distance are related to attraction between objects, i.e. gravity. And F = ma does not describe cause and effect. When cause is present, acceleration is also present AT THE SAME TIME. One is not causing the other.
Sinnott-Armstrong: "the idea is that abstract things can cause concrete physical things..."causation exists at a higher level of generality." "I am adding a new level of description, a new way of classifying physical states or neural states that did not exist without the mental terminology." "Both the mental description and the physical description have a role to play in the causal account of what happened....But if you don't think in terms of contrastive kinds of causation you'll miss all that, and then mental causation will look like a mystery."
Re: Sinnot-Armstrong and "Contrastive causality": It's not two kinds of causality, it's two kinds of epistemology: knowledge of the physical world and knowledge of human values and meaning.
One of the best things about CTT is that, for every episode about total bunk ideas like ESP and whether it exists or not, there are at least a dozen episodes, like this one, about _far_ more worthy and interesting questions.
It’s a bit upsetting the way Huw Price says that “It’s a fundamental challenge to 21st-century physics to reconcile GR and Quantum Physics.” And the 21st century is a quarter over and no progress!
O conceito da Moral Kant o extraiu no uso da Razão pois não o conseguia atraves da experimentação, que o chamou de "realidade a priori" como sendo anterior à outra.Nesse momento mágico ele "acordou" tomado pelo sentimento de relação harmoniosa propria da verdade, um sentimento dual e matematico.
Love this series. I wish that for this episode, however, he would discuss causation with a scientist such as theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. But really nice hearing all these different perspectives.
I think the opinion of causality being primitive, basic, fundamental is in accord with reality because if you rake the 4 fundamental forces of nature into consideration, they're responsible for every interaction in the universe and causality is a result of interactions,. You don't get much more primitive, basic or fundamental than that.
Yes, but this is a rather trivial observation; the relevant and important question is why it is supposedly a universal law, and on what grounds it can be so described, discovered, or conceived.
Hume , of course, lived before much of modern math and physics. His explanations are therefor missing a lot of information of the “what’s necessary”. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, require causation.
The point does not concern what the laws require, the point concerns what is required for them to be recognised as laws to begin with, why, and what that merits or implies
@@rohmann000 because you can negatively question everything. But that’s meaningless. You didn’t really respond to my post either. You added another complication which doesn’t address what I said, which, by the way is an often mentioned situation in the scientific community.
When the 'Moon' causes the tides, he said the 'Moon' does not touch the water to cause the tides, but in effect, in actuality, it does. The energy field call gravitation emanating from the 'Moon's' mass touches or interacts with the "Earth's' water (and the earth as well). So yes, on a 'Macro' Level (coagulated energy in space-time we call matter) the 'Moon' does not touch the earth. But on a 'Micro' Level (quantum fields) it does. When parts of the universe interact with material and quantum fields, highly organized information unexplained by the laws of physics emerge. We call this 'Emergence', and through 'Emergence' we experience/perceive 'Causation' in all its forms.
Well the future does change the past in a sense. The future will be different depending on whether I do A or B. But what we forget (and many deny) is the past was also different depending on whether I do A or B. Dependent connections definately run both ways.
In math, one could say adding 2 to 3 makes 5. But I prefer that the numbers simply have compositional relationships instead of implying causation. Reality may fundamentally operate the same way.
What do you mean by that and how does it apply to different causal interactions? If a ball hits another ball and makes it move, then how can this be reduced to mereological and compositional relations?
@@yourfutureself3392 Think of the resulting motion as the balancing of an ever-present and ever-running equation. As if the universe was a GPU shader. The fundamental constants are the shader parameters.
@@perfectionbox I don't really understand what you mean. Are you claiming that a ball moving another is the same kind of relation as 2+2=4? That each ball is a component of the mathematical relation between the two? Or am I completely misunderstanding your point?
@@yourfutureself3392 At a fundamental level, everything is just the vibration of a monic soliton (wave). The state of the monic is a singular value being updated by a procedure. But the wave is the procedure; the procedure is the wave. And the value is large enough to describe every particle. And the procedure (and therefore the value) can observe itself, creating the object-subject distinction. The value is the program is the observer.
Looks like philosophers like to use an unheard word instead of an explaination their idea, probably because it's even less clear to them than it is to us.
I've said this before on another one of his videos, but regardless of the wide varieties of disagreement on his videos, can we all agree that Kuhn is one hell of a host? The guy is so well read.
Hey David... didn't Kuhn write a book himself?
If he can stop using theistic opinions just to grab a wider audience he would be taken more seriously! He wants a big tent n sacrifices epistemology n truth
Why dont u ask him to Demonstrate how he know ure god makes choices and who told him! Presuppositional !
@@mikebell4649 Why would he and should he be so prejudicial in his investigation? Especially since a great number of modern philosophers are theists. I think getting a wide variety of opinions and considering them is a sign of intellectual maturity.
And this is especially true given that Kuhn has stated on multiple occasions that the existence of God and the possibility of an afterlife is one of the subjects that troubles him most of all the deep questions.
@@mikebell4649 ...what?
I love the fact that "Closer to Truth" is provided freely on TH-cam (and without ADs).. the series brings up great questions that trigger more and more questions!!.. Curiosity is the base of learning, and to have this for free open doors for people to learn and ask more all around the world.
The main problem is how to bring this kind of stuff to more people, a youtuber talking about whatever gets more views than these type of series.
Join this WhatsApp group for Philosophical discussions...
👇
Link: chat.whatsapp.com/IibF9JUazRF9IExVk5Qmh1
There are Ads now.
Without ads? What? The way I’m watching they are relentlessly mercilessly appearing.
Adblock removes them! It's free (donations appreciated)
closer to truth has become my bedtime story. I go to sleep listening to one of the videos
New to this series and digging it. IMHO it's draw is it's genuine curiosity, and the excitement encircling it. That's really tough to fake. The host, ofc is a perfect conductor for all this.
If reality tv were replaced by Closer To Truth I don't think the world's politics would look anything like the circus we see today. This sort of programming is such an understated benefit to the species. Very work Dr Kuhn 👍
the only fact this guy is a noble searcher makes me smile for him. great person
Extraordinary content! This is what TH-cam need.
Join this WhatsApp group for Philosophical discussions...
👇
Link: chat.whatsapp.com/IibF9JUazRF9IExVk5Qmh1
couldnt agree with u more
@@sirluoyi2853 You still host a whatsapp group?
Firstly - taken together, Mr Kuhn, these many chapters of Closer to the Truth constitute one of the most profound philosophical explorations of our time (i actually can't think of a comparable work in print of this scope.) In pushing into some of the deepest questions of existence - you tease out and weave together connections across disciplines, across world views, across perspectives - and all the time simply exposing the competing threads to allow us to see how they lie. You respect those you interview, and you respect your listeners. You meet with great minds and ask many of the questions I want to ask, and so many more I wouldn't have thought to ask. (Secondly - am I the only one who is, of course, at once impressed by these great minds - but then equally surprised at how many demonstrate an underlying almost emotive commitment to their own presuppositions about reality by sometimes presenting as sureties the More Speculative Ideas (eg, multiverse, backwards causation) alongside those Things More Verified as if they are the same?
i don't understand why your videos aren't getting millions of views.
Doctor Who 2002 Cause & Effect. I drank too much wine, and now must take a piss.
@@Bldyiii lol, the matrix 😁
people would rather watch mindless entertainment like fat guys chugging 10 gallons of coke. Thinking is hard work
Only those interested in ultimate truth will watch,but most people is interested satisfying their sensual needs.
people en masse are insufficiently intelligent
There isn’t really any other series like this. It is an endlessly thought provoking series. It’s very special.
This is the kind which respect the audience minds
It's in large part to Roberts interviewing skills. He asked such profound questions and has stood toe to toe with...... Everyone. Super inquisitive conversation from Robert. The guy just never disappoints.
What makes someone a philosopher is the ability to talk nonsense endlessly, while every sentence he says is neither obviously right nor wrong.
I agree, this channel is so good. One thing I think makes it so good is Robert always asks really great questions
I had this similar thought before reading this comment. This is a real public service in exposing people to these ideas.
All of my life I have been concerned with the meaning of things, identifying them, how things work and why, and entity relationships, etc. This made me feel like I wasn't as smart as other people because I never see others bothered by not knowing enough. I eventually learned that most people do not like to think and would rather fake it till they make it. I guess I wasn't really behind, I was just more curious and honest about my level of understanding in the interest of welcoming more understanding.
The surest sign of intelligence is curiosity, whereas surest sign of stupidity is disinterestedness.
Me too I'm interested in many things. I can't do them all. Not time enough dont live long enough. I've always knew for some time now about the law of cause and effect. Einstein used it. To discover ever thing he ever knew without it nothing can be known about any thing. I'm a very curious person.
I suppose. ,,,
The things is all of these smart people arent sure of their "intelligence". I assume like most smart people they doubt they are. The difference is that they are people that have done thing i.e they jumped
Kuhn makes you think, whatever that is. Curiosity is for people who like to think, dogma is for lazy,disinterested people who enjoy being satisfied with group values.
Way to go Lawrence. Another very well done episode. I deeply admire your work.
This is now my favorite TH-cam channel, along with World Science Festival.
I envy your life, mister Kuhn. Wish i could engage in conservations with so many interesting persons from all areas.
Hey Dom.. I feel the same. But I'm pretty simple-minded so I don't think my conversation with these people would get very far.
@@johnbrzykcy3076 Well, tbh i would need to improve a lot to talk with many of these people.
You can now easier than ever with social media etc. People like Dr Brian Green has e a weekly show and he answers questions.
@@terrywbreedlove Those popular scientists doesn't really answer question, only referee to what they already explained. There are other channels when young researchers and scientists explore their thought models, they do care what community want to know and do repply to every single comment. Greene is a good professor, but he wont waste time with amateurs and risk loosing credibility due to some stupid question he can't really explain.
@@xspotbox4400 Brian Greene is doing the Daily Equation show at the World Science Festival in the last weeks. They have some Q&A videos there.
Great host, amazing production quality.
I love this series but the more episodes I watch the more I realize that we actually know very little. There are very few absolute truths if any, and I wouldn't be surprised if in 300+ years people look back at our time and are amazed at what we believed and thought was true.
Try 50.
I have the same feeling when I hear songs from the 80's
Interesting and I mostly agree. I know most people think we will become increasingly advanced in the future but I often wonder could we regress. Could we lose even our current technology and have to start over. I am not sure I could start a fire without a match and that scares the hell out of me!!!
I agree a bit. But these are deep questions and I feel that our understanding of the natural world has increased a lot since I was a kid.
If oil runs out and no new energy source is found humans will probably go back hundreds of years technologically speaking.
In 2001, I had a very real motor cycle accident. It resulted in some permanent damage to my right leg. Since then I am reminded every minute of my life that causation is very real indeed and not just a mental construct.
Sorry about your leg, truly. But stating an example of exactly what is being debated doesn’t move the needle at all
Sorry for that...
Technically it was some specific chain of events (only part of what can be called "the accident") that lead to the damage.
I hope that something could be learned from those events that helps others and also that you can still lead a life worthy to live.
I have a HUGE RESPECT for each kind of activity that involves things faster than a fast ride on bicycle.
We've been playing once with a cheap, very HARD frisbee, which was capable of flying rather long distances if thrown with enough POWER. It was me who threw it mostly along the lowest path possible, as that was the most efficient. For reasons, we stood on a hillside, and changed positions, so it wasn't trivial to find the best path.
Once I threw it in such direction that a boy standing closer to me, than the intended "target", could intervene. So he attempted to catch the damn thing but it was SPINNING VERY VIGOROUSLY and since it was somewhat sharp at its circumference, he instantly pulled away his hand. That sturdy, energetic frisbee hit him right in the head and resulted in such a wound as if hit by a stone. So the cheerful game had an awfully BLOODY END.
Of course this can't be compared to most of the traffic accidents. What I'd like to HIGHLIGHT is: I knew that frisbee the most, as it was mine and played with it a lot.
I think most of the players realised it's unusually dangerous properties (I even urged them to be careful) but they had LIMITED EXPERIENCE with it.
I threw it sometimes the MOST HARD because I was able to aim it precisely and knew that after the given distance it will loose enough energy to be safely catched.
However after a while we all got "enchanted" and many of us tried the limits (that's what puberty is about, eh?!).
When more participants of any potentially harmful activity start to loose carefulness also alertness (due to tiredness) then the circumstances can change more quickly than awaited:
accident is bound to happen.
If I'm not mistaken: majority of motorcycle riders don't get involved in serious accidents (?)
What are the major causes that lead to more drastic outcomes?
On aikido lessons we spent a lot of time, a huge effort went into learning HOW TO FALL. Are there similar trainings for motorbike raiders? Is that even possible to prepare (a bit) in advance?
If that opens up too painful memories, please ignore my comment
Very enlightening ! thank you for this brilliant content.
You couldn't get me to listen to my 11th grade English teacher. At 53 years of age I can't get enough of this.
"Time is the downhill slope of God's intent, and cause is the joint of flow."
It's a shame the program didn't interview statisticians who have puzzled over the concept of causation, determinism, and probability for more than 100 years.
Right! Especially, the Granddaddy of them all -- Judea Pearl. His books, "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference" (for the expert) and "The Book of Why" (for the layman) are the last word on this subject for now.
They'd be dead by now.
Thanx! Such an interesting and under-covered topic. Your video provides insights into causation at different angles.
Outstanding
Amazing content, but I must say, the production value is also pretty darn good! Such nice shots, what a delight to watch!! :)
Keep asking the hardest of questions my brother for all of us we listening
Enlightening. Thank you. the examples about the dollar etc work well. Backward causation seems absurd. Changing the notion of space seems less problematic as explained in another video of the series.
@Islayman what makes any of us able to decide on whatever if future already exists?
Sorry, one has to peek into what kinds of experiments are done in QM (eg. a bunch of quantum particles showing non-intuitive probability distributions, or the wave like behaviour of matter particles strongly limited by the mass of the system, it's not that long that systems able to re-cohere are studied ...): QM with all the fields and special dynamics is nowhere near to full understanding of even the simplest systems...
Once you start to develop a solid grasp on basic concepts, suddenly you realize how far stretched are many of even the basic interpretations of the measurement problem, not speaking about the extrapolations they make.
What the heck is a conscious system in a block universe anyway?
This is why I am subscribed to this channel. For topics like this.
Swinburne rarely looks you in the eye. I'm the exact same. It's not that common. It's often a trait of shyness it seems.
Kuhn has very straight shoulders. Swinburne's right shoulder slants at quite a noticeable angle.
This channel is underated
Im underated
Holy wow at 4 and a half minutes in and this guest is awesome. I'm having one of those moments when you're like who is this guy! I've gotta find more
causation is our way of attributing purpose to the world in a scientific age.
Another beautiful, elevated, uplifting inquiry, and a lovely bit of vicarious world travel to boot. Your channel ROCKS!
Quality top tier conversations... this is the place to come too
I like the concept of causation, a certain strength of causation that led to the emergence of the world instead of its destruction. This is what we call believers, the uncaused cause or the Lord.
Backward causation also resolves freewill V Determinism. Both concepts apply but one is in backward time and the other in forward time. So there is duality on this level.
?? determinism doesn't "become" free will by inverting the arrow of causation and time, it's still determinism. you just perceive it psychologically as free will if you want.
Excellent, thanks. No time, no cause. No cause, no beginning. Maybe.
The beginning is the Lord . The Creator
Knowledge very well explained!
Laws of nature are not patterns of things, rather they are the essence of things !
Causation as asked here is best described as an inexorable and all encompassing chain of events.
A basebal breaks a window, it makes a loud noise, people come out to see what happened, somebody gets in trouble, somebody feels guilty, the glass must be ckeaned up, the window must be repaired, the repair costs money, somebody has to pay, somebody learns a lesson, on and on and on!
😂
It's not clear that Hume is a skeptic about the metaphysics of causation, but he is a skeptic about our knowledge of causation, because he thinks that we cannot properly ground our claim that there is a necessary connection between causes and their effects in sense experience.
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. How do you think it could be grounded?
Excellent move to come back to the theist/atheist divide to understand the divide between seeing causality as a fundamental or seeing it as derivative from human experience. Think of Aristotle's four kinds of cause - formal, efficient, material, and final -... These are four different ways of framing the world to focus on what is really significant or basic in it. What things are made of, what their "essence" is, what brought them into existence, or what purpose was behind it happening. You could say that these describe the four basic ways that we (Aristotle, not me) look at everything. As far as causal processes go, why single out any particular series of events rather than another, and why stop with a cause and effect when the whole structure of causation stretches out to infinity in every direction? Any parsing of reality to understand or explain it must be from a human perception, until such time as we encounter intelligent aliens. I side with Blackburn and the Humeans.
It's much easier to make the case that causation is an illusion than it is to make the case that consciousness is an illusion.
Causation is a concept based on time, which is still the least talked about or well defined concept in physics. No one has seen or proposed a subatomic carrier particle for time or an intrinsic field theory. Ask a physicist what time is and they will give you a series of indirect answers. "Timespace" is usually the accepted concept., which analyzes the geometry of it, but nothing else. What is time specifically? If it's the thing we are all confused about and hung up on, maybe as a construct of reality that doesn't exist, maybe this explains causality. If everything happens at once in reality, there is no need for time, and no need for causes.
Better than cable tv.
Causality is a fundamental nature of mental logic. Without it, mountain goats will jump off cliffs without hesitation. In other words, the phenomenon of life shall be characterized as causal purpose, not only purpose. Nature laws shall have their own full-scale causalities, not necessarily be fully compatible with human mental causality though. Therefore, using terms such as pattern to deny the causality of the physical world is self-deceiving.
Good one.
Enjoyed this! But are there really 1500 episodes?!
Causation can be formally described by mathematics, it is a model that is able to predict the effect of interventions or a prediction model that correctly adjusts for confounders. No philosophical speculation is needed or theist vs atheist concepts.
Can you say more? Or point to resources that explain this more thoroughly? I'm very interested!
Patterns of events are mandatory for consciousness to function. Observers will always find themselves in a causal reality.
Causation is one thing / will adding a new experience to another thing / will.
Best apologetics channel on TH-cam!
Great video for a great topic. Thanks Mr. Kuhn for being such a great host! I'd be extremely interested about the same topic seen from a physics point of view.
Seemed like a Monty Python skit.
haha
philosophers (aka b.s. artists) are only good for Monty Python skits.
@@tilik13 so you did not understand a thing.
@@eucariote79 why do you think so, mimzi?
I’m not sure what caused me to watch this.
Isn't this question the modern equivalent of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
Q "Can't we just all get along??"
A "That would violate causation."
thank u for making this video it helps me in my research!
Just wow ! Clarity at it best
Causation is a potential going to a realization and a realization going to a potential.
the beginning of causality seems to be mystery, but who knows it came from mystery
I need a video on probability. I do not understand it and it drives me crazy. Why are things random?!
Just beautiful, Robert!
My thoughts:
If experience is wired to the phenomenon of causation and (Aristotlean) logic - our most reliable tool for studying experience - fundamentally embeds cause through the construct of propositional statements, aren’t we trapped in desconstructing the nature of cause?
I really liked this video myself. My conclusion is that the concept of causation is being used backwards in many cases. It is very helpful and enlightening to look for causes to explain observations or experiences, but you get in trouble when you take these imagined "causes" and try to use them to judge nature. What you observe or experience is assumed to exist, but your explanation is just an opinion that is subject to being revised or rejected based on new data.
The subject of causation provides the very crux of discovering "bedrock reality". I would love to be able to discuss this with Kuhn. Unfortunately, such a discussion to be of value would almost certainly take more of his time than he would be willing to spare. There exists a fundamental causal mechanism that starts with "something" that has no physical characteristics; and with "nothing" that is absent even the fabric of space itself. It took many decades of pursuing this causal mechanism to arrive at a definitive relationship of such precision to know the path was more than simply a curious exercise in logic.
Thank you for a superb video!
Good duscussion
I follow all of the concepts in this wonderful series, however I dont understand this particular subject one bit
Thanks. Maybe one need a unifying quantum gravity theory to better depict reality and understand causation, whether it is a fundamental element of reality or a one among other mental constructs.
Causation is basically making something happen. Which requires some kind of a mechanism that connects the cause and effect this way.
Sometimes this causal mechanism is very simple and straightforward. But more often, effects have multiple causes and very complicated mechanisms that connect each cause to the effect.
You can find all kinds of patterns in event sequences using statistical correlations. But most of such correlations don't have a causal relationship, even though one follows the other in time. Because quite often, there is some third hidden cause that first causes the first event and then the second.
That's why people say correlation isn't causation. So, just finding a sequence pattern doesn't necessarily mean that there is a causal relationship between the first event and the second.
To establish a causal relationship, you need to describe a mechanism of how one event causes the other. And you need to show beyond reasonable doubt this mechanism exists and it works the way you say it works.
"How?" is the question any claim of a causal relationship must answer. Because if you don't describe and explain the mechanism of how it happens, then there is no way to tell if your pattern is just a correlation, or if it has a causal relationship. It's the mechanism that establishes the causal relationship.
So, it's no so much a question of whether causation exists. It's a question of whether a mechanism exists that enables one event to cause another. And this question you can answer only through scientific investigations for each seeming cause and effect.
Good post, but science assumes causation. It can't investigate it, by definition.
When you describe the mechanism of how one event makes another event happen and show beyond reasonable doubt that this mechanism exists and it works like this in every experiment, then this is experimental evidence and not an assumption.
An assumption is when you make an untestable and an unfalsifiable statement and assume that it's true. But this clearly isn't the case when describe a mechanism of how one event makes another event happen, and show with various experiments that this mechanism actually exists and it works the way you say it works. Because if this mechanism doesn't exist or doesn't work the way you say it works, then the experiments will show it. And other people can test it too independently of you.
Perhaps the problem here isn't the answer. The problem is the question. It's a badly worded question that uses an abstract word which doesn't describe what exactly it is that you are looking for.
Albert Einstein once said, “ If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/determining-the-proper-question
I think you can remove the word 'causation' and just talk about one event making another event happen through some kind of a mechanism that can be tested and shown to work in various experiments. And then you don't have any philosophical dilemma to worry about. It's just a mundane scientific question about whether one event plays a role in making another event happen or not.
Causation is an effective language that turns a description of the universe of the form "t -> X" into the form "e -> (X -> X)". The former is great when you try to answer how a system evolves in general, the latter is great when you try to answer how events or actions affect the evolution. The former is like having a computer program that is completely evaluated at compile time and presented to the user as some kind of movie, the latter provides an interface to the user so the user can interact with the program (which necessarily means that some parts are evaluated at runtime). The former tries to be objective and assumes a passive observer, the latter is somewhat subjective and permits an active experimentator. The former allows for continuous time, the latter inherently has time quantized into events.
if you eliminate the causation from the universe, then the human brain isn't eligible to understand the universe simply because it thinks in causation terms
If there's no time then everything that has, is, or ever will happen, exists at once. Causation then could just be a matter of perspective, dependant on which sequence is viewed in a particular order. Humans view things 'forward', but there could be infinite degrees and possible pathways to sequence every event that already exists.
Nando N I agree. Also is a perspective of being outside time that you could (theoretically) view all of space-time, past and present at once. And as you say, it’s all about perspective.
"At once" already presupposes the existence of time. What does 'once' mean except at a single time?
The imagination can imagine a million things, if you only allow it by ignoring any contradictions.
@@alwaysgreatusa223 Semantics. Sure, you could say that 'at once' means at a single 'time', but the word 'time' here is just used to reference and juxtapose the common use and understanding of time to be flowing. Where time is static, and not flowing, relative to the common grasp of it, it would be reasonable to say that there would be no time there, which could also be referred to as static time.
@@Ndo01The idea that things happen in no time having passed is absurd. It's not just words, it's concepts that are the issue here. To speak of time as being static is to destroy the concept of time by making it unintelligible.
This is exactly what I needed to hear while learning Newtonian mechanics.
Thank you very much for the content ♥️♥️♥️
Introducing backward causation doesn’t undermine *causation;* it undermines the uni-directionality of time. But the very idea of backward causation presupposes causation. It’s in the name lol.
Causation is a subcategory of explanation, a category we can’t get rid of per certain formulation of PSR, which Ed Feser defends brilliantly in his 2017 “Five Proofs” book (in the chapter on the Rationalist Proof).
Ps. I know that Feser denies backward causation, but he’s just wrong about that. It’s not merely theoretical, as there’s experimental evidence for it! But his case for PSR remains solid.
Causation is also probability! Let me explain. When you throw a stone at the window, the window always breaks is wrong! most probably it will break, out of many other things that can happen. It can be shown better the striking of a billiard ball, we provide a smooth top for the ball to roll, the table is well prepaired, the ball is perfectly round, ... etc. etc. So as humans we have prepaired the situation by minimising the probabilty of other things happening. But not all, a pilot training an air plan might crash on the building! We always tend to forget that the place of the experiment is carefully prepared by the experimenter to minimize the probability!
In my opinion, this is one of the most important questions. It’s something we can actually study.
Amere Mortal you can not study it. by definition, the tool you would use to study is science which is based on the cause and effect. So, it would not be an objective quest for truth. does it make sense ?
Join this WhatsApp group for Philosophical discussions...
👇
Link: chat.whatsapp.com/IibF9JUazRF9IExVk5Qmh1
@@demiurge1608 It does, unfortunately.
If you cant form memories can we then experience causality ?
a new thought ;
you do know the max speed = the transfer(or transmission) rate of causality
so all that goes slower then the speed of light is under the same hood, bound to causality..
then there is a gap, the size of a (maybe that famous)
planck length, that any 'causal tick'(lack of better word) has to jump before it gives you that transmission .
it has to buildup tension to jump that gap, thats why black holes are weird, gaps are gone, no jumps whatsoever all is one big soup of causal incoherence
Philosophers talking about physics always reminds me of Richard Feynman making fun of philosophers. They really don’t understand physics. 5:01 Here, he said gravity causes attraction but that’s not true at all. The attraction IS what we call gravity. Cause and effect are always separated by a time interval. A very short time after someone pulls a trigger, a bullet gets shot out of a gun. That’s cause and effect. This is not the case for gravity. Things are not getting attracted after the gravitational pull. Gravitational pull is just another way to say that things attract each other. What Newton found out was how mass and distance are related to attraction between objects, i.e. gravity. And F = ma does not describe cause and effect. When cause is present, acceleration is also present AT THE SAME TIME. One is not causing the other.
Sinnott-Armstrong: "the idea is that abstract things can cause concrete physical things..."causation exists at a higher level of generality." "I am adding a new level of description, a new way of classifying physical states or neural states that did not exist without the mental terminology." "Both the mental description and the physical description have a role to play in the causal account of what happened....But if you don't think in terms of contrastive kinds of causation you'll miss all that, and then mental causation will look like a mystery."
Re: Sinnot-Armstrong and "Contrastive causality": It's not two kinds of causality, it's two kinds of epistemology: knowledge of the physical world and knowledge of human values and meaning.
Causation is primitive. I'm with Swinburne here.
Energy transforms and moves as a river finding the path of less resistance.
One of the best things about CTT is that, for every episode about total bunk ideas like ESP and whether it exists or not, there are at least a dozen episodes, like this one, about _far_ more worthy and interesting questions.
What is the piece of music called at the start?
It’s a bit upsetting the way Huw Price says that “It’s a fundamental challenge to 21st-century physics to reconcile GR and Quantum Physics.” And the 21st century is a quarter over and no progress!
O conceito da Moral Kant o extraiu no uso da Razão pois não o conseguia atraves da experimentação, que o chamou de "realidade a priori" como sendo anterior à outra.Nesse momento mágico ele "acordou" tomado pelo sentimento de relação harmoniosa propria da verdade, um sentimento dual e matematico.
parabens
Love this series. I wish that for this episode, however, he would discuss causation with a scientist such as theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. But really nice hearing all these different perspectives.
Backwards inference doesn't imply backwards causation. Causation is a further primitive principle that has to be recognised or postulated.
Great videos, Robert. Thank you much.
I agree largely with mr. Armstrong. In fact, I thought exactly these things out and now I hear mr. Armstrong saying them. :)
So, a mind for which it is fundamental to 'explain things in terms of things' at one time explained things in terms of agencies ?
I have some great examples of overdetermination that actually happened to me in fairly close succession.
This show was originally aired in 2015.
I think the opinion of causality being primitive, basic, fundamental is in accord with reality because if you rake the 4 fundamental forces of nature into consideration, they're responsible for every interaction in the universe and causality is a result of interactions,. You don't get much more primitive, basic or fundamental than that.
Every cause has an effect! This is a universal law
Yes, but this is a rather trivial observation; the relevant and important question is why it is supposedly a universal law, and on what grounds it can be so described, discovered, or conceived.
Computer scientist Judea Pearl explains causation, it is now part of AI field grounded in maths.
Hume , of course, lived before much of modern math and physics. His explanations are therefor missing a lot of information of the “what’s necessary”. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, require causation.
Nothing in modern science in any way disproves or undermines the Humean account
The point does not concern what the laws require, the point concerns what is required for them to be recognised as laws to begin with, why, and what that merits or implies
@@rohmann000 you fudge around all you want, but that doesn’t make your point valid.
@@melgross why is it not valid
@@rohmann000 because you can negatively question everything. But that’s meaningless. You didn’t really respond to my post either. You added another complication which doesn’t address what I said, which, by the way is an often mentioned situation in the scientific community.
When the 'Moon' causes the tides, he said the 'Moon' does not touch the water to cause the tides, but in effect, in actuality, it does. The energy field call gravitation emanating from the 'Moon's' mass touches or interacts with the "Earth's' water (and the earth as well). So yes, on a 'Macro' Level (coagulated energy in space-time we call matter) the 'Moon' does not touch the earth. But on a 'Micro' Level (quantum fields) it does. When parts of the universe interact with material and quantum fields, highly organized information unexplained by the laws of physics emerge. We call this 'Emergence', and through 'Emergence' we experience/perceive 'Causation' in all its forms.
Vincent Pertoso I think he was referring to a regular contact
if you close your eyes.... it sounds like Stewie from family guy all grown up, speaking intellectually.
Well the future does change the past in a sense. The future will be different depending on whether I do A or B. But what we forget (and many deny) is the past was also different depending on whether I do A or B.
Dependent connections definately run both ways.
Start sharing his channel!
In math, one could say adding 2 to 3 makes 5. But I prefer that the numbers simply have compositional relationships instead of implying causation. Reality may fundamentally operate the same way.
What do you mean by that and how does it apply to different causal interactions? If a ball hits another ball and makes it move, then how can this be reduced to mereological and compositional relations?
@@yourfutureself3392 Think of the resulting motion as the balancing of an ever-present and ever-running equation. As if the universe was a GPU shader. The fundamental constants are the shader parameters.
@@perfectionbox I don't really understand what you mean. Are you claiming that a ball moving another is the same kind of relation as 2+2=4? That each ball is a component of the mathematical relation between the two? Or am I completely misunderstanding your point?
@@yourfutureself3392 At a fundamental level, everything is just the vibration of a monic soliton (wave). The state of the monic is a singular value being updated by a procedure. But the wave is the procedure; the procedure is the wave. And the value is large enough to describe every particle. And the procedure (and therefore the value) can observe itself, creating the object-subject distinction. The value is the program is the observer.
Looks like philosophers like to use an unheard word instead of an explaination their idea, probably because it's even less clear to them than it is to us.